Episode #134 - Transcript

Hello, everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode’s trying to get to the bottom of why there’s so many thinkers at the beginning of the 20th century that have such a problem with reason. I hope you love the show today.

So this disagreement that defines the state of the philosophical landscape in the early 20th century, we’ve called it a lot of different things on this show: nature versus culture, modernity versus postmodernity, objectivity versus intersubjectivity. Well, one thing about this debate, if it’s not entirely obvious by this point on the show, is that understanding the perspectives that are positioned on either side of this debate is absolutely crucial not only for understanding 20th-century political philosophy, but even for understanding the world you’re living in today, for understanding the smallest things, the philosophical underpinnings for many of the arguments you might see when you turn on the news. We’ve talked about bits and pieces of this debate for a long time on this show, and it’s high time there’s an episode you can point people to that goes into a bit of detail about this aspect of modern discourse, something that talks about why the climate of the early 20th century was filled with philosophers that had such a strong level of dissatisfaction with the legacy of the Enlightenment, that is, rationality, individualism, and the scientific method as the primary way of arriving at truth about things.

Because this whole state of affairs can start to seem kind of confusing to reasonable people. I mean, how could any serious person ever be anti-science? Look at the understanding of the natural world science has produced. Look at how it’s let us manipulate and wield the otherwise chaos of the natural world to the benefit of human beings. Look at all the different ways every day you use the great things science has produced. And what? You’re just against that system? You’re dissatisfied with the thing that made all those things possible? That’s convenient. Look at all the things rationality has produced. I mean, open up a history book for a second. Thousands of years of religious dogma, gone. To be anti-science and rationality can seem to some like you’re just being anti-human, or pro some other dogma that you want to impose upon people.

But an interesting place to get started with this conversation is that the other side of the debate, the one skeptical of the tasks of the Enlightenment, they would also see themselves as pro-science and anti-dogma. There’s, of course, an end to this story we’re telling today about our history of using rationality as a guide. But this is a place I want to begin, and the story starts in the late 19th century with the philosopher Nietzsche and some things he had to say about the attitudes of philosophers at the founding of the Enlightenment.

So some quick historical context. The beginning of the Enlightenment is often cited as the moment when Kant releases his famous essay titled “What is Enlightenment?” We have an episode on it. Kant famously describes Enlightenment as “man’s removal of his self-incurred tutelage.” And what he’s referring to is the tutelage of thousands of years of religious dogma. Later on in the essay, he actually challenges the thinkers of his time to “dare to know,” or dare to think for yourselves for once. In other words, we need another way, other than religious faith, to be able to arrive at the truth about things because faith, from these thinkers’ perspectives, has caused us a lot of problems historically.

Well, the thinkers of the time take up the challenge. They look around them. They look at all the available options, and they collectively decide to double down on reason instead of faith. This is the birth of the Age of Reason. This is the use of rational categories to make sense of things, proportioning our belief to the evidence. The political systems of the time take a strong turn towards the individual subject and mutually beneficial social contracts, as opposed to teleologies or strict roles that people are supposed to play in a society. And this whole strategy seemed extremely reasonable at the time. And, ironically, later philosophers would lament that that was exactly what was wrong with the strategy, that it seemed reasonable at the time. But we’ll get to that.

Nietzsche looks back on this moment in history, and he sees the choices that the philosophers made at the founding of the Enlightenment as an absolutely giant missed opportunity because, he says, hypothetically this was a moment when philosophers could have realized that one of the biggest problems with those faith-based views of the world, centered around the idea of religious certainty, was certainty. What these thinkers did, Nietzsche says, is throw out the religious certainty that caused them so many problems in the past and just changed the criteria for what makes something certain. Rationality is now our path to certainty. They replaced one dogma with another dogma.

So what happened was, with each progressive, classical, rationalist philosopher doing their work, we seem to be coming to terms with how everything in the universe fit neatly into these rational categories we came up with. We were finally understanding the truth after all those years, and rationality was getting us there. With each progressive scientific experiment, that was undeniably bringing us an understanding of the world that improved the lives of people -- Look, at this point, how could any reasonable person say that the process of science wasn’t accessing something of the truth about reality?

