In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Common Knowledge 8.2 (2002) 284-286



[Access article in PDF]

Peace and Mind
Seriatim Symposium on Dispute, Conflict, and Enmity Part 2:
Caveats and Consolations

Jeffrey M. Perl


Introduction:
Setting Limits

"Take it back," Stephen Toulmin urged intellectuals, on behalf of the editorial board, as Common Knowledge began its first series in 1992. Calling for papers in which theorists would signal the nth degree of skepticism by retracting the arguments that had made their reputations, Toulmin himself took back ("I regard my book Reason in Ethics . . . as the work of another person") his own earliest thinking. In the years since Toulmin's call appeared, CK has amassed a cache of promissory notes from influential theorists, largely in the humanities; but only one, a social scientist (Albert Hirschman), has delivered. Possibly the time has come to collect on all these markers. Probably the time is right for the journal itself to set a good example. But how to take back taking back?

Common Knowledge, to coin a field, is a journal of gray studies. A black-and-white day, September 11, 2001, has brought the editors to rethink our fidelity to rethinking. Stanley Fish was not alone, after September 11, in being asked if terrorist violence "meant the end of postmodern relativism." In the New York [End Page 284] Times, Fish wrote that a reporter called to ask whether "ideas foisted upon us by postmodern intellectuals have weakened the country's resolve," whether postmodernists' denying "the possibility of describing matters of fact objectively" leaves Americans "with no firm basis for either condemning the terrorist attacks or fighting back." Fish's response was "Not so"—but I am not as certain. The hesitancy that skepticism is routinely said to cause or be . . . is it such a bad thing? My bedside reading lately has been Ecclesiastes, which in our present context seems to me cheerful. Even that text, in its infamous lassitude, avers a time for this and a time for that. The trick appears to be knowing which is when.

Now is the time to set public, conscious limits to the project of this symposium: out of respect for the dead and dying, first of all, but also lest our project earn a modifier like naive. The aim of the symposium, "Peace and Mind," is to involve people who would not usually be asked to involve themselves—the intellectual community, rather than the intelligence community—in thinking about peace. There are limits to the search for peace that I would have thought obvious. But even browsing through the October 4, 2001, London Review of Books will tell you otherwise. Many of the responses there to the violence of September 11 would make, if written in distant retrospect, penetrating historical remarks; but as contemporaneous remarks about a human disaster, they leave much (shock, fellow feeling, and pity) to be desired. From an adequate distance in time, any war appears to have been evitable and every enmity unreal. To view contemporary enmities in this way may be a sign of perspicacious thinking, but—to everything there is a season—it can also seem inhuman or obscene.

An example: Osama bin Laden said in an interview, during the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, that he was not simply unaffected by death, but in love with death, while his enemies were in love with life. The statement is more than psychologically interesting, it is theologically profound. I wish his interlocutor on that occasion had been Clifford Geertz or Stephen Greenblatt, and yet understanding what bin Laden meant would not be a means to peace with him. It is not that something valuable might not be learned from thick description of the remark in context, but rather that many of us are its object and cannot be expected, unlike bin Laden's junior colleagues, to die happily at his bidding. What I am saying is that there are limits to understanding and, therefore, to dialogue. I want to add immediately, however, that those limits are themselves more severely limited than...

pdf

Share