This is a podcast episode which is also available on YouTube
When I took Culture & Anarchy for the title of this newsletter - stealing it from a book by Matthew Arnold - I was thinking primarily about how all human understanding is based in useful fictions, though we pretend our concepts are representations of a fundamental reality because we can’t otherwise get our heads around why they’re useful.
This pretence is often an obstruction to progress, however, because it encourages us to cling to concepts that we must abandon if we’re to adapt to new circumstances. Thus, in all domains of human activity, we go through cycles of discovery followed by periods of stagnation which require a shaking off of old habits - culture sows the seeds and anarchy clears the weeds.
As much as we would all like to master this dynamic - to know exactly when to profit from our current worldview and when to rebel against it - rebellion is typically an inter-generational phenomenon. Hence Max Planck’s famous remark:
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
Unfortunately, it seems to be in the nature of human psychological development that becoming an adult is partly a process of intellectual ossification.
We needn’t be fatalistic about this, however. Some people are more adaptable than others, but it’s not as easy as simply choosing to be open-minded. Method is crucial. For that reason, I’m experimenting with a new style of philosophical conversation, presented here as a podcast - whereas the newsletter is a careful, cultivating practice of essay writing, the podcast is an attempt at anarchic free association.
For the time being, you’ll probably want to treat this more as an unorthodox art project than as a typical philosophy podcast - its whole purpose is to avoid the standard mould of conceptual warfare in an effort to find new modes of engaging with each other, but this requires exploration and openness to failure.
If you prefer to read, there’s a transcript below.
Transcript
Hi, I’m Callum. I write the Culture & Anarchy newsletter, and welcome to what is essentially an experiment in culture and anarchy as an approach to conversation and understanding.
Now, exactly what that means is something I’m going to talk about in this first conversation, but it’s really something I’m hoping we can explore and develop together in a series of conversations.
As I say, it is an experiment, so this could well fail, and there’s an element to this which is deliberately improvisational, for reasons that I will talk about. But for now, just bear with me while I find my feet.
So, if you don’t know who I am and you haven’t read anything that I’ve put in my newsletter, let me just give you a quick overview of my interests so you can have a sense of the kinds of conversations we might have.
I describe myself primarily as a researcher in human and artificial intelligence. If you were to read anything I’ve put in the newsletter, or if you were to just browse through my Notes feed on Substack, you would probably describe most of it as philosophy mixed through with some technology criticism.
But I’m not primarily - or professionally - a philosopher. I’m not an academic. I don’t have a track record of publications. I’ve worked for the past few years in private industry on AI products, but I’m interested in the history of AI as a research programme since the 1950s and its systematic, predictable, repeated errors or failures - the so-called AI winters - because of what I think are fundamental misunderstandings about what human beings are as evolved organisms, and how we perceive, interact with, and understand the world.
That raises a whole bunch of philosophical issues which, in terms of my own critique of AI, I come at through late Wittgenstein, through American pragmatism, through a strand of phenomenology, through Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, towards enactivism and modern cognitive science. I’m also interested in Taoism and Zen Buddhism, which I think overlap in very interesting ways with continental and American philosophy.
But alongside all that, the undercurrent of all of it is really an interest in humanism. It’s an interest in human beings as an evolved species - how we perceive ourselves and how we try to improve ourselves and the world to make it conducive to our well-being.
Part of what this conversation is about, and part of my whole approach to the newsletter, is trying to think about how philosophy can be useful for practical living.
That’s something which is not always obvious, particularly when you talk about metaphysics, or you talk about thought experiments in the philosophy of mind, their relationship to how we live every day is - I wouldn’t argue it’s non-existent, some people would argue it’s non-existent, I think a lot of the time it’s not obvious, at least.
When we think about day-to-day living, maybe the closest we would get to metaphysics is the question of free will. Otherwise, people might think that practical living is really about ethics. I don’t think it’s that restrictive. I think all philosophy can serve practical functions, but it takes philosophy itself to really be clear about what that means. A lot of the discussions I want to have are about finding the roles that philosophy can have.
