by Sven Nilsen, 2023
This blog post is arguing about how important it is to decouple philosophical positions from people.
The thesis is that people do not “have” philosophical positions. Philosophical positions are not possessions, because whenever you make up a definition of possessing a philosophical position, it can be demonstrated that the definition does not hold for all philosophical positions.
This blog post will not conclude the thesis, but reason toward a conclusion that supports it. The point is to argue that the thesis is non-trivial to reject.
The argument style is based on appealing to human intuition, with an underlying premise of bridging the gap between Analytic and Continental Philosophy. Fear not, because on the Analytic side, there is solid evidence.
However, assuming the thesis is true, this does not mean that “possessing a philosophical position” is rejected within a single philosophical position.
Philosophers in this post:
Hegel lived in a time where computers had not been invented, when secularism still was not developed, so his mistakes in analytic reasoning and social reasoning must be regarded as historical events, not as doctrine which is passed down to modern Hegeleans.
Russell built much of his career on top of Frege’s work, so he was priveleged from an Analytic perspective. However, he did not understand computers the way I do. He corrected Frege and thus, naturally, I will correct Russell. One problem is that Russell, unlike Frege in his time, will not be able to respond. Russell is the person which I will criticize in this blog post.
Wittgenstein was Russell’s student which barked on a life-long journey to figure out the relation between language and logic. The life of Wittgenstein is as dramatic, controversial and interesting as it gets. However, one could also say this about the other two philosophers.
I consider myself a Wittgensteinean, but not a post-modernist. The reason is that I think the relation between language and logic is central to my own work. However, I regard Analytic philosophy as what philosophy will be eventually, in a far distant future, when there is a galactic civilization in the Milky Way. I am not afraid of grand narratives, on the contrary I think people ought to embrace this form of abstract corruption. However, it is still abstract corruption, so be careful.
Post-modernism rejects grand narratives on the basis of flaws in ideology. I, on the other hand, consider flaws part of the human condition overall, so I reject post-modernism, knowing that I am biased.
However, I was going to talk a bit about Hegel.
When people read Hegel, they might easily interpret him as authorative and analytic. So, I will mention some stuff first to bring you out of this misconception.
Hegel was a supporter of the French revolution and skeptical toward Christianity. Late in life, Hegel found some aspects of Christianity that he thought was appealing.
It is easy to explain this, but it requires some background on the history of Christianity.
Early Christianity was targetting a popular polytheistic religious movement in Galilea, aimed to make itself compatible with Judaistic eliticist monotheism, failing, reinvented, then spreading to the rest of the Roman empire as a night-club anti-political religion covered by a mask of charity (mystery cults were illegal in the Roman empire, unless they were focused on charity). Mostly done by women.
Late Christianity evolved in the politics of the Roman empire. In this phase, Christianity turned against diverse views of divinity, burying the past and burning lots of women for witchcraft. This continued until the Enlightenment started (coinciding with the fall of Byzantine empire and their academic refugees) and we got Scientism arising as a new way to find out the truth about God. A forgotten popular book (rediscovered by the field of Intellectual History), written in reaction to persecution of Calvinists in France, contributed to the rise of Pietism. Pietism evolved in reaction to Scientism, which resulted in new popular and cultist movements.
What Hegel did, was “peeling off” levels of language in Christianity until he found something interesting. Not surprisingly, he found an aspect of Seshatism (a dual-Platonic language bias), which was more suitable for his taste. Seshatists are usually not authorative, but more playful, which is what Hegel was.
What most people associate with Christianity is authority and opposition to science, e.g. how the Catholic church treated Galileo. However, Christianity has a long and complex history that suffered from the trauma of Bronze Age religions going through collapse, blaming women (e.g. Eve and Pandora, demoted goddesses) and women reacting to this trend who gave birth to it (both historically and by doctrine). The dialetic problems of Christianity aside, which I here emphasize in order to help you understand Hegel, my intention is to show how easy it is to misunderstand him and think he was authorative in his philosophy.
Also, to philosophers with the skills of logic on the level of Russell, one can not easily treat Hegel as analytic in his reasoning. His language is way too imprecise. Since Hegel used imprecise language, which is not uncommon for Seshatists, he seemed to fail at forming some basis in analytic reasoning. However, Seshatic philosophers are able to move further in some aspects that do indeed have an analytic basis. It just takes longer time for Platonic philosophers to get there.