But then hundreds of years go by. And, as the goals of the Enlightenment are played out, problems start to arise. And this dynamic starts to produce philosophers that want to understand the limitations of classical rational thought. One of the first major ones that gives rise to this trend was Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard has a quote -- and I’m paraphrasing here -- but he says, here are all these philosophers and scientists of his time that understand the deepest levels of reality and existence; and here he is, and he can’t even understand Abraham. What he’s saying is, science and rationality during his time is supposedly producing some of the most comprehensive understanding of reality that we’ve ever had. But, when it comes to certain aspects of what it means to be a human being, rationality just cannot help you there. It's not a useful tool in that context. So many things about your life on an everyday level -- human existence is filled with paradox if you look for it. There are times in our lives -- and he gives examples from the life of Abraham -- there are times when continuing to live in the face of that paradox requires irrationality. Kierkegaard thinks this irrationality is an important part of our existence, just as important as rationality, it turns out. And, if you ever tried to swear off irrationality completely and make purely rational choices all the time, you’d be left in a state of total paralysis, he says.

Maybe a good metaphor of this is to try to think about what it would be like to have a book that told you how to be a human being in 300 pages, you know, a field manual for life. Better yet, picture having a book that’s supposed to tell you how to raise a child, right? You open it up, and it’s filled with these math equations and syllogisms, geometric breakdowns of how to design the nursery. Look, for anyone that’s ever actually raised a child before, you know how tremendously oversimplified something like that would have to be. Now, the intent of the author may have been to arrive at a new level of certainty about parenting. You know, “Let’s dare to think for ourselves, for once. Remove ourselves from the tutelage of the parenting dogma of the past.” But the best intentions in the world don’t change the fact that there’s something missing there. There’s something about being a human being that’s lost when we’re using purely rational analysis to try to explain it.

More than that, no matter how much scientific progress we are making, the tools we use to catalog that scientific data, the means of analysis, aren’t even remotely similar to the way we experience reality as human beings. Perfect example to describe this phenomenon, used in the work of professor Lloyd Kramer. He says, take time, for example. There’s this thing about the universe that we call time. We want to use rational analysis to understand it better, so we measure it, record it, and study it through the use of tools of rational analysis that we call clocks. Now, for a clock, seconds are uniform. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, so on and so forth. Time, when viewed purely through the lens of rational analysis, looks like that. But what is our actual human experience of time? Well, sometimes time flies. Sometimes a few seconds of something agonizing can feel like an hour to us. The point is, when it comes to understanding the universe, clocks might be the ultimate tool. But when it comes to understanding certain aspects of our human experience of the universe, the tool of rational analysis just cannot tell the full story.

So Kierkegaard becomes a symbol for a fracture in this idea, this idea that starts to seem like a pretty extreme idea, that rationality is going to be able to provide us with an exhaustive understanding of everything. But people might argue back to that, look, maybe there are things about being a person that aren’t entirely rational, but informing every decision you make shouldn’t be the goal of rationality anyway. The truth that science gives us about the natural world, that’s the goal here. That’s the thing we have certain access to through reason. Rationality is going to give you the most accurate information about how things are that’s available to us. And then it’s your job to go out, use that information, and actually do something with it.

Well, Kierkegaard was just the beginning. This critical look at reason, that would eventually lead to the malaise of the early 20th century, began to be critical of the scientific method as well. More specifically, a few important questions. And here they are. When we arrive at a scientific understanding of something and that understanding allows us to manipulate the natural world to benefit people, can we say that science is accessing the objective truth of reality? And, what I mean is, can we say that science is at least in some way communicating with some intrinsic structure of the universe? After all, why would it be so repeatable in a lab setting if it weren’t? Sure, maybe our understanding of it isn’t exhaustive. We still have many more years ahead of us to conduct more science, but there must be at least something about the truth that we’re touching there.

