The Nirenberg-Badiou debate over Being and Event

In the latest issues of Critical Inquiry, one can watch a philosophical critique of Alain Badiou's book Being and Event degenerate into an academic mudslinging contest with a distinctly testosterone-laden tone.

Ricardo and David Nirenberg proposed a criticism of the way Badiou employs mathematics in the summer 2011 issue. In the most recent issue, the philosophers Adam Bartlett and Justin Clemens as well as Badiou himself responded with quite violent counterattacks.


Bulldozer Ethics?
It is quite evident from his work that Badiou holds himself in high esteem. Depending on taste, one may see this as a case of megalomania or simply of "refreshing immodesty" (as Bartlett and Clemens see it, p. 372). In either case, grooming one's legacy is legitimate enough, even if it gets a little thick at times.

However, other aspect of his style are a little harder to forgive. His attempt to secure himself a place in history is not just expressed through a "refreshing immodesty," but at times also through cruder bullying tactics. Sometimes this just involves him holding up the authority of mathematics as a shield in front of himself, but at other times, he gets more aggressive with the intimidation and the name-calling.

For instance, there is nothing discreet about his attack on the Nirenbergs (his "adversaries," p. 362). They are "stupid," "ignorant," and "careless" (p. 364, 362, and 363), and they make "beginner's errors" (p. 363) while a "constant confusion dominates their thought" (p. 364).

Their critics, Bartlett and Clemens, are on the other hand "clear, informed, and independent" (p. 362).

"Insinuating Rhetoric"
This last remark is a little surprising in the light of the actual style of the article by Bartlett and Clemens. While they scorn the Nirenbergs for "promulgation of an insinuating rhetoric, whose ideological affiliations are at once evident and obscured" (p. 367), they themselves do not seem to mind a bit of ridiculing name-calling: "we would like to renominate Nirenberg & Nirenberg, Nirenberg & Son, as Nini" (p. 366).

One should read these allegations of rhetoric and insinuations against the backdrop of their own style, including quotes like this:

Among much, we will ignore Nini’s effort to demonstrate a familiarity with French philosophy. Badiou’s engagement with the philosophical ‘tradition’ is so extensive, fundamental, and so beyond anything cited here by Nini as to make the latter’s contribution puzzling. (p. 371-72)

Or, in the style of classical rhetoric: "Now, other people might have drawn attention to my opponent's lack of intelligence, to his fat body, or to his embarrassing military record, but I, on the other hand, value the proper tone of the open debate ... (etc.)"

This is all a little disturbing, given that Badiou claims to have something to say about love and politics. It's one thing that he overstretch the significance of his mathematical metaphors a little, but is this really the kind of person we want to take our ethical advice from?

Gendlin: "How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can" (1997)

I've read Gendlin's opening essay in the anthology dedicated to his philosophy. I find it fascinating, but also quite wrong-headed in some ways.

Gendlin's point is that we have something like a bodily intuition about phenomena that is well articulated by some words and not so well articulated by others. His claim is that by attending closely to this intuition, we can become more acute observers of our life-world, or so I read him, at least.

Looking For Words
His favorite example of this phenomenon is the poet searching for a suitable line to continue a poem (p. 17). He also cites the practice of rephrasing your point when someone doesn't understand you as evidence that there is "a . . . ." that we can succeed or fail at making other people appreciate (p. 13).

In other words, the point seems to be a call to "return to the phenomena themselves," as the phenomenologists said. "Any text or theory," he explains, "becomes more valuable when it is taken experientially in this way" (p. 40).


He illustrates this kind of thinking with an example from Wittgenstein, not about poetry-writing, but about letter-writing:

I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. Or a picture occurs to me and I try to describe it. Or an English expressions occurs to me and I try to hit on the corresponding German one. Or I make a gesture, and I ask myself: What words correspond to this gesture? And so on. (PI 335; quoted by Gendlin on p. 37)

His conclusion is, with explicit reference to the "postmodernism" in general (pp. 3, 6, 9, 19, 34-35), and Derrida (pp. 8, 35-36) in particular:

People's lives include a great deal that they cannot say in the existing language, but can become able to say. As philosophers, let us stop telling people that they cannot possibly have anything to say that is not already in the public language. (p. 34)

Trying To Succeed
I am skeptical about Gendlin's flirtation with the concept of authentic language for the reasons that Richard Rorty has explained in his wonderful essay on Heidegger's mysticism. Even though there truly is some experience of looking for and finding the right words, it is not clear how serious we should take this experience.

A different way to conceptualize the situation would be in terms of skill. Just like looking for a word, the attempt to accomplish some bodily action can be associated with immense frustration and satisfaction. This is obviously not because the action was there all along in some non-realized form, and we should look at linguistic skill and success the same way.

This also clears up another confusion Gendlin's story, namely: Why would we even want to explicate our intuitions in the first place? Is it for the sake of "truth"? "Authenticity"? "Correspondence"? He touches on the answer with his example of rephrasing your explanations: This is an attempt to bring your hearer into a different state, not an attempt to create a good fit.

This communicative purpose could in principle be achieved with the most ridiculous or outlandish effect imaginable; a completely "wrong" word, a gesture, a cartoon. The success criterion is here change in the state of the hearer, not a relation between words and bodily knowledge.

