The End of Philosophy: What’s the Point? A Call for Negative Philosophy

Negative philosophy can protect us from our dangerous yearning for certainty about who we are and should be. Photo: Skye Horgan.

This is the fifth and final entry of my series on philosophy. Here are links to the first, second, third and fourth posts.

My university would never let me teach thermodynamics or chemistry, but teach first-year students philosophy? Sure, why not. Before we mull over Plato, I prime the pump by asking, What is philosophy? What do philosophers do? As the young folk stare at me suspiciously, I urge them: Take a wild guess, there’s no right answer, philosophers squabble endlessly over what they do.

Finally a brave soul ventures, with the upward inflection common among the young, Philosophy searches for truth? [1] Yes, I reply, but so does science. Both seek truth that applies not just to specific places and times but broadly, even universally. Philosophy and science were once a single enterprise, but they diverged over the past few centuries. So how do they differ today? Eventually someone replies, Scientists do experiments? And philosophers just think about stuff?

Yes, now we're getting somewhere! I exclaim. I add: Science addresses questions that can, in principle, be answered through empirical investigations, given sufficient resources. How old is the universe? What is matter made of? How did life emerge on Earth. How did we humans emerge? Philosophy, in contrast, obsesses over mysteries that at this point, and possibly forever, cannot be empirically solved. What is real, or true, or good? Does free will exist? Does God? Many philosophers would object to this distinction, but I’m the boss in this class.

Why, I ask next, philosophize if you never get anywhere? What’s the point? My students are stumped, so I tell them: Philosophers protect us from our deep-rooted need to be sure about what we are and ought to be.

That’s the money shot of this series. In previous posts, I’ve considered whether philosophy is a truth-seeking method, martial art, ethical guide, art form. Philosophy is all these things, but it is, or should be, primarily an instrument of doubt, which counters our terrible tendency toward certitude.

David Chalmers, in “Why Isn’t There More Progress in Philosophy?”, acknowledges that philosophers are better at toppling than erecting truth claims. He is dissatisfied with this outcome, which he calls “negative progress,” because he can’t abandon the quest for truth. Ambitious philosophers will always yearn to be system-builders, like Kant, or better yet discoverers, like Einstein and Crick.

But philosophers should be proud of their negative progress, they should embrace their role as wrecking balls. Demolition is a noble calling, given all the harm caused by know-it-all-ness. And by harm I mean everything from over-prescription of psychiatric medications to genocide. [2]

Let’s call this critical pursuit “negative philosophy.” Negative philosophy resembles a peculiar, paradoxical field called negative theology, which attempts to describe God while stipulating, as an axiom, that God transcend description. Negative philosophy, similarly, seeks truth while insisting that it is unattainable. [3]

Plato, via his alter ego Socrates, invented negative philosophy--and inadvertently demonstrated why we need it. Plato defines wisdom as knowing how little you know, and his parable of the cave warns that we’re prisoners of our own delusions.

But the old know-nothing is really a know-it-all. Plato believes—he knows—that he has escaped the cave and seen the True, Good and Beautiful blazing in all their glory. Others can see the light too if they follow his lead, and together the enlightened elite will rule the benighted masses.

We need negative philosophy to save us from our saviors.

Philosophers have labored mightily to inoculate us against religious dogmatism. Spinoza and Voltaire argued for an impersonal God consistent with reason. Nietzsche pronounced God dead, and Bertrand Russell, just to be sure, drove a stake through God’s heart. Today, God is still kicking, but science is the dominant mode of knowledge—with good reason, because science has given us deep insights into and enormous power over nature.

Some scientists, intoxicated by success, claim that science is revealing The Truth about, well, everything. They succumb to scientism, which exalts science’s power and disdains other modes of knowledge. These arrogant scientism-ists overstate religion’s evils and downplay the damage done in the name of reason.

Some philosophers have reacted to science’s ascendancy by denying that science achieves durable truth. Others have gone to the opposite extreme, becoming public-relations shills for science and denigrating non-scientific ways of knowing.

While avoiding either excessive skepticism or servility, philosophers should call out scientists for overreaching, especially when scientists promote simplistic, deterministic claims about what we are and should be. After all, faith in pseudo-scientific ideologies—from Marxism and eugenics to free-market capitalism—has caused far more destruction than religious zealotry over the past century. 

My favorite negative philosopher was Paul Feyerabend. When I interviewed him in 1992, Feyerabend ridiculed the idea that scientists can “figure out” the world. What scientists have figured out, Feyerabend said, “is one particular response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and the reality that is behind this is laughing! 'Ha ha! They think they have found me out!’” I hear you, Paul.

David Chalmers, whether he knows it or not, was practicing negative philosophy when he defied Francis Crick’s proclamation that we are “nothing but a pack of neurons.” Consciousness, Chalmers retorted, can’t be reduced to purely physiological processes.

My negative-philosophy notion, like most of my notions, didn’t impress the pros in my philosophy salon. A critique of a truth claim, “Nigel” sternly informed me, is a truth claim. Grrr. This is the kind of sophistry that gives philosophy a bad name. Everyone knows the difference between a positive claim, like a proof of God’s existence, and a critique of that claim. Right?

But Nigel, darn him, has a point. You can’t criticize truth claims without making truth claims, and you can’t bash ethical systems without having an ethical leg to stand on. I prefer to think of these as paradoxes, not contradictions. [4]

But negative philosophy can be tricky, even for the greats. Karl Popper, when I mentioned that some critics found him dogmatic, pounded the table and insisted that his critics are wrong. Thomas Kuhn tied himself in knots trying to tell me precisely what he meant when he talked about the limits of language.

Philosophers must doubt themselves, but not so much that they despair and seek jobs at Goldman Sachs. They must also avoid skepticism so extreme that it enables fascism and the wholesale rejection of science, including global warming and the theory of evolution. They must try to make the world a better place, even though they probably won’t.

And as long as I’m laying down rules here, let me allow some positive philosophy. Maybe “moral truth” is an oxymoron, but war is clearly bad, just as slavery and subjugation of women are clearly bad. I wish more philosophers would join me in arguing that ending war is a moral imperative, because I’m getting nowhere.

A final point to wrap up this series: After my students read the parable of the cave, I ask them: Are you in the cave right now? Their answers vary. Goody-goodies say college is helping them get out of the cave, and smart-asses say college is pushing them further into the cave.

The gloomy ones, with whom I identify, mutter that if you escape one cave, you just end up in another cave. To console them I say, with upward inflection: Maybe knowing you’re in the cave is sort of like escaping it?

Footnotes:

1.   Maybe upward inflection is appropriate for philosophical reflection?

2.   Re harm: Here’s a partial list of horrors fueled by certitude: the Crusades, the Inquisition, European enslavement of Africans and extermination of Native Americans, the Reign of Terror, the Holocaust, Stalin’s gulag, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam War, the nuclear arms race. Let’s add the U.S. “war on terror,” which since 9/11 has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

3.   Re negative theology: In 1999, researching Rational Mysticism, I attended a conference on “Mystics” at the University of Chicago. Theologians, philosophers and other scholars acknowledged the irony of discussing mystical experiences, which are commonly said to transcend language: the experiences are “ineffable,” as William James put it. “Mystical literature is that which contests its own possibility,” one speaker said. Another said he mistakenly arrived at the meeting hall a day early; as he contemplated the empty hall he thought, “This is taking negative theology too far.”

4.   I stumbled on a paradox embedded in skepticism while writing Rational Mysticism. I had begun regarding my skepticism as a spiritual practice, which clears the mind of garbage, but then my handling of actual garbage gave me pause. I use plastic garbage bags, which are packaged in a cardboard box. After I yank the last bag from the box, the box becomes trash, which I put in the bag. I sensed a riddle in the ritual, and eventually I got it: Every garbage-removal system generates garbage, and that includes meditation.

Further Reading:

I try to practice negative philosophy in essays such as “The Weirdness of Weirdness” and in my free online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment.