Barry Allen

Cavell reads Nietzsche’s reference to Übermorgan, the day after tomorrow (the day after the crisis of nihilism), on the model of Übermensch, as a surpassing dawn, elucidated with examples from Emerson and Thoreau. These philosophers may not be Dionysian pessimists on the other side of Western nihilism, but they are as untimely as a midday dawn. In Cavell’s Emersonian terms, they are perfectionists, assuming “the right to seek a step toward an unattained possibility of the self, to want a world closer to the heart’s desire.” Cavell, too, is an untimely perfectionist in American philosophy. He spent his career comfortably close to the center of the Analytic establishment, feeling answerable, he says, to their judgment, yet he consistently refused to follow their lead in defining his questions. Instead of abandoning the Analytic audience he seems destined to disappoint, he has endured as the aesthetic conscience of their otherwise pretty philistine approach to philosophy. Cavell does not have an aesthetic theory as such. Instead, he has an art of philosophy whose engagement with art—the films of Fred Astaire, the voices of opera, characters in Shakespeare—is a method unlike any other for enacting philosophical engagement.

The forms and specific situations of the government of men by one another in a given society are multiple; they are superimposed, they cross, impose their own limits, sometimes cancel one another out, sometimes reinforce one another. According to a commonplace in the critical discussion of Foucault's later work, he is supposed to have decided to take up Nietzsche's interpretation of power as Wille zur Macht, ‘will to power.’ For instance, Habermas believes he has criticized Foucault when he says, ‘Nietzsche’s authority, from which this [Foucault’s] utterly unsociological concept of power is borrowed, is not enough to justify its systematic usage.’ Charles Taylor finds in Nietzsche ‘a doctrine which Foucault seems to have made his own,’ viz., that ‘there is no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature, that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life.

Are there matters we should exclude from inquiry? Personal privacy apart, it seems difficult to justify. By what higher, better knowledge than the results of inquiry itself could one know what inquiry ought not know? Is such knowledge a metaphysical intuition whose authority cannot be questioned? Isn't that a fairy-tale? But what about ethics? What about ethical limitations on knowledge? Can they not concern more than simply what to do with knowledge we have, concerning instead the very dynamic of knowledge, the direction of inquiry itself? Might not the best ethics of knowledge teach that certain directions of inquiry are forbidden, like a trespass against personal privacy?

Instead of following the behaviorists and abandoning the concept of experience, Dewey wanted to reconstruct it. Dewey was an ardent Darwinist, so whatever experience is, it has to be an evolved, presumably adaptive power. “Experience” became for him one word for the multiplex relation between the evolved, adapted organism and its environment. Human environments include groups and social relations mediated by language. But “experience” is not centered there, or restricted to the use of language. Experience comprises our total interaction with the environment. It is with this experience that knowledge begins and where its value is proved.

Gilles Deleuze has a growing readership in English philosophy, where for long he was eclipsed by brilliant contemporaries like Derrida and Foucault. It is good that we are coming to appreciate his highly original and fascinatingly intricate philosophy. He worked with integrity and genius to do something different in philosophy from everything he was hearing in contemporaries. None of the familiar labels—structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics—apply to him. One thing he shares with all of these movements, however, is a conviction of Nietzsche’s importance, and his Nietzsche and Philosophy is second only to Heidegger in influencing how we understand Nietzsche’s accomplishment. The passion for Nietzsche sets Deleuze apart from another quasi-outsider whom he somewhat resembles—Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead is another original, who wanted to do something new and different in philosophy, and not become mired in a polemic about “metaphysics” and whether it is finished. Shaviro thinks philosophy would be a lot different if Whitehead had enjoyed the attention the last century lavished on Heidegger and continues to lavish on Nietzsche. He epitomizes their difference in terms of their guiding question. Heidegger asks, What is the meaning of being? Whitehead asks, How is it that there is always something new? For Heidegger, metaphysics has always said the same, a monotonous litany of the names of Being. Whitehead is interested not in what metaphysics has always said, but what it has never yet said, even denied and rejected: the body, emotion, inconstancy, change, contingency, perspective. Deleuze writes appreciatively of Whitehead, but learns more from Bergson (whose current renaissance is largely his doing). Deleuze’s books are terrifically hard to read. There is nothing like them in our philosophical literature. He expects serious readers to struggle, and seems almost maliciously to exacerbate the encounter. Skeptics may wonder if it’s worth the trouble. Increasingly, though, an English readership is finding that it is. Shaviro’s book is more about Whitehead than Deleuze, but that is because he thinks that if we like Deleuze we should like Whitehead, too, and forget about Heidegger and Nietzsche. When he quotes Whitehead, saying “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true,” I wonder if he might not be half right.

