Apparently, I was writing a scaffold for my PhD thesis in 2015
The argument I am defending now is architecturally the same argument I made in my BA 10 years ago. I just had the wrong materials, the wrong vocabulary, and the wrong opponent.
I have spent the last few days reading my BA thesis.
I had not opened it in years. It is a forty-five-page Apple Pages doc I wrote in 2015 at Vytautas Magnus University, in Lithuanian, on Arthur Koestler’s concept of inherent vice within human consciousness and what it means for the contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of law. It was supervised by Dr. Viktoras Bachmetjevas (now, eleven years on, my PhD supervisor), defended in front of a small panel, marked, filed, and forgotten by most of the people involved, including, I have to admit, by me. I did not think of it as the beginning of anything. I thought of it as a closed chapter, a piece of student work that had served its purpose by getting me a degree and then properly stayed where it belonged, on a shelf, in a folder, in a directory I never opened.
The reason I opened it recently is that I wanted to know whether I had already been writing the thesis I am defending now, eleven years ago, without knowing it. I had a suspicion. The suspicion turned out to be somewhat correct, and slightly more uncomfortable than I had been ready for. The architecture of the argument I am making now, in a PhD on AI and the developmental conditions for practical wisdom, is the same architecture I made then, in a BA on law and a flaw in human consciousness. The materials are different. The opponent is different. The conclusion lands in a different domain. But the shape of the argument, the kind of impossibility it tries to demonstrate, the relationship between what reform proposes and what reform requires, the way the conclusion closes by showing that the proposal cannot supply what it presupposes, all of that was already in place in 2015. I had been writing this thesis for eleven years and had not noticed.
That is the simple version. I want to do the longer version here, because the simple version is too tidy and the long version is the one I actually trust. Two things have changed in eleven years, and both of them matter. The first is that the materials I was working with then could not bear the load I was asking of them. The second is that the philosophical apparatus I now have at my disposal, which I did not have then, makes the argument defensible at a level the BA could only gesture toward. The interesting fact is not that the architecture stayed the same. The interesting fact is that the architecture stayed the same despite my being wrong about almost everything else.
This post is about why that happened, what it tells me about how my own thinking works, and what it might tell anyone reading who is in the middle of trying to make an argument they are not yet ready to make. A word on what this post is not. The PhD’s specific argument, the technical apparatus, the philosophical interlocutors I now lean on most, the mechanism that lets the structural-impossibility move land, all of that belongs to the next several months of this Substack. Each of the upcoming posts develops one piece of the apparatus. The point of this post is to tell the BA story honestly, since that is publicly defended work, and to say what stays the same when philosophy matures. The point is not to preview the apparatus. The apparatus will come, post by post, in its proper place.
What the BA was about
Let me start by laying out what the BA actually argued, in its own terms, before saying anything about what was right or wrong with it. I want to do this carefully because some of it survives and most of it does not, and the survival is what I want to point at.
The BA opens with Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle says that tragedy works because we recognise the tragic hero. We recognise him not as a wholly noble person whose downfall would be incomprehensible, nor as a wholly vicious person whose downfall would be merely deserved, but as the kind of person we know ourselves to be, who falls because of an error. The Greek word is hamartia. Aristotle uses it to name the kind of mistake that makes a tragedy tragic rather than merely sad.
The BA takes this word and runs with it. It says that hamartia, on a longer reading, can be interpreted in at least four ways. It can be interpreted as something that does not exist at all, as merely the contingent error of a particular character, a flaw we observe and learn from but which does not characterise human consciousness in general. It can be interpreted as a flaw that exists but is avoidable, something we can identify and design around. It can be interpreted as a flaw that exists and is not avoidable, something built into what we are as conscious beings. Or it can be interpreted, in the Christian tradition that shaped early modern legal thought, as original sin, a flaw with which we are born and from which we cannot deliver ourselves without grace.
