In a democracy we are entitled to ask of any organized pursuit whether it contributes to our collective activity of governing ourselves under the rule of law. This is not the only question we want to ask; nevertheless, it is an important question because a democratic polity’s first obligation is to preserve the conditions of its own operation. Politics is, in this sense, the condition of all other activities, public and private. We know this not just from Hobbes’s theorizing of the state of nature but from the history of great wars of the twentieth century. Total war really does mean total. When politics turns deadly, it can destroy everything and everyone.
This political demand made on philosophy is no different from that made on the financial system. We want to know not whether bank practices make individuals a lot of money but whether they contribute to the well-being of the entire community. We ask the same question of other cultural and social pursuits: do their contributions serve a public purpose, or do they undermine public purposes? Philosophy, particularly political and moral theory, has not convinced many people of its public purpose. Some suspect that philosophy breeds a kind of ideological conceit that tends to polarize the community; others suspect that it is likely to lead people astray, forsaking common sense for ideology.
1The democratic challenge to philosophy is both ancient and familiar, beginning with the trial of Socrates. He was charged with and convicted of corrupting the young with false beliefs relating to those entities—the gods—that were thought necessary for the political cohesion and effectiveness of the city. His defense failed, but it showed us something important about the nature of philosophy’s defense. He offered no list of Socratic doctrines, the political impact of which could then have been evaluated. Rather, his defense was an effort to engage his accusers—and judges—in the activity of philosophy. The defense of philosophy, in other words, is the practice of philosophy. This is exactly the task I plan to take up in this work: to defend philosophy by engaging the reader in philosophy.
2 Philosophy is a practice of discourse, not a set of doctrines. We don’t learn philosophy by learning what philosophers have believed. We learn philosophy by engaging with each other in a critical examination of our own beliefs and practices.
Philosophical engagement needs a common object of discourse. I propose that we turn to popular films for two reasons: first, because they are popular, they are widely known and easily accessible; second, because they are popular, the imaginative resources they deploy are responsive to the audience’s expectations. We are that audience. Talking about popular film is, therefore, a way of talking about ourselves.
What does such a philosophical inquiry look like? We could begin with literally any film playing at the local cinema. I will begin with a recent winner of the Academy Award for Best Motion Picture of the Year (along with four other Oscars):
The Artist.
3 I choose it not for its content but only because its success suggests familiarity.
The plot of
The Artist frames a particular moment in the history of film: the transition from silent films to talking movies. The narrative traces the fall of a silent-film star, George Valentin, and the rise of a talking starlet, Peppy Miller. It forces us to think about the transition from silence to sound by taking us back across the divide, for the film is itself (mostly) silent.
4 The film takes the point of view of silent film, reflecting on its own demise. We experience a kind of guilty pleasure, for we know that such films are “primitive” and that we are no longer supposed to like them. They are artifacts for historical study, not contemporary forms of entertainment. Enjoying the film, we indulge in a double break: the break that every film offers from the ordinary demands of our lives, but also the break with an expected form of contemporary entertainment. We appreciate the aesthetic quality of the film, and we are proud of ourselves for achieving that appreciation. It is as if we decided to read Latin for a few hours instead of turning on the television—except that it turns out that it is the television that is presenting the Latin, and it now fits our contemporary expectations.
The Artist is nostalgic in form, but the entire deployment of the techniques of silent film is done with a certain irony. There is no sense, for example, that the film is meant to inaugurate a wider return to silent films. This is not traditionalism or romanticism. The experience aimed for is not the lost aesthetic virtues of the silent actor, as if they were something to be recovered. We are never unaware of the artificiality of the film’s denial of voice. Neither does the film examine the diverse technical, economic, and social factors that figured in the moment of transition. The transition is really just the background against which a very familiar story is played out. That story would be the same on either side of the transition; thus, it can easily span the transition itself.
The film’s return to silence is not exactly a gimmick, but neither is it serious. It is a form of play. As such it startles us. It gives us access to a certain joy in the visual representation of narrative, where the sound of dialogue gives way to the sound of music. From the very first scene of an audience watching a silent film accompanied by a live orchestra, we are aware that music is going to carry us along the plotline. Music signals emotional investment, as well as continuity and disruption. There is no doubt a pleasure in coupling the visual to the musical, without the disruption of speech. But there is also a point: we don’t really need speech to understand the narrative of the film and to experience the impact of plot and characters. We know exactly what is going on and who these characters are, but not by virtue of anything they say—or, at least, hardly by virtue of language, since there is an occasional intertitle offered.
The film juxtaposes the technical change of the medium—from silence to talkies—with the personal drama of actors whose successes and failures are products of these changes. Valentin, the Artist, begins as a wildly successful silent-screen actor. Because he refuses to speak, he is left behind by a changing Hollywood. His personal life disintegrates—divorce, poverty, alcohol, loneliness—as his professional career collapses. At the same time, Miller succeeds. The two meet in a chance encounter that ends with a kiss, when he is still a star and she has yet to begin her career. He helps her with her initial steps into the business of silent film. We already expect that by the end, she will return the favor. Soon, she displaces him as the face—and voice—of the new cinema. Of course, she is silently in love with him and continues to do her best to protect him during his self-imposed, destructive exile. In the end she saves him by finding a new medium of sound that is neither voice nor silence, in which the two can perform together on a common ground: tap dancing.
