incrementalism & the loss of quality: contra 'critical analysis', pro 'speculative' philosophy
incrementalism & the loss of quality:
the artifice of contemporary ‘critical’ analysis
& the justification for a rebirth of ‘speculative’ philosophy
I wrote my last post, ‘incrementalism…” etc., because I was reading about Darwin and Huxley, and I began to realize how the contemporary misinterpretation of Darwin’s methodology, in terms of analysis rather than data collection or empiricism, was a significant part of the mix in contemporary scholasticism, that is, in the decadence of the arts intellectually, both in and out of academe, and perhaps of science as well. But I was not in a position, at that point, to integrate it back into a full exposé of the present putatively ‘critical’ consciousness. Nor did I isolate the key effect of the specific vector of the misinterpretation, which I now recognize to be the loss of qualitative distinctions, in both the arts and the sciences. I recognized the artificial loss of certain particular qualitative distinctions, namely in the presumption, specifically, that life, abstract thought and consciousness can all be assigned to the incremental process of emergence inherent in the course of evolution, and that evolution therefore not only has or will ‘explain’ them, but that they thus have no right to stand as qualitatively distinct from ‘matter’ or ‘material reality’.
This, of course, is a corruption of Darwin’s incremental analyses. At the outset, Darwin uses his incremental analyses to show that apparently disparate phenomena, in the realm of biology, could ultimately be linked by a series of visible steps. Initially, however, his purpose was not so much ‘proof’ as the refutation of traditional objections that had been raised to the possibility of evolution. As I explained in my previous post, what Darwin did was not necessarily 'prove' evolution, which required the relatively full description that has been produced since, but disprove the contemporary arguments and cavils against the possibility of evolution. What Darwin proves finally is the possibility of evolution.
I began to understand, as I wrote my last post, that incrementalism has become a pervasive ‘tool’ in present intellectual discourse. But I had not come into view of the full generalization, the full implication. Today, incrementalism is not just the tool for disallowing specific qualitative distinctions, it is a tool for disallowing almost any qualitative distinction in almost any field of the arts or sciences, apart from the undeniable qualitative distinctions inherent in immediate sense experience or generally accepted ‘objective’ scientific formulations.
If we can take a great work of art and do an incremental analysis of the work so that we prove to our own satisfaction that the work is the sum of the technical activity involved in its creation, we have ‘proved’ the continuity between technique and art, and therefore art is simply the summation of given technique. If we engage in this process long enough and often enough, and we convince ourselves that art is finally conceptual and not creative, that really, the ‘leap’ of creativity – the real teleological force, the production of something truly ‘new’ –is just an illusion, and that we can 'think' our way into art, and think our way into art with an incremental sequence of habitual or given concepts.
But technique is not art. While there is legitimate creativity in literally every field, including engineering, the mastery of the conceptual or craft base is neither ‘art’ nor creativity.
But we have used incrementalism to destroy the qualitative distinction between craft and creativity. And this is pervasive culturally.
I am now in a position to draw a full picture of the present ‘critical’ philosophy, such as it is, since it does not deserve the name of ‘philosophy’ – which, legitimately, is a study appropriately reserved for creative insight into the functions of consciousness, beginning with creativity itself.
I had mentioned Hume in my previous post, particularly with respect to solipsism, the fact that all experience, both inward and outward, is ‘representation’ – to use the old language : 'modifications' of the 'substance' of consciousness itself. And I also glanced past his shell game, the inherent contradiction in his ‘philosophy’ in presuming that certain ‘representations’ were also ‘matters of fact’. Matters of fact, according to Hume, are our immediate responses to objects of the senses. Therefore he also calls them ‘sense impressions’.
But, as I said in my previous post, ‘sensation’ is an analysis of representations. Since we know that all sensory phenomena are reduced to isolated sense data, tiny elemental bits of information not necessarily related to each other, we cannot assume that ‘representations’ have any specific or necessary connection with ‘the external’. The knowledge of this connection is derived from some secondary source, and unless we are willing to analyze this secondary source – this basis for ‘object formation’ in consciousness itself – the claim that certain ‘representations’ are necessarily immediately connected with ‘the external’ must be considered an artifice.
We cannot have it both ways. We cannot claim that ‘objects’ are ‘representations’ in consciousness but are also necessarily ‘sense impressions’ and ‘matters of fact’.
Kant trips over precisely this point. While he attempts to establish the basis for ‘objectivity’ within the frame of consciousness as the field of ‘representations’, he must still maintain that objects are self-existent outside the range of our consciousness.And Kant’s metaphysics begins to describe how objects are formed within consciousness itself, in terms of the synthesis necessary in self-awareness. Perhaps some things exist externally as ‘entities’, but ‘object’ as such is a form of consciousness and not necessarily a form of ‘the world’.
