As Difficult As Rare

A couple of days ago I posted a little note, which blew up my notifications:

All I was trying to say was that it is obviously important in philosophy to come up with good ideas, not simply to argue for them. And I don’t believe that arguing is usually the way we come up with good ideas. Argument might be an effective way of deciding which ideas to believe in. But adjudication is not creation. Safety inspections are important for deciding whether a building is sound. But safety inspections on their own don’t erect the building to be inspected. Hiring a fastidious accountant doesn’t, on its own, fill your bank account. Fixing a leak in the bucket doesn’t, on its own, fill the bucket. And, likewise, a method for judging which ideas are good and bad—true or false—plausible or implausible—acceptable or unacceptable—是 or 非—doesn’t by itself generate any ideas to be judged.

Most of the conversations I had here were thoroughly constructive and enjoyable. A few people asked me how I can admire Spinoza, if I don’t think that arguments are the most important thing about philosophy. Here is my answer to that, if you’re interested:

But a few people ascribed to me all sorts of absurd pronouncements, for example that arguments should have no place in philosophy. Often the same people accused me of doing the same to others: YOU ARE ACCUSING US OF HOLDING THAT ARGUMENTS ARE ALL THERE IS TO PHILOSOPHY! NOBODY IS SAYING THAT!

But… was I accusing anyone of holding that? “Nobody is saying that” is a double-edged sword, my friends.

Nobody is saying—outside some radical fringes—that there should be no building safety inspections. But plenty of people are saying that too many building inspections—an excessively rigid and rigorous regulatory system—can result in fewer buildings being made. People feel it’s just not worth the time and money to go through all the rigmarole required to prove a building sound. Nobody is saying that accounting should never be done. But accounting too fastidiously can prevent you from ever making any money to account for in the first place, for example if you refuse to make any investment unless you can prove the risk to be 0 with 100% certainty. Nobody is saying that leaky buckets shouldn’t be repaired. But if you refuse to fill a bucket unless you’ve proven at the molecular level that no egress of water is physically possible, you’ll probably just never fill your bucket.

Likewise, nobody was saying that arguments should never be used in philosophy and serve no purpose (if you dig through all my threads and find me saying that somewhere, remember that I am nobody, so my point still stands). I was, however, saying that an unhealthy obsession with arguments can get in the way of actually creating interesting ideas. A disciplinary culture that only takes ideas seriously when they can be supported by strong arguments and stand up against counteraguments is surely going to intimidate a lot of people out of sharing their ideas. See Kirstie Dotson on the “culture of justification” in philosophy.

It is, or should be, an obvious fact of life that regulation and quality-control can easily kill the thing it is trying to control. Academics of all people should know this: my job largely consists of monitoring and reporting on tasks that nobody has any time to do, because, like me, they’re too busy monitoring and reporting. Increasingly, the sector resembles a bunch of surveilance cameras all pointed at each other, with nothing else to surveil.

It should also be a trivial point that regulation can also be counterproductive. Regulatory measures to make buildings safer can occasionally make them more dangerous. Or, as I think happened with the Grenfell tragedy, fiscal regulations designed for a kind of safety—to protect the taxpayer from the costs of uncontrolled spending—can force a local council to make an incredibly dangerous decision. Regulatory misfiring is most likely to occur when the regulations miss some crucial piece of knowledge: all buildings must be made fireproof, using… asbestos!

Arguments are, at best, the regulatory structure of philosophy. But we often tell our students that the regulatory structure is the thing itself! I think that this is dangerous. Students come away with the notion that their job is to argue for/against ideas, rather than to generate the ideas to argue for/against—that they are the building inspector rather than the builder, the accountant rather than the investor, the bucket repair kit… ok, you get the picture. Not only can this intimidate people out of developing powerful, interesting ideas for which they don’t yet know if they can argue, it can also lead people into accepting the wrong ideas: those that meet current standards of argument, even when those standards miss some crucial insight—the philosophical equivalent of asbestos fireproofing. The greatest danger is that an overregulated thought-environment can quash the insight that would reveal the mistake in the regulations before it ever gets to appear.

I recognise that there’s a balance to be struck between regulating philosophical ideas through standards of argument and nurturing the creativity that generates ideas in the first place. Ok? I’m calling for balance! Moderation! Everybody chill! Yes, I said that a world that was all regulation and no creation would be a sad, small, priggish, officious world. Well, wouldn’t it be? I fear that academia is fast becoming such a world—this is probably more the fault of the bureaucrats than the philosophers, but shouldn’t the philosophers be wary of emulating the bureaucrats?

Finally, I want to note that when something is new and vast, it is very difficult to subject it to regulation. If it is unlike anything else in this world, if it changes all the rules of the game, then existing regulations will be meaningless in the face of it. This is how I think the truly great philosophical ideas emerge into the world. It is meaningless to argue for or against them in terms of existing concepts and standards. If they are right then all the concepts and standards will have to change. We cannot argue about them, we can only greet them by returning to the wonder in which, according to Plato, philosophy begins.

If we want to keep alive the spirit of philosophy, I think that learning to hold this attitude of cautious wonder is much more important than the skill of arguing. And it is a real skill. Recognising novelty is a skill. As the world becomes familiar to us, familiarity breeds contempt, and more and more novelty passes us by. We decide that we’ve seen something before, without even properly looking at it. We barely glance at things before packing them into the boxes of our familiar categories, until all we see are the boxes. Our minds are too developed to encounter the world’s novelty. As a commentator on the Zhuangzi wrote: “Understanding transformation means being free from the fully-formed mind”.

And when we do recognise novelty, coping with it is another skill. When we reach for the security blanket of our familiar regulations and realise that they don’t apply, we are tempted to panic and retreat into the safety of the regulable. I understand this; I do it myself. But I don’t think it’s consistent with the truly philosophical spirit to move only in the space of regulable thoughts.

Some of my colleagues, who agree with this general point, ask me whether I think this sort of philosophical spirit can be taught. The skill of arguing clearly can. Are we better off just teaching that? I don’t know if it can be taught, but I think it can be nurtured. My writing on here is my own rather pathetic attempt to nurture this spirit. I am trying to unform my own mind, so that I can see things anew. I am hoping that, by mimesis, I might help to unform the minds of others. I am not, contrary to what appears to be a popular belief, trying to provoke rage and defensiveness. I have a lot still to learn.