
The Culture of Criticism – What Do We Owe the Enlightenment? - sbuk
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121837/what-do-we-owe-enlightenment
======
spdionis
This is a great thought provoking article about the intricacies and paradoxes
of our current society.

It's a little OT but I want to ask HN a simple question. The vast majority of
my friends and acquaintances completely despise philosophy and they have one
single question: what is the usefulness of philosophy?

I am often inspired by reading philosophy related articles, as I was inspired
by my philosophy teacher in high school. Unfortunately/fortunately I was in
another country with a completely different educational system. In this
country most people only meet philosophy in a single semester in college and
it's only a rush to memorize the most things possible about philosophers. How
do I explain the importance of philosophy for the development of our mind?

~~~
cafard
The pragmatic (in the non-philosophical sense) argument is that it is less
than helpful to be a Spinozist or Cartesian or whatever without knowing it,
and without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the position. C.S. Peirce
(who trained as a chemist) remarked that much of what was called "plain common
sense" was simply Aristotle. I encountered a teacher in an NLP course who
quoted Aristotle's four types of causes without having any idea that it came
from Aristotle. Listen long enough and you will Kant's Antinomies of Pure
Reason argued forward and back by people who haven't cracked _The Critique of
Pure Reason_.

The other argument is that it is a challenge and a pleasure to follow some of
the strongest minds as they make, elaborate, and challenge theories. Not
everyone will find it a pleasure. Still, I suspect that the difference between
encountering Plato or Locke in a one-semester summary and actually reading
Plato or Locke is comparable to the difference between encountering "The
Marriage of Figaro" in a plot synopsis and in attending a competent
performance.

Beyon

~~~
romaniv
_The pragmatic (in the non-philosophical sense) argument is that it is less
than helpful to be a Spinozist or Cartesian or whatever without knowing it,
and without knowing the strengths and weaknesses of the position._

Because that forces you to actually think through your positions and argue for
them using your own words, rather than deliberately obscure academic slang?

In natural sciences and math the simplest theory that works is the preferable
one to use. In "modern" philosophy and various branches of academic criticism
everyone tries to outdo each other in complexity. The practical result of it
is that many people operate under false assumption: the assumption that if no
one understands you, you automatically "win". This does nothing to improve the
quality of reasoning or discourse.

~~~
bobcostas55
I think you have a very narrow view of academic philosophy. Certainly there
are many who obfuscate intentionally, or invent myriads of terms where it
isn't really necessary. But there are plenty of writers, particularly in the
"analytic" tradition, who write very clearly and succinctly.

Try Hume (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding -- short and high-impact),
Russell, Rousseau, Searle, Putnam, or Dennett.

~~~
romaniv
For every Searle there are several hundred people who routinely spew porridge
of post-structuralist terminology to address the most trivial of questions. So
who better characterizes modern philosophy/criticism?

~~~
kijin
Come back in a hundred years and see how many people remember Searle vs. any
of the post-structuralists.

Heck, you don't even need to wait a hundred years. Go to any philosophy
department in the English-speaking world right now and ask how many people
know Searle vs. any of the poststructuralists.

------
astrocyte
"In a world where 2+2 currently equals 5, who are yee enlightened ones to
argue different?" Yells a 'modern' day citizen of "success".

For those who feel enlightenment still matters, think deeply... Very deeply
about the meaning of this.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I'm not sure that "present-day citizen" and "the _New Republic_ " are exactly
congruent.

The _New Republic_ faces, itself, the central paradox of the Enlightenment
humanist's project: if he succeeds, he abolishes himself by converting
humanistic literature into accurate naturalistic and scientific description.
Having done so, he is out of a job.

Thus the Enlightenment becomes the enemy of the humanist, who must defend his
office lest he be pushed around by those awful math nerds.

~~~
pron
I don't think anyone, including Foucault -- actually, especially Foucault who
viewed Enlightenment philosophers and even existentialists as essentialists --
would think or want human-related literature to be an "accurate and scientific
description". Anyone concerned with the "ought" does not confuse it with the
"is", and therefore any scientific description of human society can only be
temporary and certainly not normative. If anything, this view is even more
associated with opponents of the Enlightenment than with its proponents. The
only way the philosopher will be out of a job is if people confine themselves
to the notion that society cannot be changed and there's nothing we can aspire
to. Since the entire history of the human race empirically disproves this
notion (and shows that the chance of people resigning themselves to this idea
is very low), the philosopher is unlikely to lose his job. I think pretty much
all philosophers warn against the naturalistic fallacy, and even scientists
who believe science may assist in making value decisions do not think it can
_dictate_ values.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Excuse me, but this is yet another time at which we _must_ differentiate
between naturalist philosophy and non-naturalist.

