Category: Philosophy

Politics as a field of imperfect cognitive states

Our epistemologists have been thinking about knowledge for a long time and about how to define it. The standard view is that knowledge is justified true belief; but that hardly settles the matter since all three terms – justification, truth, and belief – are in need of further clarification. When it comes to the question where knowledge is to be found, we have tended to look at mathematics, or physics, or at cases where an object is clearly perceived under ideal conditions.

But in social and political life we are rarely dealing with knowledge in this sense. In these domains we encounter conjectures, surmises, guesswork, “convictions,” presumption, suspicion, interpretations, attempts to make sense, etc. I am particularly interested in states of uncertainty and disorientation because these seem to prevail now in our politics.

I have argued in Politics and the Search for the Common Good that politics is inherently a domain of uncertainty. Uncertainty affects all aspects of political life and brings about its characteristic volatility. Disorientation, on the other hand, is a malady that disrupts politics and can destroy political institutions. But the two are connected and for this reason we will need to look at them and their interrelation. We are uncertain when we don’t know (don’t know for sure) what has been, what is, or what will be. The difficulty we have in separating news from “fake news,” information from misinformation exemplifies this condition. We are disoriented, on the other hand, when we don’t understand what has been, what is, or what will be because we lack adequate words and concepts to do so. Our inability to analyze our current condition, to say what kind of political transformation we are experiencing and what might come after may count as an illustration. Though similar in some respects and interrelated as they are, uncertainty and disorientation belong, nonetheless, to different cognitive registers: one concerns our knowledge, the other our understanding.

We need to distinguish, however, between uncertainty and the feeling of uncertainty and likewise between disorientation and the feeling of being disoriented. The two are easily confused. The feeling is something that may or may not attach itself to an actual state of uncertainty or an actual condition of disorientation. But it is a secondary (and second-level) psychological state that relates to a primary (first-level) cognitive condition. We may be objectively uncertain about what is to come but feel confident that we know. In other words, we think we know when we really don’t. It is then said that we suffer from a sense of false certainty. False certainty is a common feature of political life and it goes hand in hand with its indubitable uncertainties. In his book Fire and Fury Michael Wolff writes that Donald Trump’s White House staff and members of his cabinet had become aware after a few months of “the baldly obvious fact that the president did not know enough, did not know what he didn’t know, did not particularly care, and, to boot, was confident if not serene in his unquestioned certitudes.” What holds for uncertainty, applies also to disorientation. We may feel that we understand what is going on, when this is, in fact not so. Disorientation is, in this respect, like dementia. Disoriented as we are we may still believe, just like the demented, that we are doing fine, are of clear mind, grasp what is going on, have things in hand.

We need to distinguish, moreover, between perceptual and conceptual forms of disorientation for it is the latter that is characteristically at stake in politics. We may be disorientated when we wake up in an unfamiliar room or when we are caught in a dense fog. Then we don’t know whether to turn left or right and find ourselves frozen in place. Even in the case of perceptual disorientation we must, of course, distinguish between being and feeling disoriented. Waking up in an unfamiliar pitch-black room we may still believe that we understand its lay-out but then bump unexpectedly into a wall. But both being perceptually disoriented and feeling perceptually disoriented are different from not knowing how to describe our situation adequately or not being able to act politically in an appropriate way because we lack the concepts for analyzing where we are and where need to go.

To make these distinctions does not mean to downplay the importance of feelings of uncertainty or disorientation in politics. Such feelings of uncertainty and disorientation may generate unease, anxiety, even nausea and these can stop us from acting or can drive us into precipitous action. But such feelings are still secondary to actual states of uncertainty and disorientation which have a far more direct impact on what happens. Actual uncertainty and disorientation, instead of creating anxiety, are often accompanied by opposite feelings of certainty and orientation, the resulting smugness may have an even more devastating effect than felt uncertainty and disorientation.

