The Self-Devouring Octopus; or, Logic
The Operation of Falsity
“Reason” is the English translation of the Latin ratio, which in turn renders the Greek logos. The Greek term features in what is perhaps the best-known verse of the Bible—“In the beginning was the logos” (John 1:1)—and it provides the suffix in the names of countless fields of scientific study, from mineralogy to epidemiology to psychology. It also gives us the name of a field in which the Greek term figures not as the suffix, but as the root: logic. Logic has for much of history been conceived as, so to speak, the science of reason.
Philosophers today might balk at this characterization, as it is generally held now that logic is the study rather of validity, which is a property of arguments, and not a faculty of human minds. But this is a recent turn of events, and it occurs at a moment when most philosophers have forgotten that reason itself, as will be discussed in chapter 2, was not always held to be confined to human minds; rather, it was understood to permeate and give shape to the entire order of nature. So let us not be too faithful to the sensitivities of the present moment. Instead, let us consider the broad sweep of the history of logic, of reasoned argument, and the many ways in which reason’s endeavors have proved self-subverting.
One of the key elements of philosophy’s myth of origins is that it was born at the moment debaters came to value truth, rather than victory, as the goal of debate. This was, legend has it, the moment of separation of the philosophers from the sophists: the splitting off of two distinct ancestral lines. At the moment of this split, the role of the philosopher had already been distinct for some time from that of another personage: the seer. That is, in Greek antiquity already, ordinarily, a philosopher did not tell you of his visions in dreams or other ecstasies; he did not tell you, ordinarily, what had been dictated to him by God or by some personal muse, without necessarily understanding it himself. Philosophers do not take dictation but always come to their views on their own. Nor do they make arguments simply for their own sake, or simply in order to win a debate. Yet both sorts of activity, that of the seers and that of the sophists, contribute amply to the ancestral DNA of modern philosophers.1
Today philosophers are much more likely to recognize their shared genetic link with the sophists than with the seers (though the method of intuition, beloved to many philosophers, may appear, upon scrutiny, to be little more than a secularized form of “seeing”). Lawyers, rhetoricians, and debate-club members share common ancestors with logicians, metaphysicians, and ethicists, though since antiquity they have evolved in a different niche, with an overarching purpose that is not just different from, but in many respects counter to, the aims of philosophy. Cicero, the first-century BCE Roman statesman and lawyer, is a sort of patron saint for those who follow in the same profession, or at least for the ones who have learned a few things about their profession and its history. Thomas Cromwell’s law education in the sixteenth century consisted in memorizing large portions of the Roman author’s oeuvre.2 And Cicero is also held in high esteem by academic philosophers, even if most cannot tell you much about him.
Socrates for his part was falsely, and outrageously, accused by his peers at Athens of making the weaker argument the stronger, among other crimes, for it was precisely this practice that Socrates had spent his public life disavowing. He did not want anything so vain as to win a debate. He wanted the truth, if this was to be had, even if it was furnished not by him, but by one of his interlocutors. Yet still today overachieving high school students are encouraged to make the weaker argument the stronger when they are assigned, by lot and as teams, one side or the other of a debate topic: that capital punishment is justifiable, perhaps, or that capital punishment is unjustifiable. It is generally hoped or expected that these students will go on to law school, and will someday take on clients, whom they will successfully defend, regardless of what they might themselves believe about their clients’ guilt or innocence. And many of them, between high school debate teams and postgraduate study of law, will undertake a program of undergraduate study in philosophy, which they will be encouraged to think of as “pre-law.” Yet philosophy cannot in fact be preparatory to lawyering; the search after truth and the search after winning arguments can come together only when reality itself permits this. In practice, however, the two ends are often intertwined, and likely the more venal the society in which philosophy struggles to hang on to some modest institutional standing, the more it will have to present itself as useful for the practical aims of making the weaker argument the stronger.
There are of course other uses of the rhetorical art than lawyerly power plays. To the extent that it is an art, those who practice it may sometimes aspire to the creation of beauty. Upon his professorial appointment in Paris in 1551 at what would later become the Collège de France, the great French humanist Petrus Ramus (Pierre de la Ramée) took the title of “Regius Professor of Philosophy and Eloquence,” effectively institutionalizing the vision of learning he had spelled out in his Address on Combining Philosophy and Eloquence of 1546.3 We may not be startled by this conjunction today, but what Ramus sought to do in putting these two terms together was to combine two great—and, by the time of the Renaissance, sharply opposed—traditions: Scholasticism on the one hand, which gives us logical arguments concerned most of all with form; and humanism on the other, which gives us the arts and letters, all of what today might be called “content.” It is the latter that makes it worthwhile to know anything at all and that gives us something to which we might apply, though preferably not obsessively or superciliously, the rules of logic that we have mastered. Ramus encouraged his students to learn from syllogism and poetry alike, and in so doing caused tremendous controversy. An anonymous anti-Ramist pamphleteer accused him of “following no particular route but merely barking at theoretical odds and ends.”4 In the sixteenth century as today, there was a generally unspoken rule that philosophy is not to become too eloquent, and to the extent that it encompasses poetry and oratory within its purview, it is abandoning its assigned post.
Today philosophers hardly speak of eloquence, either for or against, though a term that covers much of the same territory, “erudition,” occurs with surprising frequency. It seems, often, among academic philosophers, to function as a backhanded compliment: the erudite philosopher is one who knows many facts, but has not synthesized them into a rigorous or systematic account of anything important. When it occurs outside of academic philosophy, in turn, “erudite,” like “brilliant,” is a word ideally suited for Twitter, hastily summing up, in a single flat-footed adjective, hard-earned knowledge of things that are not now considered worthy of hashtags, that are not currently trending. Erudition is either a compensation for rigor, then, or it is an incomprehensible and moderately impressive quirk. Like eloquence, of which it is a direct descendant, it is suspect, not least in its very human eclecticism. We are reminded by Ramus’s Address of the long history of philosophy’s effort to safely cordon off this other sort of knowing.
The best argument in favor of this cordoning, perhaps, is that poetry and oratory can be deployed to work upon people’s passions, while syllogism, valid inference, deduction, work only on the reason. And these two magisteria, to invoke Stephen Jay Gould’s account of the relationship between science and faith, must never overlap.5 Yet the best and most eloquent rhetoricians have always known that such a sharp separation gives logic an undeserved pass. Cicero had mastered logic, but was sharply aware of its potential for, so to speak, weaponization. He understood that the rules of valid inference might be deployed for questionable ends, and indeed that arguments that check out logically might still be wrong to the extent that they have been deployed for nefarious reasons, as tools in a maneuver for power. Lawyers might dazzle their adversaries with rhetorical flourishes having only a semblance of truth, but Cicero himself knew that one can also dazzle, and subdue, and vanquish a conversational partner using logical arguments that involve no legerdemain at all, that are perfectly true, yet perfectly petty and manipulative. It is just such a prospect, of being true and spurious at once, that Herman Melville’s eponymous character in The Confidence-Man invokes, attributing it, somewhat peculiarly, to the work of the Roman author of Germania: “Even were there truth in Tacitus,” he writes, “such truth would have the operation of falsity, and so still be poison, moral poison.”6
How can the truth ever be “moral poison”? What is it to be true, but to have “the operation of falsity”? One long-standing problem in the history of the teaching and transmission of logic, has been this: in order to be able to skillfully discern sound and valid arguments, one must also become skilled in identifying spurious ones. Thus a significant portion of logic has consisted in the study of sophisms, to the point that it has seemed impossible, for some, to see logic as anything more than the science of sophism. Like police detectives who go undercover and become too attached to the trappings of the criminal underworld to ever return from it, so too are logicians drawn in by sophisms. Thus Cicero complains of logicians whose whole endeavor is “to make contorted conclusions, to speak filthily, to use petty little arguments.”7 We see much the same complaint in the second-century CE satirist Lucian of Samosata, who insists that logicians “have nothing other than miserable little words and measly interrogations, … with which they feed their minds.”8 And the fourth-century CE Byzantine rhetorician Themistius expresses a similar view when he complains that logicians waste their time on “rude and troublesome sophisms, difficult to understand and useless to know.”9 Or the second-century CE Gellius, author of Attic Nights, who warns that to spend too much time in “those mazes and meanders of logic” can only result in a sort of “second childhood,” a mental infantilism unbefitting any wise or even competent adult.10 To return again to Cicero, the Roman author finds it fitting to cite Plutarch’s description of “the octopus [who] sits through the winter devouring himself,” as a suitable metaphor for the self-defeating activity of the logicians.11 Logic, these authors worry, is nothing but an inane, self-destructive, shameful distraction: the science of truth, corrupted by the operation of falsity.
Likely no philosopher has ever been more committed to the promise of rationality than Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, writing mostly from Germany at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. He believed, evidently sincerely, that if we simply succeed in devising an adequate artificial language, with all of our terms rigorously defined and all of the rules of inference clearly spelled out, there will be no more conflict, from small family squabbles to wars between empires. We will simply be able, whenever the first signs of conflict begin to appear, to declare, “Let us calculate!” (or, translated differently, “Let us compute!”). In this way we will see, “without any ceremony, … who is right.”12 The problem, of course, as many of Leibniz’s contemporaries already saw, is that many of us are simply too attached to the ceremony that Leibniz’s method dispenses with. We like “drama,” as is often said today; we do not want our positions in disputes to be formalized and clarified. We want, rather, to press our case with the help of our passions, our imaginations, and whatever other smokescreen we have at our disposal to deploy against our enemies, to stun them and confuse them. We do not want the magisteria of rhetoric and logic to overlap in any way that must be explicitly acknowledged, but this does not mean that those in the magisterium of logic will not wish to show their mastery of a foreign tongue when it proves useful. Such magisterial overlap between these two “languages,” between straightforward argumentation and manipulative rhetoric, is particularly common in the case of international conflict and high-level diplomacy, of the sort, in fact, in which Leibniz himself was implicated as a career courtier and privy councillor to dukes and emperors. When indeed is the case for war ever pressed, by those who wish to launch into it, on the basis of a consideration of the objective evidence for its justice or for an overall greater utilitarian good as its expected outcome? When did any state ever change its mind about going to war on the basis of a Leibnizian calculation that yields up a conclusion in favor of the antiwar faction, that shows that it is not reasonable, that the truth of things prohibits it? When opposed diplomats press their cases to one another, do their claims not always give evidence, even when true, of what Melville calls “the operation of falsity”?
