I've been reading Walter Cerf's wonderful preface to the Harris and Cerf edition of Hegel'sDifferenzschrift. The nicest thing about it is the long speech that Cerf imagines Schelling and Hegel making upon a visit to Kant, explaining to the snoozing man how critical philosophy leads to speculative philosophy. It's just a wonderful pulling together of so many important dialectical strands in German Idealism.
Another thing kind of weirded me out though. Cerf really interestingly notes how the conceptual divisions that Hegel attempted to overcome were not some kind of abstract game but in some sense constitutive anxieties of the age. The root distinction between particular and universal has all sorts of historical resonances such as issues concerning the relation between an autonomous, yet alienated, individual and the community that both nurtures and stifles him (and it is a "him" with Hegel). In order to be able to be intellectuals, the young Hegel and friends lived in a kind of painful monastic self-denial that exacerbated these tensions (cf. Kierkegaard), and they (unlike Soren) really did for a time at least hope that the French Revolution would somehow be the historical overcoming of them.
Of course existentialism turned necessity into a virtue, taking the very tensions that Hegel and friends analyzed to not be things that could be sublimated, but instead things just constitutive of the human condition. Some strains of Speculative Realism go this one better, and see these tensions as inscribed in the non-human universe itself. Tristan Garcia is to some extent a metaphysical (that is British, not American) Hegelian with no Aufhebung.
Reading Garcia and Cerf together made me wonder if our current time has any constitutive tensions analogous to all of the particular/universal dichotomies that haunted Hegel. With Garcia, I think many of Hegel's are still with us. But to some extent we are used to many of them now. Again, the tension between liberal autonomism and communitarianism, and crap aspects of both, are just facts of life we all unsuccessfully navigate now in ways big and little. What interests me tonight is whether there is anything like this that future Walter Cerfs might describe as distinctive of our point in history? I realize that this is probably a silly game, but I'm interested if anyone has any suggestions.If I had to suggest something it would be the causal inefficacy of true beliefs that have a high relevance to the good.
With the scientific method wedded to basic ethical competence, we are finally at a point where we have some incredibly important true beliefs relevant to human well-being. They aren't just known by supersmart people, but are also such that any reflective person of good will believes them. Consider beliefs relating to: (1) negative effects of income inequality, (2) overfinancialization, (3) global warming, and (4) austerity economics. For many of these areas, the basic causal stories, as well as what an informed person of good will would desire as public policy, is in no way problematic or especially difficult. The information about the underlying mechanics and what we ought to do is in and explicable to laypeople. This is a tremendous historical advance.
But these really, really important true beliefs seem to lack any causal power whatsoever. Just look at the European Union's vicious and insane economic policies or environmental policy in the United States (hurricane season just started, and no matter how bad it is going to get, it is a priori that yet again nothing that will happen will make one damned bit of difference with respect to preventing future catastrophes).
I think to some extent the failure of clinical psychology should have warned us that our age would be haunted by this problem. The whole Freudian myth was that the act of having true beliefs about the causes of your own inability to get your crap together would somehow magically help you get your crap together. What a strange thing to have believed! Now we are seeing the failure of this myth with respect to nearly every aspect of human well-being. It's sort of a collective akrasia not unlikely to be the death knell of our species.
The issue resonates philosophically as well. First, contemporary debates about internalism in ethics just are debates about whether certain beliefs could be magically causally efficacious. Second, much contemporary theology is a move against the idea that metaphysical beliefs (about resurrections and whatnot) can magically fix one's spiritual state (traditional clinical psychology could only have been invented in a Protestant culture steeped in such magical views). Third, this issue is actually the flip side of what John McDowell is worried about in Mind and World . This is no accident, as the Fichtean/Schellingian route through intellectual intuition as an example of something both sensory and conceptual is also the marriage of perception and action.
I know that there's some sense in which we've been here before, with Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach (and we all know where that went). Somewhere Zizek takes issue with Marx on this; I need to read that. But I think Marx has it wrong too. Mere interpretation (just coming up with true beliefs) is a let-down, but mere change is wrong too. Or rather, thinking one already has the right beliefs and therefore one need only put one's queer shoulder to the wheel is also mistaken. If the beliefs are causally ineffecacious with respect to bringing about the good, then the beliefs themselves are suspect.
Rather than Marx's quip about "changing the world," the proper (perhaps upside down) German Idealist response should be the following. What philosophy should be doing instead of merely "interpreting the world in various ways" is producing beliefs that do what internalists think moral truths do to agents who believe them, producing true beliefs that change the world towards the good. I realize that seems crazy, both given that our age is characterized by this very lack, and perhaps for reasons of intrinsic implausibility. This being said: (1) Hurricane season has begun; this issue of the causal inefficacy of good-relevant true beliefs really is pressing, and you can forgive some of us who live in Louisiana with kids our philosophical superstitions. (2) I think the intuition of craziness comes because the retake on Marx's formulation rejects (overcomes? sublimates?) the distinction between rhetoric/fiction and philosophy. But some of us reject that distinction. Maybe this is what literature and philosophy as literature are already doing. Perhaps the task of literature in this regard really is impossible (cf. Catarina's worries), but I'm not sure that means it's not worth doing. (3) I really do need to read Zizek on Marx's eleventh thesis. If anyone still reading this knows where the discussion is, please share. I know he says that more reflection is exactly what we need, but maybe he said something in that context about causally efficacious reflections versus inefficacious ones. He's in general so comfortable with the German Idealists that I'd be very surprised if he didn't see the same Fichtean issue and is much better at navigating these waters.
For example, if philosophy as fiction itself can't produce causally efficacious beliefs, then why is it any more worth doing? Why not just go back to the old thing of interpreting the world in a causally ineffecacious manner? I mean, it's very good work if you can get it. I'm certain that Zizek must have considered this.
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