Has science killed philosophy? (Short answer: No.)

Is philosophy past its sell-by date now that we have science to find out the definitive 'truth' about the universe? Well, as you can tell by the fact that I put 'truth' in quotation marks, my answer is “no – don’t be ridiculous” and here is why...

This blogpost is based on a talk that a friend (who is a doctor of philosophy) and I (a former philosophy teacher) gave back in 2016, when it seemed to be particularly common for those of us into philosophy to be fielding questions along the lines of “Isn’t philosophy pointless now we have science?”, “What has philosophy given the world compared to science and technology?” and “Isn’t philosophy dead, like jazz or guitar rock?” Having both found ourselves on the wrong end of such frustrating pub conversations – and worse, having seen similar arguments coming from high-profile science champions such as Bill Nye The Science Guy, Neil deGrasse Tyson and even Stephen Hawking (RIP) – we decided it was time to gather up our 'beefs' and air them. Now it’s almost three years later but these 'beefs' bear repeating, so here goes.

In the first instance it’s tempting to take “What has philosophy given the world?” at face value and argue back with “How about all of politics, or ethics, or formal logic... or SCIENCE ITSELF?” but this doesn’t tackle the accusation that philosophy has "served its purpose so can now be retired” and kind of misses a more fundamental issue – that to suggest science could replace philosophy is to fundamentally misunderstand the difference in what science and philosophy respectively do.

I would be the first to admit that many of the 'classic' philosophical questions and quotations that get trotted out again and again are creaky old obsolete BS (the 'mind/body' split anyone?) – but that kind of undergrad cliché stuff is no more representative of the cutting edge than an apple falling on Newton’s head is of the current state of physics. I would also be the first to admit that that academic philosophy seriously needs to do more to fight the tendency to retreat into an ivory tower of needlessly impenetrable jargon and navel gazing, and needs to engage and communicate with other academic fields and wider society more – but that doesn’t mean philosophy in general is dead and buried.

Bill Nye The Sceince Guy's special journey

Bill Nye’s arc is an interesting one, because in 2016 he posted a video in which he pooh-poohed philosophy as pretty much useless, and not worth bothering with, compared to science.

As Olivia Goldhill in Quartz put it: “The video, which made the entire US philosophy community collectively choke on its morning espresso, is hard to watch, because most of Nye’s statements are wrong. Not just kinda wrong, but deeply, ludicrously wrong... Nye’s remarks, which conflate ideas from completely different areas of philosophy, are a caricature of the common misconception that philosophy is about asking pointlessly ‘deep’ questions, plucking an answer out of thin air, and then drinking some pinot noir and writing a florid essay.”

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry in The Week pointed out: “To argue that philosophy is useless is to do philosophy... More to the point all of the institutions that make modern life possible, very much including experimental science, but also things like free-market capitalism, the welfare state, liberal democracy, human rights, and more, are built on philosophy. All of these things are cultural institutions: They exist because many people find certain ideas valuable and decide to act on that basis... If the ideas that underlie these cultural institutions become lost, or misunderstood, those cultural institutions might malfunction. This is very much the case of science.”

But in 2017 Nye revealed the backlash had led him to a complete about-face on the issue after “months” of sleepless nights as he decided he must learn more about philosophy – and he now believes everyone would benefit from a more 'philosophical' outlook, stating “I’ve come late to this. Now I’m all about the philosophy. Bring it on.”

For those of you baffled at Bill Nye’s new-found enthusiasm, still convinced that science makes philosophy pointless, I urge you to ask yourselves the following:

1) What do you imagine philosophy is?

Because it has such a long and diverse history, and the term has been used in different ways at different times by different peoples, what exactly we mean by 'philosophy' is tricky to pin down. The word itself, of course, derives from ancient Greek: 'philo' meaning love, 'sophos' meaning wisdom – hence, literally, “the love of wisdom”. The Oxford Dictionary definition is: “The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline.”

For the Greeks, philosophy started as a combination of the semi-mystical with what would later be called 'natural science', with questions such as “What is the universe made of?”; with Plato, Socrates and Aristotle the emphasis shifted to practical and moral questions such as “How should the perfect society be arranged?” and “What is it to live a ‘good’ life?”; the term has been used to cover all manner of religious thought and theology from cultures all over the world, from Middle Eastern mysticism to medieval Christian scholarship to European alchemy to Buddhist spirituality to ancient animism and everything in between; it has been concerned with what exists and what the nature of what exists is; with what we can know and how can we know it; with how language works and how logic works and mathematics works and how such things relate; with the human condition – psychology, consciousness, free will, existence in general and our place in the world; with the study of cultures and cultural criticism, what is actually going on in our society and others and whether that could or should be different... which leads us back to politics and ethics once again.

The above list only scratches the surface but what should be clear is that philosophy is NOT one method, NOT tied to any particular subject, NOT tied to any particular time or culture and NOT tied to a functional end goal or practical application. It is also absolutely NOT just a matter of “what I believe” (Marilyn Monroe quotes, touchy feely platitudes, unquestioning religious or political dogma, random cute 'thinky thoughts' that are not pursued or subjected to any scrutiny). If anything distinguishes philosophy, it is that it is recognizable as rigorous, structured, analytical thought – even if you think that it is misguided or plain wrong. What philosophy is, is a catch-all term for the history of analytical human thought. 

Now try asking again: “Isn’t analytical human thought pointless now we have science?”, “What has analytical human thought given the world compared to science and technology?” and “Isn’t analytical human thought dead, like jazz or guitar rock?”... See? You get my point.

2) What do you imagine science to be?

Unlike philosophy, science is a method. There may be multiple schools, stances, methodologies and disciplines within science, but generally speaking, to be identifiable as science, there needs to be an empirical basis to how knowledge is arrived at. A testable theory is drawn up, then tested in some way and accepted, rejected or tweaked depending upon the results... then the theory is developed further for further testing and retesting in a cyclical and continual process of model-building and refinement. The scientific method has certain accepted philosophical underpinnings, though these have been argued over (and continue to be argued over) by theorists and – yes – philosophers, to ensure that how we do science is as rigorous as it can be, and that we can be as sure as we can be that what we are gathering from the process (and how we interpret what we have gathered) is as valid and reliable as it can be.

But science is not as united as the layman thinks – all fields tend to be deeply divided by rival schools with different outlooks competing for supremacy; much of what is taken as 'hard fact' by the layman (because a man in a white coat said it) is not taken that way in the academic field – there is a lot of uncertainty, theorising and 'best fit' interpretation going on with a only a relatively small core of undisputed 'fact'. Furthermore, the facts themselves do not tell us what meaning we should take from them: interpretation and meaning is put on by us afterwards, in applying how the facts relate to us and what relevance they appear to have to our current lives, given our other knowledge – other knowledge which in turn is filtered by interpretation.

This means that when scientists start banging on about the 'meaning of life' or the 'ultimate truth', they are leaping beyond what science is supposed to be about or equipped to do and in fact engaging in (often pretty amateurish) philosophy. Please do not confuse pseudo-philosophical bluster by scientists with actual science – it's perfectly possible for a researcher to do perfectly good, solid science and then gush a bunch of shoddily-thought-out philosophy around it, without even really being aware that they're doing it; because they haven't bothered to even glance at the fruits of thousands of years of rigorous, rational, analytical thought that has thoroughly mapped the problems and pitfalls of certain arguments and ways of thinking because “Isn’t philosophy pointless now we have science?” I mean, FFS.

3) Do you think it's pointless to be self-aware about the way we think and the concepts we use?

If philosophy was only about discovering 'objective facts' about the objective world, then – Yes! – science does that much better. But even the most dry, 'objectively' framed science is riddled with everyday assumptions and concepts that are virtually never analysed outside of philosophy. As every philosopher knows, even our most basic concepts – about life and existence, space and time and number and identity and logic and knowledge and consciousness and cause and effect and everything else – often start to unravel on scrutiny, proving to be much more complex than assumed, as elusive as trying to catch a cloud, or simply liable to fall apart all together. These concepts underpin everything about the human condition, the human world, the human experience – and are the product of 'us' in relation to the 'world'. As such thinking and talking about them is a perfectly valid way to unpick and analyse them, for greater understanding. The focus of philosophy is not simply on pinning down objective facts – rather it is about analysing the very concepts that make up how we engage, experience and interact with the world and others. Philosophy is about humanity’s self-awareness. 