Now this is all difficult for those who have not specifically studied the history of philosophy. But the upshot is that Hume teaches us how to play a game in which, because we have two bases which we consider to be simultaneously ‘real’ but which in fact are mutually exclusive in terms of any legitimately grounded philosophy, we can proceed to disprove anything we care to disprove.
Hume insists that the only valid knowledge is sensory based, which inverts the dualistic paradox, since it brings the ambivalent category of ‘sense data’ – a product of the rational analysis of ‘representations’ and therefore derivative of experience, rather than its source – into play as the key to validity. From the perspective of ‘sense data’, mind is necessarily illusory. While all representations are contained in mind, no representation of mind can be formed in terms of sensory data. Therefore mind is a chimera. The same holds true for matter. While matter seems to derive from sense data, it is in fact a generalization which, in itself, lacks essential sensory content. Therefore matter is in fact a mirage.
Of course, this drives Hume into a fairly narrow corner, at least for the philosophers, since it means that generalization itself is called into question. Hume is required to insist that all experience is essentially singular moments of representation, that these alone are ‘real’ (as we would say), and therefore that a generalization is a specific experience with a general term appended to it.
For the most part, sympathetic ‘philosophers’ have consistently ignored this aspect of Hume’s philosophy, since it means that not only generalization, but analysis itself is moot. The same holds true, to a lesser degree, with his analyses of causality and necessity. If generalization, causality and necessity are ‘after the fact’, philosophically, and therefore not categorical in themselves, then analysis itself loses its inherent validity.
Kant resolves the dilemma by opening the door to the understanding and analysis of reflective awareness, which places functions of consciousness as prior conditions for the act of experience itself. But this of course brings with it, not only a host of paradoxes and apparent contradictions, it ultimately suggests that analysis is empirically based. That is, analysis, if it has independent validity, must be based in and derived from experience, and not in logic itself as a prior or self-subsistent principle.
Now, of course, Kant had tried to prove the latter, but his argument was tenuous enough to be exposed to radical criticism, beginning, as we suggested, with the attack on his need to posit the self-existent object, the ‘thing in itself’, outside the frame of consciousness and representation. But, among the philosophers, what this did was strip away, to their own satisfaction, everything excep this apparent validation of logic and the activity of analysis itself. So they turned the Humean involution back outward again, establishing tangibly the two points of ‘value’ from which they could theoretically demolish any proposition that they found offensive. If we assume that validity inheres only in analysis and sensation, and assume implicitly that the two ‘values’ are both distinct and the same, we have the tools to disprove any principle we care to disprove.
Of course, certain generic qualitative distinctions remained, not because the ‘philosophers’ could not use this peculiar device in their ‘demolition’, but because to use this ambiguous analytical / concrete instrument in their destruction would be evident sophistry and thus point up the artifice of the instrument and not disprove the distinction or principle. Hence the opportune nature of the apparent apparatus that Darwin handed them. It was easy enough, in the debates of the 19th century, to assume that Darwin was actually ‘proving’evolution, and proving it explicitly in terms of relatively short but brilliant sequences of empirical increments showing that apparently disparate ends could be linked by a single process. Almost no open commentary or substantiation was required to effect the transition from this to an analytical tool in which, by reducing the distance between two intellectual points to a series of increments, we obviate any qualitative distinction between them.
The fact that this kind of intellectual activity has become incredibly pervasive and invariably involves a presumed level of absolute validity does not change the fact that it is absolutely ersatz.
Perhaps this era will become known as the age of deconstruction. And perhaps not a few present thinkers would be happy with that label. But I doubt they would appreciate the moral valence that it will imply.
Analysis presupposes not only the validity of the act, but a substantive and definable base, a metaphysic and a metaphysical substantiation of its own validity. Analysis cannot subsist as a self-contained island in the midst of a sea of pure skepticism. Without a substantiation of the deconstructive process, deconstruction itself is moot. We might as well revert to Russell’s qualified realism, and to his basic personal optimism, without his pervasive intellectual cynicism.
The problem is not in philosophy, per se, but in the cul de sac that philosophy has backed into because it never really understood empiricism. Philosophy is not based on logic, but on inference and analysis, which are not essentially logical, but empirical operations. They are the formal correlates of self-awareness, the process by which we not only become self-aware, but by which we abstract experience as ‘object’ and so forth. As such, it has a positive, substantive and irrevocable base. But no amount of logical analysis will take us there. Only the analysis of experience itself as the function of reflective awareness leads us to the base of validity, which is the set of experiences that are validity itself.
This, of course, is what I have been talking about on and off throughout this blog, so I feel like writing QED here. But it is a positive base to a positive philosophy and the necessary next step if we hope to recover a culture which can be defined in something more than soda and ground beef.
Finally got down to it. I think a great piece of writing that pretty well turns everything on its feet.
It is good to think on the scientific method/s and evolution and philosophy...how it all interrelates even unto the man on the street....
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