Inspired by the Original Wu II: Creative Philosophy Is About Thinking Differently, Composing, 21/04/2015

Continued from last week . . . Here’s the short version of what I’m thinking of doing with Sunzi’s Art of War for the Utopias project. I literally thought of this idea on a subway Friday morning, so it won’t be very well-developed or investigated, barely even thought about beyond the initial notion that it sounds like a cool idea. This is an idea so raw, it smells funny.

The United States, for example, has not been very good
at waging war without relying on brute force.

Sunzi stresses the centrality of deception for war. By deceiving and tricking your enemy, you can minimize the human and material cost of war by enormous measures. It’s a way of managing conflict using intelligence and interventions in the initial conditions of phenomena before they grow out of control. The powers of individuals working together, applying their individual ingenuities and skills to a common goal, is the centre: generals, spies, soldiers, technicians, and citizenry all contributing individually.

The general remains central in Sunzi’s own text, appropriate for the authoritarian political traditions of ancient China. But the importance of ingenuity and intelligence to succeeding in conflict offers an alternative, and probably more successful, model of global conflict and intervention. The American government could certainly learn that there are many more subtle methods to undercutting your enemies than the blunt force of economic sanctions and bombing campaigns.

Bouncing ideas of Sunzi off of a philosophical exploration of the First World War would, according to many conversations I’ve had about academic rigour, never fly. Jünger, to take an example that I’ll visit in detail soon, never had any detailed engagement with Sunzi’s writing, and himself had little intellectual engagement with Clausewitz, being only an ordinary soldier. But this is, perhaps one advantage to coming from outside the university system. 

Be aware that I’m not trying to excuse actual sloppiness in scholarship. I actually see Barry Allen as doing something similar with Vanishing Into Things, where comparative philosophy becomes not about historical influence or conceptual cataloguing alone, but seeing if some interesting new concept can emerge from the collision of thoughtful readings of texts that are otherwise alien to each other.

Barry’s third chapter is a dialogue of Sunzi’s with Clausewitz’s thought, with just the framework I’ve described. There’s no historical evidence that Clausewitz ever read Sunzi himself, and if he did, he probably would have found it irrelevant frippery, what with all the Chinese scholar’s talk of intelligence and deception when only physical force and the brutality of character to finish the job is needed for war. He plays the texts off each other to see what we can learn.

Alan Sokal with the best descriptive caption he could get.

I see Steve Fuller offering a similar philosophical technique in the closing section of his Knowledge: The Philosophical Quest in History.* I’ll talk about this in more detail on Friday when we publish our last dialogue on the blog. But it has to do with his last word (even though it’s never the last word as long as someone keeps trying to have it) on the Sokal Hoax.

* Given how much Barry couldn’t stand Steve’s book, I think he’d understand my impish smirk when I identify something in common between his thinking and Fuller’s. I have some pretty serious issues with the content of Fuller's philosophy, although I find much to admire in his method and approach, broadly conceived. More details on Friday.

Essentially, his critique of Alan Sokal’s largely successful denunciation of humanities scholars trying to discuss scientific ideas in the context of humanities scholarship, is that Sokal didn’t understand the audience that the humanities is written for. Philosophers in the intellectual circles of cultural studies who gave political readings of scientific concepts weren’t talking to the scientists themselves, but trying to craft more populist versions of the essential concepts of new scientific principles. 

Let me put it this way. How many actual physicists in the 18th century literally thought of the universe as a clock? Probably not many, and none of the good physicists. But the clockwork image of the universe dominated the popular philosophy of the post-Newton era. It inspired the ontology of mechanical determinism. The cultural studies model was trying to craft the same broadly applicable popularly-aimed intellectual concepts for the modern sciences like quantum physics.

Here’s a cheat code for my own work. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity does the same kind of thing, crafting politically actionable, popularly understandable (if still a little intellectual and pretentious) conceptions of core concepts in ecological science.

It’s as if I’m saying to the reader, “Here is a different way of thinking than we’re generally accustomed to. Let’s consider its meaning, implications, and capacities, and see if there’s anything we can learn from it to adapt to the situation we face here and now.” This is philosophical creativity.

Inspired by the Original Wu I: A Humanity Forged in War, Research Time, 20/04/2015

I like accidental discoveries. Ideas that I come across completely unexpectedly that reveal a blank space in how I conceive of a problem or issue that turn out to be critical. I had a moment like that read Barry Allen’s new book on ancient and medieval Chinese philosophy. 

What could modern humanity learn from the military
philosophers of ancient China?

As I’ve written before, the Utopias project is going to involve a philosophical analysis of the concept of the mass man as it arose through the First World War. This is why Ernst Jünger and Filippo Marinetti’s writings will be so important to setting up the book’s central problem: they were central thinkers of the mass man. The First World War spurred rapid philosophical development of a literal end to individuality. This is totalitarian politics. 

I’ve been reading Barry’s book largely for pleasure, not really thinking of the philosophers of ancient China as any figures who’d have to do directly with this project that focusses its energy almost entirely on the last century or so. But in his chapter on Sunzi and The Art of War, Barry developed a fascinating idea that could be a pivot point in the entire analysis of the philosophy of mass man.

The most influential set of ideas on the development of military policy, arms manufacture, and martial strategy in the First World War era was that of Carl von Clausewitz, Prussian general and author of On War. I had not at first thought of Clausewitz himself as a source of philosophical ideas. Whenever I encountered him in reading or teaching, it was always as a strategist, never a philosopher. So I always thought his work was a guidebook of the details of military strategy.

Frankly, I also never thought of the military as being a place that typically produced a philosophical mind-set. At least not until this year. Having such an insightful teacher in my communications program with a lifelong military history opened my mind quite a bit about some of my presumptions. Like a lot of lifelong self-identified leftists, I think I’ve let my systematic and institutional problems with the military bleed into more personal scales. That’s quite a mistake.

Here’s a summary of Barry’s analysis. Writing in the 1830s, Clausewitz described war as a place where, because all knowledge was uncertain, knowledge was useless. Spies, espionage, any attempt to gain knowledge of the enemy other than the most basic reconnaissance of positions in the immediate area, were useless because they were less reliable than absolutely certain.

Apparently not enough, as the First World War forged a
conception of humanity as masses, units subsumed
into a collective identity, interchangeable, expendable.

What mattered in war was the moral fortitude to overcome your enemy through overpowering him in brute force. The side with more artillery, slogging through the blood and terror for longer, would win. Barry writes of him, “Do not prepare your calculations. Prepare your battalions. It is force, not knowledge that wins wars.”

There are no men in this vision of war, only numbers. Individuals only matter insofar as they’re counted in a collection of forces,* no more important as people than an individual bullet matters to the smooth operation of a machine gun. It may as well be any bullet as long as it kills an enemy soldier or otherwise damages enemy forces. It may as well be any infantryman too.

* The importance of counting as one of a collection in his ontology, and the direct political expression of this idea is at the root of my suspicion of Alain Badiou’s thought. But that’s a complicated fight for another day, and may not even fit into the scope of the Utopias manuscript itself. Badiou's is simultaneously too big and complicated a philosophy and too narrow and niche a figure to spend much time in Utopias in direct argument with him.

Here is the mass man, the essentially totalitarian conception of the individual. Hannah Arendt saw it explicitly, the vision of humanity as shaped by total war.

And perhaps, I thought, sitting on the subway early on a Friday morning, Sunzi himself could offer a hand at crafting the solution to truly overcome the philosophical spectre of totalitarianism whose destructive reaction haunts us so profoundly. . . . To be continued (if not tomorrow, then in three or so years)