Hans Sluga Blog

I just received the first “presidential alert” on my cell phone and I was, frankly, appalled. It’s not just that I don’t want to hear from Donald Trump. I also don’t want receive “presidential alerts” from any future president. What’s wrong with this? The name is another building block in the construction of the imperial presidency. It’s not a name that democrats should be thinking of. Why not “National Alert” or “US Alert” or “Federal Government Alert”? We have been assured that the current office holder will not use it for his own political purpose. But why would a future president not think: a presidential alert is a presidential alert and I will use it as such? What stands in the way?

Why do I believe that water boils at roughly 100 centigrade? Ludwig Wittgenstein asks in one of his notebooks and he answers: “I made the experiment myself at school. The proposition is a very elementary one in our text-books, which are to be trusted in matters like this, because ….” The moment of hesitation suggested by the dots after the “because” leads him on to another question in his next entry: “What kind of grounds have I for trusting text-books of experimental physics?” And to this he answers tentatively: “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 scattered kind. I have heard, seen, and read various things.”[i]

Is Wittgenstein gesturing here toward some kind of skepticism? The opposite is the case. He is trying to determine, rather, in what our certainty about the boiling point of water consists. It is worth thinking further about this case, because it throws light on the question of certainty and uncertainty in other domains of human life and, in particular, in the domain of politics. Physics is the clear opposite of politics. In physics we possess established and agreed upon means of verification; we have far-reaching consensus; and we have in this way achieved a great deal of certainty about the physical constitution of our world. Uncertainty, disorientation, and disagreement prevail, on the other hand, in politics.

The proposition that water boils at roughly 100 centigrade looks like lots of other plainly empirical propositions but it is, in fact, of a special sort. It’s related to a convention according to which the boiling point of water at sea level is to count as 100 and the freezing point of water as 0. But when Wittgenstein measures the temperature of boiling water at the level of Vienna and determines that it is roughly 100 he is not simply giving expression to this convention, he is stating an empirical fact. It might, after all, be the case that at so many feet above sea level, water boils at a significantly different temperature from the one at which it boils at sea level.

Wittgenstein’s question concerns this empirical truth. And when he asks himself why he believes it he advances two reasons. The first is that he has measured it himself in school. But, it is possible that he was clumsy then and got the measurement wrong; or, perhaps he misremembers; or, it was possibly not water he measured but some other liquid he believed to be water (or now believes to have been water); or the boiling point of water has changed still then. So the memory alone may not be enough to assure him of the truth of the proposition. Wittgenstein adds that elementary textbooks also assert that under usual conditions (except, for instance, on high mountainsides) water will boil at roughly 100. But that only shifts the burden, because why should one believe those text-books. In reality, there are a number of other reasons for Wittgenstein’s assurance about the boiling water. He is likely to have been  told about it by his parents, teachers, and other adults. The fact is mentioned not only in text-books but also in other writings as, for instance, in cookbooks. The proposition is thus anchored in an entire social structure.

This appears to me also what Wittgenstein means when he writes: “I have some evidence, but it does not go very far and is of a scattered kind. I have heard, seen, and read various things.” Our trust in the claims of physics is not based on a single conviction (let’s say that the textbook I have in front of me is reliable); it is trust in a whole system of mutually supporting parts of which I have only an incomplete and partial grasp. In other sections of On Certainty Wittgenstein speaks of such a system as constituting a world-picture of which he again says that I have accepted it as a whole, not piecemeal. “In general I take as true what I found in text-books, of geography for example. Why? I say: All these facts have been confirmed a hundred times over. But how do I know that? What is my evidence for it? I have a world-picture. Is it true or false? Above all it is the substratum of all enquiring and asserting. The propositions describing it are not all equally subject to testing.” And a few entries later: “Think of chemical investigations. Lavoisier makes experiments with substances in his laboratory and now he concludes that this and that takes place when there is burning. He does not say that it might happen otherwise some other time. He has got hold of a definite world-picture – not of course one that he invented; he learned it as a child. I say world-picture and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-of-course foundation for his research and as such also goes unmentioned.”[ii]

