Academics Don't Get It

It's good to see this article being talked about. I see you recognise the insights that Ansart's atricle contains, but I assume you judge these to be for the most part incidental.

However, without disrespect, you do not appear to have grasped the nature and purpose of Ansart's exegesis (and it is exegesis with the intention of arriving at understanding, not partisan advocacy of any variety of "warrior ethics", which he is undertaking). The purpose of Ansart's inquiry is, as he states a number of times, first by reference to Davidson's principle of charity in interpretation, to identify whether there is any governing coherence to the "bundle of contradictions" which Hagakure contains, contradictions into which its author appears to provide very little insight, assuming he is alive to them at all. For it may be that the contradictions are stubborn for the very reason that they reflect a stubborn truth which is dialetheistic, or at the very least paradoxical. But before we get to that point - and it is easy to jump straight to it, since apparent paradox is often used as a lazy device for concealing confusions and tensions in thought which a writer mistakes for profundity or wisdom - we need to unbundle the contradictions, or conceptual tensions, to get a clear look at them.

That is what Ansart is attempting to do. There is a tension in the proposition that service in loyalty should be blind and other exhortations in Hagakure that the servant should be, in effect, a prudent practical reasoner for his retainer's benefit and guidance. Ansart rejects the argument that loyalty of counsel equates with the blind loyalty which Hagakure extols, for the obvious reason that the later form of loyalty does not just eschew the practical rationality of counsel but appears to valorise its opposite: a kind of arational (if not always irrational) intensity of commitment. Ansart offers one ingenious suggestion that the contradiction may indeed be, in the context of those social relations which obtained among samurai contemporaneous with Hagakure, only apparent, since it was accepted – and expected - that different people would discharge each different form of loyalty: they operated to some extent as supplements of each other.

His most original suggestion is, however, that the principle of coherence in Hakagure resides in the notion of a will which is unbounded by and unrelated to personal, socially-constituted, loyalties of any kind; a will which is not an instrument in the performance of moral obligations, or a necessary condition precedent to practical reasoning about moral obligations, but a power which lies and is exercised beyond those obligations by which we are tied in relations of liability to or power over other socially-situated persons. Because it is to this will which Hagakure’s fascination with blind devotion and frenzy is directed, the work is not, after all, a “bundle of contradictions”. Hagakure expresses, on Ansart’s argument, a “proto-existentialist” theme and this is what “explains its enduring appeal”. In the course of arriving at his formulation of this theme, Ansart has shown himself fully capable of understanding the meaning and value of the notion of “service as an ethic”. He does, in fact, “get it”; his purpose, however, is to show that the prescriptions which Hagakure extols as necessary to this “ethic” are not at all straightforwardly coherent; and that its real intention is, in any case, much more exploratory (and ethically creative) than prescriptive.

His writing is a model of clarity and discrimination; he writes prose in which the intelligence can be seen as active and alive. All these are traits which few academics possess. He betrays not the slightest interest in the pompous obscurity and self-indulgent theorising which tiresome academics “trained” in post-modernist rhetoric inflict on their readers (or rather their captive students, since surely they have few genuine readers). He has produced, in just under 20 pages, an essay which offers a wholly new and persuasive interpretation of the text, and does so with insight and a scholarly apparatus which contains many pregnant relevancies fit for further investigation.

In any case, and for what it is worth, the above is my assessment of the article.

"Those who can't do, teach."

Academics generally are pretty clueless about most things.

They are like someone who studies tennis -- average ball velocity, spin techniques, statistical analysis of shot placement -- but has never picked up a racquet.

Doing is the only way really to learn something.

I read books written only by people who DID the thing they are writing about. Reading anything by an academic generally is a waste of time.

Your example of abandoning a flawed religion or doctrine actually seems a bit like what the author is talking about. If you adopt some kind of belief to elevate humanity, but in the event humanity does not get elevated, how is that really different from a favour not being returned, thus justifying not continuing your service?

I'm not sure the values of the warrior and the scholar are really all that far apart when you look closely. Saying "service is its own reward" is not that different from the "knowledge is its own reward" that motivates academics to do what they do. And I'm still generally convinced that is the motivation for academics, as many could earn more money and status in other professions if they chose to. Certainly the politics and bureaucracy of university life seem like an affront to the values of pure and noble academic pursuit, but the professors I've met seem to view playing that game as just a necessary means to an end. By some accounts, modern military forces also suffer from similar kinds of bureaucracy, intransigence and internal politics.

Incidentally, Steve Dutch, an American geologist with military experience, makes some interesting points about modern military values from the perspective of 'academics' at http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/WestTech/xmilitar.htm . Maybe this is isn't really the same as the warrior ideals you're talking about here, but note the point he makes about obedience not being mindless obedience.