Developing, parallel to common language (which philosophers
frequently call natural language), different types of sign
systems, humans utilize the latter's mediating force in order to
increase the efficiency of their action. "Give me a fixed point
and I'll move the world" is the equivalent philosophical
statement characteristic of the civilization of the lever and
pulley. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty says in a scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor
less." "The question is," says Alice, "whether you can make
words mean so many different things." Reading the dialogue from
Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, with the magnificent
works of great philosophers (from Plato to Leibniz, Kant, and
Hegel, Peirce and many more) in mind, one understands Alice's
trouble. With the exception of Wittgenstein, nobody really seems
to have been bothered by the ability people have to make words
mean many things.
Today, we could be directed to a philosophical paraphrase in
which, instead of a fixed point, the need for a sign system (a
language) is spelled out. Adapted to the scope of the conceived
practical experience, such a sign system, when put into
practice, will change the world, will "move" it. Diagrammatic
thinking, the powerful cognitive model Peirce advanced,
exemplifies the idea. Cybernetics, biogenetics, computers, and
research in artificial intelligence and artificial life, as well
as political, social, aesthetic, or religious concepts are
examples of domains where such sign systems have been devised.
They have facilitated forms of human self-constitution that
contribute to the contradictory image of today's world. Such
languages reflect the fundamental process of progressive
mediation, participate in the diversification of the languages
used, and affect the status and value system of the ideal of
literacy. They serve as the scientific disguise of philosophy.
Clarity (difficult to achieve in natural language), evidence,
and certainty seem guaranteed in the language of science. In
addition, objectivity and the ever seductive truth, for which
philosophy was never known, are also apparently within reach.
There is to philosophic discourse an internal reason for its
continuous unfolding: People constituting themselves as
philosophers change as the world they live in changes. Human
reasoning is part of the world; the ability and, moreover, the
desire to think of new questions, attempt answers, and doubt our
own ability to reach the right answer are part of what defines
the human being. The consequences of mediation in philosophy
should not be ignored. Mediation implies, on one hand, a high
degree of integration of human praxis (to the extent of making
individual contribution anonymous), and on the other, a no less
high degree of the subject's independence in respect to the
object of work or reasoning, or the object represented by the
other participants in human praxis. While it seems appropriate
for science to know more and more about a narrower range of
subjects, it contradicts the image of philosophy as it is formed
in language and embodied in the ideal of literacy. Due to this
metaphorically defined deepening of knowledge, each philosopher
is more independent of the other, but more intensely integrated
than ever before due to the necessary interconnection of this
knowledge. The meaning of this paradoxical situation is not easy
to clarify. The overall process has followed two qualitatively
contrary directions: 1) concentration on a precisely delineated
aspect of knowledge or action in order to understand and control
it; 2) abandoning interest in the whole as a consequence of the
assumption that the parts will finally be reunited in the social
integrating mechanism of the market, whether we want it or not.
We now have particular philosophies-of law, ethics, science,
sport, recreation, feminism, Afro-Centrism-but no longer a
comprehensive philosophy of existence.
The scientific disguise of philosophy contributes to its renewed
struggle for legitimacy. It adopts concepts and methods
pertinent to rationality. In order to deal with reason, or to do
away altogether with questions of reasoning, it unfolds in
science and technology. Durkheim tried to apply Darwin's natural
selection model to explain labor division. At present,
philosophers have become memeticians, and examine computational
simulations of Darwinian principles in order to see how ideas
survive and advance. Spencer believed that the increase of the
productive power of work increases happiness. Present-day
philosophers are eager to diagram the relation between work
satisfaction and personality. Some even try to revive Compte's
positivist philosophy, to improve upon past Utopian schemes, or
to invent a calculus of intellectual well-being. Short of a
philosophic inquiry, everything becomes a subject waiting for a
philosopher who does not want to stay within the boundaries of
the history of philosophy.
Once new movements, some better justified than others, and all
reflecting the shift from the authority-based civilization of
literacy to the endless freedom of choice of the illiterate
context, needed a powerful instrument to further their programs,
they chose, or were chosen by, philosophy. Secularism and
pluralism meet within philosophic concerns with the gay
movement, feminism, multi-culturalism, integration of new
technology, implications of aging, the new holisms, popular
philosophy, sexual emancipation, virtuality, and more along this
line. In a way, this reflects the new awareness of efficiency
that permeates philosophic activity, but also its struggle to
maintain its relations to literacy. Legitimate doubt is generated
by the choice of subjects that seem to attract philosophers, and
by the apparent lack of philosophic matter. When the language is
not obscure, the philosopher seems to discuss matters, not really
question reasons, and even less advance ideas or explanatory
models. Wholesale generalizations do not help, but one can
really not escape the feeling that the process through which
philosophy liberates itself from literacy has been less
productive than the similar process of science's emancipation
from language.
