Stefan Lorenz Sorgner
Pre‐Pythagorean thinkers in the ancient Greek world were referred to as sophos, as wise. Pythagoras was the first to refer to himself as a philosopher (Peterson 2011, 167). Philosophy is the love of wisdom, or should it rather be translated as love of truth? According to Plato, the highest idea is the form of the good. According to Nietzsche, philosophers are creators of values. Both of them stress that the central philosophical goal is to find a reply to the question of the good life, and having an understanding of the good life is surely a central feature of wisdom. Truth, on the other hand, has different connotations, and truth itself becomes a problematic idea, especially when we reflect on its relevance in the light of a naturalist anthropology. Why should anyone be interested in truth as correspondence to the world?
“What is the value of truth?” is the central question that Nietzsche raised (KSA, vol. 11, 699–700). Like modern social scientists, he has a naturalistic understanding of human beings. In a world without eternal forms that can be contemplated in an immaterial realm after death, the value of the activity of contemplation and knowing for its own sake becomes problematic. Seen from a naturalistic and evolutionary perspective, human beings are a special type of animal who are embedded in a world full of fights, wars, and struggles. Surviving, directing, and dominating might be important human activities from this perspective. In that case, though, why should knowing the truth for the truth’s sake be of any relevance for us animals? In other words: What is the value of truth from an evolutionary perspective? Replying that knowing the truth for the truth’s sake is what makes us human, because we as humans are rational beings and therefore are God‐like creatures, is no longer an option. Any such glib (and self‐aggrandizing) response is ruled out if we see ourselves as a type of animal, historically and genetically continuous with other animals and participating solely in this one natural world.
Truth is no longer an end in itself, but has become a means. A pragmatic concept of truth remains an option, however; on such an account, truth is whatever works in this world. If acts make us feel good, if judgments lead to reliable conclusions, and if reflections bring about predictable results, then these things work – and it is possible to regard them as true. Can we specify further the phrase “whatever works in this world”? What happens, if something works in this world? Does a judgment work, if it helps us survive? Is survival the prime human motivation? Is the will to survive the fundamental human drive, as Schopenhauer suggested? Should not suicide be impossible, if this were the case? But many humans commit suicide. Maybe the will to survive is just an expression of an even more basic drive. Indeed, Nietzsche suggests the will to power as an alternative. It is a tempting reply, one which provides us with a plausible story for most life‐world situations. However, is power an intrinsic good? Might it be just a means for something else?
Feuerbach and Richard Wagner suggest love as that something else. Love is a drive that has been regarded as a central force by both naturalistic thinkers and religious ones. Still, is not love just a Hollywood invention that we strive for, because most of us are not strong enough to enjoy life by permanently trying out new facets of its fullness? Love might be just the boring daughter of our hedonist desires. Maybe Freud was right in that respect! Why, however, should there be just one drive that can be found in all human beings? If we continue to look for such a drive, do we not simply continue playing an all‐too‐German philosophical game? Maybe all of these drives and others can be found in all of us. Alternatively, our psychophysiological constitutions might differ radically from one person to other. In that case, any attempt to give an account of a basic will is bound to fail, since there is no identical fundamental drive within all of us. It is a difficult terrain. Yet, these questions are important, because the question of the good life is relevant to all aspects of our lives, from personal to legal ones. They became particularly relevant to the paradigm shift toward posthuman philosophies that has been taking place for quite some time (Ranisch and Sorgner 2014).
Seeing ourselves as God‐like rational creatures was the dominant worldview within the history of Western philosophy between Plato and Kant at least (Sorgner 2010, 30–108). However, this changed dramatically with Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud. We have moved away from seeing ourselves as possessing a categorically special ontological status in the world (Sorgner 2010, 239–266), and this altered self‐understanding brings about a radical philosophical paradigm shift. Seeking the truth as correspondence to the world for its own sake is no longer a plausible philosophical task. Instead, pragmatism, postmodernism, skepticism, and naturalism have become popular philosophical self‐understandings. They result from a powerful historical shift away from our Platonic, Christian, and Kantian humanist past.
It is interesting to note that postmodern thinkers and naturalist philosophers do not realize how closely related their ways of thinking are. A naturalist anthropology implies the need to abandon the correspondence theory of truth, because in a purely naturalistic world everything changes in all aspects at every instant, which makes impossible any kind of unchanging something to which a judgment could correspond. On the other hand, the view that all perspectives are interpretations – the common attitude of postmodern thinkers – can best be made plausible on the basis of a naturalistic philosophy, because the natural drives within all of us are responsible for the criteria on the basis of which each of us sees the world. No perspective can be separated, even conceptually, from the psychophysiological makeup of the perceiver. Nietzsche was the first to realize this insight. Consequently, he embraced both positions, perspectivism as well as naturalism (Sorgner 2007).
