Concepts and Persons THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES This page intentionally left blank Concepts and Persons THE TANNER LECTURES ON HUMAN VALUES Michael Lambek with Commentary by Jonathan Lear Sherry B. Ortner Joel Robbins UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London © University of Toronto Press 2021 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0905-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-3959-7 (PDF) ISBN 978-1-4875-3960-3 (EPUB) Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Concepts and persons / Michael Lambek ; with commentary by Jonathan Lear, Sherry Ortner, Joel Robbins. Names: Lambek, Michael, author. Series: Tanner lectures on human values (Cambridge, Mass.) Description: Series statement: The Tanner lectures on human values | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210214945 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210215054 | ISBN 9781487509057 (cloth) | ISBN 9781487539597 (PDF) | ISBN 9781487539603 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical anthropology. Classification: LCC BD450 .L24 2021 | DDC 128 – dc23 Title page image: Barbara Hepworth © Bowness. Photograph courtesy of The Pier Arts Centre. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement of Canada du Canada Contents Foreword vii elizabeth anderson Preface and Acknowledgments xi CONCEPTS AND PERSONS: THE TANNER LECTURE 1 COMMENTARIES Another Description: Serious Games 55 sherry b. ortner On Games: A Response to Sherry B. Ortner 62 Brief Encounter 72 jonathan lear Premature Interpretation and the Difficulty of Anthropology: A Response to Jonathan Lear 87 Concepts and Values, Anthropology and Judgment 102 joel robbins Mistakes of Grammar and Anthropological Judgment: A Response to Joel Robbins 115 Concluding Remarks 127 References 133 Commentators 149 Index 151 This page intentionally left blank Foreword John Dewey once said, “Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”1 Dewey urged philosophers to get out of their armchairs and start their philosophizing from the problems people encounter in their lives. To do this well requires that they engage those already in the field who have devised diverse ways of studying people and their problems. Those studying the human condition through other modes also invariably draw on norma- tively freighted ideas that pose questions and difficulties that are frequent subjects of philosophical investigation. We – philosophers and non-philosophers – would do well to think together in our attempts to make sense of, and cope with, our predicaments. In this spirit, and in the spirit of the Tanner Lectures themselves, the Philosophy Department at University of Michigan has long stressed the importance of inviting people from fields outside phi- losophy – including biology, classics, economics, history, law, liter- ature, psychiatry, psychology, and sociology – to deliver the annual Tanner Lecture on Human Values. When, as chair of the Philoso- phy Department, I had occasion to invite the next Tanner lecturer, I noticed that the last anthropologist we had invited was Marshall Sahlins, in 2005. Since then, anthropology has turned ever more seri- ously to ethical dimensions of life – to the fact that people understand and deal with their condition not simply in terms of challenges to the 1 Dewey, “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy (1917),” in The Essential Dewey, vol. 1, 68. viii Foreword satisfaction of their desires or the advancement of their interests but in ethical terms – as, for example, duties to fulfil, sins to avoid, and ideals to realize. I was therefore delighted to invite Michael Lambek, Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Ethical Life at the University of Toronto – and, as his title indicates, a leader in the anthropology of ethics – to deliver our 2019 Tanner Lecture. Lambek draws on the work of several philosophers – including Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Jonathan Lear, Alasdair MacIntyre, Gilbert Ryle, and Ludwig Wittgenstein – to explore the predica- ments that arise in the ways people live with concepts, and with per- sons. He is particularly concerned with our ambiguous relations to “metapersons” – spirits, deities, demons, saints, and other human-like figures. It is far too easy to dismiss metapersons as unreal, and hence as concepts we should live without. Even atheists often relate to metaper- sons in fiction, drama, and history, and to currently existing humans reconfigured in our culture as metapersons – for example, pop-music idols and pro-wrestling personas. We fantasize about them, heroize and demonize them, write fanfiction about them, engage in cosplay. Concerns about their ontological status are often orthogonal to the varied ways engaging with metapersons animate ethical life. While Lambek warns that it is too “heavy handed … to describe metahumans as the anthropomorphization of concepts,” that is not a bad starting place for considering one way we engage with them. Ethical concepts are often better contended with when we imagine how particular metapersons manifest them in particular circumstances than in the abstractions of philosophical analysis. When Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?”; when Hillary Clin- ton imagined conversing with Eleanor Roosevelt to help her think about how to face challenges in her life; or when audience mem- bers at a performance of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reflect on Brick’s alcoholism to make sense of the addiction of one of their own family members, they engage with metapersons as guides to action and understanding. Sometimes metapersons trouble us. We may feel haunted by ancestors with whom we had fraught relations – unforgiven wrongs, buried secrets, failures to communicate. Lambek seeks to illuminate the human condition by focusing on the case of Salim, a young man from Mayotte who is haunted not only by unfinished business with his suddenly deceased mother but by Foreword ix the spirits with whom his mother, a professional spirit-handler, engaged. The latter hound him in his dreams, demanding to strike up a relationship with him in accordance with their practice, upon the death of their handlers, of seeking cohabitation with the deceased’s descendants. As a reformed Muslim, he regards them all as devils with whom it is sinful to interact, even if only to ask them to go away. One can be a good Muslim, or interact with spir- its, but not both. Salim is also overcome with guilt at his failure to warn his mother against engaging with spirits, as doing so would send her to hell. Other Muslims in Mayotte have more easy-going relationships with various spirits, as longstanding local customs hold that only some are evil. Embracing a both/and perspective on the concepts informing their ethical lives, they see no conflict between being a good Muslim and engaging with spirits. Lambek argues that Salim’s troubles exemplify a type of ethical conflict that may arise for any persons whose lives are informed by incommensurable ethical concepts. Since nearly all of us inhabit societies that include multiple incommensurable ethical traditions informing our lives, Salim’s troubles offer materials for reflection about our own. In Salim’s case, the reformed Muslim concept of “devil” is incommensurable with the diverse concepts of spirits in local Mayotte culture. Lambek argues that, in regarding the latter as all devils and hence as commensurable with reformed Islamic notions, Salim makes a conceptual mistake. If we understand the meanings of concepts through their roles in language games – in how we live with them – we can understand Salim as taking a concept of spirits belonging to one language game and treating it according to the rules of another. Although he feels compelled to live strictly in accordance with reformed Islam and hence to repu- diate traditional ways with spirits, he cannot repudiate the latter without experiencing turmoil – in part because repudiation also puts him in seemingly unresolvable tension with his deceased mother.2 2 It is as if, in the midst of an American football game, Salim catches the ball and starts playing with it according to the rules of rugby. Although he is dedicated to playing rugby exclusively, Salim finds that he cannot simply ignore the consequences of finding himself in a football game.