But the term “world-picture” is probably too narrow to capture what Wittgenstein is after. We, Wittgenstein, Lavoisier have acquired not only a way of looking at things, but also a whole set of practices into which that pictures enters. It is not only that we take the propositions in the text-book for granted, but we use and handle our text-books in a certain way, they are part of an educational and institutional structure. The trust we have in the claims of science is, to say it again, a trust in a whole system that includes propositions, people, writings, institutions, and practices. This system – let us call it “physics” for short – has, of course not always existed. It has come about in a course of historical development that is certainly worth retracing. Our overall trust in physics is constituted by bits of trust (the trust we have in a particular text or a particular teacher) that have developed over time and have come together to form an interconnected and mutually supportive system. We can speak then of a systemic trust as against trust only in this or that particular. And the two, systemic and particular trust, are somewhat independent of each other. I may entertain a systemic trust in physics while at the same time experiencing doubts about a particular text-book or a particular teacher. Particular doubt is always possible and often appropriate. I certainly should not trust unconditionally whatever I am told under the heading of physics. But this need not and typically will not undermine my systemic trust in physics.

 

 

In 1997, Bell Labs in New Jersey hired a young German physicist, Jan Hendrik Schön, who had received his doctorate earlier that year from the University of Konstanz in Germany. The people at Bell soon came to appreciate their new colleague. Within a short time, Schoen reported spectacular new results in the semiconducting properties of organic materials. His discoveries included “a field-effect transistor based on organic crystals, the quantum Hall effect and zero-field metal-insulator transition in that device, superconductivity where others had failed to find it, the first organic laser, the first light-emitting field-effect transistor, behavior indicative of transistor action in single molecules, and more.”^[iii] Together with some co-authors he began to publish peer-reviewed papers in prominent scientific journals like Science and Nature. By 2001, he and his co-authors were coming out with a new research paper about every eight days. Schön’s reputation grew rapidly and he received a number of prizes and awards both in Germany and the US for his outstanding scientific work.

But not all was well. Other researchers began to discover irregularities in the numerical data and when they tried to repeat Schön’s discoveries they could not do so. By 2002, Bell was sufficiently worried to set up a committee to investigate the problem. When they requested Schön’ raw data, he claimed that he kept no notebooks and that he had erased from his computer because of limited hard-drive space. Schön’s “spectacular discoveries” turned out to be fraudulent inventions from beginning to end. In September of 2002, Schön was dismissed from his position at Bell. Two years later the University of Konstanz revoked his doctoral degree, a decision that was confirmed in 2014 by the German Federal Constitutional Court. Schön works today for an engineering firm in Germany.

When Eugenie Samuel Reich published her book on this scandal in 2009, she subtitled it „How the biggest fraud in physics shook the scientific world.” The Schön scandal did, indeed, generate some very profound questioning in the scientific world. How was it possible that Bell Labs, a highly respected institution, let this series of fraudulent action continue for five years? Where was the scientific oversight? And how about Schön’s co-authors? They were eventually exonerated; but should they not have been aware of what was going on? And what of the peers who had supposedly reviewed Schön’s articles before their publication? And how about the responsibility of the scientific journals to make sure that their publications could hold water? And how, finally, about the scientific bodies that had given Schön their prizes and awards? Myriam Saratchik, herself a distinguished physicist, wrote in 2009: “Our reluctance to question the basic integrity of colleagues, the self-interest of journals and institutions—Bell Labs in this instance—our own wishful thinking, our ambitions, and our failure to set standards for recording and storing data are all factors that enabled those fraudulent claims to go unrecognized for too long.” She added that the case “challenges our reliance on the premise that science is self-correcting—that is, that wrong results or theories are ultimately corrected and superseded.”^[iv]

But the story of the Schön scandal also shows that his false claims and theories were ultimately exposed and superseded, even if it took a few years. The fraud may have shaken the scientific world, but it didn’t shake it apart. Our systemic trust in physics has not been destroyed by it. There have been other errors and frauds in physics: the announcement of n-waves in 1903, the discovery of an upsilon particle, or that of element 118. The turbulence created by these errors and frauds has, however, affected only the research edge of physics. None has undermined its central teachings. Our trust in the belief that water boils at ca. 100 has never been questioned.