This typology is the BA’s organising move. The thesis goes on to claim that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of law has been committed, often without knowing it, to specific positions on this typology. Legal realism, in Holmes’s version, is committed to the first position: there is no structural defect in human consciousness, just observed behaviour that the legal system can map and predict. The rational-choice tradition that Posner inherits from Holmes is committed to the same position, or to a slightly weaker version of it where rationality is a competence that occasional weaknesses of will only confirm by exception. Judicial minimalism, in Sunstein’s version, is committed to the second position: yes, human consciousness has structural defects, but environmental design can call out the better parts. And the Christian-puritan inheritance, which the BA traces back to the Mayflower Compact and the legal regime of the Plymouth Colony, sits behind all of these as the cultural source of a particular intuition about purification and rehabilitation, an intuition that survives in the cognitive-science school’s reform optimism long after the theological frame that produced it has been retired.
The Koestler move comes in the middle. Arthur Koestler, in The Ghost in the Machine (1967), argued that human consciousness contains a structural defect that is neither contingent error nor original sin but a feature of how the human brain evolved. The defect, on his account, is what he called a schizophysiology, a mismatch between an older limbic brain that handles emotion and instinct and a newer neocortex that handles abstract reasoning. The two systems do not fully integrate. The result is that human beings reliably make errors of a particular kind, errors that no amount of training or socialisation can fully prevent, because the errors are built into the architecture of the brain itself. Koestler called this the human predicament. He believed it could be addressed only at the level of physiological intervention. Cultural reform, on his view, was insufficient because the problem was not cultural.
The BA takes this seriously. It calls Koestler’s structural defect inherent vice, borrowing the term from Common Law, where inherent vice names hidden flaws in objects that no inspection can reveal. The Common Law uses the term in marine insurance contexts: an item that contains an inherent vice cannot be reliably insured against the damage it will do to itself, because the damage is built into what the item is. The BA’s move is to apply this legal category to consciousness. Human consciousness, on the BA’s reading, contains an inherent vice in something like this sense. Not a flaw that can be inspected, identified, and treated. A structural condition of what consciousness is.
The argument is then that this matters for legal philosophy in a specific way. Legal systems are designed around assumptions about what the people they regulate are like. Contract law assumes a rational and informed party. Tort law assumes a reasonable person. Criminal law assumes a culpable mental state, what the common-law tradition calls mens rea, a guilty mind that knows what it is doing and that the doing is wrong. All of these legal categories presuppose a particular conception of consciousness. If consciousness contains an inherent vice in Koestler’s sense, then the legal categories presuppose something that may not be reliably there. The legal system’s project of general prevention, the idea that the law can deter crime and protect public goods by addressing itself to the rational and informed citizen, runs into a structural difficulty. The citizen the law addresses is not the citizen the law gets.
The conclusion is where the BA does its most interesting work. The conclusion introduces a distinction between accuracy and precision, drawing on Don Norman’s work on design and Ryle’s competence-disposition distinction. Taiklumas, in Lithuanian, is the word the BA uses for accuracy. Tikslumas is the word it uses for precision. Accuracy is a property of systems. Precision is a property of particular acts. A normative system like law requires accuracy: it has to operate at the level of classes of cases, not particular cases, because it has to apply to everyone and the regulator has to be able to predict how the law will work in advance. A consciousness with an inherent vice, on the BA’s reading, can at best deliver precision. It can make particular judgments well or badly in particular cases, but it cannot guarantee accuracy across a class of cases. The conclusion is that general prevention is impossible. What is possible is precise interdiction, case by case, but not the systemic project that contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of law has, on the BA’s reading, set itself.
That is the argument. It runs from Aristotle’s hamartia through Koestler’s schizophysiology and the Common Law category of inherent vice to a conclusion about what kind of legal system is and is not available to creatures with the consciousness we actually have. It engages Holmes, Posner, and Sunstein as three reform positions that each presuppose a particular consciousness-ontology, and it tries to show that each of them, in different ways, cannot accommodate what Koestler identifies. It engages Pinker as the strongest available defender of the cognitive-science school’s optimism, takes Pinker’s argument about declining violence and evolved better-angels seriously, and tries to show that even granting Pinker the structural-vice claim survives. It engages Summers and Schlag as critical voices within the Anglo-American legal tradition, voices that recognise that something is wrong with the machine-shaped picture of legal subjectivity but cannot quite say what.
