Theories of the Real and Practice of the Ideal, Jamming, 24/02/2015

One of my regular commenters on the blog is a colleague from the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, Thomas Basbøll, a writing coach in Denmark. He and I have philosophical disagreements about pretty much everything we talk about. Probably our most profound disagreement is over the nature of reality; you don’t get much more profound than that.

Thomas retired his own blog last year (at least for now), but on one of my posts last week about the nature of objectivity and the ethics of journalism and communication, he wrote a few things about the nature of society and social existence. He distinguishes between things and people. Things are the subject matter of objective knowledge and material processes. People are the subject matter of subjective processes, including the social institutions that people create to manage their societies at large scales. 

Distinguishing a human ideal from a material real
all too often blinds us to the material causal power
of human technology and civilization, material which
embodies and expresses thought.

It’s a dualism that I’m not really cool with, in my own perspective. Mostly, that’s because of my thorough materialism: I’m not comfortable with making strong distinctions on the basis of substance, particularly when humanity slots into a category of its own. I’m not going to give solid arguments as to why this is the case and more essentialist dualisms are wrong. I don’t think metaphysical facts are of this kind. We can’t definitively say which are true and which are false by empirical investigation or deduction. 

I can describe a particular broad set of metaphysical concepts that constitute a general perspective on how to understand existence, and argue pragmatically for why it is better for us to make sense of ourselves and the world along these lines rather than others. This is basically what Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity does with ecocentrism, metaphysically, ethically, and morally. 

Given our current situation, a philosophical approach to humanity’s world that follows the general pattern of humanism, taking humanity to have an essence that makes it of a substantially different kind than the rest of nature conditions maladaptive behaviour. A metaphysics of our continuity with nature conditions more sustainable activity.

Thomas’ metaphysical distinction of things and people defines action as something different from the real, though I doubt that it is kosher to put them in a hierarchy of more or less reality, as has sometimes been done in philosophical history. He writes that “only materiality constitutes the objective reality.” Social institutions, being the creations of humans, exist as subjective (or perhaps intersubjective) idealities. Action in the context of a society (the only action possible) has a dynamic of obedience. But institutions don’t give orders that individuals follow. 

Instead, think of institutions as establishing the frameworks and conditions for social and political action. A social institution is an ideal entity that we understand, and what constitutes our understanding is our practice (or should I say praxis?), moving according to the possibilities for action that their frameworks structure.

A very intense Ian Hacking.

Thomas cites Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s The Social Construction of Reality as a key philosophical touchstone in this conception, that what is socially constructed is other than real. But I’d stand on the shoulders of another landmark sociologist philosopher as a touchstone for my developing my own view: Ian Hacking, who wrote that what was socially constructed was just as real as anything else, because human actions and relations are themselves real, material processes.

I worry that Thomas downplays the reality of emergent entities, entities that are constituted through relations. Because relations constitute all bodies, structures, and matter. I find it very retrograde to regard entities constituted through human action as somehow less real than entities constituted through other kinds of relations. 

Thomas also has some fascinating ideas in some older entries about the nature of language that flow from his distinction of the material real and the human/social ideal. Our languages and our ways of knowing the world, under this distinction, are traditions of action and understanding, a notion that he evokes Borges to explore. 

For one thing, the correspondence conception of truth as the assertion of facts is pretty inadequate in this model. But because traditions are ideal entities in Thomas’ thinking, so they guide and determine our actions, moving us to think in particular ways. And he may be right about the character of language and knowledge paradigms as traditions, but his distinction of real and ideal may encourage us to think that our models of knowledge are somehow disconnected from reality. 

Think about this implication of that disconnect: If we our traditions of methods to know the world are ideal in a sense that they’re distinct from reality, schiz between the ideal and the real becomes inevitable, almost a matter of definition. Being so deeply situated in our traditions as we are, the ideal becomes a prison cutting us off from the real. We lose the conception of our knowledge and social action as causal.

• • •

He slips and slides away from easy definition. Borges.

Thomas refers to Borges’ story “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim.” It’s the story of different ways that a particular story is interpreted. The subject of our contemplation is the narrative of a young man searching for an ideally good and holy man, and each of the protagonist’s encounters brings him to characters progressively approaching this ideal. The story ends with only a brief glimpse of the mysterious al-Mu’tasim.

Borges describes this fictional book as having two separate editions. In the first, al-Mu’tasim is described in superlative terms, but has particular idiosyncratic traits, clearly a person with his own life who has achieved much ethical progress. This al-Mu’tasim is barely glimpsed in the story, but we know that he is a real person in the narrative, with a singular history and identity, from whom we could learn. 

The al-Mu’tasim of the second edition is a pure idea. Each person the protagonist speaks with about him describes him as a reflection of themselves. This al-Mu’tasim is an image of perfection to which we can only approach while it remains equally distant. Such is the flaw of the unreal.

• • • 

This is one of the main reasons I’m glad that I take part in the SERRC. Adam Writes Everything will participate over the next month or so in a new experiment in book review writing, which I’m really quire excited about. I hope to promote it beyond just the circle of SERRC, spreading it to wider academic publications and forums. 

Beyond these experiments, SERRC is also a gathering place for people with remarkably diverse philosophical approaches, perspectives, and ideas to work on common problems. Our diversity cuts off unfortunate tendencies to philosophical groupthink that all-too-often emerge in communities based solely in university institutions and content-restricted journals. SERRC is the kind of community that I think will make genuine philosophical progress over the next century.