The Cabbage Farm is a region of discourse inhabited by a creature of fiction called the Cabbage Farmer, whose posture I’m accustomed to adopt in philosophical conversation. Years ago, when the impulse to this practice first arose, it was convenient for me to put some distance between my own thoughts and the ridiculous claims and idioms of this phantom. By now it’s most often difficult for me to distinguish my attitudes from his attitudes or my sayings from his sayings.
The Cabbage Farmer is a wholehearted Socratic knucklehead with a lively sense of the compatibility of sincere and ironic intentions. He begins in philosophical discourse from puzzlement at strange philosophical sayings, chiefly his own sayings, and proceeds with a skeptical and cynical tendency to criticize and deflate the overblown claims of reason.
Decades of such practice have led him to a path he calls skeptical naturalism. According to the Cabbage Farmer, the first task of the right-thinking skeptic is to burn down the strawman they call the Radical Skeptic in the schools, by demonstrating the absurd dogmatic character of that strawman’s arguments, by submitting them to right-thinking skeptical treatment in the manner of Sextus.
Such treatment begins and ends with a certain respect for appearances. A right-thinking skeptic learns to take his own appearances for granted, to follow them quietly, to avoid arbitrariness in his reports and investigations, and to minimize disturbance from exaggerated discursive gestures motivated by prejudicial anxieties and ambitions. The tendency of such motive forces to drive discursive animals toward unwarranted faith in figments of rational imagination is quieted by the right-thinking skeptic’s practice of exploding the logic of conceivable alternatives. In happy cases, the result of this homeopathic treatment is a robust sense that no item in a target range of conceivable alternatives can be affirmed or denied in keeping with the balance of appearances.
Along these lines, I suggest that Sextus provides an early version of a critique of the Myth Of The Given. I expect there’s room to argue that his version is more powerful and less distorted by conceptual confusion than more recent variations on the same theme.
The skeptic’s skill with the razor severs the confused discursive connections by which unwarranted affirmations and denials of conceivable alternatives sprout grotesque disfigurements of reason such as Platonism, Cartesianism, and Kantianism. To the same art fall the obstinate dogmatic perplexities that motivate the seeming insincerity of those who would deny the objective force and character of their own appearances and thus run reason off its natural tracks — for instance along the lines of Rorty’s adaptations of collected gleanings from the likes of Dewey, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Heidegger, Davidson, and Quine.
The same fate befalls the presumptions underlying the tendency of the 20th-century naturalists either to advocate metaphysical materialism or to speak as if metaphysical materialism had been quietly taken for granted — for instance, to speak as if metaphysical materialism and atheism are “rational”, “plausible”, and “sensical”, while metaphysical idealism and theism are “irrational”, “implausible”, and “nonsensical”. Isn’t it less arbitrary, more completely rational, more honest and philosophically austere, to treat these divergent views as equally speculative, equally indeterminable by evidence, and equally thinkable? The same line of criticism extends to the spooky behaviorist tendencies that influenced the discourses of 20th-century naturalists, even among those who were not so queasy about the facts of subjectivity.
According to the Cabbage Farmer’s diagnosis, such unwarranted biases among the 20th-century naturalists were inflamed overreactions to historically prior excesses associated with idealism, Kantianism, Cartesianism, and the dogmatic burdens of traditional religions. The ill effects of this inflammatory response are observable in the interminable antagonism of the atheists, materialists, behaviorists, and their opposites; and more insidiously, in the havoc wreaked upon the fragile custom of reasonable discourse in the spaces left unguarded as a result of the tendency among the 20th-century naturalists to a repressive, irresponsive, and ultimately exclusionary and divisive form of half-hearted quietism pursued in accord with their unwarranted dogmatic presumptions.
The Cabbage Farmer suggests the discourse of skeptical naturalism is at least as rational and reasonable as the dogmatic discourses of the 20th-century naturalists, and offers a political incentive to split the difference for those who might otherwise claim the two accounts have equal weight. Support for the incentive is drummed up by a cynical account of the great boondoggles of Hellenic and Western philosophy.
