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"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

What Is the Use?

10/20/2007 10:50:29

Over at openDemocracy, they've just published a somewhat silly article about the meaning and purpose of debate. It would have to be silly, of course: it raises the existential, self-justifying question that can't afford to have a sour answer. So Tony Curzon Price brings together a collection of history's great philosophers of the public sphere, all moderated by a fictional incarnation of Cmdr Taco, the nerdy moderator of Slashdot. Here is a summary of their replies:

Plato would have us design a site to deliver Truth; Rousseau would have it generate social agreement; Mill wants distributed judgment amongst intellectuals on the big questions of the day; Arendt wants a realm for the development of individuality and virtue; Habermas is looking for discursive Truth, but just as importantly is looking to propagate the conditions of modernity that permit it.

As someone with big desires for fostering and participating discussion and debate (not always successfully), this question is close to my heart. For me, the justification is selfish. It is "erotics," in the sense Susan Sontag meant it when she spoke of "an erotics of art," or the erotics of the drunken Platonic symposium: I love conversations. They get me high. Like other highs, though, that doesn't necessarily say that they are a good thing.

And in all of modern ethics theory, what is the one example of what not to do that everybody can agree on? Nazism (everything else, it appears, is subject to moral relativism). And what conditions, it seems, gave rise to Nazism? German society in the century before, and especially the intervening years after World War I, was probably the most philosophically interesting society the world has ever seen. All the while they thought they were trying to catch up to Athens, it is likely that the German universities, cafes, and student groups had long exceeded the Greeks in vigor, urgency, and cleverness. This was the world that gave rise to Heidegger, Arendt, Einstein, Heisenberg, Benjamin, Scholem, Hayek, Wittgenstein, and the list goes on.

What, politically, came from that outpouring of genius and passionate discussion? Nazism and its attendant Zionism (I make that judgement, if it helps, as an American descended on one side from German Christians and on the other from Eastern European Jews).

The mood that comes across in Gershom Scholem's memoir, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is the kind of thing I can only dream of: hordes of brilliant people passionate about ideas and eager to change the world with them. But what came of it? Benjamin was chased to his death by the Nazis and Scholem put his eggs in the basket of the Israeli invasion of Palestine.

Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, who were also active (and in love) during that time, put a powerful faith in "thinking." "Questioning is the piety of thought," Heidegger could write (in "The Question Concerning Technology"), eager to create an exit from an overly technological society in which thought and contemplation had dwindled. Arendt, even while defending the vita activa against the vita complentativa (in The Human Condition), can see discursive thinking as an end in itself: "What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing."

But where does thinking get us? I keep being struck but the point made in Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained that consciousness is there to serve evolutionary purposes: it holds only so many of the reigns to perception and decision as it functionally needs to. Thinking was not really invented to master itself. We cannot turn all trust over to thinking, whether our own or that of our leaders, for we are all bound in the same troublesome biology. In the partial view of that biology, ideas like Nazism and Zionism can seem to make a lot of sense, particularly when one has such great faith in ideas.

Let me propose, then, that we not fool ourselves: the chief purpose of thinking and discussing are not those things themselves. I think a rather more sacramental purpose is at work, something more visceral. Eating the body and blood of one another, so to speak. Being together, getting high together, learning to trust one another. We can celebrate the erotics of thought and try to change the world with it, but not without being aware of its limitations, making of it a false god in need of Heidegger's "piety."

Creating a wider conversation really means expanding our love. Thinking harder really means building trust. It is an economy of exchange and a performance whose purpose is to reveal something transforming. Unlike Rousseau at openDemocracy, I am not interested in generating agreement and discovering the "General Will." Rather, it is discovering the fact that we are all sharing a room together and we have to learn how to get along.

re: What Is the Use? - 10/27/2007 08:17:03
Posted by tony curzon price

thanks for the conversational reply!

I wonder if you are unfair on Rousseau: i think the germ of his idea for the General Will comes in the Essay on Language, where the original social problem posed is coordination to effectively hunt large game - a bit like your shared room.

But I entirely agree that communication is an economy of exchange ... though there is the remaining interesting question of whether "Cheap Talk" does anything. For example here:
www.lps.uci.edu/home/fac-staff/faculty/skyrms/CheapTalk.PDF

Tony

re: What Is the Use? - 10/27/2007 16:31:47
Posted by nathan

Thanks so much for your comment! You are right, it is very likely that I am not being fair to Rousseau, considering I haven't read him in about five years. But I think, from what I've been able to summarily scan (here and here), there are some important differences between my "shared room" and his General Will.