As put by Cambridge don Raymond Geuss in his recent alternative history of philosophy Changing the Subject: Philosophy from Socrates to Adorno: “Confronted by a standard question arising from a normal way of viewing the world, a philosopher may reply that the question is misguided, that to continue asking it is, at the extreme, to get trapped in a delusive hall of mirrors.” One of the most characteristic things about philosophy is that it questions the questions, which may seem infuriating but is actually the unique strength of it – it never takes things at face value, always analyses the underlying assumptions and attempts to bypass or overhaul conventional ways of thinking, to find new ways to look at old and entrenched problems, or explore a deeper, more fundamental understanding of the concepts involved. 

This is best illustrated by the fact that, the deeper you go into philosophy, the more 'meta' the questions get. You may start off asking whether, for example, abortion is morally justified or morally wrong; then you move to asking if you can logically 'think out' morality, and come up with a system that will tell you whether any particular moral question (e.g. concerning abortion) is right or wrong; then, when you get really 'hard-core', you start asking what the concept of morality even is, where it comes from, what it’s based on, how it functions and plays out in the world. These are different levels of thinking and arguing – and notice the more 'hard-core' philosophical questions get, the less 'practical' they are. The impracticality of philosophy is something I will vigorously defend – philosophy at its most fundamental should be free and abstract, removed from the pressures of having a particular purpose. Just like art, having a particular functional goal (for example to push a political idea, sell a product or appeal to the tastes of a particular demographic) tends to limit, warp and bias the results. Philosophy, like art, is defined by being removed from practical concerns – in fact a focus on practicality can undermine it.

It’s about the journey, man, YOLO

Philosophy and science are not two rivals both racing to get to the 'facts' on the same racetrack – with science the younger, fitter, better equipped competitor. They’re not on the same racetrack at all; they are different beasts in different games. And yet they are inextricably linked. Philosophy not only begat science but is weaved throughout its methods and theorising today in ways that still need to be regularly unpicked and paid attention to keep the engine of science well tuned (It should also be noted that both are also bound up with a third Siamese twin – the realm of mathematics, statistics and logic).

Certainly, you rarely get a 'right' answer in philosophy, but you can certainly uncover 'wrong' – ie. arguments that simply don’t work, concepts that are inadequate or flawed, and scientists really should pay attention to this before going beyond the data and espousing wider metaphysical theories and interpretations about life and the universe and everything. Philosophy, though, is really not just about bagging a fact as an end result, it's about the journey: the deeper understanding gained by analysing and unpicking the concepts we use and assumptions we make – it is about the structure of our thought and the world as we experience it.

But the lack of a particular, practical end goal does not make philosophy pointless. Think about it: If you say hard-core philosophical questions are pointless to think about, you are essentially saying it’s pointless for individuals, societies, cultures – or even humanity as a whole – to be self-aware.

Ritual ~or~ why horror movies get it all wrong

In horror movies a ritual is something with unique and frightening power - you say the right words, do the right movements, with the right props in the right place and time and BAM! Something happens, something extraordinary. But the idea that certain rituals could, say, summon a demonic spirit or open a portal to another blasphemous dimension is not just heightened reality - exaggerated, oversimplified and tweaked into the fantastic - the idea is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a ritual even is. Let me explain:

1.

We tend to think of religion when we think of rituals because that's where they appear at their most deliberate and obvious, and it's this link with the divine, spiritual, mysterious and awe-inspiring that of course has led to their inclusion in horror and supernatural fiction. But they are everywhere in life, often completely unconscious: from the order and manner in which we do things before leaving the house or when we come home from work; the ways in which we greet each other and say goodbye (language is full of ritual features); the motions we are expected to go through when buying an overpriced coffee or haggling over a Turkish carpet; motions we are expected to go through at a job interview or on a date; the games that we play for sport and what we do watching them; how we perform music or drama or comedy and what we do watching them; to what we say and how we move when we gather to celebrate, commiserate or protest... These traditions, habits and expectations are part of the functioning of a society, a shared language of symbols and behaviour through which we can understand each other, and the world, and navigate our way through it.

I have always been a bit sniffy and dismissive of ritual in everyday life, I know; perhaps sometimes unfairly, as traditions and rituals do serve an important purpose in social cohesion and stability, and even our ability to make sense of the world. But at the same time there is something maddeningly knee-jerk and brain-dead about how we can often all simply fall into step and thoughtlessly repeat the same old actions - long after they have ceased to actually do what they were designed to, long after they have come to symbolise something quite different from what they profess to, or long after they have become simply empty and impotent gestures that have no remotely rational purpose. And there can be something maddeningly pompous in how we can take tradition and ritual all so seriously. But I know my behaviour is chock full of habit and ritual too - and a ritual is, if nothing else, a comfort.

2.

Which brings me back to what rituals are not. The idea that doing a ritual just once could produce some new and startling effect - the idea of a ritual as the catalyst for some a creative and dynamic action such as opening a portal, casting a spell or conjuring a demon - is kind of the opposite of what a ritual really does. Rituals are an attempt to KEEP THINGS THE SAME - to solidify and make concrete an idea or behaviour by repeating it again and again. Think about where rituals are deliberately done - religious services, marriages, funerals, remembrance services, awards ceremonies, military parades, seasonal celebrations, or even superstitious behaviours and OCD-like ticks - and it is obvious that these are repeated symbolic actions that are designed to try to leave a lasting mark on the ever-changing maelstrom of life as it flows by - a bid for reliable regularity in a transient and uncertain world.

Rituals mark a milestone, remember past lessons we do not want to forget or keep an idea or belief alive; they codify a useful way of doing things - knowledge, skills and strategy through practice; they train social behaviour or create a norm for how to act and what to expect; they try to exert control or comfort where it is sorely lacking. If we want to sombrely remember Archfiend Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, or maybe celebrate His Satanic Majesty's 13.8 billionth birthday, or maybe ensure that Cthulhu's heart-warming life advice or innovative guitar technique are never forgotten, by all means, lets get a ritual going. But as for actually summoning those guys and making new things happen, forget it. The only effect ritual actually has is on human psychology and behaviour.

Life goalz ~or~ 'what I found out': 2017

It’s New Years’s and also I’m 40 (in case you missed me mentioning that in every blog post this year) so I am going to take a moment to quickly review my LIFE GOALS. Now there are three that are so apparently amazeballs that we’re all supposed to want them 2 the Max, and if we say we don’t, we’re lying. Well, get a load of me:

Power

I have worked in various roles in various spheres now and have become quite familiar with the lot of managers and bosses and the ladder and all that. Working in regional news I got to see behind the curtain of a lot more institutions and organisations and came into frequent contact with movers and shakers at various levels in various hierarchies. The more exposure I had to this the more it began to dawn on me: I actually don’t want much in the way of power. I’m happier working relatively independently and certainly have no desire to tell other people what to do; in fact that’s a headache I could do without. I really, really value my independence and freedom of expression – freedom to speak my mind honestly and critically without having to toe the line; to do my own thing how and when I want to do it; to turn off from work and turn my attention to other things once I’m out the door; to go about my business fairly anonymously etc – to the point I will retreat from anything that threatens these freedoms. People at or near the top of the chain in institutions may not have anyone specifically telling them what to do, but they are hamstrung and compromised in dozens of different directions that would make me recoil, and the further up the chain you go the more enmeshed you become – to have to tether your entire being to some corporate or public entity or enterprise; to be under scrutiny constantly; to be responsible for the gripes and security of an army of people below you; to have be publically accountable for a whole range of crap that may or may not be your fault. Urgh. No, ta. The very idea brings out my soul in a panic rash.

Fame

If power could in fact end up restricting your existential freedoms, that’s nothing compared to fame – what a poisoned chalice that has turned out to be now we have learnt of it, readers! I used to want to be a rock star. Phew, eh? What a lucky break that never happened. Naw, seriously though, like a sizable majority of the population I used to see fame as the ultimate success because, I suppose, it appears to be validation on all levels – that you are special, you are talented, your skill is recognised, you have influence, you are fundamentally an interesting person. Except that fame does not actually prove any of those things, but what will happen is that you and your life will become public property that is fair game for everyone to chip in on, and you and your life will become a business commodity that everyone will constantly want a piece of. And what then? Many are tied to the desperate Sisyphean treadmill of maintaining it, others are stuck with it but desperate to escape back to anonymity. Now: I am really not a public person and I really don’t want to be one. I was not even comfortable putting my face next to news stories I’d written, or getting too much attention on twitter (seeing as it has become the place that people go to be truly awful to each other these days); I could not cope with fame. Fame sounds amazing for about the first year or so, then it sounds like a hollow victory and bubble-like existence. Ta, no.