The seventeenth-century French philosopher Pierre Gassendi, for his part, explains Plutarch’s image of the self-devouring octopus as an expression of the idea that logic can only “be fed on its own discoveries.” For Gassendi, “there is no use for its precepts beyond itself, and therefore it were necessary that whatever is born within its limits be consumed within them.”13 Many other philosophers, ancient and modern, have further noted the deep problem, to which I have already alluded, that the logical arguments that we dismiss as “sophisms” are often perfectly valid and sound, and yet also are plainly distractions at best, and, at worst, dangerous rhetorical tools. Take the famous sophism of the horns: “You have whatever you have not lost; but you’ve never lost your horns; therefore, you have horns” (this is an ancestor, in turn, to the comedy routine in which an innocent man struggles to answer the question “When did you stop beating your wife?”). Or this one, a variation on the so-called fallacy of composition from the early eighteenth-century African philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo, who had a long career in Germany, in his 1738 work, the Treatise on the Art of Accurately and Soberly Philosophizing:
This goat is yours.
This goat is a mother.
Therefore, this goat is your mother.14
If these examples look something like jokes, it is with good reason: the formal structure of a joke may be understood as something like a satire of logical inference. Immanuel Kant would define jokes as “the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”15 This is the reverse of what happens in a proper, nonsatirical logical inference, where the conclusion is the final confirmation that a burgeoning expectation is indeed something.
Sophisms, we might say, are the soured, curdled form of arguments. They are of course also great fun, and highly seductive. The fact that logicians have often amused themselves by exploring the commonalities of these forms of inference, and attempting to construct inferences that displayed features of both the logical argument and the joke at once, should not be surprising. That falsehood opened up the door to a universe of imaginative possibilities, as hilarious as they are irresponsible, was even enshrined as a rule within logic itself, delightfully known as the “Principle of Explosion”: Ex falso sequitur quodlibet (From a falsehood anything follows). Once you’ve allowed even the tiniest untruth into your argument, well, from there, as the song has it, anything goes.
We have seen two principal complaints about logic: that it too easily degenerates into sophistical distractions, and that it is like an octopus that “devours its own cups,” that is, that it has only itself to feed upon. Plutarch’s complaint, cited by Cicero, is not unrelated to the common observation over the centuries, for example by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that logic cannot tell us anything about the world, but can only clarify what we already know about the world through nonlogical means.16 In his 1925–26 lectures published as Logic: The Question of Truth, Martin Heidegger would observe around the same time, somewhat more disparagingly, that Scholastic logic, or the art of syllogism, “is a form of sloth tailor-made for instructors, … a fraud perpetrated on the students.”17 From their very different perspectives, Cicero, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger are all concerned that logic is empty, and that to revere it too much by treating it as if it were in itself valuable is at best a waste of intellectual effort. Gassendi, for his part, perceives a connection between two objectionable practices: the habit of taking logic as an end in itself, on the one hand, and, on the other, the misappropriation of logic for “logomachy,” for doing battle for power over others by means of logical arguments. Thus he complains of “those ancients who passed their lives contriving the mazes and meanders of sophisms, and brawling over those things that are taught in logic, and clinging to these things as if they were not the path, but the destination towards which we are hurrying.”18
Not even logic, in short, is safe from human unreason, from pettiness, distraction, passion, insult, and bickering. In fact, if the philosophers I have selected to cite here are correct, logic—which has often been expected to serve as our great bulwark against unreason—is not only not safe from corruption; it is particularly prone to corruption by human passions and self-interest. There might be ways to train it so as to serve toward human and individual improvement, but what is clear is that it is not going to train us, as we are always training it upon our adversaries and for our own ends. These ends are often naked maneuvers for power, and they are also often, as in the various sophisms we have surveyed, simply mischievous fun. Not infrequently the line between these two sorts of deviation is blurred: as we will see in chapter 8, one of the basic functions of jokes is to gain power over others by taking them down a notch, by exposing their inferiority. Sophisms and jokes alike, then, often function as little explosions, smoke bombs we set off to confuse or to stun as we advance our own interests. These strategies, moreover, are not somehow opposite to the art of logical argumentation; they are often virtuosic instances of it.
Kaspar Hauser and the Limits of Rational Choice
Contemporary academic philosophy is not generally interested, as Cicero, Gassendi, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger were, in the way in which even a mastery of reason can be turned toward the exercise of unreason in human life. It mostly limits itself, rather, to attempts at precise definitions of what reason is, and to the production of possible counterexamples to these attempts. Thus for example in causal decision theory—a branch of philosophy with significant relevance to the work of economists and political scientists—there has been abundant discussion over recent decades of what is called “Newcomb’s problem.”19 You are presented with two boxes, one that is transparent, and one that is not transparent and whose contents you do not know. The transparent one contains one thousand dollars. The opaque one contains either one million dollars, or nothing. You are told that you are permitted to take either one box, or both boxes. The hitch is this: whether the opaque box has one million dollars in it or not is determined by another party involved, the so-called reliable predictor, who reliably predicts in advance which choice you will make, and determines to put nothing in the opaque box in the event that you take both boxes. You are aware of this factor at the time of the choice. You want to maximize your wealth. So here is the problem: Do you take one box, or two? Some people reason that whatever is in the opaque box cannot be changed at the moment the choice is made, so you may as well take both. Others reason that you had better take only the opaque box on the expectation that it will indeed contain one million dollars.