The audience can make sense of this film-without-voice because we know the plot so well. We recognize a world filled with egotistical men who must learn of their dependence on women; corporate agents who make decisions based on money, not friendship; and servants who act out of care rather than for money. Most of all, we know the story of the triumph of love. Valentin would be self-directed as an artist in control of his creations. He fails because no one is in such control. Looking at his own shadow projected on a screen—the null point of his “screen image”—he reaches his moment of self-awareness, describing himself as “stupid” and “proud.” His sin has been pride. He has confused the adulation of his fans with genuine love.
He thinks people love him because of his artistry, but what they love is the movies. They love his screen self, of which the real artist has been just the momentary and accidental beneficiary. Thus, when he realizes his sin is one of pride, his film image literally walks off the screen, leaving him alone, which is just what he is outside of the studio’s production capacities. Change the production output, and the people move on. That the audiences move on to Peppy Miller is just an accident. She is no more in control than he is.
What is not an accident is that he cannot regain control and find meaning in that life until he opens himself to the love of another. To be alone is to be nothing at all.
5 For the Artist, to be alone is not to be seen; it is to have no projected image of himself. In this state he acts to complete his own negation by violently destroying himself. To become someone again, he must admit his vulnerability; he must give up his pride. Only then can he love. Thus, the end of the film—a raucously joyous production of a tap-dancing number by Valentin and Miller—contrasts vividly with the opening of the film, in which he comes onstage to the enthusiastic reception by an audience and then deliberately slights his costar, who is also his wife. Valentin’s redemption occurs through the process of his first being humbled and then his recognizing that only love can make us whole. To get to this position, he must choose to trust Peppy Miller. “Trust me” is just what she says to him, as she brings him out of the depths of suicidal despair.
Shortly before the end of the film, there is a suicide scene in which Valentin puts a gun to his head, while Peppy races to reach him. Here, the film deploys the oldest Christian theme: through death is life. She is the agent of his rebirth. Romantic love has taken over the imaginary space of Christian faith. This, of course, is the theme of countless films: we must give up an image of the self alone in order to find the true self through love. Trust establishes the genuine bond to another, which is completely different from the solipsistic relationship between the artist and his screen image. Thus, the name of the new movie in which Valentin and Miller star as a tap-dancing team is The Sparkle of Love. That sparkle is both internal and external: in love, the two of them can now recreate the world.
This is a very old story. We can cast it against political change, economic change, technological change, or even the change that is personal aging. Change, which we cannot prevent or avoid, defeats any claim that we are masters of ourselves. The film brings the point home by linking the cinematic change to the collapse of the stock market. The movie star and the Wall Street mogul both learn that they are decidedly not “masters of the universe”—to use a contemporary expression. The film tells us that we must accept our vulnerability and meet it through our reliance on love. We learn this lesson from the least among us: servants and women. Against change and the threat of change we have only the steadfastness of love.
The Artist succeeds because we are so familiar with this story of the sin of pride, the experience of fall, and the recovery brought about by love. This story has as good a claim as any other to be the founding narrative of the West. It is still preached in our churches; it fills the airwaves; it is there at the movies. Do we not want our children to take it to heart? It was no accident that
The Artist was produced while the entire West was reeling from the economic collapse of 2008. Behind its play of nostalgia we see the imaginary resources that we bring to bear in our own reflections on the meaning of economic collapse today.
The Artist tells us that we must learn anew to dance together. The Oscar goes to the film that shows us yet again who we are or, at least, who we should be.
The film is, of course, entirely implausible. It offers melodramatic exaggeration, as well as anachronism. We don’t care, though, for the film is not trying to describe the world but to tell again the myth of the redemptive power of love. If we press the film for its political vision, however, it yields a somewhat darker result. For there is one group, of which we catch a glimpse, whose silence is not merely a matter of technology. These are the nondescript, shadowy figures of the corporate board, who decide without bothering to speak—at least to us. They control the studio, and against them Valentin has nothing to plead. We know, even if we are not quite aware, that they control Valentin’s fate, just as they control Peppy’s. Interestingly, the film cannot help but let in this glimpse of power, even as it indulges the myth of love and redemption.
Power penetrates the fantasy but only for a moment. The visible narrative of the film adheres to the myth or what I will call an “archetype.” Thus, when Valentin tries to produce a silent film that can hold off the new world of talkies, he utterly fails. Our glimpse of that film-within-a-film, however, produces the one moment of genuine surprise in The Artist. As Valentin is sinking to his death in quicksand, he says (in a dialogue box) to the presumed heroine, “I never loved you.” We are shocked, for we expect the last words always to be of love. With such a final line, how could his film not fail? That unsuccessful ending is contrasted with a number of endings we see of the new, talking films of Peppy Miller, which offer just what we expect: the success of love. She always gets her man. To this story even the men of power must pay their respects. Power is always complicated; it is rarely unidirectional.
Valentin fails as an artist because he has failed at love. His wife has left him; he has no children. He has only a dog, whom he obviously does love and who requites that love. Most of all, however, he loves himself. He is doomed to fail until he learns to love another. We do not need words to understand this plot. It is a part of who we are. It was there, we might say, at the beginning. If we ask why we imagine the world in this way, the answer is not simply because this is the way the world is. That would be the answer of religion. Neither, however, is the answer that our imaginations are stuck in a prerational world framed in childhood. That would be the answer of psychoanalysis. Philosophy’s role is to help us grasp the archetype and to understand how it works as we navigate our common world of meaning. Philosophy’s role is not to judge this as good or bad. That determination depends on whom we love and how we love.
