From the EditorPerl, Jeffrey M.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299018
In this introduction to the silver anniversary issue of Common Knowledge, the journal’s founding editor explains the unusual format of CK 25:1–3. Arranged in eleven “conversations” of pieces published since 1992, the format fulfills a promise made in that year to Richard Rorty that a full issue would be devoted, some day, to conversations among people who have inspired in each other “interesting and important” intellectual disagreements. The editor further explains how, over the intervening years, the disagreements among contributors have evolved. While Common Knowledge began as an enterprise of “Left Kuhnian” or “Left Wittgensteinian” contextualists, hoping to get beyond the problem known as “incommensurability,” it has become over the past quarter-century a venue in which the commensuration of paradigms and worldviews, even religions and cultures, is continuously essayed. As he writes: “The question, in other words, is [no longer] whether worldviews are commensurable. The question is whether we should do what it takes—all that it takes—to communicate and reconcile with those we fear. . . . But whoever—let us admit it—takes on the task is going to end up with dirty hands. This job is not one for contextualists in white gloves. . . . There is no clean methodology for reconciling worldviews at odds. . . . By this time . . . our hands are filthy, and our shoes unwearable indoors.”
Commensurability and the Alien MindQuine, W. V.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299042
In this brief essay Quine clarifies and limits his sometimes misconstrued and misapplied thesis of the “indeterminacy of translation.” It does not imply, as some have claimed, that translation is impossible or arbitrary. Nor does it say (as due consideration of the place of observation in science confirms) that arguments from the indeterminacy of translation can be extended properly to a supposed incommensurability of scientific theories.
Potentially Every Culture Is All CulturesFeyerabend, Paul;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299054
With a focus on the role of Achilles in the Iliad, this essay argues that it is a mistake to assume that languages and cultures are closed totalities impervious to influence from the outside and from internally driven transformations. If we eliminate that assumption, several others likewise become untenable, including the assumption that precise meanings for words or concepts are available in principle. Objectivism and relativism are claimed to be equally chimerical.
Exchanging PerspectivesThe Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologiesde Castro, Eduardo Viveiros;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299066
Originally published in 2004 in the Common Knowledge symposium “Talking Peace with Gods,” this article elaborates the nature and consequences of the perspectivist cosmologies of Amerindian societies. Contemporary Western cosmologies regard humans as ex-animals who became differentiated from other nonhuman species through the acquisition of advanced cognitive capacities. Amerindian cultures, by contrast, regard animals as ex-humans who became differentiated from both modern humans and other animal species via a series of physical adaptations. Underneath these physical differences, both humans and nonhumans retain a shared human soul; what is more, each species perceives its own kind as human and all other kinds—including humans—as animals. Viveiros de Castro distinguishes this “perspectivism” from relativism: whereas Western relativism assumes multiple valid cultural models, Amerindian perspectivism holds that human and nonhuman species possess a common values system and cultural framework. While this commonality is ordinarily obscured by biologically grounded, perceptual differences, the gap in perspective may be bridged by shamans, whose gift of adopting nonhuman subjectivities enables them to see other species as they see themselves—namely, as humans partaking in human culture. Perspectivism influences both the practices that Amerindian peoples adopt toward nonhuman species and their attitudes toward other human groups, especially in the context of warfare. The Amerindian warrior’s capacity to overcome an enemy ultimately depends on a shaman-like entry into the subjectivity of another: rather than denying the personhood of his enemy, the Amerindian warrior must acknowledge the affinity between them.
Self-SubversionHirschman, Albert O.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299102
In a survey spanning over half a century of his own work, Hirschman, among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century on political economy, celebrates the ability to undermine one’s own claims and theories. Whereas skepticism toward other people’s work is not noteworthy, Hirschman argues, self-critque is crucial in relation “to one’s own generalizations or constructs.” But self-criticism and interpretive changes do “not in the end cancel out or refute the earlier findings”; rather, they help to define domains of the social world where originally postulated relations do not hold. Exercises in “self-subversion,” while often experienced at first as traumatic, are eventually, as Hirschman’s own career attests, “rewarding and enriching.”
The Achievement of AmbivalenceSegal, Hanna;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299114
Segal traces the development and use of the psychoanalytic concept of ambivalence from Eugen Bleuler to Freud to Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. Segal’s own argument, ultimately, is that ambivalence is an achievement rather than a problem, though only when it is acknowledged and not repressed. Her essay concludes its survey with Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents” and Segal’s own meditation on the cultural implications of failure to acknowledge ambivalence. In their efforts to overcome ambivalence, groups often depend on the most primitive psychotic mechanisms, dealing with aggression by projecting it outward and thereby creating enmities. Merging with a group superego allows for the perpetrating of atrocities in wars and revolutions that would never be pursued in our personal lives. Segal warns that the price for failing to recognize ambivalence in the nuclear age is very high, perhaps even the survival of the human race.