A journey through the many philosophically oriented Web sites
reveals very quickly that even when philosophy opts out of the
print medium, it carries over many of the limitations of
literacy. The ability to open philosophic discourse, to adopt
non- linearity, and to encourage dialogue free of the pressure of
tradition is often signaled, but rarely accomplished. The medium
is resisted, not enjoyed as an alternative to classic
philosophical discourse. Such observations have prompted the
opinion that scientists are becoming the most appropriate
philosophers of their own contributions.
Who needs philosophy? And what for?
At this point, one question naturally arises: Is philosophy
relevant after all? Moreover, is it even possible without the
participation of natural language, or at least without this
intermediary between philosophers and their public? In blunter
terms, can we live without it? In the context in which
efficiency expectations translate into a practical experience of
an unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turn
into another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, as
it was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity's
self-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? If
indeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purpose
be?
As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardless
of the new condition of language, philosophy remains possible
and is indeed relevant. As far as its functions are
concerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness,
corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-they
remain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless to
reiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophy
pursued different interests as these proved pertinent to
efficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread to
the table nor artifacts. Their skill was to formulate questions,
especially the very probing questions-"What is what?" and
"Why?"-in their attempt to address the origins of things.
Deciphering the reason of things and actions-in other words,
understanding the world and its apparent order (what the Greeks
called eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers and
interpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can we
explain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently by
people in search of scientific rationality than by philosophers
per se.
No historic account, no matter how detailed, can do justice to
the definition of philosophy. Its subject changes as human
beings change in the process of their practical
self-constitution. From philosophy, science and all the
humanities (ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, law)
evolved. Even our concern with language is of a philosophic
nature. It seems that philosophy is, in the final analysis, the
only authentic domain of abstraction. Its interest is not the
individual, the concrete, the immediate, not even the idea, but
the abstraction of these. Where other domains, such as
mathematics, logic, linguistics, and physics are intent on
understanding the abstract notions around which their domains
are built, on giving them life in the context of practical
experiences, philosophy seems driven by the quest for reaching
the next level of abstraction, the abstraction of abstractions,
and so on. Science uses abstraction as an instrument for
reaching concreteness; philosophy follows the inverse path. There
is always to the philosophic attempt a call for the next step,
into the infinite. Each accomplishment is provisional. To
experiment philosophically means not so much to search
systematically for causes as to never end the inquiry. There are
no right or wrong philosophic theories. Philosophy is cumulative
and self-devouring.
That people will never stop wondering what is what, the more
their own activity will multiply the domain of existing
entities, goes almost without saying. That they will ask again
and again how they can know, how they can be sure that what they
know is true, or at least relevant, is also evident. The species
is characterized by its ability to think, produce and master
tools, acknowledge value, and constitute itself as a community
of shared concern and resources, through its playfulness and
other characteristics (alluded to in terms such as Homo
economicus, Zoon semiotikon, Zoon politikon, Homo ludens).
Probably more than all these partial qualifiers, the species is
the only one known to question everything. As language experience
marked the genetic condition of the human being, questioning
marked it too, probably through language mechanisms in the first
place. When the child articulates the first question, the entire
genetic endowment is at work.
We are who and what we are in our inquisitive interaction with
others. Our minds exist only through this interaction. This
statement says in effect that to philosophize became part of the
process of human self-constitution and identification. The only
referent of philosophy is the human being constituted in
practical experiences. Together with other surviving literacies,
philosophic literacy will be one of many. The philosophy of the
civilization of illiteracy will reflect the circumstances of work
and life characteristic of the pragmatic framework. It will also
be subjected to the severe test of market exigencies as these
reflect efficiency expectations characteristic of the new scale
of humankind. Science can justify itself by the return in
investment in new explanatory models. It also leads to new
technologies and to higher levels of efficiency in human
practical experiences. Philosophy certainly has a different
justification. Philosophic necessity is evasive. Short of living
off the past, as literacy, religion, and art do, it needs to
refocus on reason as the compass of human activity. Focusing on
alternative practical experiences, philosophy can practically
help people to free themselves from the obsession with
progress-seen as a sequence of ever-escalating records (of
production, distribution, expectation)-and moreover, from the
fear of all its consequences. It can also focus people's
attention on alternatives to everything that affects the
integrity of the species and its sense of quality, including the
relation to their environment. When past, present, and future
collapse into the illiterate frenzy of the instant, philosophy
owes to those who question its articulations an honest approach
to the question, "Is there a future?" But as this future takes
shape in the presence of humans partaking in the open world of
networked interactions, banalities will not do.