3. Heat-Strengthened

I have been thinking about this book on death for years, been trying to write it now for more than four.  Before the pandemic, I had laid a plan that charted out just how this book should go.  I had outlines of the chapters, each neatly devised to address a particular aspect of bereavement.  I had, too, a bibliography made dense by articles and texts representing both the latest and the most storied of philosophers who turned their attentions to addressing death.  In the book, as already in its outline, I would take on my other voice, that one I’m paid to use, the one with patience well employed to outline arguments, “show my work,” and develop firm conclusions.  It was to be the kind of book that other philosophers would read, what we who study and do research would call a “contribution to the literature.”  But I have grown too restive for that voice.  My complaints about what it is to be an academic philosopher are many, and most involve what I have come to see as the distortions of my natural character the profession has performed upon me.  

 

I have lately been reading a book, An Immense World, about animal perception.  In it, the author Ed Yong details the radical variety of ways of perceiving the world.  In some important sense, an animal’s sensory capacities distill the stuff of experience into just those features that it can register.  Creatures notice only what their senses are built to notice:  The dog’s world is a cornucopia of odors, the spider’s is focused on vibrations, the tick’s world is a place of scent and heat.  Following the early 20^th century biologist Jakob von Uexkull, Yong calls a world so distilled an Umwelt, and every species has its own, an experienced environment shaped by what it is capable of noticing.  Our senses do not tell us what the world is like; they tell us only the bits of it that we are biologically equipped to recognize.  In this, we all are limited.  Or, as that old biologist Uexkull says, the world writ large is “constricted and transformed into an impoverished structure” dictated by the needs and capacities of the creature who experiences it.   

 

I am tempted by Yong’s work to make a fanciful study of my own, to treat the contemporary academic philosopher as its own species with its own distinctive Umwelt.  As Yong observes, no creature can afford to attend to all within its environs and the senses of each are built for selectivity, for noticing just those features of environment that somehow pay to notice – those that conduce to avoiding threats, finding nourishment, and, most generally, to surviving.  I cannot here assay what complex evolutionary pressures have produced the Umwelt of the philosopher, but it suits me to think of philosophers as not unlike the common tick.  A tick is built for finding blood, turning its heightened olfactory powers and heat detection toward this effort.   A philosopher is built for argument, for seeking out reasons and justification, for abstract thinking and conceptual complexity.  Both naturally miss out on other sorts and styles of experience.  But for both, survival may depend upon the operation of our special focus.    

 

Contemporary philosophy, like many academic disciplines, presently operates under the horrifying dictum publish or perish.  That is, if one will get and keep a job, one must produce research.  Like most creatures, philosophers prefer survival.  So, they produce and publish.  Ordinary people will likely not have encountered any of the resulting flood of published philosophy, for it is placed in specialized academic journals and with academic presses, its audience the other ticks.  It operates within an Umwelt that other creatures – which is to say, other people – largely do not share.  Philosophical perception is specially narrowed to meet the survival and success conditions of the profession as it presently functions in contemporary academia.  What journals and presses will publish is what we must adjust ourselves to seeing and to saying.  You need senses well adapted and constrained to endure the world of our profession.  

 

Philosophical success, and thus philosophical perception, is driven by argumentation, but argumentation of a specially constricted sort.  A generally strong argument will give someone reasons to accept a conclusion or, more modestly, to consider the conclusion plausible and worthy of careful consideration.  But the contemporary philosopher’s version of argumentation goes well beyond the generally strong.  It aspires to be unassailable, to armor the one who offers it against any and all objections.  A host of peculiarities and idiosyncrasies follow from this most basic aspiration, but let me just describe the psychology of it all, at least as I experience it.

 

It turns out that there are very few philosophical conclusions one might draw that cannot be assailed.  However, one reliable strategy to minimize objections is to keep conclusions modest – smaller targets are easier to guard than larger ones.  Gone are the days when philosophers wildly speculated or ruminated ambitiously about thoughts still incomplete or half-formed.  Instead, one should seek to offer only what one can defend, and defend under the heavy assault of eager critics, and it won’t just be one’s conclusion that they’re after.  Precision in language – in how one’s terms are defined and employed, in how one articulates one’s reasons and the relations between them – is crucially important.  Vagueness is a vice, rigor our cardinal virtue.  Even a relatively good argument will have neighboring arguments that are bad, so one must take care to distinguish, with quasi-scientific exactitude, what one is offering from any nearby lesser possibilities.  One will need to eschew any ambiguities.  Enlivening thinking practices, such as the appeal to analogy or employment of metaphor, are undertaken only at one’s risk.  Above all, one should entertain and convincingly answer any objections that one’s view could possibly invite.  One will not succeed in this, for no one could, but still and all, one should give a mighty effort at it.

