Draft
PHILOSOPHY IN
THE IRON CAGE
Nur durch
dem Sauber bleibt das leben wach.
Stefan George
Summary
I aim to show how Max Weber’s view
concerning the disenchantment of the world allows us to give a general
explanation of the present quandaries of philosophy. It belongs to the nature
of philosophy to be a product of what Freud called primary process, which is
common to art and religion and belongs more properly to the lifeworld. Moreover,
philosophy can be seen as a cultural activity combining religious-mystic,
artistic-aesthetic, and scientific-heuristic elements. As a consequence, it
belongs inevitably to the domain of “magic”. However, philosophy is forced, by
the contemporary rationalization and bureaucratization of research, into a
scientistic and disintegrative direction to the detriment of its indispensable magic
dimensions. In this way, philosophy is corrupted, risking to end up fragmented
into futile scholastic discussions. This corruption increases even higher now
when the bureaucratization process of the academic profession is speeding up
through the demands made by the World Wide Web network.
There is a pervasive socio-cultural phenomenon in the
course of the development of civilization that Max Weber called Entzauberung
der Welt: the disenchantment
of the world,
in literal translation, the demagification of the World (Weber 2022).
The demagification had a remote origin. At the beginning of the civilizing
process, everything around us was seen as alive, capable of possessing will and
passion and responding to human appeals. In addition, the cultural practices
that presided over human communities were themselves naturally and organically
constructed in the formation of an intimate lifeworld. This was a world called magical. Even within Christian monotheism, when communities were
run in association with religious leaders and when saints and miracles still
existed, the human universe was still filled with magic. After the protestant
reformation and the development of capitalist economies, the power of magic in
directing human life was more and more replaced by the power of what Weber
called rationalization (calculation, measurement, control) associated with
bureaucratization (organization, hierarchy). Although religion still has a
voice today, it accompanies rather than presides over human life. The
bureaucratic rationalization of life, on its side, was ultimately propelled by
the practical results of the development of science.
Together with
the decline of the religious role in human life, we also see a decrease in the
inspiring role of art. The reason is that also art belongs to the magic
dimension of life, a dimension that is almost inevitably debased by the
processes of rationalization of modern societies. A rationalized-bureaucratic
society does not need art as something that enhances human consciousness and
sublimate feelings (ex.: classical music in the German society of the XVIII
century). It needs art mostly as an instrument of alienation (ex.: heavy-metal
rock) since this helps people to cope better with their mechanized role in a
bureaucratized society.
The main problem
found by Weber in the rationalization-bureaucratization process is that it too
easily reaches its major efficiency by impoverishing the inner life of the
individuals. It empties people from their possible links with themselves and
others since it separates them from the organically developed life-world that
once fed them through the powers of magical forms of control and orientation. As Jürgen Habermas summarized, the pathologies of
contemporary society arise from the colonization of the lifeworld by the
system, that is, by social institutions that through bureaucratic
rationalization alienate individuals and ensnare their autonomy (Habermas 1995:
Bd. II, VI).
Weber introduced
the concept of demagification influenced by Nietzsche, which makes us think of nihilism.
For Nietzsche, the main consequence of the loss of the foundational role of
religious belief would be nihilism, which can be either passive, as in the
example of a perverse upside-down Christian, who despises moral values as a
reaction to the loss of belief, or active, as in the case of the production of
insufficient or inadequate substitutive values. Examples of the last case can
be the creation of local ideologies, which include both a pacifist sect such as
the Hare Krishna and a terrorist organization such as the Ku Klux Klan. Other
examples can be degenerate substitutive creds, such as Marxist-Leninist
communism in its Stalinist version, or German Nazism. In such cases, we are
dealing with profoundly disturbing social pathologies that still beset us
today. Although Weber admitted the great social importance of rationalization
and bureaucratization, he was also a sharp critic of the drawbacks created by
them. It is worth quoting here Weber’s prophetic passage, in which he uses the
metaphor of the iron cage to expose the loss of inner life in a scientifically
rationalized and bureaucratized world:
No one knows who will live in this
cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development,
entirely new prophets will arise, or whether there will be a great revival of
old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished
with a sort of convulsive self-importance. To the “last man” of this cultural
development it might well be truly said: “Specialist without spirit, sensualist
without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of humanity
never before achieved.” (Weber 2002: 182)
The purpose-oriented (Zwecksorientiert)
economic-institutional system undoes the mythical modes of apprehension of
reality organically born from outdated forms of life, tending to replace them
with an alienating system presented in the form of bureaucratic institutions
that shape the values and interests of human beings belonging to them. In this
“polar night of icy darkness” (Weber 1994: xvi), human beings would be
designated to the role of small cogs within an immense machinery that would
gain directive power over their lives. This diagnosis isn’t more pessimistic
only because he also believed that the society that unwittingly produces the
iron cages has enough power to transform the institutions it has created.
My aim here is
to show that the above-presented ideas can be useful in explaining the
contemporary drawbacks of philosophical practice. They help us to explain the scientistic
trend and the fragmentation of contemporary philosophy. Scientism,
as the submission of philosophical practice to scientific standards, has been
denounced by philosophers as the major drawback of contemporary philosophy,
from Wittgenstein to P. F. Strawson and Susan Haack. And the fragmentation can
be seen as a perverse way of easing philosophical discussion.
1
To tackle the question, we need to notice three
peculiarities of philosophical practice.
The first is
that from a Freudian perspective, philosophical thinking results from the primary
process in which the affective charges (Besetzungen) do not need to
remain fixed to their respective representations, associating freely with
others through displacement or condensation. This is a characteristic not only
of dreams, but also of religion, art, and philosophy. The primary process,
common to religion and art, produces the non-rational characteristic that
permeates all philosophy, which must be set aside in the process of
rationalization. It is contrasted with the secondary process of rational
scientific thought, in which affective charges are strongly aligned with their
representations.
The second
peculiarity concerns the view of philosophy as a derivative cultural practice
like the opera, which mixes music, poetry, and plot (Costa 2002). Philosophy
would result from material, motivation, and procedures derived from three
fundamental cultural practices, which are religion, art, and science.
In Plato’s elaborations of his doctrine of ideas, for example, we see a
mystical grounding component derived from his Orphism, an esthetic component
made evident in the metaphors and allegories of his dialogues, and a
proto-scientific, truth-searching component, seen for instance in his attempt
to explain how it is possible to say the one of many. The mystic component, one
could suggest, is responsible for the comprehensiveness of a
philosophical view, the esthetic component for its metaphorical vehicles
of expression, and the proto-scientific component for the heuristic
argumentative procedures. Philosophers like Hegel, Nietzsche, and Locke, though
holding to other dimensions, are respectively inclined to the extremes of
religion, art, and science, though inevitably preserving something of the other
two dimensions. Even whole philosophical traditions, namely, the German, the
French, and the Anglo-American, are respectively inclined to the mystic,
esthetic, and truth-seeking extremes.
The third
peculiarity concerns the direction. Philosophy can be easily seen as a protoscience
when we consider that particular sciences were all born from it. Philosophy is
what can be made before the conditions for a truly scientific investigation are
found. It serves as a place-holder for what in the future might become science
in a wide sense of the word.
Now, because
philosophy is an unavoidable product of the primary process, because it
contains mystic drives and esthetic forms, and because it cannot become science
without ceasing to be philosophical, it cannot be torn apart from its roots in
the lifeworld.
In a mass
society like ours, which is increasingly rationalized and dominated by science,
both, religion and art, and, consequently, philosophy, must be anathematized or
domesticated, since religion and art belong rather to the world of magic and,
consequently, also philosophy insofar as it must be to some extent propelled by
mystical and aesthetic motivations. Now, if we exclude the mystic and aesthetic
components from philosophy so that only the heuristic procedures should remain,
considering that the last must be here inevitably permeated by the first ones,
the result must be inevitably something like scientism. Instead of
heuristic approximations made through the primary process (ex.: Democritus’
“atoms”), one must fake a scientific philosophy, as if it were resulting from
secondary processes (ex.: neuroscience instead of epistemology).
Indeed,
scientism spreads. Its main sin is reductionism since it always excludes
some form of philosophical inquiry. Think, for instance, of Rudolph Carnap’s
definition of philosophy as “the logic of science”, to the exclusion of
everything else, or of Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of reference, which
should eliminate theories of reference from the philosophy of language, or of
Alvin Goldman’s attempt to substitute traditional epistemology by cognitive
science.
2
Now we come to the examination of
the ways the present mechanisms of bureaucratic rationalization militate
against good philosophy.
