My first week here at the Philosophy Bistro has gone well. I get my meals free, the witticisms are frequently both complimentary and complementary, and whenever someone complains about my service, they at least start off by saying, “Bless his heart.” My only concern is that Wode Toad was in charge of my orientation, and I have not always found his instructions easy to follow. For example, he spent about fifteen minutes explaining that I must starch my shirts so that their collars are “stiff” without being “rigid,” and I have found this a fine line to tightrope across. Still I try my best, in part because I love the work, and in part because I can tell that the management is generally beneficent even when inscrutable.

“What have I told you about overdoing the chlorine?”

I cover all of my first week at the bistro in more detail in my epic “Ode on a Wode Toad,” but this is not yet ready for publication. (I made the mistake of writing the first draft in Gaelic, a language that I know mainly from Scrooge McDuck cartoons, and this has complicated my translation efforts.) Rather than drilling down further into my own experience, however, the way an artist might, I would like to step back and abstract from that experience as a Philosopher would. As an aid to this abstraction, let’s consider another case.

A good friend – we will call him “Rosebud” – recently told me he had called a meeting with another manager at his workplace for the first time in several months. For a long time they met regularly, at Rosebud’s invitation, but during the crunch period of a major, year-long project he ceased to find the time. Now that things had settled down he wanted to check in again, but the other manager’s first response had been to ask in a worried tone what the meeting was about. As we talked further, I began to see that these two probably had divergent expectations about their session. Rosebud understood that he had taken the responsibility earlier for establishing a good relationship with his co-worker, he had gotten too busy to keep meeting with her, she had not taken steps to continue those meetings, and their work together had suffered some as a result. He wanted to clear the air without blaming anyone, while inviting both of them to do better in the future. The other manager, I sensed, might have taken for granted Rosebud’s early initiative to bring them together, felt ignored or abandoned when he stopped calling meetings, and decided that if there was any blame to go around, it should not go to her. This was only a guess on my part, but it seemed a good way to make sense of Rosebud’s story. When it came time for me to offer advice, I made two suggestions: (1) Forget the past and just focus on the future, and (2) Stress the positive, including giving any praise that you sincerely can. Rosebud understood how the first suggestion could reduce defensiveness and avoid the kind of deep processing that he appreciates but his co-worker might now. And he generally agreed with the second suggestion too, but worried that it would be manipulative.

Since this discussion I’ve thought a lot about management and manipulation. In my own years managing people I never really reached a settled position on this topic. In part, I blame Immanuel Kant.

Everything you say seems more erudite when you’re wearing a powdered wig.

Kant, you see, is almost without question the leading ethical thinker in the Western Philosophical tradition, certainly as judged by his reputation among contemporary Philosophers. He is the leading theorist of autonomy – the right of each individual to make their own informed decisions – and so the arch-enemy of even the most well-meaning manipulation. You must never, according to Kant, use other people as a means to your own ends, but must instead engage with respect for their innate ability to decide their own goals. Over the decade I spent in college and graduate school, I can recall only a few ethical debates where Kantian arguments did not play a significant part, and only slightly fewer where Kant did not have the last say. Individual autonomy is essential our overwhelmingly liberal culture. (I mean “liberal” in a slightly broader sense than it’s usually used, and that’s a discussion that will have to wait for another day.) And I grew to appreciate and largely adopt this position for my own. I made something like a vow to myself that I would always try to treat people as ends-in-themselves, to avoid manipulating them, even in a sincere effort to help them, and instead to give them the information they need to make their own decisions.

And then I started managing people. And then I became a (step-)parent. And I wonder what Kant would have made of either experience. I certainly don’t think there will ever be a Kantian Guide for Raising Autonomous Children, and we have yet to see a book with a title like Kantian Leadership in the Boardroom. The latter is surprising, because the still burgeoning world of business books keeps churning out management guides based on the lives of considerably less admirable figures, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan among them. (For those in a rush, here is a brief summary of the lessons from Genghis Khan’s career: gather the nomads, make sure you’ve invented stirrups so that they can fire their arrows forward or backward while riding at a full gallop, and avoid southern China like the plague, because that’s where the plague comes from. Also, if you see someone with either of these books on their desk, walk away.) There have even been books that draw on other ethical thinkers. But Kant just does not lend himself well to such application.

It took me a while to figure out why. And while managing adults helped me learn this lesson, it’s been helping raise young twin daughters that has really let me understand: before people can hear you, they have to trust you. Kant, like most Philosophers, treats language as it consisted mainly of statements exchanged between people dispassionately contemplating the world. But that is not usually so. Take the sentence, “You could have done that better.” We can analyze its truth conditions and find that it is almost surely true. You – whoever you are – could almost surely have done that – whatever it is – better by some reasonable standard. This is the typical way Philosophers study language. But it’s not how most people, including Philosophers, actually use language most of the time. If someone you trust tells you that you could have done better, you know they have your best interests at heart and think it’s important for you to be encouraged to improve. (I make variations of this statement to my step-daughters almost daily, and increasingly they say it back.) By comparison, if someone you’ve come to see as your enemy says the same thing, you’re more likely to think they are trying to undermine you. And you may be right.

People warned me when I first began managing some of my fellow faculty members that all of my professional relationships would change. I didn’t believe them. Or rather, I believed that that could happen, but I thought it all depended on how I carried myself. If I still treated people the same way, we would have the same relationship. But that wasn’t true. The same words had different meaning when they came from “the boss.” I anticipated that I would have to stop making fun of my close friends, and that they would probably make fun of me less, at least when I was around. But I didn’t get that everything I said and didn’t say would be scrutinized for possible threats. I didn’t realize that the (honestly, rather limited) power I had in this new position meant that people I had known for years were going to have to learn to trust me in this new role, and that without that trust they honestly would not be able to understand me the same way any more.

Here’s where Kant really got me into trouble. I kept trying to give people information and let them make their own decision rather than manipulating them into what I thought was the right decision, whether on my terms or what I took for their own. And this had worked for me as a teacher and as a colleague. I think one of the reasons I got elected to an administrative position in the first place was that people found me collegial in precisely this way. But when I did the same thing as a manager, people were confused. I believe that some thought I was trying hardest to manipulate them when I was trying hardest not to. It took me a while to hear how they must be hearing me when I said things like, “That decision needs to be yours, and I respect whatever decision you make.” I imagine that if you’re in the certain percentage of the population that has not had a relationship with a supervisor like the kind I was inviting, such statements seem particularly sinister.

If I were starting administration all over again, I would pay more attention to earning people’s trust from the beginning. You’re never going to get everyone – disliking the boss is just too fun and too well ingrained at most institutions, often for good reason. But parenting has hammered in how essential it is to earn trust at the outset. Once you’ve got it, even difficult conversations become easier. And if you don’t have it, even exchanges you think will be easy can be fraught.

So that’s why I encourage Rosebud to let his Kantianism go just this once and to risk feeling a little manipulative in an attempt to build trust with his co-worker. And that’s also why I so appreciate it when Wode Toad begins by saying, “Bless your heart,” even when he continues with, “You’re as dumb as a bag of hammers, aren’t you?” It tells me that my amphibian overlord cares for me and wants me to understand that. I’m guessing that he reads a lot of Aristotle.

Picture credit: Robert Shields, Wikicommons.

Hello, my name is Brandon and I’ll be taking care of you here at the Bistro this evening. Thanks to Chef Robert for giving me this gig, and I hope I last long enough to earn my own doodle.

Ask me about our bottomless cup of despair. 

When I considered what to serve for my first post, the answer came to me quickly. It’s one of my favorite stories, involves a dear and sadly deceased friend, and teaches an important philosophical lesson about as memorably as one could hope. Unfortunately, the first title that occurred to me was “The Parable of the Panties,” which I thought might be working a little blue for my first shift, and could also lead to some amusingly disappointed Google searches. But the present title quickly took its place, so as soon as I locate the croutons and dribble a little balsamic vinegar on top, your appetizer will be right out.

Philosopher

My buddy Joseph Yeh died twelve years ago and I’m still mad about it. That’s not necessarily the most spiritual attitude to adopt, but most days I prefer it to my sadness over his loss. It was such an absurd way to go: jumping off a boat to take a swim, forgetting to set the anchor, and failing to make it to the nearest island after the boat blew away. After we heard the news, some of us took dark comfort in our realization that of all of our friends, Joe was easily the one most likely to fake his own death. Some days I honor Joe’s memory by imagining him somewhere in Central America, working undercover and waiting for the day he can step back into our lives right where he left off, starting by saying, “Funny story.” (In researching this story I learned that this fantasy is no longer operative.)

That would be the right way to begin, because Joe’s life was one funny story after another. He did not just tell them, he lived them. Many were merely delightful trifles. I’ll never forget wandering into the hall that held our college swimming pool and finding Joe and his friend Phil taking turns walking to the end of the diving board, delivering a rhyming couplet, then jumping in. After a minute or so of this I caught Joe’s eye. He just said, “Poetry in motion,” as if that explained everything, then dove in again. This sort of thing happened every day when that man was around.

Other stories had a deeper resonance. My favorite illustrates an important philosophical question: What counts as knowledge? One famous answer is that you know something when you have a justified true belief.

The main point of this definition is that it is not enough for your belief to be true for it to count as knowledge. You must also have adequate evidence. This is important because if this definition is right, then we know much less than we often say we know. We often use the phrase “I know” as if it were synonymous with “I’m positive.” But Philosophers would like you to keep in mind that your certainty is not in and of itself proof, even if it feels that way. (This is a good example of why Philosophers get invited to so few parties.) To test this definition we need an example – preferably a memorable one – featuring a true belief that seems to be justified but actually is not. That’s where Joe Yeh’s story comes in.

One year in graduate school Joe dated a woman I never had the opportunity to meet. Things became strained between them for a period without quite reaching the breaking point. During this time Joe had a brief affair. He felt bad about it, but apparently not bad enough to inform his girlfriend. Life went on as before, or so he thought.

Coincidentally, around the same time Joe helped organize and run a conference. Since the speakers were mostly other graduate students from out of town, the organizers all offered to provide them rooms if they had any available. Joe spent the night at his girlfriend’s, giving up his own bedroom for an incoming speaker who happened to be female. Later that week, Joe found a pair of women’s underwear in his room. It was the same brand and color that his girlfriend preferred, so he put it in the basket with other pieces of her laundry. Only much later would he find out that this underwear was not his girlfriend’s size.

Soon thereafter the semester ended and Joe and his girlfriend went their separate ways for the summer. She stayed with her family in the Seattle area, and shortly before the fall semester began Joe flew out for a visit. They got on a ferry to the island where her parents lived, at which point Joe’s girlfriend asked him if he had had an affair the previous spring. There was a brief pause during which Joe decided to confess. Before he could answer, however, she added that she knew he had because she had found the other woman’s underwear in her laundry pile at his place.

There are few prettier places in the world for an argument.

Joe laughed, which was the wrong reaction. Their relationship probably couldn’t have been salvaged at that point, as hinted at by the fact that his girlfriend waited until he had flown across the country and gotten on the ferry to her parent’s house before making her accusation. Still, if Joe had any chance of earning her forgiveness, he likely lost it with that laugh. But without defending any of his actions in this whole affair, I will say that I understand and sympathize with his laughter. Because you don’t expect your mate, in the process of charging you with having an affair, to present you with a classic philosophical conundrum. But that’s what happened.

I used to tell this story in my classes. There were usually a couple of people who couldn’t get past the word “panties,” which is one of the reasons I’ve largely avoided it here. But most others appreciated the problem. “Did she know he had an affair?” I would ask them. Almost without exception a majority would say, often fervently, that she did. She believed that he had an affair and he had, so that counted as knowledge. But the only proof she offered – or so Joe said in his anecdote, and so I assume for the sake of argument – was the pair of underwear that belonged to the graduate student speaker, with whom Joe did not have any inappropriate contact. Should we really count his girlfriend’s belief as knowledge, then?

Consider another example. As the cliché says, even a broken clock is right twice a day. But imagine that your clock is stuck on noon. A friend calls and asks you what time it is. You say that it’s noon, which in fact it is. Your friend says, “Are you sure?” You answer, “I know it is. I’m looking right at the clock.” Do you really know what time it was, or was that just a lucky guess?

Fall backward.

Or take the very different case of religious faith. Long ago I traveled to Philadelphia with a friend to stay with one of his friends, and we all met a young doctor who worked in an inner-city hospital that dealt with a high number of violent assaults. I remember him saying in a matter-of-fact tone that the area where he worked had a significantly higher homicide rate than Israel-Palestine, which in the early 90s was a striking claim. At some point after dinner the conversation took a philosophical turn when I wasn’t looking, and the doctor drew my attention when he suddenly beat his fist on the wooden table and shouted, “I know there’s a God.” It was a powerful claim, not least for the context he had developed all night with a stream of stories about the horrors he confronted every time he went to work. I remember the long drive back to Kentucky, looking out the window and wondering if that – whatever it had been – counted as knowledge, and if what that had been was conviction. (A couple of years later I would read the book On Certainty, which dealt with related issues in ways I found mesmerizing, which led me to declare Philosophy as my fourth and final major. But that’s another story.)

“Call me in the morning.”

Finally, imagine reversing the situation, so that instead of an unjustified true belief we’re dealing with a justified false belief. Supposedly, the Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein attended a party one time.

Yes, I would love to hear more about your opinions.

I say supposedly, because it stretches credulity a bit already to imagine that cranky Viennese at any sort of social gathering, but let’s use our imaginations. Another attendee began ridiculing the pre-Copernicans who held the mistaken belief that the sun revolved around the earth rather than the other way around. “Wasn’t that positively stupid, thinking the sun went around the earth?” this man made the mistake of asking Wittgenstein, who replied with his standard icy stare, saying, “Yes. But I wonder what it would have looked like if it did.” Of course the sun would appear much the same in that case, like a golden chariot racing across the sky, and if the courses of the stars would seem different in a Ptolemaic universe, the alterations would be subtle enough to be missed even by most close observers. In other words, belief in geocentrism was justified by the available evidence. It merely had the misfortune of also being wrong, although it took Copernicus to prove it. So did the pre-Copernicans know that the sun revolved around the earth? It’s difficult to say that they did. But no more difficult than finding yourself accused by your girlfriend of cheating while taking a ferry across Puget Sound.

Who’s orbiting whom?

That’s today’s meal. If you saved room for desert, speak up and I’ll tell you about the time I recounted this story for a room full of police officers, who decided that the story was about me, not Joe, and refused to allow me to retract my “confession.” Thanks again to Robert for letting me serve you, and to Joseph Yeh for all the laughs and insights. Don’t forget to tip your wait staff, and please – don’t try the veal. Veal is evil.

Photo credits: N/A, Augusta Chronicle, Mark Parisi, N/A, Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, Salvador Dali, Titan, uncertain, Hameed at Deviant Art.