Before I develop some of those themes, I just want to comment briefly on the format of these conversations, because I already mentioned that it is, to a degree, improvisational.
Part of that is an interpretation of the theme of culture and anarchy, which I’m already using in the newsletter. There are many different ways of thinking about culture and anarchy as a sort of dialectical dynamic that structures human thinking and human scientific inquiry. In a moment I’ll try to develop some thoughts on that. But, in one framing, it regards the method that I’m using to engage in philosophy myself.
The cultured side of it is the newsletter, and it’s cultured in the sense of being a cultivating practice of carefully sitting down to research essays which require a substantial amount of thought and proofreading. For somebody of my perfectionist leanings, they can take quite a lot of time to put together and feel satisfied with.
The anarchistic side of the equation I want to satisfy with this different medium of conversation, where the anarchy in it is the improvisational quality of just sitting in front of a camera and talking.
There are many different reasons why I think that can serve a useful function. One of them, to be honest, is holding myself to account. I think if we want to get away from an approach to philosophy as just game-playing and point-scoring, we ought to be able to speak off the cuff about the impact that philosophy has had on our lives.
So this is partly a self-experiment to find whether I can sit and talk about things I’ve learned, or whether philosophy for me is just a game of sitting at my computer, opening some books, and making arguments with people on the internet. Because that’s a possibility but I’m hoping it’s not [that]. So here’s me finding out.
Another aspect of it is being able to talk freely without too much of the impulse towards self-censorship. That’s something which I think I’m going to come to discuss a little bit later, but I just want to finally comment as well on the format of the conversation, because, as I say, what I’m doing essentially is sitting here in front of a camera and talking without preparation, except spending a few minutes beforehand thinking about where to start.
I have with me a little notebook in which I will take notes of threads of ideas that come up, so that I can keep track of things I might want to return to later. Otherwise, I expect, just because of the way I think, that as I’m moving around through different subjects I’ll want to reference certain thinkers, possibly certain passages in certain books. So I may occasionally get up to fetch a book, bring it back, read you a passage, and discuss it.
So already I’m split in terms of topics to pursue, because one thing I want to talk about is culture and anarchy as a theme - how to interpret it in lots of different ways besides just the method that I’ve described to you.
There is another thought that came to me, though, about the format of these conversations which I want to unpick, and it’s to do with the idea of philosophy as therapy.
As I think I said a few minutes ago, there’s an element of this approach to conversation which is sort of deliberately engineered, and part of it which is not engineered at all, to allow for some improvisation. But there’s a quality to this which may look like - and it’s not accidental - it may look like a kind of therapeutic conversation.
There are different ways of interpreting what philosophy as therapy means which I’m interested in. As an example, therapeutic philosophy, in a narrow sense, in terms of its development in the twentieth century, has to do with correcting certain kinds of conceptual confusions that we can find ourselves labouring under, typically because of supposedly misleading qualities of language as the medium of conversation.
Because of its grammatical structure, language can conjure certain illusions for us which just lead us down garden paths. So there’s a therapeutic element to it which is pointing out those conceptual confusions, primarily so that we actually stop asking questions which are not sensible questions to ask.
There are other ways of thinking about philosophy as therapy, however. So, on the topic of how philosophy has a practical role, let’s think for a moment about the question of how something like metaphysics, or something like thought experiments in the philosophy of mind, could possibly serve a practical function, when it might just look like silly game-playing for the sake of a certain kind of person who wants to make a living out of ivory-tower, armchair philosophising.
When we think about the practical consequences of philosophy, we naturally tend to think of it in terms of what we, as a collective, can make use of to make society better. That’s completely understandable. I think most of the time that’s probably what we want. But I don’t think that’s the only function that philosophy can or does serve.
