“The Death of Socrates,” by Jacques-Louis David (1787)
The following essay will be published in three installments; this is the third and final one.
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Congratulations on Doing the Impossible: On the Death of Philosophy, #3
To say that the work of Analytic philosophers, their students, and their critics, helped lead to advances throughout science and mathematics may appear, at first, to be irrelevant to the history of philosophy as an institutional field in its own right. It is absolutely relevant to this history, however, for the following three reasons:
It gives the lie to the idea that Analytic philosophy “disappeared” without a trace after its mistakes were finally laid bare. When it was proved “impossible,” Analytic philosophy did not disappear; it was transformed by contact with other fields of learning. Like the dinosaurs, specifically the little therapods, evolving into birds.
Some of the most important applications of the work done by Analytic philosophers leads, inexorably, to problems that “Continental philosophers” with organicist sympathies also faced and could not solve by themselves. Modern biology, neuroscience, and environmental science, for example, all rely on definitions of organisms and systems that combine ideas from both sides of philosophy’s civil war.
Consider, once more, Russell’s frightened, insightful reaction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Consider Whitehead’s own later shift towards a more phenomenological and holistic philosophy (in Process and Reality). The story of philosophy is, or used to be, marked by an endless chain of fruitful collisions…it was only through collaborative networks of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and others (including artists like Proust) that our current, greatly expanded understanding of the universe emerged.
Therefore, when philosophy descended into civil war, not only did its own internal complexity suffer, but the “side” of Continental philosophy was deformed into, among other things, a sentimental and relativistic attachment to the entire canonical history of philosophy. Everything, one felt, that had been so severely marginalized until the 1960s, probably had some kind of claim to the truth, in the same sense that literature can be fictional and also “true.” This makes for good philosophy courses—Rorty’s course, at Stanford, introduced me to Kierkegaard, for instance, along with Kant and Hegel—but it is also a dead-end. Performing the greatest hits of the philosophical canon is no substitute for arguing, in the present, about the nature of the universe. Philosophy cannot survive without a continuing interest in the universal truth of its own propositions.
We have to remember that Hegel, for example, did not perceive himself as a wild theorist or a lazy syncretist. His “magnum opus,” The Science of Logic, both tries to be and is an early expression of logicism. Bergson did not want to be wrong about the élan vital. Wittgenstein did not want to be obscure or haphazard, though his work can seem like it is both things, a lot of the time. One of the most deplorable features of modern philosophizing, such as Robert Sapolsky’s Determined, is its willingness to decorate its own theoretical limitations with a relativistic shrug. Sapolsky cheerfully mentions that many of his friends disagree with him about the nature of free will, but he does not let this bother him very much. Similarly, in The Big Picture, physicist Sean Carroll talks about religious faith as something other people have, something he admires but chooses to eschew. One should be bothered. That’s what makes Thoreau such a refreshing companion: not a broad, genial spirit, but a lot of prickly moralizing. Thoreau aims in our general direction at all times; thank God for that.
It should not come as a surprise to us, either, that the study of what cannot be known, cannot be expressed, and cannot be totalized would lead us towards other proving-grounds, in a wholly different sphere than scientific objectivity or technological progress. I am referring, of course, to the living proof that philosophers give us by making committed decisions about how to live. There are, generally speaking, two overlapping models in philosophy: the work of self-fashioning and the life of principle, and the path of objective, academic analysis. Neither can exist without the other. Deprive him of his truths, and Socrates becomes as useless as Diogenes: a rebel without a cause. Divorce the conduct of life from the problems of philosophy, and the result is not merely uninspiring, but actively in error. It fails the test that Hanna calls “a strict evidential appeal to human experience, which I call ‘the criterion of phenomenological adequacy for metaphysical theories’” (Hanna, 2022: p. 66). The feeling of emptiness that haunts the oeuvre of the logical positivists springs from their inability, in most cases, to go beyond a shabby rationalism in their diffident attempts to explain the ethical foundations of their considerable labors.
There was one notable exception to this generally woeful lack. Before I tell that story, however, I want to acknowledge the importance of Quine’s work to the undoing of Analytic philosophy and the problem of how to live. In his response to the Vienna School of logical positivism, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” first published in 1951, Quine rejected the positivist distinction between “empirical” observations and “Analytical” judgements, which the positivists based on a distinction between unchanging, starry constellations of rational, propositional thinking, and the verifiable—but logically equivalent, and indeterminate—results we get when we measure active processes taking place in the world. The logical positivists weren’t inventing this from whole cloth; the distinction is already foreshadowed in Aristotle, in his theories of causality and accident. It also resembles, very closely, Kant’s distinction between Analytic and synthetic judgements. Quine’s article, which many people read as the “last word” on the Analytical/empirical dichotomy, was (like Gödel’s work) not merely critical, but also generative. Quine advanced the concept of interconnected “webs of belief.” These were based partly on correspondences between our ideas and our experiences, and partly on the human desire for a coherent set of beliefs and ethical precepts that remain—despite our best efforts, and sometimes even because of them—only partially grounded in the vagaries of our contingent, fallible, and mortal lives.