Are There Rationally Undecidable Arguments?Frank, Manfred;Morris, Ruth;Allen, Barry;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299126
Frank in this article treats the disagreement between François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas over whether there are arguments that cannot be decided rationally. Lyotard identifies rational undecidability as the “postmodern condition.” Habermas objects that reasonable procedures do exist that are adequate for the resolution of any argument among reasonable participants. Frank judges Lyotard’s argument as unpersuasive yet blames Habermas for dismissing altogether the idea of rationally undecidable disagreements. Frank then turns from contemporary philosophy to early German Romantic hermeneutics and literary theory to substantiate a claim that unresolvable disagreement exists even amid consensus. “Every consensus,” Frank writes in explication of Friedrich Schleiermacher, “contains a residual misunderstanding that will never entirely go away, and this is why no consensus as to either the meaning or the interpretation of the world can ever be final or universally valid.” Frank moreover cites the even more radical position of Friedrich Schlegel: “All truth is relative—but together with that proposition another must be coordinated: there is essentially no such thing as error.” Frank’s own conclusion, reached after comparing these Romantic notions with Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, is that “the shaping of consensus will never lead us to a universal symbolism that everyone must make use of in the same way.”
Unloading the Self-Refutation ChargeSmith, Barbara Herrnstein;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299138
This essay is a critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato’s Theaetetus as leveled by Socrates against Protagoras’s “Man is the measure . . ,” the essay considers various aspects of the charge, including its paradigmatic theatrical staging, its frequent pedagogic restaging, its logical and rhetorical structure, its complex emotional and psychological effects, and its apparent cognitive dynamics. After discussion of the comparable structure and dynamics of related self-undoings in myth and drama, the examination of alleged exposures of self-contradiction moves to general observations regarding the recurrent encounter between conviction and skepticism (or orthodox and unorthodox views) and the question of how best to understand the phenomenon of fundamentally clashing and arguably incommensurable beliefs. These encounters and questions are usefully addressed and illuminated, Smith suggests, by constructivist epistemology, contemporary history and sociology of science, and recent work in cognitive theory. In connection with the logically circular question-begging or self-affirmation commonly involved in (alleged) demonstrations of the relativist’s (supposed) self-refutation, Smith gives particular attention to the evidently endemic tendency to cognitive self-stabilization.
“Weak Thought” and the Reduction of ViolenceA Dialogue with Gianni VattimoVattimo, Gianni;Zabala, Santiago;Mascetti, Translated by Yaakov;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299150
In this interview Vattimo discusses with Zabala the possibility of a nihilist philosophy of law as an alternative to the idea of justice and the violence that predictably results from it. To make this substitution would involve the redirection of humanity away from its self-understanding as progressively approaching a metaphysical truth that is eternal and toward the acceptance of an already existing “polytheism of values,” where truth is a contingent and changing product of discursiveness. A society that structures its legal system on what Vattimo terms “optimistic nihilism” would dismiss any urge for the unity and strength supposedly characteristic of monoculturalism and univocal values. Such cohesion as is possible must come from flexibility, responsiveness to contingency, and an openness to multivocal values. “To apply justice to human affairs,” Vattimo argues, is no more than “to adjust things” as conditions change.
Peace and Knowledge Politics in the Upper XinguVanzolini, Marina;Sauma, Translated by Julia;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299162
With special reference to the Tupi-speaking Aweti people, this article reconsiders the nature of Xinguan pacifism in an analysis of sorcery and its relation to war in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil. It is argued that the mechanism that keeps violence there under control is probably less the result of an applied pacifist ideology—that is, rejection of war as the socius’s generative matrix—than the effect of a specific conception of knowledge. It is through the Xinguans’ refusal of the idea of singular truth, rather than through their rejection of war, that their logic is “good to think” through the question of peace. This article divides roughly into two parts, the first concentrating on Xinguan sorcery, and the second on their knowledge politics.
Left-Wing KuhnianismRorty, Richard;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299186
In this brief essay Rorty comments on how some fear that Thomas Kuhn’s widely persuasive view of science can and is being used to denigrate science or to reduce our sense of its difference from literature. Rorty goes on to argue that no part of culture should be invidiously set against another as in any way privileged. Questions about the epistemological status or rationality of different disciplines or areas of culture should be dismissed, he claims, as pointless. He calls this perspective “left-wing Kuhnianism” and discusses its importance for the journal Common Knowledge, in whose twenty-fifth anniversary issue this essay appears.
