A note on politics and philosophy

(Something vaguely related to infinite thought's post on politics and ontology...)

The fundamental indifference of the real is terrifying. But I believe we cannot truly grasp this indifference without obviating its immense terror, without rationalizing it. This is a temptation because we are not indifferent to the indifference of the real.

Philosophy suffered a setback with the death (or flight or suicide) of God. God came to the aid of thinkers stuck in the quicksand of doubt. He guaranteed our clear and distinct ideas. The Enlightenment also seems a distant memory, and the notion of 'Reason' is almost obsolete: yes, humans do work things out sometimes, but the preponderance of idiocy on earth is such that man seems more and more to be the irrational animal. And we have become cynical, no longer believing in ourselves: a quarter of Britons think the moon landings were faked (and the rest probably realize it was nothing more than a multi-billion dollar ideological gambit against the soviets). And so we turn to science. In a time when no one can be sure of anything, with relativism rife, and even our fellow philosophers telling us things like 'the Gulf war didn't happen' (but I saw it on TV!), there is nowhere else to turn. Scientists have been working away, for a few centuries now, perfecting their instruments and corroborating their discoveries. Corroborating, which is to say, repeating experiments and verifying conclusions. Which is also to say: verifying that, all things being equal, the same effects are observed. Science can be understood here as a large-scale, organised and sustained manipulation of the real. And it is the unquestionable success of this global effort which makes it so attractive.

The daily routine of most humans today closely resembles that of pre-humans: ie, living in order to consume. Thus when man appears to have returned to his animal habits, it is only right that our conception of truth also return to its origins. As Peter Sloterdijk says, "the look which follows a tossed stone is the first introductory form of theory, and the feeling of agreement engendered by the success of the throw is the first level of a post-animal truth function." (La Domestication de l'Etre p50. )

But what has politics got to do with this? I think politics needs to be understood in a much broader sense than has generally been proposed in the online debate: that is, as a thinking of the collective existence of humans in terms of their collectivity. The bourgeois distinction between public and private needs to be obliterated, as does the idea that 'the we' is an ethical matter.

I want to begin with an anthropogenetic story. Before man, the universe was indifferent and inhospitable to life, and, in contrast with today, that menace was a daily practical problem for creatures on earth. Early man took two crucial steps to solving, or at least deferring that problem - the development of a social "huddle" and the increased use of tools (again, La Domestication de l'Etre). The result of these changes was a distancing of nature, or rather a socio-technical sheltering from the threatening world. Crucial to man's origin was the introduction of a mediator between man and external reality, which was both defensive and technical in essence. As history has shown, this was effective at reducing the pressures of (environmental) natural selection. Man established the conditions for flourishing. It ought to be noted that the originary shelter has become what is today know as 'the world'. Nature is so thoroughly enframed by humanity that it no longer really exists except as outdoor leisure centre or something we're trying to exploit or save. Yet our growing mastery of the real conceals from us the primordial mediation (I can't think of a better word) at the root of this apparent mastery. Like the Hollywood film which effaces the technologically productive medium between it and the spectator, the real today is thought as if it were grasped directly, rather than via the vast socio-technical apparatuses of contemporary civilization. The social, which emerged as a means of limiting reality's access to us, has become the systematic management of our access to reality. To think a non-human world would require becoming pre-human.

To be clear, sociality is not structured by autonomous individuals, but itself structures those individuals who constitute it. The social is inscribed on us, and in the twentieth century this has progressed far from the discipline of docile bodies, into a regime of neuronal/behavioural programming which will only increase in scale ( and here I think neuroplasticity studies will provide a lot of interesting new knowledge both to those doing the programming, and those trying to think it). Comparative neuroanthropology is also yielding some important results, concerning the brain activity of different language speakers (an article somewhere on this blog) which I believe will lead us to recognize that two people from different societies will have brains which process input (reality) very differently. We cannot escape the socio-cultural 'correlation' because we are not in it: it is in us.

Surely we must still have a certain connection with reality in order to 'function'? Yet here we encounter difficulties because the real, and 21st century capitalist reality are now almost co-extensive. You are equally considered mad - in the sense of lacking a grip on reality - whether thinking that you can walk through walls, or believing that you can repeatedly tell your boss to fuck off. Because of this, we can begin to appreciate the austere genius of positivism. Forget interpretation, forget analysis. Focus on the facts. Don't speculate. We cannot erase the socio-subjective markings in our perceptual apparatus, but by adopting a pared down, positivist attitude, we can restrict the contamination of our knowledge. This is why science has been so successful in relation to the other fields of human knowledge. Attention to detail, patience and a theoretico-conceptual asceticism. And we can gauge the success of science in its observable results, in the manner and extent to which objects can be altered, moved, de-composed etc. The speculative side of scientific work is not to be rejected, but understood properly: the exciting and experimental hypothesis is only that, a hypothesis, until it is verified in repeated, controlled encounters with the world.

On the other hand, what is arguably the least successful science, philosophy, does still have something to do. While science proper was busily experimenting, collecting data and distilling its contents to their purest, most reduced form, philosophy was always too ambitious, too daring with its concepts, building moral and metaphysical edifices which couldn't withstand the winds of history. However this irreverance is needed now, because while the human sciences are waiting for the real sciences to provide all the answers, society itself is quietly drifting up shit creek. Philosophy is the only domain that is truly comfortable with the counter-intuitive; the study of philosophy is primarily learning to habituate one's mind to ideas, and particularly relations between ideas, which are anathema to common sense. As it gradually becomes clear that everything which exists is material, and that our basic understanding of the world and our place in it is false, thought will need all of its conceptual contortionism to engage with the facts of science and begin to think this new world.