But, on the other hand, when philosophers started asking these questions about what we’re really doing when we conduct science, what they started to realize is that there are aspects of science that are inextricably relative to the culture the science is produced in. The best way I’ve ever seen this dynamic explained is by the philosopher Richard Rorty. So I’ll try to summarize his main points the best I can here. Think of the birth, existence, and reproduction of scientific ideas the same way you would think about the birth, existence, and reproduction of species in terms of natural selection. So for thousands of years it was believed that the universe was designed by a grand designer. And there were many arguments philosophers had for this, not the least of which was, “Just look around you. How convenient that I drink water and there’s water all around, that I exist in this very small range of temperatures and weather patterns, and that’s exactly what the world is around me.” The point was, “Look, how could you not think that this wasn’t a celestial hamster cage designed with your survival in mind?” And for thousands of years that was the default. Sure, you had the sporadic thinker that came along every now and then and questioned it, but every time the onus was on them to prove why this theory had any merit at all, given the fact that it was so contrary to our deepest intuitions about reality.

Well, you know the story. The theory of natural selection offered an alternative. This was a theory that explained how things could seem perfectly designed for environments they were in, but the reality was that all the beings that didn’t correspond with the environment died before reproducing. Well, scientific ideas exist in an environment as well, that is, the set of scientific and cultural biases that they were produced in. The scientific theories that correspond with these biases subsist; they’re rewarded with tenure. They may manage to reproduce. There’s a sense in which, if a slightly different culture had come to pass, the way we scientifically understand things would slightly change as well. There’s a sense in which, if a completely different culture had come to pass, just as different creatures would have been able to gain tenure in a drastically changed environment, a completely different way of scientifically categorizing the world could have emerged.

So this in no way takes away from the utility of scientific ideas, but this does start to raise a very important question to the thinkers during the late 19th century. Rorty puts it this way: “Are the longest-lasting and most frequently relied upon theories stable because they match a stable reality or because scientists get together to keep them stable, as politicians get together to keep existing political arrangements intact?” The answer to this question makes a giant difference when it comes to how you view the findings of science. The difference the answer to this question makes is actually very similar to the way postmodernity looked at the history of philosophy in our series on Gilles Deleuze. What is philosophy? He asks. Well, it’s not an act of discovery; it’s an act of creation. In other words, philosophers when doing their work are not discovering the intrinsic structure of the universe. Reality’s far too chaotic to ever be able to do something like that. The more accurate analysis of what’s going on would be that philosophy is an act of creation. Philosophers create systems of concepts that give us one version of reality, one perspective that might be useful to us.

Well, a very similar charge is being leveled here about the history of science. Science is not discovering and accessing the intrinsic structure of the universe. Science is creating one version of understanding what we have access to. And what necessarily goes along with that is, this understanding is always relative to the perspective of the observer, which is always a person, who is also embedded in a set of cultural biases and a current set of scientific paradigms that their time accepts and proceeds from. So, if you’re a philosopher in the early 20th century that happens to see science in this way, the impact this has on how you view, essentially, the last 200 years of Western democracy becomes horrifying, because you instantly realize that this problem you have with science is, in actuality, a problem with reason itself.

So, at this point in the story, rationality itself starts to come under fire. And some of these critiques are actually reworkings of older critiques of reason. For example, Edmund Burke spoke several times about how, when it comes to the progression of human thought, but more specifically when it comes to how we should structure our societies, you never want to fully commit your strategy to rational analysis. And he gives many reasons why you wouldn’t want to do that, but one of the big ones he would say is -- Look, when you decide that you’re going to determine which thoughts are legitimate or not based on purely rational analysis, what you see when you actually put that into practice in the world is that you can basically find a way to rationalize anything. Look no further than you own personal life for proof of this fact. How many times have you reasoned to a conclusion about something and still been wrong? Maybe you know somebody that made a big mistake in their life. And, after the fact, they thought about what happened, and they found a million ways to rationalize it to themselves and others. And it all makes perfect sense to everyone why they did it. But, nonetheless, it’s obvious to everyone that they still made a huge mistake.

See, this is an important distinction to draw about rational analysis. When it comes to your personal life, if you decide to take a purely rational approach to something and you end up with problems, it’s no big deal. You really only hurt yourself there. But, on a societal level, should we be using a purely rational approach when it comes to determining the legitimacy of thoughts? The bigger question here that concerns this debate between these two groups -- should thoughts be considered to be accessing the intrinsic structure of the universe simply because they pass the test of human reason? Because human reason is always doing its work within the parameters of human ignorance. And that human, that’s omnipresent throughout that whole process, is always subject to cultural limitations. Just like we experience time -- and it's not like we’re a bunch of giant clocks walking around -- our experience of time is relative to the perspective of the observer.

Here are philosophers in the early 20th century saying that reason and the criteria for what makes something reasonable or not are also relative to the observer. Now, it should be said, nobody, not on either side, is trying to do away with reason. Nobody’s trying to do away with science. They’re trying to do away with what they see as dogma, or the idea that what reason and science is providing us is access to certainty. This is why Nietzsche thought people like Kant at the beginning of the Enlightenment missed out on a big opportunity. That could have been the moment when they realized that certainty about things shouldn’t have ever been the goal in the first place. We should value reason; we should value science, but not deify them. We should understand them for what they are. They’re not discovering anything; they’re creating something.

That subtle distinction may not seem like much, but it actually has massive effects on how things play out in the world. And this is ultimately why people care so much about this. Because if you’re one of the philosophers in the early 20th century that thinks reason and science are relative to the culture they’re conducted in and not objectivity, then one of the first critiques you have to have about the Enlightenment is that the Age of Reason might have been a horrifying period in human history, where we used reason to justify cultural imperialism. Because when reason becomes something that’s capitalized, then it becomes the standard against which every society is judged.

See, to these critics, what happened at the beginning of the Enlightenment is, we made this bold proclamation that the best way to organize the relationship between government and citizen is reason. And this bold proclamation marks a major shift not only in the way the Western world typically structured their states but also in how the citizens saw their role in the political process. This is the birth of the individual in modern Western culture. We’ll talk about it more on next episode when we go deeper into the work of Leo Strauss. But, essentially, this is the moment when societies in the West move away from teleologies and societal roles and move instead towards rational individualism.

This is yet another criticism of the Age of Reason from around this time period, by the way, that rationalism, when applied to the political process, necessarily moves thinking towards a focus on the individual. And it’s this shift towards the individual person as a focal point that’s responsible for a centuries-long progression of people becoming more and more narcissistic and self-centered. If that’s a modern criticism, this is the origins of it. But, again, we’ll talk more about that next episode. Back to the primary point, though.

Rationality, to these critics, leads to cultural imperialism when applied at a societal level. Because if rationality is relative to the culture it’s being used in and things like rational debates are the way that we determine political legitimacy, then what the goals of the Enlightenment produce are societies that appoint themselves as judge, jury, and executioner of the rest of the world based on their own narrow parameters. Think about it. They get to decide the definition of what’s rational or irrational based on their own cultural makeup, and then they get to slap on their world police badge and be the moral arbiter of everyone else, the rest of the world constantly under this magnifying glass of their own version of rationality. And, at this point, the default way to view all other cultures becomes comparing them to this rational ideal that we’ve set up. How much do they deviate from the ideal society that we’ve determined the values of? To the critics, that becomes the ultimate new question when dealing with other cultures, knowing that if at any point a culture becomes too “irrational” in how they’ve set up their society in relation to us, rationality can also become the justification for invasion.

See, that’s also one of the problems the early-20th-century thinkers were starting to have with reason. Reason, as it turns out, is not this sort of ahistorical, acultural, objective tool for arriving at facts about things. The results of rational analysis were varying to such a large extent; societies were using the guise of reason to justify such massively different conclusions. These philosophers started to think that maybe David Hume was right all along -- Hume’s fork, or Hume’s guillotine as it’s often called, the central thesis being that you cannot possibly derive an “ought” from an “is.” No matter how optimistic thinkers were at the beginning of the Enlightenment, no matter how much they thought reason could eventually provide us with objective morality, the more that science and rationality were left to do their work, the more it became clear to these thinkers in the early 20th century that that was never going to happen. The more the political process focused on the individual and tried to use the results of science to arrive at values about how to structure our societies and how people fit into them and all sorts of other stuff, the more the goals of the Enlightenment were left to play out, the more it became clear that when you try to force reason to come up with objective values about anything, you’re doomed to failure because, to these thinkers, that’s just not something rational analysis is capable of doing.