What would we say if asked to explain our lives? Many of us would begin to offer a narrative not unlike what we find in The Artist. We, too, struggle for the redemptive promise of love; we, too, fear the emptiness of a self alone and powerless before a changing world. Even as we offer this narrative of fall and redemption, however, we are suspicious of the play of power that we cannot quite grasp. Philosophy follows these narrative paths and brings them to our attention. It does not tell us how to respond: we might choose to abandon or reform some of these beliefs and practices; we might affirm them. It is enough for philosophy that we come to know ourselves.
The Artist is structured around a powerful imaginative configuration that is widely shared. We appeal to it in explaining not just our own lives but those of others. The narrative often grounds a feeling of trust: we can trust those who have learned this lesson of love. Often, the narrative is configured as one of a dissolute youth who almost succumbs but is rescued by love. George W. Bush offered this story, but so did Edward Kennedy. Change the context and we have Saint Augustine. The narrative can be used to describe entire societies.
6 They, too, are tested when individuals pursue only their private interests. When the crisis—change—occurs, they are not prepared. They succeed only as they learn again the lesson that we must love one another. How often was this imaginative construction used to give sense and direction to the national project that began on 9/11? In
The Artist we see the story as comedy, but it is also powerfully present in tragedy. Listen to the narratives offered in the wake of the killings in Aurora, Colorado, in July of 2012. There the deaths were real, but the lesson we are to draw is the need for love. Philosophy’s object of inquiry is the meaning created and maintained by the narrative. It is distinct from the efforts of “experts” to explain the causes of the shooting, whether in individual personality disorder or in social factors such as an absence of gun control. Philosophers are distinct, as well, from those who use the event as an occasion to express an opinion—for example, we have become too irreligious or too permissive. Philosophy lies between science and opinion.
BETWEEN SCIENCE AND OPINION
Promising more than it could deliver, traditional philosophy has lost its audience. Most people believe it has also lost its point. Who thinks that metaphysics has more to teach us than physics about the nature of the real? If space is curved and time slows down at the speed of light, what are we going to learn from the metaphysicians? Physics is stranger and more puzzling than anything metaphysics has to offer. Does philosophy do any better with morality? Moral theory seems to have been stuck on the same debate for more than two hundred years: should we follow the utilitarians or the deontologists, Bentham or Kant? Too much Bentham, on the one hand, and we may start cutting up individuals to use their body parts to save others. Why not trade the one for the many, if we are strict utilitarians? Too much Kant, on the other hand, and we start speaking the truth to the Nazi at the door asking about the Jews hiding in the attic. Which of us would ask a philosopher for advice in a tough case?
What about political theory? Surely here philosophy can help us to get our principles right. There has been no lack of philosophical work on the basic principles that must inform a liberal polity. Those principles, however, have been deeply challenged by the communitarians and are now questioned by the multiculturalists. Arguing against both are the postmodernists, who tell us that there is no distinction to be made between philosophy and ideology or ideology and power. Can philosophy do more than provide arguments in support of the political positions we already hold?
The actual political injustices of our day—and every other—are so evident that philosophy seems beside the point. The most pressing problems of politics today are less of the sort “What should we do?” than of the sort “What can we do?” We don’t know how to make our actual political arrangements function effectively, even with respect to the goals that we agree on. We don’t need to theorize about health care to know that we need to reduce its price and increase its coverage. The same is true of the dislocations threatened by global climate change. We don’t need complex inquiries into the demands of equality to know that the distribution of wealth in this country is deeply problematic. We don’t need to inquire into the nature of justice to know that there is something wrong in a society that imprisons so many of its young minority men. We don’t need theory to condemn genocide, torture, and corruption.
Political paralysis and moral uncertainty cannot be cured by philosophy. Even when philosophy has interesting and important things to say about the nature of our political problems, it does not have any particular insight into how to make ideas effective as political practice. Today, however, we have a great need for people who can practice a political art, whether or not they are well grounded in theory. That art requires situated judgment, for the scope of possible action is a matter of context and history. Theory will not tell us how to move people to act; rather, it is a call for them to stop acting while they take the time to reflect. It will not tell us how to mobilize to create a movement or to seize an opportunity.
When we turn from the United States to Europe, there is a stronger argument to be made that theory has mattered to politics. The last century was the great age of political theory. Who would care to repeat it? If Kant led to Hegel, Hegel to Marx, and Marx to Lenin, who can trust theory? The problem is not just on the left. Whatever else we might say about Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger—two of Weimar’s greatest philosophers—they did support Hitler. Our own philosophers were slow to identify the problems of racism and quick to protect property. The judgment of our age seems to be that when it comes to politics, philosophy is either worthless or dangerous.
7There is very little evidence to suggest that we should trust philosophers with power, but of course power is not on offer. If not power, what about advice? Hasn’t the role of philosophy been to “speak truth to power”? Philosophy, however, is not going to settle our arguments over the requirements of justice or the procedural arrangements that adequately meet the multiple demands of fairness, recognition, and efficiency. It has had thousands of years to resolve such issues. Still today, we can do no better than to read Plato and Aristotle, if we want to think philosophically about these problems.
Even if we thought that our politics would be aided by clarifying the basic norms of political life, few would think that philosophers could help us. Most people probably think that philosophy would just make the problem of disagreement even worse. Philosophy, they think, is just another forum for the expression of opinion, and opinion is relatively impervious to argument.
Philosophers inadvertently support this common view, because they do not reach a consensus. Philosophy is not like science, in which experts converge on common answers. Scientists converge because they share an immense body of knowledge, as well as common disciplinary rules for what counts as a contribution. Philosophers share neither. If the philosophers do not agree, does that suggest that there is no knowledge to be had here? If there is no knowledge, must it all be opinion?
The political reception of philosophy today is actually burdened by the fact that its practice is a form of speech. Philosophers produce nothing but talk. In America, where speech has such a privileged political position, there tends to be a flattening of all forms of discourse. In terms of legal regulation, this may be a good thing. Its effect is to extend the protections of the First Amendment well beyond the parameters of formal, political debate.
8 Nevertheless, one consequence of this broad protection is a failure to draw distinctions. Every argument becomes an expression of opinion, a point of view.
9 We find ourselves puzzling over the speech rights of creationists. Are they not entitled to express their opinion just as much as the supporters of evolution?
If speech is speech, then everyone has a philosophy in the same way that everyone has a religion: “a philosophy of life.”
10 The very meaning of philosophy has been inverted: instead of a practice of critical inquiry, philosophy now delineates a set of privileged beliefs that need not be defended. To suggest otherwise seems an expression of undemocratic elitism. Why should it matter how one reached one’s opinions? What matters is the expression of them. With the recent extension of free speech rights to corporations, even a corporation can have a philosophy. It is just more speech, and are we not all better off when we have more speech competing for our attention?
11These views about freedom of speech—more speech is better—are increasingly difficult to explain. In classic First Amendment jurisprudence an unrestricted domain of free expression was thought to lead, in the long run, to truth.
12 The competition among ideas—not the regulation of expression—would be the most effective way of moving from falsehood to insight. But this mode of thinking presumes that people are listening to each other with a certain openness. Ironically, the Internet may have dealt the deathblow to the marketplace of ideas as the justification for free speech. The Internet invites a turning to the like-minded in the reception of opinion, not an engagement with others.
13 This is a market without exchange. The very idea of critical exchange can get no foothold when every instance of public speech becomes simply a way of reaffirming an opinion.
Reflecting these changes in the economy of speech, more recent justifications of free speech tend to rely on values of autonomous selfexpression.
14 It’s not about persuasion, and not about truth, but about authenticity. I should not have to keep from public display any aspect of myself. That would render me effectively “in the closet.” The public sphere becomes a place for recognition rather than deliberation. Under the norm of recognition difference is no longer measured on a scale of truth because there is no truth to be had apart from the difference itself. The result is a kind of aestheticization of speech, which finds its political expression in our contemporary practice of identity politics.
When philosophers come to the public sphere pedaling the products of their own inquiries, they will be treated just like any other merchants of opinion. If they are “lucky,” they will be invited onto the talk shows alongside the religious claimants and the political ideologues. Each has an opinion. No matter how successful they are personally, this will be the end of philosophy. Philosophy’s claim is that it is not simply another moment for the expression of opinion but rather a form of inquiry into what opinion is worth having. Its role is critical, not expressive. Philosophers should have no settled opinions, because they cannot know in advance where that practice of critical deliberation will lead. Whatever respect the philosopher is due attaches to his or her pursuit of discourse as a practice of freedom—not freedom in the sense of a lack of external constraint but freedom as a quality to be earned by an openness to engage, reconsider, and experiment.
15Philosophy is neither science nor opinion. If these are our only alternatives, then philosophy has simply disappeared. The first problem for philosophy today, then, is to defend the possibility of a free practice of critical self-reflection that disavows the universal claims of science but insists that it is more than a personal opinion.
16 What philosophy has always promised is an “examined life.” What this might be I have begun to illustrate in my discussion of
The Artist.
One comes out of the theater with an opinion: the movie struck you as good or bad. It left you feeling good about Valentin’s success or bad because you know that tap dancing has no more of a future in the movies than silent films did. Or perhaps you thought the movie boring because in some sense nothing happened; there were no surprises. Philosophy won’t tell you whether your opinion of the film was right or wrong, but it will lead you to see that your opinion relies on an entire world of meanings without which not just the movie, but everything in your life, can make no sense. To come to understand the nature of this world is the task of philosophy.
PHILOSOPHY AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY
Philosophy, I am arguing, should return to its Socratic roots. At stake is “an examined life,” not some grander scheme of truth, whether at the foundation of knowledge or of political and moral practices. Recent political philosophy, however, has offered a very different democratic defense of itself—one grounded in the discovery of the first principles of a legitimate political order. We need to consider the strength of that claim before we head to the movies.
Here is the most compelling argument I can imagine linking philosophy to political legitimacy. It is important in a democratic political order that somewhere in the society there be an ongoing conversation about the grounds of political authority. The importance of that conversation does not arise from its direct impact on particular policies. We are not waiting for the outcome of that conversation in order to know what to do. Rather, the argument for the political importance of this conversation is that politics is the sort of activity that gains legitimacy by inviting an open and transparent examination of its first principles. Habit and tradition alone are not enough. While those qualities are important for long-term stability, with stability comes the threat of perpetuating the unjust and the inefficient. A modern, democratic practice of governance rests on a faith in its own legitimacy, but that faith will fail without the belief that the question of legitimacy is not just potentially open but actually engaged. In short, the modern political order requires an acknowledgment that fundamental issues are being addressed by someone, even if not by everyone.
