A New Look at the Left Wing

lukesimcoe:

First, don’t be so quick to dismiss Rorty, for he possibly provides the bridge between continental and analytic philosophy that you’re looking for. At the risk of oversimplification, Rorty’s thesis in his opus, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, is that “striving to get things right” is still a worthwhile pursuit, made all the more valuable when we admit that there is no “right.” Our commitments to values like liberalism, democracy, etc. are in fact made stronger when we choose them because we feel they’re the best way to conduct our affairs, as opposed to choose them because they’re analytically sensible. To be a little crass, people seldom put their lives on the line for a formula or equation (not to suggest that analytic philosophy is simply math with words, although some of it is), whereas countless men and women die every day for beliefs.

This brings me to my second point. You say the goal of philosophy is to help potential be realized. I doubt many would dispute this point, but what’s up for debate is how best to achieve this goal. What many, including Rorty, would suggest is that people are mobilized more by stories, myths, drama, etc. than by rational arguments. Personally, I think this becomes more evident with every passing day, but sadly, it is the so-called Right that has clued into this. It’s an increasingly common critique of the contemporary, visible and popular left that they’ve failed to win over the hearts and minds of the people because they’ve adhered to the notion, as Barthes put it, that the left does not need myth because it has truth on its side. Tell that to the people who believe, despite concrete evidence to the contrary, that Obama was born in Kenya… So, essentially, if you want to “realize potential,” you may need to accept that the continental approach to doing so is the better method (at least at this moment).

In closing, I’d be wary of setting up this binary between analytic and continental philosophy, that while useful for your purposes, may not stand to real scrutiny. For every analytic philosopher who transcends simply “spotting weakness” there is a continental philosopher possessed of strong, clear argumentation (Rorty being one of them). There should never be a “one best way” of doing philosophy, and in many ways, that is precisely what the continental tradition is reacting against. Nor should all philosophy necessarily need to be timeless and eternal. Far more generative is philosophy that is contextually appropriate to its era, and thus allows those living in that era to better understand their time. 

tl;dr All hail nuance! Contest precisely those ideas that go uncontested! Or something like that…

I think you are quite right to point out the significance of feelings in doing philosophy. Our feelings and beliefs play a powerful role in forming what philosophers call ‘our pre-philosophical intuitions.’ Despite first appearances, the dominant trend in contemporary ethics is not Rawlsian thought-experiments or abstract utilitarian moral calculus, but a way of doing ethics that is based around our intuitions. It involves examining our thoughts and feelings about a moral issue carefully, then seeing which of our intuitions are well-grounded. If they are, then we can figure out which moral principles motivate (or ought to motivate) our intuitions so the principles can be applied to other relevant situations. A lot of very good analytic philosophy has been done that gives our feelings and intuitions the respect and careful thought they deserve.

As a realist, however, I feel obligated to dismiss Rorty’s idea that ‘there is no right.’ It’s difficult to understand Rorty’s denial of realism given that he was a pragmatist- after all, how can we do what works without an epistemically and ontologically objective world in which to work? As John Searle writes, it’s difficult to give an argument for the external world or a correspondence theory of truth, as these are often presupposed even by philosophers who attempt to deny them. Searle’s version of realism stresses that there can be multiple valid ways of interpreting the same world (a notion that I have no intention of denying), an idea he calls ‘conceptual relativity.’ But Searle also says it does not follow from the truth of this that realism is false, there is no such thing as truth, or that reality is merely a social construct, and contends that it is a category error to assume so, as I believe Rorty does.

(Source: newleft)

An Analytic Left: Metaphysics

Author’s note: Incidentally, this is my 1000th post. I’m glad it’s something I’m really proud of. It’s also the much-belated first entry in a series.