From a neuroscientific standpoint, Quine’s “webs of beliefs” are thought-provoking forerunners to modern research into bias, decision-making, and the categorization of long-term memories. (Much of this work was taken further, but not far enough, by Daniel Kahneman, in the book Thinking, Fast and Slow.) But from an ethical standpoint, it is sufficient to remark that Quine’s theory of experience and belief holds open a space for those insuperable ethical divergences produced by differences in individual experience, including the cultural, economic, and political heritances that form the backdrop of each life. Such divides can never be fully dissolved by words. They can, however, be acted out, according to each individual’s necessarily distinct ideas about which ethical principles to believe in, and how to realize such principles in action. Quine’s cautious attitude towards human fallibility, in which respect he is a better reader of Kant than his enemies, is also a reminder that the project of philosophical discourse enjoins us to fight our battles on paper, while allowing each person to live out his beliefs, as much as possible. The opposite of sentimental relativism is not absolutist intolerance, but an ongoing conversation among the living and the dead.
It has never been the case that the line between philosophical belief and outward behavior was an easy one to draw. What makes Socrates so fascinating, as a character preserved for us by Plato, is precisely how surprising he is. He is absolutely committed to searching for “the Good,” but he approaches it with irony and a delicate sense of restraint.[1] In Plato, one finds many rather direct statements about “the good,” but an enigmatic figure stands behind those words at all times, and often chooses to behave in ways we might never have guessed. Returning from Athens to a somewhat nearer era, there was once a young man, of aristocratic birth, who came from a rich and prospering family. He became a philosopher, but his work was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, where he served (on the Kaiser’s side) and won three different medals for the bravery he displayed as an artillery officer. Historian and biographer Wolfram Eilenberger sums up his life afterward like this:
A return to the old world of Vienna would have been unthinkable for him even had that world still existed. Neither war nor philosophy had freed him from the riddle and the misfortune that he was to himself. He returned from the war transformed but by no means clarified. In order to combat the remaining chaos within him, he spent long months in the Italian POW camp at Campo Cassino drawing up the most radical plan imaginable. First of all: signing over his entire fortune to his siblings. Second: never again philosophy. Third: a life of honest toil—and lasting poverty. (Eilenberger, 2020: p. 41)
Anyone suffering from the misapprehension that Walden ought to present, for our delectation, a direct correspondence between the life Thoreau lived and the words that he wrote, ought to keep the examples of Socrates and this admirable young man both in mind. For, as Eilenberger paraphrases his remarks to one teacher and mentor,
A good life is based not on objective grounds but on radically subjective decisions. It cannot be meaningfully said what a good life consists of; it must show itself in real, everyday execution. (Eilenberger, 2020: pp. 40-41)
He was talking to Bertrand Russell. The young man’s name was Ludwig Wittgenstein. The work of holding up the Tractatus and finding, inside of it, the key to his life, remains to be done even now.
NOTE
[i] See, for example, Socrates’s demure behavior at the drunken orgy of the Symposium; his refusal to join Euthyphro in condemning Euthyphro’s father, who has committed manslaughter; and his decision to enrage the citizen’s tribunal assigned to his case in the course of the Apology.
REFERENCES
(Eilenberger, 2020). Eilenberger, W. Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy. Trans. S. Whiteside. London: Penguin.
(Hanna, 2022). Hanna, R. “Six Studies in The Decline and Fall of Professional Academic Philosophy, And a Real and Relevant Alternative.” Borderless Philosophy 5: 48-130. Available online at URL = <https://www.cckp.space/single-post/bp-5-2022-robert-hanna-six-studies-in-the-decline-and-fall-of-professional-philosophy-48-130>.
(Juster, 1961). Juster, N. The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Epstein & Carroll.
(Schulz, 2015). Schulz, K. “The Moral Judgments of Henry David Thoreau.” New Yorker. 12 October. Available online at URL = <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum>.
(Thoreau, 1854/1957). Thoreau, H.D. “Walden.” In H.D. Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience. Cambridge MA: Riverside Press. Pp. 1-227.
(Wikipedia, 2024). Wikipedia. “Horizon Forbidden West.” Available online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizon_Forbidden_West>.
(Wittgenstein, 1922/1981). Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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