There is, no doubt, an aura of legitimacy that comes from the knowledge that someone is subjecting our political practices to examination. The Supreme Court is arguably the institutionalized presence of this role in the United States.
17 But the Court is part of the political order. There are, therefore, limits on its critical capacities. In particular, it addresses discrete problems and only as they come to it in the form of justiciable controversies. It asks whether laws and practices are constitutional; it does not ask whether the constitution is itself just or whether the government it creates is legitimate. A broader critique serves the broader purpose of sustaining our political faith in the basic forms of our political life.
How this air of legitimacy actually arises is less than clear. Perhaps it arises from the conviction that this conversation must continue in the background so that it remains available at moments of crisis. Or perhaps political legitimacy arises in exactly the opposite way: the continuation of such a background conversation prevents the emergence of a crisis of political legitimacy. Our faith in scientific inquiry would fail if we thought the first principles of a field could not bear reexamination when new problems arise. Political legitimacy may be like scientific inquiry in this respect. These two possibilities loosely correspond to Thomas Kuhn’s view of scientific investigation, moving between episodes of revolutionary paradigm shift and ordinary science.
18 A similar parallel might be drawn to religious practice. The ordinary church member may not see the direct relevance of theological speculation to the claims of faith. But the idea that faith can support a deep theological inquiry may lend some sort of legitimacy to ordinary practices. Just imagine the opposite: a religious practice that could not bear such an examination.
Contemporary political philosophy lays claim to just this sort of foundational role, identifying and defending the first principles of a democratic polity. The dominant works of political theory over the last generation, those of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, arguably fit here. Rawls saw that there is nothing about the political order that cannot be questioned from the perspective of justice. For him this meant that we had to develop a theory of justice that went all the way down. Most dramatically, one is not necessarily entitled to the benefits of one’s personal endowments. Those productive capacities may be in part natural, but the distribution of the benefits must be measured by a norm of justice.
19 We need, then, to agree on a theory of justice to move from production to distribution. Agreement, he thought, could be reached if we all imagined ourselves behind a veil of ignorance. At that point we could rely only on the voice of reason, which will speak in the same manner through each of us. In that original position, to which we return in philosophical argument, we will consent to basic norms of governance that are themselves the product of pure, practical reason—pure because nothing apart from reason can penetrate the veil.
Habermas’s work is similar to that of Rawls in substance and form. Instead of distributive justice, Habermas focused on the legitimacy of political outcomes: what are the conditions under which we are legitimately bound by a political decision?
20 Just as Rawls saw that there is nothing natural about distributions, Habermas saw that there is no self-evident, Archimedean point from which we can construct a political order. Once we realize that everything about the polity is entirely artificial—that is, man-made—there is no premise that cannot be questioned. Instead of understanding legitimacy as a foundational point from which all political order derives, he located legitimacy in an open process of discourse in which we seek to justify to each other our political arrangements. The first task of philosophy is not to specify a substantive norm of justice but to articulate the norms of discursive justification. Those norms offer a discourse ethics that must then be used to create—or evaluate—a viable institutional structure. We need not imagine a veil of ignorance; rather, we need to create institutions in which citizens can exchange arguments in an effort to persuade each other by speech alone.
Both Rawls and Habermas operate at the foundations of political order. Both are committed to individual rights of equality and recognition. Both ask under what conditions a political order can legitimately exercise coercion over an individual. Both are doing fundamental philosophy at a point close enough to our actual institutions that their work speaks critically to our practices. Both present their work in massive tomes that are inaccessible to all but professional philosophers. The substance of their theories is democratic, but this is hardly philosophy for a democratic audience. Indeed, one has to go to graduate school just to have the time to read the books. Nevertheless, each has had an enormous impact on the practice of political philosophy. Political theory became largely commentary on their work.
The question remains whether the political philosophy spawned by Rawls and Habermas has served the democratic purpose of grounding belief in the legitimacy of our practices and institutions or of encouraging reform of these practices in the direction of legitimacy. In the end this argument seems weak and close to apologetics. Can we really claim that the philosophy department is the center of critique upon which the legitimacy of the political order depends? Writing commentary on John Rawls is hardly the same as writing commentary on the Bible—after all, the Bible has been in popular circulation for millennia, while nonprofessionals will never read Rawls.
My argument for the legitimizing role of philosophy may have let the philosophers off too easily. Unable to show how philosophy is relevant, I have argued that philosophy is a condition of any sort of legitimate politics. The argument defends philosophy in the abstract, without offering any way to know whether the professional discourse of philosophy that we have today actually serves this purpose. How could I even begin to give a demonstration of this point? We do know that, despite the work of Rawls and Habermas, our actual political practices have deteriorated in both of the dimensions on which they focused. The distribution of wealth has moved dramatically in the direction of inequality; our political discourse is driven, if not controlled, by vested interests.
21 Philosophers are not at fault. But of what use is philosophy when it is cast as the construction of ideal norms, whether of justice or process?
The problem for engaged citizens, including holders of public office, is not that they have no interest in fundamental norms. Rather, they don’t know what to make of the ideal types that are generated by contemporary theorists, and they have no interest at all in the professional discourse that has developed around those ideal types. Our political practices have become far too complicated and interrelated for us to believe that such first principles can help us going forward. After all, the dominant political development of the age may be the embrace of capitalism by a communist country, China. In the confrontation between theory and practice, theory has turned out to be a weak force both here and abroad. A philosophy of first principles is neither capable of, nor suitable for, doing actual political work.
