A great chimerical epithet?

March 19, 2006 1:56 PM

In "What Metaphors Mean" Donald Davidson refers to a critic who called Tolstoy "a great moralizing infant". Who was that critic, and in what work was Tolstoy so called?
posted by kenko to Writing & Language (10 answers total)

Best answer: I had about decided Davidson simply made up the quote when I tried Google Book Search and found this. Now, the annoying little clip they give you doesn't show who Mann is calling a "great moralizing infant," but assuming it was Tolstoy (page 106 is in a chapter called "Goethe and Tolstoy") there's your answer. You can probably track down a copy of Mann's essays without too much trouble if you want to make sure.
posted by languagehat at 3:17 PM on March 19, 2006

And may I add that Davidson is a supreme jerk for not naming the critic. In my humble opinion. (An appropriate punishment would be for people to start quoting him simply as "a philosopher.")
posted by languagehat at 3:18 PM on March 19, 2006

Hey, that's not very nice.

If it wasn't for philosophy, you guys wouldn't have your cushy little discipline. (Besides, many of us don't care for his arguments.)
posted by ontic at 12:10 AM on March 20, 2006

1) Huh? What did I say against philosophy? I said Davidson was a jerk. You must have failed Philo 101 if you think that implies all philosophers are jerks. And I know nothing about his arguments; I was reacting solely to his not naming his source.

2) What "cushy little discipline"? "You guys"? I'm an editor; exactly how does the existence of philosophy impact editing? Or anything else, for that matter? I guarantee you that if no philosopher had ever written, the world would have gone on much the way it has. I don't begrudge you guys your often very interesting musings, but if you think they have a serious impact on the world at large, you're spending too much time reading each other.
posted by languagehat at 5:44 AM on March 20, 2006

1) Well actually I just intended to poke a little fun at linguists. I can see that you took it as more than that. But now I see I misinterpreted your comment. You meant instead of referring to him as "Donald Davidson", refer to him as "a philosopher". Pretty funny, actually. What I read (after spending years with warring philosophers of language and linguists) was "refer to him as a philosopher" as opposed to, say, a "linguist and a philosopher" which would be more laudable. You get the same thing with string theorists, who some physicists claim are "just philosophers".

2) I was assuming one could be both an editor and a linguist. But I will take your bet on the world being different. I think that without Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Locke, Descartes, Hobbes, Newton (who called himself a natural philosopher), Marx , and so on that the world would be quite a bit different. I'm not sure how we'd settle this, though. We'll need a window into other possible worlds.
posted by ontic at 9:53 AM on March 20, 2006

Response by poster: Thanks mr. hat!
posted by kenko at 10:39 AM on March 20, 2006

Ah. Now that I know where you were coming from, I withdraw the excessive snark quotient of my response. But having read the Wikipedia article on Davidson (about whom I was ignorant), I feel quite confident in stating that no linguist would consider him a "linguist and a philosopher"—he's a philosopher who liked to dabble in ideas about language, like Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein knew absolutely nothing about how language actually works, so his thoughts on the subject are pretty much worthless except to other philosophers. I can't speak to Davidson's knowledge, except that this quote sets off my bullshit alarm: "I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed."

As to your second point, you're right, I spoke way too loosely. If it's accepted that Marx was a philosopher (and I guess I have to let philosophers make that determination), then clearly that particular philosopher made a difference. I'd amend my statement to read "if no philosopher had ever written on non-applied subjects [i.e., excepting political/economic thinkers], the world would have gone on much the way it has." This means everything from ancient speculations on the world ("It's all fire!" "No, you fool, it's all water!") to modern metaphysicians and language theorists. But I realize that's a provocative statement.

As for me, you can think of me as both an editor and a linguist as long as you interpret the latter as "someone who got a good grounding in linguistics in grad school but did nothing with it professionally." I play the linguist on MetaFilter (though I'm always happy to defer to a real linguist like Mark Liberman, who posts here as myl), but I'd never dream of describing myself that way to a linguistics prof. Here's what I recently wrote an e-mail correspondent:

You know, I occasionally have a fantasy about a world in which people's natural interest in language manifested itself in an interest in linguistics, and linguistics courses were so popular colleges competed to hire away each other's star professors, and anybody you stopped at random on the street would know what a phoneme was and have a strong opinion on the merits of the latest theory of English grammar. In such a world I'd just be an editor who occasionally waxed nostalgic for his grad school years and tried to get an idea of what they were up to these days at Language Log Plaza; I certainly wouldn't dream of shooting off my mouth about how language works -- I'd leave it to the experts. But in the wretched, violent, functionally and linguistically illiterate world we actually inhabit, I'm the moral equivalent of an expert; because almost everyone knows less than nothing about the way language works, it's actually a public service for me to keep hollering "Language changes! Difference is OK! Words do not come from clever acronyms!" It's a little depressing sometimes.

Hmm. This is all a bit off-topic, isn't it? But since I answered the original question, I kenko won't hold it against me.
posted by languagehat at 10:52 AM on March 20, 2006

I hope kenko won't hold it against me. Dammit.
posted by languagehat at 10:53 AM on March 20, 2006

Oh good, all is well. And yes, I believe the world would barely notice if philosophers of language had chosen some other career (unless it was, say, cancer research -- lots of intelligence, just misdirected). Point about Davidson not being a linguist is well taken, I ran across him for the first time while doing Lakoff on metaphor, so I'm damaged goods.
posted by ontic at 5:12 PM on March 20, 2006

We're all damaged goods here on MeFi.
posted by languagehat at 6:36 PM on March 20, 2006