Russell started out with a wild ambition of formalizing mathematics in logic. This is something we take for granted today, thanks to his hercules effort.
The breakthroughs in logic were so jaw-dropping impressive at the time, that it resulted in many people rejecting Hegelean philosophy. Logicians at Russell’s time was trying to solve problems by separating meta-language from object-language. It is only recently that we learned how to unite them using something called “exponential propositions”.
Today, we understand that something called “normal congruence” plays a large role in the language bias influencing Russell’s thinking:
A function f is normal congruent when:
a == b -> f(a) == f(b)
Assuming normal congruence affects the language bias in logic. The reasons are complex, but basically it determines certain stuff one can prove, which in turn reaches conclusions that people take for granted over time. Normal congruence was thought to be natural among logicians, due to the work of Leibniz.
Therefore, historically, the way people thought about logic was restricted in some sense. It was not until development of Category Theory when people started to suspect that Hegel’s philosophy was still relevant for Analytic philosophy.
Today, we know about something called “tautological congruence”.
A function f is tautological congruent when:
(a == b)^true -> f(a) == f(b)
All normal congruent functions are tautological congruent, but not all tautological congruent functions are normal congruent. For example, if you want to reason about randomness, then you need to reason about functions that are tautological congruent but not normal congruent.
Wittgenstein was talented in many ways, but because he was so curious about new ideas, often lost interest in developing existing talents further. So, you can imagine what his life was like: A constant pursuit of new ideas while leaving a trace of unfinished projects. People who came after are picking up these ideas and exploring them further.
While Russell thought that Analytic philosophy was about following the rules, Wittgenstein thought about it as a game which rules he was supposed to break, just for fun.
However, Wittgenstein discovered something of tremendous importance:
Things are hard
You should not laugh of this.
Most Analytic philosophers at Wittgenstein’s time thought that logic was a straight-forward path toward the ultimate future. Naturally, this idea crashed and burned.
Later, when most people had given up, some of them found a way to make incremental progress.
A later example demonstrates this tendency: When John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, planned a summer workshop for AI in 1956, he believed that 10 people could make significant progress on several research areas. The result was that almost none progress was made in any areas of AI. AI tech today is a result of decades of incremental improvements that accumulate until they reach tipping points.
Why was McCarthy so wrong? First, all people have optimism bias. Second, because John McCarthy was an expert in logic, he kind of understood what he was doing, but also, he underestimated how hard it is.
Wittgenstein understood that there were things about language that were hard and not easy in the sense of logic. It does not mean you can not figure it out, it just takes much longer time and more effort than you plan to put in. This is why I consider myself a Wittgensteinean, by emphasizing problematic aspects of the relation between language and logic.
Now, why is Hegel relevant in all this? Because this problematic aspect of the relation between language and logic, is problematic in the sense of Hegel.
Russell’s influence on philosophy turned historically out to be bad for Hegeleans. However, in recent times, Hegel’s philosophy is on the way up again.
If you could call, the most important and influential philosopher in the Western world, as being ever “looked down upon”. This is how great Hegel is considered in philosophy. Some love him, some hate him, but they are all influenced by him. This is because there is an entire field of philosophy, called “Continental Philosophy”, which does not care as much about the analytic problems.
Yet, from an Analytic perspective, there is still some atonement to be made.
When we say that a person is Hegelean, Russellean or Wittgensteinean, we seem to project psychologically that the person “possesses” some philosophical position. After all, the entire reason we use such names is because there are differences in their philosophy style.
Yet, you can not say that people “possess” philosophical positions in a sense where the notion of possession is well defined.
Do you find that these three ways of “possessing” a philosophical position follow some common well defined meaning?
I think that these 3 ways of relating to a philosophical position are completely incompatible with the intuitive notion that you can “possess” a philosophical position in a trivial sense.
When we say that people have some philosophical position, we understand what they say, but we do not understand what it means to “possess” some philosophical position. In a way, you can have a philosophical position, but you can not “own it” in a sense which all philosophers agree upon. However, within a philosophical position, you can take stances on what it means to “possess” some philosophical position.
I think it is interesting that there is an “Inside vs Outside” perspective of possession here.
In some sense, people who have philosophical positions consider themselves to possess them, but the very idea of possession changes between philosophical positions! So, what one person says using the same words, means an entirely different thing to another person with a different position.
Perhaps this is why, as a Wittgensteinean, I take language bias seriously (and humorously!).