These insights have been captured well in Plato’s Republic. In its seventh book we read of humans living in an underground cave – an allegory for social and political life as we know it. Tied down, hand and foot, the inhabitants of the cave can see only shadows on the wall before them, not what produced them and also not the world beyond their cave. They are not only ignorant of the things beyond their range of vision, they are also unable to understand their own situation and they can also therefore not conceive of any alternative to their pitiful state. If anyone of the inhabitants of the cave manages to turn around and sees what produced the shadow play, he will, however, be “pained and dazzled and unable to see the things” whose shadows he had seen before. (514c) And if he should actually reach daylight, he will be dazzled once more until his eyes have adjusted to the above ground reality. But should he return into the darkness of the cave, he would once again be confused and “behave awkwardly and appear completely ridiculous.” (517d) There are thus for Plato two states of political disorientation: the first when one comes from the darkness of ignorance into the light of knowledge and the second when one returns from this light into the darkness of human social life. The inhabitants of the cave are convinced that they know and understand reality, but they are, in fact, familiar only with shadows and lack the concepts to understand their actual situation. They are both ignorant and disoriented but feel all the while certain and oriented. By contrast, the one who escapes from the cave will at first be thrown into a state of confusion. His felt uncertainty will make him realize that he lacks the words to understand reality as it is. He will be moved therefore to acquire the concepts necessary to describe how things are and in what way the world of common human life is one of illusion. But when he returns to the human habitat and encounters the false certainties of its inhabitants, he may not fare well. They may deride and resent him and even seek to get rid of him in order to preserve their precious illusions.

The Atomization of Knowledge

We have learned that the ocean waves pulverize our plastic debris which is then consumed as dust by the fish we eat. The circle is closed and the poisons we have created come back to us in this altered form. The internet pulverizes human knowledge and feeds it back to us as unconnected bits of information. Our minds are bound to be ultimately  overwhelmed by all this new kind of poisonous debris.

Digital technology has had the peculiar effect of atomizing human knowledge and this in two ways. It has favored the creation of small bits of information which are passed around in digital messages. And it has overwhelmed our ability to concentrate on extended lines of reasoning. There is too much information, tempting us to move quickly from one bit to another. We are distracted by all these bits of knowledge that are offered to us so enticingly on all the websites of the world. This is already showing disastrously in our students who find it increasingly difficult to read whole books. We feed them instead with power point slides that contain carefully selected bits of information. Even this blog illustrates what is happening. Blogs are signals of the decreasing attention spans of those who write them and those who consume them.

One consequence of all this is that we find it increasingly difficult to weigh and assess the information that comes to us. We begin to believe things just because they have appeared somewhere on the internet. We lose our capacity to ask where this information comes from and who has authored it. The disunity of knowledge acquires thus a new and more extreme character. Human knowledge is a dispersed structure; there is disunity in it but there are also clusters of density and integration (theories, fields, disciplines, world-views). It is this equilibrium of unity and dispersion that is now coming undone. Click here

The result of all this is a wholly new condition for human knowledge. So, we need an epistemology that takes these developments into account. Call it a critical epistemology of the internet.

The disunity of knowledge

Our sharpest break with the tradition has come with the realization of the disunity of knowledge (of thought, the mind, the world, and pretty much else that concerns philosophy). We are no longer trying to construct “a system;” we are not looking for “the foundations” of a single structure; we have abandoned the belief in completeness and in our capacity to make everything cohere.

A vivid expression of this revolt against the entire philosophical tradition from Aristotle to Hegel is due to Nietzsche who declared his “profound aversion to reposing once and for all in any one total view of the world” and proclaimed, instead, the “fascination of the opposing point of view: refusal to be deprived of the stimulus of the enigmatic.” (The Will to Power, 470) The remark provides a key to Nietzsche’s writing and thinking. It helps to make sense of his aphoristic style as well as of his belief in many perspectives. Not that readers of Nietzsche have always appreciated this point. Nietzsche himself wrote in a sketch for his last book: “I mistrust all systems and systematizers; perhaps one [of them] will even discover behind this book the system I have sought to avoid. The will to system is a dishonesty for a philosopher.”

Another expression of this same idea is found in Wittgenstein’s later writings. He asks himself there what reasons he has for trusting text-books of physics and he answers: “I have no grounds for not trusting them. And I trust them. I know how such books are produced – or rather, I believe I know. I have some evidence, but it does not go very far and is of a very scattered kind. I have heard, seen, and read various things.” (On Certainty, 600) This is, of course, not a biographical note but meant to reveal the status of our usual claims to knowledge. What we call knowledge is, indeed, of a scattered kind. Linked to this thought is Wittgenstein’s realization that the mind (or soul or self) is not a unity – a conviction that the tradition has made a supporting pillar for its belief in the immortality of the soul. (A simple substance, it says, cannot disappear through a process of disintegration.)

