on building connections

Tonight I’m reading some analytic metaphysics that is useful for what OOO has been doing, and maybe I’ll post about that in the near future. But it reminds me of why I think the erasure of the analytic/continental divide is a premature idea.

When we read a strong author, there is always something strange and foreign about the experience. Too often, it seems that we are expected to understand immediately the ways in which we agree and disagree with that author.

One example recently in mind was Meillassoux. His book made an immediately powerful impression on me, and in fact I wrote the first review in English of his book. (Another was published in the same week, but mine was written months earlier before being held up in the journal pipeline.)

So, obviously I had some idea of what I thought of After Finitude, and I stand by most of that Philosophy Today review, which was published early in 2007, not long before the Goldsmiths SR launch.

Nonetheless, writing about him this summer was a mental struggle, because there are still some points where you just aren’t sure what to make of the similarities and differences. Only through work can you do that. Some of the work comes through rereading. Some of it comes through reading other publications by the same author (in this case, L’Inexistence divine was the new work on my desk). Some of it comes from hearing intermittent objections of my objections over the years from Meillassoux himself. It takes awhile to piece together lines of communication and divergence, just as it takes awhile to put together a factory, with the final factory probably quite a bit different from the initial blueprint. There are cost overruns in some places, savings in others; some contractors prove unreliable, and some parts of the factory turn out to be too cold, hot, or inefficient to serve the roles designed for them in the initial concept.

The problem with attitudes toward the analytic/continental divide, it seems to me, is that they take an all-or-nothing approach. If we spend decades thinking that the two traditions are two different worlds and have nothing in common, then the overreaction is to say “it’s ridiculous to think that philosophy should exist in the plural; there is only philosophy, not analytic or continental philosophy.”

But this is premature. When there are such differences in terminology and style and even such differences in the nature of the ambition, points of connection must be discovered, built, and solidified, not defined out of existence by fiat. If you’re reading another author, and a fortiori if you’re reading another tradition (analytic philosophy, Indian thought, medieval thought), then if you are serious about it, the translation ought to be a bit of a struggle. Premature communication can be at least as harmful as no communication at all.

It is known that isolation is often the key to the emergence of a new species. If all philosophers in the world had to appear before a joint assembly of tens of thousands and speak their doctrines through a microphone, there might be a sort of rapid mutual awareness, but this doesn’t mean that anyone would understand each other. Sometimes isolation is a strengthening measure. The end of isolation occurs not through the fiat of saying “we’re all the same,” but through tentative links which are then built into larger corridors.

This often strikes me when people talk about, say, Islamic philosophy. The re-opening to Islamic philosophy (which I fully endorse, and in my own small way have tried to assist) is often presented as a sort of shoot-the-moon, “how dare the West remain focused on its own traditions?” gambit, which is then supposed to be instantly global. Well, I’m all in favor of global reading, but it’s also a heck of a lot easier to build a bridge between Western and Islamic philosophy than it is between, say, Western and Chinese philosophy. Islamic philosophy, after all, is essentially a Western philosophy: it’s Helleno-prophetic in background, if that adjective is allowable, and the connections are already pre-given if we just follow the path back far enough. (Indeed, I’ve argued that Western philosophy is still wrestling with the occasionalist deadlock that was initiated in the Arab world over a millennium ago.) But to build connections between European and Chinese thought would need more work and more caution, since similar surface content might not have the same significance at all in the two cases.

And this leads to a more general point, which is the puzzling fact that people expect a philosophy to have answers to everything from the moment it appears. A philosophy is viewed as a systematic grid lain over the world from the start, and it ought to have universal coverage from day one. What if we had expected the same of telephone companies, or of the interstate highway system? This could have been done rapidly only through shoddy work that wouldn’t hold up over time.

This is why I’ve claimed that philosophy is less like a systematic gridwork and more like a light rail infrastructure. The elements of light rail are tracks, cars, signals, and stations. What are the elements of a philosophical infrastructure? In my view, the only important element is surprises.

Anyone can have an opinion about something, and proclaim that opinion aggressively. What is harder, as Meillassoux said in the interview from which I quoted last night, is to realize that there are problems that are not immediately solvable. (For him, Hume’s problem which he regarded as prematurely solved; for me, the problem of how if entities must themselves be sealed off from relation, how they can then mutually interfere nonetheless.) There’s no reason these problems should be the same for each of us, and it is empirically obvious that we don’t all care about the same problems. What is important, I think, is that we all avoid the bullshit of pretending to care about problems that don’t truly occupy us; philosophy should aim at universal coverage, of course, but not start there. We start where we are, and build outwards.

