(This entry updates and enriches a Substack upload of mine from June 2022.)
In philosophy everything is up for grabs. Politics is becoming like this. There is less and less on which we agree. We can't even agree that nations need enforceable and enforced borders or that biological males must not be allowed to participate in women’s sporting events!
Widespread and deep-going lack of consensus in philosophy casts serious doubt on the cognitivity of the discipline, its claim to be knowledge. If the cognitivity claim were well-taken, why have none of philosophy’s problems ever been solved to the satisfaction of a majority of its competent practitioners? This question is perhaps of no great interest, except to professional philosophers, as long as the controversies of the cognoscenti are confined to the ivory towers. Technical academic controversies rarely spill into the streets. No one literally gets up in arms over the correct analysis of counterfactual conditionals. But when weightier controversies seep into the general culture, trouble of a non-academic sort is on the way.
I will give some examples in a moment.
Widespread and deep-going lack of consensus among the citizens of a country on matters of fundamental philosophical importance can lead to civil war. The USA is now in a state of mainly cold civil war, but things have been heating up and getting uglier by the day. This is undeniable by anyone who is keeping up with current events. We are headed for social collapse. Some will say we are accelerating toward it. I prefer an even ‘darker’ physics metaphor: we are jerking toward it. Collapse is not inevitable, and we should avoid defeatism; ill-understood forces, however, are at work. The election is three days away. This election may well be our last chance to slow the slide if not turn things around.
The denigrators of philosophy typically dismiss it as so much hot air. What they don't realize is that many if not most of the hot-button issues that exercise people, the denigrators included, are philosophical at bottom. To see what I mean, consider some of the issues that divide Left and Right:
For the Left, people are basically good; for the Right, they are not. The answer you give presupposes an answer to question number four on Kant's list: What can I know? What ought I do? What may I hope for? What is man? This is the main problem in philosophical anthropology. I note in passing that the great Enlightenment figure (1724-1804) had a properly realistic if not pessimistic view of human nature: “From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
For the Left, (material) equality trumps liberty; for the Right it is the other way around. This is obviously a central question in political philosophy.
For the Left, the differences between the sexes are socially constructed and therefore malleable; for the Right, socially constructed gender roles are secondary to biological and perhaps even metaphysical differences between males and females that cannot be socially engineered. This a variation on the ancient conflict of idealism and realism. The social constructivists are a species of idealist.
For the Left, abortion is a woman's reproductive right and simply a matter of health care; for the Right, the human fetus, at least in the later stages of its development, is a biological individual with its own right to life that ought not be violated. Abortion is a bloody enactment in concreto of competing positions in metaphysics about questions regarding time, change, and personhood.
For the Left, the purpose of art is to "challenge the status quo and bourgeois sensibilities"; for the Right, "to produce works of beauty and profundity to elevate the individual and society." (I quote from Dennis Prager.) Questions about the nature and purpose of art belong in aesthetics.
These are very deep philosophical disagreements. Time was, when most of us in this country didn't disagree about them or even raise them as serious questions. The answers in broad outline were provided by our founding documents and the Graeco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage that underpin them. The leading ideas were emblazoned on our coinage: “Liberty,” e pluribus unum, “In God We Trust.” It would be very easy to show that the Left, which has hijacked the Democrat Party, is inimical to each of these ideas. DEI is where these noble notions go to die.
My point, then, is that what were once ‘ivory tower’ disputes are now political disputes. In this sense our politics have become like philosophy. Everything is up for grabs, including what it is to be woman! When a member of SCOTUS cannot say, or will not say, what a woman is, a sea change has occurred.
And this means trouble. ‘Interesting’ times lie up ahead! I advise you to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Whatever the outcome on 5 November, the war will continue, intensify, and become increasingly ‘existential.’ That is to say: it will become less verbal, less cultural, hotter, and more like a real war. The conflict unto death in which we are currently embroiled is deeply rooted in philosophical soil. To borrow the title of Thomas Sowell’s great 1987 book, it is A Conflict of Visions.
Theme music for a Saturday night.