Tom Poljanšek
Not just philosophers eye enthusiasm with suspicion. Often contrasted with sobriety, it is seen as a distortion of our view on reality, of things as they really are. However, one might counter this take on enthusiasm by pointing out that it rests on a dubious assumption that is, in the wake of Sellars, often called the Myth of the Given or Givenism, i.e. the idea that things could be viewed for what they are, as raw data, without (distorting) attitudes or judgments. This is one of the points suggested by Tom Poljanšek in his great ode to enthusiasm. (Here is a longer conversation about Tom’s work.) In this brief response, I would like to point to some reasons for my agreement with the claims running through his ode.
In the passage quoted above, the sober person is portrayed as assuming to have a privileged epistemic access, i.e. access to the “things themselves”, in virtue of being undisturbed by enthusiasm (or perhaps other strong attitudes or emotions). According to the sober person, then, enthusiasm works like an interpretation or judgement of a fact or thing. While the thing as such is given, the attitude of the enthusiast (who is taken to interpret or judge it, perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) is taken to distort it. In taking the attitude of sobriety as an undistorting approach to things, sober persons take themselves to be realists in opposition to enthusiasts, who are seen as judging, projecting, interpreting and hence distorting what is given. Taking things this way, the sober one is a Givenist who not only takes themself to differ in attitude but in epistemic privilege. Some psychologists took this idea of opposing enthusiasm and ran even further, claiming that depression yields a more realistic attitude to the world. But, as Tom points out, Givenism is a “deception”.
Givenism and the rejection of it as a myth have a long dialectical history. But the appeal to bare, undistorted data, things or facts has not ceased, especially when philosophers pride themselves on their immunity against ideology and unbalanced emotion. In this spirit we find, for instance, Gilbert Ryle, claiming that only (analytic) philosophy is immune to ideology, or Timothy Williamson, claiming that realism is a “sober philosophy”. What is new, at least by my lights, in Tom’s approach to the issue (and his implicit rejection of Givenism) is the introduction of enthusiasm into this history. Higlighing at once the social, epistemic, and psychological dimensions of enthusiasm, he exposes unfounded rejections of enthusiasm as a form of falling prey to Givenism. We might conclude, then, that sobriety is an attitude that might, mutatis mutandis, come with the same virtues or vices as enthusiasm and thus doesn’t afford epistemic privilege. There is no content we could entertain without attitude.
One might now wish to object that, even if sobriety is merely a sort of attitude, it might be a more appropriate attitude in epistemic endeavours than, say, enthusiasm. But what would make sobriety more appropriate? Arguably, the supposed realism of sobriety is owing to Givenism. So the assumption of one attitude being more or less appropriate might boil down to a matter of changeable conventions. As I see it, then, it’s not that one attitude wins out against another. Rather, it takes all kinds of attitude to approach the world. In this spirit, we might say that there is also a givenism about attitudes. Neither sobriety nor enthusiasm are attitudes as such or work in themselves. It takes a bunch of enthusiasts to make me feel sober or a sober person to make me feel enthusiastic.
Handling Ideas 