The Is-ness of "Is"

The other day I was on a GLB panel addressing an education class, and the perennial question came up: What should you do when a student says That's so gay?

Aside from the usual expressions of deep concern, which I've written about before, one of the other speakers said that it's important to tell kids the "real meaning of 'gay.'"  I didn't know whether to address that, but I wish now that I had.

There is no "real meaning of 'gay.'"  Words don't have "real" meanings.  His remark was especially funny given the fraught recent history of the word.  It may be that this guy, who's in his late 40s I think, is a bit too young to remember the fuss that swept America after 1970 over homosexuals' brutal appropriation of "gay," a nice innocent little word that you can't use in front of children anymore because of Teh Political Correctness.  If "gay" had a real meaning, it wouldn't be "homosexual," it would be one of the older ones, like "happily excited" or "keenly alive and exuberant."  Like it or not, using "gay" to mean stupid, uncool, weird, is as "real" as any other meaning.  It appears that Merriam-Webster hasn't caught up with the newer meaning yet, though it has already been with us for about thirty years.

It happened that this week I finally began reading Gender Trouble, Judith Butler's classic of queer and gender theory, originally published by Routledge in 1990.  The copy I'm reading was printed in 1999, and includes a ten-years-after preface by Butler.  So far -- I'm going slowly, because I have so much else I need to read and this isn't the kind of book one dashes through in any case -- the preface is interesting, and I'll probably be writing more about the book as I proceed.

Butler wrote a few things that I liked quite a lot.  But then I came to this:

Much of my work in recent years has been devoted to clarifying and revising the theory of performativity that is outlined in Gender Trouble.  It is difficult to say precisely what performativity is not only because my own views on what “performativity” might mean have changed over time, most often in response to excellent criticisms, but because so many others have taken it up and given it their own forms [xiv].

Performativity, like any other complex abstraction, "is" not anything.  From what I've read elsewhere over the years, it seems that Butler had not really thought through what she meant by "performativity" when she wrote the book; and as she says here, her views on the subject have changed over time.  She goes on to say that her usage was influenced by Jacques Derrida, which surprised me a little because I thought that the word was popularized by the philosopher John L. Austin and his followers.  It seemed to me that (as is commonly the case in and out of academia) many of the people who appropriated the term from Gender Trouble didn't bother to understand what Butler meant, or thought she might mean, by it.

So I'm not saying that Butler, or other writers, don't know "the real meaning" of "performativity."  To some extent you can, for analytic purposes, define a term to mean anything you like, though it takes great care and effort to leave out the historical baggage that the term carries with it.  This happened to Richard Dawkins, for example, in The Selfish Gene: though he insisted that he wasn't using "selfish" to mean what it does in everyday discourse, in practice the everyday associations kept sneaking back in.  "Homosexual" ("as we think of it today") is another case.  And as I've complained before, many academics seem to believe that meanings inhere in words, and need only to be excavated to find what is already, mystically there.  It appears to me that Butler in that passage was making the same error.

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Meaning?

I knew I shouldn't have started reading a nonfiction book today!  I got bogged down taking notes and thinking about writing a blog post, instead of finishing this fairly short book and moving on to some of the others that are piled up around the apartment.

The book is The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (Acumen Publishing, 2010) by the philosopher Mary Midgley.  I was thinking about the online dispute about atheism I'd joined on Facebook the other day, so I began looking up some useful resources, and Midgley came to mind.  I hadn't read anything new by her in some time, so I decided to see if she'd published anything recently.  She is, after all, ninety-six years old now, but she's gone on writing.

Richard Dawkins has long been one of her targets, and one reason I like Midgley is that she once provoked him into yammering that she was mean to him: her "highly intemperate and vicious paper" was "hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic."  I'd say that Dawkins needs to get out more, but of course the irony lies in his own attack-dog manner: he loves to dish it out but he can't take it.

At any rate, The Solitary Self is a brief discussion of the importance of sociability in nature, and in particular among human beings.  Midgley accepts Darwinian evolution, but holds that Darwin didn't imagine all life as engaged in cutthroat competition: he recognized that cooperation was at least as important as competition, but this aspect of his theorizing got much less attention as natural selection came to be thought of as the sole driver of change in species.

Maybe I'm jumping ahead, but I was struck by Midgley's remarks in the book's introduction that she will begin by "turn[ing] to the vast topic of cosmic meaning":

Dawkins, Peter Atkins and others present the claim that the universe is meaningless as something factual, scientific and, more specifically, Darwinian.  Their ground for considering the biosphere -- or sometimes the whole cosmos -- to be meaningless is that it is ruled by natural selection, which they present as simply a form of chance or, as Jacques Monod put it, a lottery.  From this they conclude, as Steven Weinberg did at the end of The First Three Minutes, that "this is an overwhelmingly hostile universe ... The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless" ...

