When Philosophers Panic

Two extreme responses to crisis

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

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Last weekend I was lucky enough to be at the Realisation Festival, a philosophy festival at St Giles House, Dorset. The weather was wonderful and the food was amazing. The keynote speakers (Sarah Wilson and Sharon Stein) were provocative, insightful, and passionate, though the tenor of their talks was funereal, about collapse and crisis.

This reminded me of earlier periods of uncertainty, and over the next few weeks I’ll try to show that social uncertainty can lead to embracing extreme generality (what I’ll call rationalism) and embracing extreme particularity (what I’ll call empiricism). Both extremes attempt to build a foundation for knowledge, and therefore are associated with the term foundationalism (usually referring to the early twentieth century).

It is fitting, then, that John Locke, one of the most important figures in British Empiricism, lived in the very house where the festival was held from 1666 to 1688, the period leading up to the publication of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689).

A photo I took of St Giles House, residence of the Earl of Shaftesbury, including the fountain which matches the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain in Piccadilly Circus (Shaftesbury Avenue).

By far the best part of the festival was the conversations after the talks. Several of the people at the festival had read the Neither/Nor paper I spoke about last week, and had helpful comments and questions. Because there were one hundred and fifty brilliant attendees, I had the chance to describe my work in many different ways. Each time someone asked “What's your book about?” I experimented with new explanations, to see what resonated.

So what is your book about?

Over the past few years, I’ve played with many ways of describing my philosophy, Neither/Nor.

When asked “What is your book about?” I have often said: “It’s about two ways of knowing. The first is knowing through language, mathematics, abstraction. The second is knowing through the senses, embodied experience, or intuition.”

Today I’ll try another approach, which in my view is closely related:

“It’s about why debates between rationalism and empiricism recur in periods of uncertainty.”

Rationalism and Empiricism

First, what are rationalism and empiricism?

When the terms “rationalism” and “empiricism” are used together and unqualified, most people will think of the Early Modern Period, in seventeenth and eighteenth century European philosophy. This framing pits people like Descartes and Leibniz (rationalists) against Bacon, Locke and Hume (empiricists).

The question underlying these debates is this: “What is the source of knowledge?” The rationalists appeal to abstraction and the use of reason, which involves thinking. Just think of Descartes’ “I think therefore I am.” The empiricists appeal to facts and the use of observation, which involves investigation. Here’s Francis Bacon, on the empiricist side:

There are and can exist but two ways of investigating and discovering truth. The one hurries on rapidly from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from them, as principles and their supposed indisputable truth, derives and discovers the intermediate axioms. This is the way now in use. The other constructs its axioms from the senses and particulars, by ascending continually and gradually, till it finally arrives at the most general axioms, which is the true but unattempted way.

— Novum Organum (1620), Aphorisms Book I, XIX

Philosophical Extremism

I want to argue that rationalism and empiricism are extreme positions, and that they come with a host of auxiliary assumptions. So why do these extreme positions arise?

I’ll argue that when the foundational certainty of a society is shaken, a strong urge towards foundationalism arises. Foundationalism is usually associated with the early 20th century, and included projects which sought to ground knowledge in incontrovertible truths, to find certainty by beginning with that which cannot be doubted, then building on top of such a “foundation.”

Most of philosophy education describes such positions as arising out of a “will to truth.” But I am arguing that it is actual sociological uncertainty which drives philosophical responses. Once uncertainty passes a certain threshold, philosophers will flee to opposite extremes. When the center cannot hold, thinkers seek psychological refuge in positions that promise absolute certainty.

The rationalists attempt to flee sensory uncertainty through retreat into pure abstraction — universal laws, pure reason, mathematical certainty, or eternal truths. They seek to transcend the messy particulars of the senses ("all is not as it seems") in favor of timeless generalizations.

The empiricists attempt to flee interpretative uncertainty through retreat into pure concreteness — bare facts, rigid methods, observational data. They attempt to avoid interpretation ("just stick to the facts") and to ground knowledge directly in observation.

Both responses promise escape from uncertainty, but both result from philosophical panic — and both will fail as a result of their extremity.

In Neither/Nor terms, one extreme reifies concepts into eternal systems, while the other dissolves everything into contingent perceptions.

Next week, I’ll tell three short stories, which capture these two extremes arising three times in European philosophical history: In Ancient Athens (404-320 BC), in Early Modern Europe (17th–18th Centuries), and at the start of the 20th Century, around WWI.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with someone! Please also consider supporting me on Patreon or Ko-Fi.

Best,

Bryan

Haven’t we heard this one before?

Maybe! See if you can find a common thread through these three posts: