on sudden intellectual reversals

on sudden intellectual reversals
by doctorzamalek
March 6, 2009

The most interesting event while finishing up the final chapter of Prince of Networks was that I flipped exactly 180 degrees on one of the key points that I made just six weeks ago in my lecture at the American University of Paris. It’s not worth explaining the particular point in detail, except to say that my view in January was that relations between objects and qualities are always direct while relations between objects must always be mediated. There turns out to be an important (and surprisingly glaring) exception to the latter maxim, while I now think the former claim was exactly the opposite of the truth.

More interesting is the general point… often, it’s a good sign when we flip 180 degrees on a particular issue. It often means that we were on to the right topic and drew the wrong conclusion, and generally this experience of the sudden flip in conclusions illuminates all the more why the topic was the right one.

As an undergraduate I heard a panel discussion on radio about creativity. They had several writers and musicians on the panel, but the most interesting panelist turned out to be the physicist Murray Gell-Mann (one of the original quark theorists), despite his colder manner of delivery than his fellow panelists. He was telling the story of how he gave a public lecture about the theoretical impasse he was facing, for some reason made the blunt statement that the values in his equation had to be integers rather than fractions, and –voilà– he immediately saw that his blunt statement was absolutely incorrect, and the fractional solution came immediately into his mind in a moment of Zen-like enlightenment. That story has always stuck with me.

This seems connected with a principle I’ve often defended, which is that you know you’re on the right track if your position is being attacked at the same time for opposite reasons. It’s a good sign for Latour, for instance, that he is often dismissed as a social constructionist in the Anglophone world but often dismissed as a reactionary realist in France. (Or in a non-geographical way of putting it, philosophers tend to call him a social constructionist while many sociologists call him a reactionary realist.)

As I’ve said before, this seems connected with Aristotle’s definition of substance as that which can support opposite qualities at different times. Or with the interesting fact that the greater the thinker, the greater the political polarizations that can spring up around that thinker’s work.

I’m not sure if this provides a useful method of discovery, though it might… it might be that you can play with reversing some of your own ideas 180 degrees just to see what the consequences might be. But my experience has been that you can’t force it. Usually there is some peripheral consideration that forces you to reverse your view on some point, but once in awhile it just hits you from nowhere.

I remember spending many weeks in the fall of 2004 wondering how there could be a double withdrawal– real tools withdrawing from access, and intentional objects withdrawing behind their specific adumbrations. Suddenly it struck me that intentional objects don’t hide at all: they are not hidden behind their adumbrations, but fully present from the outset, and merely encrusted with those particular accidental features, “like streamers on a maypole or jewels on a houka.” The intentional object is not “absent” in the lack of adequate intuition, it is merely oversaturated with surplus features that do not belong to it essentially. These are satisfying moments, but I’ve found them difficult to force. It often takes “calendar time” to bring them about rather than “work time.” You need time to become bored with a theory before it’s easy to see the holes in it.

It seems to be generally the case that productive people in any field have only a small window of time when they are especially productive in generating new ideas. I always assumed it was about 15 years; the art critic Clement Greenberg also said it was 15 years, but added the interesting wrinkle that the 15 years need not be consecutive. There is often a break after 7 or 8, with another 7 or 8 coming later. I don’t remember which artists he was thinking of (maybe Picasso), but I’m willing to go out on a limb and make that claim about Heidegger… According to my reading of Heidegger, he was unusually fruitful from 1919-1929, and again from 1949-1953 or so. That cuts out the 1930’s, his most popular period with many readers, but I’m prepared to defend the claim that the 1920’s and early 1950’s were his truly significant periods as a philosopher.

But to return to the main point I had in mind… Why can’t fruitful periods begin earlier or end later? The former question seems easier to answer. A certain period of study and apprenticeship is obviously needed. The more difficult question is why it can’t continue for a longer period. When I raise this question I’m often met with counter-examples that are not really counter-examples: people will say, for instance, that Derrida broke the rule and kept producing original ideas much longer than most thinkers. At this I raise an eyebrow, for there is a difference between real conceptual breakthroughs and the application of earlier breakthroughs to new topics.

But what if the average human lifespan were increased to 200 years, as may well happen someday? I wonder if this would merely lengthen the period of adolescent apprenticeship to the age of 70 or 80, or if we would not see an unprecedented lengthening of the creation window.

A few years ago I read a study suggesting that we are all about 10 years behind our peers of a century ago, due largely to sociological factors. That is to say, a 40-year-old intellectual now would be the equivalent of a 30-year-old in 1900. This seems somewhat plausible to me based on wide reading of biographies, my favorite genre of all. Schopenhauer’s colossal system, published well before the age of 30, would be almost unthinkable now. No one seems quite that ripe at that age anymore.

The study surmised that this has to do with the greater amount of knowledge that must be assimilated now compared with a century ago. I’m somewhat skeptical about that conclusion; my view is that the canon of must-read materials is probably more or less constant in every era, and we simply compensate for growth by truncating some of the less compelling classics as time goes by. You can now be considered perfectly well-educated if you’ve read Homer but not Ovid, or Tacitus but not Suetonius, whereas that probably would not have been the case at an earlier date.

My theory, instead, is that we act as we are expected to act. One hundred years ago, 30-year-olds were being thrust into positions of responsibility much more than is the case in our own time. Most Egyptian males my age do look and act 10 years older than I do, probably in large part because their culture does not create zones of prolonged adolescence as we do– I was going to say “as we do in the West,” but our Provost was recently suggesting that this is largely an American phenomenon and not a European one, and this rings true to me. Educated Egyptians will tend to establish a career path and a marriage a bit earlier than we do, and this gives them a certain adult gravitas and even appearance at an earlier age. There are exceptions, but that seems to be the rule… Egyptian undergraduates seem younger than their American counterparts, perhaps because they are always still living at home under parental guidance. But when I meet my ex-students on the streets of Cairo at age 28 or 29, they seem immeasurably more adult all of a sudden at that age than my American friends of the same age group.

To return to the study’s somewhat depressing conclusion… it claimed that later emergence into maturity is not compensated for by a later window of originality. This was based on empirical data from the study whose outlines I no longer recall. In other words, if a century ago people were especially productive of original ideas from 30-50, it’s now 40-50 rather than 40-60. I have no idea if the study is correct, but it’s worth taking seriously.