It is important to stress and to recognize that it need not be self‐defeating to affirm that all perspectives are interpretations. The Liar’s Paradox applies only if one identifies interpretations with falsifications, because in that case (but only then) the following logic applies. If all interpretations were falsifications, the perspective of perspectivism would also be a falsification. This would, no doubt, be a self‐defeating position. However, if you identify a perspective with an interpretation, and an interpretation with a judgment that can be false, but which does not have to be false, then perspectivism is internally coherent. Perspectivism as an epistemological position, then, is itself a perspective that can be false, but which need not be false. It is, admittedly, a perspective whose truth cannot be decisively established. If it were established, then it would falsify itself. Nonetheless, via narratives that support its plausibility, perspectivism turns into a strong methodology, because it is a position that has not convincingly been falsified within a long philosophical tradition, a position that has attracted many extremely gifted thinkers.
For all that, perspectivism remains a position that can, in principle, be rejected. At the same time, such a rejection can only occur if someone – perhaps a philosopher – managed to show us a judgment that is not an interpretation but is a necessary truth that corresponds to the world. Some of the new realist thinkers, whom I regard as potentially totalitarian ones, claim that this can easily be done by pointing out that it is not a mere interpretation that water is H2O, that the earth turns around the sun, or that someone’s name is Michael Jackson (Ferraris 2012). Theirs, I suggest, is a very naive line of reasoning. All of these judgments are pragmatic truths. They are true because we have defined things that way, or because it works if we base our acts on these judgments. However, they are not philosophical insights.
Philosophers are stuntmen for all the really tricky questions that lie at the foundation of the other sciences. If you talk about water, the earth, or a human being, then you still do not know what these entities consist of and how they are related to one another. Do human beings possess a categorically special status in this world by belonging to a separate ontological realm? Can matter be separated ontologically from mental qualities, or do words such as “mind” and “matter” merely stand for conceptual differentiations that lack any ontological implications? What is the relationship between ontological and evaluative and normative judgments? What these new realists regard as truth are pragmatic conventions that work, conventions presupposing foundational philosophical concepts whose meanings are far from clear and can therefore be false.
If this is the case, one can wonder what could count as a realization of a truth in correspondence to the world. I must admit that I have no answer to this question. If I knew, then I would have a clear criterion for a truth as correspondence, and I would have to move away from my perspectivism. Yet I do have criteria for the plausibility of philosophical judgments, and I will deal with them a bit later. What I do not have, and cannot conceive of, are plausible criteria concerning the correspondence theory of truth.
Even though postmodern thinkers and naturalists represent two of the most dominant contemporary perspectives, there are other contemporary thinkers who merely realize the challenges connected to any broadly humanist worldview, but decide to take either a pragmatist attitude, “Whatever works is true,” or a skeptical one, “I do not know whether I know anything.” All of these insights and approaches have in common that any affirmation of a traditional correspondence theory of the truth is no longer plausible. What remains is the natural world in which all human beings and other animals have come about due to unplanned evolutionary processes. We might not desire truth for the truth’s sake, yet we try to make sense of the world, to find a way of dealing with life’s immense variety of challenges. We seek a timely, scientifically informed kind of wisdom that enables us to live exciting, flourishing, and fulfilled lives. Unfortunately, it is far from clear wherein this wisdom consists. Even within a specific tradition (any that we care to identify) the replies given to the question of the good life are manifold.
A good example of the diversity of concepts of the good within one tradition is naturalist‐minded thinkers, such as transhumanists and many bioliberal ethicists, who advocate the use of enhancement technologies. Thus Nick Bostrom upholds a Renaissance ideal of the good (Bostrom 2001). Julian Savulescu argues for the universal validity of a commonsense account of the good (Savulescu 2001; Savulescu/Kahane 2009). I, on the other hand, doubt that any non‐formal account of the good can be regarded as plausible (Sorgner 2013a, 157–85). Rather, the main philosophical task is to put forward reasons in favor of one’s own position. In a way, a good argument functions like a good advertisement. It needs to be tempting for the audience, and if it is done well it ought to change their perspectives. However, it has to fulfill this task in one of the most intellectual disciplines. Therefore, the most effective means need to be employed for realizing this purpose: accordingly, intelligence, wit, rhetorical skill, strategic alliances, institutional power games, and many other elements play a role in a philosophical war. The spirit of the times, or Zeitgeist, is responsible for the outcome. Thomas Aquinas quoted Pseudo‐Dionysius the Areopagite more often than Aristotle (Gill 2014, 18). Nowadays, all philosophy students know the latter, but hardly anyone has heard the name of the former. It is one aspect of our Zeitgeist.
The Zeitgeist is also responsible for academic evaluations of emergent philosophical perspectives. The perspectives being presented are the result of interplay between one’s cultural environment and the needs, demands, and drives of one’s individual psychophysiology. My own way of thinking rests on the following three pillars (Sorgner 2013b, 55–60): (i) affirmation of the wonderful achievement of negative freedom; (ii) acknowledgment of scientific and technological findings; and (iii) the recognition of widespread or dominant attitudes. It must be noted that I do not affirm them because they correspond to the Zeitgeist, but because my psychophysiology makes me regard them as plausible. Yet I am happy that these insights are not merely my own perspective, but are widely shared among enlightened people. Let us consider them in reverse order.
Recognition of widely shared opinions: Hereby, I refer to sociological, psychological and other research in the field of social sciences as well as to personal narratives that can be employed for underlining and stressing that the issue in question is shared by many, if not most, people. For example: psychological studies show that for many people there is a correlation between pro‐social behavior and happiness (Aknin et al. 2015, 788–795).
Acknowledgment of scientific and technological findings: Hereby, I take into consideration that our age is a scientific and technological one. It is a widely shared attitude among enlightened human beings today that scientific and technological research provides us with a solid basis for our insights. This attitude does not imply that we are getting to know the truth as correspondence to the world. However, if we wish to base our judgments on something, then technoscientific research is usually a reliable method for finding workable solutions. By referring to the latest insights in scientific and technological fields, we grant a pragmatic attitude a significant role within our methodology. An example: when we advert to epigenetic research, it becomes plausible that environmental influences can have an effect on genetic structures, which reveals that these two domains are more closely interconnected than was acknowledged during the twentieth century (Japlonka and Lamb 2005).
Affirmation of the wonderful achievement of negative freedom: Those two insights ought to be adopted only if they do not undermine our freedom. It is easy to use such philosophical pillars to justify totalitarian political control. Accordingly, I point to the foundational relevance of the achievement of negative freedom. It needs to be stressed here that freedom is an achievement and not a truth. Still, it is a norm I affirm and fight for strongly, and I am extremely happy that it is valued highly by many living human beings. It was not, however, affirmed during most of our cultural history, and indeed it is still not valued highly in many parts of this world. Hence, I regard it as highly important to remind people of the pedigree of the crucial norm freedom. Thereby, its relevance can best be made plausible. So, here is my advertisement for negative freedom as a fundamental norm to guide our thinking and conduct.1
The norm of negative freedom was fought for successfully during the European Enlightenment. Before the Enlightenment, religious and political leaders maintained the right to decide on the concept of the good to which citizens must subscribe. If a political leader got replaced by someone of a different religious confession, the citizens had to adapt their own confession and, together with it, their concept of a good life. My realm, my religion. With the beginning of the Enlightenment, more and more people grew dissatisfied with this practice, because they wished to lead the good life on the basis of their very own idiosyncratic conceptions of it. Philosophers, scientists, writers, artists – and scholars and experts of many other disciples – started fighting for the right to live in accordance with their own understandings of a good life. They no longer wished to be treated paternalistically by religious and political leaders. As a consequence of all these processes, the norm of freedom has steadily gained further recognition and acceptance. Even though much remains to be done to encourage and ensure freedom, even in the most enlightened countries on earth, the political acceptance of this norm has increased significantly since the Middle Ages and early modernity.
By raising awareness of the tough historical struggles that resulted in our current liberties, I am trying to make people (philosophers, politicians, and ethicists in particular) conscious of what a wonderful achievement it is that the norm of negative freedom is now so widely accepted. This insight is of enormous relevance when, for example, discussing the parental right to decide on the option of selecting three fertilized eggs after IVF and PGD, the personal right to ask for physician assisted suicide, or the option of three biological parents, sharing a child in common, to marry if this is in their interest. All these kinds of narratives, stories, and analyses can be employed in exchanges on applied ethical subjects as well as when discussing ontological, epistemological, anthropological, or media issues. What is important is to use all the best advertising techniques for winning the philosophical war, because this is what it is – an intellectual war of values.
Implicitly, Plato also seems to have had some sympathy for this understanding of philosophy, as becomes particularly clear in his Politeia (the Republic) notably in Book I, when Thrasymachos participates in the debate with Socrates. Plato won that war of values, and Nietzsche has a point when he analyses Christianity as Platonism for the masses (KSA, vol. 5, 12). Culturally, Platonic thinking still has a very strong standing, as becomes clear when we consider how many political constitutions attribute to human beings an ontologically special status categorically different from that of other animals. I participate in this debate on philosophy’s future prospects from a Nietzschean transhumanist perspective, hoping that this time a naturalistic, this‐worldly, non‐religious, non‐dualist, and, above all, more open‐minded and pluralistic way of thinking will be the cultural winner in the intellectual war of values.