Department of Unverifiable Information
The New Yorker is deservedly famous for its fact-checking department, which strains every sentence for errors and inadvertent ambiguities. Mistakes do get by, but not many; unverified assertions that are in theory verifiable usually get cut. John McPhee, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, wrote a fascinating piece about the whole process a few years ago. According to McPhee, assertions that aren’t in theory verifiable — or are, for whatever reason, allowed to go unverified — are put “on author.”
I thought of this phrase the other day when I came across the following passage in Larissa MacFarquhar’s generally excellent profile of the British philosopher Derek Parfit:
There is something not-there about him, an unphysical, slightly androgynous quality. He lacks the normal anti-social emotions — envy, malice, dominance, desire for revenge…. Parfit is less aware than most of the boundaries of his self — less conscious of them and less protective. He is helplessly, sometimes unwillingly, empathetic: he will find himself overcome by the mood of the person he is with, especially if that person is unhappy.
One doesn’t have to be a philosopher to be struck by the epistemological grandiosity of this description. Did Parfit tell MacFarquhar that he lacked the normal anti-social emotions, or did she reach this conclusion on her own? Either way, it’s an extraordinary claim to be making about anyone — that he’s innocent not of anti-social behavior (though that, too, would be extraordinary) but of “normal anti-social emotions.” This sentence implies that the author is privy not only to the way Parfit feels, but also to the way most people feel. So, for that matter, does the sentence comparing his “awareness of the boundaries of his self” to that of others. This is a voice of perfect omniscience, the kind one might expect to find in a novel, not a piece of journalism. Coming across such a passage, one can only respond, “If you say so.”
As it happens, Parfit himself once worked at the New Yorker as a researcher for The Talk of the Town, a section of the magazine that has perfected the art of sizing people up without pretending to step inside their heads. If someone tells you he’s never felt anger, there’s your story: let the reader consider what sort of person tells you that. Put it on the reader, or on the subject, but not on author.
It would be interesting to have a look at the piece, but we don’t subscribe and probably won’t. The New Yorker‘s far from what it once was – somehow doesn’t seem worth the money.
The author seems to be mixing two styles – casual biography and gossip intimate. I wonder whether she’s writing (or has already written) a gossipy biography of the man.
“He lacks the normal anti-social emotions — envy, malice, dominance, desire for revenge….” I suppose this could be meant ironically; one would like to see the face of a person uttering that sentence, and hear the tone of voice.
Parfit’s central claim according to the article — he has synthesized Kantianism, contractualism and rule consequentialism at a deep level in what he calls a Triple Theory. “An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by some principle that is optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.”
It’s a bold claim and I suppose it presumes that almost every member of these three schools has misunderstood his own tradition.
I always hate to introduce any controversy but I’m taken with the fact that Peter Singer has such high praise for Parfit. Does Singer find in the Triple Theory a more solid justification for infanticide than his own provides?
I read this New Yorker article with great fascination. (I disagree strongly with David Smith’s view of the magazine; under David Remnick, it’s as good or better than ever, certainly better than under Tina Brown.) The questions that Matthew has raised came to my mind as I read it. But the profile is written in an unusual style: a lot of rat-a-tat, matter of fact sentences that nonetheless made sweeping claims, to the point that i thought it carried the label “novelistic,” to use Matthew’s word, on its face, and therefore those descriptions had to be taken with a great deal of caution. On the other hand, the author gained credibility from evidently having been privy (with a tape recorder?) to a lot of rambling philosophical chat between Parfit and his philosopher wife.
I have read enthusiastic reviews of Parfit’s latest book as an Instant Classic or Philosophical Landmark. I was not persuaded. The New Yorker profile of the person is very touching, the picture of an overgrown and lonely child, but frankly it undermines the case for the book: a rather odd duck doing a kind of philosophizing that, to me at least, also seems rather odd.
On top of all this, I once sat next to Parfit at a dinner. It was probably in the middle Seventies. He told me with great pride, a perfectly sincere and straight-faced manner, and no sign of that damned British frivolity that he had never read Plato.
When I mentioned my astonishment at this statement to a knowledgeable philosopher, he insisted that it wasn’t true, that Parfit was pulling my leg or that I had misunderstood him.
When I read the New Yorker profile, which gave every evidence that Parfit had very well read Plato by the date of that dinner if not by his teens — although he might have just compartmentalized Plato as “muddled” — I naturally thought back on this episode. I wondered to what extent the author might have been captured by the same self-created and eccentric persona that he was probably passing off on me.
There seems to be a great temptation in journalism these days to personalize everything – and sensationalize it at the same time. You can’t just discuss philosophy – you have to talk about the philosopher, his wife, his living room, his accent, his cat, and his car, and you have to find unusual, picturesque aspects to all of them.
I strongly disagree with Peter’s characterization of the New Yorker as better than ever. The cartoons, which is what I look at first, are terrible :O)
Larissa MacF has been on my “don’t read” list for long enough that I’d almost forgotten why. Thanks, Matt, for the reminder!
Peter S. –
Wittgenstein sometimes sounds more than a little crazy. Maybe Parfit isn’t all there either, as the old saying used to put it. Why not?
There’s such a thing as taking philosophers too seriously.
I also read the profile but what nagged at me was this question: wherein does this universal principle reside? If I were writing this in Latin I would have begun with a word indicating a question to which I do not have an answer. Help, please.