That is what I wrote in 2015. I want to be honest about what was wrong with it before I say what was right.
What was wrong
Well, several things were wrong.
The first thing that was wrong was the source. Koestler was the load-bearing source for the inherent-vice concept, and Koestler was the wrong source. The Ghost in the Machine is a 1967 popular-science book whose central neuroscientific claims, in particular the triune-brain model and the idea of atavistic limbic-system leftovers, did not survive the scientific scrutiny of the following four decades. By 2015 the triune-brain account was already a textbook example of how popular neuroscience can lag behind the actual research. I knew this at the time, in the abstract, and I did not let it stop me from making Koestler the load-bearing source. The reason I did not let it stop me is that I needed the argument to work, and Koestler gave me a way to say what I needed to say. The cost of that decision is that the BA’s central concept rests on a scientific account that is now openly criticised. A reader who knows the neuroscience could dismiss the central concept at first read, and would be right to.
The second thing that was wrong was the mapping from hamartia to inherent vice to structural defect to Koestlerian schizophysiology. These are not the same concept. Aristotle’s hamartia is what makes the tragic hero recognisable to us, a kind of error in judgment that we recognise because we are the kind of beings that make this kind of error. It is not a structural feature of consciousness as such; it is a feature of how a particular character meets a particular situation. The Common Law’s inherent vice is a property of objects. Koestler’s schizophysiology is a hypothesis about the integration of two evolutionary phases of the human brain. The BA treats these as variations on a single concept, and that conflation is what lets the argument move. It is a productive conflation but it is not argued for. A reader who pays attention to the differences could rightly ask the thesis to choose one register and stay there.
The third thing that was wrong was the is-ought transition at the close. The BA itself, in §1.1, carefully accuses Skinner of conflating is and ought. Skinner moves from a descriptive claim about behaviour (”organisms produce behaviour that is determined by external stimuli”) to a normative claim about how psychology should be practised (”psychology should restrict itself to studying behaviour”). The BA correctly notes that this transition is unargued. And then the BA proceeds to make a structurally similar move of its own. It moves from a descriptive claim about consciousness (”consciousness has an inherent vice”) to a normative claim about law (”therefore general prevention is impossible”). The accuracy-precision distinction almost does the work of bridging this gap, but only almost. The implicit premise that bridges it is that the legal system is constitutively committed to systemic accuracy, that this is part of what makes a legal system a legal system rather than a collection of particular judgments. That premise is true, I think, but it is not argued for. It is taken for granted. The argument therefore does what the argument accuses Skinner of doing.
The fourth thing that was wrong was the engagement with the legal-philosophical positions. The BA reads Holmes, Posner, and Sunstein each through a single consciousness-model lens. Holmes is read as a behaviourist about legal consciousness, Posner as a rational-choice theorist, Sunstein as a cognitive-science reformer. These readings are not wrong, but they are partial. Holmes is also a legal pragmatist whose understanding of judicial reasoning, in The Common Law and in his later opinions, is much more nuanced than The Path of the Law alone would suggest. Posner’s jurisprudence, especially in How Judges Think (2008) and Frontiers of Legal Theory (2001), is closer to a kind of legal realism with explicit cognitive-limit acknowledgments than to the pure rational-choice model the BA assigns him. Sunstein’s judicial minimalism comes out of democratic-theoretical and epistemic-humility commitments that have their own internal logic, not derivable from a Koestlerian premise about consciousness. The BA flattens these positions into the typology it needs. The flattening is productive but it is not historically careful.
The fifth thing that was wrong was the conclusion’s positive moment. The BA concludes that general prevention is impossible and that what remains is precise interdiction. Tikslus pažeidimų užkardymas, the Lithuanian phrase the BA closes on. The reader is left to guess at what this means. There is no account of what precise interdiction is, how it differs from prevention, what kind of legal-normative practice survives the impossibility result. The conclusion gestures at a positive proposal and then stops. A reader looking for a constructive contribution finds an architecture of negation without the architecture’s positive other half.
The sixth thing was the failure to engage the legal system’s non-prevention functions. Even granting the BA’s argument fully, the legal system has functions that survive the impossibility of general prevention. Retributive justice, where the law imposes proportional punishment without claiming to deter future crime. Restitution, where the law restores what has been lost. Expressive functions, where the law announces what the community holds inviolable. Specific deterrence, distinct from general prevention, where the threat of punishment shapes the behaviour of particular agents who have already shown that they are inclined to violate the law. None of these are addressed. The BA conflates general prevention with the legal system’s whole project of legitimacy. The narrower argument the BA can actually license is that the prevention function is impossible, not that the legal system is generally unworkable.
These are six real problems. They are not small. A careful reader of the BA, in 2015 or now, can press hard on any of them and the argument will give ground. I want to say this clearly because the rest of the post is going to be about what was right with the argument, and the rest of the post will sound much better if the failures are named first.
What survived
Happily, something about the shape of the argument is still there.
What I mean by shape, as opposed to content, is the kind of move the argument tries to make. The materials I used in 2015 were wrong in several ways, and the conclusion the argument supports was incompletely defended. But the kind of argument the BA was trying to be is recognisably continuous with the kind of argument the PhD is trying to be. I am uncertain how much weight to put on this. Some of it may be the boring fact that I am the same person; I will come back to that worry near the end of the post. What I can say is that re-reading the BA I keep finding moves I am still making, in a different domain, with materials that have taken me a decade to assemble.
The clearest of these is the immanent-critique structure. The BA does not begin by saying that contemporary Anglo-American legal philosophy is wrong. It begins by laying out, charitably and precisely, what contemporary Anglo-American legal philosophy is. It grants each of the three paradigms its internal logic. The critique it eventually offers is from within: it shows that each paradigm, on its own terms, is committed to a particular account of human consciousness, and that the account each paradigm is committed to runs into a difficulty internal to the paradigm itself. I learned later that this method has a name and a long lineage, that Hegel develops it, that Marx inherits it, that the Frankfurt School elaborates it. I was doing it in 2015 without knowing what it was called. The honest reason is not that I had philosophical taste for the method. The honest reason is that I could not see another way to write the chapter, and the way I could see felt like the only way that did not require me to import a framework I had not earned.
The other move that is still there is the taxonomic one. The BA opens with a typology of four interpretations of hamartia and maps the three legal-philosophy paradigms onto positions in the typology. The typology is what makes the BA’s impossibility claim legible, because it lets the claim land at the level of what kind of position a paradigm can occupy rather than as a complaint about any specific paradigm. The PhD has its own typology now, in a different domain, with categories I had to earn the right to use. The shape of the typological move is recognisable from the BA. Whether it is recognisable because it is a deep feature of how I think or because typological moves are extremely common in philosophy is a question I cannot answer.
A few smaller things hold up at the same level of abstraction. The BA reads reform positions through what they are committed to about the human agent the reform is supposed to address; the PhD reads its reform positions the same way. The BA takes the strongest available version of the optimist position and tries to grant it fully before showing where it falls short; the PhD does the same kind of engagement with its own opponents. The BA notices that the most sophisticated reform is the one that acknowledges the defect it proposes to overcome; the PhD makes the same recognition in its own register. I am listing these without numbering them because I do not want to make a parade of it. Whether they amount to an architectural instinct or to a set of habits a particular thinker tends to fall back into is a distinction I am not sure I can defend.
What I can defend is the more modest claim: the shape of the BA argument is recognisable, eleven years on, in the shape of the PhD argument. The materials have changed. The conclusion sits in a different domain. The shape carries over. That carrying-over is what I want to look at more carefully in the rest of the post, even though I am wary of making more of it than the evidence supports.
What methodology is
I want to spend a section on what immanent critique is and how I came to recognise it as a method, because the recognition is one of the few specific things I can say honestly about the gap between the BA and the PhD without pre-empting the technical work that the upcoming posts on this Substack will develop.
The BA does not use the term immanent critique. It does not name its method at all. It just proceeds. It opens with Aristotle. It moves through Koestler. It engages Holmes and Posner and Sunstein. It closes on the accuracy-precision distinction. There is no methodological introduction. There is no defence of the method against alternatives. There is no acknowledgment that the method has a history or a pedigree. It is just done.
This is, I now know, an undefended way to proceed. A panel could rightly ask why the argument moves the way it moves rather than some other way. Why engage Holmes through his consciousness-ontology rather than through his legal-pragmatist commitments? Why take the cognitive-science school’s reform optimism as the principal opponent rather than, say, natural-law theory? Why treat the three legal-philosophy paradigms as alternative positions on a single typology rather than as developing positions in a historical dialogue? These are real methodological questions. The BA does not answer them. The BA does not even acknowledge that they need to be answered.
What I now know is that the BA was practicing immanent critique without naming it. Immanent critique is a method with a precise philosophical pedigree. It runs from Hegel through Marx to the Frankfurt School to contemporary critical theorists who have taken it up in various forms. The method, in its general form, has three features.
First, immanent critique grants the framework’s success on its own terms. It does not import an external normative standard against which the framework is to be measured. It accepts the framework’s internal logic and tries to follow that logic to where the framework’s commitments produce consequences the framework cannot absorb. The critique is from within.
Second, immanent critique works by identifying the framework’s load-bearing commitments and showing where those commitments cannot supply what the framework needs them to supply. The critique is structural rather than thematic. It does not say that the framework is wrong about this or that particular issue. It says that the framework’s overall position requires a particular kind of supporting structure, and that the structure cannot bear the load the framework is asking it to bear.
Third, immanent critique closes by demonstrating the structural-impossibility result. The framework cannot succeed on its own terms. The critique does not propose an alternative framework. It demonstrates that the framework as it stands is internally inadequate. The constructive moment, where an alternative is proposed, is a separate move, and immanent critique does not require it. The critique can be complete without the constructive moment.
The BA does all three things, without naming them. It grants Holmes, Posner, and Sunstein their internal logic. It identifies what each paradigm requires of its consciousness-ontology. It shows that each consciousness-ontology, on examination, cannot supply what the paradigm needs. It closes on the structural-impossibility result. The constructive moment, tikslus pažeidimų užkardymas / “precise interdiction,” is gestured at but not developed. This is, methodologically, exactly the right way to leave the argument. Immanent critique does not require the constructive moment. The BA is complete on its own terms, even if a reader is left wanting more.
The PhD does the same three things, but now with the methodological apparatus explicit. The introduction of the PhD names the method as immanent critique and locates it in the lineage. The chapters proceed accordingly. The PhD has the methodological apparatus the BA was missing. But the method is the same method. The BA was doing it. The PhD is doing it more carefully, with the apparatus named, with the lineage acknowledged.
What I now think is that immanent critique is the only honest method for engaging with a framework one cannot simply dismiss. The reform positions I am engaging now in the PhD are not wrong in the easy sense. Each of them has done real philosophical work and has a real internal coherence. The honest way to engage with them is to grant their success on their own terms and then to show where their own commitments produce consequences they cannot absorb. The dishonest way is to start with a different framework and use it as a stick to beat the first framework with. The dishonest way produces unproductive philosophical exchanges. The honest way produces exchanges in which both sides can learn something. Immanent critique is the philosophical practice of the honest way.
