21st Century Kropotkin II: The Continuity of History, Research Time, 08/07/2014

A few years ago, I presented some of my work in environmental philosophy at the Summer Institute for American Philosophy, a short version of a paper about the usefulness of John Dewey’s ontological thinking for environmentalist ethics and ecological metaphysics. The paper, in longer form, was eventually published in Environmental Ethics. 

At the conference, I met the ageless Joseph Margolis, who was the keynote speaker. One of the interesting conversations he and I had over the week was about the nature of time, and history in particular. He and I disagreed over what could properly be called history. With his Hegelian influence, Joe understood history as an entirely human affair. With my ecological way of thinking, I understood history as a function of change itself, which means that everything in the universe has a history, and all our histories affect each other. 

An advantage to Kropotkin's view of history is that he
doesn't separate the pre-history of humanity from the era
of civilizations that left detailed records.

Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid offers a take on history similar to mine, but arrives there for different reasons. The book, as I’ve said in previous posts, is weird. I don’t think I’ve read anything like it before, which is a commendation as far as I’m concerned. It understands the political associations of mutual aid and communal life as evolutionary adaptations of self-conscious social beings. He explains how this is so by situating the human race in an unbroken continuity of evolutionary history.

Now, Kropotkin’s evolutionary chronology has distinct disadvantages. It’s extremely brief, covering essentially just under two chapters of a book that does largely concentrate on human history. Since the book was written over the 1890s, Mutual Aid doesn’t have nearly the depth, breadth, and detail that contemporary accounts of the evolution of life on Earth can muster. While our own knowledge does remain incomplete, today we do have a better grasp of what kinds of creatures dominated the past epochs of Earth’s biosphere, and rely less on the notion that contemporary animal and plant species can be extrapolated back in time with little change because of their ‘hierarchically’ ‘lower’ place on the ‘scale’ of evolution.*

* I include these terms in scare quotes because hierarchical concepts don’t even really make sense in contemporary evolutionary theory. Kropotkin uses them because they are the terms contemporary to his own time. 

Henri Bergson was one of the most popular philosophers of
the early 20th century, but he remains a cult figure today.

But despite these failures of the technical aspects of evolutionary knowledge, Kropotkin offers a vision of Earth’s history and biological evolution as a single duration. Writing in the 1890s, he was already articulating in his scientific and political writing what Henri Bergson was doing in his concurrent philosophical work. Time and Free Will developed the basic concept of duration, and his subsequent books put it to work. A duration was a single continuous flow whose internal changes were a unified process, affects affecting affects (if I can make a reference to stoic philosophy, causes causing causes causing causes). Each duration was qualitatively different.

The boundaries between durations were sketchy in Bergson’s philosophy. In some contexts of his writing, a duration was an absolute, but in other analyses, what constituted a duration depended on what a thinker herself chose to examine as such. 

I don’t know how much of Bergson’s work Kropotkin was exposed to, and I don’t know if anyone has ever taken the question seriously. But if Kropotkin could be said to analyze human history in any way, I would understand him as conceiving of human political history as the later stages of a duration that encompassed all that was known of the changes that constitute the history of animal life itself, from his genesis to his own day.

It’s a very novel way to think about human history, and I think we could all benefit from taking this point of view more often.

Love of Wisdom Doesn’t Mean Seeking Eternal Truth, Research Time, 23/10/2013

Some final thoughts after finishing Joe Margolis’ Aesthetics book. The last argument of this short, but dense and rewarding, book is a sustained critique of the major theorist of aesthetics in the English language since the mid-twentieth century, Arthur Danto. An impartial survey this book is not. Ultimately, Margolis sees a fundamental problem in how Danto combines his universalism with his historicism. He says you can combine these productively, but that Danto doesn’t.

Some disclaimers before I riff for a while. One, I don’t yet know a whole hell of a lot about contemporary aesthetic philosophy, and Margolis’ book serves as a critical (and boy, is it ever critical) introduction to Danto’s aesthetic theories. I went to Margolis as a starting point, an entry to the field. I’ve always tried to avoid general survey books or books that claim impartiality when I really want to engage with a new field of thought. It’s the same reason I don’t trust textbooks anymore: they simplify a complex field of thought too much. I’d rather leap into a new field with the help of works by writers whose work I already trust. Like Jean-Paul Sartre helping me dive into Marxism, Joseph Margolis is helping me dive into aesthetic theory. 

Two, my remarks today are more general thoughts on whether philosophy, as a discipline, should pursue the truth, rather than pursue truthfully understanding the world. There is a difference between the two.