Consider first
how philosophy was made in the time of Locke and Hume in Britain, or of Kant
and Hegel in Germany. Philosophy could be the result of a long, persistent,
even immense “work on oneself… on one’s own way of seeing things”, to use
Wittgenstein’s words (1998: 16). In those times culture was honored by a
learned nobility and those who valued high culture in a highly stratified
society. Publishing could wait. This was so until at least the World War II. A
moral principle of people like J. L. Austin, for instance, was only publishing
if one had something important to say. In other words, philosophy was the work
of a small caste of intellectuals with the freedom to do what they wished, if
they wished, as long as they wished. The old Greek precondition of
“contemplative idleness” was fulfilled.
The scenery
began to change in the second half of the XX century when the number of papers
began to rise, and the ethic of publishing or perishing began to universalize.
Amid growing competition, academics began to remember Weber’s image of a cog in
the system whose only aim in life was to become a greater cog. Now, in the
worldwide network-bounded XXI-Century, the number of academic articles has
grown so exponentially, that their evaluation and possible influence depend
more on institutional and publisher’s reputation than on their intrinsic
values. Susan Haack, who studied the situation carefully, adds symptoms of
intellectual corruption like careerism and cronyism to this, along with what
she calls perverse incentives (2021: 26). For instance: modern
universities are now managed by CEOs stressing productivity and the need for
anyone to be research-active. Academics should publish as fast and as much as
possible, in a wild competition that could work in some domains of applied
science, but not at all in philosophy, since it gives no chance of maturing
ideas. Moreover, the person writing a philosophical article must adequate his
goals to those goals pre-established by unknown editors of specialized
journals, discouraging true originality. After all, originality cannot be
planned. And really original philosophical works must create their own
parameters of evaluation. These are all corrupting demands regarding the most
proper philosophical activity.
This state of
affairs is what Haack considers disastrous. It is when scientistic
philosophy shows its seductive powers. It is not philosophically demanding,
allowing more people to participate: the specialist must know only some niche
of discussion along with some methodological devices and some particular science.
That is, the would-be philosopher does not need to acquire general culture,
learn the history of philosophy, or even the recent history of his or her
field.
A consequence,
particularly evident in central domains of philosophy (including metaphysics,
epistemology, and philosophy of language) has been the fragmentation
caused by what Haack called precocious specialization, whose mechanism is the following:
Adopting some prima facie questionable assumptions, theorists develop
some funny hypothesis upon them. This funny hypothesis almost certainly leads
nowhere. But it makes it possible for all the participants of the sect to
entertain discussion for the years ahead. Finally, she says, boredom sets in,
and they abandon the problem, looking for another funny questionable hypothesis
so that they can begin the game again (2014: 21). The situation gets still
worse when these new “fields” of sub-specialization begin to subdivide
themselves in others unlimitedly (cf. Soames 2003 II, Epilogue). The big contrast
with discussion sustained in a true new field of scientific specialization is
that the latter is well-grounded, while philosophical specialization is done on
shaky foundations. When it comes to the different groups of theorists working
on the same problem, each group working within its form of precocious
specialization, these groups do not even argue with each other, forming what
she calls “cliques, niches, cartels, and fiefdoms” (2021: 24). The example I
would choose is the discussions of theorists of reference in the philosophy of
language, where one group defends metalinguistic theories, another
predicativism, another two-dimensional semantics, another referentialism, and
still another neo-descriptivism... All these theoretical fashions must be at least
partially wrong since it must be possible to build some overarching theory
capable of solving the problems once and for all. However, attempting to do
something in this direction would be to embark on a difficult, dangerous, and
maybe endless adventure outside of any interest group, which no one would
submit in sane consciousness. Nonetheless, it is precisely such kind of
adventure that could make philosophical progress possible. (Costa 2023: 6-7)
The conclusion
is that contemporary philosophy is headed for disaster. This is so because the
present bureaucratic rationalization of the philosophical domain is unable to
deal with something proper of philosophy, namely, its inevitable belonging to
the magic world, forcing much of philosophy into scientism. The indispensable
mystic-esthetic components of philosophy, its nature as a product of the
primary process, must be replaced by forms of scientistic fragmentation able to
be easily captured by the rationalized ways of evaluation of its practice. And
by the lack of more proper philosophical works to serve as models, bureaucracy
levels philosophy lower and lower, to allow creative production to all
participants, independently of legitimate interest or vocation. In this milieu,
specialists without spirit can do hollow work believing they are doing good
work only by forcefully ignoring what is known outside the strict boundaries
they set for themselves. As Haack noted, the final result of scientistic fragmentation
caused by precocious specialization is that philosophy ends up investigating
how many philosophers can dance on the tip of a needle.