At least as it concerns most philosophers of a radical bent, the waters here are notoriously murky. We have vague concepts brought to bear such as ‘being,’ (Sartre & Heidegger) ‘dialectics,’ (the Marxists) ‘becoming,’ (Deleuze), ‘ontology’ and so on. These terms are rarely clarified, and most attempts to do so by later philosophers result in other philosophers accusing them of not understanding or misrepresenting the work. My goal here is not to explore any of these concepts from my preferred perspective of analytic philosophy (and in so doing open myself up to the aforementioned criticism), but instead to offer an argument that the branch of contemporary metaphysics known as realism is a fruitful position from which the left can base its inquiries. In the first section, I will outline (in very broad terms) the advantages of realism over its competitors. In the second, I will examine the position from a political perspective and discuss a few of its implications.

§1. Realism and its challengers. 

In a chart I made a week ago, I outlined the broadest elements of contemporary metaphysics’ two main positions on the so-called ‘problem of universals.’ These go on to inform much inquiry about further topics, such as the nature of concrete objects or ‘particulars,’ the ontological status of propositions, the distinction between the necessary and the possible, and more. I left out another main challenger to realism, however, because I confined the infographic to positions predominant in analytic philosophy. The other challenger, resisted by many analytic philosophers, is idealism. In modern philosophy its most prominent advocate was Kant, who argued that our ideas of objects constituted an insurmountable barrier to our epistemic access to them. On his view, the most we can ever know about concrete objects (or ‘noumena’)  ’in themselves’ is that they exist. The rest of our knowledge is mediated by our conceptions (or ‘phenomena’) of these objects. This idea is more prevalent in contemporary continental philosophy.

Realism holds that the features of everyday objects that we take to be properties (shape, size, color, even relations with other objects) and the categories to which they belong (or ‘kinds’) are as much elements of reality as the objects themselves. With this in mind, the realists have built an impressive array of metaphysical theories with a considerable degree of explanatory power. They may not all agree with each other on the nature and structure of concrete objects, but we can discuss the objections and challenges to their views while leaving these internal distinction aside.

Nominalism. The nominalists deny the premise of these theories on the grounds that realists present a world filled with strange concepts with unclear identity conditions, but their challenge is how to explain the nature of everyday objects and occurrences with as much elegance and substance as the realists. They attempt to do so in different ways, the two most prominent of which assert that any talk of ‘universals’ or ‘kinds’ in pre-philosophical inquiry is just a disguised way of discussing linguistic concepts, or conventions (‘tropes’). The realist response to this view is that nominalism merely substitutes linguistic universals (with similar identity conditions) for the universals it tries to deny, has an extremely difficult time of explaining exactly how its metaphysical frameworks work without contradicting itself, or that it tacitly relies on the very categories it argues against. 

Empiricism. The empiricist challenge to the metaphysical enterprise began with David Hume, and its most prominent advocates recently were the Vienna Circle of logical positivists in the 1960s (whose work influenced the Austrian School economists considerably). They say that the metaphysical categories of both realists and nominalists are nebulous, unverifiable, and completely out of the reach of empirical verification (they offered a similar challenge to ethical categories). These features made metaphysical frameworks, on the view of the empiricists, not worth talking about. The metaphysicians’ response has typically been to point out that the empiricists have absolutely no conceptual apparatus for making sense of the very powerful pre-philosophical intuition that things have properties and come in categories (or kinds). The realists concede that empirical observation offers nothing in helping us clarify these categories, but their explanatory power makes them more than worth holding on to.

Idealism. Kant and Hegel’s versions of idealism differ, but they are similar in that they posit ideas more fully ‘real’ (to humans, at least) than concrete physical objects. On Kant’s view, our concept of an object presents a barrier to knowledge and perception of that object. On the Hegelian view, or ‘absolute idealism,’ ideas are all that exist- physical objects are just people’s way of conceiving of them. The Kantian view is the one that persists more today due to the influence of materialism in both main branches of philosophy. On the Kantian view, the properties we discuss are only features of concrete objects in our minds, and have no necessary relation to the object as it actually exists. The realist response to this view is to contend that the arguments idealists make to deny that we can ever have cognitive access to objects, if true, can also apply to ideas. They claim that if concepts constitute a barrier to things, there’s no reason that this doesn’t pose the same difficulty to our concepts of concepts. According to anti-idealists, this leads to an infinite regress: we can’t access ideas directly, so we have concepts to make sense of them. But we can’t directly access the concept, so we have to create a further concept, and so on. Realists claim this unacceptable implication of the view is a fatal flaw. Additionally, the challenge to materialists who incorporate idealism is that they cannot explain exactly how ideas pose this barrier to concrete objects without ceasing to be materialists. Realists offer instead that far from being a barrier to our knowledge of things, ideas are the means by which we access them- and their metaphysical categories offer a very compelling framework with which to make sense of things.

