Neither/Nor: Final Salon and Progress Report

This Saturday, online

This weekend

If you're free tomorrow (Saturday 6pm London time), please join me online to discuss my ongoing philosophical work in the final salon of my Interintellect Fellowship 😊 This session will complete the six month fellowship which I was awarded.

Details here.

The past six months

As you’re probably aware, I’m working on a book. I named the work Neither/Nor eight months ago, and received an Interintellect Fellowship to work on it six months ago. But the writing will cover research which I began in 2020.

People ask: “How’s the book going?”

I answer: “Slowly but surely.”

I thought I’d give a written progress report here. If what follows sounds like it’s mostly reading rather than writing, that is true; I’ve been trying to set up a social routine so that I can write without having to engineer human contact into every week.

That routine has just come online in the past few weeks as I’ve begun work (on digital preservation) at the British Library. This means that I’m preparing to write at a much faster rate in the near future.

However, I have still made progress. During the past six months, I wrote a first draft of the introduction to Neither/Nor, at about 12,000 words, which outlines the argument.

I continued work on Buddhist dependent arising — especially by reading Katukurunde Nyanananda Thera’s 1971 masterpiece, Concept and Reality in Early Buddhist Thought. The earliest available Buddhist texts (the “Pali Canon,” which came together in the last few centuries BC) will provide the background for the two modes of reasoning I’m exploring. This will require a close look at dependent arising as well as “papañca” or “conceptual proliferation.” It’s possible that I will be treating Concept and Reality in more detail, possibly as a series of lectures or essays.

I read Beckwith’s Greek Buddha (2015) after reading ancient Pyrrhonist sources including Sextus Empiricus (~200 AD). The Pyrrhonists will provide (along with Buddhism) another source for early pragmatist thinking, and a potent set of tools for combating dogmatism.

I read Montaigne’s Essays, including the Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576), to understand the role of scepticism in the Early Modern period. I read Pascal’s Pensées (1670) too, which provide an interesting usage of Pyrrhonist scepticism alongside Stoicism. I find that where he lands (Christianity) is just another form of dogmatism of which Pyrrho would never have approved. Still, I like Pascal’s Neither/Nor strategy, taking a strong dose of scepticism alongside a strong dose of dogmatism then seeing what emerges.

I read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (1887) and Ecce Homo (1888), and I am now reading Beyond Good and Evil (1886). I’ll probably also need to read Birth of Tragedy and the notes to Will to Power, and maybe Gay Science as well. I had been putting Nietzsche off for some years, wanting to come up with my own account of the origins of morality, and of abstract categories like good and evil, as well as my own understanding of the nature of the transition which took place from Hellenic psychology to Hellenistic psychology, before reading Nietzsche’s arguments. This is of course difficult to do entirely cleanly since Nietzsche had such a big impact on later writers. Still, I tried. There are places where we came to extremely similar conclusions (and I can show evidence which he normally omits). But we diverge significantly in other places. More on that later.

I’ve been simultaneously reading the first and second volumes of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818–44; the latter is a commentary on the former). His thinking on the relationship between concepts and perception will be extremely important to Neither/Nor, and it’s worth saying that, of everything I’ve been reading, I think Schopenhauer is the most spectacular genius (perhaps matched only by Spinoza). He is also the most fun to read (much more so than Spinoza). He’s one of the few in the past who makes perception primary, and conceptual thinking/rationalism secondary, to what it means to be human.

When relevant I dipped into Spinoza’s Ethics (1678) as well. Although his understanding of the relationship of concepts to perception leaves something to be desired, he provides a critical and potent anti-teleological account of nature. I will need to flesh this out by reading Lucretius and Francis Bacon, because I plan to take a stand against Kant and Schopenhauer on the question of teleology (Nietzsche did this too in his youth, but we only have fragmentary notes).

As historical grounding for some of the Axial Age claims I’m in danger of making, I read Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.

I got an overview of Wittgenstein’s work from Rupert Read and dipped into the Philosophical Investigations (1951). I will likely be including a chapter on Wittgenstein, though this is the least developed at the moment.

I read some of Einstein more closely, especially “Geometry and Experience” (1921). I will likely be writing about his relationship to Schopenhauer, and also the Hilbert–Brouwer debate and its consequences.

This means the preliminary outline looks like this: the Buddha, Darwin, Pyrrho, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Einstein, Wittgenstein.

The book will explain the theoretical background for a practical approach. It will take as objects whole systems of metaphysics, look at their origins — in that sense, Neither/Nor will represent a kind of meta-metaphysics. But because it will also ground its examination in the practical effects of adopting any such philosophical position, it will remain deeply pragmatic. It will provide a framework for deciding how and when to inhabit or construct a worldview, and how and when to drop or destroy a worldview and produce another.

I re-read the Tao Te Ching in various translations, and returned to the Zhuangzi whenever necessary — which, while reading Western philosophy, was often. Chinese philosophy from this period (5th–2nd century BC) provides an excellent ameliorative to the conceptual problems found in Western philosophy, which, I intend to argue, are often the mere result of Indo-European grammar.

I’m trying to get some grounding in Medieval philosophy, looking especially at Abelard on the problem of universals. I’m also planning to read Luria (Cognitive Development, 1976) and Arendt (Human Condition, 1958) soon, and a few more 20th century thinkers (possibly Whitehead or Korzybski).

If this all sounds a bit abstract or difficult, fear not, as I’m intending the book to be fun. Let’s see if I can do that.

I’ve been running lots of experiments with voicenotes; you can hear those on the podcast. It’s probably not obvious now, but these represent the experimental and practical side of Neither/Nor.

I’ve also had at least one question as to why I’m engaging with older thinkers rather than modern cognitive science or neuroscience.

I will eventually get to more recent stuff, but I’m reading the ancients for the same reason Schopenhauer thought they must be read. The ancients had less conceptual baggage, and therefore more direct access to experience. Experience is the only source of wisdom; words can harbour wisdom but not produce it. We moderns are encumbered by concepts, and without reading ancient texts or anthropology, we can’t see how blind we are to the effects of our inherited assumptions.

Conceptual proliferation produces suffering at the individual level and also confusion at the societal level, because it takes as simple objects what are highly contingent and complex results of cultural evolution. This is tantamount to treating cheesecake as a natural and inevitable kind.

The task of Neither/Nor is to complicate the basic philosophical questions, but not merely to complicate them. Instead, it will show how first complicating or deconstructing concepts can allow better simplifications, and the construction of new and more useful concepts.

In other words, it won’t (as postmodern is caricatured to do) smash conceptual systems and leave the reader with the pieces. It will, through historicizing and deconstruction, show how constructs can be taken apart, and how new ones can be put together.

As always, I’d love to hear from you!

Bryan