The Loss of Deep Problems
The Certain and the Measurable as the End of Metaphysics and Spirituality
“Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) suffer from what may be called 'loss of problems'. Then everything seems quite simple to them, no deep problems seem to exist any more, the world becomes broad and flat and loses all depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably shallow and trivial... ... quia plus loquitur inquisitio quam inventio... (Augustinus).” - Wittgenstein, Zettel, 456-7
Wittgenstein then adds: “Russell and H. G. Wells suffer from this.”
The quote from Augustine’s “Confessions” means “because inquiry speaks more than discovery.” (AUGUSTINI CONFESSIONUM LIBER DUODECIMUS 12.1.1)
I would like to set St Augustine's quote alongside a quote from St. Thomas Aquinas:
“It may well happen that what is in itself the more certain on account of the weakness of our intelligence, which is dazzled by the clearest objects of nature; as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun. Hence the fact that some happen to doubt about articles of faith is not due to the uncertain nature of the truths, but to the weakness of human intelligence; yet the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.”
St. Augustine writes about endless problems without answers, not of a world without problems nor philosophy that ends problems. Beyond the certainties of measurable knowledge, we need to open ourselves to receive answers that are metaphysical and spiritual, which is indeed a knowledge of "highest" things.
St. Augustine cautions us against asking too many questions in search of a certainty where none is possible, and of not accepting enough answers that point to what lies beyond the sensible. Too many possibilities and critiques mean not enough realization of the actual gifts we receive and actual changes we need to make.
"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince
The essential things are incalculable, immeasurable and beyond the crudities of stimulation and simulation.
The urge for certainty and 'rational control' involves an attempt to identify a truth that insulates its possessors from chance and contingency, from the indeterminacy that is endemic to a life lived in dependency upon and relation to fragile others. It should come as no surprise that the reductionism involved in such a search for certainty should come in time to issue in notions of AI and pure unfeeling inhuman rationality. Certain people think that rationality is simply the ability to assemble and use knowledge or to solve problems or to memorize. Intelligence is a total human activity. It is nourished by human relations, by chance and contingency, by (non-simulated, non-stimulated) joy and desire (the desire to calculate no less than the desire to write), by psychological obsessions and cosmic longings, by wishful thinking, by imagination. The intellect is not algebra; it is a function of living a fully human life in relation to fully human beings. The computer is not alive and lacks such relations; it can never offer more than simulation.
Human intelligence consists of three essential aspects:
1) Imagination. There is no intelligence without imagination; 2) Spontaneity. Ideas spring up on matters to which you have devoted little direct attention. 3) The grasp of a situation, a context, a relation, a problem, etc. This grasp is indivisible.
The reductionists who hanker after certainty in fear of contingency, chance, and indeterminacy seek to eliminate all these aspects, or instrumentalize them to the end of external engineering.
I've been re-reading Jacques Ellul's The Technological Bluff and shall quote extensively from chapter 8 “Rationality” to make the point:
“It is only abstract thought that can be assimilated, interpreted, and imitated by the computer. The more thought refers to life, the less accessible it is. It is only on the level of theoretical knowledge that the computer can measure and simulate. It is paralyzed in the field of practical knowledge. In no operation, then, do we really have intelligence. Human thought feeds on our experience of life as we register and interpret it. Imagination, fantasy, myth, intuition, and experience transform themselves into thought. Computers can imitate the human brain, but the human brain is not a separate entity—it is part of a body. The experiences of this body provoke the reactions of the brain and set the rational process going in one or another direction...
Computers do not have the dreams or fears or desires that feed and stimulate human thought. This is why they may imitate one of the operations of the brain, but no more.
It is for this reason that computers cannot produce anything that might be called art except in the purely formal sense of putting one color or one note next to another. Genius lies in the heart. Songs of despair are the most beautiful of songs. Some immortal songs are pure sobs.
To put it simply, the most perfect machine is purely rational, but human beings are not. They are not rational in their feelings and opinions and conduct, and they do not find it easy to live in a purely and exclusively rational milieu. Who of us has not been frightened by reading about Utopias, whether of the 16th century or the 19th, with their perfectly mechanical organization, their closed world in which there are no accidents, but everything is foreseen and regulated? No one wants to live in them. And whenever people find themselves in an over-rational society, irrational behavior breaks out at once. Imperfect though it may be, our Western society is already infinitely too rational. We have to submit to rules and constraints and exercises in collective discipline, and we thus react against the excessive rationality. The more a society wants to be rational, the more we express irrational urges.”
[rationality – the paradox of rational design and control – the unreason of technical society]
“Yet we must also consider the complementary aspect of this mistake in discussions of rationality. The universe that is constructed according to a rational design, with rational means, and with an ideology of rationality, leads to the astonishing result of such irrationality that I can even speak (see below) of the unreason of the technical society. We have here a kind of monster. Each piece is rational but the whole and its functioning are masterpieces of irrationality.
We must demonstrate this in detail, for it is obviously not the view of technocrats, who are not in the habit of looking at a complex whole or taking note of significant details that are not in keeping with the general plan. We are well aware that the general plan enables us to shut out after a time facts that do not fit into it. Such facts are simply understood as aberrations or accidents. But they are precisely the facts which should claim our attention if we are to focus not on what we pretend is happening, but on what is really happening and what will tomorrow become the significant whole. These facts reveal a notable Institutional, economic, and political tendency, all according to techniques, toward a striking irrationality.
in the technical domain, which is our own, rationality is necessarily operational and instrumental. It is the rationalizing which results in technical exploitation of the earth and which reduces all things (human beings included, as we have seen) to objects of calculation for representative thinking.
My affirmation is that the rationality of technique and all human organization plunges us into a world of irrationality and that technical rationality is enclosed in a system of irrational forces... provoking dehumanization and the cold and indifferent rationalization of human relations.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Bluff, Chapter 7, Mastery over Technique
*[human mastery over technique – the modern delusion of attempting to calculate the incalculable. We have to cure ourselves of this itch. Rather than being a coherent response to the reversal of reason adumbrated above, it is a fundamental part of the problem]
“But beyond a certain degree of power we enter the sphere of the incalculable. "The incalculable is simply the unconditional promotion of power, unceasingly measured and reevaluated. But precisely when we come up against almost absolute power, against the technique which can do unheard-of things, we cannot master it. We feel this unconsciously. We thus experience a terrible fear. We sense that power is closed to basic questioning. If technique can do anything (as we are all convinced), we cannot stand up to it. We are not its master. This obscure feeling explains the enthusiasm, the delirium, the frenzy which has greeted the computer and its many applications. At last we can calculate the incalculable. We can master power with greater power. Humanity has discovered this.
But one thing is lacking. We have not become the masters of the computer. The means by which to achieve domination is on the side of that which we have to dominate. What all those who think they can master technique lack is a basic understanding that technique is simply power, that no one can master power, and that by its very nature power forbids all questioning and slips away from all attempts to seize it.”
A couple of essays by me on the above themes
On St. Thomas Aquinas
This article by Ray Monk is well worth reading on Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ray-monk-wittgenstein
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