§2. Epistemological and (Potentially) Political Implications. 

On the face of it, it might not seem like these technical and esoteric schools of thought have that much to with how we make sense of our political world. But these ideas do not exist in isolation: they have epistemological implications:

“…realists sometimes define propositions as things that it is possible that someone think or, as it is put, ‘entertain’ them. …and they are equally there for all thinkers. They are intersubjectively available. They can be the common objects for different thinkers and different speakers; and because they are, realists claim, communication and a shared conception of the world are possible. What I believe, I can state for your consideration, and you too can come to believe it.” Michael Loux, Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, p. 126.

Those who talk about ‘social constructionism’ as it relates to science or reality always rely on a tacit denial of realism. Two ideas play an important role in postmodern thought: that what we call sciences are just the construction of internally coherent narratives that bear no necessary relationship with reality (this relies on nominalism), or that the entire category of ‘reality’ itself is socially constructed, and any reference to its independent existence is incoherent (this stronger position relies on idealism). But, as I claimed in §1, the latter view, at least, seriously jeopardizes the claims to materialism of any philosopher that holds it. For if material things are all that exist, then it’s nearly impossible to explain exactly what an idea is if it bears no necessary relationship with the physical world, and how something that bears no relationship with the physical world can serve as a barrier to it in every possible instance. 

Ian Hacking contends that the difficulties in understanding between social constructionists and scientists result from an unstated nominalism on the part of the former, and a commitment to realism on the part of the latter. The scientists (or their philosophical advocates) believe science to be doing important work with the categories and properties proposed by the realists, whereas the social constructionists believe it to be the construction of coherent narratives with an only contingent relation with reality. Much analysis has been done about the sociology of science that relies on nominalism, and I’m not sure the full implications of the position have ever been taken seriously by one of these philosophers. They may indeed be prepared to accept them, but they should take seriously the current debates surrounding the idea that plays an important role in their thought.

This is not to deny the operation of power relations in scientific or philosophical inquiry, nor to deny the effects economic conditions in society have on them. However, I think many philosophers take the implications of those observations too far and suggest that every aspect of our concepts carries embedded economic conditions or power relations. I don’t think this is true. For example, our notion of the word red may carry political connotations, structures of power relations may mediate when, where, and how it is talked about, but the color red- the content of the notion- remains unaffected. The other factors are only contingently related to it, whereas the color bears a necessary relation with the concept of it, on the view of the realist; they remain categorically distinct. 

If they are not; if every aspect of our thought is pervaded by these relations, then the view has two important and damaging implications. The first is that it places a huge burden on its proponents to explain exactly how the content of our notion of the color red is affected by power relations or economic conditions. Certainly we can think of plenty of examples of ideas which are profoundly affected by both (AI research as it relates to philosophy of mind, for example). But there are many concepts for which explaining how they demonstrate embedded power relations is inordinately difficult (the nature of shapes, for example). This brings us to the second implication: the view is not falsifiable. It has no explanatory power in our society, as it is compatible with every state of affairs. Any attempts to apply it are going to be completely ad-hoc and unsystematic- it tells us nothing novel about the way things are. If it holds in every case, it doesn’t do us much good to apply it to specific cases- we’d just be shoehorning examples into a pre-existing theory. On the realists’ view, we can accept the role of power relations and economic conditions in shaping how and when we talk about ideas without these implications. By keeping the content of the concepts distinct from the historical factors that surround them, we have the conceptual apparatus to better explain the cases where these factors come into play. 

The final point I’d like to discuss is that of relativism. Typically the objection to realism by many radical philosophers (especially of a postmodern bent) is that of hubris: how can we be so arrogant as to assume that our philosophical categories hold across all times and places? Their objection follows the syllogistic form:

1. If realism is true, then there are universally applicable categories.
2. It is not the case that there are universally applicable categories (relativism is true).
3. Therefore, realism is false. 

But categorically denying the existence of universals, as I often stress, is itself a universal claim, one that necessarily requires us to have cognitive access to the very universal categories it attempts to deny. Terry Eagleton’s critique of Stanley Fish is highly relevant here: “Like almost all diatribes against universalism, Fish’s critique of universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests, the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth, the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like.” It is in this sense that relativism is self-refuting. 

Obviously, we should not take this too far and suggest that the Western way of doing things is best, or that other cultures that do not incorporate our understanding of this idea are necessarily wrong. If it is the case that all people come to understand the world through abstract concepts that are intersubjectively available, as Loux contends, then other cultures and historical periods could have better conceptions of how the world works than we do. This is the real implication of universalism, and it unfortunately has often been overlooked. I think there’s a lot of truth in the idea that many critical theorists and postmodernists have offered: that very often ‘universal perspectives’ really meant ‘rich white male perspectives,’ but I think that once again they have taken the implications too far and abandoned universalism. Real universalism, if it is to bear the name at all, must come to respect and incorporate these differences. I think this is a worthy task, and I think realism gives us the conceptual apparatus to do it.

Take, for example, the case of different navigation techniques between early modern European sailors and Polynesian navigators. For a long time, the latter was seen as ‘primitive’ because it did not rely on maps and the same instruments as European ships did. But from the very start there was evidence that the vastly far-apart Pacific Islands contained a single culture and language, one which required the presence of capable and sophisticated navigators. James Cook, the British navigator, brought Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator and priest, with him on a journey across the Pacific. They reached what is now New Zealand and made contact with the Maori there, with whom Tupaia shared a common culture and language- he was welcomed as a gifted religious person. Despite the presence of very seaworthy vessels among the Polynesian cultures, Europeans assumed their navigational techniques were crude and outlawed the use of them as soon as colonies were established. But the techniques persisted, and contemporary revivals of them proved their ability to reach islands all over the Pacific. They were both effective and extremely sophisticated, incorporating wave patters that form under different oceanographic conditions, the presence of local animals to judge distance to land, and other environmental factors not typically used by European sailors. In addition, European and Polynesian techniques had one important thing in common: the use of an image as a guide in sailing. The Polynesian navigators had a very intricate and detailed mental map derived from positions of stars on the horizon, while European navigators relied on physical maps. This has been used by theorists of geography and sociologists of science to illustrate the point that there are multiple valid ways of interpreting the world that are mutually incompatible. But I think we can recognize the truth of the first point without accepting the latter. After all, some Polynesian navigators have incorporated the compass into their own system, which demonstrates that the two systems are not incompatible. On the view of the nominalist or social constructionist, their way of knowing is given value in this regard by being similar in technique or efficacy to the European one. On the view of the realist, it has value because it bears reliable access to reality through its use of abstract concepts- concepts other people can come to know and understand.  The Polynesian system of navigation and the European one may operate in different ways, but they are fundamentally about the same thing: getting from one place to another via the water. This reliance on common abstract categories is one powerful implication of realism.

I think the benefits of adopting a realist framework far outweigh the potential negative implications, and it gives us a robustly defended and theoretically sophisticated position from which to base further inquiries. It allows us to accept observations based on embedded power relations, economic conditions, and false appeals to universal ideas without taking their implications into self-contradicting territory. Realism, therefore, has value for radical inquiry in its own right, rather than merely being less problematic than its alternatives.