Philosophy in a Technological World

Gods and Titans

James Tartaglia

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350070127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geist & Körper in der Philosophie

Philosophy has come to seem like a specialist interest with little or no influence on our lives. On the contrary, argues James Tartaglia, it was the philosophy of materialism which taught us to turn from the gods to seek practical assistance from the titans, thereby reversing the moral of an ancient Greek myth to inspire the building of today's technological world. As the largely unreflected belief-system it has now become, materialism continues to steer the direction of technological development, while making us think this direction is inevitable. By drawing on neglected idealist traditions of philosophy, Tartaglia argues for a new way of looking at reality which asserts our freedom to choose, reaffirms and builds upon our ordinary, everyday understanding, and motivates us to convert technological innovation into a process driven by public rationality and consent. With discussions ranging from consciousness, determinism and personal identity, to post-truth culture, ego-death and video games, this clear and accessible book will be of wide interest.

1

A World Without Philosophy

§1. Imagining the world without philosophy

Without philosophy we would not be where we are now. In a trivial sense this is obvious, for we would not be where we are without tennis either, although there would be other games to build lives around. But without philosophy we might still be running with the animals. Natural philosophical curiosity about the ultimate nature of reality led to the cataloguing of fundamental elements and forces. It led to science. Perhaps the desire to master observable regularities could have taken us down that road in some other way, but speculation about what lay behind those regularities was the philosophical impulse which actually delivered. Similarly, curiosity about the meaning of life led us to the supernatural realm of religion. It is hard to imagine ritual practices developing without the gods they were meant to appease, and those gods were another explanatory principle arising from philosophical curiosity; another ultimate reality to stand behind the commonplace. Without religion, which is always philosophical at heart, we would have not been inspired, united and divided in the ways which led to our civilizations. We might not have had art, given that other animals do not and its earliest extant forms evidence religious inspiration. Could we have arrived somewhere like this without philosophy? Nobody knows. But it was philosophy that sought to draw a line between us and the other animals, and looking about us now, it seems to have succeeded.

Many would be prepared to celebrate the philosophical instinct, broadly construed, as an ancient impetus to all we were subsequently to achieve. But whatever might be thought about philosophy’s historical role in the emergence of science and religion, both of these are clearly integral to our current situation. Without science and the technology it facilitates, and vice versa, we would be unceremoniously returned to the Stone Age. And if religious faith were to suddenly collapse among the large and growing majority of the world’s population who have it, we have no idea what chaos might ensue; even militant atheists surely envisage a very gradual transition. It is hard to imagine our world without science and religion, then. But what would it be like without philosophy? Denouncements of philosophy have reached a crescendo in recent times, so let us try to imagine the situation being hoped for.

Universities would have one less kind of degree to offer, but would soon make up the numbers elsewhere. Academic philosophers would be out of a job, but they might be able to reapply their skills to science, mathematics, literature or history. The educated public would have one less field of interest to engage them, so lightly worn copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra would have to part company from The Picture of Dorian Gray, The God Delusion and travel guides on casually erudite bookshelves.

But on second thoughts, universities would now have to be very careful what they were teaching, since philosophy has spread widely across the humanities and social sciences; anything written before the ban might be infected to some degree. Even natural scientists might sometimes feel the inclination to wax philosophical during the course of a one-hour lecture, so that would have to be curbed. And as for those casually erudite bookshelves, only the travel guides would really be safe. We might be able to save Dorian Gray, if it could be reworked to make it more boring, but not The God Delusion. There would have to be a widespread decimation of the popular science idiom which has filled a void left by religions and their philosophies in many people’s lives. They usually contain plenty of philosophical speculation worked around reports from the scientific frontiers, since there is philosophical interest in alternative realities, the origins of the universe, human nature, eternal life, and so on. Perhaps we would travel more in a philosophy-free world, thereby broadening our minds in this other tried-and-tested fashion.

This may all be considered inconsequential on the grounds that philosophy is entertainment. We might be squeamish about tampering with great works of literature, theatre, film, music, poetry, paintings, conceptual art, etc., but you could hardly leave it intact in a world free of philosophy, lest it inspire the wrong thoughts. But since philosophy has no clear connection to what gets food on the table, and the extensive redactions to Shakespeare would no doubt be done expertly, let us reserve judgement for now and turn to something more practical.₁

Politics is underpinned by philosophical commitment. Left- and right-wing politicians have different views about how society should be organized, in line with how they think we ought to live. In the background of their debates are left- or right-wing academics who use evidence to support action-plans for implementation. But motivating such plans are philosophical views, such as that states should try to maximise happiness, not interfere with individual liberties, and so on. These views emerged from reflection on what we should all desire. This is a paradigmatically philosophical notion because it alludes to a meaning of life, despite the fact that only the religious might instinctively make the connection nowadays. But the connection is there, because nothing could better secure the ‘should’ of what we should all desire, than the ‘is’ of a meaningful reality in which we have our place, such that we should all desire something because the nature of reality dictates that we should bring it about; just as the nature of reality dictates that the apple fall from the tree. Thoughts about what we should all desire become less philosophical, and more practical, when the scope of the ‘should’ reduces to ‘should in order to bring about such and such results’. And less philosophical still when the ‘we’ reduces to ‘we people of this nation’ or ‘we workers’. But given the root of all such thoughts, they remain very philosophical.

If philosophy were to go then politicians could no longer lay claim to deep commitments. But you might think this would be no bad thing on the grounds that real political action happens in debates about implementation. Still, it is hard to imagine political life without some kind of ideological split. We cannot reduce it to disagreements about implementation plans without deciding what we want to implement, but we can hardly agree on how we should live without engaging in exactly the kind of philosophical debate we are trying to eradicate.