Danto is quoted, “I am . . . an unabashed essentialist, as much concerned with specifying necessary and sufficient conditions as I would be were I in the immediate company of Socrates, engaged with him in the pursuit of definitions. What may look like historicism on my part is my recognition that except and until art revealed its deep philosophical nature through history, there was nothing philosophers could do, not knowing the way art was to reveal itself.”

Basically, this is sham historicism. Genuine and honest historicism is the view that all of existence is subject to change. We don’t know how that change will come or what will come about, but all is changeable, and will change eventually if you wait long enough. This makes the traditional philosophical quest for the eternal unchanging truth about the world impossible.* In the kind of historicism Danto describes as his own, the flux of history is a means by which conditions eventually arise that reveal eternal truths to us. If we’re paying attention at the right time, eternal truths appear for us to recognize and accept. They could be about any subject: the nature of the good, the character of God, the structure of justice, or the essence of art.

*I don’t think very many people in the discipline think philosophy is about the discovery of eternal truths through pure reason anymore. But it’s an unfortunate tendency of thinking among some mediocre practitioners and some particularly annoying undergraduates. 

This isn’t real historicism. It’s lip service to historicist insights so those ideas can be more easily dismissed from an essentialist perspective. If you accept contingency as the nature of the world, then you won’t want an essentialist perspective on the universe. You won’t believe in The Good, but in various goods for creatures and bodies of various types, and their relations. You won’t believe that art has an invariant essence, that there could ever be an unchanging categorical definition of what art is that “carves nature at the joints.”

That old Platonic saying doesn’t realize that the joints of nature change over time, and that a clearly true idea in one context isn’t true in another. This isn’t an arbitrary relativism, because philosophy takes on an ordering task in this vision of truth. Philosophy becomes about mapping truths to their conditions of validity, understanding how the flux of history operates. I think that’s actually a much better practice than how philosophy has been conceived as seeking eternal truths through pure reason. After all, on that latter conception of philosophy, it has an end: when all the truths are discovered, philosophers must retire because the task is done. On my conception of philosophy, the practice need never end, but only change.

Where Is My (Place in the Philosophy of) Mind? A History Boy, 22/10/2013

I suppose I need have had no serious concerns about arguments between Joe Margolis and myself over his treatment of the nature-culture relationship in his Aesthetics book. The last quarter begins with Margolis making the same point I did yesterday about culture being an emergence from natural processes. 

This last quarter of the book is where he makes a statement that I knew was lurking under the surface of his analysis for a while, and that I very much agreed with, despite not always wanting to say so. When someone becomes very skilled not only at writing philosophy, but also thinking it, that person can understand how concepts that are at the forefront of one sub-discipline may occur implicitly in a different, seemingly unrelated, field. Margolis is able to connect the tendency of Analytic aesthetics to presume that no cultural knowledge or background is required to understand an artwork, with the principles of eliminativism in philosophy of mind. Both presume that there is nothing about cultural or mental propositions that cannot be explained by reducing them to propositions about natural bodies or mere being in aesthetics, and the brain in theory of mind. 

The classic Doctor Who story The Brain of Morbius features
a literal brain in a vat, who is quite desperate to get back to
the worldly action that completes him, mass murder and the
conquest of the universe.

I became fascinated with the problems of the theory of mind in my late undergrad, and wrote my MA thesis on the problem of the relationship of mind to the outside world. I argued, basically, that worldly perception was a part of thought and everything else associated with mind. Internalism about mind makes no sense, the brain in a vat is not a real problem, and one can’t build a workable theory of mind that doesn’t integrate mind with the perceptual relationships of the real world. Basically, exactly Margolis’ point: any account of the human mind and personality is incomplete if it doesn’t include cultural factors, a person’s actual life in the world.

My last public work in philosophy of mind was a commentary I gave at the 2010 Canadian Philosophical Association conference at Concordia University, in Montréal. The paper was about the spectrum inversion problem in philosophy of mind: Victoria sees a particular patch as red, and has seen that colour as red all her life, while Jamie sees and has seen such patches as green, but they both use the word ‘red’ to refer to the colour in question and have no problems saying true propositions about the colour; who sees it correctly? 

The most explicit reason why I left philosophy of mind is a question of style. Writing style: the essays in the sub-discipline abound in ridiculously obtuse technical language. Most papers in philosophy of mind contain so much technical shorthand as to make it utterly inaccessible to non-experts. Not just non-philosophers, but non-experts in philosophy of mind. Sometimes even non-experts in that particular sub-discipline of the sub-discipline (which would mean they’ve created sub-sub-disciplines?). 

An even worse problem I think was more fundamental. What today is called philosophy of mind has its heritage in cybernetics and the cognitive science that arose from it. This was a very multi-disciplinary community: in addition to philosophers, there were computer scientists, mathematicians, robotics engineers, neurologists, psychologists, and biologists. But as the field evolved, it splintered into a cornucopia of different debates and problems with their own concerns and sets of problems. An intellectual movement that began as a wide variety of disparate researchers coming together fragmented into highly technical debates whose terms and problems have become mutually incompatible. 

The paper focussed on the problem of Jamie and Victoria's phenomenal experience. My commentary focussed on what grounds anyone has to say what perceptual qualities are normal in the first place. My critique came from far outside the typical terms of the debate on this problem in philosophy of mind, but I thought it made an interesting challenge. The audience, including a former professor of mine, found my ideas interesting. Through the question period after I delivered my commentary, the presenter didn’t even acknowledge my presence in the room and when the session was over, he stormed out. 

What I find the most moribund sub-fields of philosophy of mind are the ones that refuse to accept what Margolis and I understand: that mind is incomplete without its world. The few, like Andy Clark, who try to explain this in the terms of philosophy of mind end up resorting to ridiculous arguments about shopping lists and iPhones. They try to prove that the mind exists in the world because actions we consider mental, like memory, can be carried on outside the skull. With, for example, shopping lists and iPhones. 

Having to put the argument in the terms of philosophy of mind makes a profound and intriguing argument sound silly. Margolis, and the Adam Riggio of 2007, are trying to explain how worldly perception grounded in a historically contingent and dynamic set of cultural practices and processes is necessary for a complete understanding of the human mind. I find it incredibly difficult to understand how some highly intelligent people need to have it drummed into their skulls that, in the words of Hilary Putnam, meaning “just ain’t in the head.”

Natural Culture, Research Time, 21/10/2013

A curious idea occurred reading Joe Margolis’ Aesthetics book this weekend. The central motive of the book is that the contemporary Analytic aesthetics discourse in the discipline of philosophy either ignores or refuses to believe an important truth: culture is separate from nature, and cannot be explained entirely in naturalistic terms, referring only to individual thinkers and universal terms. The precise argument I won’t go over here, because it’s extremely complicated, involving an exploration of the Hegelian model of historicizing our aesthetics. I’m writing an 800 word daily blog post, which has a slightly smaller mission statement. 

So take it for granted that the framework of aesthetic production and critical appreciation is conditioned by historical contexts and developments. From this, it follows that peculiarly cultural processes are the only such processes that can create what we call art in all its forms, disciplines, and genres, and art’s appreciation and criticism.

If you ever need a visual explanation of the natural character
of human culture, watch Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana.
Among many things, it shows how even empires rot.

This would appear at first to put me at odds with my older colleague. My ecophilosophy manuscript describes a conception of culture that is itself a naturally generated process: the plasticity of the human brain enables a creative sense with our artifacts and tools because we become self-conscious of our relationship with the world. Engagement with the world actually drives and shapes the intelligence and personality — self-consciousness — as the higher brain develops through practical action as an infant and toddler. An evolved human trait, a trait that emerged from ecological selective processes, our brain plasticity creates culture. 

I latch onto this as the only way to conceive of humanity, as a natural creation, that can condition an unalienated environmental activism. If we see our ecological crises today as a war between the good creative nature and the bad destructive culture, we end up with a politically dangerous environmentalism that devalues humanity through making ourselves other than nature. Overcoming this, we can more easily conceive of humans as natural creatures ourselves, subject to natural happenings like self-extinction from drowning in our own waste matter. How we overcome it is understanding culture as a product of nature, a peculiar adaptation that may be beneficial for some contexts, but not for others.

How to adapt my suspicions that an aesthetically informed ethics can be the philosophical science of virtues that can show us how best to live? If the whole solution to whatever impasse in which contemporary aesthetics finds itself stuck can be solved only be separating nature and culture?

Easy. Just because culture is a natural process doesn’t mean specifically cultural products are of the same kind as non-cultural parts of nature. After all, if cultural products weren’t a radical innovation from what had come before, we cultured creatures wouldn’t have built any of the systems like technology, government, economies, or art. It’s clearly of a different order from what came before. 

The ecophilosophy project doesn’t reduce culture to anything. It expands the concept of nature to cover all of what is. Culture is a brand new, peculiar, remarkable creation of nature with its own singular order. 

Two Flavours of One Man That Make Him Seem Like Two (or More) Men, Research Time, 17/10/2013

Some of the future philosophical projects I want to work on involve aesthetic theory, or at least reference it. The first signs were a few passages throughout Félix Guattari’s book Chaosmosis, where he discusses how ethics and even ontology can be considered, after a fashion, an aesthetic matter. 

This doesn’t have strictly to do with arguments about the nature of the beautiful, or any of the traditional topics of aesthetics. Guattari’s thought begins redefining aesthetics as a set of philosophical tools for understanding how the parts of bodies assemble to work harmoniously. That’s the ontological way of thinking about it. He also connects ethical reasoning to his model of aesthetics, but doesn’t do much with it in that book. Shortly after its publication, Guattari was dead of a heart attack and didn’t do much of anything following that. I think one way to pursue this line of inquiry is in virtue ethics; we can consider a set of virtues as derived from an aesthetic analysis of what makes a good person. This idea is still very rudimentary.

But to familiarize myself with some of the core concepts of aesthetics, I’m doing a little research. Right now, I’m periodically reading a short book by Joseph Margolis, On Aesthetics: An Unforgiving Introduction. I met Joe in Summer 2011 at a week-long conference at University of Oregon where he was a keynote speaker, and we stayed in periodic contact.

Hegel is a brilliant example of my basic idea of
how the history of philosophy works. There is no
one absolutely correct interpretation of a
philosopher's writing and ideas. This is why I
don't like going to conferences and presentations
by historians of philosophy: their professional
debates all seem to be over who is right as if
there can be only one.

One thing this book reminded me of was a different sort of reading of Hegel than I had typically made myself, as you might remember from some of these posts. To make sense of where I’m about to go, it helps to remember that after Hegel’s death in 1831, there were two traditions of philosophy that took up his work over the 19th century. One group, today called the Old Hegelians, took Hegel to have described in his Logic the only possible structure of rationality, and how that rational structure culminated in the perfect knowledge of Hegel himself and the socially conservative German society that produced him. This was my reading of Hegel, and the source of my dislike for his philosophy. The emphasis in this reading is on the structure of thought’s progressing through a series of conceptual negations to a perfection of rationality that contains all possible ways to understand the world, and rejects all alternatives it hasn’t already accounted for as not true reason. This was the Hegel of Deleuze’s interpretation, which I share.

However, Margolis takes his reading of Hegel in a different direction. He focusses on the historicity of knowledge, the idea that what thought is capable of changes over time, that thought is never truly impersonal but is always expressed within a partiality, a worldly context. The universal structure of knowledge is created and attained by people in a given time and place, and their ability to create systems of universality in thought frees them in a positive sense. Essentially, Margolis historicizes Hegel. He considers that vision of reason's progress to perfection in Absolute Idealism as Hegel's own mythmaking, his contingent philosophical response to the problems of his own day. The idealist metaphysics that the Old Hegelians fetishized is one set of beliefs that will be made obsolete as the world changes in history. Margolis keeps the mechanism of generating grand visions of the world, while rejecting the particular grand vision Hegel himself offered. This interpretation is more in line with the people who were called the Young Hegelians, people who applied Hegel’s philosophy to their theories of social revolution. 

You might expect me, having encountered such a reading (and this isn’t the first time I’ve seen this; after all, I’ve read some Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner), to let go of my previous reading of Hegel and embrace the socially progressive one. But I won’t, because Hegel didn’t. 

Rather, I should say that Hegel’s philosophical corpus was sufficiently complex that different emphases within his works result in widely divergent interpretations. It’s no problem for me to accept the validity of a position like that of Margolis, but remain on my own path, and my own engagement. The works of the Young Hegelians had, on their own power, a more far-reaching legacy than those of the Old Hegelians. This is the natural tendency of works that progress beyond the conclusions of those who inspired them. The Old Hegelians were philosophical conservatives; they considered Hegel unsurpassable, so restricted their works to commentary and application of their visions of Hegel’s own philosophy. Just like social conservatism, philosophical conservatism dies out from a lack of creativity, the inability to adapt to changing times. To the flux of history.

The whole reason I don’t want to inform my own work with too much of Hegel’s thinking is precisely because the conservative interpretation can so easily exist alongside the progressive. There’s a duality to his thought that I’m philosophically uncomfortable with. Even though some of the most progressive and utopian social and political philosophy flowed from Hegel’s influence, this shuttered conservatism of the forgotten Old Hegelians follows these progressives like a vampiric shadow. I find this shadow too dangerous.