I think, with a lot of metaphysics - and I say this in a genuinely open way, and I don’t mean it to be denigrating - I think a lot of metaphysics is a kind of self-medication for what I would describe as neurosis. As I say, I’m trying to use those terms neutrally, as somebody who has had what I consider to be philosophical neuroses myself.
Let me give you a concrete example of how I think that works. In twentieth-century philosophy, if you look at the existentialists - take, for example, The Myth of Sisyphus by Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus tries very specifically to provide answers to fundamental questions which are of significance to how we live our lives. Camus’ whole project of exploring absurdism is about resolving the question of the ridiculousness of existence so that, philosophically, we don’t feel compelled to suicide, because why would we not kill ourselves when we find ourselves in such an absurd situation?
Now, I’m not particularly convinced by Camus’ line of argument in The Myth of Sisyphus. I think one of the reasons why the argument fails, in fact, is because the approach it takes is too metaphysical to really address the issues it’s interested in. But there you have a prime example of somebody trying to use metaphysics to deal with a neurosis, where that neurosis is essentially an anxiety about finding purpose in life.
We have to remember that that is a psychologically live question for lots of people. It’s not an academic question what the meaning of human existence is. That is a viscerally important question to people who may genuinely wonder why to get out of bed in the morning and how to choose their next action. So philosophy as therapy, even when you’re looking at stuff like metaphysics, can really mean helping you become comfortable with the human condition.
There’s another sense of philosophy as therapy, however, which I think is really just in the same vein as the focus of philosophy particularly in the Roman and Greek classics, but also in classical Indian and classical Chinese philosophy, which is really about the pragmatic utility for social organisation.
You get this in Plato. You get it in Aristotle. You get it in Laozi and Confucius. Even when people like Plato are developing theoretical texts like the Republic, rather than focusing on therapy for the individual in terms of their psychological anxieties, you can consider it a kind of therapy for society, in terms of fixing the ways in which society might be broken.
So for philosophy to be therapeutic is not necessarily for it to take on this particular appearance of having a conversation with a therapist. But there is a reason why I want to have a conversation like this, which is off the cuff and which does have that dynamic of a therapeutic-like conversation: philosophers tend to want to avoid any implication that philosophy has a kind of self-medicating function, because there is obviously a very real potential there for it to undermine the philosopher’s project.
Again, if we look at an example like Camus’ work on The Myth of Sisyphus and we say that the project Camus was undertaking was one which essentially tried to help him with his own anxiety about life, then you have a basis in psychology to potentially ignore the philosophical argument.
You could say Camus’ problem was the social conditions in which he found himself, which were not conducive to him having a form of life in which he wouldn’t even have asked the question in the first place about his life being absurd. I think that probably works as a criticism, but there is therefore a risk that treating philosophy as therapy means that, when we think we’re engaging with questions for their own philosophical content, we’re actually doing it for motivations which are more to do with psychological anxieties that we don’t want to be honest about.
What I want to do in these conversations is be honest about the motivations we might personally have. I’m mindful of the fact that, in a Substack Note recently, somebody wanted to take me to task for suggesting that certain confused ways of thinking in philosophy might benefit from what I think I termed a ‘therapeutic readjustment.’ I really want to be clear about the fact that there’s nothing shameful in needing therapy. We all need therapy.
There’s a fun quotation from Moby Dick, actually, which I will pull up in a second about that. But this conversation is a space in which to not be fearful of one’s anxieties and the psychological needs that we want philosophy to fulfil. But before I move on to the next topic of conversation, I’m going to do my first book dive and find that quotation from Moby Dick.
So here’s Moby Dick. If I can just find the page. This is not a particularly philosophically significant passage, but it’s one that stuck in my mind when I first read it, and seeing as it popped into my memory I thought I might as well share it.
So this is the opening to Chapter 17, The Ramadan, and Ishmael is thinking about Queequeg’s religious practices. He says:
As Queequeg’s Ramadan, or Fasting and Humiliation, was to continue all day, I did not choose to disturb him till towards nightfall; for I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody’s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toadstool; or those other creatures in certain parts of our earth, who with a degree of footmanism quite unprecedented in other planets, bow down before the torso of a deceased landed proprietor merely on account of the inordinate possessions yet owned and rented in his name.