Michael Foucault speaks of different discourses with their own distinctive internal rules and he points out that not everything possible is actually ever said. “We must look, therefore, for the principle of rarification or at least of non-filling of the field of possible formulations… The discursive formation is not therefore a developing totality, … it is a distribution of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions.” (The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 119) And again, in slightly different language: “The archive cannot be described in its totality… It emerges in fragments, regions, levels…” (p. 130)

While Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault agree that there is nothing uniquely foundational for philosophy to think about, they do not mean to say that it doesn’t matter what we make the subject of our thinking. Some philosophical questions are clearly more urgent than others. For us the decisive issue is now our individual, social, and political existence as human beings. The pressing issue is what it means to be human and all three, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault, wrestled with that.

 

 

Why I am (still) a philosopher

 (Click here for part 1)

Dear Raymond,

Do we have to be as pessimistic about the future of philosophy as you are in your latest book? I still hold some hope for the subject and believe it, in fact, to be needed today more than ever.

That said, I agree with you that the current state of philosophy is not good. You are right that philosophy as conducted in our Universities and Colleges seems to be turning more and more into a propaedeutic enterprise for future lawyers. But what we call “philosophy” has often been two very different things: on the one hand, a scholastic undertaking for schooling young minds, and, on the other, a creative form of thinking on “fundamental” issues and the latter has frequently taken place outside the educational institutions. Of the philosophical thinkers you discuss in your book only some were professors. Socrates was a public gadfly and nuisance, Lucretius a poet, Augustine a bishop, Montaigne a bit of a hermit, and Hobbes a courtier. It may turn out that the most serious thinkers of the future will not be found in philosophy departments.

Philosophy as serious thinking has, of course, never been an academic “discipline” with set boundaries and doctrines. It has always moved, as you describe in your book, from subject to subject, and for question to question, like a snake wriggling here and there, constantly shedding its old skin. Since science has changed our intellectual climate and technology our social environment, we shouldn’t expect philosophy to remain the same. I like a phrase that Wittgenstein used to describe his own work; he called it “one of the heirs of the subject that used to be called ‘philosophy’.” So, whatever it was that once went under the label of philosophy has left an inheritance; something is left over to be carried into the future; but the inheritance is dispersed; there is more than one heir. That seems to capture where we find ourselves today.

I like to believe that there will be those in the future who will continue to ask questions about all kinds of things that others are leaving unquestioned. There will be those who continue to invent new concepts and with their help recast what may already have been said by others; there will be those who experiment with new ways of looking at ourselves and the world; there will be those who attend to all kinds of details of things that others pass by; and there will also be those who test arguments for and against all kinds of sane or insane convictions. All that will hopefully go on and we may as well call what is practiced in some such a way by the old name of “philosophy.” There is surely no harm in appropriating that word for ourselves. In doing so we are waving our hand at those who have come before us, indicating to them that we are still walking on the road on which they have walked.

But if we say that philosophy as serious creative thinking is still needed, we must be clear on where and how it is. We must ask ourselves: what calls most urgently for such thinking? We have been through a period where philosophers would have said that we need to think most urgently about the foundations of knowledge, logic, mathematics, or science. I believe that our priorities must be different and here I think you and I will agree. What most calls for thinking today is our social and political existence because we can see today how fragile their structure has become. And if we can’t secure our social and political existence, then nothing else can be secured. This alerts us to the fact that our entire reality is changing dramatically and that we will therefore also need a new kind to creative thinking, one that can keep up with the changes around us. Our question then becomes, who will be able to engage in the kind of thinking that is now needed. This is where the challenge of your book really begins to bite. Of how much creativity is our philosophizing capable? There may, of course, be no theoretical answer to this. All we can do is commit ourselves to the project of serious thinking and continue to work as well as we can with what we have inherited.

Your friend,

Hans

Does philosophy have a future?

Raymond Geuss,  Changing the Subject. Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. 2017

Professor Raymond Geuss
Professor Raymond Geuss

Raymond Geuss has made a name for himself in recent years as a critic of the abstract, normative theorizing that dominates mainstream political philosophy today and is represented most prominently by the work of John Rawls. (The kind of philosophizing that asks: What is the ideal socio-political order? What is the best form of government? What are the right principles of justice? and that proposes carefully honed theoretical answers to these set questions.)  By contrast, politics, is for Geuss, a practical craft rather than the application of a theory; it is concerned with what people do rather than what they ought to do; and its actions take place in institutional contexts that change over time. Political thought should therefore be  realist, practical and historical in spirit and forego the search for general normative principles; these, Geuss argues, will in any case turn out to be formulaic and politically useless. (Philosophy and Real Politics, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2008)

It is, perhaps, no accident then that Geuss has been led now to take a broader critical look at the entire tradition of philosophy. Changing the Subject consists of twelve essays on individual philosophers from Socrates to Adorno, focusing in almost every case on a single text. Geuss calls it “an intellectually relaxed essayistic introduction to some issues that I take to be of interest.” (p. xvi) Socrates, Plato, Lucretius, Augustine, Montaigne, Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Lukács, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Adorno are each given an essayistic reading, but some other prominent philosophers – Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, and Kant – are all absent. But historical completeness is not Gauss’ goal. That was, he explains at the end of his book, to show us how “the questions which humans ask change, depending on the historical and social circumstances.” Most of the questions which philosophers have asked were moreover never convincingly answered and some have simply disappeared. In a final, positive flourish Geuss declares: “There are, however, questions that do not go away, even if we cannot adequately answer them.” (p. 302) It is obviously his hope to have shown in the course of his twelve essay which questions these are and why it is worth asking them in ever new ways, even when we can’t come up with conclusive answers.

But there is another worry that becomes apparent in Geuss’ conclusion to his book. He understands that “the twelve authors whose work was discussed here do not form a natural group or an invisible collegium or tribunal.” (p. 302) Why then do we call them all philosophers? What is this discipline whose questions seem to be changing over time and whose answers are never final? Geuss is convinced that there has been enough continuity “that one can pick out an identifiable configuration called ‘philosophy’.” (p. 296) But the configuration has a specifically historical character: it began with Socrates and Plato, and we should not assume that it will persist indefinitely. Geuss has, indeed, doubts that it can go on because “it is a highly peculiar social and cultural configuration which requires a highly specific set of conditions to flourish. These conditions, whatever they are, do not seem to have existed during the past forty years.” (p. 301) The conclusion suggests itself to him because he does not see any kind of originality left in philosophy, no real capacity for turning old questions into new ones. Philosophy, he fears, has lost its capacity to “change the subject.” And it is certainly remarkable how “professional” and inbred philosophy has become today, how preoccupied it has become with elaborating ever more complex theories. There have really been no philosophical writings in the last half century or so who have succeeded in opening up new issues.  Such publications – from, let us, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – are by now all half a century old.

Geuss allows that, even without being creative, the discipline may continue for a while “as an exercise in running through traditional thoughts and forms of argument in pedagogical or propaedeutic contexts.” (p. 300) It may persist through mere inertia. “This is the current state of philosophy in the universities.” (p. 301) Its logical and linguistic puzzles may go on to occupy some minds as a harmless occupation and private pastime. But genuine philosophy can flourish only under very specific conditions. For it to exist “deeply rooted dissatisfaction with the state of our world must be experienced by some people who are living a life in which their basic physical needs are satisfied, are capable of focusing developed intellectual and cognitive powers on their situation, and do not think the situation is so self-evidently hopeless that there is no point in thinking about it.” (p. 299) Admittedly: “Just because nothing much seems to have happened since the 1970s doesn’t mean that the dying embers of the subject might not flare up into life again under the right circumstances.” (p. 298) But Geuss concludes despondently that “we cannot assume that as our world falls apart now in ecological catastrophe, there will necessarily be any renewal of philosophical activity.” (p. 299)

Should we agree with this dire assessment? We might answer Geuss that philosophy has previously gone through cycles of creativity and sterility, and that it has been in an unusually productive phase since the last quarter of the 19th century, one which seems now to have run its course. Phenomenology and existential philosophy, positivism and analytic philosophy all originated in this period. So one response to Geuss would be to counsel patience and see whether some new forms of philosophical thinking will eventually emerge. But what about his worry that in the face of a looming ecological catastrophe this is unlikely o happen. There are, of course, those who discern no such catastrophe ahead. But even if one agrees with Geuss on such a possibility, one might think that it is precisely what calls for philosophical engagement. Aren’t we faced with the question what it can mean for us to be human under the present conditions and why the human form of existence deserves to be preserved and nurtured? Are we justified in giving up on this question simply because the looming catastrophe may overwhelm us? Perhaps we should be saying in the words of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “There is only the fight to recover what has been lost and found and lost again and again: and now under conditions that seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”