Contrary to Rawls and Habermas, fundamental theory has no special place in determining the shape of a political practice.
22 There are also values of commitment, care, faith, and love, which are no less at issue in our political communities but may be incommensurable with the claims of justice. These norms do not appear as abstract propositions. We don’t come to a conclusion about the nature of love behind a veil of ignorance; we don’t find our commitments through discourse ethics. Political theorists tend to believe that the abstract determines the possible, but this is exactly backwards. In politics the actual produces the possible. Finding myself committed to the nation, my possible world is shaped by the actual. Commitment cannot compete with justice if theory sets the terms of the debate. But why should it? It was love that moved Adam in the Garden and faith that moved Abraham as he went to sacrifice Isaac. We are not so different in the range of our beliefs and commitments. Was this not the message of
The Artist: to insist on principle looks like pride, and there is no reasoning with love.
If we claim that with respect to political acts and institutions all of these values should be subordinated to justice, and that justice is a matter of reason, we still need to persuade others to that position. Reason’s superior role is not a self-evident first principle with which all must agree. That claim will always be contested by those who worship other gods, literally or metaphorically. To observe the plurality of values at work in the community is not an argument against justice or a claim that justice is irrelevant. Rather, the point is that justice is one value among others. A political practice surely should take account of justice, but it is not the case that it must seek to realize a theory of justice. The Artist ends with trust, not justice.
Politics arises out of the diverse practices and beliefs of the members of the community. If we argue that these should all be subjected to the ordering of an abstract norm of justice, then we are announcing that we are people who maintain certain beliefs about the good and about ourselves.
23 We may be such a people, or some of us may believe this about ourselves some of the time. Surely, philosophy has a role in elaborating what those beliefs are, but it is beyond its mandate to say that people who do not share those beliefs should. Would they become better if they did so? How would we answer that question when the issue is what constitutes the basic norms by which to evaluate the quality of a life?
It is hard, of course, to speak of justice without implicitly assuming that it is
the norm that is to govern our relationships with others. But as soon as we make that assumption, we have to bring theory into contact with the actual community. Philosophers often imagine this as a contrast between religious particularity and the universality of reason. They think that all of modernity—history itself—is on their side. They believe that what is self-evident to them will be self-evident to others, as soon as the blindfolds of particular cultures are removed—thus the veil-of-ignorance metaphor. Reason, they argue, is universal exactly because it requires no prior commitments of faith, only an openness to arguments that meet standards to which all can, and therefore should, agree. But religion is not the only source of particular values that stand up against reason. As we saw in
The Artist, we are more likely to speak of love than faith, but the conflict between the universal and the particular is the same.
24I am not going to be moved by an argument for justice when it stands against the love I feel for particular individuals. I literally do not care if the acts I take out of love are in conflict with justice. For those whom we love, we will sacrifice our all, even if that means injustice to others. What parent would abandon a child for the sake of justice? Of course, we hope that the choice will not have to be made, but in small ways it is made all the time. Each time I choose to favor my own family over the claims of equality for others, I am choosing love over justice. Most of us would not have it any other way. But this tells us a great deal about the way in which meanings actually create and sustain our world.
There is no natural hierarchy of norms that puts justice first. We don’t assess the relative merits of different nations on a scale of justice when we identify ourselves politically. We know who we are quite independently of the justice of our nation’s policies. We find ourselves already committed because we literally find ourselves in a world. That world is not a product of reason, as if we built it from behind a veil of ignorance. Peppy Miller simply shows up for no reason at all. We are not behind the veil but in front of the screen. None of this means that we are indifferent to injustice or to issues of reform—only that the place of justice in our normative universe is not self-evident. Its place is not fixed by abstract argument.
As a democratic, political community we don’t need a theory of justice. Rather, we need something far more modest: a critical capacity to orient ourselves toward our own beliefs and practices. Philosophy’s role, if it is to have one outside of the university, is not to ground but to disrupt. It does so not by turning to first principles, as if its grand topics can be settled once and for all; rather, it disrupts by asking each of us to take up the task of examining who we are, what we believe, and to what we are committed.
PHILOSOPHY AND THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY
Philosophers cannot make people other than they are, but philosophers can help them to understand better who they are. The promise cannot be that critical self-understanding will make people more politically effective or morally virtuous, for we have no idea of the nature of the connection between self-awareness and action. Thinking too much is a familiar source of inaction. Virtuous action may arise from character and impulse as much as from reflection.
25 Nevertheless, the pursuit of self-knowledge remains a deeply attractive course to many people. Self-understanding remains a form of wisdom, and this is the only knowledge that philosophy can promise. Like Socrates, we must act with faith that, introduced to the possibility of an examined life, individuals will take up the invitation. The disruptive discipline of philosophy can promise no more than to make us individually and collectively a problem to ourselves.
Is there, then, any public role for philosophy? Not if we mean by this some form of application of theory to practice. But this is to measure philosophy by a particular understanding of what constitutes a public role. In this view there is no public role for art or even for liberal education. Yet we believe that art and education are critical for the character of our political life—not because they are a means to some other end but because they constitute a part of that life. Art and education are activities we perform together, and doing so, we constitute a public domain of meaning. The same can be true of philosophy.
