Reality and Its Dreams

Raymond Geuss

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780674968950
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Raymond Geuss is one of the most inventive and distinctive voices in contemporary political philosophy and a trenchant critic of the field's dominant assumptions. In Reality and Its Dreams, he challenges the "normative turn" in political philosophy—the idea that the right approach to politics is to start from thinking abstractly about our own normative views and then, when they have been clarified and systematized, apply them to judging political structures, decisions, and events. Rather, the study of politics should be focused on the sphere of real politics, not least because normative judgments always arise from concrete historical configurations of power, including ideological power.It is possible to do this without succumbing to a numbing or toxic form of relativism or abandoning utopianism, although utopianism needs to be reunderstood. The utopian impulse is not an attempt to describe a perfect society but an impulse to think the impossible in politics, to articulate deep-seated desires that cannot be realized under current conditions, and to imagine how conditions that seem invariant can be changed.Geuss ranges widely across philosophy, literature, and art, exploring past and present ideas about such subjects as envy, love, satire, and evil and the work of figures as diverse as John Rawls, St. Augustine, Rabelais, and Russell Brand. His essays provide a bracing critique of ideas, too often unexamined, that shape and misshape our intellectual and political worlds.

1

Dystopia: The Elements

THE ACADEMIC MOVEMENT known as “analytic philosophy” had its origin in the first half of the twentieth century in Vienna and Cambridge.¹ It is also well known that this movement was originally held together by the credo of a small group of philosophers who had an explicit agenda and strongly held views about how this agenda was to be pursued. Philosophy, they thought, needed to be brought into the “modern” world, by which they meant the world of “science.” The model of “science,” however, was modern natural science. In “science,” it was thought, theories were formulated in the language of mathematics and empirical methods were used to test them. The huge success of technology in applying scientific theories and thereby allowing us to predict and control natural processes was the best possible indication that “scientific method” held the key to understanding the world. Philosophy could stop being a children’s playground where rival groups squabbled incessantly without ever being able to agree on anything and where there was no such thing as cumulative progress in cognition, only if it, too, could find its own appropriate analogue to the “scientific method.” These philosophers had a number of ideas about how to proceed in developing and deploying such a method. Philosophy, they thought, was “analysis” (hence the name of the movement). The concepts we use in everyday life, in our beliefs and arguments, and that are implicit in our ways of dealing with the world are mostly vague and unclear, and what is more such concepts usually occur not as sharply illuminated individuals but in obscure clumps in which (strictly) conceptual, theoretical, empirical, and often also associatively emotive elements are complexly copresent. The task of the philosopher is to cut paths through this undergrowth separating the different strands and analyzing them into their elements. So do not investigate the uses to which our concepts are generally put, the inherent plausibility or empirical well-foundedness of our convictions, or the truth of our beliefs—to do that is the job of one or another of the “special” sciences. The philosopher should take these concepts and beliefs as given and try to analyze their “meaning.” This limitation is construed positively as a laudable form of modesty, or recognizing one’s own limits, or as a necessary consequence of the modern principle of division of labor. It turns out that not only “everyday concepts” are in need of clarification and analysis; some more informal, or (as yet) insufficiently mathematized, kinds of science can benefit from the same treatment. After analysis of concepts, there is perhaps a further task of reconstructing the formal structure of the scientific and everyday theories which lie behind our everyday beliefs. This is mostly assumed to be a relatively simple matter of putting the newly clarified concepts in formally specified relations to one another and perhaps specifying in an equally simple way their relation to possible modes of verification. However, everything relating to the actual verification of a theory, the collection and evaluation of evidence, decisions about which sets of concepts were more insightful (as opposed to which were “clearer”), which hypotheses were more fruitful, what the implications of acting on one set of hypotheses rather than another might be—all of these were matters that were to be considered outside the purview of philosophy altogether. Seen from an external point of view and a sufficient distance, one can in retrospect discover ethical, moral, and possibly even aesthetic motives that played a role in the genesis of analytic philosophy. Some of the early supporters of the movement seem clearly to have been strongly influenced by a moral predilection for a certain kind of intellectual sobriety, or an aesthetic liking the simple, the plain, the “pure,” and the unpretentious,² or to have had an especially highly developed psychological need for “certainty.” In some cases the absolute aversion to “theology” in all its forms seemed to have political roots in a dislike of the forms of political absolutism that have sometimes been associated in the West with certain forms of theological thinking. It is one of the weaknesses of the movement that for its own internal reasons it was never able to acknowledge and hence give any coherent and articulated account of these motives. The utopia of the early analytic philosophers was a society in which “science” had completely replaced the traditional forms of humanistic culture, especially art, rhetoric, and religion, and had seen itself established as the sole guide to sensible human action. “Scientific method” was to set the terms within which any serious philosophical or political discussion could be conducted.