 

Matters are different when we turn to politics. Here we find trust (both particular and systemic) but also and just as characteristically both particular and systemic distrust. Fraud and error are common in politics and so are accusations of fraud and error; but unlike in physics we have no generally agreed upon methods to combat and correct them. Almost anything said or done in politics is disputed or, at least, disputable. All trust is open to being revoked. Particular distrust is surely endemic in political matters and, indeed, often justified. We distrust the motives and actions of the opposing party and there is always such a party. But we also distrust our own side: the wisdom and viability of proposed policies and the probity of their proponents. Infighting in what claims to be one political party is common. These are all signs of the uncertainty that inhabits politics. Systemic distrust in politics is, however, a different matter but it is likewise a recurring feature of our political reality. We discover it, for instance, in our own current state of increasing disorientation. This disorientation is associated precisely with a creeping spirit of systemic distrust. What we call “populism” is likewise a child of systemic distrust. The more common is to understand “populism” as an anti-establishment movement. But this is unhelpful for a number of reasons and populism is best understood as a manifestation of systemic distrust. We can identify four reasons why the interpretation of populism as an anti-establishment movement is insufficient. First of all, much of human politics can be conceived as a struggle between a “populus” (i.e., “a people” however defined) and an establishment or elite. But to use the term so broadly, strips it of its discriminative function. It would then turn out that almost all politics is “populist.” Second, both the notion of the people (or populus) and that of the establishment or elite are under-defined and that leaves the characterization of “populism” as the struggle between the two too vague to be of use. Third, neither the populus nor the elite form a single group. There is, in fact, no such thing as “the people” or “the elite” as specific agents within the political drama. There are, rather, both popular and elite groupings. And these will often turn out to be at odds among themselves. Thus, one elite group, say, the clergy, may align itself with a disempowered section of the populus and similarly a group within the populus may align itself with the conservative holders of property and capital. And this leads us finally to understand that systemic distrust in politics is not inevitably confined to the populus but can extend also to elite groupings. It is such distrust that may at times consolidate an alliance between some elements of the populus and some elements of the elite. Illustrations are not difficult to find. In the Protestant Reformation it was not the ordinary believers alone who lost trust in the institutions of the Roman church, but monks and nuns, priests and Bishops shared that distrust and it was this clerical elite that often stirred the distrust of the ordinary believers (think of Martin Luther and John Calvin and their religious and political agitation). Similarly, the Soviet Union collapsed not just because ordinary citizens lost faith in it; equally important was that parts of the ruling elite were equally devoured by distrust of the Stalinist system. (Think in this case of Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbatchov.)

It is in this kind of situation that we find ourselves in today. There appears to be a great deal of disaffection with the existing political structures and hierarchies. Systemic distrust seems to be spreading through our politics. Such distrust may, however, have different scope, different intensity, and different reach. We may feel distrust towards the dominant political parties, or towards the current governmental structures, or towards the existing form of political rule, or even towards politics as a whole. The scope of our systemic distrust can thus be still focused or broad and all encompassing. We know from several of Plato’s dialogues how much he distrusted the democratic Athenian state. But in the Politikόs (The Statesman) he makes clear that his distrust extends to all human politics. Such politics, left to its own devices, will inevitably lead us, in his colorful phrase, into an “abyss of unlikeness.” Only the Gods can save us and their return to the helm. Martin Heidegger appropriated this Platonic thought when he expressed his profound distrust of all political systems, East and West, in his famous interview for the magazine Der Spiegel. Only a God, he concluded, can save us. Disaffection from politics is, indeed, a significant political phenomenon and we won’t understand the nature of politics unless we also get this phenomenon into view.

Systemic distrust of this or that part of our political reality or even of politics as a whole can be more or less intense. It may lead only to a detachment from politics and a turn towards other matters. Those living in totalitarian systems often find themselves pushed in this direction. They realize how little their views and actions will count in the political scene and so they turn toward their own private or scholarly concerns. Disaffection from the suspect parts of politics is also an option and so is the violent turn against this suspect reality. Finally, the distrust will most likely not be felt by everyone or equally strongly and different people may distrustful of different aspects of the political reality. As some begin to distrust his or that aspect of the political system, others will hold on to the existing political order. Different objects, levels, and kinds of distrust will divide the population and if the intensity of the distrust is sufficiently strong one side and sufficiently resisted on the other, the political system will certainly undergo turbulence. There is, however, no formula for determining how far the systemic distrust may spread and how strong and encompassing it will be. We can only say that when it ranges far enough, is sufficiently intense, and wide in scope, the political system is likely to break down. America, The West, and the global community are clearly not or not yet at this point. But given the proliferation of political distrust we are now observing, we urgently need to determine its role in political like. A diagnosis is needed of the nature, the sources, and the strength of this condition. Or, to put it differently, what we need now is a hermeneutics of suspicion.