Riches

Now come on Thomas, really? Ok, yes, I would sorely like to be considerably better off, that is a given. Everything is just harder to do and maintain when you’re poorer, and having to count the pennies is depressing and grinds you down. Yes, I want to have the money to buy nice things now and again, live in a nice home, travel more, and not worry about the expense. But, in line with studies that suggest money does not make us happier beyond a certain point where we are out of poverty and into comfortable, reasonably flush security, I have no real desire for flashy excess at all – in fact I kinda think flashy excess is pretty much always a sign of vacuous amoral try-hard bullshit. Add to that that, unless you win the lottery, you don’t just get rich without strings attached (see Power); and that there are consequences for your conscience, relationships and sense of self; and that I don’t buy for a second that wealth is necessarily anything to do with merit and... well, a friend and I had wildly divergent responses to the Scorsese black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street, thus: I found it morbidly fascinating, a tale of vile people with awful inter-personal relationships and something critical missing in their souls cutting a destructive swathe through the world of high finance. “But wouldn’t it be ace to actually live like that?” my mate said, referring to their lavish lifestyles. Well... “Um. No,” I had to tell him. Whatever bit of people it is that craves superyachts and absurd shiny rollerskate cars and a house with 15 empty bedrooms and cocaine on your private jet and gold leaf on your f***ing ice cream obviously just isn’t in my peasant-stock blood. It just all looks like so much empty swank wank, wastage of existence to me.

So, if I’m pooh-poohing power, fame and riches for their distinctly turn-to-ashes-in-the-mouth potential, what kind of life goals would I push in their stead on this dawning of a new hopeful year?

Robustness

Actually, end-state goals are a bit suspect in general I think, because the Buddhists were right – everything is temporary. I am old enough now to have seen plenty of people attain 'living the dream' status, and lose it again; to appear to have the perfect life one moment, then really not a few years down the line – and vice versa (the good news is while cloudless joy may never last, nor does lightless suffering, a mercy often overlooked but built into this 'time marches on' business). Things simply do not stay the same, and even if you can hold onto something, or keep doing the same things, the world changes around you and things go stale – so simply planning to achieve one state, one situation, one goal, and assuming that’s your happily ever after, is rather unwise; because then there’s the whole of the rest of your life to negotiate. I was once forced, at gunpoint (not at gunpoint), to watch 25 minutes of JoJo Bows, and her mum, repeatedly tell a TV camera about how she was finally living her dream and she never thought she would but she always dreamt of it and now she was living it and this was her dream and she was living her dream and this was great – and I got sad because I could only see impending child-star breakdown because what then, JoJo, WHAT THEN? No. If I am going to set a post-40 life goal a good one would be this: To strive not for any particular one end state, but for greater resilience, robustness and savvy to weather the slings and arrows, storms and changes that will be happening in life anyway, whatever. That takes an openness, a resourcefulness, flexibility, intelligence and, importantly, this...

Relationships

Because they are everything. If I stop for a moment to consider it, it moistens up my ducts because everything about where I am now is down to the friendship, support, influence and companionship of family and friends. They have been my rock, my mirror, my focus group, my bed and bread, my entertainment, education and enlightenment, my shoulders to cry on, mentors, cheerleaders, life coaches, homies and my home – and much more. They make me proud to know them and want to strive to live up to who they want or need me to be, or think I could be. I can’t overstate it – I, Thomas, an acknowledged selfish, self-absorbed loner and misanthrope, owe everything to the good people in my life, and hope I can give something back to them all. In particular (it will come as no comfort to the lonesome) but hitching yourself to another human in a relationship scenario, if it works right, just changes everything: Suddenly there is a net of support, a bed of warmth and comfort, that makes all kinds of things possible that just weren’t before and in many ways allows you both to stretch out and become more confident in various directions, while simultaneously acting as a shock absorber and balm for those slings and arrows mentioned above. I'm sorry for the yuk, but it's true. That's why nurturing good relationships is a goal in itself because there's not much more that is so utterly impactful upon our lives. Also, you learn stuff.

Learning

Back when I was a philosophy teacher I used to try to explain the ongoing drive to ask those big, impractical questions by saying: "When you are born into the world you have no idea what you are, what the world is, or what on earth is going on. As a child you ask and learn more about this, but once you attain adulthood you’re just supposed put all that on one side and turn your attention to making money, being useful, making a family, making a name. Well, I never felt I got a satisfactory answer, so I’m still asking." That was fine for a while, but when I left teaching for the more worldly world of journalism I too had got a little tired and jaded with the inconsequential and unworldliness of philosophy, thinking “What does it matter? It doesn’t help you live.” I thought I’d reached the end of the road with all that deep thinky stuff, having arrived at a kind of mellow, world weary nihilism after endless circling on the same old questions. But I was wrong.

The past four or five years have thoroughly jolted and shaken me out of that kind of slumber and shown me without a shadow of a doubt, that as clued-up and wise-ass and jaded as I got, I still did not have life, or the workings of the world, or people down at all; because there were multiple surprises, twists and turns in store, both alarming and wonderful and, man alive, there was stuff to be learnt. The past couple of years in particular have unexpectedly transformed everything in ways I could never have predicted in my personal life, and have shown me you can explore those big questions not just as well as doing the work and family thing, but because of and through the work and family thing – it's all more life, and real with it. This has left me with a renewed thirst to learn more and more – I don’t mean just the accruing of facts or experiences, but the real stuff, the how-does-this-all-work: What we are, what the world is, or what on earth is going on. I feel both like I’ve made strides in that compared to my previous understanding, but also that I am newly confident in my capability to learn more, and newly confident in the value of it, even if it’s an endless task. It does matter, because it can help you live – with an intelligence and purpose that bolsters the above-mentioned Robustness. Of course, I will only get so far before I shuffle off: The Buddhists are right, everything is temporary. But in that time I reckon I can get a heck of a lot further than those who are dicking around, tunnel-visioned and half-sentient, chasing power, fame and riches for reasons and ends they don’t even really understand; and I hope that I can in that time pass on at least some insights that might help other people in the problem we all face every day – the problem of how we can happily live.

Happy 2018 n that.

Maps and tropes

In a matter of weeks I will be 40 and, actually, it feels about time – so much so that I am writing this blog post early.

The shift in world view from late twenties to mid-thirties I documented here but it’s now clear that was only half way through a decade-long process of jettisoning and upgrading youthful ideas and attitudes – and actually, that process is ongoing and will likely continue, until I lose my mind or turn up my toes, whichever comes first.

Trying to explain what feels different over these past four or five years is hard to pin down (there are hints of it here and here) though a lot is in line with the expected 'life begins' trope: I feel more comfortable in my own skin than I ever have; I know myself better than I ever have; I have learned to value and enjoy the little things more; I give fewer shits about appearance, ego and cool; I have less patience with fluff, bluster and bullshit; I am much more inclined to view things pragmatically and with a calm scepticism than idealistically and emotionally; I have less faith in prevailing wisdom and the judgment of powerful people, because I have seen well-qualified authority figures make demonstrably bad decisions a few too many times; and I have discovered jazz, dressing with a colour palette and the joys of interesting architectural design.

But there's more, something more I'm still struggling to pin down...

The slow process of disillusionment

I started this blog in my early 30s and the tag line “Life: Or ‘the slow process of disillusionment’ as I call it” has been floating around on it for most of that time, supposed to be humorously downbeat but also heartfelt ­– it did feel like virtually everything I thought was true, good, exciting, reliable or even attainable in my youth was in the process of turning out to be more complicated, ambiguous, problematic or simply more mundane as adulthood progressed. Your childhood maps and expectations of the world slowly prove to be flawed and insufficient and you have to update them with amendments in untidy, ugly scrawl or chuck them away completely. How sad, I thought, but them's the breaks.

Then I thought that was a sad thing. Now I think“Thank God for that”. If there’s one major thing I would like to point out about my 40-turning feeling it’s this – because if I hadn't got rid of those quaint old maps I'd have been stuck with them.

Because I have been noticing more and more and more in the past half decade how it’s not just me – everyone has these maps of what the world is supposed to be, ranging from basic childhood values to the received horse-sense of adult society – and all of it is a little cock-eyed, riddled with misleading myths and assumptions.