The word utopia, coined by Thomas Moore in the 16th century,³ is ambiguous because the first letter u in the Latin (and then the English) form of the word can represent either one of two different possible sounds in the notional original Greek: ou (not) or eu (good). So “Utopia” is either “Noplace” or “Goodplace.” More’s island, as described, is not just a nonexistent good place but an ideally good place, and this third semantic element—that “utopia” is not just good but ideally good, a place of perfect, unsurpassable goodness—has now become part of the meaning of the term.

Utopian thinking, if one means by that the imaginary construction in thought of an ideally good place, is a two-edged sword. Speculation of the kind that finds its expression in utopianism is often associated with setting free human impulses and powers that can easily escape our control. There are at least two very different ways in which utopian political projects can fail. First of all, the project can simply fail to attain the concrete goals it has clearly set itself, such as Shakespeare’s “hang all the lawyers,” the redistribution of land, the abolition of money, the disbanding of police forces, or what have you. However, the project can also fail because it turns out that when its concrete goals have been attained, the resulting utopian state for whatever reason no longer seems so desirable. Simply killing the king does not get you anywhere if he is succeeded by a Lord Protector who is just as unsatisfactory. In fact, of course, it is a standard liberal fear that the ability of utopian projects to muster some of the apparently more prepossessing human sentiments in support of their goals represents a special danger. To be able to cloak a course of action in a mantle of disinterested commitment to what is ostensibly god’s command, a demand of justice, or a necessary part of the common good is, they claim, often a way of reducing the ethical barriers that limit human ruthlessness.

Thinking about ideally good societies naturally leads one to wonder about societies that are particularly deficient, humanly especially unpleasant, or otherwise reprehensible. Formed by analogy to More’s coinage, the word dystopia (from the Greek dus/dys: “bad”) is now used to refer to an (imaginary) ideally bad society. It is important to keep in mind that utopia/dystopia have their origins in a specific literary work and have remained to some extent literary genres. They are not intended to be realistic sociological descriptions of any given society, but rather imaginative constructs the purpose of which is to allow us to get aspects of our world into sharper focus in the interests of evaluating features of it that might otherwise fail to be fully appreciated. More’s Utopia presents a communist society as a foil to the primitive accumulation of capital in the sixteenth century, and Orwell’s dystopian 1984 now looks more realistic in our world of virtually universal electronic surveillance than it did when it was written in the late 1940s as a criticism of what at that time were no more than primitive anticipations of the NSA.

Philosophical discussion can sometimes have the effect of sharpening some oppositions, but if sufficiently systematically pursued, it can also sometimes have what is something like the opposite effect of effacing the highly distinctive profile certain positions originally possessed. As objections are raised and responded to, distinctions proliferate and qualifications are added, more and more revisions are made, and as more and more epicycles are introduced, the initial motivation gets lost.

For a hundred years now “analytic philosophy” has been involved in such a continuous and progressive process of historical abrasion. One can have two different attitudes toward this process. Should one admire the way in which the approach has become “more sophisticated” with the passing of time or feel that it has lost the plot and that its practitioners are now like latter-day “Arval Brothers” going through the motions of an archaic ritual while singing words that no longer make any sense to them? Historically, however, the more extensive and deeper the dominance of “analytic philosophy” in the established institutions (universities, journals, foundations), the less sharply outlined and more mealymouthed the originally provocative program has become, but also the less willing philosophers seem to have become to reflect on the presuppositions and the implications of doing philosophy in this way. Is anything left of the original utopian hopes of analytic philosophy? If these were connected with the use of a certain method, how do things stand with that method today?