We may, for instance, account for the transition from early to late Platonic dialogues in terms of a movement from the skeptical and cynical austerity of Socratic method to the antiskeptical Pythagorean excesses of Platonism. The transition is arguably accompanied by a shift from rational democratic antiauthoritarianism supported by critical thinking, to irrational antidemocratic authoritarianism supported by golden lies and motivated — on a charitable and optimistic reading — by practical doubts and intellectual anxieties about the compatibility of unembellished philosophical austerity and harmonious social order.
We may account for the hyperintellectual excesses of the modern Gothic philosophers, exemplified in Cartesianism and Kantianism, as likewise motivated by concern among the literati for the capacity of the people to stomach the demands of social order without mythological incentives. More specifically, however, the cave-paintings of these modern epistemologists may be characterized as overreaching attempts to establish terms for a peace treaty among the parties competing for privileged institutional authority in a period of sweeping socioeconomic, scientific, and ideological change. These modern mythologists exaggerate the reach of reasonable discourse in weaving narratives according to which competitors might agree to delimit and coordinate the respective authority of church and state, and of moral and natural philosopher, to tell tales to the people.
The discourse of the Cabbage Farmer thus encourages us to consider the political costs and benefits, contexts and motives, as well as the methodological character and substantive implications, of any philosophical discourse. In that light, his emphasis on the practice of discursive austerity is an invitation to review the balance of accounts in our inherited narratives on skepticism and cynicism. I expect a revision of the history of philosophy along those lines would demote the great boondoggles and put closer to the center the critical and deflationary tendency that emerges in the record with Socrates, Diogenes, and Pyrrho, that passes through Sextus to Bacon, Gassendi, and the full-grown Hume, and that arguably appears among the 20th-century naturalists in the work of Ryle and Wittgenstein.
What is gained, and what is lost, when we divide the people according to their fantasies? Better to unite the greatest number in a single discursive community centered by wholesome philosophical austerity, and thus promote the fragile customs of reasonable discourse and methodological naturalism.
As a green man, a skeptical naturalist and cynical humanist, the Cabbage Farmer attempts to mediate between the academy and the people, playing the role of a knucklehead who wanders from the commons and the cabbage fields, to the workshops and the marketplace, to the gates of the governors and the ivory towers; prepared to engage anyone with an interest in philosophical conversation; disposed to begin by treating each interlocutor with the same hospitality and respect, regardless of their doctrine, their background, or their socioeconomic standing. In keeping with that lifelong custom, the Farmer’s discourses have come to reflect a wide range of philosophical concerns, and to integrate responses to interlocutors with widely divergent interests in the dispositions of one single person.
Informed by that experience, the Cabbage Farmer occasionally engages in ritual chastisement of the professors. For it seems to him that unwarranted biases in their dogmas, methods, and manners have rendered their discourses irrelevant, ineffective, and contrary to the interests of the common good. If these professors are unwilling or unable to perform their special function, who shall we hold accountable for the task of promoting a common practice of reasonable discourse among the people? If the philosophy departments can’t get themselves to discharge this obligation, it’s not clear there’s any justification for their payrolls, and worse, it’s not clear what other institutional authority might be assigned this particular responsibility, so crucial to the philosophical fitness of a people and their potential for democracy.
The Cabbage Farmer’s circuit from puzzlement to a wholehearted practice of skeptical epistemology and a cynical reassessment of the history of ideas intersects with conversations about language, logic, and rationality; with talk about sentient agents and speaking animals; and with an account of the relation of philosophical discourse to the empirical and formal sciences, to politics and ethics, and to all the other arts.
As an unpaid and uninstitutionalized specialist in this field of free and open discourse, the Cabbage Farmer has occasion to sort his thoughts about rhetoric and about craft in general. He has learned to treat his own practice as an act of devotion and an offering to the people; learned to put devotion to craft near the center of his way of life; and learned to aim his practice, along with all his action, in keeping with the imperative to live for the sake of all sentient beings.
I expect the Farmer will have a few words to say about that principle too, if I can grant him enough time for the exercise.
The Cabbage Farm 