And in tandem with this I have been noticing more and more and more: The world is not how you think it is. Everything is more complicated than you are led to believe. Your maps and expectations are all wrong. Not just mine, not just yours – all of them.

Tropes

I still don't feel like I'm making myself clear enough. So: Let's talk about tropes. By which I mean recurring devices and themes in things like art and literature, especially salient today in film and television.

What happens when a car goes off the edge of a cliff in a film? It explodes. What happens when someone is dangling over an abyss but instead of climbing up to safety they try to reach for that golden amulet on the nearby ledge? They plummet to their death, the greedy nobs. What happens when an authoritarian society creates a 'game' for public entertainment, where people are forced to run or fight to the death? The participants band together and spark revolution, of course!

These recurring ideas and motifs can be anything from a common type of scene (the heroes peep over the edge of that rocky outcrop/hidden balcony to conveniently observe an evil ritual below that reveals the full horror of what is going on!); a basic pairing of things that always go together (aliens = ancient Egyptian imagery, right?); to a full-blown complex narrative (Google 'The Hero’s Journey').

These things are outlined in exhaustive and mind-boggling depth at the wonderful TV Tropes website, which says: “A trope is a storytelling device or convention, a shortcut for describing situations the storyteller can reasonably assume the audience will recognize. Tropes may be brand new but seem trite and hackneyed; they may be thousands of years old but seem fresh and new. They are not bad, they are not good; tropes are tools that the creator of a work of art uses to express their ideas to the audience. In fiction, it can even be impossible to create a tropeless tale.”

In life also it can also be impossible to create a tropeless tale about how you think the world works. Because this stuff doesn’t just happen in entertainment, this is how we think in general ­– in our social interactions, our politics, our culture, our everyday expectations and judgements. Our lives are full of stereotyping, narratives we have invented or absorbed from the world around us, and unexamined 'zeitgeist' assumptions. Some are fairly overt and obvious, but others go unrecognised for what they are – nothing more than shortcuts and habits of thinking that may actually not reflect reality all that well. Because actually, in reality, the car most often doesn’t blow up; it just crunches and comes apart and that’s it.

Here be dragons

These tropes, of course, combine into maps of what the world should be like, whether dealing with politics, romance, religious belief, social shiz or even work or business. Of course these maps are useful, usually contain at least some identifiable truth, and we have to have them to get by and get around. But while some are better than others, not a single one of them is complete or sufficient (no matter what all those self help and 'get rich, happy, healthy and successful' guides may try to tell you) – how could they be? Because the world out there is more bizarre, diverse and complex than any guide-map can convey.

Treating these maps like they are complete and sufficient is often the source of endless trouble and grief. The SatNav is never the territory – yet often people seem to prefer gluing their eyes to that rather than looking at the damn road and learning to take it as it comes. I see people everywhere, all the time, sticking to their maps and coming at life full of some certain 'faith' that it is this way or that, that this will happen or that must happen... as the SatNav drives them off the edge of a metaphorical cliff.

It’s not just that this attitude sets you up for disappointment, it sets you up for crisis – because when what you thought 'needed' to happen doesn’t, it’s a disaster – the entire world is cast as a dreadful hell because you can not even contemplate an alternative. All you have is what's on the map and “Here be dragons”. So when your map proves to be wrong – OMG, DRAGONS.

But the world is not a dreadful hell, it just is. Disappointment is a bummer, but if you think one scuppered plan ruins everything, you’re not looking properly. So it turns out life is not arranged around you having fun, or being successful and fulfilled all the time as your entitled destiny, after all. Boo hoo. That doesn’t mean you can never have fun or be fulfilled or successful, just that sometimes you will, sometimes you won’t, these things never last forever and you probably have to keep working at it. And no one is immune from bad things repeatedly happening that you have to soldier though – that's not the end of a fulfilling life, it's grist to the mill of it.

The biggest misunderstanding of the field of cognitive psychology is the idea that it's all about positive thinking and telling yourself to be awesome and happy. Yes, we should regularly remind ourselves of the good things – but simply running away from reality and telling ourselves 'positive' fairy tales is not a great strategy for sustained and robust mental health. Getting a more flexible and up-gradable map, learning to read it properly and using it more in conjunction with the actual, real, road is a better one.

Raw, strange and crackling

For me, at 40, it seems life is bigger, more complex and crackling with mystery and possibility than I ever imagined in my earlier adulthood. It's huge, raw, strange and unknowable. It may be stable and calm enough to map out in the steady spots, but it strikes me as unimaginably varied and extreme at the edges. The very nastiest, bleakest stuff does happen. So does the most beautiful and sublime. A lot of the time neither makes its presence felt. But time and again, I've found, whatever you think things are like, they are not necessarily like that.

I honestly don’t know how to communicate this, and will have to keep on trying because I don’t think I’ve done it here at all. I look at younger people and despair to think: “My God, you have so much to go through, so much to do, to endure, to have happen before you can see this," which sounds utterly pretentious, I know. Maybe that’s how my parents look at me still.

Whatever, I’m now so much more wary of over-reliance on maps and tropes, especially those that other people have decided everyone else should adopt – I do not trust the judgement of those who are navigating life from an off-the-peg ideology or overly-embellished narrative, set in stone.

For me, at 40, there is no grand plan. My life’s work is now just to navigate through whatever happens, seeking out the enriching things while trying to avoid the awful stuff, dealing with what comes at me and pushing to keep the good things good or make the bad things a little better, step by step. And most importantly trying to understand it better and deeper as I go – because that is the one project that makes sense of it all to me, though a project that will never be complete, until I... stop. At which point, I 'spose, it stops with me. But let's see how far we get.

That's how I'm seeing things right now. I have no idea what is in store any more – and I really, really like that. To fall back on a hackneyed old trope: 'Life begins', indeed.

The Heidegger question ~or~ what happens when an academic icon turns out to be a Nazi nut?

What happens when one of the most interesting and original thinkers of the 20th century turns out to have been a full blown Nazi?

A scandal and crisis is currently running rampant trough German philosophy departments, and to some extent the wider philosophical world, as the publication of Martin Heidegger’s notebooks from 1931 to 1948 has revealed him to be significantly more on board with the Fuhrer’s kinda thang than anyone previously realized.

The Velvet Underground of continental philosophy

Who is this Heidegger and why does it matter, you may ask – well, while he may not be a household name, his position in 20th century philosophy is unassailable. His influence on French and German thought in particular is HUGE. Well known, but never quite getting mainstream popularity, he is the Velvet Underground of continental philosophy: His legacy is in the mark he made on the big names that followed him – from Jean-Paul Sarte and his existentialism (a running philosophy joke is that Sartre’s whole career is based on a chapter of Heidegger's Being and Time) to Jacques Derrida and his deconstruction (good band name).

He was one the leading lights of the phenomenology movement, which may sound like gibberish to you, but I can assure you his ideas are still having an impact today, perhaps behind the scenes of modern life in academia, but still there none-the-less.

And besides, his philosophy is just so damn intriguing, packed with original, surprising and profound insights. He said western philosophy since the Greeks had been so concerned with knowledge and ethics and so on, it had ignored the question of being – what IS being, what is it to BE? He wanted nothing less than a complete overhaul of philosophical thinking – to destroy traditional metaphysics and build up a new account of existence by going back to raw experience itself. And, if you can get past his awful, over-complicated, jargon-heavy writing style, it’s far-out, revelatory stuff, with surprising parallels to eastern philosophy such as Zen Buddhism and Chinese Toaism (see here) and all that good stuff.

So, it’s doubly upsetting for me, someone who studied him intensively for over a year and found wisdom and solace in his musings, to learn that his appropriately named “black notebooks” are full of frankly nutty endorsements of the work of the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

Didn't we already know he was a Nazi?

In fairness, it should be said that none of this is out of the blue – it was known that Heidegger was a paid-up supporter of the Nazi Party from 1933 until the end of the war, and vocally endorsed Hitler and his cronies. But you kind of hoped his prolonged flirtation with fascism was kind of an embarrassing mistake, that he was caught up in the zeitgeist and swept along with the propaganda.

He was, after all, an iconoclast, wanting to sweep away the tired old order and start with a clean slate – so it’s easy to see how leaders promising the same in politics and society might have chimed with him. He is also very critical modernism in his work - modern life, modern ideas, particularly technology - and has a romantic notion of a more authentic, primordial, simpler way of being in the past. He very much sees the individual in modern society as having “fallen” from authentic being in some way, having become lost and dehumanised – so it is possible to understand why Hitler’s back-to-the-land, harking-back-to-a-forgotten-golden-age rhetoric might have appealed to the idealistic academic.