One subject to consider in such a hermeneutics is the link between particular and systemic trust and distrust. Our systemic trust in physics did not come about all at once. It developed in stages as particular bits of trust came into play. We began to have confidence in the methods of those who pronounced on matters of physics. We came to respect the institutions of the scientific academy and the research university. Publishers and scientific journals established their reliability. And so on. These particular bits of trust came to be struts in the edifice of systemic trust. Systemic trust was the cumulative outcome of a manifold of particular trusts we have come to acquire. When the struts of particular trust are destroyed, systemic trust may get weakened and ultimately get destroyed. But while the growth of systemic trust is always cumulative, the destruction of systemic trust can also be sudden. Consider personal relations of trust and their breakdowns. Assume that you have trusted someone fully and unconditionally (a partner, a loved one); but then you discover that your trust in this person was at some point broken. This need not induce a complete, total, and sudden breach of trust, but it may and frequently does. Feeling betrayed in one thing, you now conclude that you should never have trusted that person at all and certainly should not trust them with anything from now on. Such moments are known to us also from large social contexts. Here are examples of the destruction of systemic trust – some cumulative and others that were sudden.

The Protestant Reformation began with Christian believers losing their trust in particular religious practices and beliefs. The moral integrity of the Pope was questioned and with it the institution of the papacy; the financial probity of monasteries and churches was thrown into doubt; traditional institutions and customs were questioned in the name of the Bible. Such particular doubts accumulated and eventually led to systemic distrust of the entire clerical structure. The French Revolution exposed the distrust that had accumulated around the established political and economic order of France. The systemic distrust exploded eventually in  a regime of terror and anarchy. A similar process led to the Communist Revolution in Russia. In the 1930’s, many Germans ended up distrusting their government’s ability to solve the overwhelming economic and political problems of the post-First World War period; their distrust extended to the mainstream political parties and their leaders and from there to the democratic system of government. The result was another collapse of a political system. In the 1960s, many Chinese began to lose faith in the Communist Party that had brought an end to prolonged civil war and that had re-established China as an independent state. Once the distrust reached a critical point, it needed only a few words from Chairman Mao Zedong to trigger a wholesale upheaval we know as the Cultural Revolution, a vast manifestation of systemic distrust. What we are witnessing today in America and also in other parts of the world is the transformation of particular bits of distrust into the systemic variety.

One feature stands out when that happens. It is not that the need for trust evaporates when a system of trust (a whole world-picture) collapses. For it turns out, that we cannot live for long without some form of trust. It is, rather, that the trust gets re-configured in this situation. It becomes concentrated and now turns to a single figure or a single institution in which it invests everything. There emerge then bearers of trust – not typically as passive objects in which trust is invested, but as active persons or institutions that advance themselves as worthy of trust. Systemic distrust has thus generated the great leaders of the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther, John Calvin), the protagonists of the French and Soviet Revolution (Robespierre, Lenin), and political champions (Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong). In our own precarious political situation, Donald Trump has proposed himself as a bearer of systemic trust and he has for some people, indeed, become the one in whom that trust is currently invested. But Trump is a deeply flawed and limited figure and may not succeed in maintaining that role. This does not mean that his possible failure will restore the systemic trust on whose decline Trump’s rise has depended. Others may want to compete for the role of bearer of trust at that moment. Stephen Bannon is surely one contender for this position.

 

Notes

[i] On Certainty, 599 and 600.

[ii] On Certainty, 162 and 167.

[iii] Myriam Sarachik, Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World,  Physics Today 62, 10, 57 (2009); https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3248480

[iv] Ibid.

“The Hermeneutics of Suspicion” is meant to be a section of the larger project I am calling The Empire of Disorientation. It is intended to be the final chapter of that text.

