Month: March 2013

One of the dominant characteristics of contemporary life is the dissolution of every form and grade of unity, from the banal to the sublime: with the move of music culture from large record labels and mass radio to self-produced artists and iPods, visual media from basic cable to YouTube, news from print to the blog, retail resources from overblown chains to smaller niche markets and online shopping, the passive homogeny of top-down commercial culture is giving way to a wide array of choices given to each individual singularly; the rapidity of international travel, the increasing ease of immigrating between developed countries, and the peculiar phenomenon of a trans-national culture of multi-culturalism wither away at the sense of national identity once accorded to a people by being citizens of a given state; the hierarchical arrangement of the sciences and the subordination of those sciences to broadly humanistic ideals in the University is ever giving way to a stratified system of autonomous and distinct disciplines thinly tied together by the goal of constantly proliferating new information; the coherence once given to a people by a common religion is no longer normative, and the void left thereby is largely filled by means entirely subservient to the individual—e.g. art as a form of self-expression, self-help psychology, and religion-free “spirituality.”

This loss of unity is present in philosophy specifically in manifold ways: the dissolution of continental philosophy in practice into a multiplicity of Weltanschauung philosophies, each dictated by the needs/whims of a niche audience; the dissolution of analytic philosophy into various sub-disciplines, often with different methodologies, unrelated goals, and radically different assumptions in the mainstream work done in those disciplines; the absence of works written in the last 50 years fitting into a philosophical canon not for specialists of some philosophical sub-discipline, but for all philosophers; the proliferation of “philosophy of” and “meta” disciplines as a means of buttressing the independence of the disciplines that they purport to treat; the replacement of the substantial unity of the book by the journal article qua contribution to the chaotic whirlwind called “the literature”; the rapid proliferation of different systems of logic leading to a de facto pluralism about what constitutes correct thinking.

The Common factor in each of the above

In each of the above cases, advances in technology have served as a material condition for the changes mentioned: the invention of the internet, advances in commerce, the growth of the university, etc. have removed impediments and thus made these changes possible. But technology is not the cause of these changes (except materially, and therefore equivocally).

Rather, considered finally, each of the above changes can be viewed as subservient to the augmentation of the freedom of each individual qua thinker, where freedom is defined as non-compulsion, and thought as self-expression—that is, a pure activity.

This is why soliloquy is becoming a more normative form of speech: witness the blog, the status post, the comment in online media.

This is why the metaphor of thinking as a game, with all the indifference implied thereby, is now an apt one.

This is why the breakdown of the paradigms of modern thought will likely not give way to a new unified philosophical tradition, as, for instance, the breakdown of Aristotelianism gave way to Cartesianism at the dawn of modernity.

This is why contemporary philosophy takes place in an environment in which very little is, in fact, compelling: not because the arguments are malformed or based on faulty or vague intuitions (though they often are); but because compulsion presupposes a passivity that is altogether foreign to the braggadocio of contemporary thinking.

This is why publishing practices in philosophy today prefer novelty to depth.

And this is why, while the waning of the theoretical ends of classical philosophy are reflected in the closing of many—especially liberal arts-oriented—philosophy programs, philosophers survive more and more in a transformed state by subordinating themselves to the practical goals of other disciplines: in so-called experimental philosophy; in business ethics institutes and medical programs; in the development of formal systems of logic as tools both for everyday thinking and for computational systems, and in the task of culture and creed construction for political think tanks.

In short, the loss of unity both within and outside of philosophy is consequent upon the absolute subordination of thinking qua self-assertion to the cause of the freedom of the individual. In a sense writ (very) large, I shall like to call this complex liberalism; if one seeks a further qualification, I shall call it monadological liberalism, in order to distinguish it from its incomplete[1] Lockean counterpart.  Liberalism is the cause of the fragmentation of the modern world.

Some problems reflexively posed for philosophical writing by this fact.

            The most serious problem posed for writing about this phenomenon is the self-reinforcing character of liberalism itself.

Self-reinforcement is not unique to liberalism: witness the skeptic who takes the refutation of his position as further support for it; or the religious pluralist/syncretist, who can only encounter the object of his interest as supporting his own superficial spirit of tolerance, in spite of the repugnance of that spirit to nearly every creed he may encounter.

This self-reinforcement occurs in multiple ways, of which the following are the most immediate. First, the provincialism of different philosophical sub-disciplines serves as a preventative measure against the emergence of a thinking that can alter this status quo; the fragmentation of philosophy into sub-disciplines makes it unfit to receive truth that transcends those disciplines and their characteristic concerns. Second, on the off chance that a thinker of substance does arise, any set of formulae advanced by that individual can be glibly absorbed as the doctrine of a thinker, from which a shallow discourse can be constructed about “n‘s theory of x,” or a school of adherents to this teacher’s doctrine, “n-ists” can be assembled: this a posteriori attribution diverts attention away from the real matter in that thinker’s thinking, and devalues every possible philosophical insight by giving it the prima facie label of an opinion. Third, when an insight is absorbed, it is only so absorbed as a possibility—that is, in accordance with a teleology that makes every philosophical stance purely optional.

This state of affairs has the consequence that any philosophical thinking done under its auspices is effectively sterile until it is itself understood and addressed.