The empire of Science, the retreat of Philosophy—five responses

It's a familiar story: The explosive successes of the empirical, modern sciences after [insert Great Man or Important Event here] forced philosophy back into ever narrower corridors of speculatability, like polar bears on a shrinking iceberg. How did philosophers respond? In several ways.

First, by grovelling—becoming lackeys, imitators, under-labourers, popularisers, celebrants, sanctioners, policemen, epistemologists. Second, by taking flight—becoming idealists, phenomenon-botherers, intrepid explorers of the ineffable ethers of language, morality, love, art, experience and religion. Third, by criticising—becoming on-lookers to history, lords of the margins, doyens of discourse, geniuses of the presupposition, sniping and biting for plurality and process, railing against fixity, sediment and being-forgetting, deploring all dogmatism. Fourth, by returning to dogmatism—becoming artists of object-schemes, journeymen of the dreaded litany, scenographers of the grandest thing-scapes, brave speculators on the furniture and infrastructure of the universe, incisively discerning the withdrawn fundamentals that had previously passed us by. Fifth, by focusing on problems—becoming pragmatists, anthropologists, sociologists, finding license to think wherever there are problems to be thought through; thus, travelling wherever they please, being barred from nowhere, but never traversing Reality, never journeying 'everywhere.'

It'll be clear from my rhetoric where my sympathies reside. Philosophers were right to be chastened by the successes of the sciences. Where they came a cropper, to use a beautiful Britishism, was in their responses—at least until they arrived at the properly pragmatic option of understanding the purpose of tradition-disciplined philosophical thought practices to be the invention and transformation of concepts in response to particular problems, in alliance with various other actors.

It is perfectly right to wish to once again grant philosophers their passport to travel wherever they please, regardless of this or that domain's domination by whatever scientific power. Indeed, such domination is certain to raise problems requiring philosophical attention; thus intellectual wanderlust is explicitly encouraged in the problem-pragmatic understanding. What is wrong is to think that such papers give philosophers access to a reality over and above (or even simply beyond and beside) that which is available to the sciences or to any other practice-complex.

Indeed, philosophy does not access.

A defence of philosophy without a concomitant deflation results not in advocacy as part of a diplomatic process but in fortification in a process of war-making. Which brings us to a first-order cosmopolitical question that can now be understood as lying at the heart of philosophical discourse: is it coexistence or victory that is the order of the day?

The reality of speculation – speculative pluralism

Perspectivism, or scientific relativism, is never relative to a subject: it constitutes not a relativity of truth but, on the contrary, a truth of the relative. 

– Deleuze & Guattari, What is Philosophy?

Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. 

– William James, Is life worth living?

[...] when Sartre’s Roquentin, out of despair, vomits on a tree root, he certainly does not realize that the tree, the root, the rhizome have exactly the same problem as his: that they too are existential entities and not substances, that they are organisms which wage a bet on life in the sense that they have to exist, to get out of themselves and apprehend—hence the word prehension, so necessary for Whitehead—and that many other beings are necessary for the continuation of their existence. 

– Bruno Latour, What is given in experience?

Is existence worth existing? There's only one way to find out: speculate.

Speculative pluralism suggests not speculation on reality but, rather, the reality of speculation.

The pluralist specification: A philosophy must be capable of comprehending its own partiality and contingency without recourse to 'of course, I might be wrong'; that is, without the epistemological caveat. It must be capable of understanding itself as an event – and, what's more, remaining true to this particularity. It cannot outsource its particularity to doubt.

Speculative pluralism is sceptical of all 'regulative ideals' and 'as ifs.' These are the sounds of disappointment, not thought.

The least of a badly constructed concept's problems is that it is wrong.

Does 'reality' demand representation? In what tongue did you speak to it last?

Thinking is not 'made of' thought. The contrary: thencefrom derives all 'realist' mystification. (Thought can only 'correlate' if it is made from itself.)

To designate thought as 'speculative' – or, indeed, as 'pluralist' – is not to satisfy it with 'maybes.' Such indulgences are for those safe from the abyss.

The autogenic ends of philosophy

I am not a philosopher and am not interested in philosophy for its own ends. Then again, I am enough of a philosopher to be suspicious of anyone who is interested in philosophy for its own ends. Such introversion and self-interest seems, to me, to divert thought away from both where it is needed and where it thrives.

Call it conceptual callisthenics (Latour), the creation of concepts (Deleuze), or the development of a wisdom tradition (Sloterdijk) -- either way, the point is that philosophy mustn't pursue its own ends. Such self-pursuit is, one could even say, unphilosophical.

Self-pursuit is scholasticism; is a dog chasing its own tail; is a serpent eating itself...

Such autogenesis becomes autoerotic.

Pragmatism, with teeth

For a problem there is a condition worse than insolvability: inconsequence.

How few ponder the purpose of their Sisyphean (or, better, Ouroborean) predicaments!