Background Commitments: Style & Content
I’ve been mulling over an aborted exchange that almost took place between me and Sinthome over at Larval Subjects, concerning the role examples (ought to) play in philosophical writing and thinking. As one can guess, the larger context of the exchange involves the role ’style’ plays in thinking and communication. After a bit more mulling, I’ve decided to post a few thoughts on it. Rather than discussing Sinthome’s position, however, I want to take as my object Brian Leiter’s review of Christopher Janaway’s latest book on Nietzsche (Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy). I’m hoping this attempt at indirect discussion (and an immanent critique) might facilitate things, since Leiter’s remarks seem to be in line with Sinthome’s on the issue of Style (i.e. style and content are in a sense separable).
Anyway, Leiter’s critique of Janaway’s book seems to be grounded by two “metaphilosophical” claims, which strikes me as problematic. And what I would like to do, in what follows, is identify these claims, and figure out what presuppositions are in play. I’ll be quoting from Leiter at length.
1. Leiter’s Objection:
In his review (to which I’ve already linked) Leiter tells us that,
Janaway believes that it is wrong to treat Nietzsche’s writing style as “mere modes of presentation, detachable in principle from some elusive set of propositions to which his philosophy might be thought to consist,” since to do so, “is to miss a great part of Nietzsche’s real importance to philosophy” (p. 4). “Nietzsche’s way of writing,” he explains, “addresses our affects, feelings, or emotions. It provokes sympathies, antipathies, and ambivalences that lie in the modern psyche below the level of rational decision and impersonal argument.” This, Janaway says, is “not some gratuitous exercise in ’style’ that could be edited out of Nietzsche’s thought” (p. 4).
Now, Leiter also thinks that Janaway’s claim remains unsubstantiated, if not false. In fact, he thinks that “these, and similar passages in Janaway’s book, seem to confuse Nietzsche’s practical (or therapeutic) objectives and his philosophical positions.” That is to say, not only is there a manner of separating philosophical content from Nietzsche’s style, which amounts to distinguishing between Nietzsche’s philosophical position and his therapeutic method, one must do so in order to understand Nietzsche. “There can be no doubt,” Leiter explains,
that Nietzsche’s practical objective is to transform the complacent consciousness of (at least some of) his readers about the received morality, and it seems equally clear that he thinks the only way to do that is by engaging them emotionally. Yet the proposition that readers will only * change their most basic moral commitments if their underlying affective states are altered is a philosophical position that can be stated unemotionally, as Janaway himself often does. What Janaway fails to establish is that one can not, in fact, separate out Nietzsche’s philosophical positions (about agency, motivation, the origins of morality, etc.) from the mode of presentation that is essential to his therapeutic aims. (emphases added)
We can reformulate Leiter’s objection as follows: Janaway’s claim concerning the inseperability of style and philosophical content is itself a philosophical claim concerning the relationship between style and content. Hence, it too is subject to the same ‘rules and regulations’ of philosophical argument. It must be established. (To make matters worse, Janaway’s thesis requires a negative existence proof –i.e. there exist no ways in which style and content can be separated — which is, needless to say, a very difficult argument to make.) Janaway, however, does not establish this point. Moreover, Janaway seems to be caught in a performative contradiction: he asserts that style and content cannot be differentiated without some form of loss, while enacting just such a separation. That is, he presents Nietzsche’s philosophical position independently of Nietzsche’s style. Thus, given the lack of argumentation and the apparent contradiction of his thesis, Janaway book is problematic. Fair enough.
However, Leiter also attempts to demonstrate that a negative existence proof of the kind Janaway would require in order to justify his claim is itself impossible. Leiter offers us the following analogy:
Consider the analogous case of Freudian psychoanalysis. Unlike Nietzsche, of course, Freud’s books had no therapeutic aim: therapy took place in the psychoanalyst’s office. Freud’s books, by contrast, expressed the cognitive content of his philosophical or theoretical positions: about the structure of the mind, the interpretation of dreams, the course of human psychic development and — most importantly for our purposes — the centrality of the mechanism of transference to therapeutic success. Yet a correct theoretical description of transference is no substitute for the patient’s actual experience of transference in the therapeutic setting, when he projects onto the analyst the heretofore repressed feelings that had been the source of his suffering, thus permitting the patient to recognize the reality of those feelings at last.
Leiter’s point, I take it, is metaphilosophical: there is a fundamental difference between the experience (of transference) and the theory explaining it, which is analogous to the difference between one’s experience of reading Nietzsche and the content of Nietzsche’s thought. And, in both cases, one need not understand the theory in order to have the experience.