 

All of what I here describe may well sound paranoid, a style of thinking undertaken in a defensive crouch because enemies are everywhere.  But, as the saying goes, it’s not paranoid if they really are after you.  The contemporary philosopher’s Umwelt is a place of danger because philosophical reasoning is so tightly tethered to philosophical critique.  The surest test of whether an argument is any good, so the reasoning would go, is whether it can withstand concentrated opposition.  Both in print and in person, philosophers habitually engage each other in such opposition, their interactions dominated by conversational spirals of objection and reply.  This naturally creates a feedback loop.  Accustomed to having one’s ideas assailed by others, one tries to better armor them.  But still the critics come.  So one tries to armor them some more or shrink the target smaller still.  The senses become at once narrowed and acutely tuned to perils.  Readers more accustomed to metaphorical language than philosophers tend to be may have noticed that my language has taken on some rather martial atmospherics.  I have slid away from ticks and into something else entire.  This is because I cannot help myself, because, alas, I am too thoroughly a tick for my own good.

 

Contemporary philosophers habitually describe their own Umwelt in language evocative of fighting and of war.  This is how we see and represent among ourselves the nature of the world that we experience.  We use the language of “attack” to describe the ways we treat each other’s work.  Argument is “combat,” philosophers “gunslingers.” To engage in debate with ordinary people is, for a philosopher, like “bringing a gun to a knife fight” – quickly over and with much one-sided verbal bloodshed.  Even other academics find us sometimes nigh intolerable, a fact boastingly acknowledged by one philosopher who noted that our aggressive style “would be considered unseemly in other disciplines.”  In my own modest midwestern department, after we subject visiting speakers to vigorous question-and-answer sessions, some of my colleagues express great satisfaction that while we might be small, still we “punch above our weight class.”  The implications are here so weird that I must trace them out.  In the Umwelt of philosophers, a guest left bloodied by a punching host is counted a success all round.  The guest can come away knowing just where her soft spots are so she can later guard them better, and the host has further honed the pugilistic skills that can conduce to his own survival.  (One can build an entire career in contemporary philosophy simply publishing papers that articulate the small errors of others or offering minor corrections to minor points made by one’s fellows on their own way to their own minor conclusions.)  The language philosophers use to describe our world is of course a lot of macho posturing and foolishness, but let me just indulge the point and take it all the way it goes for me.

 

In addition to reading about animal perception, I have lately been reading English history too, and was last night captivated by one death that stood out for me amidst the many bloody battles.  In describing the conditions under which the War of the Roses was conducted, Dan Brown describes the armor that the best would wear.  Atop an underlayer of fabric would be sewn chain mail, the mail close fitted and the thread to do the sewing the stoutest then available.  Over this would go “heat-strengthened and highly polished metal,” the armor itself, encompassing all “from throat to toe.”  Lest we forget the head, this would bear the helmet, along with its visor equipped with but a “tiny slit through which to view the terror of the slaughter.”  Of course, wearing all this gear presents a hazard of its own.  An armored knight knocked to the ground will struggle against all that weighty metal to try to rise again.  But what most caught my attention is a poor fellow named John, Lord Clifford.  At twenty-five, he had already survived multiple conflicts.  On the day of his death, having violently captured a contested bridge, he removed his neck guard to take a drink.  And that is when an arrow ran him through the throat.  In fifteenth century war, you must wear gear that forbids relieving thirst.  What sight of things you might achieve will be glimpsed through an altogether narrow slit, an Umwelt made too small and by the choice to don that armor.  Both human perception and human need are sacrificed for raw survival.  This is how philosophy has come to feel to me.  I, too, could use a drink.  

 

I should not here belabor all this business about how professional philosophy is currently constrained and so constraining, far less continue to mix talk of ticks and Lancastrian nobles.  If I am honest, and by now I surely should be, my principal motivation is defensiveness.  I seek to explain a waste of mortal hours, how I could for several years pursue an idea that I have, far too belatedly, come to judge as terrible and more than a little ridiculous.  

 

The book that I was going to write had a conclusion made most definite.  I was going to show that bereavement is, and perhaps can only be, confusion.  I was going to argue for confusion, and then defend it against all comers.  I would consider other arguments, the ones that aspire to establish something better than confusion as what we can make of death, but mostly to expose their weak spots and then to dispatch them.  Worse still, in my work on this, I attempted a precise taxonomy of confusions – all the different kinds that come in grief and from what sources each may come.  This naturally entailed that I exercise great effort at precision and at rigor – if you will make a system of confusions, you will need to carefully distinguish each from each.  Finally, and at long last, I understood the gruesome folly of it all.  Somehow, in the course of my own rich and varied life, I came to start a book about how grief appears glimpsed through a helmet slit. 

 

My conclusion about the experiences come in bereavement has not changed.  Really, the best thing I can say of these is that they are all confusion.  But I will no longer try to argue that.  I do not think it can be done.  Genuine confusion, I expect, is much like genuine humility – it is not a thing well captured by one come in the full armor of reasoning and intellect.  It is not a thing to assert or defend – if you must defend your own humility, you likely do not have it, and so it is with confusion.  If it can be laid out in exacting, precise language, it has become something altogether different, a bloodless abstraction never met yet in life.  Even if it could be done, if a rigorous argument for confusion could be made, I am no longer one to make it.