Thinking Things Through
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self-defeating, since (as Charles Sanders Peirce argued, long ago) the very
condition for uttering or expressing it makes it impossible—namely, the words
we use to announce or propose it. As Bertrand Russell wrote to an American
correspondent who solicited his views on that subject, it’s so nice to meet
another solipsist—we must get together more often. If Cartesianism (and its
variants) is a contradiction in terms, then communitarianism is the self-evident
truth we have so long sought but evaded, thanks to our idolatry of (rugged)
individualism (again, attacked by Peirce throughout his long and lonely
intellectual career, from 1871 until his death in 1914.^ For Steeves, individuality
is relative, not absolute: it applies to cells as well as (to) species (136), and it is
never an unqualified essence.
As Isaiah Berlin put it in one of his inimitable conversations that I was
privileged to overhear [in 1969], “pigs search for tmffles, so naturally they
divide the world into truffles and non-truffles.” Likewise, the notion of an
individual is a tool, handy for some things, but not others. There is no all
purpose tool or all-embracing idea; the quest for such omniscience or reductive
omnipotence is both misguided and dangerous. Aristotle held that individuals
are always members of classes and thus by definition unknowable; whereas, for
William of Occam, Willard van Onnan Quine, and the redoubtable John Wayne,
they’re all that is. These extremes betoken the fanaticism that begets them: all or
nothing usually means nothing. Steeves takes a moderate position on what Duns
Scotus would call haeccity (thisness); he’s no zealot. For him, individuals are
neither indispensable nor insidious. Instead, they are useful, fruitful, heuristic
concepts or ideals, but only up to a certain point—and beyond that, pointless if
not downright pernicious. Yet it takes an individual of Steeves’s caliber to resist
and reject entrenched views, and spurn conventional wisdom. If character is
destiny, then Steeves has plenty, and is not lacking in the very uniqueness that
his opponents reify, or deify.
That in turn suggests another admirable quality of Steeves’s book, one
we also find in DuBois, and a handful of other synoptic thinkers who grace the
annals. Hardly anyone in our country dares to do big picture thinking, theoria in
the best sense; even Richard Rorty, who comes the closest, has spent most of his
career explaining why theoria is impossible—or as dead as God has been since
Pascal, Nietzsche, Hume, Kant, positivism, and Russian anarchists buried him.
One either masters one’s problems, or one is mastered by them. Likewise, we
represent our times, yet as one great writer saluted another,^^ in rare but
compelling cases, they represent us (the age of Newton, the era of Einstein, the
minutes of Warhol). Steeves has the right to represent us—and that’s no eulogy.
But it does commemorate what he has taken from the stream of thought. He has
anticipated our needs, then met them, so we can see who we are in his eyes—
and the reflection of our own. This is I/Thou thinking at its finest, and an
antidote to the nihilism and emptiness of the age of New Age despair. His book
is an epitome and microcosm of human experience, and of his own soul. He isn’t
just a theorist, but a witness, a judge of human folly, and a seer. That’s a lot of