On the plus side it is known Heidegger prevented students from holding a book burning, and from displaying anti-Semitic posters, at the entrance to the University of Freiburg while he was rector, despite his ongoing support for the Nazis at the time. You hoped his silence on the matter after the war was because he was just too proud and ashamed to talk about his stupidity in backing the Third Reich. You hoped he felt a crushing sense of betrayal when it became clear the politicians he naively trumpeted turned out to be more monstrous than even their enemies imagined with the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

You also hoped whatever Heidegger’s personal politics, they did not impact on his work – his philosophy is not overtly political, it is about being in general – asking what it is for a self-aware consciousness to exist in the world, what it is to be “a being for whom its own being is an issue” – fundamentally, what are we and what is the world?

But no.

Oh dear

The black notebooks (as yet unpublished in English) apparently make it more than clear that Heidegger himself had a deep seated anti-Semitism that was deeply integrated into his philosophy. He talks of “world Judaism” as one of the main drivers of western modernity – ie everything he loathes as dehumanising us and taking us away from authentic being. Why and how exactly "the Jews" are responsible is not clear, except that Jewish communities in Europe tended to be necessarily rootless, itinerant people “divorced from the soil” (a bad thing for Heidegger) and tended to be happy to grasp the new possibilities offered by modern society. There was also a view prevalent at the time that "world Judaism" was really behind the Russian revelation, and that most threatening of modern ideas, communism.

Never mind that blaming a relatively small and peripheral ethnic minority for all the ills of the modern era is fucking ridiculous. Of all the possible roots of modernity, with all its mechanisation, exploitation, tranquilisation and alienation from authentic existence, “The Jews” is really not an obvious go-to-source. The European Enlightenment or “Age of Reason”, yes. The Industrial Revolution, yes. Free-market capitalism, the afore-mentioned communism and – FFS – fascism, absolutely. Jews? Um. No.

In “fairness” to Heidgger he does also point the finger at English, American and Soviet culture, but still – it shows he buys into the then-all-too-common paranoid and idiotic conspiracy theories about “world Judaism” of the kind espoused by Hitler in Mein Kampf, even if he pooh-poohs the Nazis’ racial angle in favour of a cultural one.

Holocaust

But the worst blow comes with the publication of the notebooks from after the end of the war, in which Heidegger talks about the Holocaust. In one jaw-dropping passage he appears to think it is more of a tragedy that Germany’s mission to transform the modern world – which had the potential to “save” the west – was stopped by the Allies before it could come to fruition. He sees this as a crime against history that is even greater than the genocide of six million people.

Surely, you might think, the Holocaust was the ultimate outplaying of the kind of dehumanising effect of modernity and technology Heidegger was so against - the production-line industrialisation of murder itself. But who do you think he blames for it - the Nazis he so stupidly supported? No, of course not. He blames "the Jews". Yes that’s right, they brought it on themselves – because they supported and drove the technological modern era, they are responsible for their own deaths by it. Not the Nazis who actually did it – they were simply trying to wipe out this Jewish culture of hateful modernity (that by Heidegger's own criteria they themselves took to an extreme in order to do that, but let’s not think about that). Yes, it really is bit like saying we can wipe out racism by the genocide of a racist race. Bloody racist races.

Fallout

It’s not just that his views are vile – the history of philosophy is liberally sprinkled with horrible people who nevertheless had something interesting to say – it’s that they are just fucking nonsense. The fact that they are full of paranoia, hypocrisy, leaps of logic, and vast blind spots missing the obvious, casts serious doubt on his critical thinking faculties and the water-tightness of the rest of his work, which will now have to be re-evaluated in the light of this.

I mean to say, some of the translated passages of the black notebooks that have come my way read like a genteel and wordy version of the foaming-mouthed spoutings of a disgraced UKIP parliamentary candidate – if I read someone spouting this today I’d write that person off instantly as a nut, not worth wasting my time listening to. For that to be coming from someone I happen to think is among the most original and profound thinkers of the 20th century presents me with a hell of an inconsistency. How does one square this? Do I try to shrug off his more unpleasant views (surely an exercise in dishonest cherry picking)? Do I write off all of Heidegger’s thought (surely a bit baby/bathwater)? Have I woefully misjudged bonkers disgraced UKIP parliamentary candidates, who are in fact all philosophical geniuses?

All I can say is at least Heidegger wasn’t anyone’s posterboy. He never achieved the kind of hero status of the likes of Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, partly because his writing style is so impenetrable, pedantic and dull – no teenage philosophy students are scrawling Heidegger quotes such as “The projection of Dasein’s ownmost-potentiality-for-Being has been delivered over to the Fact of its thrownness into the ‘there’,” on Twitter.

Ban or study?

It will be interesting to see how the academic world deals with this. Günter Figal, chair of the Martin Heidegger Society, has already resigned, stating his shock at the content of the notebooks, and that he is no longer willing to act as a representative for such a man. Those of us who always preferred Nieztsche – whose work was appropriated by Hitler and therefore is also tainted with such associations – can sit back and gloat, as our man, who died long before the Nazis and was vocally down on both anti-Semitism and nationalism in general, now looks like John bloody Lennon.

One thing I hope doesn't happen is that Heidegger will be treated like Jimmy Saville and excised from history. If nothing else that would be dishonest, since whole schools of thought with far-reaching consequences in the modern world owe a debt to him, whatever kind of beast he was - and our understanding of the history of philosophy would be poorer for skimming over him.

A ban on Heidegger would serve no one, and that is not the way philosophers do things anyway. What is brilliant about philosophy is that it doesn’t shy away from tough topics and questions for reasons of taste and decency – it delves right in. Burying and censoring things is the very opposite of the philosophical nature – rather it seeks to drag the truth out into the light, in all its ugliness and complexity, and then proceeds to dissect and debate it for eternity, to try and find out how it works, what might be going on and what the meaning and implications might be.

I suspect this is what will happen with Heidegger. If they are not already, people will soon be doing PhDs in the impact of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism on his phenomenology, or the implications of his Nazism for the work of his followers such as Satre (who, by the way, supported Stalin even after it became clear he was a mass murdering Gawd-help-us). And really, that’s the way it should be. Heidegger should not become untouchable – we simply have to handle him in a new and enlightened way.

The "Religious Nihilist" Thought Experiment

A warning – I don’t intend this to be offensive or belittling to anyone’s religious beliefs. I am not saying the below is how religious thought is; everyone has their own personal reasons and rationale for their beliefs, convictions, faith or world-view. This is simply me trying to conceive of how I, as a weary, non-believing, faintly nihilistic type, may authentically take up something that, at least on some level, resembles a kind of intense religiosity. I am aware what’s outlined below is perversion of what religion is supposed to be, but that is kind of the point. And that’s not to say it can’t provoke thought for both the faithful and faithless. Take from it what you will.

THERE are days when my nihilistic tendencies get to me.

Probably on the long commute home from work when I’ve forgotten to put on the radio to distract me; or stuck in a doctor’s waiting room with nothing to read but some whiffle about expensive country homes and posters warning me about terrible things that might happen to my body if I don’t live a healthy lifestyle (or even if I do live a healthy lifestyle).

It’s slightly shameful to admit – I am no sixth-former, sent into a depressive tailspin by an un-prepared-for first-encounter with Sartre. As a world-view, I have been fearlessly staring the existential void in the face for well over a decade. I am steeped in it. I am a veritable creature of the abyss – I live my life perched on the edge of that chasm, and lo! laugh heartily into the howling wind that issues forth, and all that jazz... but, sheesh, sometimes it comes sharp – and I feel a sore need for a cardigan, when there is no cardigan to be found.

I’ve said before (here) that it is actually impossible to be a nihilist. Everyone has to take a world-view, everyone has a value set (in that they value some things as important, some not; some true, some not), everyone buys into some ideas and pooh-poohs others – we have to in order to get on with our lives.

But, even so, my standard position that ultimately, taking the grand overview of existence, there is no final purpose or meaning to be had, is kind of nihilistic. This isn’t usually something that gets me down, it’s kind of liberating, and means I see the universe as an awe-inspiringly strange place that will never cease to surprise; and I will never settle on one certain, tired, dull interpretation.

