A grand title for the weekend's blog entry.
I spend my life studying, reading, writing, thinking, and trying to work out what I actually think about the world. That sounds very pretentious, but its true. Well, true when I am not watching Eastenders or running, climbing, or worrying about other less important/non-existential questions, such as, whats for dinner?, how can I make £20.00 last a week?...
Anyway, there are two problems I have resolved recently that I would like to share. The first will be about philosophy.
1.) I used to study philosophy at university, and whilst I really enjoyed some aspects of it, I often found myself questioning the utility and validity of some of the central debates. Sometimes I found it impossibly hard to take the lectures seriously. This led to a crisis in intelligence- perhaps I was just too dumb to grasp these abstract concepts. Well, now I have an answer.
I found some parts of philosophy to be useful thought exercises to enhance my understanding of the mechanisms of thought and knowledge. For example, Hume's discussion of 'How do we know the sun will rise tomorrow'. He argues it based on past probability, but argues that it is not certain the sun will rise tomorrow. Probability is based on our experience to date- but what if tomorrow the sun didn't rise... or the next day, or the next day, or the next day... what if in fact the past billion or so years have been a blip in the natural order of this planet's trillion gazillion year history. Probability would then dictate that the sun will not rise tomorrow.
This example is just an analogy to open our minds to the uncertainty of knowledge. I found it helpful back then.
This example, however, is cast over by the many bad experiences I have of philosophy. Philosophy of mind... are our bodies separate from our minds? Are they distinct- PHILOSOPHICALLY speaking. Idealism vs materialism: what is more important, our abstract rational minds or our interactions with the world. Metaphysics... how do we exist through time and space? Does the king of france exist, semantically speaking?
I found myself alienated by debates that just seemed like a chronic waste of time. How do people get funding to argue about whether the colour red exists? Surely it should not take me three hours to comprehend two hours of a book? Do these people have lives?
...How can anyone seriously suggest in this day and age that our mind is separate from our bodies? Prove using mathematical logic that god exists? Seriously, what the hell?
This alienation with certain philosophical debates carried over into my studies of social science. Philosophy of Social Sciences is also plagued with disputes about the nature of reality that I found so frustrating. Is the world fixed and concrete or is it fluid and relative? Should we use, philosophically speaking, quants or qualitative methods? Seemingly irreconcilable debates... reams of literature. Pointless arguments persisting through the time and space so hotly debated.
Then I discovered the philosophy of Pragmatism, and I felt a warm fuzz of intellectual harmony.
Pragmatists believe that the centuries of philosophical debates have been disconnected with the world and action. They believe that we should only debate things in philosophy that have a practical application in the world... knowledge is action, not sitting around debating the true nature of colour.
They believe knowledge should be useful, and is constructed of consensus debates. They distinguish between normal and abnormal discourse: normal discourse is when people can debate constructively to resolve issues and progress. Abnormal is when people argue for years and are locked in futile debate that has no relevance to how the world functions... read: debates about idealism/materialism, quantitative/qualitative, god... etc.
Finally! Someone came up with a sensible name for this stuff: ABNORMAL. Couldn't have thought of a better word myself.
Anyway, I love pragmatists for this. They confirm what I have always thought deep inside but was too afraid to say it. I thought I was the stupid one who couldn't understand something about philosophy. But no... now I feel confident enough to assert I was right all along.
Alienating philosophy carried out by professors on their high brow pedastals producing inaccessible and irrelevant texts has given philosophy a bad name. It is time to move on to modern philosophy, one which is about progression, 'normal' discourse on what is relevant in society today.
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I suppose it would be unhelpful here to offer some criticisms of pragmatism. Well, for the sake of furthering the discussion, I'll do it.
ReplyDeleteI'll start off by stating my position on 'alienating philosophy', and then work backwards to some thoughts on the pragmatists.
I've come to the conclusion that its possible to turn more or less any area of thought into a kind of dry, scholastic and nearly-meaningless sort of exercise. There are certainly plenty of university professors and lecturers about who carry on discourses in a pretty unproductive way. I like to call this 'scholasticism'. What I mean by it is this - an exercise in simply unfolding a convoluted set of intellectual categories belonging to one school or other, without arriving at a conclusion that is in any way useful, either to the further study of the debate in question, or in a broader context.
Anyway, the existence of 'scholasticism' oftentimes obscures the fact that the debates it raises are in fact important and useful in contexts wider than the academy itself. I can't think of a single great philosopher who introduced some of philosophy's more complicated debates without having intensely practical purposes in mind. Its not right to dismiss out of hand fundamental debates in philosophy because they have been handled badly.
I guess I should provide some examples. What about idealism vs. materialism. There are few debates that have been subject to more scholasticism. At the same time, this is one debate that has had political consequences of a really fundamental nature. Take Locke's attack on idealism. Why does he do it? Locke needs to be able to argue that every single person in society is roughly equal to any other, that each member of society has just as much right to sovereignty as any other. If you admit, as many of Locke's opponents did, that people have innate qualities that make them better or worse (founded on the doctrine of innate ideas, hence idealism) then you can justify the type of oppression that Locke was arguing against. This is certainly still a live issue today (see Stephen Pinker etc.). If you could argue that people have innate qualities that make them superior or inferior (based on genetics maybe), what would stop you from setting up a political system to reflect that. I don't think any explanation is required here of how fundamental debates about materialism/idealism have been to another set of discourses that fundamentally concerns human freedom - Marxism!
And what about postmodernism? Again, I think we can find plenty of examples of scholasticism about. But does that lessen the impact of the postmodernists we should care about, such as Michel Foucault or Edward Said. Aren't these people who have used fundamental questions in philosophy, such as questions concerning the nature of truth and the existence of ideas, to have a real impact on human freedom and development.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I'm sure you get my gist. What about pragmatism? I really think that these is a massive problem in their argument that there's no ontological difference between facts and beliefs. Its one thing to say (as you say correctly) that we should debate things that are actually relevant to the world. But what the pragmatists argue is that truth consists in what it is satisfying to believe, or in what produces the best experiential outcome as a result of being believed. Questions: how can we measure that outcome, especially if we are supposed to do it on behalf of other people? what if that criterion works in the short term but not in the long term? what if it applies for some people and not others? Also, is it still unimportant that some things might simply be 'true'?
Personally I think Foucault does a much better job of making knowledge an instrument of political action, and of understanding how it has been constructed to reinforce power-relationships and so-on. The pragmatists are a bit like utilitarians - they want the greatest happiness for the greatest number, but don't have a particularly good way of working out what that is.