More accurately phrased, since the cognitive or philosophical content of Freud’s (or Nietzsche’s) theory is descriptive and explanatory, it is different in kind from the affective experience one has in therapy. And hence the affective encounter can be separated from the explanatory model without incurring any semantic loss. Although there is absolutely no doubt that a close connection exists among the experience of a given phenomena (transference), its theorization (i.e. describing a phenomenon and developing therapeutic techniques), and practical import (successful therapy), the phenomena itself need not — indeed, cannot — be theorized within the context of its experiential field (i.e. therapy itself). In contrast to Freud, however, Leiter insists that Nietzsche’s
books are both the expression of the theoretical position and the therapeutic method. Nietzsche’s theoretical positions [...] are both explicit and implicit in a text that also aims to produce a therapeutic effect on certain readers [...]. Just as successful therapeutic transference requires the patient to experience the repressed feelings directed at the analyst, so too a successful revaluation of values requires engaging the reader sub-consciously at the affective level [...]. From none of this, alas, does it follow that one can not separate out philosophical or cognitive content from the therapeutic technique. (emphasis added)
2. Presuppositions
Needless to say, Leiter’s argument is a good one. But it is based on at least two interrelated presuppositions, which are — to my mind at least — suspect, and remain uninterrogated (of course, within the context of a review, there’s no room for any investigation of them, but that’s a separate matter). First, he implicitly appeals to a theory/practice distinction (albeit one that seems to be sanctioned by the fact that he is discussing a work of secondary literature, which already seems to endorse some such difference between it and its object). Second, he commits a category mistake (i.e. Janaway’s commentary stands to Nietzsche’s Genealogy in the same relation as Freud’s theories stand to his therapy), which is the product of his metaphilosophical stance (i.e. the difference in kind between affective experience and a theory explaining it), and which Leiter does not sufficiently follow through on.
I find the second issue most troublesome. However, for the sake of completeness, let’s consider the first claim. As we’ve already seen, Leiter’s counterargument hinges on the “natural” division between therapeutic practice and theoretical explanation, which maps onto what some philosophers of science still call (after the positivists) “the context of Discovery” and the “Context of Justification” (I’ve even heard some folks talk about the ‘context of education,’ which is distinct from the other two; interestingly, I think the motivations for introducing this third context are similar to the problem I’m trying to attribute to Leiter). Whereas Leiter understands the affective encounter that Nietzsche’s style and Freud’s therapy produce as a matter of practice in which some theoretical content remains implicit, he understands the theoretical commitments underwriting this encounter as belonging to, well, Theory. Is such a neat separation between the two spheres always legitimate? If not, is it legitimate with respect to style and content?
Let me answer the question indirectly by pointing out a (perhaps unintended) Bait and Switch on Leiter’s part. We’ll remember that Leiter initiated his separation of theory from practice by focusing on the Analysand’s experience of transference, which is said to be the fulcrum for successful therapy. Indeed, the analysand doesn’t need to know the first thing about transference, its mechanisms, or its potentials in order to experience it. As Leiter says, “understanding the mechanism of transference is no substitute for the experience itself.” The problem, however, is that the theory/practice distinction underwriting Leiter’s argument does not appear on the side of the Analysand, but from the perspective of the Analyst. Transference is the Analyst’s (intermediate) goal, rather than the origin of his or her practice. Hence, this Anaylsand’s affective experience is a product of an Analyst’s practice, which can then be integrated into the practice itself, rather than a constituent component of it. Now, if we’re willing to accept that producing the affective experience of transference is a goal of therapy, rather than a constituent element of it, then some theoretical understanding of the mechanisms through which transference occurs is indispensable for therapeutic practice. One has a better chance of reproducing an experience when one knows the underlying mechanisms. From the Analyst’s perspective, then, the “natural” distinction between theory and practice is quite artificial, since, ceteris paribus, therapy unfolds and modifies the Analyst’s theoretical knowledge. There can be no practice without theory, no theory without practice.
So, what initially appeared to be a theory/practice distinction has turned out to be a perspectival difference between Analysand and Analyst, whose differentiation occurs via an affective experience. In the context of therapy, then, the theory/practice distinction does not hold. Even if the concrete experience of the Analysand cannot be substituted for the theoretical knowledge possessed by the analyst, transference cannot be experienced outside of the cooperative relationship between analyst and analysand. Same with the knowledge of the Analyst. The concrete therapeutic relationship is tantamount to praxis, which implicates an explanatory, descriptive sphere instead of separating it out. No transference without (some form of therapy), no therapy without theory, no theory with the experience of transference, etc.
This said, then, it would seem that the attempt to separate theory from practice does not always obtain, although it may be redistributed along the relationship between analysand and analyst. In Nietzsche’s case, the relationship is between reader and writer (or text, if one prefers). Notice, then, that Leiter assertion of a difference in kind between affective experience and theoretical content is really a perspectival relationship to the same ‘object’ — therapy itself (for Nietzsche, morality) — that does not admit of any clean separation. This point will help me explain in a moment why I’ve attributed a category mistake to him. But for now, it’s enough to say that by treating the different perspectives entailed by therapy as distinct in kind, Leiter is forced to conclude that the theory can be separated from practice. But this presupposes that theory is not an integral component of therapy itself, and that therapy is not the object of theoretical study.