I say, we good Presbyterian Christians should be charitable in these things, and not fancy ourselves so vastly superior to other mortals, pagans and whatnot, because of their half-crazy conceits on these subjects. There was Queequeg, now, certainly entertaining the most absurd notions about Yojo and his Ramadan;—but what of that? Queequeg thought he knew what he was about, I suppose; he seemed to be content; and there let him rest. All our arguing with him would not avail; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all—Presbyterians and Pagans alike—for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.
So there’s a humanism in that, which is why it stuck with me. There’s Ishmael, on the one hand convinced of his own Presbyterian Christianity, but at the same time completely open, in a non-judgemental way, to the absurdity of all spiritual practices.
There is therefore not only an openness to it in terms of a kind of pluralism, but an openness specifically to the absurdism in it, in the sense of everybody being “cracked about the head.” That’s what we all are. We’re all evolved and thrown into the world with potentials for anxiety and neuroses. It’s just a foolishness, and a fear, and a kind of self-denial to pretend that philosophy, of all subjects, would not be something that we try to leverage to deal with our anxieties.
As I was saying before, these conversations are places for us to feel comfortable with that fact, and to discover what new kinds of conversation might be made possible by being honest about it.
So, all that said, I have been neglecting to actually talk some more about culture and anarchy as a theme of the newsletter, and as a theme of this conversation. As I already said before, I was thinking about culture and anarchy as approaches to method -culture being a certain style of writing, anarchy being a certain style of off-the-cuff discussion. But the reason why I actually named my newsletter Culture & Anarchy - it’s a title I stole from a book, 1869 I want to say, probably the 1860s, I don’t remember the exact date, by the English social critic Matthew Arnold.
He wrote the book as a kind of critique of Victorian liberalism - liberalism in the classical sense of the sort of free-market logic of capitalism. But I think the dynamic he sets up in that book between culture and anarchy is really something which applies to all sorts of modes of human inquiry and understanding. I think the dualism in it is pertinent to the duality in Taoism, which is another one of my interests.
Let me just read for you probably the most important passage. The most famous passage, anyway. He says:
The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief in following them mechanically.
Immediately as I read that again, it also strikes me as related to a passage in one of John Dewey’s books, which I also want to share now to shed some extra light on this theme. So give me a second to fetch that.
Okay. So, no book to show this time because I’m using a tablet, but this is John Dewey’s Experience and Nature, where he comments on the practical role of philosophy, and particularly what he describes as an empirical approach to philosophy. Again, if I can just find the page. Dewey says:
There is a special service which the study of philosophy may render. Empirically pursued it will not be a study of philosophy but a study, by means of philosophy, of life-experience. But this experience is already overlaid and saturated with the products of the reflection of past generations and by-gone ages. It is filled with interpretations, classifications, due to sophisticated thought, which have become incorporated into what seems to be fresh, naive empirical material. It would take more wisdom than is possessed by the wisest historic scholar to track all of these absorbed borrowings to their original sources. If we may for the moment call these materials prejudices (even if they are true, as long as their source and authority is unknown), then philosophy is a critique of prejudices. These incorporated results of past reflection, welded into the genuine materials of first-hand experience, may become organs of enrichment if they are detected and reflected upon. If they are not detected, they often obfuscate and distort. Clarification and emancipation follow when they are detected and cast out; and one great object of philosophy is to accomplish this task.
An empirical philosophy is in any case a kind of intellectual disrobing. We cannot permanently divest ourselves of the intellectual habits we take on and wear when we assimilate the culture of our own time and place. But intelligent furthering of culture demands that we take some of them off, that we inspect them critically to see what they are made of and what wearing them does to us.