I came to this recognition slowly. In 2015 I was doing immanent critique because it felt like the only honest way to engage. I did not know it was a method with a history. I did not know it had a name. I just did it. The methodological recognition came years later, through reading the secondary literature that names what I had been doing. The recognition was useful because it gave me the resources to defend the method against alternatives. It was not useful in the sense of changing what I was already doing. I was already doing it.
This is, I think, true of most philosophical methods. The method is in the doing, not in the naming. People who use a method without naming it are not failing to use the method. They are using it in the only way it can be used. The naming is a second-order activity, useful for explanation and defence, but not constitutive of the practice. The practice is the practice. The naming follows.
What eleven years bought
The most important thing eleven years bought was apparatus.
The BA was reaching for things it did not have the vocabulary for. The accuracy-precision distinction was reaching for a distinction in the philosophical tradition that the BA did not yet know it was reaching for. The Koestlerian inherent vice was a placeholder for something I would later come to understand as a more carefully specified philosophical claim about a particular kind of capacity and what happens to it under particular conditions. The reform positions the BA engaged through their consciousness-ontology commitments are the same kind of reform positions the PhD now engages through their commitments to a particular conception of the human agent, but the framework that licenses the engagement is now much more developed.
I am being deliberately elliptical about what the PhD’s specific apparatus is, because the specific apparatus is what the next several months of this Substack will develop. The post for May, the posts for June, July, August, and beyond, are each a careful exposition of one piece of the apparatus. The point of this post is not to preview the apparatus. The point is to say that the apparatus exists, that it took eleven years to assemble, and that the architecture it now supports is the architecture the BA was reaching for in 2015 without yet having the materials.
There is one specific thing I can say. There was an author whose work I should have been reading in 2015 and was not. The reason I was not reading him is that he was not in the Lithuanian academic ecosystem I was working in. His texts had been available in English translation for over a decade by 2015. I came to him through other routes, years later, and when I did I recognised that he had been making, in a different domain and with much better apparatus, the same kind of argument I had been trying to make. The PhD inherits his framework as one of its foundational references. I am not going to say who he is here, because a post on his work is part of the Substack’s planned content for later this year, and revealing the connection now would spoil what will be more useful when it comes in its proper place. What I will say is that the experience of recognising, in someone else’s work that has been available for decades, the argument you have been trying to make is one of the strange experiences of philosophical maturation. The mature response is gratitude. The immature response is despair at being unoriginal. The work of philosophical maturation is the slow movement from the immature response to the mature response. I am still working on it.
The general point is that the discipline of philosophy is, among other things, a long apprenticeship in reading the right people. If I had been pointed toward the right reading list in 2015, the BA would have been a better BA. It might even have been the same kind of argument as the PhD now is, applied to law rather than to the domain the PhD addresses, with the apparatus already in place. I did not get pointed toward the right reading list. The years it took to get there are years I would not have needed if my reading had been better directed. This is not a criticism of my supervisors or my institution. It is a general observation about how philosophical reading works. You read what is in front of you, you follow the citations, you go where the citations take you. The texts that turn out to be foundational for the argument you are trying to make may not be the texts you are first pointed toward. There is a long process of reading-toward-the-argument that nobody can shortcut for you. You have to do the reading. The reading takes years.
The corollary is that the people who do not read the right interlocutors are not failing to make the argument. They are making the argument with worse materials. Some of them will eventually find the right materials. Some of them will not. The discipline of philosophy, at its best, is a system for connecting the people who have made an argument with the people who are now trying to make it. The system is not perfect. It misses things. It miscatalogs things. It is structured by national and linguistic and institutional gravity. But when it works, it shortens the path between architecture and apparatus considerably.
What the BA had that the PhD has lost
I want to flag one thing that the BA had that the PhD has lost, because the loss is what produced the legal-philosophical companion paper I am now writing.
The BA engages Holmes, Posner, and Sunstein as three reform positions, each presupposing a particular consciousness-ontology, each running into the structural-vice problem in a different way. The PhD does not engage philosophy of law at all. This is a missed opportunity. The legal system is a social structure that the PhD’s argument should have purchase on, because law is one of the normative systems most explicitly committed to a particular conception of the agent it regulates. The BA was reaching for this. The PhD has not yet made the connection.