A “method” is generally a specified sequences of steps directed at allowing someone to attain a certain end or goal. What “method” is right will depend on what the goal is, and in the case of forms of cognition, that will mean what one wants to find out and the conditions under which one is investigating. If I want to find someone’s telephone number and have an old-style telephone book, a good method will be to search alphabetically for the surname of the party whose number I am looking for. If I am speaking to Information, a good method will be to pronounce the name and perhaps also the address very distinctly into the receiver. Sometimes internal evidence will make clear some of the conditions that need to be fulfilled before a method can be applied. If the first step is “count the number of buttons” and the coat does not have any buttons, the method will not apply, but there will be a limit to how far such internal evidence can lead. The more formalist the approach one takes to a “method,” the less the “method” will be able to comment on itself. In general, it seems reasonable to distinguish between what we might call “the method itself,” formulated in a relatively abstract way—“open the telephone book and look alphabetically at the surnames”—a single actual instance of applying that method, and the various general claims that might be made about the usefulness of the method, the conditions under which it can most usefully (or at all) be applied, and what kind of results one might expect from using it. So, for instance, in the early modern period Newton formulated a series of laws with the help of which one could explain and predict the motion of bodies. When one could explain some natural phenomenon by reference to these laws, one spoke of a “mechanical” explanation. One might then become so impressed by the beauty, simplicity, and explanatory power of such “mechanical explanations” that one might try to extend the domain of phenomena of which a mechanical explanation can be given. If one were in a particularly exalted mood, one might even claim that one could give such a mechanical explanation of (virtually) everything. How far does the realm of phenomena extend for which one can give such an explanation? The mere concept of a mechanical explanation alone tells one nothing about this, rather a theoretical statement about the extent of mechanical explanation—about what sorts of phenomena will admit this kind of explanation and what kind of phenomena will not—will be a statement of a completely different kind. Let’s call that a “program.”

Programs can be more or less theoretically ambitious, and they can be more or less detailed in what they purport to encompass. So a program might be minimalist: “In some cases natural phenomena can be explained ‘mechanically,’ so it is never a good idea to exclude from the start the possibility of giving a mechanical explanation.” Or somewhat more positively one could claim: “It is always useful to start by seeing whether one can find a mechanical explanation, and only when that shows itself to be unavailable should one look for other ways of trying to make sense of whatever phenomenon it is one is investigating.” Or even more positively: “As far as forms of motion in this domain (for example, planetary motion in our solar system) are concerned, the best explanations will turn out finally to be mechanical.” The strongest version of this would, of course, be that (finally) all explanations will be “mechanical,” that is, will be capable of being couched in terms of applications of the Newtonian laws to specific configurations of material elements. So “programs” are more like what Kant calls “regulative principles” than sets of descriptive or theoretical assertions. That is, their use and intention is to point researchers in a certain direction and recommend a mode of proceeding, rather than making any kind of substantive claim. Of course, one can in one sense gather “evidence” for or against a program, but the way this “evidence” bears on evaluating the program will be different from the way a simple observation might confirm or refute a theory. If I say, “In historical explanation always look for psychological explanations (or economic factors, or environmental causes or institutional reasons),” I can marshal evidence in the form of acknowledged good explanations that have the required form or I can fail to be able to find such explanation. This is different from what happens when I am trying to evaluate a specific (historical) claim such as “the incidence of kuru fell in New Guinea in the 1970s because the authorities began strictly to enforce the prohibition on cannibalism (and kuru is caused by eating human brains containing the pathogen).”

I wish to claim that a full-blown “philosophy” (in the traditional sense) is something different from a philosophical “program.” A “program” can be more or less modest in its claims, but a “philosophy” has to make something like what Hegel would have called a claim of “reason” not just of the “understanding,” that is, a totalizing or maximalist claim. So a “mechanistic program” might merely say it was in general a good idea to start by looking for mechanical explanations, but a “mechanistic philosophy” would be one that was committed to the universality, self-sufficiency, and exclusiveness of mechanical explanations. Mechanical explanations could always be given (for any phenomenon that was at all significant and capable of explanation at all), they were always sufficient in themselves, and they needed nothing else to supplement them.

So one can distinguish in principle four slightly different things:

1. An “analytical method,” a relatively abstractly defined set of procedures about what to look for and how to proceed (based on dividing complex meaning structures into their elementary parts and specifying clearly the way those parts related to each other and to some purported source of authority [usually, “experience”]).

2. A specific application of that method to some concrete case, domain, or problem.

3. The “analytic program” (in a more extensive or less extensive form).

4. “Analytic philosophy,” which makes some kind of claim to “totality” for the analytic method, that is, it asserts that the method has (virtually) universal application and needs nothing else to support it; it also tells you why the universal application of the method is possible and important, why this is relevant, and why you will not be leaving anything else of importance out, if you simply use the method.

It does seem to be a deeply rooted feature of modern life that we sometimes feel the need to break down complex unities into their elements. We find that this gives us a sense of understanding and control, and perhaps there are also various other advantages sometimes associated with this way of proceeding. And what reason could one have to object in principle to the use of this method, where appropriate? However, the fact that we all do occasionally proceed by analyzing complex cases into their element or distinguishing between different meanings of “the same” words does not in the least indicate a commitment to “analytic philosophy” in any serious sense. Not, at any rate, if “analytic philosophy” retains any commitment to some of its earlier slogans such as “philosophy is analysis of language, or analysis of concepts [sotto voce: and nothing but analysis of language]” or “all philosophical problems are problems of language.”

Analytic philosophy in its original form was cognitively comfortable with the way science was actually organized—it was not fomenting anything like a revolution in science. Science was to be accepted as it was, to be sure formally tarted up a bit—cleaned and brushed, as it were—and put into the correct “logical” form, but not questioned in any significant way. The fact that what philosophers called the “logical form” was not formally interesting enough to attract the attention of a serious mathematician for a moment did not seem to matter, nor did the fact that empirical science had seemed to get on perfectly well without philosophical “analysis” and showed every sign of continuing to do so. The suspicion that despite the perfectly honest protests of some of its earlier, especially Viennese, devotees, analytical philosophy had a proselytizingly conformist streak seemed more and more difficult to suppress.

To be more precise, each of the two subgroups into which the analytic movement divided had its own sacred cow. For one group (“ideal-language philosophers” or “positivists” of the stricter observance) this was “science.” For the second group “ordinary language” was not in all its particular manifestations sacred and thus to be held absolutely inviolate; still it was considered fundamentally sound and a source of healthy insight and, for some, potentially spiritual reinvigoration. “Science” (and “ordinary language”) are “really” “in order” in themselves and can take care of themselves. They need philosophy only at best as a form of minor therapy and prophylaxis to protect them from being misunderstood. Philosophical “problems” characteristically arose when language was on day release from its workaday task of ensuring smooth communication or when the clear and austere structures of science were misinterpreted by being incorrectly recast in a medium that was foreign to them. The task of philosophy is to prevent these avoidable aberrations and to untangle them if they arise. Many of these misapprehensions in fact arise because people have become fixated on a historically superseded stage of philosophical inquiry. Either they continue using obsolete scientific categories that have passed into philosophical usage and become ossified there—“substances,” “essences,” “principles of natural teleology”—or they fail to understand something about the way ordinary language works and they try to parse it in conceptually inappropriate ways, by, for instance, construing what are in fact performatives as if they were simple descriptive statements. Very often, then, philosophy is called on to clear up problems it has itself (in a previous incarnation) generated. Beyond cleaning up its own mess, it does not seem to have much of a point apart perhaps from giving secondhand overviews or superficial syntheses of the salient results of science or of some of their more interesting procedures. Much of this might be of some aesthetic, but little cognitive, interest.

So does analytic philosophy tend to foster a naive trust with respect to and excessive solicitude for certain kinds of facts—the “facts” of established sciences and the “facts...