Me, Them, & You, Part 1: Speaking of Things

How Our Means Determine Our Ends

“Philosophy” is an almost impossibly broad category, denoting a vast collection of ideas, theories, methods, intuitions, hopes, and doubts from basically every human culture that has any written record (and probably all the ones without one as well). Thus, we must be careful when we talk about “what philosophers do” or “the current views in philosophy”. If we do speak this way, it is almost certain that what we really mean is “what this particular kind of philosopher, who publishes in my native tongue, is doing” or “the current views of the kind of philosophy I happen to have read recently and tend to like”. We should not confuse such limited surveys of a tiny sliver of philosophy for philosophy in toto.

And yet, we do often engage in such an error—certainly, many philosophers do! I remember speaking to a philosophy professor who specialized in analytic philosophy of mind. I mentioned the work of Martin Buber, and how great an impact he had had on my thinking. She responded rather breezily, “oh, I think I read him during my undergrad work. These days, I really only read philosophers.” I was taken aback—she seemed to think that Martin Buber, one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the 20th century—didn’t qualify as a philosopher at all, presumably because he wasn’t an analytic philosopher, but rather a member of that amorphous and threatening mass known as continental philosophy (queue the Imperial Death March on your headphones).

And, to be frank, it is very often analytic philosophers (at least in my experience!) that tend to draw the fence of philosophy in this hyper-narrow and exclusive way.¹ Analytic philosophy—basically, post-Kantian English language philosophy that focuses on producing sets of indubitable propositions and relies on a strict forms of propositional logic to do so—has barely existed for 2 centuries.² And yet many analytic philosophers seem to think that doing philosophy correctly basically means only reading other analytic philosophers and employing its methods, to the exclusion of just about every other philosophical school or method (excepting occassional references to big names from the past like Aristotle or Hume). Other contemporary approaches to philosophy, whether from the broad continental and phenomenological tradition, or the pragmatic/pragmaticist tradition (to speak nothing of Indic, Chinese, or other non-Western philosophical methods), are generally either ignored or explicitly attacked as insufficiently philosophical. It is, gentle reader, not a recipe for truly critical engagement with the world.

Any method will, of course, have its limits. And the solution is not to insist on one method to the exclusion of all others, but rather to be rather promiscuous in employing methods: try many out and see what works. I think most serious and honest thinkers will come to realize that different kinds of questions sometimes require different kinds of tools. As they say, if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Widen the selection of tools in your toolbelt, though, and the diversity of the world is easier to see.

It’s certainly not my contention that analytic philosophy is completely useless or bad, though I do feel like its method is so limited that its truly useful applications are quite limited.³ And I certainly think that it has bitten off far more than it can chew—instead of embracing a healthy does of epistemic humility and recognizing that its method(s) cannot answer every question, it has tended to insist that any question it cannot answer is either not worth answering, or isn’t even really a valid question at all.

This reaction, and the intellectual myopia it tends to cause, is, I think, a result of the specific method that dominates in analytic philosophy. It is here, I think, that we can see how method can get in the way of useful results, and this can drive home how important it is to critically evaluate our own methodological preferences.

As I said above, analytic philosophy, generally speaking, is focused on producing a set of ironclad propositions about the world. Truth, under this method, is arrived at by accepting the right propositions, and rejecting the wrong ones. Thus, one should accept the proposition, “the earth orbits around the sun” and should reject the proposition, “the sun orbits around the earth.” By doing so, one has added to one’s stock of true propositions, and has incrementally increased one’s grasp on truth.

Now, for all kinds of questions, this kind of method is of course quite effective. We humans do indeed tend to build “models”⁴ or systems of knowledge about the world in this way, slowly adding to our sets of true propositions and thereby understanding our reality that much better. One of the (often helpful!) features of this approach to building up knowledge is that any true proposition should predicate some feature of a given entity in a completely public way. In other words, true philosophical propositions should make statements about things that anyone, in principle, should be able to check and verify for themselves.

The nature of the sun’s and earth’s relative motion, for example, certainly seems like such a public entity or event: presumably, we all live on the same earth, and are enlightened by the same sun. If this is so, then whatever is true about these entities for one of us must be true for any of us; it can’t be the case that in my reality the earth orbits the sun but in your reality the opposite is the case. If that were somehow the case, we must be talking about two different suns and earths (and surely this would become the focus of our inquiry going forward).

Assuming that we are living in a shared reality, then if a given proposition is true for me, then it must just be true, period. And if it turns out that I have made an error, then the proposition is revealed to be false, not only for me, but for everyone. In this sense, philosophy done by propositional logic is effectively always third-person; philosophers speak about entities that we can all see or otherwise detect or interact with (whether these are physical entities, concepts, or whatever else). This third-person aspect is, as I parenthetically admitted above, quite useful, because it allows us to easily learn from each other and to work together to build up an extraordinarily detailed picture of our shared reality (just consider, for example, the information contained on a map of the earth. How much of that have you verified for yourself?)

This third-person approach to truth, then, is very useful and has myriad applications. But we might wonder whether it has any limits. Are there any questions for which such a method would obscure rather than reveal? And here philosophy of mind rises to the fore.⁵ Philosophy of mind involves a huge number of related but distinct questions, but I think most would agree that the most contentious, interesting, and intractable questions in philosophy of mind have to do with phenomenality, or the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”: how is it (or, indeed, is it) the case that human beings have some kind of subjecthood, some kind of immediate qualitative experience, some “thing it’s like to be” what they are?

As I have written on before, these questions are difficult primarily because they are not really objective questions at all; indeed, they are questions about the nature of subjectivity as such. When we ask about the nature (or, indeed, the bare facticity) of someone else’s immediate qualitative conscious experience, we have a big problem: even those of us who definitely believe that other humans’ immediate qualitative conscious experience is real must admit that such experience is not evident to us whatsoever: I do not experience pain, for example, when you step on a nail (and I must admit I am thankful for that!)

Consciousness is not a Phenomenon, Part 2: Other People's Windows

But this is just another way of saying that, to the extent that immediate qualitative conscious experience (I am just going to refer to this as “phenomenality” from here on out) is not available to third-person evaluation. Instead, we have to admit that, if phenomenality is indeed real, it is purely, irreducibly, and exclusively a first-person reality, experience, event, or entity. If I offer the statement, “I am having an immediate qualitative experience of the quality of greenness”, though this has the form of a proposition (more or less), it’s not clear that anyone could verify the claim. It could theoretically be a proposition whose truth could contribute to an overall stock of knowledge about our shared reality (since presumably my phenomenality is part of the larger collective reality), but there doesn’t seem to be any clear method by which anyone but me could actually make use of such a statement.

Obviously, though, if one’s philosophical method is based around insisting that all truth can be (and must!) expressed through thoroughly third-person propositions, we have a problem. And I think this is, fundamentally, the problem at the heart of analytic philosophy of mind. Even those analytic philosophers, like David Chalmers or Thomas Nagel (to mention only two of many), who very much want to defend the reality of phenomenality find themselves attempting to describe that reality in propositional logic. But if that mode of expression can only denote third-person truths or experiences, then it’s not at all clear how they could even address, much less capture, any truth about a thoroughly first-person truth claim. Instead, they often want to translate first-person reality into some kind of third-person proposition. But as is often the case, much is lost in translation.

Indeed, the problem is even more pernicious because all third-person propositions are themselves made by some subject which views the world from their own particular first-person perspective. In this way, any third-person view of reality is dependent on a first-person perspective. Phenomenality is the unavoidable window through which any account of objective reality arrives. Yet so much work in analytic philosophy of mind is built on the idea that we can achieve objective truth without any reference to subjectivity at all, from a kind of Archimedean view from nowhere in which epistemic limits are reversed and reified into ontological assumptions without comment or critique (“the world as it appears to me must just be the world as it is”). Such an approach is, I think, always suspect. Yet when it comes to philosophy of mind, it’s downright catastrophic.

At the heart of the problem, of course, is that I think many (most?) analytic philosophers would simply want to deny that there could be any “first-person truths” that were not reducible to third-person propositions. But, of course, if asked why they made such a denial, I don’t think they could provide any justification beyond the fact that they are methodologically committed to such an exclusion. But surely this is begging the question.

This is, of course, where phenomenology is at its strongest, because at its core (and when it’s done right!), phenomenology is nothing but a philosophical method aimed squarely at first-person truth claims. This does, certainly, mean that phenomenology is of much less use when making third-person truth claims—but while many analytic philosophers seem to think this is a lack that proves the uselessness of phenomenology (and certainly of continental capital-p Phenomenology), this just brings into sharp relief the need for a diversity of methods. Husserl was clear that phenomenology required the bracketing of any questions about the noumenal—that is, questions about third-person propositions—so that the philosopher could focus on first-person questions of how reality presents itself in thought. But he never pretended that all truth could be discovered under this epoché!⁶

The methods we use will determine the kinds of answers we can find. The method(s) most common in analytic philosophy have wide, but not universal, applicability, but it seems to me that many (most?) analytic philosophers do not recognize this and are not interested in even considering the possibility. I think this is a huge problem in analytic thought, and is slowly leading to analytic philosophy so flattening its view of the world that I often find much of the work produced in that space to be of little genuine philosophical value—at least, for the specific questions I find most interesting and important. This is especially true in certain fields—not only philosophy of mind, but also in philosophy of God/philosophy of religion and in ethics.

I’ve already outlined the basic problem I see in analytic philosophy of mind. But the problems for philosophy of God and ethics are distinct. If questions of consciousness are irreducibly first-person, the same cannot (necessarily) be said for questions about God or ethics. Under most definitions of the word “God”, God is not simply some kind of subjective experience or event; likewise, any ethics worth the name is definitely not just a set of subjective preferences.⁷ So Phenomenology, on its own, cannot deliver some kind of corrective to the third-person propositional method essential to analytic philosophy. Yet, I do think some other method—or methods—is needed. We will further explore the need for such a method in Part 2, next week.

Me, Them, & You, Part 2: Speaking to Things

1. I am going to be generalizing rather massively about analytic philosophy here. As ever, I think my generalizations are broadly accurate, even if not perfectly precise (how could they be?) and generally indicative of the major trends in analytic thought, especially in philosophy of mind. Of course, feel free to (politely and constructively) disagree in the comments!

2. While there certainly is analytic philosophy published in other languages, I think there can be no doubt that the vast majority of analytic philosophy, and nearly all of the most influential works, have been published in English.

3. In most forms of ancient philosophy, at least in the Greek and Indic worlds, contemporary analytic philosophy would likely be seen as being useful only in the sub-fields of logic and perhaps rhetoric.

4. I hope any Rortyans in the crowd will forgive this sloppy usage!

5. Those who have read some of my previous work will know that I do think analytic philosophy of mind is worth engaging; in particular, David Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind is well-worth the time to read—at least, the first half is.

6. Indeed, Husserl was confident that phenomenology could lead to a renewed and reinvigorated Science. This is explicit in his The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

7. I’m looking at you, Nietzsche.