“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Jiggery Pokery Trumpery

Graham Harman has found a perfect term to describe a maneuver that's only too common in our world: trumpery. I tell you that your ideas are far less sophisticated than mine by pulling out a pseudo-counter-intuitive trump card. Viz. my favorite (least favorite) one from Continental philosophy: “Of course you would be totally naive to think that there is a continuity between humans and animals. That would be mere Darwinism, a dreadfully unsophisticated mistake.” I can also think of dozens of examples from Dennett and Dawkins et al.

“Trumpery” is a great term. It has a hint of something like effrontery or mockery (because of the sound of the word), a kind of affected importance.

Harman holds trumpery responsible for some of the terrible pickles we've gotten ourselves into and I think he is definitely on to something. His example:
“Contrary to the gullible masses of readers who all think Heidegger is straightforwardly anti-technology, it’s not really that simple.” This is trumpery: a deceptive, misleading trump card based on false sophistication.
Or this from phenomenology:
Correlationism does this as its essential gesture: “The naive are trapped by the pseudo-problem of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’ or ‘outer’ and ‘inner’, when in fact we are already outside ourselves in our very inwardness.”

1 comment:

Jeremy Trombley said...

What about claims that something is "teleological" or "essentialist"? Are those trumpery as well? As if to say "You shouldn't listen to X because X's philosophy is teleological and/or essentialist, and mine is not."
It frustrates me because I often can't figure out why X's philosophy is teleological or essentialist, and whoever is making the claim doesn't explain it very well.