Another feature of our fragmented philosophy
is that it seems like a headless turkey. Where everyone must be a
philosopher, no one can be a philosopher. Like great art, philosophy was
always the work of a few persons. In the past, it was the product of some
towering figures who were able to elevate the level of the discussion by
discovering links between the most extreme domains of knowledge. This was the
case of Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. In the first half of the XXth
century, there were still figures like Wittgenstein, Russell, and Husserl. And
in the second half, on my lights, there was at least Jürgen Habermas. In the
present century, however, there is none. Since bureaucratic mechanisms for
selecting comprehensive work are crumbling, something vital to philosophy seems
to have been lost.
3
Is there a way
out of disaster? Is the second part of Weber’s prophecy feasible? That is,
instead of sterility, a revival of old ideas and ideals? Can philosophy
recuperate its integrity as a kind of magic undertaking?
Also here Haack gave what I believe to be
the right answer: what is lacking is the pursuit of a properly comprehensive
philosophy. Wittgenstein wrote about the necessity of comprehensiveness
through surveyable representations (übersichtliche Dartellugen) of our conceptual
grammar (2009: I, 122). Ernst Tugendhat understood philosophy as the investigation
of those central conceptual structures responsible for our understanding of the
world (1992).
To this Haack adds a heuristic element that
she called “search through successive approximation” (2014: 30), beginning with
a vague general conception. One can compare the procedure with the art of
painting: one begins with the conception as a whole, a vague display of shapes,
colors, lights, and shadows… Gradually, shapes are more precisely delineated,
errors are detected and corrected, details and tonalities are added, and what
at first seemed like an incomprehensible blur is transformed into clear and
convincing images.
To justify this method Haack resorts to the
notion of consilience (2014: 15 f.): the heuristic assumption that the
world has unity, which is indispensable to the progress of science. If the
world has unity, then true scientific theories must interlock each other. This
means that they must be able to reinforce each other regarding their truth. An
example is molecular genetics, which corroborates the findings of Mendelian
genetics, both of which corroborate and are corroborated by the theory of
natural evolution, which is corroborated by geological data, etc. Haack applies
the idea of consilience to philosophical theories. Overstating the point,
Wittgenstein said that the difficulty of philosophy consists in the fact that
for one philosophical problem to be solved all philosophical problems must be
also solved. Indeed, to the extent that different subareas of philosophy are
interlocked to each other, theories developed in these subareas need to be able
to heuristically reinforce each other. Now, awareness of consilience also
demands the procedure of successive approximations by making different places
of the picture gradually more coherent with one another. This was certainly a
method used by traditional philosophers, such as Kant, and Hegel. Of course,
the kind of preparation for doing philosophy through comprehensive conceptions
and successive approximations is laborious. It may require the effort of a
lifetime, and it may be restricted to those who are willing to make that
effort. But how else could anyone think philosophy is possible?
Bibliography
Costa, Claudio (2024). How Do Proper Names Really
Work? Berlin: De
Gruyter.
– (2002). The Philosophical Inquiry: Towards a Global Theory. Langham:
UPA
Susan Haack (2014). “The Fragmentation of Philosophy, The Road to
Reintegration”, in Reintegrating Philosophy. Ed. J. F.
Göhner, Eva-Maria Junger, Springer Verlag 2016.
– (2021). “Scientistic philosophy, No; scientific
philosophy, Yes”. Philosophical Investigations, vol. 15, 2021, pp. 4-35.
Habermas, Jürgen (1981). Theorie des Kommunikativen
Handelns. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Soames, Scott 2003. Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth
Century, vol. II. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Tugendhat, Ernst (1990). „Die Philosophie unter dem
Sprachanalytischen Sicht“, in Philosophische Aufätze 1967-1990.
Weber, Max (2002). Die protestantische Ethik und der
Geist des Kapitalismus. C. H. Beck.
Weber, Max (2022). “Wissenschaft als Beruf“. In Schriften 1894-1922. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 474-511.
– (1994). Political Writings. Ed. Peter Lassman (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (2009) Philosophische Untersuchungen. Oxford: Blackwell.
– (1998) Culture and Value. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário