Reframing the Masters of Suspicion

Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud

Andrew Dole

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350065192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Kritische Theorie

This book revisits Paul Ricoeur's classification of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud as the "masters of suspicion", and provides a thought-provoking critique for critical religious studies scholars, as well as anyone working in critical theory more broadly. Whereas Ricoeur saw suspicion as a mode of interpretation, Andrew Dole argues that the method common to his "masters" is better understood as a mode of explanation. Dole replaces Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion with suspicious explanation, which claims the existence of hidden phenomena that are bad in some recognizable way. Each of the masters, Dole argues, offered a distinct kind of suspicious explanation. Reconstructing Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in this way brings their work into conversation with conspiracy theories, which are themselves a type of suspicious explanation. Dole argues that conspiracy theories and other types of suspicious explanation are "cognitively ensnaring", to borrow a term from Pascal Boyer. If they are true they are importantly true, but their truth or falsity can be very difficult to ascertain.

1

Suspicious Explanation: A Primer

In this chapter I will set the stage for the reconstruction of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as purveyors of suspicious explanations of large-scale social phenomena. These are explanations of large-scale social phenomena that postulate the existence of “hidden” factors and generate negative ethical charge. Over the course of this chapter the senses in which I use these terms will become clear.

In the first section of the chapter I will discuss causal explanation in general and explanation by reasons in particular, and will introduce the notion of ethical charge. In the second section I will discuss the explanation of large-scale social phenomena, noting different ways in which notions of agency can figure in such explanations. In the third section I will discuss inference to the best explanation as a method (loosely construed) for deciding whether to accept or reject explanations. I will close the chapter by describing Hegel’s notion of the “cunning of reason,” which I take to be a crucial historical starting point for the tradition of suspicion.

Causal explanation

I noted in the introduction that Ricoeur’s decision to reconstruct Freud in hermeneutical terms was influenced by the view that reasons cannot be causes. My rejection of this position marks my single most important point of departure from Ricoeur. Accepting that reasons can be causes erases the puzzlement that motivated the hermeneutical framework in the first place, and opens the way to a reconstruction of the masters as offering causal explanations in which reasons (and other mental factors) figure. Because of the crucial role it plays in my work, I need to justify the idea that reasons can be causes before proceeding; but because the idea is both commonsensical and now well attested among philosophers, only a minimal justification is needed.

Recall Flew’s puzzlement with the idea that Freud “was apparently thinking of unconscious mental processes as the inferred efficient causes which produce obsessive acts as their effects.”¹ Flew subscribed to the conviction that efficient causality, the sort of causality that is thoroughly at home in a materialistic metaphysics, was the only suitable basis for properly scientific explanations. Recall as well that Carl Hempel’s deductive-nomological model of explanation was grounded in the idea that causality operates in accordance with natural laws that admit of no exceptions, such that the true form of a causal explanation will be a statement of a natural law plus a description of the conditions in which that law operated in a specific instance.²

It was only shortly after Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy that Donald Davidson issued his first significant defense of “the ancient—and commonsense—position that rationalization [explanation by reasons] is a species of causal explanation.”³ Davidson’s arguments initiated a wave of philosophical discussion, one product of which has been a broad embrace of the idea that mental factors such as beliefs, decisions, and affective states can be causes; and Davidson would eventually point out that accepting this position obviates the need for a construal of Freud’s theories that avoids notions of explanation.⁴ I am interested in a stream of these discussions that hold, in the words of Tyler Burge, that “the probity of mentalistic causal explanation is deeper than the metaphysical considerations that call it into question.”⁵ Where positivism assumed what was taken to be a well-understood notion of causality as a basis for reconstructing of the phenomenon of explanation, many post-positivist philosophers have in contrast assumed what are taken to be culturally widespread and stable practices of explanation as a basis for reconstructing the notion of causality. That is, these philosophers understand causes as the sorts of relations that figure in the explanations that we offer and accept in both scientific investigations and in our everyday lives. And given that our ordinary practices uncontroversially allow reasons, broadly construed, to explain events (human actions and the events that these in turn produce), the idea that reasons can be causes is a natural concomitant of this approach. As Jennifer Hornsby has put the point, “Reason explanation is causal in a sense that rules out this idea of causality and explanatoriness coming apart . . . reason explanation is causal-explanation (where the hyphen signals that causality and explanatoriness enter the scene together, as it were).”⁶

The literature since Davidson contains several independent examples in the literature of post-positivist reconstructions of cause and causal explanation. Richard Miller takes explanation generally to be the “adequate description of underlying causes helping to bring about the phenomenon to be explained.”⁷ Miller argues that causality “has no informative and general analysis”: it is, rather, a “core concept,” possessed of a stable center that has been expanded over time.⁸ The concept’s “core” is constituted by a number of “elementary varieties” of the causation, including “pushing (for example, the wind’s blowing leaves), giving sensations or feelings (for example, a sting’s hurting) and motivating action (for example, fear’s motivating flight).”⁹ The concept has over the course of its history been extended to such factors as “entelechies, unconscious processes and structures, action at a distance, electromagnetic fields, and momentum treated as a physical factor involved in the causation of balance points and trajectories”; these extensions partake of historical contingency, and some have been controversial, and some temporary.¹⁰ One result of this position, which was particularly important for Miller, is that it allows for the basic notion of explanation as adequate causal description to operate across the natural sciences, the human sciences, and everyday life. It thus allows reasons to be explanatory in a sense that is not fundamentally different from the way that physical forces can be, and allows for consideration of historical explanations, such as figure in the works of Karl Marx, alongside natural-scientific explanations.¹¹

Similarly, James Woodward grounds his account of causality in the idea that explanation and causal inference are “widespread, everyday activities in which most human beings, including people in other cultures quite different from our own, engage.”¹² On his account “any explanation that proceeds by showing how an outcome depends (where the dependence in question is not logical or conceptual) on other variables or factors counts as causal.”¹³ He defends a manipulationist account according to which “the distinguishing feature of causal explanations, so conceived, is that they are explanations that furnish information that is potentially relevant to manipulation and control: they tell us how, if we were able to change the value of one or more variables, we could change the value of other variables.”¹⁴ And while explanations that appeal to reasons are not of independent interest to Woodward, his position undercuts the notion that explanations that deploy notions of agency make use of causal concepts in a different way than explanations that do not.

My rationale for regarding reasons as possible causes is, then, that it is uncontroversially a part of our ordinary practices of explanation to think that people sometimes act for reasons, and to be a cause just is to figure in a (true) explanation of why something is the case. It is, of course, possible that our ordinary practices of explanation are massively erroneous, and that in fact people do not ever act for reasons. But this skeptical worry is not relevant to the project of trying to understand how explanations that appeal to reasons work.¹⁵

For the next part of the discussion I will need a few examples of well-formed explanations in both the nonhuman and the human spheres. In these examples, because signifies a claim to explanatoriness.

The match is burning because it was struck.

The match is burning because there is oxygen in the room.

Smith died because he was shot through the heart.

Smith died because he seduced Jones’s wife.

I would like to make three comments on this list. First, I intend it to be accepted that all four statements are causal explanations, in spite of the fact that there are recognizable differences among the causes they describe: all identify one factor as the one that made the difference regarding some phenomenon’s being the case. Second, note that in the second example, what is identified as doing the explaining is a condition or a state of affairs—there being oxygen in the room—rather than an event or an action. On the notion of a cause as (following Woodward) a variable on which some outcome depends, states of affairs can perfectly well be causes, just because they can be such variables. And third, note that what I have offered is two cases in which a different explanans has been offered for the same explanandum. And it should be apparent that the differing explanations in question are not mutually exclusive: it might be the case that had the match not been struck it would not be burning, and also that were there no oxygen in the room it would not be burning.

