The World Beyond Kant's Head

For a project I’m working on, and will be able to say something about later, I re-read Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head, and I have to say: It’s a really superb book. I read it when it first came out, but I was knee-deep in writing at the time and I don’t think I absorbed it as fully as I should have. I quote Crawford in support of several of the key points I make in my theses on technology, but his development of those points is deeply thoughtful and provocative, even more than I had realized. If you haven’t read it, you should.

But there’s something about the book I want to question. It concerns philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

In relation to the kinds of cultural issues Crawford deals with here -- issues related to technology, economics, social practices, and selfhood -- there are two ways to make use of the philosophy of the past. The first involves illumination: one argues that reading Kant and Hegel (Crawford’s two key philosophers) clarifies our situation, provides alternative ways of conceptualizing and responding to it, and so on. The other way involves causation: one argues that we’re where we are today because of the triumphal dissemination of, for instance, Kantian ideas throughout our culture.

Crawford does some of both, but in many respects the chief argument of his book is based on a major causal assumption: that much of what’s wrong with our culture, and with our models of selfhood, arises from the success of certain of Kant’s ideas. I say “assumption” because I don’t think that Crawford ever actually argues the point, and I think he doesn’t argue the point because he doesn’t clearly distinguish between illumination and causation. That is, if I’ve read him rightly, he shows that a study of Kant makes sense of many contemporary phenomena and implicitly concludes that Kant’s ideas therefore are likely to have played a causal role in the rise of those phenomena.

I just don’t buy it, any more than I buy the structurally identical claim that modern individualism and atomization all derive from the late-medieval nominalists. I don’t buy those claims because I have never seen any evidence for them. I am not saying that those claims are wrong, I just want to know how it happens: how you get from extremely complex and arcane philosophical texts that only a handful of people in history have ever been able to read to world-shaping power. I don’t see how it’s even possible.

One of Auden’s most famous lines is: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” He was repeatedly insistent on this point. In several articles and interviews he commented that the social and political history of Europe would be precisely the same if Dante, Shakespeare, and Mozart had never lived. I suspect that this is true, and that it’s also true of philosophy. I think that we would have the techno-capitalist society we have if Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Immanuel Kant, and G.F.W. Hegel had never lived. If you disagree with me, please show me the path which those philosophical ideas followed to become so world-shapingly dominant. I am not too old to learn.

Steven Johnson and the connected mind

Folks, I’m still way busy, so posting will continue to be light for a while. I’m hoping at some point to have substantive responses to Steven Johnson’s new book Where Good Ideas Come From, which I read last week. For now, check out Jason B. Jones’s review, and consider one important question, which will take me a while to elaborate.

Johnson’s great theme is the virtue and power of connectedness — “Fortune favors the connected mind” will end up being the tagline for the book — but he acknowledges that too much connection can be a bad thing:

The idea, of course, is to strike the right balance between order and chaos. Inspired by the early hype about telecommuting, the advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day experimented with a “nonterritorial” office where desks and cubicles were jettisoned, along with the private offices: employees had no fixed location in the office and were encouraged to cluster in new, ad hoc configurations with their colleagues depending on that day’s projects. By all accounts, it was a colossal failure, precisely because it traded excessive order for excessive chaos. . . . Slightly less ambitious open-office plans have grown increasingly unfashionable in recent years, for one compelling reason: people don’t like to work in them. To work in an open office is to work exclusively in public, which turns out to have just as many drawbacks as working entirely in your private lab.

Elsewhere he argues that “Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were emerging from a medieval culture that suffered from too much order. If dispersed tribes of hunter-gatherers are the cultural equivalent of a chaotic, gaseous state, a culture where the information is largely passed down by monastic scribes stands at the opposite extreme. A cloister is a solid. By breaking up those information bonds and allowing ideas to circulate more freely through a wider, connected population, the great Italian innovators brought new life to the European mind.”

This buys too easily into a very familiar but now largely discredited narrative of the Renaissance as emancipation from the Dark Ages, and ignores the massive intellectual contributions of monastic culture, but the general point is surely right: there can be overly ordered, closed, and private intellectual environments, and there can be overly open and chaotic ones. The fact that Johnson celebrates “the connected mind” so strenuously in this book, in chapter after chapter, suggests that he thinks we need more openness. But here’s my question (at last):

Is that true? Is it really our problem today that we’re not sufficiently connected?

discuss

"Fortune favors the connected mind." — Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From.

"City ideas, like cities, are fashionable. But fashions change quickly, so city ideas live and die on short cycles. The opposite of city ideas are 'natural ideas', which account for the big leaps forward and often appear to come from nowhere. These ideas come from nature, solitude, and meditation." — Jonathan Harris.