Darwin, however, made no such claim.  Although he abandoned the rather naive Christianity of his childhood, he remained deeply impressed by cosmic order and still saw that order as akin to mind.  Questions about the transcendent still struck him not as meaningless, but as genuinely mysterious.  He did not think we could expect certainty about them.  And, of course, this view fits well with the thought that our faculties have largely been evolved for more modest uses.

But his tentative attitude also fits well with that of many physicists today who are struck by the coincidences that are emerging in the cosmic order: quite specific arrangements, like the cosmological constant, for which no reason can be given.  .. Randomness is not, after all, something that could ever be scientifically established.  Taking it for granted it is more a matter of temperament and intellectual fashion than of reasoning [11f].

I don't think I consider it "factual" that the universe is meaningless.  I do think that I'd need pretty good reasons to accept any meaning that someone dreams up and offers.  Walter Kaufmann talked about what he called the exegetical fallacy, which consists of reading one's own ideas into a text and getting them back endowed with the text's authority; I think this fallacy is also at work when people claim to have found "meaning" in the universe and try to impose it on everyone else, because, like, the Universe told them!  Finding meaning in the universe is like seeing a cloud that looks like an owl: the owl isn't there, it's in our heads.  I don't think the universe's lack of meaning is a problem, though, because there's no reason it should have a meaning, or a purpose, or a point.  Human beings are meaning-makers; we give ourselves meaning, we have purposes.  Where we get them from is an open question, but if a god existed, where would it get meanings and purposes?

What bothered me about this passage was the false opposites.  Randomness is not the opposite of meaning, for example.  But like all opposites, it has meaning only because its opposite (whatever you think it is) exists.  Order relies on disorder; meaning needs meaninglessness.  The universe exists prior to meaning, so in that sense you can reject both claims of meaning and meaninglessness, just as you can reject claims that the universe loves you and that it hates you.  The universe isn't hostile, but neither does it care.  It's not apathetic either, since apathy implies that it could care but doesn't.  There's no reason I know of to assign intention to the universe.  That could change with new knowledge, but for now the burden of argument lies on those who want to ascribe meaning to the world apart from human interests.

Mysteriousness is just fine with me, but again, that says more about us and the limitations of our minds than it says about the universe.  Given the common human tendency to convince ourselves that we know more than we actually do, a becoming humility is in order.

Midgley goes on say:

Thus, in the organic as well as the inorganic world, matter itself seems to contain tendencies to develop in one way rather than another.  No extraneous, engineering God on the seventeenth-century model is needed to make this possible, although the traditional theological idea of an immanent God, pervading and animating the world, is perfectly compatible with it [13].

More false opposites.  Before there was an extraneous, engineering God there was an extraneous craftsman God, making Adam out of dust.  Or an extraneous magician God, creating by declaration: Let there be light, and there was light.  The "traditional theological idea of an immanent God" has its own problems.  It should not be confused with "traditional" ideas of God as a kind of all-powerful person.  A theological, immanent God, it seems to me, is the result of rejecting traditional ideas of deity but wanting to hang on to the name.  I also have this feeling about Process theology, for instance: much of it makes some sense to me, but I see no reason to call the processes it describes "God."  For one thing, it is bound to lead to confusion, not only when trying to talk to philosophical laymen but when philosophers talk to each other.  I've noticed that they tend to equivocate between different conceptions of gods, without realizing that they're doing it.  One of the more egregious leaps of this kind was used by Thomas Aquinas in his proofs for God's existence: "And this," he would conclude, "all men understand to be God."  But they don't, not really, because his philosopher's god was not the god of popular, "traditional" theism.  It seems to me preferable to leave talk of gods out of serious philosophy, if only to avoid this kind of confusion.  I'll consider reintroducing the term provisionally if it serves some useful purpose, but so far I haven't seen any cases where that was true.  The burden of argument, again, lies on the advocate for God-talk.

I think Midgley's remark about "the rather naive Christianity of [Darwin's] youth" also indicates something gone wrong in her discussion.  Whose childhood religion isn't naive?  Midgley certainly knows more than I do about Darwin's life and intellectual development, but what I've read about him indicates that he rejected Christianity and theism pretty thoroughly as an adult.  He didn't adopt a more sophisticated Christianity, whatever that would be.  Though Midgley herself is not a Christian, she reminds me of Richard Seymour in her tendency to cut Christianity too much slack.