As someone who has published a number of books on the nature of life and reality, I regularly receive emails from ordinary members of the reading public who want to share their own metaphysical theories with me. The vast majority aren’t educated in philosophy: some have little education at all, whereas others have doctorates and are even widely recognized in their own fields—such as neurology, engineering, biology, etc.—but not in philosophy. I know from other authors that they, too, receive the same kind of emails.
As if this weren’t enough to betray the metaphysical unrest underlying our culture today, as publisher of Iff Books I also regularly review philosophy manuscripts submitted by lay people. These aspiring philosophers have come to a point in their lives where their idiosyncratic metaphysical intuitions have more or less congealed. Tellingly, the resulting insights are much more satisfying to them than the mainstream views they inherit from our culture—such as physicalism and religious dualism—which is alarming: here we have lay but reasonable people sincerely believing they can singlehandedly do better than the mainstream. Even more alarmingly, often they actually can.
Although physicalism is the reigning ontology in our western intellectual establishment, the consensus that underlies it seems to be merely superficial; a habit rather than a conviction. At least in my own relatively large and varied circle of acquaintances, many scientists, engineers and scholars pay lip service to physicalism—for a variety of pragmatic reasons—but, in their heart of hearts, harbor more than a few doubts about it. Just under the seemingly quiet surface of the consensus gentium, our intellectual establishment seems to be brimming with idiosyncratic metaphysical perspectives.
In his impressive and important book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor calls this proliferation of metaphysical views the “nova effect.” It began as a reaction to the erosion of religious faith in the nineteenth century and is now—with the advent of the Internet and social media—reaching bizarre proportions. In Taylor’s words, the effect consists in the spawning of
“an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options, across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond. … The fractured culture of the nova, which was originally that of elites only, [now] becomes generalized to whole societies.” (p. 299)
And thus, philosophers no longer have a monopoly on creative metaphysical thinking. Or rather, everybody is now a philosopher, even if not properly trained as one.
Indeed, there is an important sense in which doing philosophy is intrinsic to being human. With our unique capacity for reflection, we not only can, but perhaps are destined to, ask the big questions: Who are we? What’s going on? What’s the point of it all? From this perspective, doing philosophy is much more than just the day job of philosophy graduates. With the possible exception of those who must struggle constantly to merely survive, the rest of us inevitably face these questions at some point in life. Hence, we all philosophize, haphazardly as the case may be.
And here is where the active participation of trained, professional philosophers in our cultural dialogue has never been more important in the whole history of the West. When it comes to metaphysics, our culture’s confusion is unparalleled, which is both cause and self-fulfilling consequence of the nova effect. The undeniable success of technology has even encouraged some scientists—typically the self-appointed, militant spokespeople of scientific materialism—to conflate what works with what is, and thus conclude that behavior-predicting models can replace philosophical reflection.
Only lucid, clear, persuasive philosophy can break this vicious cycle. Not only are the self-appointed spokespeople of scientific materialism unwittingly creating a metaphysical mess of historical proportions, the average educated person is trying to fill the gap and do some philosophy on their own. Without professional help to identify and demarcate the field of plausible play, what chance do they have? One by one, they fall to common logical fallacies that have been known for at least two and a half thousand years.
Insofar as exploring philosophical questions is an innate part of being human—perhaps even the meaning of life itself—philosophy is one of the most important professions, if not the most important. Whereas more economically prestigious fields such as medicine, law, engineering, etc., are merely utilitarian—that is, means to an end—philosophy directly addresses our reasons to live. Doctors may help us stay alive, lawyers may help us stay out of jail, engineers may make our lives more comfortable, convenient and fun; but only philosophers address what we live for.
Yet, if we look around, do we honestly see philosophers playing such a decisive role in our society? If not, why not? The social need for professional, lucid philosophizing is blatant and overwhelming, so what has gone wrong?
For starters, philosophers can learn a thing or two from the spokespeople of scientific materialism: they have managed not only to pass science for metaphysics, but also to make science look exciting and fun. The media isn’t blind to it, and thus science gets a lot of airtime, a lot of opportunities to influence our culture and the lives of our fellow citizens. Philosophy, on the other hand, seems largely stuck in an ivory tower of impenetrable jargon, ghostly abstractions and unending hair-splitting. How have we come to find ourselves in this situation?
It’s not too difficult to see how, if we are honest with ourselves. Imagine the popular appeal of a TV show featuring two analytic philosophers discussing and trying to pin down the exact meaning of, say, the concept of causality. Would it be comparable to the appeal of a show featuring, say, the UK’s baby-faced rock star physicist Brian Cox speaking unintelligibly about quantum entanglement, drawing ‘Whoa!’s’ from a befuddled but captivated audience? Honestly, we may have something to learn from that kind of charade.
