Originally, this was going to be a post on why I hate Rationalism (and things associated with it, like the New Atheist movement.) Then I realized that my problem wasn't so much with Rationalism as it was with Teleology. So now this is a post on why Teleology has to die.
I suppose I should start by precisely defining my terms in the traditionally high-handed manner, but eh. Precise definitions are so rarely actually helpful. Impressionistic will have to do. There will be sufficient high-handedness as things stand. Teleology, as I'm using the word, is essentially the set of end-states - "perfection", "truth" and "utopia" are three of the clearest examples, but any idea of a state of affairs where progress ceases altogether counts - these ideas can be found in all fields of human thought, from aesthetics to religion to politics to science (the Theory of Everything is a particularly good example). And all of these ideas, without exception, are destructive.
Take truth, for instance: truth is an idol worshiped by many, held up as the ultimate aim of human thought, as the only thing worth pursuing, but its true nature is this: truth is the sacrificial altar where thought dies. Imagine actually knowing the truth - isn't it self-evident that nothing more can be thought once the truth is known? There is no questioning, no wrestling with problems, no change, no growth. Truth is stagnation. Truth is not a state of existence that any living mind could participate in, for no living mind could fail to change or to grow. (Consider also the behavior of those who claim to know truth. It's bad.)
Or look at what the idea of "moral perfection" does to people. Instead of feeling limited and specific guilt for actual moral transgressions (that is, the sort of guilt that is actually useful for motivating you to improve), many of us have been taught by our parents, by our religions, by our teachers, to compare ourselves to this unrealistic standard of moral perfection - which, of course, we fail to live up to, causing an increasing build-up of unresolved guilt and self-flagellation. The same pattern can be observed at the macro level, where - at least in the United States - the sharp contrast between the idealized version of the country (with liberty and justice for all) and the one that exists in reality (the one built on slavery, with Trayvon Martin, the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and an absolute inability to ever achieve the moral high ground in any conflict (listen, World War II was a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to actually be the Good Guys for once, and then we dropped two nuclear weapons on civilian centers.)) results in the twin responses of outright denial and desperate, misguided, guilt-driven activism.
With that kind of cognitive dissonance, it's no wonder people turn to eschatologies and savior narratives. It doesn't matter whether you're waiting for the Revolution, the Rapture, the Singularity, or just Someone to do Something - what you have, in effect, said, is "We can't fix this by ourselves. We have to wait until it becomes, magically, alright." You have capitulated to Teleology, and unless you recant, you will wait for Something to happen until you die, having accomplished nothing.
Well, fuck that. Teleology has to go. And not just fundamentalist beliefs that "This is truth (or perfection) and this is how we get it," - no, we also have to get rid of the idea that truth or perfection is unattainable, but that the point is to get as close as we can in a sort of asymptotic striving. "Of course we can't actually achieve truth," they say, "but we can get as close as we can, and isn't that something, perhaps even noble in its own way?" Well, no, it's not.
And here's my second point: not only is Teleology destructive, it is totally incoherent. The ideas of Truth or Perfection are not just contradicted by all of human experience (we have absolutely no empirical reason to believe these sorts of end-states have any reality, conceptual or otherwise) - but they are completely inconceivable. This is why Christian authors have had so much difficulty dealing with the concept of Heaven (I am thinking particularly of C.S. Lewis' two attempts, in The Great Divorce and in The Last Battle, both of which portray Heaven as an infinite journey toward Truth and Perfection, since actually portraying those states of existence is impossible). Go ahead, try to imagine a state of absolute moral perfection, or a state of absolute truth. The mind recoils, or else edges around it with comfortable and meaningless religious platitudes.
"Inconceivable? Ridiculous! The ideas of truth and perfection are not only very much conceivable, they are necessary! And what's more -" Listen, hypothetical (and apparently indignantly British and heavily moustached?) interlocutor: these ideas are not necessary. They are merely entrenched. Heavily entrenched, no doubt - these Platonic absolutes curl around our brainstems, but if Stargate has taught me anything, it's that these parasites can be removed (as Wittgenstein reclaimed language from Plato with the idea of the "family resemblance", grounding language in similarities, approximations, and the way people actually think - rather than the Platonic (and entirely bullshit) idea of the essential thingness of a thing).