These examples should make it clear that not just any account of causes, even if true, will count as an explanation. Two commonsense observations about causality are that events typically have multiple “simultaneous” proximate causes (this is obvious in cases where conditions are variables in Woodward’s sense) and that anything that can itself be cited as a cause will itself be, or will have been, caused. Thus if explaining a phenomenon required an account of all of the causes that figure in that phenomenon’s being the case—all of the variables on which its being the case depended—then all explanations would have an infinite number of members. But in fact our ordinary practices of explanation allow single factors to be explanatory. Those practices thus incorporate some features which discriminate among the many causes of a phenomenon, singling out some of these as the ones that explain. As Larry Wright has remarked, “In some contexts, ‘Why the explosion’? is adequately answered by, ‘Some jackass left the burner on too high,’ and injecting esoteric microphysics would be an impertinent bore.”¹⁶

Miller adopts the term adequacy as a label for the property that makes certain causal claims into explanations. He argues that adequacy in explanation is both field-specific and pragmatic. Adequacy is field-specific in that within particular fields of inquiry, expectations are in place at any given time as to what an acceptable explanation is supposed to look like. Miller labels such expectations standard causal patterns, noting that these are in part “stopping rules,” rules which determine the point at which it is permissible to “break off the work of causal analysis with the remark that the factors described were sufficient in the actual circumstances.”¹⁷ And explanatory adequacy is pragmatic in that requests for explanation are frequently directed toward ends which are served by knowledge of only certain of the many causes of a phenomenon. In one of his examples, when asking what caused the car crash in which Jones, driving to a grocery late at night to buy cigarettes, is killed by a car driven by Robinson, it would make sense to say that the crash occurred because Robinson was drunk, or that he was driving at a high rate of speed in the wrong lane; but it would not be adequate to say that the crash occurred because Jones was a smoker, even though Jones’s habit made a necessary causal contribution to the crash. Miller argues that this is so because (or perhaps better, to the extent that) our interest in explaining the crash lies in a desire to reduce the number of such crashes. Knowing more about the role of drunkenness in the crash serves this aim, whereas “No one’s effort to avoid vehicular death is supported by knowledge that Jones would not have been killed if he had not smoked.”¹⁸

Miller draws a broad moral from examples of this sort. As complex as the activity of explanation is, we can appreciate its unity and utility “if we view it as the kind of description which is most fundamentally a basis for coping with reality, i.e. for promoting or preventing change.”¹⁹ In other words, “ Explanation directs us toward those parts of the history of the world that are of most use in coping with the world. . . . This is the point of the activity as a whole.”²⁰ This position is shared by Garfinkel, writing prior to Miller,²¹ and by Woodward writing afterward, as we have seen.

The conclusion that matters for my purposes is that explanatory adequacy is contextual. The project of explanation is often governed by an interest that is only served by some of the true causal accounts that might be offered; and in every case great deal of the causal story of the phenomenon under investigation will, of necessity, be simply taken for granted.

Agent explanations

In this section I introduce the notion of the commonsense belief-desire explanation. We uncontroversially offer and accept claims like these:

Jones shot Smith because he wanted Smith to be dead;

Jones shot Smith because he believed that doing so would lead to Smith’s death;

Jones shot Smith because he believed that Smith had seduced his wife;

Jones shot Smith because he was gripped by uncontrollable rage.

In my usage belief-desire explanation refers to any explanation that identifies as explanatory some factor within the psychology of an agent. We commonsensically accept that such things as beliefs, desires, intentions, ends, and feelings can be causes in Woodward’s sense—that is, that these can be the crucial variables on which actions, and the events that these in turn cause, depend. We understand that such factors function as causes only when embedded in larger complexes: for example, Jones’s desire that Smith be dead would not have caused him to shoot Smith unless he also believed that shooting Smith would lead to his death. But here as elsewhere, context determines which causes will count as explanatory. For some explanatory purposes it will suffice to know why Jones desired Smith’s death; for others, what he believed about the effects of firearms.

It will be useful at this point for me to connect my discussion to a current topic in the cognitive sciences. Cognitive scientists commonly use the term Theory of Mind (ToM) to refer to the ability to represent to ourselves the contents of other minds (whether human or not). Matt Rossano, for example, describes ToM as “a form of causal attribution whereby an organism assigns another’s action to an internal state such as a belief, a desire, or an intention.”²² ToM makes it possible for us to infer (whether correctly or incorrectly) the emotional states or in...