That ultimate meaninglessness just seems a necessary conclusion. It’s simply to say that meaning and purpose can only be found at the small, local scale, where there is a connection and relevance to you and your life. Meaning is always personal and human-centred, we create it by the patterns and links we construct around ourselves.

The further you zoom out of this local sphere, the more of an overview you take, the more alien and unknowable everything gets: You can no longer take a single, definite perspective or interpretation on things, it’s no longer obvious what the significance of anything is. The web of meaning you have weaved for yourself as you pootle through life no longer looks as relevant, solid or certain. Ultimately there is no definite meaning to be had in the face of sheer, objective truth. There is only information – as soon as you try to “meaningfully” interpret it, you are limiting it, choosing what to highlight and what to ignore, squeezing it out of shape, drawing a finite, solid line through a vague, chaotic sea of possibles.

But (again), even so, these days come when I take a long, hard look at the modern, rational, human world and feel nothing but a cold, grey, empty sinking feeling. Maybe a touch of despair, maybe a touch of horror. It’s probably much more to do with my energy and stress levels, and my brain chemistry at the time, than any rational process, but there are valid reasons for it that can’t be ignored.

And then I wonder if life without a religious myth-narrative to fill it up is, perhaps, a mistake.

What?

What? Let me elaborate: Without the certainty of a transcendent element to existence - without a God, or a heaven, or a higher realm that one is required to remember and pay attention to daily - it is all too easy to fall into the conviction that there is no reason to consider anything greater or beyond yourself and your everyday shit at all. Life becomes grey and functional, devoid of higher meaning – since, after all, there is no higher meaning, ultimately.

Maybe we’ll coo at some big sciencey stuff that Prof Brian Cox tells us is “ameeehzin,” now and again, but that’s about it. That’s just entertainment, really. Most of the time, for the secular sectors of society, life is a largely tunnel-visioned, largely blind affair. Everyone runs around like ants, completely immersed in their own little tasks and troubles and bubble-like mindsets. And nothing encourages us reach out or beyond, to be any different. And nothing happens at all unless there is money in it.

Neitzsche thought that nihilism was just the void left over when the old myths were cast off. After killing God we would be left with a vacuum, a directionless emptiness that we would not know how to fill. But he was determined this was only a phase, and it could be turned around into a positive, brave new chapter in history, a step towards mankind becoming something else – something new. He followed Epicurus, and preceded Sartre, in suggesting that actually, by casting off the old Gods, the old myths and values, the old narrative, we were free as individuals to forge our own meaning, take on full responsibility for our actions and choices; we had no-one to bow down to or take the responsibility away from us any more. Kill the father-figure - we can become our own gods.

But (you guessed it), even so - when I’ve still not turned that radio on to distract me - I’m not sure that, rather than nihilism giving way to a brave new world, it’s not vice versa. Once the adrenaline and novelty of that noble, high-minded God-jettisoning moment has worn off, the tendency is then to retreat into a rather nihilistic, selfish, self-absorbed existence, just living from day to day – because what else is there?

The tendency is to fall into instrumental rationality, where everything in the world, in life, is only valued by how useful it is for a specific, practical purpose, a specific set of goals. Those goals might be making money, solving a logistical problem, raising the family, advancing the business or pursuing the career; sure, other things go on in your life, but they are mere frivolities, luxuries, leisure activities – nothing is of any real worth or importance unless it advances the functional goals of that instrumental rationality. Very businesslike, very practical, very rational – and very grey, very joyless, very narrow, very dehumanising. And, of course, all utterly pointless, in the grand scheme of things.

The Examined Life Is Not Worth Living... no, hang on...

Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living,” but he was full of it. Yes it is, Socrates, it very much is, and often a lot happier and less complicated than the "examined" life. Because, when I’m on one of these downers (for chrissakes, turn on that radio, Simon Mayo will sort you out...) it seems all the years of rational analysis and truth-seeking have only served to add an extra layer of complicated angst to my mortal existence. All of it has only served to lead here – an awareness of being trapped in a futile, absurd situation, with all the accompanying emptiness, ennui, mild horror and slight despair that goes with that revelation. The price of knowledge is a fall from grace - Adam and Eve found that out. I wish, in moments like this, that I could just flick a switch and turn it off, Socrates old chum.

But I cannot flick that switch. So, if I cannot stand to be a contemplative sort in a nihilistic world any longer, maybe I should re-imagine my world: If I cannot stomach instrumental rationality, perhaps I belong with those who believe in something transcendental... even if I can’t believe in it myself. Hmmm. How could I resolve this?

Cosmic Horror

Maybe rational atheism was a mistake. Maybe secularism is a dead-end. Maybe the only way out of this interminable bleakness is to get a myth, escape into a dream of my own making.

Because, if you find it more evident and likely that there is no guiding intelligence behind the universe; that the idea of a single purpose to life just doesn’t make any sense; and even if there were an intelligence and a purpose to things they would not be benevolently centred on us and our wellbeing – if all of that, then there is no reason to believe that knowledge of the “true nature of reality” would be a pleasant thing to have.

From the perspective of rationality the “true nature of reality” is as likely to appear senseless, wasteful and cruel, as it is inspiring, purposeful and empowering. There is no reason why it wouldn’t appear crushing, maddening, soul destroying, like a form of Lovecraftian cosmic horror without the cool aliens. The universe is utterly blank and indifferent to our struggles and our fate, our concepts of good and evil, significance or insignificance. We are part of a blind process playing out. Maybe we are simply not built to have too much awareness of this, or to deal with this without a mythological buffer. Maybe fully comprehending the “true nature of reality” can only destroy us.

Or – maybe that is the logical conclusion of rationality: to realise rationality is a death-force - trying to hold the blank meaninglessness of everything in your head while you go about your business is actually anti-life and untenable; it gets in the way, it encourages you to give up, curl up and quietly wither away and die. Maybe the logical conclusion of rationality is to realise there are no answers, so you may as well make up your own.

The New Narrative

And here is the thought experiment – what if I did that? What if I decided this nihilistic thinking was simply all too much, and I should get myself religious? What if I enacted a kind of tactical retreat, an “ongoing suicide of reason” (as Nietzsche put it), and got a New Mythological Narrative, with my own God or Gods, heavenly realm and afterlife? Wouldn’t life become so much more meaningful, so much more purposeful and serene?

Here is the thought – a religion born of nihilism: maybe I can’t fully, really believe that there is an ultimate purpose to life, that there is a benevolent, anthropomorphic intelligence watching over us, that any concept of a heavenly afterlife I’ve ever come across makes any coherent sense... but I can believe in the necessity of believing in such things.

It wouldn’t be God, or a saviour, or a heaven that I would have faith in, it would be the necessity of the myth to living a good, happy, meaningful life. And that faith would be authentic.

How would such a faith manifest? Well, for a start I would consider myself saved. Genuinely, my life would have been transformed by this. The world would look different, I would have been given strength by the unshakable certainty that I have to believe in, and live by, the New Narrative. That would give me considerable armour against whatever the world could throw at me.

I would have purpose – I could devote my life to the New Narrative, and the more I did this, the better I would feel. Life without it is a mistake, I’d know, so there would be no doubt in my mind of its importance, no matter what anyone else said. The effect of day-to-day power-politics and the demands of instrumental rationality would be softened by my assurance that there was more to life, and as long as I stuck with the Narrative, I was doing the right thing, and all was ok with the world.

I would meet non-believers with a missionary zeal. I would want to save them too, and communicate the revelations I had had. I would shake my head sadly to watch them go about their meaning-poor lives. They had not got to the stage I had, I’d think, they were not far enough along the road. They have not seen the True Light. They do not understand how ultimately awful and hollow existence is without the New Narrative, because they have not thought about it enough.

I could still consider and contemplate, so long as it was refracted through the New Narrative, and the Narrative itself was ring-fenced as a no-go area. In fact I’m sure it would be a boost to have whole new areas of thinking to explore, and artistic inspiration to be had.

The thought I astonished myself with was that to all intents and purposes my behaviour, though coming from a different justification, would appear identical with someone of a deeply religious conviction. The truth of the New Narrative would not matter - a faith is a faith.

All the stresses and strains of life, all the complications and tragedies, would be swaddled by the comforts of having the Narrative. No more existential-abyss staring. I’ve done that, I'd think, that was a mere phase that led to this.

A life at peace, secure and confident in my beliefs, with a comforting transcendental dream of God or Gods, and a heavenly realm, to escape into at will, without any guilt or doubt that doing so wasn’t the logical, justified, good thing to do...