Another way to say the same thing is that a seller who puts a price tag on a commodity chooses a certain "word" that may or may not have the right effect. This is not because it does not "fit" the commodity, but because it would create the wrong effect in the hearer, such as the belief that the commodity was of a cheap quality, or that it is too expensive.

Yet another similar example occurs when you speak a foreign language. In that situation, you have a gold standard for ease of communication---communication in your native language---and that association can produce a whole lot of frustration as you try to achieve as fine-grained distinctions and precise effects with your impoverished skills in the foreign language.

The Gendlin-Johnson debate

Eugene Gendlin is a philosopher and psychoanalyst who's been writing on the interaction between logical thought and intuitive thought since the 1970s.

He argues that we should view intuitive thinking is a resource that may inform logical thinking, but not be simulated by it. He thus recommend a kind of thinking that crosses back and forth between intuitive thought and formalizations of this intuitive thought.

In 1997, he and Mark Johnson engaged in a debate on metaphor. This sprang out of Gendlin's essay "Crossing and Dipping" (1997), but the debate took place in a volume of critical essays on Gendlin's philosophy (Kleinberg-Levin: Language Beyond Postmodernism, 1997).

Gendlin on Metaphor
With respect to metaphor, Gendlin stated in the essay that he sees the meaning of a metaphor---indeed, any sentence---as something that can be explicated, but only on a case-by-case basis and with reference to intuitive understanding.

This means that we may understand and explicate a given metaphor, but not in general formalize the mechanism that produces this understanding. He explicitly cites Wittgenstein for this idea. The resultant theory resembles both the thought of Donald Davidson and of Derrida.

Consider for instance the way he tries to show how language can produce meaning without necessarily relying on a preexisting system:

Even conjunctions can say something when they come here: I promise to and your many viewpoints, rather than to but them. Once some words have worked in a slot, the slot can also speak alone: I will try to . . . . our discussion. (sec. II)

This is indeed creative as well as intelligible tokens of language use, although they come with a quite considerable amount of uncertainty.

Gendlin seems only partly to appreciate the fact that metaphors can be more or less easily understood. He would probably recognize uncertainty on the formal level, but not on the intuitive.

He further stresses the fact that understanding a metaphor requires quite a lot of knowledge, not only about the source domain, but about the target domain as well. A "use-family," as he calls the source concept, can easily be applied wrongly by an incompetent hearer.

A metaphor thus has a "precise new meaning" (p. 174), but this meaning can only be retrieved by "crossing," not by computation (p. 172).

Problems with the Ordering
Gendlin criticizes several key issues in Lakoff and Johnson's theory. For instance, he rejects the idea that the concreteness ordering has bottom elements, or maybe that it is an antisymmetric order. He thus writes of Johnson that

he sometimes sounds as if he were speaking literally about the physical motion domain as if it were original or "basic." (p. 169)

He similarly criticizes Lakoff and Johnson's claim that there is an identifiable set of elements in the ordering that serve as the ultimate basis of our conceptual system.

To exemplify this, he produces a typical cognitive-semantic interpretation of the prices rose. This bases the metaphor on the mapping MORE IS UP, which allegedly arises from our experience with piles and the like.

He then provocatively states:

But I think that prices "rise" because the numbers get larger, and we count up from 1. (p. 171)

This calls the empirical evidence for the cognitive analysis into question. Why would our concrete experience with numbers---including talking about them---not bear any weight on the issue? Could years of schooling not make any difference to whether we saw something as concrete?

Gendlin extends this critique Johnson's way of tackling metaphors in general:

He imports a cognitive scheme in which he formulates the "correlations," and then selects the fewest that could account for the variety of instances. But what he calls "basic" or "experiential" correlation seems no different in character from all the rest, which he calls "resulting" or "subsequent" (p. 171)

This is very similar in style to some of the other critiques of Lakoff and Johnson. Often the components of their analyses seem to come out of nowhere, with no independent motivation, and do exactly the right thing at the right time.

Taking such an analysis as evidence of anything is therefore quite dubious. Gendlin says this in terms of "revers[ing] the order" of explanation (Sec. I) or "reading concepts back" (p. 169). Haser and McGlone puts it in terms of circularity.

The Limits of Prediction
In Gendlin's reply to Mark Johnson (pp. 173-74) as well as in his essay (Sec. II), Gendlin gives examples of the limits of metaphorical inferences.

Johnson seems to admit that he has no systematic theory that can account for the precise layout of these limits:

What cognitive semantics cannot capture in its generalizations, however, is the affective dimension of this experiential grounding of meaning. We can point to it, but we cannot include in our mappings and generalizations the felt sense that is part of what the metaphor means to us, not can we include the way it works in our experience. (p. 167-68)

However, calling this an "affective" issue belies the fact that this actually leads to wrong inferences, not just to anemic descriptions.

What none of these authors seem to consider, though, is that the meaning of expressions may not be entirely settled in the head of one individual. It is true that prior knowledge will inform the best guess of any hearer, but as metaphors fossilize, a social decision process is also going on. This points in the direction of a role for convention.