My intention has been to practice a particular style of political thinking which I have called “diagnostic practice.” We can, in effect, distinguish three styles of political philosophy: political idealism, political realism, and diagnostic practice. My goal was to advance the third as the most promising and most fundamental.

Political idealism is what I have previously called “abstract normative theorizing.”[i] But I have come to understand that this term may be too specific and for that reason misleading. Political idealism, as I understand it, is a style of thinking in which the philosopher seeks to spell out what politics should look like, how it should be conducted. Political idealism is prescriptive in character though not necessarily normative. If I say to you: please, wash your hands before handling food, I am speaking prescriptively; if I announce that everyone needs to wash their hands before handling food, I am advancing a general standard (of cleanliness, in this case) and more precisely a norm. Norms are general and are usually expressed in the form of principles or rules. It is true that the political idealist at times seeks to formulate an abstract standard that political life is supposed to observe. Justice, equality, freedom, democracy, order, security would be among these. Sometimes such a philosopher might even lay down principles or rules for what the implementation of such a standard requires. Thus, we have John Rawls’ two principles of justice. This style of political thinking is rightly called abstract normative theorizing. But there is another form of philosophical thinking that also aims at specifying how politics should be conducted. It consists in the rich description of an imagined alternative political reality. We sometimes call such imaginary description “utopian” and we can thus speak of utopianism as a second form of political idealism. Plato’s Republic exemplifies this utopian style of political philosophy. Like John Rawls, Plato is concerned with justice; he is so, however, by describing in detail what, according to him, a just city would look like. I want to distinguish  abstract normative theorizing and utopianism as two varieties of political idealism.

Now my first claim is that political idealism cannot stand on its own feet because any prescriptive statement about politics presupposes some understanding of the political realities. I have previously expressed this observation with respect to abstract normative theorizing in the slogan: You can’t make rules for a game, if you don’t know what game is being played. That is, you can’t make useful rules in that situation. To the extent to which you ignore or bypass  the political facts on the ground, the political norms will remain empty formulas that can be filled in a multiplicity of ways. The dilemma of political idealism becomes even more obvious when we turn to utopianism. For the question is: From where does the utopian thinker take the component elements of his account of the ideal society, if not from the real society which he knows? The picture Plato draws of his ideal (“happy”) city certainly differs substantially from the actual life of the ancient Greek city-state, but it is for all that a variant of that kind of political order. Or, to take another example: the rudimentary picture that Marx and Engels draw of the future Communist society is still a variant of the bourgeois, industrial society of their own time. The simple fact is that the human imagination is limited. And what is more: if someone were really to draw a picture of a form of life that was totally different from our own, we would not be able to appreciate it as a utopian alternative to our reality. Wat holds for utopianism is also true of abstract normative theorizing. We can see that clearly in the writings of John Rawls. He, too, can’t escape taking note of our political reality. But his account is bloodless and highly stylized, as if we were still living in the eighteenth century and its preoccupation with individual liberty and not in the rough and tumble of the twenty-first.

When we probe the writings of political idealists we discover, indeed, that they always contain or at least presuppose some understanding of the political realities. But it is often only a rudimentary view of that reality and not a critically examined one. I conclude that a securely grounded political philosophy will have to base its prescriptive formulas on a fleshed-out, realistic view of political life. Political realism appears thus as a more fundamental style of political philosophy. I don’t mean to say here that political philosophy must begin with a positivistic gathering of data as it is so often pursued under the heading of “political science.” I take political realism, rather, to be the attempt to grasp the political realities in theoretical terms. Machiavelli and Hobbes are usually seen as the initiators of a realistic approach to politics. Political realism, as I understand it, has adherents both in contemporary theorizing and in the thinking of politicians. (We might think, for instance, of Henry Kissinger as a characteristic representative of the latter type.)

Raymond Geuss has in recent years made a strong case against political idealism and specifically the kind of normative theorizing advanced by John Rawls. In his book Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton 2008) he asserts unconditionally that “political philosophy must be realist.” (p. 9) It must be concerned in the first instance, he adds, “not with how people ought ideally (or ought ‘rationally’) to act … but rather with the way the social, economic, political etc. institutions actually operate.” (Ibid.) It must recognize that “politics is in the first instance about action and the context of action, not about mere beliefs or propositions.” (p. 11) It must accept that “politics is historically located,” (p. 13) It must also understand that “politics is more like the exercise of a craft or art” than an application of a theory. (p. 15) Its exercise depends on skill rather than theoretical understanding. Geuss writes provocatively: “In my view, if political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist’ view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neo-Leninism.” (p. 99) But what does he mean by “neo-Leninism”? According to Geuss: “Lenin defines politics with characteristic clarity and pithiness when he says that it is concerned with the question that keeps recurring in our political life: ‘Who, whom?’ … Although Lenin’s formula is basically correct, it is perhaps too dense and needs to be developed or extended… First of all, the formula should read not merely ‘Who whom?’ but, rather, ‘’Who [does] what to whom for whose benefit?’ with four distinct variables to be filled in, i.e., (1) Who, (2) What, (3) To whom, (4) for whose benefit? To think politically is to think about agency, power, and interests, and the relations among these.” (pp. 22 and 25) And so Geuss concludes: “If one takes this extended Leninist model as the matrix of political philosophy, certain consequences would seem to follow. The first is that it would be a mistake to believe that one  come to any substantive understanding of politics by discussing abstractly the good, the right, the true or the rational.” (p. 28)

Terms like “idealism” and “realism” have wide currency in philosophy and they are used in numerously different ways. We need, for that reason, be deliberate and cautious when we speak of political and political realism. We can see that, for instance, when we think about Donald Trump and political realism. He certainly shares with political realists their scorn for seeing politics in moral terms. Unlike George W. Bush, he doesn’t speak of an axis of evil in the world; and unlike Barack Obama and the Democrats, he is little concerned with the issue of human rights. As an amoral capitalist he believes in self-interest and the exercise of power, in the use and pursuit of money in politics. He believes in “the art of the deal.” In these respects we might call him a political realist; surely not a political idealist. But we know also that he is not much interested in the actual realities on the ground. He sticks to a simple picture of the world, despises experts, and ignores advice. In his factual claims he is often quite unrealistic. Trump makes us understand that the term “political realism” is ambiguous. In one sense it is a general belief about how human beings act and a set of policies derived from this: the belief, for instance, that human beings are essentially selfish or that they can be successfully bullied into what one wants them to do. In another sense the term realism refers to a commitment to the need to recognize the actual, concrete political facts. Trump shows us that the two don’t necessarily go together. Political realism can, in other words, go hand in hand with a lack of realism.

And we can apply that lesson also to those thinkers we have come to recognize as political realists, be they Machiavelli or Hobbes, Carl Schmitt, the author of The Concept of the Political, or Samuel Huntington, the author of The Clash of Civilizations. All these writers pride themselves on their realism, but they often operate with highly schematic pictures of human motivation and this often tints and even mars their genuine concern with the actual realities of political life. The concept of political realism must thus be used with caution. Raymond Geuss, who is widely considered today to be an advocate of political realism, has, in fact recently renounced that label. I heard him do so a few months ago at a conference in Norwich, England, but he did not say then what bothers him now in this term.

I myself argued at this conference that the problem with political realism was not so much the ambiguity of the term, as the fact political realism, though it is certainly superior to and more fundamental than political idealism, is itself still philosophically ungrounded. In order to recognize this, we should ask ourselves from where the political realist draws his insights about political reality. When we look at the writings of so-called realists, we notice, as I have just said, that they often operate with very large and untested assumptions concerning, for instance, human nature (our basic selfishness or inborn cooperativeness) or social relations (as being naturally relations of subjection or domination), or of social institutions operating exactly like individual human beings (the doctrine of the raison d’état). We need to ask ourselves, instead: how do we actually come to know the political realities? What are the possibilities and limitations of such knowledge? What concepts are adequate for grasping and describing this reality? This leads me to conclude that we need to pursue a third style of political philosophy, the one I have called diagnostic practice. I mean by this precisely a style of political thinking that attends to the cognitive and conceptual dimensions of our political understanding.

We can describe the differences between these three styles of political thinking in the following way. There is, first of all, and maybe as the oldest and most established form of political philosophy, a style of thinking that associates politics with ethics. Political idealists speak, in fact, regularly of politics as applied ethics. Then there is a style of political thinking that wants to look at the structures and processes that constitute our political reality. This, we could say, treats political philosophy as a branch of ontology. There has recently emerged a philosophical study of social reality and social relations that goes by the name of “social ontology.” We could say that political realism might be considered a part of this kind of undertaking. But there are also as I have said, cognitive and conceptual questions that need to be asked. That is the concern of diagnostic practice. This kind of practice might thus be considered to belong to the larger area of epistemology. It concerns the specific epistemological conditions and constraints of political understanding. My claim comes to this: political epistemology trumps political ontology and the two together trump prescriptive political idealism. The relation between the three is not one of either-or but rather of priority and fundamentality.

One basic premise of diagnostic practice is that all our thinking about politics (whether it is that of an engaged politician or that of a political theorist or philosopher) is conducted within the field of political reality. The question for diagnostic practice is then how and to what extent that field makes knowledge of itself possible. Diagnostic practice will concern itself therefore with three kinds of question. The most general is how and to what extent the inhabitants of the political field understand that field and their own place in it. Every inhabitant of that field is positioned in a distinctive temporal and spatial location and this will, of course, affect their perception of the field as a whole; it will provide them with specific insights but also limit their range of vision. Politics is, moreover, an active enterprise and not simply one of understanding. Given the inherent limitations of our knowledge, we find ourselves forced to action under non-ideal cognitive conditions. How then do we manage to act when we have no full grasp of the situation in which we find ourselves? The third question concerns the outcome of our actions. Given that we have only a limited grasp of the reality of the political field and given, in particular, that we are inevitably unsure of the thoughts and intentions of other actors, how can we ever be confident about the consequences of our actions?

Political theorists can suspend judgment in cases where political agents may be forced to act. They can take time to assemble their knowledge of the political situation, of the thoughts and intentions of the political actors, and of the consequences of their actions and can do so with some degree of detachment. But even they are confined in their range of vision by the spatiotemporal location they occupy. They may find their access to the past obstructed by the lack of traces left over in monuments, documents, or memories; they may discover their capacity for comprehending the present in its vivid detail to be limited; and like everyone else in the political field they will find themselves unable to look clearly into the future. They may also lack adequate concepts for organizing and describing the political field and its complex, ever shifting configurations. The outcome has to be that the insights of the political theorist, including the political realist, will inevitably tenuous. As for the political actors themselves, the political field will always be even more so a domain of uncertainty and often of disorientation.

The diagnostic approach is meant to throw light not on a reality apart from us, but on one in which we ourselves are embedded as political thinkers. Diagnostic practice has to provide an account also of both political idealism and political realism. Diagnostic practice must equally attempt to throw light on the diagnostic practice itself and on those who pursue it (and thus on ourselves).  We will want to ask what powers of reason the diagnostic thinker can rely on in making his claims. Diagnostic practice needs, in other words, finally turn its eye on itself.

 

Political idealists are intent on proposing not just any alternative to our political institutions and practices but alternatives they consider better than what we have. But from where do they take that conviction? Utopianism often relies on intuition. The utopian thinker draws a picture of an alternative reality that he hopes to be so appealing that we will naturally come to see it as superior to what we have. Let us say, for instance, that it is a picture of peace and abundance. Everyone will surely prefer a political system that can provide these goods. The only problem is that the utopian thinker cannot tell us how to get there and attempts at implementing the ideal may go horribly wrong. Mao Zedong was inspired by Marx’s vision of a communist society and sought to establish a state in which the usual division of labor was abolished. Everybody would equally share in all tasks. Households and villages would produce their own necessities, even their own coal and steel. Mao called this “The Great Leap Forwards.” It ended with the death from starvation of some 40 million Chinese people. Throughout the twentieth century various attempts have been made at a radical reconstruction of society in the name always of some utopian vision; but all, it turns out, have failed.

It might be argued that they have failed for two reasons but that this is no ground for giving up on all utopian hopes. Our utopian visions have failed, first, because they had no rational basis, and, second, because they did not sufficiently consider the problem of their implementation. But once we begin to reflect on the rational basis of a utopian vision, it seems we are shifting grounds away from the utopian variety of political idealism to the normative kind. For at that point we begin to think in terms of general standards that our political order is to live up to and, perhaps, even of principles and rules for the implementation of these standards. We can see this clearly in Plato’s utopianism. His Republic draws a detailed picture of an alternative political order, but Plato also feels the need to justify his utopian vision by arguing that it implements a standard of justice which is not egalitarian but hierarchical and is based on a supposedly natural order of human capacities. Plato also considered the question of how such a system could be established. He pinned his hope on philosophically educated rulers or tyrants (“philosopher-kings”) but he was also fully aware that such men may be rare and that they may have a chance at instituting a new political order only under exceptional conditions such as a complete breakdown of democratic society.

There are reasons then why utopianism will drift into normative theorizing. Our question concerning the viability of political idealism thus becomes one concerning our capacity for justifying political norms. For the normative theorist will, of course, not want to advance his norms as free-standing and without further justification. Nor should he seek to justify these norms by appeal to some intuition for at that point we are back to the situation that destabilized the utopian variety. Intuitions are inherently ungrounded, disputable, and insufficient as guides to political action. How then will the normativist back up his favorite norms? The only available answer seems to be by some kind of rational calculation and argument. This is how Immanuel Kant sought to justify his ethical principle, the categorical imperative. We can see how John Rawls sought to adapt this Kantian procedure in his attempt to justify his principles of justice. The question is, how successful such an abstract appeal to reason can possibly be.

This is a point to which I will need to return. I set it aside for the moment in order to turn my attention to political realism. For one might think that the normative thinker will be successful only, if he has an adequate grasp of the political realities. Such a grasp, it might be added, is essential, furthermore, if we are to have any clear understanding of how our ideals (utopian or normative) are to be implemented. We need to know in this case what our actual situation is and what is possible in it. To return for a moment to Mao Zedong and the Great Leap Forward. Mao’s problem in pursuing this project was multifold. We might say that the vision of the communist society on which he operated was too indistinct to be ever converted into reality. But he certainly also had an inadequate knowledge of the economic realities of China in the 1950’s and throughout the course of his experiment he remained so detached from those realities and so un-informed about them that he continued with his experiment to its last bitter end.

But how well do we ever understand the political realities in which we are operating? To what extent are the concepts we use to describe and analyze those realities – the concepts, for instance, of Marxist dialectical materialism – adequate? When we start to think seriously about political realism we are driven into considerations that concern what I have called diagnostic practice.

Our problem is that in politics we seem to be always operating under imperfect cognitive conditions. It is this idea we must seek to elaborate. Now we need not assume that there are ever perfect cognitive conditions. Philosophers committed to the belief in pure reason, may think so. But we can leave them to their own useless ruminations. The important point for us is that knowledge in political matters does not reach the same standard as that in some other fields. I am inclined to think, for instance, that our knowledge in physics is of a different sort from that we have when we think in or about political matters. It is useful, then, to compare and contrast these two kinds of knowledge.

 

Notes

[i] Politics and the Search for the Common Good, chapter 1.

We are increasingly living in a world regulated by algorithms. Everything from our access to information through air travel and the ways governments treat us is determined in this manner. We would, in fact, be unable to live our contemporary form of life without this.

But this still expanding aspect of life also creates a host of new problems. One of them is that of transparency. Information about us is used by businesses, governments (friendly and unfriendly), and other unaccountable bodies. But in ways we are rarely told of.

More serious still is the fact that we are heaping algorithms on algorithms and this can lead to unwanted outcomes, even to crashes that no one has been able to foresee. Some experts think that such events are already occurring regularly in the world’s stock markets, particularly in places where computers are used in High Frequency trading.

A third threat arises from the fact that we are now designing algorithms that are capable of modifying themselves, of adapting and learning. We may end up not knowing any longer how these will function. The danger is that we may be losing control over our own technology.

Our engineers are unable to tell us what needs to be done in this situation and so they are passing the burden to others. They speak, accordingly, of ethics as “the new frontier in tech,” and foresee even “a golden age for philosophy…. Where there are choices to be made, that’s where ethics comes in.” But philosophers thinking about ethics are unlikely to be able to resolve the problems created by our new technologies. They can perhaps alert us to the existence and urgency of these problems but it’s not in the nature of philosophy to provide us with ready-made answers.

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