The idea that truth or perfection are necessary for progress - scientific, philosophical, moral, or otherwise - is purely a figment of the Platonic infection. To think that progress necessitates some sort of absolute metric presupposes Teleology. But look at how people actually think: we know (or can figure out) what one step better than here looks like. Progress means "better than here", not "toward some ideal". Maintaining that distinction is the first step toward living and thinking progressively, rather than teleologically.
About Me
- priestwarrior
- University of Chicago dropout. Ex-Evangelical Christian. Transfemale. Charismatic and talented, but extremely lazy and just a little bit arrogant. The only trace of my southern upbringing is a persistent short e to short i vowel shift.
6 comments:
You've read the same book more than once because you wanted to experience the same story over again, even though you already knew everything that would happen in it. Knowing everything (a theory of everything) doesn't predicate whether progress would cease, because there still is certainly plenty of work to do and a lot of things to experience.
To be honest, though, I don't believe in a theory of everything, but I do believe in perfect states, not as an end, but as a beginning. Suppose you were awesome, epic, and a blacksmith, and you go to forge a sword. If the sword you make has a defect in its material, at some point that defect will defeat the purpose of the sword and bad things will likely happen as you are undoubtedly in the midst of glorious battle at that time. If the sword were perfect, you would think you would win your battle and bad things would be less likely to happen (such as dying).
On the other hand, suppose your sword is imperfect, and though it does not break, you still lose your battle. On the day of your execution before the evil tyrant, the axman raises your sword to strike your head off, and at that moment - as the axman swings down with your sword - the defect causes your sword to break, plummeting the part of your sword into the heart of the evil king by his own executioner's hand. A sword without defect would have simply lopped your head off. Which sword is better?
Perfection is never something in isolation, because nothing is completely isolated from everything. We only see it manifested in circumstances, because timeless things are transparent to us. This is probably why Christ named only these two commandments: love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
But otherwise, yeah, you're right: waiting for perfection is about as interesting as "you made a perfect sword, the end." Then again, perfection is appealing in that there you cannot go wrong and there you have nothing to lose.
Levi, thank you for this interesting post. My thoughts are provided below, in the form of reactions to specific points you've made followed by a more general response. My knowledge of philosophy is extremely limited, so I'll be responding on the basis of my own reason and intuitions.
"I suppose I should start by precisely defining my terms in the traditionally high-handed manner, [...]"
I don't think I've ever seen this done in a way I'd describe as high-handed, but perhaps that just reflects the limits of my own experience.
"Precise definitions are so rarely actually helpful."
In ordinary life? I know that I find them very helpful in linguistics, and I'd imagine they can be pretty important in mathematics and in the law as well...
On the meaning of teleology: "any idea of a state of affairs where progress ceases altogether counts"
I'd imagine you didn't mean this to include bad states of affairs in which progress has ceased because it's being prevented by force. But then, you said you were going to characterize the notions you were talking about impressionistically, so I'm certainly not going to carp at you about loopholes.
With regard to your condemnation of truth as stagnation and as the death of thought: even if we somehow knew the truth, would that really mean the death of all intellectual life, or would we instead still be able to write treatises and argue about whether or not we had reached a good state, and what the philosophical implications of that state were? (You don't have to respond to this; I'm probably being somewhat facetious with this point. Of course, you don't have to respond to anything I'm saying.)
"(Consider also the behavior of those who claim to know truth. It's bad.)"
But surely this doesn't reflect poorly on truth itself? After all, the behavior of those people is completely consistent with the possibility that if they actually did know the truth, they wouldn't act that way, but would instead act in a good way. (I'm not claiming that that's actually the case, though.)
