Love of All Wisdom

I’ve lately been trying to start understanding Speculative Realism, a contemporary movement within “continental” philosophy. Speculative Realism is of particular interest to me because, it seems, it is one of the first philosophical movements whose social network is focused on the Web. (One of its leading thinkers, Graham Harman, has his own regularly updated blog.) This is not yet the future I’ve been starting to imagine where the Web replaces universities and book publishing as philosophy’s institutional locus, since most if not all Speculative Realists are academics. Still, it’s an interesting first step.

Now what about the content of Speculative Realism, the ideas? It’s a difficult school of thought and I’ve only scratched the surface, by scanning of some of the websites. I am certainly not in a place to evaluate this emerging tradition’s arguments, not yet at least. But to help myself and others think through what Speculative Realism might mean, I’d like to try some preliminary comparison – what Charles Tilly would call “individualizing” comparison, the attempt to understand one phenomenon by drawing connections to others.

As I understand it so far, the most central idea in Speculative Realism is a critique of what the French Speculative Realist Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism.” I pinch Meillassoux’s definition of “correlationism” from Skholiast’s blog: correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” Correlationism is an idea associated above all with Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, according to which our knowledge is limited to categories of human thought; it is thereby anthropocentric, focusing epistemology and metaphysics too much on the human subject and not enough on objects in the world. (Thus Speculative Realists like Harman often refer to their thought as “object-oriented philosophy,” a philosophy focused on the objects of knowledge, as opposed, presumably, to the “subject-oriented philosophy” of Kant.)

The first comparison that came to my mind when I read about this was one that I doubt Speculative Realists would find flattering: Ayn Rand. (continue reading…)

Andrew Moon of the Prosblogion (probably the leading blog in the philosophy of Abrahamic traditions) was recently rereading Robert Adams’s The Virtue of Faith, and was intrigued by a passage that I also found intriguing. Adams is arguing that uncertainty is a central part of a good personal relationship:

Well, suppose we always saw what people were like, and particularly what they would do in any situation in which we might have to do with them. How would we relate to people if we had such knowledge of them? I think we would manipulate them. I do not mean that we would necessarily treat people in a selfish or immoral way, but I think we could not help having an attitude of control toward them. And I think the necessity we would be under, to have such an attitude, would be conceptual and not merely causal. If I pursued my own ends in relation to you, knowing exactly how you would respond to every move, I would be manipulating you as much as I manipulate a typewriter or any other inanimate object. (continue reading…)

Browsing in the library I recently stumbled across Edward O. Wilson‘s ambitious book Consilience, in which the famous biologist tries to propose a unified account of knowledge – one in which the natural sciences take a supreme role. I have a certain sympathy with Wilson’s project – his attempt to unite the different realms of human knowing is not so different from my own long-term goal of constructing a philosophy that draws from many (and preferably all) traditions of inquiry. It’s unfortunate, then, that Wilson’s attempt falls flat in a wide variety of ways – but they can, at least, be highly instructive ways. They do very well, especially, at illustrating the limits of an empiricist account of knowledge. (continue reading…)

“Religion” and “science” are typically held to be opposing worldviews, especially in the United States where they identify two sides of a cultural divide (such that Jesus fish and Darwin fish are as common on American cars as are bumper stickers). For those of us who are trying to learn from both, it often seems like a relief to hear compromises like the late Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of “non-overlapping magisteria” (abbreviated NOMA). Briefly, in effect, Gould says that there is no need for conflict between science and religion, because science deals with questions of fact and religion with questions of value (or of “moral meaning”). Ken Wilber puts forward a slightly more sophisticated version of the non-overlapping magisteria view:

Simply imagine what would happen if we indeed said that modern physics support mysticism. What happens, for example, if we say that today’s physics is in perfect agreement with Buddha’s enlightenment? What happens when tomorrow’s physics supplants or replaces today’s physics (which it most definitely will)? Does poor Buddha then lose his enlightenment? You see the problem. If you hook your God to today’s physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it. (from Grace and Grit, p. 20)

Gould’s claim would be a great way of resolving the conflicts between science and religion – if it were true. The problem is that it isn’t. (continue reading…)

I recently had the pleasure of reading an interesting paper by Neil Sinhababu, a friend I met while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas. Neil’s paper, thoughtfully posted online, is entitled The Epistemic Argument for Univesal Hedonism. In it, Neil makes an argument for a strong and controversial position that I’ve flirted with before myself: that pleasure and displeasure are the only things intrinsically good or bad in any ethical sense.

Neil’s argument proceeds roughly as follows (and this summary, qua summary, must necessarily leave out some of the detail and precision of his argument): Ethical judgement all derive from one of two sources: emotional perception and phenomenal introspection. The source of most of our commonsense judgements about morality is emotional perception: a process by which we react emotionally to states of affairs in the world, form moral judgements in connection with these emotional reactions, and thereby perceive the states of the world as having objective moral qualities. Neil draws on Jonathan Haidt’s empirical research to support this point.

Neil goes further, however, in arguing that we are wrong to make moral judgements on the basis of emotional perception, thus rejecting Mencius’s metaethics as well as those of the moral sense theorists. Emotional perception, he claims, is inherently unreliable. (continue reading…)

Justin Whitaker makes an important point about my Noble Truths post: “I have to laugh, thinking of the Buddha as a ‘mostly-suffering-free’ spiritual ideal instead of the traditional ‘fully awakened one.’”

Justin’s quite right that what I present in that post looks like a rather washed-out version of Buddhist tradition, “a bit dour.” I think the title “One and a half noble truths” effectively acknowledges that I don’t claim the view to be traditional Buddhism. I agree that it doesn’t provide the kind of excitement available in the Third Noble Truth’s promise of a life without suffering.

But I don’t make the claim that one and a half of the truths are right on the grounds that it will motivate people to practice; I make the claim on the grounds that it’s true. Amicus Buddha, sed magis amica veritas. If it’s not Buddhist, well, that’s a big reason I don’t call myself a Buddhist.

And if people don’t get motivated? If they don’t do the hard work the path requires, because the diminution (as opposed to elimination) of suffering is not enough of a motivator? Well, then the questions get tougher. (continue reading…)

Rare is the philosopher who doesn’t give happiness a significant place in the good life. Even Kant, often caricatured as making no room for happiness, still says both that it is a duty to secure one’s own happiness in this world, and that one needs to hope for happiness in the afterlife. Happiness, then, is a topic of key philosophical importance, whether by “happiness” we mean the pleasant mental state aimed at by Bentham or the broader conception of human flourishing in Aristotle’s eudaimonia; and most accounts of the latter include some element of the former.

We would do well, then, to pay attention to the burgeoning field of psychologists’ empirical research on happiness. The field faces a number of methodological problems, but comes to interesting insights in spite of these. One deservedly popular book in the field is Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, a well written and engaging summary of current research. Gilbert does a good job of summarizing many psychologists’ counterintuitive findings about happiness.

The problem is that some of Gilbert’s conclusions contradict not only common sense – which isn’t a problem, because contradicting common sense is the point – but each other. He concludes at the end that we are not as different from other people as we think we are, and that therefore in order to be happy we should ask other people what makes them happy. Yet elsewhere in the book he acknowledges that people don’t themselves know what makes them happy. The most obvious example is children: ask anyone who has children and they will tell you their children are their key source of joy, yet every study on the subject concludes we get less happy when children are born, and happier again when they leave. Which is to say that according to Gilbert’s own data, other people’s self-report is not the best place to find out what will make you happy.