A Fly in the Ointment

Tuesday

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Wittgenstein was not himself a positivist, but his early work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, had such a profound influence on early twentieth century philosophy that the philosophy that we now identify as logical positivism was born from reading groups that got together to study Wittgenstein’s Tractatus — what I have elsewhere called The Ludwig Wittgenstein Reading Club — primarily the Vienna Circle.

Wittgenstein began his education as an engineer, and only later became interested in philosophy by way of the philosophy of mathematics then emerging from the work of Frege and Russell. It has been said that the early Wittgenstein approached philosophy like an engineer, setting out to drain the swamps of philosophy. A more familiar metaphor for Wittgenstein’s philosophy, though for the later rather than the earlier Wittgenstein, is that of philosophy as a kind of therapy:

“A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.”

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1944, p. 44e

Wittgenstein does not himself use the term “therapy” or “therapeutic,” but frequently recurs to the theme in other words:

“In philosophizing we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important. (That is why mathematicians are such bad philosophers.)”

Wittgenstein, Zettel, 382

The idea of philosophy as therapy is not entirely new. In my Variations on the Theme of Life I noted the medieval tradition of conceiving philosophers as “doctors of the soul”:

“During late antiquity philosophers were sometimes called ‘doctors of the soul.’ Later yet, Avicenna was a practicing physician in addition to being both a logician and a philosopher, and he stands at the head of a tradition of doctor-philosophers among the Arabs. All this has a superficial resemblance to the contemporary conception of philosophy as therapy, but in reality it is the antithesis of the modern conception of philosophy as a sickness in need of therapy, of scholarship as an illness, and of the philosopher as corrupt and corrupting.”

Variations on the Theme of Life, section 767

Every age must confront the ancient and perennial questions of philosophy anew, because each age has its own, peculiar therapeutic needs. It has become a commonplace of contemporary commentary, as least since the middle of the twentieth century, that the pace and busyness of our civilization today is driving us insane, and in so far as this is true, we are more in need of therapy than previous ages.

In my previous post, Philosophy for Industrial-Technological Civilization, I suggested, contrary to Quine, that philosophy of science is not philosophy enough; that we also need philosophy of technology and philosophy of engineering, and to unify these aspects of the STEM cycle within the big picture, we need a philosophy of big history. There is only one problem with my vision for the overarching philosophy demanded by the world of today: there is no demand for it. No one is interested in my vision or, for that matter, any other vision of philosophy for the twenty-first century.

Previously I wrote three posts on contemporary anti-philosophy:

● Fashionable Anti-Philosophy

● Further Fashionable Anti-Philosophy

● Beyond Anti-Philosophy

The most prestigious scientists of our time seem at one in their insistence upon the irrelevance of philosophy. A post on the SelfAwarePatters blog, E.O. Wilson: Science, not philosophy, will explain the meaning of existence, brought my attention to E. O. Wilson’s recent statements belittling philosophy. SelfAwarePatters has also written about Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “blanket dismissal of philosophy” in Neil deGrasse Tyson is wrong to dismiss all of philosophy, but he may have a point on some of it.

It is almost painful to watch Wilson’s oversimplifications in the above linked “Big Think” piece, though I suspect his oversimplifications will have a wide and sympathetic audience. After implying the pointlessness of studying the history of philosophy and making the claim that philosophy mostly consists of “failed models of how the brain works,” Wilson then appeals to the “full story of humanity” (without mentioning big history, though the interdisciplinary concatenation he mentions is very much in the spirit of big history), and formulates a point of view almost precisely the same as that I heard several times at the 2014 IBHA conference: once we have this big picture view of history, we no longer need to ask what the meaning of life is, because we will know it.

The inescapable reflexivity of philosophical thought means that any principled rejection of philosophy is itself a philosophical claim; unprincipled rejections, that is to say, dismissal without reason or argument, have no more standing than any other unprincipled claim. So the scientists who dismiss philosophy and give reasons for doing so are doing philosophy. The unfortunate consequence is that they are doing philosophy poorly, much like someone who dismisses science but who pontificates on matters scientific, and does so poorly. We are well familiar with this, as pseudo-science has been given a megaphone by the internet and other forms of mass media. Scientists are aware of the problem posed by pseudo-science, but seem to be blissfully unaware of the problem of pseudo-philosophy.

There is a book by Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists, that I have cited previously (in Fashionable Anti-Philosophy) since the title is so evocative, in which Althusser says, “…in every scientist there sleeps a philosopher or, to put it another way, that every scientist is affected by an ideology or a scientific philosophy which we propose to call by the conventional name: the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists…” It is this spontaneous philosophy of scientists that we see in the anti-philosophical pronouncements of E. O. Wilson and Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Not only eminent scientists, but also science popularizers share this attitude. Michio Kaku’s recent book, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind, is essentially a speculative work in the philosophy of mind. There is a pervasive yet implicit Kantianism running through Kaku’s book of which I am sure he is unaware, because, like most scientists today who write on philosophical topics, he has not bothered to study the philosophical literature. If one knows that one is arguing a neo-Kantian position on the transcendental aesthetic, in trying to come to terms with how the barrage of sensory data is somehow translated into an apparently smooth and unitary stream of consciousness, then one can simply consult the literature to learn where state of the argument over the transcendental aesthetic stands today, what the standard arguments are for and against contemporary Kantianism, but without this basic knowledge, one does little more than repeat what has already been said — better — by others, and long ago. Even Sam Harris, who has some background in philosophy, gives his exposition of determinism in a philosophical vacuum, as though the work of philosophers such as Robert Kane, Helen Steward, and Alfred R. Mele simply did not exist, or is beneath notice.

The anti-philosophy and pseudo-philosophy of prominent scientists is an instance of the spontaneous philosophy noted by Althusser. But this spontaneous expression of uninformed philosophical speculation does not come out of nowhere; it has a basis, albeit dimly understood, in the nature of science itself. What is the nature of science itself? I have an answer to this, but it is not an answer that will be welcome to most of those in science today: science is philosophy. That is to say, science is a particular branch of philosophy, that branch once called natural philosophy, and it is natural philosophy practiced in accordance with methodological naturalism. Science is a narrow slice of a far more comprehensive conception of the world.

Scientists are philosophers without realizing they are philosophers, and when then pronounce upon philosophical questions without reference to the philosophical tradition — which is much broader and pluralistic than any one, single branch of philosophy, such as natural philosophy — they do little more than to restate their presuppositions as principles. Given the preeminent role of science within industrial-technological civilization, this willful ignorance of philosophy, and of the position of science in relation to philosophy, is not only holding back both science and philosophy, it is holding back civilization.

The next stage of development of our civilization (not to mention the macro-evolution of our civilization into another kind of civilization) will not come about until science utterly abandons the positivistic assumptions that are today the unquestioned yet implicit presuppositions of scientific inquiry, and science extends the scientific method, and the sense of responsibility to empirical evidence, beyond the confines of any one branch of philosophy to the whole of philosophy. To paraphrase Plato, until philosophers theorize as scientists or those who are now called scientists and leading thinkers genuinely and adequately philosophize, that is, until science and philosophy entirely coincide, while the many natures who at present pursue either one exclusively are forcibly prevented from doing so, civilization will have no rest from evils… nor, I think, will the human race.

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