Politics, narrowly, is the work of the institutions of governance. But democratic politics, broadly seen, is our living together in a common domain of meaning—a culture. Our political institutions reflect and contribute to our identity, but that identity is first of all a matter of finding ourselves with a shared social imaginary.
26 Together we imagine a common world that binds us to each other through shared values, practices, and meanings. The social imaginary sustains our history, as well as our sense of the future; it establishes the boundaries of home and homeland; it tells us what is the nature of the family and the community; it offers the variety of forms in which we each think it possible to realize a meaningful life. Many of these points are already evident in a film as narratively simple as
The Artist, the interpretation of which requires inquiry into love and death, pride and loneliness, change and commitment, as well as myth and power.
The social imaginary is that which sustains what Clifford Geertz referred to as “webs of significance.”
27 Referring to the social imaginary, rather than simply speaking of culture, is a way of emphasizing that the human world of meaning is a product of the imagination and that imagining the world is a collective project. The world within which we live has no existence apart from our imagining it together. A film is just such a common imagining, and philosophy’s role can be to bring to light the web of significance that the film simultaneously creates and maintains.
People do not occupy the world as if they were dropped into an environment upon which they now do experiments to determine its nature and limits. We can study the world in that way, but this is not the way we occupy the world first of all and most of the time. The world in which I imagine myself is one in which I am bound by a geography of emotional space. Space has a meaning to me that is established by the multiple narratives that make sense of my place in the world. I think of my country not as a geographical formation but as the site and consequence of a history. I think of my more immediate home as the site of my family history. The same is true in every dimension of our experience. Lived time is not that of the chronographer. Rather, it is history and hope, duration and completion. We remember and we plan. We mourn for loss and hope for redemption. Of course, I can make a time line from the beginning of the universe to the end. I can take up the attitude of the scientist toward time, just as I can take the geographer’s attitude toward space, but the lived significance of that time line begins when I place myself on it. My time becomes the reference point from which I imagine all other time.
Modern science had to work very hard to free itself of the idea that human beings and the earth are at the center of the universe. The modern era arguably began with the realization that humanity’s perspective on the world was not a privileged point from which to determine truth. Indeed, absent the capacity to transcend that perspective, to take the view from nowhere, science is not likely to find any truth at all. But the discovery of the necessities of science is misunderstood if taken as a statement about the way in which the subject lives in the world or about the shape of the world as a matter of lived experience.
28 The sun may not go around the earth, but surely we live as if it rises and sets each day. Science did not change that; it did not put the poets out of business, and it did not render the imagination merely a source of falsehood.
A useful analogy to other organisms can be made. When we ask how the bird finds its way south or how ants know how to build a nest, we are imagining them as subjects acting on an external world. How, we ask, do they know how to do this? But we don’t ask how a liver knows how to produce bile or lungs know how to breathe. We don’t say that the liver works by “instinct.” But what does
instinct mean beyond our observation that the organism pursues certain functions? The boundary between inside and outside is something that we bring to our perception of the organism.
29 It is not simply there. The organism is in the world not as a ball is in a box but rather as an organization of functions. It does not see a world and decide how to act. Rather, it is always being-in-the-world. There are, we might say, as many worlds as there are organized ways of being. Biologists speak of an ecological “niche,” but it is wrong to think of this as some place that precedes the organism, which then adapts itself to it. The niche is only a niche to an organism, and the organism is only such to the niche. Neither exists without the other, not because they are well matched but because each only makes sense with respect to the other.
People are not so different from other organisms in their relationship to their world. That world does not precede us as a niche into which we enter. It comes into being only with us, and it lasts only as long as we last. We are not separate from it nor it from us. It is easiest to see this with respect to language. Language is simultaneously an objective feature of our world and something that only exists for and through us. We cannot conceive of ourselves apart from language, yet it is not in us. It is an aspect of our way of being-in-the-world. We can say the same thing of history and other aspects of our culture that together constitute our world. The important difference between us and other organisms is not culture versus nature but rather our capacity to take our world as an object of thought. It hardly follows, however, that our world is entirely plastic, as if a world that relies on symbols is one that can be reformulated at will. Many of our ways of being in the world are more durable than any possible project of reconstruction: for example, language and family.
30The work of the social imaginary in creating and sustaining a world is not different in kind from the work of the artistic imagination. Entire worlds are at stake in the imaginative work of artistic creation. A novel or a film does not just present us an issue to think about. When we are watching a film or reading a novel, we often stop thinking of ourselves as observers on the outside. Rather, we have a sense of the whole from the inside. A film is not a commentary, and it is not theory. It is rather a showing forth of a world that is its own construction. Of course, that world does not come from nowhere. It is no less dependent on the social imaginary. For that reason a film can be used as an initial point from which to engage in critical self-reflection on our common beliefs and practices.
Philosophy must find its place as a critical form of the same imagination that creates the work of art, the historical narration, or the discourse among family or friends. Its function is critical not in the sense of offering a practical critique but in the sense of exposing to view that which we take for granted. Philosophy can aim to show us how the imagination constructs the world that we find ourselves within and that we share with others. It can do so only by offering an interpretation in the same way that one speaks intelligibly of a work of art only by offering an interpretation.
31 Philosophy’s role is to interpret in a way that brings to deliberate awareness how the social imaginary creates and sustains meaning.
We inherit the world as a form of social capital; we join in the project of the social imaginary. We come to ourselves and others with commitments to language, families, religions, politics, arts, and forms of knowledge. We come with friends and enemies, with lovers and teachers, with parents and children. We come understanding roles and responsibilities. At no moment are we simply a self alone in a natural world. We come already so deeply attached to this imagined world that we can only say that it is us and we are it.
We want to know how these different imaginative structures intersect and interact with each other, for our lives are complex and rich because of the multiple strands of meaning in our world. Traditional philosophy assumed that politics and morality could be well ordered, but in fact, the world that we occupy does not even follow the principle of noncontradiction. We maintain and pursue multiple values, some in contradiction, some in tension with each other. Rarely do we have to choose between them. When we must, we may face tragedy.
We know all of this intuitively. We operate in the world through a kind of innate sensitivity. The artist creating his work does not first analyze the elements of a world that he or she wants to create. Abstract principle will not produce any particular work. Creating the work is the creation of a world. Each of us takes up the role of artist of our own lives. We do so in the multiple small choices we make each day but also in those moments when we know something important is at stake. We don’t apply a rule. We create meaning.
Just as the meaning of my life is not something different from my life, the meaning of our common life is not something different from that life. The community is a means to our individual ends, but it is at the same time a common practice of meaning. In our political life, meaning does not precede the act. We learn who we are by being it. This is true of all products of the imagination. For this reason a theory of art won’t produce good art, and a theory of politics won’t produce a good polity.
Interpretation begins from the particular—the actual products of the imagination—and explores from there the shape of the possible. When we interpret a work of fiction, we explore the possible world that is brought about by the work. We have no access to that world other than through the work itself. That world sustains the text, but it does not exist apart from the text. In this way the meaning of the work exceeds the boundaries of work. We can, for example, ask of the characters in the story why they acted as they did or what might have happened had they acted otherwise. We see the possible through the actual whenever we deal with the work of the imagination. The same is true of each of us: our possibilities do not precede us but are the consequence of our actual lives.
32This structure is at stake when we write history as narrative. History is not the realization of abstract possibilities that somehow exist alongside the facts. An account that is a mere chronicle of facts sees no possibilities at all. What might have been emerges only as we interpret what actually happened. The narrative imagines a meaningful world, one in which the account of what happened gains its sense against what might have happened. Historians cannot locate their narratives at too abstract a level. If they do so, they risk becoming theologians, explicating the unfolding of a divine plan. The idea of unrealized possibilities is always difficult to assign to a perfect God. Neither, however, can the narrative simply stick to the facts as if they were individual events causally related to each other. Human events are not the subject of actual causal demonstration: there are no experiments to be run, no repeat of conditions, no testing.
Of course, one can study large-scale change over time; one can study the human as an aspect of a world determined by causes. Human events have underlying conditions, for example in geography, technology, and economy.
33 The possibilities created in narrative, however, refer not to these structural conditions but to possible decisions or courses of action. A historical narrative holds forth these possibilities, which may not even have been present to mind for the actual actor. The narrative offered by a historian shows us the meaning of events by reading them as the consequences of individuals or groups acting for reasons. The only measure of the historian’s success is whether he or she convinces us to see ourselves—or others—in this way. We move from the actual to the possible through an interpretation. History has reasons, not causes, and reasons only are such to a free agent.
34Philosophy can no longer hope to convince by drawing on reason alone, as if there were an abstract, normative science to be applied to our community and individual lives. Political theory goes astray as soon as it assumes that the internal aspiration of a community is to realize the ideal of reason, wherever that might lead. If anything, this is a theological construct asserting itself as a secular truth. The normative claim of reason was once grounded in the idea that here we approximate the mind of God. Without that the claim is simply ungrounded. Our life—communal or private—is not a science experiment. It is not fact at all but a grand work of fiction.
35Philosophy can take as its task the critical work of the social imagination turned in on itself. A philosophical interpretation differs from other forms of critique in its disregard of disciplinary lines and conventional boundaries. The art critic’s role, for example, is to locate a work in its genre and assess whether it is a good or bad performance within that genre. The critic asks whether it is a well executed example of its kind. The philosopher wants to know about the “elementary forms” of the imagination—to understand how they evolved, where they are challenged, and how they fit together. He wants, in other words, to reveal the imaginative world within which the particular both has a meaning and creates possible meanings. His end is to bring some critical awareness to this world. What happens after that is no more up to him than it is to the rest of us. Stopping here, before the project of reform begins, the philosopher shows himself to be a true democrat.
36In taking up popular film as the object of a philosophical study, I am translating into contemporary form one of the earliest moments of philosophy. In the
Republic Socrates asks what justice is. He decides that the direct pursuit of the nature of justice in the soul of man is too difficult a task. He needs, at least at first, an object in which the features of justice will be cast larger and therefore be more evident. He looks, therefore, to justice in the city, as an enlarged image of justice in the soul. He hopes to be able to work the argument back down from the macro to the micro, from the constitution of the city to the constitution of the human being. We face the same problem in asking how it is that the social imaginary constructs and maintains our common world. Rather than pursue the issue directly, we can take up an enlarged image of that world—popular films. The self-contained world of the film will place some boundaries on our inquiry and provide a concrete object with which to explore the patterns and forms of meaning within which we pursue our ordinary lives together.
37 Until and unless philosophy gets out of the ivory towers and back into the streets, it will continue its slow death from lack of care and, even worse, lack of respect.
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