Simon Mayo's Drive Time

Of course, this is a fantasy. I almost wish I could do it. If I ever do become intensely religious over-night, this is very possibly what has happened.

But in truth, though I make a big noise about my nihilistic tendencies and existential angst, I don’t think in such a bleak way most of the time. Well, not all of the time, anyway. I don’t think it is really possible to know “the true nature of reality” at all, but any reaction we have to knowledge is all about what we bring to the table ourselves. We don't have to react with anguish. I do think any step towards knowing the nature of reality can, and should, be possible to experience as an enlightening, mind-blowing, awe-inspiring and – yes – empowering thing, if you just approach it right, with an open and clear mind, letting go of your day-to-day angst.

Anyway, life is full of beauty and wonder and laughter and meaning, actually, on that small-scale local-sphere level. You just have be in the right mood, receptive to it, know where to find it, and recognise it and appreciate it when you do. And learn to shrug off that instrumental rationality stuff when it gets too much – avert the gaze, go check something different out, enjoy the glorious so-called "irrelevancies" of life, they are as important as anything else, if you want or need them to be.

Ultimately meaningless or not, being in the world is utterly, berserkly, fascinating. There is so much out there to check. If you ever have a problem with existential ennui and encroaching nihilism, it’s usually no more then a sign that you’ve got stuck in a rut and need a change of mental scenery: go learn something new, get out more, speak to someone different, travel a bit maybe.

I mean, what was I thinking anyway? I love the ultimate, empty, meaninglessness of existence, that stuff fills me with a buzzy rapture, the sublime mystery of that is my religion – it’s just the humdrum, work-a-day, over-familiar human sphere that I often find restrictive, grey and mean – that is the problem.

Whatever, that’s enough. Probably the most telling thing of all is the fact that if I’d just turned Simon Mayo on, none of this would have happened. It’s drive time, folks. I'm off to laugh heartily into the howling abyss for a bit. Ha ha.

And now I'm going to talk about telepathy.

I know what you’re thinking: Telepathy? Really, now, Thomas?

Never let it be said that this blog shies away from the real, important, practical issues on everyone’s lips. Yes I’m going to talk about telepathy, which I’m sure is a topic that has been playing on your mind too, dear reader.

Mmn. Ok, it’s not my intention to get all sci-fi, or even new-age, on your ass. I actually want to talk about the function of language, which is what I’m going to do, and the telepathy angle is just a (admittedly peculiar) way to do that.

Having been a fan of both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in my time, what language is and what language does is something I’ve hmmm'd on extensively; and being currently a newspaper man, the use (and abuse) of words is something I continue to ponder, mostly to my own aimless distraction. Which is why it’d be nice to siphon some of it off here.

So here’s something language-related that’s bugged me for some time: I saw this guy giving a talk a couple of years back, and was generally impressed with the massively interesting and quite important stuff he was doing. However, I found myself wary about embracing his enthusiasm for one thing. He said something like (I paraphrase): “Wouldn’t it be good if we could just bypass language altogether and directly communicate our thoughts and feelings from mind to mind.” He seemed to think this would clear up arguments and misunderstandings with his spouse.

I’ll admit that, like many people, I have fantasised in the past about being able to see into the minds of others, and thought how much easier life would be if I could do that. I’ve also, in moments when I’ve felt misunderstood and lacking sympathy, wished I could just show someone what was going on in my head so they would get how I felt and understand what I understood.

But that kind of thing would only work as a one-off, if you were the only one with that power and could turn it on and off. If we all woke up tomorrow able to see and feel the inner-most workings of each other’s headspace, I think it would be nothing less than the end of civilisation as we know it.

FREUD

Freud’s theories may have been largely discarded as science – his constructed model of ‘the psyche’ has little in the way of research evidence to back it up, and much of the detail just looks bizarre and wrong-headed in the light of modern psychology; but the basic notion of the unconscious still rings true to some extent: The idea that we really are not entirely rational creatures under the surface, and that there must be all kinds of processes going on within us that we’re just not aware of on a day-to-day conscious level seems self-evident.

Freud was convinced that our conscious selves – our identity, our persona, how we think of ourselves and present ourselves to others – is only the tip of the iceberg of the full entity that is us.

Beneath the surface everyone is a seething mass of childish, irrational, reactive animal urges, fears and desires that are necessarily kept repressed and hidden from the world - to the extent we ourselves barely acknowledge or understand them. This is true of everyone, no matter how sophisticated, controlled and professional they appear on the outside, from the Queen to Jeremy Paxman to Bez (some are better at it than others). How aware or unaware of this stuff we are is debatable, but we certainly need to learn, consciously or unconsciously, to keep it in check to participate in society as a responsible adult.

But just because this stuff is kept in check, doesn’t mean it's not there – and more importantly, thought Freud, these basic fears and desires actually influence our so-called ‘rational’ decisions and behaviour much, much more than we would like to admit: We tend to come up with rational explanations for our actions afterwards, but it’s obvious there is more to our behaviour than simple logical thought.

In short the idea that human nature and human society is driven by enlightened, logical rationality is a complete myth – reason is at best a regulatory tempering force, and a tool for use, in how we our go about our lives.

I must say personal experience of living in ‘rational society’ (not to mention living with myself and my own weather-like temperament and unmanageable whims) has led me to have a hell of a lot of sympathy with this aspect of Freud. Anyone who has spent time delving into the dispassionate, analytical world of philosophy and psychology and then turned their gaze once more on the barely-sentient everyday politics of human relationships will know the world really does not run on reflective rationality.

But never mind the unconscious – simply knowing what is going on in everyone’s heads, conscious or not, all the time would make any kind of business-like interaction or professional detachment impossible to maintain. Imagine if every minor resentment, annoyance or uncharitable thought you had was immediately known by everyone around you – or how you would feel if you immediately knew everyone else's. That’s bad enough, but it would be so much more than that – everyone would know how you were feeling all the time: There would be no way to hide boredom, reluctance, anger, fear, disdain, discomfort, silliness – or your preference for the company of certain people over others – or, God forbid, desire, neediness and lust.

Everyone’s internal landscape must be so unique, dense and complex that it may as well be an alien world. We would all have to become inconceivably more understanding and forgiving of others if we were going to be party to everyone’s inner-most secrets and feelings all the time. Just to glimpse what is going on inside someone is to know what it is like to be them, in the raw. I suspect the experience would be so over-whelming we would never recover from it.

NIETZSCHE

Which tells us something about the function language plays. It is not, and has never been, simply for transferring dry information. It allows us to choose what we reveal or what we keep secret, it gives us a chance to control how we present ourselves. It acts as a buffer and is also a diplomatic translation tool that enables us to communicate sensibly, at a distance. It acts as both conduit and filter, and is to some extent a protective mask for our inner landscape.

I suppose at this point some readers might be raising an objecting finger - am I suggesting it's a bad thing to be honest and open? Am I advocating deception and secrecy? Aren't I being be pretty down on the purity of straight-forward truthfulness? Why should we have to hide our true selves?

Well, dear, dear, reader, I raise you Nietzsche. Things are not as simple as 'truth' and 'lie', said the walrus-‘tached one, not when it comes to how language is used. There are, in fact, many shades of grey between those supposed exclusive opposites.

Certainly there are lies - out-and-out untruths – things that are demonstrably not the case - complete fabrications, deliberately created - that you could utter, but this is not really our concern here.

Nietzsche's concern is what we mean by truth: Because 'truth' is a very difficult thing to pin down. “Every word is a prejudice” said he - one of my all-time favourite lines because it so succinctly sums up his view of language: The very words you select to convey information necessarily spin it in a particular way. Any expression in words will only highlight a small, limited aspect of the concept or situation you are dealing with, a concise and contained package of signs that gestures towards a wider reality and tries to pin it down in finite terms.

There's a whole raft of decisions that need to be made before you float an utterance out from your gob: What words are you going to use, what angle are you going to come at it from, how will you start, what are you going to include, what are you going to leave out, what are you going to highlight or prioritise as important? All of these elements serve to present the information in a way you want it presented, designed to have a particular impact. There are possibly infinite variations, all of which are 'true', in that the facts are the same, despite very different trajectories.