In naturalist philosophy, "ought" statements eventually dissolve into a very
specific class of "is" statements. One observes that the universe consists of
particles, bits, and joules, and comes up with moral foundations suitable for
living life as a human being who is made of particles, bits, and joules. If
the universe contained a fundamentally moral component which we could exhibit
and manipulate - the same way we can exhibit and manipulate particles, bits,
and joules - we would consider that to be basic too. But it doesn't: so moral
statements must reduce to non-moral statements.

What one does _not_ do is _precisely what is done in non-naturalist
philosophy_ , which is to insist that "oughtness" is an ontologically
primitive property of certain objects called "moral propositions", which have
nothing whatsoever to do with atoms, bits, and joules, and which, despite the
non-naturalistic philosopher's inability to exhibit any such thing beyond
"Surely torturing puppies is wrong!", are nonetheless considered an essential
component of the universe on a level with particles, bits, joules.

People have always been all too ready to insist that anything we don't fully
understand, but which affects us emotionally, is an irreducible, ontologically
primitive component of the fundamental nature of the universe, while anything
you can actually exhibit and manipulate is mere gadgetry, used to make
smartphones run but otherwise of no account. Problem is, the reverse is true:
examining things we can exhibit and manipulate, _naturalism_ , has given us
more fruitful and abundant insight into the world and our lives in it than any
other approach ever tried. It has taken endless seemingly-disparate phenomena
and united them in a single conception of the universe that ties everything
from the stars in the heavens to the beat of the human heart in grand threads
of causality.

When we rely on any fixed and finite system of propositions to describe our
universe: _ignoramus et ignorabimus_. As we learn more and more fundamentally
independent propositions and unite our disparate magisteria: _wir müssen
wissen, wir werden wissen!_ And this will extend to the moral realm as well,
so that when we say torturing puppies is wrong, we will know that we are
describing a matter of fact.

~~~
pron
> has given us more fruitful and abundant insight into the world and our lives
> in it than any other approach ever tried

But this is yet another argument over definition or a value judgement. I have
spent most of my life studying math and science, and yet reading Dostoyevsky
has given me much more abundant insight into my life than anything science
ever taught me. The point is, of course, what do "insight" and "relevance"
mean? Their meaning can be entirely subjective, and is certainly not
scientific. For that matter, what does "meaning" mean?

There's no doubt that science has improved our lives, but so has politics
(which has often been very much influenced by contemporary science). True,
technology's effects are quantifiable and measurable, but being quantifiable
and measurable is not the only way of assigning value.

As to non-naturalist ethics, I see absolutely no problem with concepts that
are irreducible to atoms. Neither is math, even though math was
created/discovered by humans, which live in this universe and are composed of
atoms. I think that you're misrepresenting those ideas when you're describing
them as "essential components of the universe", when the universe is merely
the arena where these concepts form. The fact that you can find a causal chain
-- a reduction, if you will -- does not mean you can always describe the end
of the chain in terms of the first link (I'll get to that again later).

In short, I don't think you can reduce, say, literature, to atoms and forces
even though the author and the reader are composed of atoms, and the reading
process involves photons hitting receptors that start a chemical reaction in
the retina. Doing so will teach us nothing of value about literature.

I think that it is your position -- that only that which can be reduced to
atoms -- that lacks justification. Saying that science and technology are
quantifiably or "physically" useful is _almost_ (not quite) a tautology. A
shovel is more useful than a pen for digging holes, but who says digging holes
is more worthwhile than writing? Even if you _think_ it is, you cannot prove
it scientifically, because science can say nothing about values, only point at
relationships between causes and outcomes.

> As we learn more and more fundamentally independent propositions and unite
> our disparate magisteria: wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen! And this
> will extend to the moral realm as well, so that when we say torturing
> puppies is wrong, we will know that we are describing a matter of fact.

That doesn't follow. First, I don't know how science can teach us that
something is "wrong". I don't know by what scientific or mathematical
mechanism you can ever make the jump from the "is" to the "ought" \-- at the
very best science can teach us that if we seek a certain outcome, we should
take a certain action, but can it tell us what outcome we should seek?

But it's even worse than that because there is another philosophical,
unscientific mediating factor here, which is "understanding". Being able to
describe the universe and understanding it are two very different things. We
can know without understanding. In fact, I can even give the last statement a
more mathematical facet: that a process B reduces to a more fundamental
process A, does not guarantee that fully knowing A will let us predict B
because of intractability. We already know that most "interesting", i.e.
complex processes in the universe are intractable, so at best, they are
theoretically reducible, but rarely practically so. Our understanding of
particle physics can teach us little about psychology (although it may assist
in building instruments to study psychology).

So I disagree both with your assumption that we can know (or rather, that
knowing means fully understanding or predicting), as well with the supposed
consequences of knowledge.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>But this is yet another argument over definition or a value judgement. I have
spent most of my life studying math and science, and yet reading Dostoyevsky
has given me much more abundant insight into my life than anything science
ever taught me.

And you think there is no science of people? You think that just because our
current understanding of psychology is fairly hazy, it must remain that way
forever?

Or worse: do you think that there is nothing psychological about what happens
when you read Dostoyevsky, nothing that a science of human beings can say
about your experience, even in principle? How much are you willing to multiply
"irreducibility"? Until it covers your whole worldview like a cancer?

>As to non-naturalist ethics, I see absolutely no problem with concepts that
are irreducible to atoms. Neither is math, even though math was
created/discovered by humans, which live in this universe and are composed of
atoms.

But of course math is reducible to atoms. Or, if that seems a strong
statement, math is not irreducible _by default_ : Platonism is not the _only_
viable philosophy of mathematics, such that taking any other position
generates an immediate internal (within math) or external (with our other
knowledge of the world) contradiction. Both constructivism and formalism yield
neat interpretations of math as certain kinds of computations being done
within human minds.

>In short, I don't think you can reduce, say, literature, to atoms and forces
even though the author and the reader are composed of atoms, and the reading
process involves photons hitting receptors that start a chemical reaction in
the retina. Doing so will teach us nothing of value about literature.

See above regarding psychology. Since atoms and forces make up the author and
reader, we can use our theories about those to zero in on correct theories
about the author and the reader, thus gaining an understanding of what the
reader is experiencing and how he is playing an active part in reading a book.
Certainly science can teach us more about literature!

You seem to be confusing naturalism with what's been called "greedy
reductionism", which is a metaphilosophical - and therefore damn near
nonsensical - view, namely that only the most ontologically basic level of
description _actually matters_. In fact, if we _don 't_ employ our more
abstract, high-level concepts like "human being" and "Dostoyevsky novel" and
"armchair", we completely fail to make accurate predictions about the behavior
of the very much natural world around us.

As long as these higher-level, and yet closer-to-experience, concepts possess
causal power - as long as they make our predictions better and our
counterfactual models more accurate upon interventional testing - we _must_
use them. Your thoughts and feelings are _utterly essential_ components of a
naturalistic explanation of the world.

They are _also_ , ultimately, made of particles, joules, and bits.

Likewise to such mental activities as math and morality.

>A shovel is more useful than a pen for digging holes, but who says digging
holes is more worthwhile than writing? Even if you think it is, you cannot
prove it scientifically, because science can say nothing about values, only
point at relationships between causes and outcomes.

This displays the funny post-religious misconception that values are relative
to "the Universe" rather than to agents. This is incorrect.

And, presto change-o, when speaking of a specific agent, I can _certainly_ say
whether digging a hole is more worthwhile than writing, or the other way
around. Again: a scientist who _fails to predict_ that I (to take the personal
example) would rather read and write than dig a hole is simply _inaccurate_.

>That doesn't follow. First, I don't know how science can teach us that
something is "wrong". I don't know by what scientific or mathematical
mechanism you can ever make the jump from the "is" to the "ought" \-- at the
very best science can teach us that if we seek a certain outcome, we should
take a certain action, but can it tell us what outcome we should seek?

Which shows a nasty hole in your philosophical education, but regrettably an
all-too-common one: you were never told ethical naturalism
([http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-
moral/](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/)) exists.

>But it's even worse than that because there is another philosophical,
unscientific mediating factor here, which is "understanding". Being able to
describe the universe and understanding it are two very different things. We
can know without understanding.

You seem to be just pushing words around, but may I venture to guess that you
mean to differentiate between discriminative "describing" and causal-
counterfactual "understanding"?

>In fact, I can even give the last statement a more mathematical facet: that a
process B reduces to a more fundamental process A, does not guarantee that
fully knowing A will let us predict B because of intractability.

Certainly. In fact, this is the nature of reduction: to reduce B < A implies
that B happens as a specific instance of A, which often means that B occupies
a tiny corner of A's parameter space, and almost _always_ means that B's
parameter space is much smaller than that of A. For example, in describing
gasses, we can describe the precise velocities of every single molecule (the
more-reduced theory), or we can measure the temperature of the gas as a whole
(the less-reduced, higher-level theory). The intractability is often both
computational and informational.

This merely reinforces what I said above, which is that we _need_ the higher-
level concepts to correctly understand, interpret, and predict the world.
Concepts like "human being", "sunset", "profundity", "confusion", and (just
for the hell of it) "love" are also _utterly inescapable_ components of a
naturalistic worldview.

It's just "irreducibility", or in other words, metaphysical handwaving and
magical thinking, that aren't.

~~~
pron
> You think that just because our current understanding of psychology is
> fairly hazy, it must remain that way forever?

Sure but will that knowledge be so predictive as to be truly essentialist?
After all, we can't provide tractably predictive models for even n-body
systems for pretty small values of n, so I doubt we will for people. BTW, I
believe that those answers we will be able to prove and reduce with any
measure of definiteness will only tell us things we already know (or "know").

> Both constructivism and formalism yield neat interpretations of math as
> certain kinds of computations being done within human minds.

Ah, but here I think I can convince you, and make a much more powerful point
than the one regarding intractability. Consider the universal Turing machine
and its approximate physical manifestations. Whether or not it is truly
universal is an open question, but most assume that it is, yet they are not
perturbed by the following result: our universe may contain a machine that can
simulate not only this universe but _any_ universe, i.e. there are objects
that can arise within our physical universe that are more universal than our
universe itself. Can the simulated universe be reduced to the atoms and forces
of the one containing the machine? Most people will say no, as universal
computation breaks reduction. It is more general than the mechanism
implementing it, with possibly more degrees of freedom.

> would rather read and write than dig a hole is simply inaccurate.

But the question is a different one. I wasn't asking what you want to do or
even what you will do, but what you _should_ do. The definition of "should"
can live, if you will, as a concept within the Turing machine.

> This displays the funny post-religious misconception that values are
> relative to "the Universe" rather than to agents. This is incorrect.

That does not follow from what I said at all. I didn't say the universe or
"morality" necessarily dictates an answer. What I said was that the answer --
even if it is subjective, if it exists at all -- does not necessarily follow
the laws that gave rise the the being asking the question. Universal
computation etc.

> you were never told ethical naturalism exists.

Again, I think there's a disagreement on definitions. It seems like naturalist
ethics seems to say "if we know how people behave, we can deduce how they'll
program their Turing machines (and they will always program them in a similar
way), and we can therefore say something about the programs themselves", while
non-naturalist ethics simply studies the "computer science" of those programs.
I think both approaches are complementary, rather than contradictory, and
really discuss different things, even if they give them the same name.

> B's parameter space is much smaller than that of A

So what? A's entire parameter space cannot be practically determined either
(even if A is well understood), and the emergent property A may well require
that in order to be explained in terms of B. For example, to explain
psychology in terms of particle physics, we may need to understand the
interactions of, say, 1e15 bodies. Since we cannot do that, we cannot explain
A in terms of B.

Also, universal computation may arbitrarily increase (or reduce) degrees of
freedom.

> It's just "irreducibility", or in other words, metaphysical handwaving and
> magical thinking, that aren't.

Let me make clear that I am not in any way opposed to the naturalist
worldview. In fact I fully and utterly subscribe to it, just as I fully and
utterly subscribe to non-naturalism. I see absolutely no contradiction between
the two, just as I see no contradiction between simulating a universe with
different physics in a computer that exists in ours.

When I say something is irreducible, I simply mean you cannot construct a
useful model for it in terms of a lower abstraction -- not that it is not an
emergent property of that lower abstraction; obviously, it is (unless it's a
simulation run by universal computation).

\---

Of course, there is one glaring bug in my appeal to universal computation, and
that is the composition not of the machines but of the programmers. Since
there is no free will in the universe, the programmers are then deterministic,
and therefore the programs themselves. Still, even though this greatly reduces
the space of possible programs (and makes the naturalist approach to studying
the programs sensible) I think that few people will consider this (i.e. a
deterministic programmer) a useful reduction.

In any case, I think everyone will agree that the programs _can_ be studied in
isolation of the universe that created the programmers, and that doing so may
be useful.

~~~
pron
Correction: I wrote: "universal computation may arbitrarily increase (or
reduce) degrees of freedom". This is not true for a physical computer, but I
think most people will still agree that any computer breaks reduction to its
physical mechanism.

The only question is does reduction work when the programmer -- though not the
program -- is reducible. I think it's what makes the reduction useful, but
it's certainly not enough to make it the only -- or even the primary --
approach.

------
mindslight
> _Critique, Foucault insisted, is the movement by which individuals question
> all truths, especially those produced by powerful authorities._

But then,

> _If science is contested, the Enlightenment, it seems, has become a relic_

It seems like the author is falling into the same pattern. (Not that I think
creationists have a leg to stand on, or that their prevalence isn't worrying.)

~~~
spdionis
It's funny how for me, having grown up and studied in Europe, creationism
sounds completely ridiculous and I expect that everyone around me agrees. My
first instinctive reaction is "No one in their right mind would ever believe
creationism! That's obviously wrong.".

The even funnier part about it is that, after stopping and thinking about it,
I can understand why some people might not believe in it and how this could
bring to endless arguments.