In terms of the metaphor that Dewey develops there, you could essentially look at culture and anarchy as a dialectic in philosophy as a dynamic of making clothes, wearing them, and taking them off, in that picture of intellectual disrobing.
What philosophical projects do - but also what all projects of understanding do - is try, with practical motives, to come up with paradigms of understanding which give us some sort of leverage over actions that we want to take in the world, but there is an element in all forms of understanding - at least, I would contend - of reification of instrumental concepts which aren’t fundamentally real.
Reification serves a particular purpose for a particular moment, which is never eternal - when the facts change, when the world changes, when our material conditions change, the concepts that we need to help us achieve our goals must also change, but we tend to be quite resistant. We tend to resist revolution in our thought structures, which is why Arnold describes it as anarchy, and Dewey describes it as intellectual disrobing.
That process of trying to overcome concepts which have become so ingrained in our ways of thinking about the world that we don’t even notice them is something which can meet with a lot of resistance. That resistance exists in generational churn, in academic conversations, but also within our own minds. We can resist the need to throw off some of the concepts that we’ve become accustomed to.
Part of this deliberate holding of a conversation in terms of culture and anarchy is to stimulate an interest in throwing off concepts which are perhaps beloved to us, perhaps have been useful to us, but which no longer serve a purpose, where we don’t often see that they’re having that obfuscating and obstructive effect.
So I cheated slightly and just made a cut, even though I’m supposed to be speaking freely without edits, just because I lost my train of thought seeing that the sun was about to screw with my lighting. But let me pick up where I left off with Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy.
I should be clear, first of all, that the way Matthew Arnold talks about anarchy is not at all like what I just described in John Dewey’s writing. I very much stole the title of Matthew Arnold’s book and have put it to completely novel purposes.
Arnold develops a dialectic between what he calls Hellenism and Hebraism, where Hellenism is essentially science and philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge, and Hebraism is the religious impulse. His own definition of anarchy, however, equates it with a very naive, rampant individualism, and he’s very critical of it. He doesn’t see it as serving a useful function in society or philosophy. But that’s just context.
I want to actually look at another quotation from Culture and Anarchy, on the subject of the practical orientation of learning. He spends some time in his essay anticipating potential criticisms of recommending culture as a remedy for social ills, because it seems - at least from his discussion - that in the late nineteenth century the word culture had connotations of a sort of bookish learning which wasn’t of social importance. So Arnold says:
There is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it,—motives eminently such as are called social,—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu’s words, “To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!” so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: “To make reason and the will of God prevail!”
Arnold was obviously writing as a Victorian Christian, but you could substitute “the will of God” for the Tao, or for some other conception of the immanent structure of physical existence, which will give us all of the resources we need for whatever kind of realistic foundation you want in order to talk about human perfection. Those resources are perhaps things we can talk about in a future conversation.
What I’m interested in here is simply the honesty about the practical orientation of science and philosophy, but also, specifically, the fact that that practical orientation is the perfection of the human species.
Now, there is in that thought something both useful and dangerous. Perfection is a concept which suggests a movement in a direction towards absolute truth or absolute goodness. That sits very much in tension with the notion of culture and anarchy as I described it a few moments ago, as a process of instrumentalist paradigm formation and destruction. How to resolve that tension, again, is something which I think we’ll explore in future conversations.
But I think the last thing I want to discuss has to do with the focus on perfection as something which can be self-undermining. To do that, I’d like to share a passage from Freud on The Interpretation of Dreams, which is actually a considerable inspiration for the format of this conversation as a kind of free association, because that’s where he discusses the technique of free association.
Okay, so I have a translation of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Obviously there are all sorts of negative connotations of Freudian analysis, particularly in common perception today, but Freud is still at the root of a great deal of psychotherapy that remains useful, so I wouldn’t judge it too superficially if you’re not familiar with it.