Academic philosophy’s failure to arouse comprehensive popular interest doesn’t change the fact that lucid philosophy is what we need most in this bewildering “nova” era of ours. The philosophy ship carrying us through life has lost its trained officers and is now at the mercy of winds and currents. The alarming growth in cases of anxiety, depression, ennui and despair we are witnessing is—I am convinced—largely a symptom of the unsustainable lack of firm metaphysical foundations in our culture. After all, it is not easy to find oneself in the strange position of being alive, constantly fighting against entropy, knowing that one day one is guaranteed to lose the fight. If we philosophers don’t help people make sense of, and peace with, this condition, the pharma industry will continue to fill the void.
However, to properly play that role we must attune our work to the needs of society, as opposed to playing navel-gazing conceptual games that get papers published yet achieve little else. Philosophy is not meant for philosophers alone, otherwise it should be a club, not a publicly funded human activity. If we are to be relevant, philosophers must also actively communicate with the public, like scientists do. The responsibility for making the significance of our work clear to everybody can only be our own. Communication is an integral part of the job, not just something you throw over the wall for somebody else to worry about. Corporate managers know this well, because they’ve learned it the hard way.
There are, of course, valiant attempts to reach a wider public with some popular philosophy publications. And these are crucially important, something to build on. But are these efforts comparable to the popular science media industry? This year, Scientific American is completing 175 years in continuous publication, the longest run of any magazine, not only scientific ones. It faces competition from New Scientist, Pop Science, Cosmos, Discover, American Scientist, National Geographic, etc. Psychology Today is read by a broad and incredibly diverse audience. There are multiple subscription-based TV channels dedicated to science. PBS’s science channels on YouTube gather millions of subscribers. Clearly, scientists have something figured out that we philosophers, in our insular world, ignore at our own peril.
The need for sober philosophy in society is overwhelming; perhaps even bigger than the need for science. But we cannot hope to emulate the public relations success of science unless professional philosophy drives to conclusions, as opposed to increasingly convoluted, open-ended debates. For instance, the tendency to create broad comparative taxonomies of metaphysical options—instead of making choices—is of dubious value, for if the social role of philosophy is to provide lucid guidance to navigating the metaphysical undercurrents of our culture, the internal relativism of the philosophy community defeats its own raison d’être: we can’t help the average person figure out in which direction to point the rudder if we insist that all directions may make sense from some vantage point.
Granted, philosophy often can’t appeal directly to experiment—as science almost always can—to settle disputes. However, we still have internal logical consistency, conceptual parsimony and empirical adequacy as criteria to evaluate our metaphysical options. Albeit somewhat subjective, these are criteria about which there is a fair amount of consensus. What is missing is our collective willingness to apply them and own the consequences of doing so.
Far from me to pretend that I have ready-made solutions or patronize the academic philosophy community, in which I am an outsider (I earn my living doing high-tech corporate strategy). But perhaps it is precisely this outside perspective that allows me to contribute a different angle. In this spirit, I believe the key is in realizing that in both science and business—the two worlds of my professional life—the opportunity to hold on to ultimately untenable views is finite; sooner or later reality comes calling and settles the questions for the better or worse. But in philosophy, there seems to be endless opportunity to espouse one’s own pet view and go largely unpunished for it.
I submit that the professional philosophy community must find or devise some Darwinian process to play, in metaphysics, a role analogous to experiments in science and market performance in business. Without something like it the work of philosophers shall remain forever divided, open-ended and irrelevant from a social perspective. For philosophers cannot truly influence the cultural dialogue without collectively taking some position—or at least discarding others—as opposed to relativizing everything under tortuously abstract taxonomies.
With the march of A.I., automation and other megatrends that render mechanical, repetitive human labor increasingly redundant, the philosophy profession—along with art and spirituality the only human activity that directly tackles the meaning of life—has everything to become the cornerstone of our society. But for that to happen, we, philosophers, must first get our collective act together.
Bernardo Kastrup
Bernardo Kastrup has a Ph.D. in philosophy (ontology, philosophy of mind) and another Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable computing, artificial intelligence). As a scientist, Bernardo has worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Philips Research Laboratories. His focus is on Idealism, and his work has been published in Scientific American, the Institute of Art and Ideas, and Big Think, among others.
Surely the point of a Darwinian process is that it is not devised, but is simply there? Presumably there are already various impersonal social processes, such as market forces, currently contributing to the production of just such academic philosophy as there is. Perhaps the only thing that will change all that will be the work of a new “great” philosopher. Was there not more involvement by philosophers, in our collective social life, in the early days of analytic philosophy? Perhaps we are just waiting for the new Russell.
As a ‘lay’ person i agree with this completely. Western society needs this urgently.
Thanks for this very thought-provoking piece. Do you have a link to something you’ve written where you make a more concrete proposal? I am assuming you have something in mind…
A cogent call to action, I’m sure, for the intended audience. But I was sincerely disappointed with the lack of woo, given its presence in the title.
Perhaps this essay is case study in why some philosophers are incapable of convincing the public that they have little to offer. The whole thing could be summarized in a single sentence. The rest is empty verbiage doing no intellectual work. What do philosophers have to offer? The author doesn’t tell. He only asserts that there may be something. Science has a commitment to empiricism and technologies, both material and intellectual to, not only generate data, but to validate them using the tools of statistical inference and to incorporate them into models and explanations. The philosophy of science and the Science Wars have raised the the questions that can explain both the successes of the the scientific method(s) and their limits as epistemological tools. No mention of that in this essay. I would suggest the author have a look at the work of David Kyle Johnson as an example of popular philosophy done right. Most people with a philosophical bent are fascinated by a simple introduction to the free will vs determinism debate, the problem of induction, how we have a hard time being consistent in our morality (consequentialist by day, deontologist by night). Just a simple game of “spot the logical fallacy” applied to any op ed can be fun and can illustrate the utility of philosophical thought.
Maybe it is too, simple. Maybe absolute parsimony is reflected in “Don’t Worry Be Happy” or a dog’s unconditional acceptance and love. Maybe physicalism/materialism is an alter of idea(l)ism. Maybe duality is an alter of non-duality. Maybe a “transpersonal field of meditation” purposefully obscures a non-dual source.
If only “Truth is True” any confusion must be a purposeful self-delusion or misidentification. How could we not know (S)elf unless we choose not to? Our meta-cognitive self seems to be our default and somewhat benign way of being. This split minded self may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It provides an operating system where opposites seem to exist; e.g., Life v. death. “Mind at Large” (not meta-cognitive) cannot contain opposite ideas as both true. This is only possible with a dissociated aspect of this mind providing an expression of its own content where life and death, light and dark, love and hate can co-exist — insanely.
Thank you, Bernardo K. for what you write and your open mind. I love your books and interviews. AND see what happens when you encourage a layperson. Like gas on the fire. Some sort of inexplicable belief there might be depth in what they think and believe☺
In the original post, Bernardo Kastrup suggested: “I submit that the professional philosophy community must find or devise some Darwinian process to play, in metaphysics, a role analogous to experiments in science and market performance in business.”
Martin Cooke responded in his comment: “Surely the point of a Darwinian process is that it is not devised, but is simply there? Presumably there are already various impersonal social processes, such as market forces, currently contributing to the production of just such academic philosophy as there is.”
If Martin is right that some evolutionary (Darwinian) process is already at play, still, that process may not be selecting for the criteria that Bernardo would like to see selected, such as unification, determination, and social relevance (which are the opposite of the qualities he lamented: that philosophers are “divided, open-ended and irrelevant from a social perspective”). What Bernardo is seeking are constraints that will guide the evolution of thinking (about metaphysics or other problems) toward the desired criteria. Any community of inquiry needs to design institutions and fora that control for the desired criteria.
There is actually an interdisciplinary field devoted to thinking about such processes: the evolutionary epistemology of theories (not to be confused with another kind of evolutionary epistemology, that of biological mechanisms). One of the pioneers of evolutionary epistemology was the social scientist Donald T. Campbell. Several of his writings are directly relevant to Bernardo’s concerns. I would especially point to his 1986 paper “Science’s social system of validity-enhancing collective belief change and the problems of the social sciences”, which was reprinted in his book Methodology and Epistemology for Social Science (1988). In that paper he emphasized the importance of forums that “maintain a disputatious scholarly community for each problem area”, and he said:
“Effective communication has been greatly facilitated by journals specifically dedicated to critique and rebuttal, such as Current Anthropology and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. These are expensive to run and require subsidies. It seems to me of highest priority to create many more of these journals, perhaps with narrower scopes, and some that cross disciplinary boundaries (Campbell 1969). Funding priority should be given to studies designed to help choose among well-articulated alternatives emerging from confrontations. Annual problem-centered conference series have in some areas produced similar benefits. Funds for visiting other laboratories working on the same problems are also of value.”
You may also be interested in Campbell’s last published article, “From evolutionary epistemology via selection theory to a sociology of scientific validity” (1997) and the response by Francis Heylighen, “Objective, subjective and intersubjective selectors of knowledge”, in the same issue of Evolution and Cognition.
Certain philosophers have long known about the importance of what Campbell wrote about—I think of Nicholas Rescher’s metaphilosophy, for example—but the discipline in general may not yet have institutionalized such insights?
As an aside, I would note that Bernardo’s article could give the impression that science and metaphysics are completely separate endeavors, but scientists do metaphysics too, so ideally the fora for guiding the evolution of metaphysics (and of metametaphysics) should be interdisciplinary!