The Age of Incommensurability

Small changes . . . can have large-scale effects.

—Thomas S. Kuhn, “The Road Since Structure”

1. Ideas Have Consequences

These strategies of . . . incommensurability or translation . . . are, I think, the unspoken, unexplored moments of modernity.

—Homi Bhabha, “Location, Intervention, Incommensurability”

As a publisher of books for academics and intellectuals, I have at least a professional interest in the life and death of ideas.¹ It is misleading, of course, to suggest that ideas die. They can go dormant, like viruses, but they never die.

Different ideas lead different lives. When scientists classify certain kinds of things and name them, for example, “quarks,” the labeling can be expected to have no effect on the things so named. Still, the things humans might do with the knowledge they have about the physical world may have an effect on human and nonhuman life. But when thinkers and researchers classify and name certain kinds of human behavior “autism,” for example, or “attention deficit disorder,” the naming enters a feedback mechanism and will almost certainly have an effect on human behavior that will change in time the nature of the thing observed and life around it.

If this is the case—and I think Ian Hacking has demonstrated with great clarity that it is, with regard to the behavior called Multiple Personality Disorder—then the decision to say that the many kinds of human life are so utterly different as to be absolutely “incommensurable,” because they have nothing in common, might have a considerable effect, possibly liberating, but more likely damaging, on human life itself.²

In this essay I am not trying to play philosopher but rather to understand the nature of the responsibility some of us—producers, packagers, promoters, recipients of ideas—might have for the extraordinary career of the word incommensurability. I agree with Donna Haraway when she says that “positioning implies responsibility for our enabling practices.”³ Knowledge is situated. What is our responsibility as handlers of ideas? In our lives, “pure reason” and “practical reason” cannot be kept separate, but how are we to link them? Ideas about how the world is and how we ought to live get tangled up and twisted in ways that we’d best be alert to. Incommensurability is an idea, I contend, that has had consequences far beyond the seemingly arcane and certainly small world of the history and philosophy of science where it originated. Looking at its career reveals the danger that confusing epistemology with ethics puts one’s self and others into.

I have been involved in the dissemination of some ideas whose impact some consider to be good and others baleful. For example, some think that the ideas about how ordinary racism works, which Patricia Williams has analyzed, are valuably instructive, but some think her “politics of personal authenticity” and victimage are “doomed to disappointment.” Many think that the ideas of Paul de Man, whose works I have published, lead to the denigration of literature and, worse, nihilism. Some think the works of Catharine A. MacKinnon lead directly and necessarily to the suppression of freedom of speech. Some even think that the works of John Rawls, whose works many admire, lead to a harmful emphasis on rights and the social contract that is narrow-mindedly American and even does harm to the citizens of the United States by persuading them not to lift the “veil of ignorance” that blinds them to the ill effects of individualism. Most surprising is the accusation that the works of Walter Benjamin, especially his Arcades Project, promote National Socialism, the ideology that motivated those who drove Benjamin to his death.⁴ I believe that the ideas of these thinkers can and often do lead to good things. But an idea is like any tool: It is only as good as the hands in which it is held and the materials on which it is used.

The idea of incommensurability, like the idea of social construction, is an idea whose good effects are hard to sort...