It sounds like I’m talking about spin, but it’s not necessarily deliberately manipulative or disingenuous – often you will express things the way you have picked up on them, the way you see or interpret them, and prioritise what is genuinely most important to you at that moment. In fact you can’t do anything else, but also, in fact, it’s very rare you will ever say anything that isn’t in some way in your interests to say, and pretending this is the same as speaking the whole dry truth is either naive or flat-out bogus.

Neitzsche was very aware of the power politics at work in language – far from simply conveying facts, language’s function is very much to advance the agenda of the speaker – to have an effect on the behaviour or thinking of the recipient. In the first chapter of Beyond Good and Evil he essentially suggests that even the most dry and rational of philosophical writings are trying to impose the author’s values and preferences on the reader – far from being the dispassionate, open minded explorations they pretend to be, they all start with an agenda, based on the writer's value system, and seek to persuade the reader towards it.

The manipulation of language for social effect is so common we do it unconsciously and when others do it to us it often slips under the radar. We notice it in politicians because we’ve learnt to look for it, but it happens everywhere – from polite small talk with strangers to the dynamics between loved ones, from interactions in the workplace to (especially) advertising and business, the media and the law courts. Where there are people trying to live together there will be power politics, and where there is power politics it will infuse language.

But again I should stress that language has to be prejudiced – it has to take a perspective. At the end of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche laments how his ideas look dull and dead now they have been immortalised on the page, that he hasn’t represented the vibrant flux of his thoughts fully. We speak only interpretations and perspectives – the true nature of things is not to be pinned down in words. The way that can be spoken of is not the constant way, the name that can be named is not the constant name...

Language is not truth, it is a tool. Together with non-verbal cues, it’s the primary social tool of our species, massively powerful in the effect it can have. As much as we may sneer and bemoan how much easier it would be if we could communicate simply and directly, language exists as it is for a reason – because we need it that way to protect ourselves, to advance our cause and translate our thoughts and feelings. If we were to take this away, to bypass this with telepathy, everything would change – millennia of social development, the whole structure of our society, would be redundant.

WITTGENSTEIN

Nietzsche’s pre-occupation with language and its function is nothing compared to Wittgenstein – no philosopher took language apart as brilliantly as that guy.

There are echoes of Nietzsche’s assertion that language is not simply a logical conveyance of information in Wittgenstein’s later work Philosophical Investigations, particularly in the idea of language games – that the way people use language falls into different categories, each with its own set of rules, that language is woven into the various activities and modes of being we can slip into. Language is an extension of action and behaviour and the way we use it – for example commanding, requesting, pleading, joking, debating - denotes which mode we are in, and requires a response appropriate to that language game.

To understand language you really have to understand human interaction – Wittgenstein contended that without interaction it would be impossible to learn language in the first place – without feedback from others in active situations there would be nothing to tie the system of rules and symbols to. You cannot learn language by watching TV in a room on your own, and you cannot not develop your own language on a desert island on your own - you need to communicate with at least one responsive other.

The real reason Wittegenstein was so interested in language was that for him language, logic and consciousness are inseparable. Thought and language develop side by side, and both through communication and interaction with the world and others – language does not just express thought; thought is influenced by language, since language solidifies and gives shape to concepts, perspectives and ways of thinking – it structures thought, to the extent that developing language may be essential to developing a reflective consciousness, certainly to developing rationality.

It’s easy to see why – without language we have no way to consistently pin down thoughts and concepts, let alone analyze them; and in having to consider how we are going to present our thoughts in language, it makes us analyze and reflect on them.

Without the need for, and practice of, communication with others, there is really no need to be that conscious or reflective at all. Language does not arise, neither does rational thought.

Which raises the point – if we scrap language, do we become less conscious, less rational? If we have direct access to each others’ minds, would we lose our individual identity altogether and no longer have the need for considered communication; or would we have to develop a new 'language' of thought behaviour?

WE EXPLORED SOME THINGS

I don’t think for a second that the kind of total mind-merge telepathy I’ve been considering is possible at all – it seems a condition of consciousness that each perspective is isolated.

So, maybe the above is so much blather about nothing. But we’ve explored some things, and if nothing else it demonstrates that language is not just something we do to tell each other stuff – it is essential to who and what we are, and awesomely sophisticated.

Wishing that we could bypass words and see directly into each other is, I suggest, a folly, fraught with unforeseen problems, and underestimates what language does.

A telepathic society would be unrecognisable to us. It sure as hell wouldn’t look like it does in sci-fi movies, where telepathic aliens are just like us but a bit quieter, all peace-nik and touchy-feely and possibly bald. No: With that kind of power, and without language, we wouldn’t be looking at conscious individuals as we currently understand the concept at all – we would have transformed into something else entirely. That would no longer be human life as we know it.

Careful what you wish for. I’ll be monitoring your thoughts.

Consciousness ~ the kernal that will not be cracked (#2): HIVE MINDS

The attached PPT is from the first ever talk I did for the first ever Hmmm Squad group meeting.

Thought it’d be fun to throw up some far-out pictures and videos of ANTS and WIERD SEA CREATURES, because 1) They are hellish cool and 2) they’re so alien that they stretch our understanding of what living things are like - and so raise some profound, thought-provoking questions for the philosophically inclined...

I’ve rarely seen these creatures discussed in standard philosophy textbooks. But: When I was teaching philosophy of mind I found I kept using these examples when discussing certain ideas. This came out of that.

There’s not a massive amount of explanation in the PPT – was meant to be accompanied by me talking and that, so some stuff may not come across (and you’ve missed out on my gags). Ah, well. I’m sure you can do your own research on the things shown (check out honey pot ants - URGH!) – there’s this thing called the internets, you know. Seriously though, google siphonophores, or their real relevance will be lost - they are extremely hard to classify, with individual creatures tied together (some responsible for eating, some responsible for movement, like organs in a body) in a colony that acts like one organism.

But I should, at least, explain that China/Satellite/Robot diagram...

The China Brain:

The China Brain or China Mind* scenario is designed to explore the idea that consciousness arises out of complex information processing.

It’s related to the idea that if info processing just gets complex enough, then you start getting thoughts about thoughts – or rather information processing about the information processing you’re doing – ie higher level, second-tier processing - feedback, monitoring and reflection: This higher-order thinking is what “consciousness” is.

The neurons in the brain all carry out simple information processing functions, which on their own are just single mechanical actions, like chips in a computer – but when they are all put together, communicating with each other, could a “mind” arise? Is the whole “greater than the sum of its parts"?** Is that how consciousness happens?

To explore that question, the likes of Lawrence Davis and Ned Block came up with this analogy: Imagine everyone in China is asked to work together to control a big robot. Everyone is assigned one simple task to carry out, to act like neurons in the robot’s “brain”. Each individual performs their function and they communicate via walkie-talkies to co-ordinate their actions.

The results of everyone’s activity is sent up to a satellite. That processes the information and transmits the resulting commands to a MASSIVE ROBOT (awesome). That, simplified, is the China Brain scenario.

So – people are neurons, the satellite is the core hub of the brain processing their activity and bring it all together, and the robot is the body. Now the key question: Could we then say that that robot was conscious? Would an over-all CHINA MIND come into existence?

Common sense would appear to say NO, said Ned Block. No matter how well co-ordinated the Chinese people’s actions, there would still just be a lot of individuals working together. You could not say "China" had a single mind or self, that could experience things the way we do.

Yes, it would create a certain zeitgeist or culture amongst the Chinese people, and the robot would have characteristic responses and actions and ways of doing things – like any society working and living together does. But that is not the same as a fully CONSCIOUS identity and perspective. It is still a bunch of people moving as one, not a single unique being – the “China mind” remains a metaphor, no more – China doesn’t actually have a single mind, it just outwardly acts like something that does.

At least that’s how the China Brain idea is usually interpreted. In this PPT I speculate wildly about social insects and siphonores (ie colonies and "super-organisms") and hmmm about the idea of hive minds – and in the process realise I’m not so sure about the "common sense" pooh-poohing of the “China Mind”.

It seems to me the most essential question in this is what exactly is ONE thing and what is MANY things? – the clear division between fundamental concepts such as “single” and “multiple” here start to look more hazy and less defined – and I’m quite convinced this issue is at the heart of understanding consciousness, since consciousness has to be both – a complex communication between parts, and yet one single perspective, one whole thing. There is a paradox right at the centre of consciousness - and that's what makes it so tricksy. Tricksy, tricksy.

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* (aka the Chinese Nation or Chinese Gym – variations on the idea have been used by many different philosophers.)

** (look up the term "Supervenience" if you want to explore that idea further.)