A tremendous proliferation of variations on this problem has kept alive a small scholarly subdiscipline for some decades, and it has yielded valuable results in its own terms. But the situations this literature addresses are fairly remote from those that are of interest to us: those situations, for example, in which rational inferences are weaponized for irrational or transgressive ends; or those situations in which agents seem to be rationally choosing to behave irrationally; or those situations in which agents seem to simply be acting independently of any concern to be, or to appear, rational—and in so doing do not seem to be failing at exemplifying what it is to be distinctively human; rather, for better or worse, they seem to be excelling at it. For example, when people say that nuclear brinksmanship between the United States and North Korea is “irrational,” or when we say that a streak of irrationalism pervades postwar French philosophy or characterizes the work of the alt-right meme-mongers who wanted Trump to get elected just for the payoff this would bring in “lulz,” we do not mean that the parties involved here were behaving like a Newcomb one-boxer, or, if you are yourself a one-boxer, like a two-boxer.
One might take an interest in rationality and irrationality without wishing to solve the canonical problems of rational choice. The aim might be, rather, to understand the conditions under which agents decline to engage with these problems—in which they reject, for example, the expectation or the demand that they must wish to maximize their wealth, or that they must seek to give the answer the experts are expecting. Imagine, for example, a Franciscan monk in the early thirteenth century, who has sworn never to possess more earthly wealth than he is able to beg in a day and then to dispense or consume again within the same day. If a monk is caught hoarding, Francis himself might come and unleash his wrath, just as Christ did when the traders undertook their commerce in the temple. What use would it be for this monk to wager correctly in some experiment devised by rational-choice theorists to measure his rationality? Everything in a medieval Franciscan’s conception of the value in life is grounded in his avoidance of all that is of monetary value, not least money.20 Rational-choice theory has landed upon a default measure of rationality as profit seeking, but its practitioners are not generally aware of this. The same broad homogenizing force also construes every individual as at least an aspiring voter, an aspiring homeowner, an aspiring member of a thriving nuclear family; it does not hold open the possibility of opting out of all this, of withdrawal, asceticism, or monasticism. Consider by way of contrast the old idea, as in traditional Hindu faith,21 that one may choose either the path of the householder or the path of the ascetic, as a way of expressing one’s devotion to a society’s shared values. This notion is all but absent in contemporary philosophy’s reasoning both about rationality and, in the realm of values, about what we may call “the good life.” Today it is taken for granted that we all wish to be householders, and, therefore, that we all will need to make our mortgage payment each month, and, therefore, that we all could use that extra money that would come as a result of getting the rational-choice theorist’s experimental question right.
Some might argue that if we wish to extricate ourselves from the financial calculus preferred in the standard approaches to such thought experiments as Newcomb’s problem, we could simply replace monetary rewards with spiritual rewards of some sort. But such a substitution may not be so simple, for it seems to imply that spiritual rewards are the sort of thing that can be easily exchanged, as if on a currency market. Some who live their lives spiritually are not necessarily for that reason seeking spiritual “payoff.” They may well be seeking degradation, confirmation of their individual nothingness before God, which comes through the performance of humble acts that, if performed successfully, will go unrecognized. The reward is in the absence of a payoff, and if the doer is thinking in terms of payoff, then ipso facto he or she is no longer deserving of the reward. It is difficult to imagine what sort of promissory note could be substituted for such a person into the opaque box in which others might hope to discover one million dollars.
The way we respond to thought experiments that purport to test our rationality has much to do with the things we value, and with who we are. We may recall the vivid scene in Werner Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser about a Naturkind, a purportedly feral child of the sort that had been of interest to philosophy since Jean-Jacques Rousseau.22 A young man, Kaspar Hauser, is discovered after having apparently spent his childhood alone, or perhaps in intimate community with animals, in the state of nature. He is barely able to communicate, but little by little learns some of the language and customs of nineteenth-century Germany. After two years, a professor is called in to determine whether Kaspar is capable of thinking logically. The professor presents him with a sort of riddle. There is a village in which all the inhabitants tell only the truth. There is another village inhabited by habitual liars. Two paths lead to these villages from where you are standing, and you are at the crossroads. A man comes down one of the paths, and you ask him whether he comes from the village of the truth-tellers or the village of the liars. You are allowed to ask him only one question, in the aim of determining which village is which. What is the question?
Kaspar is silent, and the proud and self-serious professor eventually divulges the answer to him: “If you came from the other village, would you answer ‘no’ if I were to ask you whether you came from the liars’ village?” That’s logic, the professor says, at which point Kaspar finally speaks up, saying he knows another question that would do the trick: ask the man whether he is a tree frog. This would indeed reveal which village is which, but the professor does not accept it; he is only irritated, since it “is not a proper question.” What the professor means is that it reveals nothing about Kaspar’s ability to respect the rules of logic in his thinking. If Kaspar had been presented with Newcomb’s problem instead of the professor’s provincial puzzle, he surely would have said that he did not want the money, or would have come up with a comparably inappropriate question for the reliable predictor, and the expert would have been infuriated that his subject had refused to follow the rules.
We need not be on Kaspar’s side to recognize the importance of what is at stake in the misunderstanding between Kaspar and the professor, between the expert who believes that logic rules all, and the outsider or dissenter who adheres to a form of thinking that he finds more direct, or “authentic,” or adequate to lived experience. The mandarin professor here is in some respects, in spite of his self-image, not unlike the sly lawyer who is consciously making the weaker argument the stronger. In the professor’s monopoly of the truth, there is a certain operation of falsity, and Kaspar Hauser, as they say these days, calls it out. But in other respects the professor and the rhetorician are dissimilar. The rhetorically adept advocate is operating from a position of only partial power. He needs to convince the judge and jury of his argument’s truth, and he is looking for argumentative tools, logically valid or not, to accomplish this. The professor for his part is operating from a position of total power over Kaspar (at least until the forest-boy makes a mockery of his logic test and provokes a titter from the housemaid), and he lacks a certain self-knowledge that the sophist lawyer probably has: he takes himself to be a simple vehicle of the necessary truth of logic, rather than an agent who is asserting his own power by means of this truth. The sophist’s argument is his own creation, while the professor’s logic, at least as he understands it, is something external to him. In a sense he is merely taking dictation (though he would never see it that way). But this difference may only be a measure of the relative degree of power the professor possesses. He does not need to convince anyone of anything, as Kaspar is a nobody, a feral child. In any case the kind of truth the professor deals with, in contrast to the lawyer’s as he stands before the judge, is true whether his audience is convinced or not.
Kaspar, anyhow, is not convinced. He is, of course, only a fictional character. But he is one who has played an important role in real history, as an iteration of a stock figure of many Enlightenment-era philosophical thought experiments. Nor has he left the stage. There is quite a bit of him, in fact, in Werner Herzog himself. There are plenty of people who think the Herr Professor, along with others like him, is laughable, and do not want to listen to him. Their existence needs to be accounted for.
Carrying On about the Ineffable
The spontaneous insights of children said to be raised by wolves withstand efforts at logical treatment, but there are many other expressions of human life that put up resistance too. Among these are the deeply held beliefs of religious communities. Since the seventeenth century, the largest and most protracted battle between the forces of rationality and irrationality has been played out around the place of religion in modern society. That religion is marked as “irrational” and secularism as “rational” is a contingent fact about our society and our recent history. In other historical contexts it has been the unbelievers who are the raving, unhinged, and marginal characters, while religion in turn has enjoyed the full support and buttressing of the best logical arguments emerging from the most elite institutions of learning. For religion to be marked in this way in one era and not in another, one suspects, is yet another instance of the phenomenon we will consider in chapter 8, whereby the political left is seen to be effervescent in one era, and sober in another. Like the magnetic polarity of the earth, the moral character we associate with one of the two poles of social life—the left or the right, the religious or the secular—can switch all of a sudden, for reasons the scientists, social as well as natural, still do not fully understand.
But what is secularism? Beginning already in the Renaissance, the idea began to emerge that while religion is necessary for individuals, society itself is best organized as a truly neutral public space, independent of the church. In the following centuries the call for a separation of these two components of society, the church and the public space, often hardened into a demand for the thorough suppression, or at least restriction, of the power of the former. Thus, as mentioned in the introduction, in the Reign of Terror in France in the early 1790s, we see the conversion of Catholic churches into Temples of Reason, and in the Soviet Union under Stalin propaganda posters proliferated declaring that “Religion Is Poison,” borrowing the iconography of pagan witchcraft in order to tarnish the Orthodox Christian Church.
Until very recently, the public role of religion in modern Western societies seemed to be declining. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, also invoked in the introduction, has lived long enough to see the thorough disconfirmation of the thesis for which he had spent his decades-long career arguing: that the modern world was destined to fully achieve the goal that had begun to be articulated in the Renaissance, and had only been growing in appeal since then, of a neutral public space, where rational arguments prevail over the affective commitments of the particular communities making up a given society. This view is simply no longer tenable: from Islamic jihad to the display of the Ten Commandments in Alabama courthouses, religious commitment has flooded into political life with a vengeance in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
This sudden and surprising resurgence has stimulated a serious rethinking of the limits of the widespread presumption of a link between modernity and rationality. For centuries, it had been supposed that the increasing rationality of society could be measured by the retreat of religion, which had become equivalent to superstition, belief in false and nonexistent things. But the evident staying power of religion has now forced many—even Habermas in his later work—to ask whether, like art and the passions, religion might not be here to stay. Indeed we must ask whether philosophy, following several centuries of estrangement, might not do best to reconcile with it.
But what exactly must we come to terms with? And have modern secular philosophers perhaps been fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the thing they were hoping humanity would have the strength and clarity to overcome?
Much religious discourse is organized around what are taken to be the core “mysteries” of faith, the claims that cannot be made to cohere perfectly with our ordinary use of language, or even with the other claims of the religion itself. The mysteries, moreover, are shared by all members of a religious community, contemplated, discussed, debated, quite apart from the question whether anyone really understands them or not.Beyond enigmatic mysteries, which are the common patrimony of the members of a religion, there is mystical experience, which is had, or purportedly had, by only a small number of people within the community. Mystical experience is often characterized by the fact that it cannot be formulated in natural-language propositions—thus the mocking definition of the mystic as a person who has learned something ineffable and won’t shut up about it. Ordinarily, mysticism lies strictly beyond the bounds of philosophy. Where meaningful propositions leave off is where the tradition of rational debate descending from Socrates leaves off and a very different variety of human experience begins.
Yet philosophy has often sought to go right up to this boundary, and to get some notion of what might be on the other side, by feeling out the contours of the boundary itself. The early Wittgenstein thought that one could indicate something about the nature of the mystical, not by saying it—which would involve a performative contradiction, since the mystical is unsayable—but by showing it. Kant sought to apprehend at least something of unknowable ideas, such as the idea of God, by aiming not to understand them as positive objects of knowledge, but rather to appreciate the way they regulate our understanding without themselves being understood.
Aristotle for his part moved up to the very limit of meaningful language at only one point in his entire body of work, when he described God’s activity as “a thinking of thinking.”23 What on earth could such thinking be like? Aristotle cannot know, for all we mortal embodied human beings are ever able to think about is this or that particular object of thought, not thought itself. Even if we attempt to think about thinking, we are actually still focused on a given object of thought, and are not thinking simply and purely. Epistemology does not immediately guarantee transcendence to the person who takes it up. Aristotle moves up to the limit of the unsayable, ventures a single incomprehensible proposition (that God’s thinking is the thinking of thinking), surely in part because he feels a need to incorporate this one entity, God, which we cannot understand, into his systematic account of everything we are capable of understanding. God lies outside of nature, and so lies outside of Aristotle’s scope, but God still needs to be accounted for in order for nature itself to be understood as a unified and comprehensive whole. And so he goes up to the boundary, but does not linger there for long.
Other philosophers have shown themselves to be rather more addicted to the jolt that flirting with this boundary can carry, like cattle perpetually trying an electric fence. Thus according to Plotinus’s disciple Porphyry, the third-century CE Neoplatonist philosopher achieved ecstatic union with God, not once, but “four times, during the period I passed with him, … by no mere latent fitness but by the ineffable Act.”24 Porphyry claims that he himself achieved the same thing only once.25 We may wonder what the intervals between Plotinus’s repeated unions were like, whether, say, after the third of them he began to find some resources within himself to give an accurate account of the experience, to say whether its basic pattern or unfolding started to feel routine, or whether rather it remained just as ineffable as after the first time. It seems strange, almost comical, to number mystical experiences in this way, since even counting gives a kind of structure and recognizability to something that is supposed by definition to remain entirely beyond all description.
As the experience is beyond all description, the person who has it is also beyond accountability, and this status can obviously be useful to one in pursuit of charisma within a religious movement—useful, that is, unless the winds change, and those who were previously impressed come to take the mystic for a fraud, come to see his claim to divine afflatus as just so much hot air.
To the extent that philosophers have claimed to have ineffable experiences of their own, they are generally seen to be leaving the community of philosophers narrowly understood. More frequently we find philosophers trading in mysteries, of the expressible but still perplexing sort. Such tools of the trade are in fact very common among practitioners of what we might call “Paris irrationality”: the academic mandarins of the French university system in the late twentieth century, most notably Jacques Derrida, who spoke as successors to the tradition of philosophy even as they claimed to be “overcoming” this tradition. They did everything they could, in the name of this “overcoming,” to lead those who were willing to listen to them down false paths, to make statements that could not possibly be understood, and to dissimulate and pretend that the fault for the lack of understanding lay not with them, but with their followers (who were often gullible monolingual Americans).26 This “overcoming” has generally been understood as a breaking free of tradition by casting off ever more of its articles of faith, but this endeavor may just as easily be seen as a purifying or distilling of that tradition. It has seldom involved an openness to the discovery of other traditions, which in turn would make possible the rediscovery of one’s own as something neither to be overcome nor to be zealously defended.
But such an irenic and simple path could never be taken by the overcomers of tradition; that would be too easy. And so their preferred strategy is to riff on tradition, to play upon it like improvising musicians, without being called to express any overt loyalty to it. Even if some value may be extracted from their work, we must nonetheless agree with Perry Anderson that “the most striking feature of the human sciences and philosophy that counted in this period [in France] was the extent to which they came to be written increasingly as virtuoso exercises of style, drawing on the resources and licences of artistic rather than academic forms.”27 We may still turn to them for their “oracular gestures” and “eclectic coquetries,” but there is no particular reason to limit ourselves to the creative works of the twentieth century that packaged themselves, rather deceptively, as “philosophy” or “theory,” when in fact there remain vastly greater resources to draw on from the same period in arts and literature.
Many Paris irrationalists themselves borrow liberally from arts and culture, as well as from canonical philosophers, in order to concoct a strange new brew of their own, whose mixed ingredients can no longer be discerned or savored. Thus Alain Badiou intuitively throws together secret recipes of theory from the combination of Platonism, communism, set theory, the New Testament, and adds a special sauce of piquant allusions to twentieth-century dictators. For example, he attempts to develop an axiomatic system borrowed from Cantorian transfinite set theory in order to elucidate what he takes to be some salient differences between Stalin and Mao. Has he just affirmed his support for some horrible thing? one wonders in listening to him. The elements are too jumbled, and their recombinations too dazzling and quick, to enable a listener or reader to say what counts as an assertion and what is only virtuosic play.28 The overall effect of his work is something like a pop song that relies on the technology of sampling to drop in elements of other songs, from other genres, in a spirit of ironic recombination; or like a meme that features hammers and sickles or Red Army tanks together with a clever slogan and some other visual cue borrowed from Hollywood, say: all of which together yields up something that appears not so much an affirmation as a flirtation.
Badiou is not a terribly funny thinker or author, and it is to the credit of the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in important respects Badiou’s successor, that the latter has understood, or intuited, that the genre in which he is working is, in the end, comedy. Where Badiou gives us pure mystifications, Žižek delivers generally well-timed punch lines. These are as if designed to illustrate the so-called incongruity theory of humor, according to which comedic effect is attained by the juxtaposition of incongruous elements, like set theory and Stalinism, for the unfunny Badiou, or like Jacques Lacan’s theory of the objet petit a as illustrated in some horrible Hollywood rom-com, for the quicker-witted Slovene. Žižek has got tremendous mileage in his career out of a sort of self-Orientalizing schtick, the shame of which lies more with his admirers who buy into it than with him who performs it, in which he plays up his persona as a stock character from somewhere or other in the Eastern Bloc. This enables him to play at undermining the pieties of liberal democratic or bourgeois society, as he comes from a place where, the prejudice has it, these pieties have no hope of taking root in the inhospitable soil. The difference between being the son of a Slovenian economist in Tito’s Yugoslavia, and being, say, a victim of dekulakization in the USSR under Stalin, is all too easily obscured in his performances before American or British publics: he comes, it is supposed, from that part of the world that can be ruled only with an iron fist, and that was never so delicate as we in the West have become about man’s brutality to man. And so, when he holds forth on such subjects as the power of ideology to structure our fantasies, he is speaking with special insight; and when he speaks of the contradictions and hollowness of Western capitalism, he does so with the blunt truthfulness of which only a foreigner is capable. This is a variety of political commentary that was already perfected in Montesquieu’s invention of the characters of Usbek and Rica for his 1721 epistolary novel The Persian Letters: the exotic naïfs who reveal to us what the Parisians are really up to, behind their various conceits and self-delusions. It is also the basic template of The Beverly Hillbillies. In this genre, truth telling is always cut with a good amount of joke telling. Because one of Žižek’s primary points of access to “the West” happens to have been Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is inevitable that the truth-telling component of his contribution to this genre should turn out rather small, and that in the end—and I do not mean this in an entirely dismissive way—his entire oeuvre will in all likelihood be remembered as an unusually compendious joke book.
Far more common than mystery or ineffable mystical experience in the history of philosophy is what we may call paradox-mongering. This to some extent overlaps with the sophism-mongering we have already explored, but it focuses not so much on arguments that give the appearance of truth, even though they are plainly spurious, as on arguments that seem to compel our condemning them as false, even though we cannot find any grounds for doing so. Paradox-mongering is the perverse celebration of statements that must be true, but cannot be true. Whoever stumbles upon a new paradox—such as Zeno the Eleatic, who proved that motion and change are impossible—has got something with the charge of a mystery in his possession. He will claim that he is just following out reason itself, wherever it leads him, down the paths of rational inference. But the discovery can easily induce in the follower the suspicion, again, that the world is itself irrational, and the consequent feeling that the philosophical leader who, or movement that, touts this paradox is in a unique position, also perhaps paradoxically, to provide protection from the cruelty and uncertainty of an irrational world.
Zeno is persuasive not just because his reasoning is seemingly incontrovertible (though some fairly compelling resolutions of the paradox have been put forth over the millennia), but also because his conclusions are absurd. His “race course paradox,” for example, tells us that in order to complete a race course, we must first cross it halfway, but in order to do that we must first traverse a quarter of the field, but in order to go that distance, we must first go across an eighth of the field, but before that, a sixteenth, and so on to infinity. Thus, in order to travel any distance whatsoever, we must undertake an infinite number of preliminary voyages before even getting started. And therefore, no motion is possible. We are led to this conclusion by reason, even though it flatly denies what in some sense we know to be our daily experience.
Philosophers may feel as though their love of philosophical paradox is superior to the sort of religious belief motivated by absurdity alone, with no reverence at all for reason, but the two might not be so different in the end. We are not required, after all, to think about paradoxes if we choose not to, and even if we do think about Zeno’s paradox, and find ourselves convinced by it, there is nothing about this conviction that prevents us from going on moving about in our daily lives, from completing race courses as often as we please. Thus, in an admonition that would later be cherished by Jorge Luis Borges, Leibniz wrote to Simon Foucher in 1692, “Ne craignez point, monsieur, la tortuë” (Sir, do not fear the tortoise).29 The philosopher is referring to another version of Zeno’s paradox, which articulates the same problem of the impossibility of motion through a continuum, but does so through the fable of Achilles’s race against a tortoise. There is no need to worry, Leibniz wishes to say. We can still beat the tortoise, no matter what the paradox seems to tell us.
Or let us consider a more recent case, in which the setting up of reason as an exalted goal leads to another sort of paralysis. A corporation called NXIVM, founded by Keith Raniere, uses its founder’s “patent-pending technology” in its “Executive Success Programs” for improving our faculty of reason. The Rational Inquiry website announces that this “technology” is “more than a philosophy.” It is, rather, “a tool to create or examine philosophy—a process of philosophical development,” which can “assist individuals to maximize their potential, gain a deeper understanding of ethics, develop critical thinking skills and the use of logic, and develop a deep and compassionate understanding of humanity.” The website invokes unnamed sources, who have lauded Rational Inquiry as a “discovery of historical proportions.” Could these be our modern-day Pythagoreans? Just as Hippasus of Metapontum was thrown out of a boat by fellow Pythagoreans for having divulged the secret of irrational numbers to outsiders, so NXIVM has harshly punished its “traitors.” In a New York Times article of October 17, 2017,30 it was reported that NXIVM had requested nude images of its women members, to be uploaded to a Dropbox account, and had threatened to release them publicly if the women who had submitted them ever betrayed the organization’s secrets. The report also reveals that initiates were instructed by a company official, Lauren Salzman, to request of their “master” (i.e., their recruiter), “Master, please brand me, it would be an honor,” at which point they received a painful, cauterized brand displaying the initials of the founder, “KR.”
Is this where rational inquiry leads? I myself move within a social milieu that more or less ensures that I will not hear of an operation such as NXIVM until its scandals reach the New York Times; when they do, members of my world are conditioned to scoff and shake our heads. We believe we are the ones who are honestly engaged in rational inquiry, and that what Keith Raniere calls Rational Inquiry is nothing but a fraud. The confirmation of this belief comes with the journalistic exposés and the complaints filed with state medical regulators. But we are missing an opportunity to understand ourselves better if we presume too quickly that our own enterprise is purely legitimate and therefore exists across a great divide from Raniere’s. For one thing, there is considerably more money in the strange hybrid world where entrepreneurship meets self-help and spirituality, and where major corporations are able to pay for workshops and retreats for their employees, than there is in the budgets of many academic philosophy departments.
And where there are entrepreneurs with money, there is always the possibility of maneuvering into legitimate institutions and endeavors. This is why wealthy people with no experience or competence often find themselves elected to political office, while people of modest financial means, who also have no experience or competence, never are. NXIVM for its part was able to host a visit to the United States by the Dalai Lama, whose own peculiar brand features a mixture of entrepreneurialism and rather obvious self-help advice for getting one’s life in order. The Dalai Lama’s aura of profound spirituality seems to derive from the vague idea his Western audiences have about the Buddhist metaphysics of the incarnation of the bodhisattva: he is said to have supernatural origins, and so his advice to be honest and kind is taken to have particular weight to it. And thus the Dalai Lama is at least in some contexts a legitimate figure to invoke in academic philosophy in a way that, say, Keith Raniere is not. We have all heard of the former, probably respect him to some extent, will likely accept undergraduate papers that cite him, and will happily share in the financial largesse of the Mind & Life Institute that he cofounded, if it helps us to pursue our careers.
So the divide between NXIVM and your favorite university philosophy department is not total. What this case compels us to consider, moreover, is a clear illustration of the uncomfortable fact that cults and cult-like organizations need not declare their devotion to irrationalism, need not announce that in signing up with them you are leaving critical thinking behind in favor of some more profound or primordial experience of consciousness or emotion. It is just as easy to found a cult that explicitly announces the opposite, that it is there to do nothing more sinister than to help you develop your critical thinking skills, and that these skills are the best thing our conscious minds have to offer. No mystical union with the godhead, no voyages to the astral plane. Just reliably valid inferences and a sharpening of your fallacy-detection abilities. And a brand of the leader’s initials beneath your hip.
The uses of language, in mystery, myth, incantation, reverie, sweet song, never fully went away, even if, over the past few thousand years humankind has come to aspire to a standard of thinking and of speaking that we call, often without fully understanding what we ourselves mean, by the name of “reason.” But the very methods and practices that were supposed to have been set up to counter the damaging effects of the human mind’s propensity to unreason ended up, soon enough, mired in the very problems they were meant to solve. Logical arguments mutated into mysterious paradoxes, or degenerated into sophisms that could be deployed in order to violently cow one’s adversaries. And lovers of reason allowed the object of their love to be idolatrized in Temples of Reason and profaned in perverted cults of critical thinking. Not only has logic not led us away from unreason. It has not even managed to purge deceit, tricksterism, power plays, and legerdemain from its own quarters.