Do Scientific Objects Have a History?Pasteur and Whitehead in a Bath of Lactic AcidLatour, Bruno;Davis, Lydia;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299198
Latour in this essay criticizes and abandons the approach to science studies—in which the object of study is presumed to be inert and passively circulating amid networks of practices, institutions, authorities, and historical events — that he took in “The ‘Pédofil’ of Boa Vista,” an article published in the spring 1995 issue of Common Knowledge. Here he argues that Whitehead’s neglected text Process and Reality offers the possibility of a radical historical realism that puts the scientific object and the scientist’s laboratory on the same footing. His case study is of the Lille laboratory where, in 1858, Pasteur identified a yeast responsible for lactic fermentation. Even as Pasteur acted to cause the yeast to emerge, he felt—in a way that practicing scientists often attest—that he was “led” to do so by the propensity of things. Whitehead enables us to understand that it was not Pasteur alone who altered the representation of fermentation; the fermentation itself modified its manifestation. Hence there is historicity not only on the human side of scientific discovery—the story of Pasteur and his yeast—but also historicity on the nonhuman side—the story of the yeast and its Pasteur.
On NonscalabilityThe Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested ScalesTsing, Anna Lowenhaupt;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299210
Because computers zoom across magnifications, it is easy to conclude that both knowledge and things exist by nature in precision-nested scales. The technical term is “scalable,” the ability to expand without distorting the framework. But it takes hard work to make knowledge and things scalable, and this article shows that ignoring nonscalable effects is a bad idea. People stumbled on scalable projects through the same historical contingencies that such projects set out to deny. They cobbled together ways to make things and data self-contained and static, and thus amenable to expansion. In European New World plantations, the natives were wiped out; coerced and alienated plants and workers came to substitute for them. Profits were made because extermination and slavery could be discounted from the books. Such historically indeterminate encounters formed models for later projects of scalability. This essay explores scalability projects from the perspective of an emergent “nonscalability theory” that pays attention to the mounting pile of ruins that scalability leaves behind. The article concludes that, if the world is still diverse and dynamic, it is because scalability never fulfills its own promises.
Historians and StorytellersThomas, Keith;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299222
This guest column comprises both a review of the English translation of Carlo Ginzburg’s book Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (2012) and some general comments on the merits and demerits of microhistory as a genre poised between historical writing and fiction. The column is published in the context of two others regarding this latter topic — one by Natalie Zemon Davis, the author of the microhistorical classic The Return of Martin Guerre, and one by Colin Rich-mond. Davis’s column is a response to Keith Thomas’s having drawn approving attention to the following remark of J. H. Elliott’s: “Something is amiss when the name of Martin Guerre threatens to become better known than that of Martin Luther.” In the present piece, Thomas writes of Ginzburg, a founder of Italian microhistory, that he is more a “European intellectual” than a “mere historian,” the difference being that the former is less interested in history per se than in fields such as anthropology, philosophy, and literary theory. Thomas’s column expresses doubt about the intellectual restlessness of historians like Ginzburg and about the preparation of microhistorians to write constantly on topics new to them, but it claims as well that Ginzburg’s “combination of erudition and piercing intelligence is irresistible.”
Local Knowledge and MicroidentitiesBowersock, G. W.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299234
This response to two academic conferences—“Local Knowledge and Microidentities,” held in England in 2004, and “Patrie d’origine et patries électives,” held in France in 2009—argues that “the idea of the local can only arise from a supralocal perspective” and, thus, that there is no local knowledge without a cosmopolitan knowledge more widely shared. Contributions to the conferences remarked on the widespread existence in Greek and Roman antiquity of bicultural identity and of hypermultiple citizenship (especially for well-traveled athletes and performers). Therefore, despite much evidence of strong attachments by ancient Greeks and Romans to local places and traditions, this brief essay concludes that the concept of microidentity is “hopelessly simplistic.”
The Historians’ Preposterous ProjectClendinnen, Inga;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299246
Contrasting its author’s microhistorical approach with other historical methodologies, especially that of Keith Thomas, Clendinnen praises Kirsten McKenzie’s A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) for deftly tying the apparently idiosyncratic stories of a transported convict and the noble family whose scion he impersonated to more pervasive dynamics in nineteenth-century British imperial culture.
Martin Luther, Martin Guerre, and Ways of KnowingDavis, Natalie Zemon;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299258
Responding to a quip by a fellow historian, who feared that Martin Guerre might become better known than Martin Luther, this guest column, by the author of The Return of Martin Guerre, affirms that they are part of the same universe of historical inquiry. Knowing about Martin Guerre brings understanding of the peasant world, which is also important for the trajectory of Luther’s Reformation. Knowing about Martin Luther brings knowledge of major religious change essential to understanding Martin Guerre’s village world and what happened in it. Themes of “imposture” and “dissimulation” and the fashioning of identity are central to social conflicts and social and personal aspiration across the spectrum in the sixteenth century: they are found in the actual lives of both men and in Martin Luther’s sermons as well as in the Martin Guerre trial.