Two possibilities suggest themselves. The softer one would be to leave the politicians with their desires for different outcomes, and eradicate reflection on the reasonableness of such desires. Politicians would desire what they desire now, draw up implementation strategies, and in democracies, the people would decide which strategies they desired. ‘Wrong’ would mean ‘not part of the world which I, as a matter of brute fact, desire’. This is a compromise, however, because we would be leaving past philosophy embedded to be passed down the generations. The harder option would be to eradicate conflicting desires. The problem then arises of what we are trying to achieve, but perhaps neuroscience could settle the matter by looking inside our brains. They are physical things which evolved in similar circumstances, so it seems reasonable to suppose there is something they all want; maybe this has already been discovered.₂ Or maybe it is simply obvious that we all want food, shelter, security, happiness and eternally youthful life. Perhaps alternative desires are maladies to be treated, or are not really alternatives at all, because their neural reality is a convoluted desire for happiness. Perhaps we would not need politics at all once philosophy was gone. For surely intelligent machines would be better at working out the best implementation strategies for our utopia than the inevitably flawed, biologically implemented cognitive systems we are presently stuck with. Or we could genetically enhance politicians; perhaps we would only need one if the enhancement was good enough.

Another area of life that would be impacted is religion. Religious belief places the ordinary world we experience into a wider context of meaning, and typically holds that it is governed by something greater than, and concerned with, us. That is a very philosophical thing to believe, although the way it is often believed, namely as an unquestioned background belief, is not at all philosophical. In any case, since religious beliefs about gods imply philosophical views about reality, they would have to go. People could continue to engage in rituals and ways of life: they could enjoy the sense of community, calmly reflect in the meditative spaces of Christian churches and clap in front of Shinto shrines. But without the cultural institutions of belief, it would not be sustainable. Religion would expire with philosophy. Some will think we have now reached the most appealing aspect of this proposal.

But none of this is feasible. For even if we were able to eradicate philosophy from the world, leaving us with redacted Shakespeare, politics entirely concerned with implementation, and no religious faith, the philosophy would come right back at us – like a boomerang. Somebody would die, and stricken by grief, their loved ones would form the consoling thought that they intangibly lived on. A child would ask where the universe came from and talk of a Big Bang would simply push the question back a stage. An office worker, bored at her desk, would wonder what the point of it all was. A teenager would take psychoactive drugs and start thinking about consciousness. A scientist would wonder why her theory was so predictively successful. Questions would be raised about our political utopias and new ones would be dreamt up, better tailored to the ever-new living conditions we use technology to create. So, the proposal is not stable.

It seems it could only be made stable if, while making these changes, we also changed ourselves: by removing a philosophy gene or two. This is because we are philosophical beings. We all are, despite the fact that our philosophical natures are often suppressed before they can develop. We see this from how readily philosophical issues concern us when the social framework in which we live our lives is violently interrupted. And there is no more violent interruption than death; whether that of a loved one integral to your projects, or the imminent prospect of your own death placing you face to face with the termination of projects without which you do not know yourself. At these times people seek religious consolation, or otherwise engage in philosophical reflection. Since it is unrealistic to expect these instincts to ever be educated out of us, it is looking very much as if the eradication of philosophy is going to require neural alteration.

Now this all sounds very unattractive, of course, but the point of this exercise was obviously not to dissuade us from a concrete plan of action. Anti-philosophical sentiment is on the rise, and trying to follow through on that agenda has revealed its enormity. What we have seen is that philosophy is by no means confined to academic institutions, that losing this component of our lives is far from an obviously attractive prospect, and that there is no way we could enact the agenda in any case, short of plunging into a technological dystopia. Anti-philosophical sentiment is a real and increasingly significant phenomenon, which we have learnt to take lightly, but should not. This sentiment may be blind to its own direction of travel, but we should not be.

In the real world, of course, those who denounce philosophy do not envisage a programme of eradication. If the denouncement is thoughtful enough to envisage anything at all, which is rare, then it is for philosophy to naturally fade from our horizons; although it is worth remembering that the eradication of religion from nation states has indeed been attempted by materialist ideologues. The scientists who denounce philosophy simply assume that science has all the answers, and are irritated by the existence of a discipline in which that could possibly be questioned – because of their commitment to materialist philosophy, as I said in the introduction. But philosophers who call for an end to philosophy – a real creed, which is something that has always intrigued me – think the matter through rather more carefully.

It was the nineteenth century positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte which provided the intellectual beginnings of the current anti-philosophy trend. Comte saw philosophy as a transitional stage on the road to science; as something the demise of which signals progress.₃ But it was Richard Rorty, in the late twentieth century, who developed the theme most thoroughly. Rorty immersed his life in philosophy to an extent few can ever have equalled and he would never have issued an unqualified call for the end of philosophy. He did, however, issue many qualified ones – because, in spite of his lifelong opposition to positivism in all its forms, he accepted the essentially positivist view that philosophy holds back human progress.₄ He tried to resolve this tension by proposing that philosophy be privatized. It became, for him, an inner, personal poetry, which insulated the intellectual elite by allowing them to gaze at the world in detached irony.₅ The irony, and hence philosophy, was never to be allowed into the public sphere, where it was the elite’s moral duty to defend their views as vigorously as the non-ironic; as if the truth was on their side – which as the ironist realises, it never could be. In this vein, Rorty defended materialist ‘truths’: that everything is physical, that the mind does not exist (he pioneered this view), and so on. He would have been horrified at the prospect of extracting philosophy from literature and art, since that is exactly where he wanted it to be. The problem with philosophy, he thought, occurs only when people bring it into the pu...