The legal-philosophical paper I am writing is the recovery of what the BA had. The working title is The Reasonable Person After Phronesis. The paper takes the PhD’s argument and applies it to legal doctrine in the way the BA was reaching to do, but with apparatus the BA did not yet have. The paper is in draft. It will come out after the PhD defence. I want to flag here that the paper exists, because it is the place where the BA’s legal-philosophical instinct is being recovered, and because the recovery is one of the surprising goods of having gone back to read the BA in the first place. The PhD has lost something that the BA had. The companion paper is the recovery.
What I am not sure about
I want to be careful here, because the story I have been telling has a flattering shape and I do not entirely trust it.
Pattern-matching one’s old work to one’s current work is one of the easier mistakes a thinker can make about themselves. The eleven-year arc is the story I want to be true. It tells me that the discomfort of going back to the BA is worth something, that the time has not been wasted on detours, that what I am doing now has a longer pedigree than my CV suggests. None of these is the kind of conclusion that should make me especially confident I have read the evidence right. Most likely, the BA and the PhD have things in common because they are both me. Most of what I am calling shape might just be the boring fact that I have a small number of moves I tend to fall back into when I am trying to make an argument I am not yet ready to make. The shape would then carry over not because there is an instinct doing real philosophical work but because there is a habit doing its ordinary work.
I cannot rule this out. The honest version of what I have noticed is something more like: the BA and the PhD share a structure that I recognise, and I do not know whether the recognition is tracking something philosophically important or just tracking the limits of my own repertoire. Either possibility is consistent with what I have seen. The piece reads as if I have settled the question. I have not.
What I can say with less qualification is the smaller observation: re-reading old work is a different kind of self-knowledge than writing new work. The BA showed me, on this re-read, where my failures of nerve have stayed the same and where they have shifted. The Koestler problem is the cleanest example. I leaned on a source I knew at the time was not going to bear the load because I needed the argument to work. I still do this. The materials are different now. The pattern is the same. That is uncomfortable to notice and I am not done sitting with it.
The other thing the re-read showed me is that the argument I am defending now is genuinely older than I had registered. Whether that is a strength of the argument or a feature of my own narrowness is a question I am leaving open. Probably both. I have spent eleven years working on a particular kind of move. The materials I have for that move are much better than the materials I had in 2015. The conclusion the move now lands sits in a different domain than the one it landed in then. None of that tells me whether the move is the right move to be making, or whether I would notice if it were not.
Where this leaves me
I am going to do three things with what I have learned from this exercise.
The first is to finish the PhD. The work is in its final year. Going back to the BA has not changed what I need to do; it has changed the way I think about what I have already done, which is a different thing. If anything, the re-read is useful for the defence in a small way: if I have been making this kind of argument for eleven years, the PhD is at least not a sudden idea. Whether it is a good idea is a separate question, and one I am not going to resolve by appeal to my own back-catalogue.
The second is to finish the legal-philosophical companion paper. The paper is the recovery of something the BA had that the PhD has not yet engaged. It is in draft.
The third is the work of the next several months on this Substack. Each upcoming post develops one piece of the apparatus the PhD assembles. The June post. The July posts. August. September. October. November. December. Each post stands on its own. Together they are the apparatus this BA was reaching for in 2015, presented one piece at a time, in their proper place.
What I am taking away from re-reading the BA is more modest than the shape of this post might suggest. I have been working on a particular kind of argument for longer than I had registered. The materials I had then were not the materials I have now. Whether that is evidence of philosophical maturation or evidence of a thinker whose repertoire is narrower than they would like to admit is a question I am leaving open. It is a question I am not sure I am the right person to answer about myself.
The closed chapter turned out not to be closed. That is most of what I have noticed. I will let what the noticing means settle in its own time.