And it’s easy to get mixed up, because we get values from rational analysis. See, that’s the problem here. Rational analysis can create values because rational analysis always has cultural values embedded into it. But, in order to justify any of those values, it needs to use the results of science, and modern science has to assume value neutrality in its work. This became a big problem for modernity. This became the fate of science in the early-20th-century political landscape. Science cannot provide us with values on its own. The only thing it can do is serve as a tool, a tool to justify values that are smuggled into it by culture, all the while wearing that costume of value neutrality.

This will be another thing that we expand on, moving forward in our series of 20th century political philosophy. You know, the goal of this episode was to put you in the shoes of one of these early-20th-century thinkers and understand why so many of them had such a problem with the legacy of the Enlightenment. And, look, despite having not put out an episode in a while, I’m actually pretty deep into the writing phase of this entire series. The front-loaded nature of that work is actually why I haven’t put something out for a while; I’ve been doing a lot of other work, not my health for once. So that’s good news, I guess. But I just wanted to say that from that future vantage point I was looking back, and I felt an episode like this was crucial when it came to where we’re going in the 20th century. So hopefully you’ll thank me later.

Maybe the best place to end today is back in ancient Greece. You know, this tension between postmodernity and modernity just saturates our modern discourse. It seems like you can’t turn on any form of media for more than five minutes without being reminded of this battle that’s going on, you know. It’s actually pretty amazing to see. Like, people talk about living throughout different points in history because of the things they saw. Think of how lucky you are. You get to turn on a screen and at any moment you can watch as two people argue with each other that are living in completely different universes, pretty cool stuff. And this battle by people in the media is often cited as something that is a bad thing for society. You know, they say that this is a sign that we’re living in some pretty dark times right now. Some people go so far as to say this is a catastrophe the likes of which the world’s never seen. Who knows what’s going to happen? When people can’t even agree on some of the most basic ideas that make up their worldviews, how can we even hope to have a conversation with each other? Could this series of disagreements spell the end of Western civilization? Some people may say yes.

But I guess I want to bring you a tale of optimism because there are a lot of philosophers out there that would say, “No. This isn’t the end of the world. This isn’t some unprecedented, existential threat that we’re facing. This isn’t even a new disagreement people are having.” Remember in Plato’s Dialogues back in the Athenian Agora? This battle was going on between heavyweights in the Western world all the way back then. In one corner you had Protagoras, godfather of relativism; man is the measure of all things. In the other corner you had Socrates, largely a mouthpiece of Plato’s ideas, but him arguing for the idea that, “No. There must be some sort of intrinsic structure to the universe that we can access, and rational debate is the absolute best tool we have to get there.” Some philosophers would say, this argument’s nothing new. This has been going on for thousands of years. This very well may be one of those debates that just never has a winner. This may be one of those questions that causes arguments on the news as long as humanity’s around to have news programs to argue on.

The point is, cultures will ebb and flow with any one time period’s answer to this question. One side of this may win out for a while. You know, we may have a long period where we believe in the power of faith to arrive at the objective truth or the power of reason to arrive at the objective. But the other side may win out for a while. We may have long periods of historicism or relativism, nihilism. Some philosophers would say that, look, there are pros and cons to either side gaining a greater level of cultural control, and what we should do is just try to understand the times we’re living in as best we can. The point is, some would say that there are many things that may sink the ship of Western civilization, but this is not going to be it. People have been arguing about this stuff in one form or another for thousands of years, and we’ve survived every example of it so far.

Maybe cultures do ebb and flow in their answers to this question, and maybe we are living in a skewed time. Maybe if the popular view is that we’re currently embroiled in a culture of rampant subjectivity and relativism, maybe the thing we all should be looking out for is what will be the next thing to stake its claim to the objective truth.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.