For example, if you were ordered to write an ethics, what would you do? You’d fill in a grid of traditional problems with your own opinionated assertions. But the result would be a tissue of banalities, and your readers would dimly sense that you were somehow faking it. Or at least they should.

As a contrasting option, if I were writing an ethics (and someday I hope to do so), I’d start with a few points that I find fascinating and problematic, reflect on the more general lessons they teach us, and then build slowly outward: remaining incomplete, if necessary, rather than making false claims to a nonexistent systematicity. I think this is the middle ground between demands for system and the Nietzsche/Rée assertion that the will to system is a will to falsity. Against the latter, I would say that systematic knowledge should always be the goal of philosophy. Against the former, I would insist that it must be a goal, not the point where one stands at any given moment. Robert Jackson thanked me after the UCLA event for being willing to throw up my hands and say “I have no idea” at certain points, and I think that’s what you have to do in order not to be a faker.

If I were writing an ethics, for example, and someone asked me “does the end justify the means?”, or something like that, I would say “I have no idea.” One ought to seek the answer to such a question, but ought not to claim to have it before one really does.

In the case of ethics, I would be focused instead on a handful of problems that really do interest me. One is the point I’ve mentioned that we don’t judge everyone according to the same standards, nor should we: everyone “gets away with” certain things that no one else can, and rather than a dismal injustice of the human condition, it may be the very embodiment of justice (after all, why should everyone get away with the same things? even in the animal kingdom there are different skills and different evasions).

A related point that interests me, made by a number of thinkers but most vividly for me by Max Scheler, is that it is people rather than actions that are good or evil. There’s no time to argue the point here, but I’m quite sure he’s right. It’s one of the reasons that Badiou’s generic human has never had any force for me, however egalitarian it sounds. (I would argue that it ends up being profoundly non-egalitarian, by way of inherent reversal.)

Here’s another ethical point that interests me… Everyone seems to agree these days that revenge is petty ressentiment, that we must free ourselves from the past, and so forth. And yet retribution is a fundamental human consideration in many contexts, and not just as a sad residue of the dark human condition. Many acts of retribution are quite obviously masterpieces of beauty, and this is far more honored in many cultures than in our own.

But I digress. The analytic/continental divide is far from over. Let any typical reader of my blog read the exchanges between the typical readers on Brian Leiter’s blog, and you will see how hard it is to imagine a productive conversation. I think all of us also know perfectly intelligent people with whom we cannot stand to have conversations, for one reason or another. We’re not all good matches as mutual communicators, and we’re also inevitably going to miss the point of a number of perfectly good thinkers until the day we die. Just try to imagine Heidegger and Whitehead, arguably the two greatest philosophers of the 20th century, trying to have a conversation in around 1930. It would obviously have gone nowhere. Even now, not too much of value has been written that convincingly links the two of them, and it may be quite a long time before the majority of people recognize the equivalent greatness of both.

Communication must not be rushed.

I was again convinced of this when reading Mario Biagoli on Galileo a couple of years ago. (Biagioli got the idea from his Ph.D. director, the marvellous Paul Feyerabend.) Sometimes a refusal to communicate, a clannish isolation in one’s own community of thinkers, is the only way to protect a fresh theory from an early frost. If all ideas are put into a ring and forced into instant death match, then the currently hegemonic ones are obviously going to win in most cases. The entire spirit of the era will treat some idea as more plausible than others even if the reverse turns out to be true a few decades later.

On a related note, this is why I completely reject the notion that any metaphysics must be judged at the bar of the Science of 2010. We do not know what the science of 2050 will look like, and it may be that the Philosophy of 2010 is what ignites the imagination of the Scientists of 2050. It happened for Einstein and Bohr, after all. It’s important to move at our own pace with what we think to be true, and build on it, and after a certain period of time surprising allies may rally to our respective flags. The key is that we all avoid bullshit, and not pretend to believe something we don’t really believe just to impress some imaginary universal observer.

And when we read each other, we should be looking for surprises, not for agreements and disagreements. With the analytic philosopher I’m reading tonight, I’m hunting for surprises. And there have already been some.