Philosophy for our Future

The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:

---

The topic of this article in many ways represents a sort of conclusion to my project when seen in terms of why I think the things I write about should be paid more attention to. I choose to present a first flyover of these considerations at the present stage in order to provide a higher-level frame for the rest of my writing. This will hopefully position my project in relation to why I consider these topics to be of importance, providing an account for some of my motivations, as well as articulating both why and how it can have an impact beyond the purely conceptual. 

Technic and Magic reminds us that if we wish to change our world, first we have to change the idea of reality that underlies it.

Frederico Campagna - Technic and Magic

What is primarily needed is a growing realization of the extremely great danger of going on with a fragmentary process of thought. Such a realization would give the inquiry into how thought actually operates that sense of urgency and energy required to meet the true magnitude of the difficulties with which fragmentation is now confronting us.

David Bohm - Wholeness and the Implicate Order

I take it to be uncontroversial that we are living in an age of massive social, political, economic and ecological divide. This is a fragmentation that cuts across demographic dimensions, everyone is witness to some degree of division, inequality or imbalance. This fragmentation is not new in the history of mankind, but what we are seeing now has reached a height that is threatening large-scale collapse. We are most of us aware of this, yet for a multitude of reasons powerless to do much about it. What I shall argue for in this piece is why this powerlessness is intimately linked to our view of reality, that the philosophical backbone is, if not the, at least a common denominator to the range of issues facing us. I will take as my starting point that we are in a “crisis” with respect to our relationship to our shared world and each other. One could proceed in a great many directions in explicating the social, political, economic or ecological issues that are bound up in this relationship, but I will refrain from doing so as the existing research and literature is readily available. I must also mention that the issues addressed in this essay easily falls within the purview of social critique and critical theory, a body of work I am largely unacquainted with at present, and positioning the views I express within that critical structure will have to wait. What I will do in this essay is to claim that particularism as a worldview, that there is an external world independent of us that yet all we know and experience reduces to, is at the heart of the crisis. Few will likely recognize this position, but it is integrated so tightly with our culture that it has become transparent to us. 

…just as it was thoroughly natural for medieval thinkers to view nature as subservient to man's knowledge, purpose, and destiny; so now it has become natural to view her as existing and operating in her own self-contained independence, and so far as man's ultimate relation to her is clear at all, to consider his knowledge and purpose somehow produced by her, and his destiny wholly dependent on her.

E. A. Burtt - The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science

I have in previous essays written about independence in the context of realism, the view that there is an external world independent of us that provides grounds for our experience, science and/or knowledge. The success of science since the 16th century has by many been seen as proof of this independence, for how else could our theories, based on independent entities, conform to experiment to such a great extent? How else could we have discovered so much about nature, and utilized these discoveries towards unimaginable technologies? The simplicity and obviousness of these considerations is taken to imply correctness or truth, and though it has always had opposition (From Berkeley, Hume and Kant to Bohm, Kuhn and Koestler), and advances in science and philosophy in the last century strongly indicate the need for a more nuanced view (See e.g. Wittgenstein and the Private Language Argument, another example is quantum theory, which I plan to discuss in a forthcoming essay), I claim that the predominant global world view is one where this independence is the primary aspect of reality and our relationship to it. In this context, the global world view must be understood as multidimensional: it is educational, cultural, political, economical etc. The idea of independence has propagated from being a hypothetical statement about the relation of scientific theory to nature, via being a “truth” about reality due to the success of science, to becoming a presupposition about the relation of humanity to nature¹. And it is exactly the presupposition that man is independent that we think licenses us to exploit the environment and each other to the degree we have, because we are free from nature and each other we think we are also free from any consequences domination or exploitation may have. There are of course a myriad of factors I am not considering in this account, but my belief is that if we did not see ourselves as independent to such an extent, either as individuals or as a society, we would be mindful of the precarious balance between organism and environment. This brings me to another dimension of independence that figures in the prevailing world view.

In my writing I have repeatedly stated the importance of context and the priority of the whole. Regardless of whether we believe in a world independent of us, our cognitive abilities are limited and require us to take shortcuts in our considerations of the world. I take this to lead to the prevalence of reductionism as a general thought pattern: break an experience (or a phenomenon, problem, structure, etc.) apart into pieces and try to understand the experience in terms of how the pieces interact. The reductionist belief is that the whole is nothing more than the sum of the parts, that the experience (or phenomenon, problem, structure..) is recoverable when the parts are put together again. The initial process of breaking apart seems an automatic cognitive process in our interaction with the world: we see a world around us of objects in motion and interaction, we quite automatically categorize our experience into chairs, raindrops, trees and people. I will have to return to a more extensive discussion of this process (“World, Model and Mind”, forthcoming, in which I go through the participatory and generative conception of mind), but for now let me throw independence into this natural reductionistic cognition. Thinking of the objects that our cognition presents to us as additionally independent of both us and each other might be a process inseparable from the initial reductive categorization, but it nevertheless allows for new modes of simplification and prediction: systems of objects can be considered apart from the rest of experience and contemplated in isolation. There is no doubt that this is a powerful and incredibly useful conceptual and mechanistic tool towards explaining and predicting the workings of the world, but it must be recognised exactly as that, a tool. For what is neglected in this division of the world is of course the whole. By viewing things in isolation we miss their primary experiential aspects of unity and interconnection. There is no separating system or organism from environment and context in reality, only in our models is this possible². None of this is of course to belittle reductionist science or applications, reductionism works in explaining and predicting large domains of the world. But when it comes to the very foundations of our relationship and understanding of reality, reductionism and independence can no longer be assumed.  

Wittgenstein succinctly stated how the particularist view of reality is alienating: “This which we take as a matter of course, life, is supposed to be something accidental, subordinate; while something that normally never comes into my head, reality! That is, what we neither can nor want to go beyond would not be the world.»³ Our experience, life, our very existence, is subordinated to a universe of objects we never directly experience. Via independence and reductionism, particularism places the weight of what reality is beyond us. Our sensations and experience is granted a secondary reality that it is claimed reduces to this inaccessible material universe, and when this relationship is interwoven in education, culture, politics and economics, the result is not only fragmentation on the individual level, but on a global and ecological level. Within the view itself this fragmentation manifests as the hard problems of the external world and mind, the unclosable gap between the epistemic, our framework, and what our framework is about, the inaccessible ontic⁴. This gap will never be closed from within the framework, because the separation is built into the foundations of the particularist framework itself. All that can be hoped for is a dissolution of this multi-level fragmentation from a different view of the world, a view that positions our experience as primary reality and sees our frameworks as the contextual constructions that they are.

A symptom of particularism is the disregard for context and pluralism, as I briefly mentioned in Panoptic Interlude. One frequently sees claims of the form “According to science (or discipline, or research), X is the case”, which disregards the plurality of science, that science consists of a multitude of theories and approaches, and that there is no singular united science one can meaningfully attribute claims to. Secondly, and related to pluralism, claims fitting the above pattern disregards the contextual dimension. The communication and presentation of science is one culprit in these disregards, whether due to the scientist(s) or media. Such claims reinforce the societal dependence on particularism by framing science as a singular activity or theory, and one that represents reality in itself. The belief arises that science is the authority concerning what reality is and isn’t, that the phenomena of our experience are all in principle reducible to the scientific theories, and that the domain of science, physical reality, is entirely independent of us or our practice of science, or our practice of structuring the world in everyday living. As I will go into in more detail in an upcoming essay on World Views, separating what we experience from our particular context is no easy feat, however much we believe in some realm of physical objects independent of our belief. 

We might catch ourselves thinking along the lines of “I know that everything is somehow connected” or “I know that everyone has their own view of things”, but if we at all think these thoughts I believe they mostly occur in an analytical setting that precludes truly breaking free from the presuppositions of reductionism and independence. This is the power and prevalence of world views. The issue with particularism is of course exacerbated by its claim on defining what is real as something external to us, and truth as correspondence to this externality, for how can we from within this view truly evaluate an alternative when the criteria for evaluation are not only set by the view itself, but are grounded in something placed out of reach? The idea that there wouldn’t be an external and independent world seems absurd to most of us, because the idea necessitates a shift in all of our thought and knowledge, knowledge that is immersed in contexts where this idea is foreign. We are entwined in a framework that has, as part of itself, a mechanism that prevents breaking free of it. The only way out is to break the framework open, in order to see that we had freedom of motion all along. But this is impossible without the knowledge that we are in a framework in the first place. Achieving any of this is further complicated by the fact that the assumptions we are trying to break free from are represented in close to every sphere of human interaction, from education and play to mass and social media, policy and the financial system. There is as such not only the need for a cognitive rewiring on the individual level, but a systematic rewiring on a global level. The task seems insurmountable, but a look at the history of mankind should at the very least dispel defeatism as a strategy we likely will or should follow. 

Particularism is a closed world view. In order to evaluate an alternative, we need to assess the alternative, but the acceptable standards of assessment are themselves laid down by particularism. There is no escape without assistance. This is not to imply that there is any evil or malicious agency at work. There is no agency we can meaningfully talk about that is guiding humanity except as the sum of our individual actions⁵. And though we each may think ourselves good, acting in good faith and with good intentions, we have incontrovertible historical evidence that this far from correlates with a humanity in balance and harmony. That the totality of (what we believe to be) good intentions should sum to self-destruction should amply convince us of the priority of the whole. We all have some kind of idea of what is required. Upon recognition of the deeper interconnectedness of reality we may come to view the dependence of reality on us in its proper light. Man and nature stand in a reciprocal relationship, as Kuhn observed: “Can the members of a group properly be said to adapt to an environment which they are constantly adjusting to fit their needs? Is it the creatures who adapt to the world, or does the world adapt to the creatures? Doesn't this whole way of talking imply a mutual plasticity incompatible with the rigidity of the constraints that make the world real and that made it appropriate to describe the creatures as adapted to it? These difficulties are genuine, but they necessarily inhere in any and all descriptions of undirected evolutionary processes.”⁶ 

He said that men assume the truth of a thing to reside in that thing without regard to the opinions of those beholding it while that which is fraudulent is held to be so no matter how closely it might duplicate the required appearance. [The ambiguity in the appearance of things] is rather one more twist in the warp of the world for the deceiving of men. Where then is the truth of this? The reverence attached to the artifacts of history is a thing men feel. One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated.

Cormac McCarthy - The Crossing

We are building the world of tomorrow on a platform entirely shaped by the recent past, a past plagued by activities that have fragmented mankind and the world on which it depends. These events normalizes the present, desensitizing us to the extremity of ongoing conditions, and limits the possibilities for charting a future that is truly in balance, because the recent historical background against which we set up an alternative points in the direction of self-destruction. Relative to one’s own view any and all judgment made about a state of affairs from someone else’s view can be made perfectly absurd. What we need is a way out of such conceptual prisons, a philosophy for our future, that acknowledges pluralism at the same time as providing a coherent structure for how our views of the world makes reality. This view of reality as a whole does not proclaim what is right or wrong, true or false, but it shows forth what frameworks and ways of life are coherent with the whole, and not in isolation from the whole. There is no solid ground for this view, it is grounded in itself, and in this self-autonomy it provides the flexibility and coherence that characterizes the reality we experience. Berman, historian and social critic, saw the same over four decades ago, when discussing the paradox of reconciling knowledge as both contextual and externally grounded: «How can any conceptual system avoid such a paradoxical, and in fact self-destructive, result? It seems to me that in order to do so, a successful epistemology would have to be able to demonstrate the existence of an inherent truth or order in the conjunction between man and nature, and to survive the test of self-analysis. In other words, the application of its method to the method itself would not attenuate its validity.»⁷

In my first piece I stated that the symbolism of the magical flower of winter “...is the flower growing out of itself, symbolizing the self-upholding nature of reality, the corresponding holistic philosophy I will outline, as well as the reciprocal relationship between us and reality that this philosophy represents. We cannot at this advanced stage of civilization allow ourselves to do anything, neither politics nor philosophy, without an eye on the whole that we are part of. Though tedious, this tedium is as nothing if we take action now, against having our hand forced later. The magical flower of winter is, ultimately, a symbol and a declaration of philosophical and ecological resistance for this age of adversity, a seed for a philosophy for the future.” I see how such statements quickly devolve into truisms and platitudes. The only aspect we control is our own view of experience, but we must first be made aware that experience in fact is a view, the components of which we can shape. The only wish I hold for this essay and my project in general is that in presenting a novel take on our issues I can provide a view of things that, while far from providing practical solutions, may contribute to showing the conceptual path I think is required towards both a world and a view of the world in balance. 

---

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this or any of my other essays, consider subscribing, sharing, leaving a like or a comment. This support is an essential and motivating factor for the continuance of the project.

References

Berman, M. (1981). The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press.

Bohm, D. (2002). Wholeness and the implicate order. Routledge.

Burtt, E. A. (1925). The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. Harcourt, Brace & Co

Campagna, F. (2018). Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. Bloomsbury Academic. Quote from backmatter.

Hoffman, D. D. (2019). The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. W.W. Norton.

Kauffman, S. A. (2000). Investigations. Oxford University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (2000). The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993, with an Autobiographical Interview (J. Conant & J. Haugeland, Eds.). University of Chicago Press.

McCarthy, C. (2010). The Crossing. Pan Macmillan.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Philosophical Remarks (R. Rhees, Ed.). University of Chicago Press.

1. This is not to say that there was no schism between man and nature prior to the scientific revolution.

2. And, as I will also go trough in the forthcoming “World, Model and Mind”, there are no criteria that guarantee that what our brains have evolved to model correspond to accurately representing reality, see Hoffman (2019).

3. Wittgenstein (1980) §V.47.

4. See The Epistemic and The Ontic.

5. Isn’t this reductionistic, and in contradiction to the holistic approach? Not at all. Any agency at an aggregate level above individuals would not be meaningful to talk about as an agency, exactly because this term gets its meaning in an inter-individual context. Is there agency in the flock behavior of birds?

6. Kuhn (2000) p. 102. This exemplifies the idea of the co-evolution of organism and environment. See also Kauffman (2000).

7. Berman (1981) p. 150.