Comparison as a Matter Of ConcernStengers, Isabelle;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299270
The question of universalism versus relativism is often taken to be a matter of critical reflexivity. This article attempts to present the question instead as a matter of practical, political, and always situated concern. The attempt starts from consideration of modern experimental sciences. These sciences usually serve as the stronghold for universalist claims and as such are a target of relativism. It is argued here that the specificity of these sciences is not a method but a concern. To be able to claim that they have not unilaterally imposed their definitions on the phenomena they study is the leading concern of experimenters and should be understood in terms of the following achievement: the creation of a very particular “rapport” that authorizes claiming that what is operationally defined “lends itself” to this correlation. Linking knowledge production with a creation of rapports entails a pluralization of sciences along with the pluralization of modes of concern associated with the rapport. However, resisting unilaterally imposed definitions is not enough because with the coming “knowledge economy,” the questions that this essay raises will soon be part of a romantic past. Thus it concludes with a speculative touch, or perhaps it is a requiem, relating the creation of rapports to an ecology of practices akin to William James’s always-under-construction pluriverse.
Rethinking “Normative Conscience”The Task of the Intellectual TodayKristeva, Julia;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299282
Written originally as part of a Common Knowledge symposium (2007) responding to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s homily against relativism, which was delivered immediately before his election as pope, this essay describes a reactionary German intellectual current that includes not only Ratzinger and the conservative jurist E.-W. Böckenförde but also the more liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas. What the three share, according to Kristeva, is their assessment of “rationalist humanism” as incapable of sustaining constitutional democracies, which by nature “need ‘normative presuppositions’ [on which] to found rational law.” In an effort to “counterbalance this hypothesis,” she argues that “we are already confronted with . . . experiences that render obsolete any appeal for a normative conscience.” These experiences comprise discoveries of the modern human sciences above all psychoanalysis and literary theory, which “are likely to found the ‘unifying bond’ that secular, political rationality has until now lacked.” Thus, she concludes, “modern thought, which is neither hostile nor indulgent toward religion, may be our one good option as we face, on the one hand, mounting obscurantism and, on the other, the technological management of the human species.”
The Woman with the Pearl NecklaceBynum, Caroline Walker;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299294
This essay is a parable that delivers a message of epistemological significance for teachers and students in historically based disciplines and religious studies. Bynum writes, anecdotally, of standing “for a long time” and “rejoicing” before Vermeer’s painting The Woman with the Pearl Necklace at an exhibit in 2001 at the Metropolitan Museum. Later she discovers that the painting had not left Berlin for inclusion in the New York exhibit. “I can only hypothesize,” she reflects, “that I must have deeply needed a moment out of ordinary time” and so “saw” a work of importance to herself that she had visited often at its home in Berlin. “The medieval people I study,” she writes, “‘saw things’, as my students put it. And those same students frequently ask me what I think they saw.” Bynum then proceeds to explicate Augustine’s three categories of vision and to comment on other medieval theories about and incidents of inexplicable or miraculous seeing on the part of the “spiritually gifted.” Her conclusion is that students who ask what such people do see must be told that they have indeed seen what they have claimed to see, just “as I saw The Woman with the Pearl Necklace.”
DecreationHow Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil Tell GodCarson, Anne;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299306
This essay in both literary criticism and negative theology treats three widely diverse cases of women who “had the nerve to enter a zone of absolute spiritual daring.” The three cases are of the poet Sappho (in seventh-century Greek antiquity), the mystic Margarite Porete (in fourteenth-century France), and the philosopher Simone Weil (in twentieth-century France). Each of them underwent “an experience of decreation, or so she tells us.” Decreation, which is Simone Weil’s coinage, is here defined as “an undoing of the creature in us—that creature enclosed in self and defined by self. But to undo self one must move through self to the very inside of its definition.” The audacious, unconventional spirituality of these women led society to “pass judgments on the authenticity” of their “ways of being.” Weil has been termed “neurotic, anorectic, pathological, sexually repressed or fake” by many readers of both her work and the biographies written about her. Marguerite Porete was condemned at trial for being not only a heretic but also a pseudo-mulier—a “fake woman”—while “Sappho’s ancient biographers tried to discredit her seriousness by assuring us she lived a life of unrestrained and incoherent sexual indulgence.” These women, however, “know what love is,” namely “the touchstone of a true or a false spirituality,” and each of them finds a means of “telling God.”
Regarding Change at Ise JingūPerl, Jeffrey M.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299318
This essay introduces the second of three installments of an “elegiac symposium” in Common Knowledge on figures and concepts devalued in what Thomas Kuhn refers to as “paradigm shifts.” The essay suggests that Kuhn’s idea is provincial, in three specified senses, and then goes on to show how differently Japanese culture regards and manages major change. The author of this introduction, who is also the journal’s editor, begins by evaluating a triptych of 1895 by Toshikata as a response to the seemingly revolutionary changes brought by the Meiji Restoration a generation before. He then goes on to discuss, as exemplary of Japanese attitudes toward change, the Shinto ritual during which the sacred shrines of Ise Jingū are torn down and rebuilt every twenty years. The essay concludes by explaining how the impetus for this ritual is also involved in less-exalted aspects of Japanese culture; for example, in the peculiarities of the market for ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Overall, this essay shows that Japanese ways of regarding concepts such as “old” and “new,” “continuity” and “change,” differ so radically from those presupposed in the West that the latter should be regarded as provincial rather than as universally valid.
Punitive ScholarshipPostwar Interpretations of Shinto and Ise JingūUrita, Michiko;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299330
This article responds to Jeffrey Perl’s argument (in “Regarding Change at Ise Jingū,” Common Knowledge, Spring 2008) that, while there is a “paradigm shift” at Ise every twenty years, when the enshrined deity Amaterasu “shifts” from the current site to an adjacent one during the rite of shikinen sengū, the Jingū paradigm itself never changes and never ages. The author confirms Perl’s conclusion by examining the politicized scholarship, written since the 1970s, maintaining that Shinto is a faux religion invented prior to World War II as a means of unifying Japan behind government policies of ultranationalism and international expansion. This article shows, instead, how emperors—who are not political but religious figures in Japan—and the Jingū priesthood have acted together over the past thirteen hundred years to sustain the imperial shrine at Ise and its ancient rites. The so-called Meiji Restoration actually continued an imperial policy of restoring and intensifying the observance of Shinto rituals that were threatened by neglect. Meiji intervened personally in 1889 to ensure the continuity of hikyoku, an unvoiced and secret serenade to Amaterasu, by extending its venue from the imperial palace shrine to performance at Jingū as well. The author’s archival and ethnographic research at Ise and the National Archives shows how the arguments that Shinto is a modern invention are punitive rather than dispassionately historical.
Excellence Is by No Means EnoughIntellectual Philanthropy and the Just UniversityKatz, Stanley N.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299342
This essay asks the question “What would it mean to be a just university?” and answers to that the question may be understood in two ways. One way to understand “just” is procedural, having to do with internal governance and ensuring that a university’s policies are themselves just. The other is substantive, having to do with the university’s purpose or reason for existing. The second assumes the university is to serve some function necessary for the general good. This good is often defined in material terms: fostering a stronger economy, medical breakthroughs, more efficient use of natural resources, and so on. But such a view of the university defines its value entirely by factors external to itself. Proponents of one definition of the university’s purpose typically acknowledge some validity in the other, and universities commonly strive to fulfill the claims of both definitions. But universities also have an obligation to teach the young and to do so within the context of a common set of values that both determines the setting in which teaching takes place and encourages students to develop values that will shape their own lives. Katz argues in particular that intellectuals have a special obligation to work cooperatively to eliminate intellectual obstacles that stand in the way of commensuration, communication, and comprehension globally. It is this responsibility that he calls “intellectual philanthropy.”
The Latest Forms of Book-BurningTanselle, G. Thomas;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299354
Current technological opportunities for preserving the texts of books, above all the microfilming process, have the unfortunate side effect, Tanselle argues, of destroying the books themselves. This modern form of book-burning is all the more unfortunate insofar as it is being pursued by many who would otherwise consider themselves advocates for books and reading. The principal mistake, which has guided public policy decisions in this process, is to elevate the “text” above the “book” and moreover above the experience of reading, which entails an encounter with a physical object. Such objects, furthermore, carry within them vast fields of historical information that are lost when we concern ourselves solely with the text and, indeed, can even lead to the loss of texts themselves. Despite the mass destruction that has already been carried out, it is not too late for librarians and large professional organizations to voice their concerns and shift attitudes away from the promise of future bookless libraries and a public no longer sensitized to the pleasures and importance of the physical aspects of reading.
Publishing MattersKenner, Hugh;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299366
In this essay Kenner meditates on the past, present, and future of university publishers and scholarly publishing. He reflects in particular on the financial pressures resulting from changes in tax laws that have contributed to the decline of the scholarly monograph, and he considers as well the pressures generated by the development of online publication. He further tells cautionary tales, from his own experience, that underscore how important it is that the public stewards of scholarship and literature at academic presses not make hasty decisions about what titles to publish and what to prune from their backlists.
Une Machine à PenserGinzburg, Carlo;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299378
The author describes his research experience in the 1960s as an apprentice historian in the Warburg Library. His work on witchcraft trials in early modern Italy, he argues, was deeply affected by the library’s unique character. Aby Warburg’s law of the “good neighbor” (the book we need is placed next to the one we are looking for) is illustrated through a specific example: the encounter with a forgotten tract dealing with some anomalous Bavarian witchcraft trials — a book that would have been very difficult (if not impossible) to come across anywhere but Warburg’s Library.
A Turning-Point in Political ThoughtBerlin, Isaiah;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299390
Berlin discerns three great crises in Western political thought, each challenging one of its three primary tenets. The three tenets are (1) that questions about correct human actions are answerable, whether the answers are yet known or not; (2) that the answers to those questions, insofar as they are true, cannot contradict each other; and (3) that human beings have a distinctive character, which is essentially social. Each of these tenets has been attacked, the first by the German Romantics of the late eighteenth century, the second by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florence, and the third by the Epicureans and Stoics in the late fourth-century BCE. Berlin’s extended examination of this third case demonstrates both how firmly established was the idea that human beings found meaning only in relation to others in the polis and how great and sudden was the transition toward focus on the individual fostered by the Cynics, Epicureans, and Stoics. The suddenness and irruptive nature of this transition cannot be satisfactorily understood as a reflection of political changes alone, but its deeper roots are obscured by the dominance of Plato, Aristotle, and others who subscribed to the polis-centered point of view and regarded possible precursors of the transition as their philosophical opponents.
Left-Wing WittgensteinWilliams, Bernard;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299402
Writing in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the moral philosopher Bernard Williams considers the opposing claims of Rawlsian liberalism, with its emphasis on pluralism and procedural fairness, and communitarianism, which instead promotes more or less culturally homogeneous societies formed around shared values. Williams shares the communitarians’ critique of Rawls’s theory as excessively abstract, questioning whether a rational commitment to pluralism as the most just social arrangement can serve as a sufficiently binding social force. He simultaneously resists, however, the conservative tendencies of the communitarians, particularly their dismissal of ethically motivated social critique. Grounded in the late philosophy of Wittgenstein, communitarians reject foundationalism, the notion that beliefs can be philosophically justified, instead regarding ideologically driven social arrangements as the result of inherently particular historical and environmental conditions. This perspective precludes rational reevaluation of a society’s status quo; if a society’s adoption of values does not depend on philosophically grounded principles, neither can those values be altered through a process of collective moral reasoning. For Williams, however, because pluralism is a condition of modern life with which even culturally homogenous communities must contend, members of modern societies are aware of alternatives to their own social model, leaving a space for self-critical reassessment. Finally, Williams suggests that the desire of cultural minorities for separate states in the post-Soviet geopolitical landscape underscores the limits of both pluralism and communitarianism, limits that all of us will need to grapple with as we confront the immediate social and political realities of modernity.
Suffocation in the PolisPerl, Jeffrey M.;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299414
This introduction to the third and final part of the Common Knowledge symposium “Unsocial Thought, Uncommon Lives” (13:1 [Winter 2007]: 33–39) is reprinted here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s first twenty-five years. The title is taken from an article by Isaiah Berlin in CK (7:3 [Winter 1998]: 186–214 and likewise reprinted in the anniversary issue). Perl’s essay argues against the Aristotelian (and, generally, commonsense) presumption that “man is a social animal” and explains that the CK symposium on unsocial thought was meant to substantiate that “societies do as a rule smother instinctive (along with distinctive) behaviors, but in the process they also as a rule incarnate the least respectable instincts with greater force than individuals can do independently. . . . If even heroism and altruism, let alone standard social conduct, are oblique expressions of aggression, cruelty, and the will to power (as the hermeneutics of suspicion maintains), then the obvious conclusion to reach is that human beings are not fit company for each other. . . . The standard means of veering off from this conclusion is to blame one’s own society, or aspects of contemporary society, and then to propose improvements. Historically, evidence suggests, efforts of this kind are (or else, become) opportunities for controversy and thus for exercise of the will to power. Social order is such that even the discussion of social order occasions conflict.” Perl goes on to argue that individualists and communitarians are “fundamentally in accord”: they are “teams” agreeing to the rules of a dubious conflict from which only “stylites, dendrites, and (on the hearty end of this spectrum) mendicants” have done what is required to exempt themselves.
Love and MoneyRorty, Richard;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299438
In this essay Rorty argues that care or concern alone is inadequate for dealing with problems of Third World poverty; neither is there likely to be a convenient technological fix. There is no evading the hard decisions that global poverty will require of the rich nations, and there is no way past E. M. Forster’s dictum, in Howard’s End, that “We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.” Most of Rorty’s essay focuses on works of Forster demonstrating that, in Rorty’s words, “tenderness only appears . . . when there is enough money to produce a little leisure, a little time in which to love. . . . The cash value of the Christian ideal of universal brotherhood has, for the last two centuries, been the conviction that once science and technology have produced enough wealth—and enlightened, unselfish political initiatives have redistributed it—there will be no one left who is incapable of tenderness. All human beings will live in the light; all of them will be possible characters in novels.”
A Reply to Paul Feyerabend and Richard RortyKermode, Frank;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299450
This retitled excerpt from Frank Kermode’s introduction to the symposium “Beyond Post-: A Revaluation of the Revaluation of All Values” (Common Knowledge 1:3 [Winter 1992]: 10–12) is republished here in a special issue of representative pieces from the journal’s first twenty-five years. Kermode had called for papers in the journal’s inaugural issue (1:1 [Spring 1992]: 5–6) on “the question of value” and was to a degree disappointed with the results. He had wanted the ensuing symposium to treat and even focus on axiology in the arts, but the papers answering his call mainly dealt with political and ethical matters. In this introduction he replies chiefly to pieces by the philosophers Richard Rorty and Paul Feyerabend dealing with poverty, famine, sickness, and environmental concerns, but Kermode also addresses and mostly agrees with arguments made in Common Knowledge 1:1 by the philosopher Bernard Williams. (Williams’s article, “Left-Wing Wittgenstein,” is likewise reprinted in the 2019 anniversary issue.) Kermode’s piece concludes by restating the hope of his call for papers that “the matter of literary value” will be treated “in the broad context” that Common Knowledge provides “for discussion of the philosophy of value. Precedence must obviously be given to a planet at risk, but to lose what has been valued in literature is a sure way of increasing the unpleasantness of the future.”
The Political Economy of HungerOn Reasoning and ParticipationSen, Amartya;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299462
Sen’s essay concerns the existence of extensive hunger amidst unprecedented global prosperity in the contemporary world, but he argues that the problem would be decisively solvable if our response were no longer shaped by Malthusian pessimism. Effective famine prevention does not turn on food supply per head and the automatic mechanism of the market: there can be plenty of food while large sections of the population lack the means to obtain it. Effective famine prevention thus requires “entitlements.” Economically, governments can and should provide public employment programs so that those threatened by famine can be empowered to command food. Politically, democratic participation and a free press can work to ensure government accountability for famine prevention. The choice that Sen urges, however, is not for the state over the market—the experience of the Indian state of Kerala demonstrates that a voluntaristic approach can work as well or better than China’s compulsory “one child policy” in limiting the rapid population growth that contributes to world hunger. Rather, a reasoned solution to the problem of hunger must acknowledge the complementary importance of both well-functioning markets and open and democratic public action.
The Catholic Church Vis-à-Vis Liberal SocietyEtchegaray, Roger Cardinal;Chang, Translated by Mei Lin;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299474
Cardinal Etchegaray argues here that the dialogue between church and state, with both parties rooted in sometimes conflicting absolute claims and values, has become more recently a wider-ranging dialogue between the church and a pluralist, relativist liberal society. The very definition of “liberal society” is open to argument, and the church may find elements to commend or oppose in any given definition. Since the nineteenth century the church has often found itself in opposition to various ideas of “liberty,” especially those that represent an idolatry of absolute rights that push aside Christian spiritual and moral concerns. Now that liberalism has become the pervasive model for society, the church finds it may more easily express its critique, with the aim of making society more conducive to allowing people to become fully human. Indeed, the church provides a necessary check on the excesses of liberal society, particularly those of capitalism and democratic populism. Its essential point is the transcendent dimension of the human person—our connection with the divine. The pursuit of economic and political ends needs to be governed by a concern for the ethical, itself founded on the divine. Liberal society will only live up to its own highest aspirations through promoting self-mastery and an awareness that humanity’s freedom is ultimately found only in God.
On How Postwar Germany Has Faced Its Recent PastHabermas, Jürgen;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299486
In this essay Habermas contends that, until 1989, four phases are discernible in how postwar Germany attempted to come to terms with its “unmasterable past.” Between the end of the war in 1945 and the foundation of two German states in 1949, the first reconstruction generation mythologized the Nazi period as a criminal abyss. If this strategy allowed the government of the Federal Republic to assume legal responsibility for reparation claims, it also served to release individuals from working through their own painful pasts. This stage yielded to a second phase, one of “communicative silencing,” during the Adenauer years from 1949-63 in which the second reconstruction generation chose not to speak of the past but rather to concentrate on building the Wirtschaftswunder. The student movement of the 1960s challenged this presentism with demands for disclosure and accountability, and from the mid-1970s until 1989 this quest for unmasking existed in tension with an ongoing desire for evasion. This tension drove the “Historians’ Debate” of those years. Since reunification in 1989, Germany’s attitude toward its past has remained ambivalent. Today a New Right calls for the self-confident reassertion of a German nation unburdened by its past. But the past will lose its hold over Germany, Habermas argues, only through the work of a truly faithful memory.
“The Period After 1989”Havel, Václav;Michnik, Adam;Cavanagh, Translated by Clare;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299498
This guest column amounts to a conversation between two of the most crucial Soviet bloc dissidents about developments since the 1989 overthrow of communismin their part of the world. They agree that a “creeping coup d’état” is underway in which not only the government administrations of their countries have changed but also their systems of governance—and changed for the worse. “It is not,” they agree, “what the democratic opposition spent twenty-five years fighting for.” Their apprehension is that, under new forms, the old authoritarian impulses are returning to East-Central Europe as well as to Russia.
CosmopolitanA Tale of Identity from Ottoman AlexandriaJasanoff, Maya;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7299510
Written in an effort “to frame questions of culture and power in different terms” from those of Edward Said, this case study of Ottoman Alexandria before the French invasion in 1798 (identified by Said as the “launchpad of modern Orientalism”) reveals “lines between empowered and powerless, even East and West,” blurred or erased by “cosmopolitan mixing. . . . So much attention is paid to the way that empires divide people against each other that it is easy to forget how empires have also brought populations together, forcibly at times, yet often with enduring effects. The cosmopolitan possibilities of empire, as opposed to narrower definitions of national belonging, would shape the life of Etienne Roboly,” whose complicated existence in Egypt—as a citizen of both or neither the French state and/nor the Ottoman—is the focus of this study. The author asks her readers to glean from this article two “lessons”: first, that “nation-states, as the briefest glance at twentieth-century history will confirm, have often proved themselves hostile toward minority populations. Yet we have also been taught to see empires as evil things, which makes the second lesson— that empires have sometimes been more accommodating of difference than many independent nations—seem somewhat counterintuitive. . . . The history of Alex-andria invites us to look at how empire may provide an umbrella of common security for a range of cultures to coexist, and even at times intermingle.” Still, “the larger question is whether and how inclusionary definitions of belonging can be made to oughtweigh exclusionary ones,” regardless of the political context.
Two Hundred Years TogetherSolzhenitsyn, Alexander;Gambrell, Jamey;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7579425
This essay is a translated excerpt from the first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s controversial history of Russian-Jewish relations, Dvesti let vmeste: 1795 – 1995, which was first published in Russian in 2001 and 2002. Solzhenitsyn writes from explicitly nationalist positions, ascribing defined identities and “fates” to disparate peoples, and seeks to offer a “two-sided and equitable” account of the “sins” and historical “guilt” of both Russians and Jews. He seeks to establish “mutually accessible and benevolent paths along which Russian-Jewish relations may proceed” on the basis of an honest and full accounting of history. In this excerpt he treats the immediate prerevolutionary period of the early twentieth century, drawing on the writings of a number of prominent commentators of that period, both Jewish and Russian. He argues that a combination of, on the one hand, the investments of the progressive Russian intelligentsia in atonement for anti-Semitic policies and social violence, and, on the other, Jewish assimilation to Russian cultural life led to an identification of Jews with revolutionary and anti-tsarist culture. Among the figures treated here by Solzhenitsyn are Vladimir Jabotinsky, Lev Tolstoi, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Pyotr Struve.
Romania—Between Continuity and ChangeRomania, His Majesty King Michael of;Perl, Jeffrey M.
2019 Common Knowledge
doi: 10.1215/0961754X-7579437
This essay presents a critical account of the social and political history of postcommunist Romania from the time of the violent overthrow of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist dictatorial regime in 1989 to the writing of the essay in 1995. King Michael chronicles the processes through which power in Romania following 1989 was quickly seized by representatives of the former Communist Party and the communist secret police (Departamentul Securităţii Statului or Securitate). Led by Ion Iliescu, a former communist leader and one-time protégé of Ceauşescu, a powerful group of politicians came to dominate the National Salvation Front, an originally anticommunist political organization that held power following the coup. Through manipulation of the media and voting processes and imposition of a flawed new constitution, Iliescu ensured the ascendancy of his Party of Social Democracy during the first half of the 1990s. The essay critiques the course of events and laments the faltering pace of both economic and political reform resulting from the stagnant Romanian political situation and the persistence of former communist leaders in government. Additionally, although not as its central focus, King Michael argues that a restoration of the Romanian monarchy could help to stabilize and improve the country’s political fortunes.