Rephrased, like Kant, Freud’s theories attempt to uncover the conditions for the possibility of certain affective phenomena, and are geared towards a therapeutic end (in the case of Kant, removal of transcendental illusion). Hence, even though the critique of pure reason or of the mechanisms of the mind, appear to be distinct from scientific (or therapeutic) method, they nevertheless norm these pursuits. They are part of a given practice. Moreover, as normative, they cannot be divorced from the activities they norm. Hence, in asserting that Nietzsche’s theory can be divorced from his stylistic practice, Leiter is claiming that norms can be divorced from the activities they ought to supervene upon. In Nietzsche’s case, this is tantamount to claiming that the revaluation of values is not a normative — and normed — endeavor. That is to say, Rather than conforming to the theory/practice divide — which turned out to be, upon investigation, nothing other than a reader/text — or analysand/analyst system of perspectives that conjointly constitute the proper object of study, Nietzsche’s stylistics have a normative register, a goal, which is intrinsic to the activity being undertaken, and which implies a body of theoretical commitments that need to be developed in order for the therapeutic aims to be successfully carried out within the medium of writing.
By this point, I hope that I’ve managed to provide some plausible reasons for thinking that Leiter’s attempt to distinuish between style and content, therapy and theory, etc. is problematic — if not false. I now want to turn to his category mistake. As I said near the beginning of this post, Leiter’s attempt to distinguish between theory and practice seems to be motivated by the distinction between secondary material and primary texts, between commentary and original work. If we reconsider his discussion of Freud, such a relationship should now jump into the foreground: in therapy, Freud attempts to overcome a given problem; in his theoretical work, he attempts to formulate a descriptive and explanatory theory. Now, I’ve already tried to show why I think this conception of Freud is wrong (too narrow view of therapy, mistakes a perspetical difference for a difference in kind). However, it does seem to capture the realationship between primary and secondary texts. Indeed, a commentary on Nietzsche need not share any of the goals of Nietzsche’s work. It is, in short, an independent work, in the sense that commentary seeks to understand its object, not to continue the project laid out by it. Moreover, in the case of Nietzsche’s work, the ‘object’ of a commentary is the normative practices, effects, and potentials (just to name a few possibilities) of revaluation itself, of therapy. And, as I’ve argued above, therapy — as a normative praxis — is not reducible to either the affective experience of the reader/analysand, nor to the theoretical understand of the text/writer/analyst. Rather, it is the dynamic interplay of both. Taking this praxis as one’s object, then, means taking into consideration both the style and content of Nietzsche’s work, rather than merely the content. But it doesn’t — as Leiter recognizes — entail writing in the style of Nietzsche. The latter approach would be a continuation of Nietzsche’s work, instead of a commentary on it.
All this said, then, Leiter’s argument rests on an analogy between ‘theory/practice’ and ‘primary text/secondary text’ in order to argue that style and content are separable. But let me recapitulate. Style and content are distinct, according to Leiter, in precisely the same way as therapy and explanatory theory are distinct. And the relationship between therapy and explanatory theory is structurally identical to the relationship between primary text and secondary text. I hope I’ve shown why line of reasoning is an impossible stretch. For, in the first instance, theory and practice do not stand in the same relation to one another as ‘primary text to secondary text.’ For theory/practice is a perspectival difference, rather than a substantive difference in kind. To treat the system of perspectives, moreover, in a manner that emphasizes a primary/secondary distinction, levels out the normative dimensions of a praxis, and obfuscates a context’s dynamic development and explication of its guiding norms. Hence, to the extent that this is to true, so to is it true that style is inseparable from content — although such an inseparability does demand sensitive commentary.
Of, course, Leiter’s criticism of Janaway’s leading thesis is still on the mark: Janaway needs to prove that style and content are inseparable. But the lack of such an argument is hardly proof that style and content are separable.
* Leiter’s use of ‘only’ here is a little strange, since it introduces a stronger reading of Nietzsche’s (and Janaway’s) claim than is I think warranted. That is, it’s one thing to say that engaging one’s readers affectively is a way of making them consider their underlying presuppositions about morality. It’s quite an other to say that style is the only way to do so. Leiter’s stronger claim, it seems to me, sets up a false alternative, which leads to something of a straw man characterization: Either one believes that on must engage one’s readers affectively, via some kind of stylistic consideration, or one believes that one needn’t do this at all. From where I sit, some forms of thinking and writing may indeed benefit from an affective register; some forms are diminished by it. But Nietzsche’s style — and its relationship to his philosophical position — needs to be evaluated on its own terms, not according to an a priori dichotomy.