Those sharing a room, for instance, don't always agree, and they don't always coordinate their activity. The hope, rather, is that they operate in ways that ensure the bathroom gets cleaned from time to time even though they each have different habits. Sharing a room emphasizes difference and compromise rather than a convergence of agreement and natural consensus.

This article on signaling is really great - it is just the sort of thing I've been keeping an eye out for lately, particularly since learning about Robin Dunbar's theory on the origin of language and the rudiments of costly-signaling theory. Like Dunbar, it argues that language serves a powerful evolutionary role.

Dunbar, however, describes language as essentially an expansion of ape grooming behavior. While cooperation may be one benefit of grooming, so also is maintaining non-cooperation. For example, if I clean the bathroom from time to time (or even more to the point, say nice things to him), my roommate might mind less that I never do the dishes.

Point is, back to the original question of the how and why of a discursive community: though finding a General Will (or righteous consensus) is one possible consequence of discussion, a far more likely one is simply mutual grooming. We share ideas, we create interconnections, we share a space in which our differences can subsist.

The difficulty with the General Will as a goal, the way I see it, is the fact that ultimately we are always "wrong and contingent," no matter how right we feel. The feeling of General Will for the Nazis, with the great aesthetics of their rallies and the rest, must have been tremendous, but of course the whole project was totally mistaken. In cases like that, mere cooperation, while it may be serving evolutionary purposes, fails in serving ethical ones.

re: - 10/27/2007 23:51:25
Posted by BT

...the way I see it, is the fact that ultimately we are always "wrong and contingent," no matter how right we feel. The feeling of General Will for the Nazis,...

Do you think you could be mixing up ultimate vs. relative (or more circumscribed) truth-claims, re: using phrases like "we are *always* wrong and contingent..."? That claim may in fact be true in an ultimate sense, or from the perspective of a transcendence that's beyond everything & anything by definition, but yet I presume you'd agree that it was still "right" to fight against the Nazis, right? In other words, the pragmatics of sharing a room doesn't necessary mean that everyone is automatically *equally* wrong; contingency still demands better vs. worse (since, at the other extreme, contingency or "ontological wrongness" for it's own sake just absolves anyone of any responsibility -- that is, even if the "ultimately" true alludes every existing, given position, it doesn't follow to me that all that's left is *equally* worthy of assent or respect). The Nazis are clearly an example of assuredness gone haywire (to say the least), but it's more difficult to justify *resistance* to that sort of violent assuredness upon a notion of contingent relativism alone (since there needs to be some way of *enforcing* even a minimal respect for the contingent relativism, ultimately, when it comes to extreme cases; just presuming it as a value doesn't help whatsoever in precisely those sorts of extreme cases). Or even in minor cases, too, the person not doing their dishes eventually needs to get confronted, even if both parties are equally distant from an ultimate truth...

re: What Is the Use? - 10/28/2007 20:53:14
Posted by nathan

Yes, I would say amen to everything you say, especially the part about doing the dishes.

This is not a point to be overstated - it is more of an emotional one for me, something I say to hedge against the senses of absolute certainty (or even the taking for granted) that come so easily on a day to day basis.

The point I'd be interested in your thoughts about, though: does it seem to you that creatures like us are likely to experience anything worth the title of truth.

(Just so you know, my favorite definition of truth lately is the pragmatist one as in William James's The Meaning of Truth. But you can use any definition you like.)

re: - 10/30/2007 20:13:45
Posted by BT

...does it seem to you that creatures like us are likely to experience anything worth the title of truth.< /blockquote>

Personally speaking, I do think it's a potentiality, even if it might take anywhere up to ~8,400,000 lives to get there (!). I think James on truth is fine as far as he goes, but I also think those sorts of pragmatic definitions don't necessarily rule out more mystical/metaphysical definitions (which would demarcate various stages of union with an Infinite).

For everyday talk & experience I fully agree with the qualifications you're stressing, but was just thinking that stressing wrongness and contingency *too* uniformly is really just a variant of the logic of assuredness it's reacting against . . . whereas human reality is for the most part in the in-between/metaxy, meaning not fully merged with Truth in the mystical sense, yet not for that reason *all* wrong per se, or *as* off the mark as some other state of being might be. But I admit that in order to take that more process-oriented sense of Truth seriously one does have to posit a beginning and end (goal).

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