The so-called linguistic turn in philosophy intensified (rather than overcame) the rationalism that has haunted Western ideas about knowledge since antiquity. Orthodox accounts continue to present knowledge as a linguistic, logical quality, expressed in statements or theories that are well justified by evidence and actually true. Restating themes from the author's Knowledge and Civilization (2004a), I introduce an alternative conception of knowledge designed to overcome these propositional, discursive, logocentric presumptions. I interpret knowledge as a quality of artifacts. A surgical operation or a bridge may be as good examples of knowledge as any true scientific proposition or theory. I define the quality that marks an artifact as a work of knowledge as superlative artifactual performance. To explain knowledge in these terms is not to offer a metaphysical or epistemological theory of its essence or concept. Instead, I am explaining knowledge in terms of its good, its value, the human point of caring to know

Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sexes. Darwin thought the conspicuous sexual differences among animals are adaptations to female choice. Down to our day the biology of sexual selection confirms his melodramatic cliches: Males are passionate, armed, and ornamented, females coy and drab, conflict inevitable and ubiquitous. Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, dismisses sexual selection as “pure ideology.” “A huge body of scientific theory is incorrect.” All the parts that overlook the evolution of real cooperation, meaning not the coincidence of selfish interests, but coordinated collaboration. The evidence of such cooperation between the sexes is diverse, cumulative, and much underappreciated. Roughgarden also takes friendship and pleasure seriously. Intimate contact keeps animals coordinated, and mutual pleasure makes cooperation self-policing, without the punishing algorithms postulated by Evolutionary Psychology. Her book is a serious work of science. She argues that “sexual selection can never be demonstrated once studies are sufficiently thorough,” and shows that this whole area of evolutionary biology “is not settled science, is in considerable flux, and is not ready for export.” If you research any field affected by the claims of Sexual Selection, Evolutionary Psychology, or the Selfish Gene, you may want to study this book.

According to Davidson, Quine, by overcoming the distinction between analytic and synthetic truth, made the philosophy of language a serious subject. According to Rorty, Davidson, in concluding that "there is no such thing as a language," attains its most advanced position. How impoverished philosophy has become! It even becomes a kind of accomplishment to show that work which seemed new and different (deconstruction) is really the same old thing. Wheeler's book domesticates deconstruction for Analytic philosophers, with their snuffy ideas about their own rigor, and their complacent indifference to anything unfamiliar or difficult. Derrida emerges as a same-sayer, saying the same as Quine, who says the same as Davidson, who says the same as Wittgenstein. The same old same old. Analytic philosophers should find this comforting. Others may worry that it might be true.

Wikipedia currently exists in 270 languages, with more than 20 million articles. The English-language Wikipedia has 2.5 billion words, sixty times the size of Britannica. It may be the largest collaborative initiative in history, and influences what people the world over know or think they know. Wikipedia’s distinctive feature is the non-expert, non-professional, non-certified, non-formal production of knowledge with credible content. Academics like to sneer at that, even as more of us acknowledge Wikipedia, support it, and use it in teaching. And why should we not warm to it? The rules of Wikipedia discourse are modeled after an ideal academy. Arguments, not personal attacks or status, carry the day. It may be the most scientific encyclopedia ever; it is as self-correcting as anything in science. Purposeful, enduring bias, departing tendentiously from dominant beliefs of the academic community does not prevail. Peer control is high, procedures many and fanatically enforced. There are no back channels. Every editorial act is recorded and archived and remains on the record forever. Since its inception Wikipedia has promoted itself as an encyclopedia anyone can edit, and some three hundred thousand editors contribute each month. Some of them are not even human beings. In 2002, an algorithmic bot added thirty thousand articles in one week on US cities and towns. However, there is evidence that Wikipedia is not as welcoming of new editors as it once was and as its ideology still enjoins. Despite the policy of consensus, conflict fuels Wikipedia growth. Conscious collaboration is rare, most interaction among editors occurs when they disagree. Jemielniak, an editor and administrator with six years experience on both the English and Polish Wikipedia, has many tales about “edit wars,” when even the smallest inconsistency unleashes waves of uninhibited criticism. Why does Wikipedia work? In theory, it should not. In practice, it seems to be a new paradigm of organization, whose breezy anti-credentialism tosses traditional hierarchies of knowledge production to the wind.

Martial-arts practice is not quite anything else: it is like sport, but is not sport; it constantly refers to and as it were cohabits with violence, but is not violent; it is dance-like but not dance. It shares a common athleticism with sports and dance, yet stands apart from both, especially through its paradoxical commitment to the external value of being an instrument of violence. My discussion seeks to illuminate martial arts practice by systematic contrast to games of sport and works of performance art, especially dance

A singularity of the famous Art of War《孫子兵法》 attributed to Sunzi is the way this work conceives of knowledge as a resource for the military strategist. The idea is new in Chinese tradition, and new in the worldwide context of thinking about strategy, where Sunzi’s ideas about the value of knowledge are far in advance of the thinking of Western theorists like Machiavelli or especially Clausewitz. In this paper I analyze the role of knowledge in the Sunzi theory of strategy, and show the consistency of what this work says about knowledge with a philosophical idea of knowledge that emerges in Warring States texts of diverse genres.

Sage knowledge knows the evolution of circumstances from an early point, when tendencies may be inconspicuously, “effortlessly” diverted. This knowledge is expressed, not “represented,” being an intensive quality of action rather than of belief, proposition, or theory, and its effortlessness is not a matter of effort versus no effort, but of the intensity with which effort tends to vanish. The value of such knowledge and the explanation of its accomplishment in terms of perceiving incipience or “really seeing the little things” crisscross lines among Confucians, Neo-Confucians, Daoists, and Art of War thinkers. What distinguishes these currents arises not from different definitions or justifications of knowledge but instead different ideas about how to acquire such knowledge and especially how to train it for wisdom.