Time-wasting and intellectual engagement 2

I've received an email from A.C. Grayling in response to this post of mine about his letter to the LRB:

Dear Mr Geras

The reason why it is a waste of time to address a set of views once one has refuted the premises on which they are based is explained in the part of my letter to the LRB you take care not [to] quote. I there said that if you reject the idea that such planets, stars and galaxies as can be seen from earth determine your character and fate, you are wasting your time by studying the competing systems of astrology that require you to accept that basis in the first place.

For another example: suppose it is shown that premising a system of medical treatment on the ancient doctrine of four humours is ineffective. Would one nevertheless require medical students to study the texts of the ancients premised on that theory? I think not. Now: if you can show me what is mistaken in these remarks, please inform me; I stand always ready to learn and to be corrected.

I think you are conflating two different points: there are good historical and sociological reasons for study of competing astrological systems and ancient medicine. They are not reasons that apply to ethics, politics, the practice of medicine, or the quest for truth. What is at issue between Dawkins and Eagleton falls into the latter domain. Your point at best concerns the former.

Secondly, as I always attempt to do, I gave a reason for challenging Terry Eagleton's grounds for expecting us to take seriously the long passage in philosophical theology he offered in his review of Dawkins, namely, his claim that a deity does not have to exist to serve as a condition for the existence of everything else. I leave to your stated interest in the views of others whose premises are demonstrably false and whose logic is demonstrably faulty to extract the value from it.

I don't seek a correspondence on this matter, though in the interests of right of reply you might consider appending this to your remarks on your web site.

My good wishes to you - Anthony Grayling

I have replied to this email as follows:

Dear Mr Grayling

Thank you for your email. You say I take care not to quote your explanation for the claim that it is a waste of time to address what is built on premises one rejects. That's a locution tending towards the sharp, but unwarrantedly. First, because in criticizing your letter to the LRB I followed the normal blogging convention of linking to the text of what I was taking issue with, so giving my readers access to what you imply I may have been wanting to hide from them. Second, because what you call the explanation for your claim is in fact only an example offered in support of it. The claim is the one I did indeed quote, namely:

... when one rejects the premises of a set of views, it is a waste of one's time to address what is built on those premises...

Your astrology example then illustrates this claim, as also, now, does the additional example in your email, that of the ancient doctrine of four humours. In illustrating - exemplifying - it, the two examples do both support the 'waste of time' claim, but only because they show that there are cases for which it is true. But the claim is quite general in form ('when' having the force of 'whenever', rather than of 'sometimes when') and therefore if there are also cases for which it is false, then the claim itself is false. This is what I was trying to suggest in alluding to my own reading of post-Holocaust Jewish theology. One does not have to accept the premise embodied in the question 'where was God?' - the premise, that is, of there being a God - to think that there may be something to be learned from the theological literature on this question. One can learn the difference between a theodicy that justifies the ways of God whatever terrible aspects these may be thought to include, a theology of hiddenness or mystery, and a theology in which God is seen as being, in a certain sense, self-limiting in order to create a space for human freedom. While all this may be discounted as being merely of historical interest, learning things of historical interest is not always a waste of one's time; and, furthermore, there are substantive issues about the relationship between the values of freedom, duty and justice, and the notion of merited punishment, that are also at stake in these debates. Of course, one can come to the same issues in other intellectual contexts, contexts free of the religious premise. But this doesn't rescue your claim. That one can do that won't show that there isn't also a route through theology.

Some people think that liberty is the most important political value. Others don't. But those others do well to take a hard look at how the first group reason from their favoured premise to whatever conclusions they reach, since it may help them (the others) to understand certain aspects of liberty they would otherwise miss. Marxists who undervalue liberalism, believing its premises are flawed, should certainly read liberal political theory for the same kind of reason. Liberals for whom Marxism is a closed book can do worse than to open that book. Those who are consequentialists in ethics and those who aren't need a good understanding of what follows from the premises of their philosophical adversaries, in order to be able to assess what their adversaries are committed to. And then there is the fact that not all reasoning moves neatly from premises to conclusions anyway, with the status of the former already settled, either accepted or rejected; sometimes we move between premises and what can be derived from them, as compared with other premises and what can be derived from them, in order to arrive at a provisional judgement as between the alternatives before us.

You may well say in response to all this that these weren't the sorts of examples you had in mind. That's fine. But they tell against your 'waste of time' thesis, which was framed in too general a form.

Finally, and on a separate question, although in the democratic community to which you and I both belong you do have a right of reply to the post in which I disagreed with your letter, you are wrong to presume that you have a right of reply on my blog. You don't. I have complete discretion as to what - and whose - writing gets posted there. This is, I have to say, a happy state of affairs from my point of view, since were things otherwise I should have to endure the appearance on my blog of views, modes of address and the voices of particular people that or whom I prefer not to host. I am ready to oblige you, all the same, by going along with the suggestion that I post your email, since it is not objectionable in any of the ways that would lead me to want to exclude it. I shall post it together with this response from me.

My good wishes to you in return,

Norman Geras