Regarding your summary of the view "Let's get as close to the truth as we can, even if it isn't actually reachable"—which, at least at present, is my view—I just wanted to say that I think you summarized it very well, and fairly.
"we have absolutely no empirical reason to believe these sorts of end-states have any reality, conceptual or otherwise"
I must say that I'm not convinced that these concepts are "totally incoherent," or that they are ill formed as concepts (which I assume is what you mean by essentially denying that they have conceptual reality). Now, as far as morality is concerned, I think ethics is subjective, so I do think the notion of moral perfection brings with it the complication that it's only meaningful when evaluated with respect to a particular system of ethics, not when it's considered all on its own. But why exactly do you think that truth and perfection (moral or otherwise) are ill formed as concepts? Even if we grant that they're difficult to imagine (and I'm not particularly convinced of that either, at least not yet), surely that doesn't entail their ill-formedness as concepts?
(cont.)
Now, the end of your post dealt with the practical consequences of the teleological and progressive approaches, and I thought I'd address that as well. As I've hinted at, I don't think you've really established that teleological ideas such as truth, justice, and moral perfection actually are either destructive or incoherent. But I also don't think you've established that the teleological and progressive mindsets are actually in conflict. You say that the progressive view is socially useful because we can imagine a state a little better than our current state, and work toward it, but we can't imagine a state of perfection, so that idea really can't serve as a spur to effective social improvement. But thinking progressively and working to make small, manageable improvements can be put to the service of a more overarching teleological or semiteleological goal of achieving, if not actual perfection, then at least a state closer to it than the closest intermediate state. For instance, I would really like it if we eliminated poverty. Now, that's surely not, in that form, an actionable agenda item for an activist organization, so I agree with you that it should be broken down into more manageable tasks such as, say, "Lift out of poverty [which of course has to be defined —EZ] 5% of the poor population of the Bronx," or perhaps into tasks even more manageable than that one. But what's wrong, in the process of striving to accomplish those goals, with keeping in mind and being inspired by overarching goals such as "Let's eliminate poverty"—far more difficult to achieve though they undoubtedly are?
It also occurs to me that, if we think only progressively and never teleologically, we become susceptible to the problem of local maxima.
David, your thought process here is kind of opaque to me, so my response may or may not address your actual concerns.
Acquiring truth in one particular area of human knowledge would not necessarily preclude progress in other areas of human knowledge. That said, the experience v. knowledge question is an interesting one, and one I am still undecided on. Given perfect foreknowledge, would I find the mere fact of experience enough to justify continued existence, or would I get bored and wander out into the desert to get eaten by sandworms?
I...have no idea what your sword story is doing, other than possibly supporting my assertion that perfection is an incoherent concept, so instead I'm going to tell you the story of Grand. Grand is a character from Camus' The Plague who spends his free time working on his novel. He never gets past the first sentence, because he has decided that the first sentence has to be perfect. Spoilers, it never is perfect. It doesn't even progress in a single direction, since Grand can't figure out what kind of prose he wants to be writing. That's a pretty good microcosm of my problem with perfection.
(Erik I will respond but it's going to take some more thought.)
No worries!
Yeah, I kind of threw the ball right at the ground with this one. I think a lot of what people usually mean when they talk about perfection is about being lazy. In one form or another if things were perfect "I wouldn't have to..," or "this wouldn't have happened," or "this would have happened." Funny, isn't it, how people who are the closest to perfection probably have the most to lose if ever they were to achieve it (The Time Machine, H.G. Wells).
The only thing I think my story meant was we actually couldn't recognize perfection even if we saw it. So, why pursue perfection? I think Erik's got it right on this one: because it's better than what we've got.
Also, I guess no one told you, but perfection comes in varieties. It's like a whole bunch of tasty dishes; no one is really better than the other, but the chef is an expert and all the poisons have been taken out of the cabinet. That, at least, is my view of perfection. No purpose is perverted and all possibilities are open.
I'd like to go on, but it's getting late and I'm about wax poetic in ways I'm sure I'll want to forget about in the morning. So, let me know whatcha think.
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