Setting aside all of the sillier aspects - such as the Oedipus complex and so on - the technique of free association is something which is really important not just as a component of therapy but also as an analysis of the dynamics of creative thought. So I’m going to read you a passage about free association, and I want to prime you already to think about its potential utility in philosophical thinking. He says, for free association:
a certain psychic preparation of the patient is necessary. The double effort is made with him, to stimulate his attention for his psychic perceptions and to eliminate the critique with which he is ordinarily in the habit of viewing the thoughts which come to the surface in him. For the purpose of self-observation with concentrated attention, it is advantageous that the patient occupy a restful position and close his eyes; he must be explicitly commanded to resign the critique of the thought-formations which he perceives. He must be told further that the success of the psychoanalysis depends upon his noticing and telling everything that passes through his mind, and that he must not allow himself to suppress one idea because it seems to him unimportant or irrelevant to the subject, or another because it seems nonsensical. He must maintain impartiality towards his ideas; for it would be owing to just this critique if he were unsuccessful in finding the desired solution of the dream, the obsession, or the like.
Then there’s a passage in which he describes different psychological profiles - people who are contemplating in a ruminative, self-critical way versus people who are simply observing what is happening in themselves. After that passage he says:
The suspension thus required of the critique for these apparently “freely rising” ideas, which is here demanded and which is usually exercised on them, is not easy for some persons. The “undesired ideas” are in the habit of starting the most violent resistance, which seeks to prevent them from coming to the surface. But if we may credit our great poet-philosopher Friedrich Schiller, a very similar tolerance must be the condition of poetic production. At a point in his correspondence with Koerner, for the noting of which we are indebted to Mr. Otto Rank, Schiller answers a friend who complains of his lack of creativeness in the following words: “The reason for your complaint lies, it seems to me, in the constraint which your intelligence imposes upon your imagination. I must here make an observation and illustrate it by an allegory. It does not seem beneficial, and it is harmful for the creative work of the mind, if the intelligence inspects too 86closely the ideas already pouring in, as it were, at the gates. Regarded by itself, an idea may be very trifling and very adventurous, but it perhaps becomes important on account of one which follows it; perhaps in a certain connection with others, which may seem equally absurd, it is capable of forming a very useful construction. The intelligence cannot judge all these things if it does not hold them steadily long enough to see them in connection with the others. In the case of a creative mind, however, the intelligence has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, the ideas rush in pell-mell, and it is only then that the great heap is looked over and critically examined. Messrs. Critics, or whatever else you may call yourselves, you are ashamed or afraid of the momentary and transitory madness which is found in all creators, and whose longer or shorter duration distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer. Hence your complaints about barrenness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely.”
So the ability to free associate, which is the ability to suspend critique, is the ability to participate in the anarchic side of philosophical discourse.
On the one hand, with our practical orientation towards knowledge and philosophy in the pursuit of human perfection, we must have certain ideas on the table about what perfection is. That’s what many philosophical projects are engaged in. Even if it’s something abstruse in metaphysics or the philosophy of mind, they are constructing, at least within some domain of inquiry, an ideal of explanation in order to strive towards truth or goodness.
But in the long run, if truth and goodness are to succeed, there need to come times when you can raise fundamental questions about what even truth, goodness and perfection are.
Very often, when people attempt that - even individually, if you simply tell yourself that you want to be open-minded and explore lots of different ideas - you can still have a kind of unconscious resistance to questioning some of your assumptions.
This particularly comes to the fore if it is the case that, with certain kinds of metaphysical inquiry, their function is really a self-medication for neurosis.
So I’m going to leave this conversation with that idea, simply as an encouragement to think that there are possibilities for conversation which are as yet unexplored because much philosophy is still not yet prepared to have the anarchic openness which is necessary to make progress.
Thirty spokes join one hub. The wheel’s use comes from emptiness. Clay is fired to make a pot. The pot’s use comes from emptiness. Windows and doors are cut to make a room. The room’s use comes from emptiness. Therefore, culture leads to profit, anarchy leads to use.
— Daodejing, mischievously translated
