Grand Strategy Annex

1st March 2012

Post with 3 notes

A Clausewitzean Conception of Philosophy

I have been listening to Daniel N. Robinson’s Teaching Company lectures Consciousness and its Implications, and thoroughly enjoying it. I’ve been planning on brushing up on philosophy of mind for a manuscript I’ve been working on, but this has had unintended consequences of giving me a lot of new ideas, and my manuscript has been neglected while I work on these new ideas.

Here is a passage from Professor Robinson’s lectures that I found particularly compelling:

Some philosophers have suggested that we should content ourselves with ordinary forms of explanation. The philosopher Georges Rey suggests that problems be divided into those “peculiar to the mind” and those outside the mind. This fits the notion of customary explanations as containing the “causal” conditions within themselves. But the central task of any discipline, once it has mapped out its territory, is to arrive at a settled position on just how far its explanatory resources are likely to take it. In philosophy of mind, to raise the question of mental causation moves the philosophical question to a scientific question. Is it any surprise that the philosopher asking what is, at base, a scientific question, soon discovers the inability of philosophical modes of explanation to settle it?

And he goes on to add:

It can be argued that questions of causation are, in principle and always, scientific questions.

I don’t agree with the professor on this. For my part, I think I would be at least as likely to find scientific modes of explanation unable to settle philosophical questions as I would be to find philosophical modes of explanation unable to settle scientific questions, and as soon as this thought came to me while listening to the above passage I realized that it suggests a Clausewitzean conception of philosophy (and of science).

Clausewitz famously maintained the continuity of war and politics, as expressed in this famous passage of On War:

“…war is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book 1, Chapter 1, section 24 

I have written about how Foucault has inverted this famous Clausewitzean doctrine that war is the pursuit of politics by other means (for example, in Toward a Dialectical Conception of War), by saying the politics is the pursuit of war by other means. Clausewitz and Foucault put together suggest that war and politics are to different forms of essentially the same human activity — two sides of the same coin.

A similar claim could be made for science and philosophy, i.e., that they are two sides of the same coin, and I would furthermore suggest that the coin in question is understanding — i.e., understanding the world.

That is to say, and to say it in other words, that the claim could be made that science is the pursuit of philosophy by other means, or it could be just as well claimed the philosophy is the pursuit of science by other means.

The ultimate continuity of science and philosophy means that philosophical explanations would approach by degrees providing an answer a question framed in scientific form, just as a scientific explanation would approach by a matter of degree providing answer to a question framed in philosophical terms. Each explanation would ultimately prove unsatisfactory, not because it is “wrong,” but because it is framed in different terms than that to be explained.

If we take the further step and reformulate an essentially scientific answer to a philosophical question in philosophical terms, we are simply doing philosophy, just as if we reformulate an essentially philosophical answer to a scientific question in scientific terms, we are simply doing science.

But to say “simply” in this context does not do justice to the relationship between science and philosophy. The larger point here is that there is a scientific way of approaching questions and a philosophical way of approaching questions. They are distinct paradigms, if you will (understanding “paradigms” in the Kuhnian sense). The distinction, however, is far from absolute. Each shades over into the other at the far edge of inquiry. 

Philosophical questions pushed to the brink of philosophy can become scientific questions, just as scientific questions pushed to the brink of science can become philosophical questions.

Under these conditions of conceptual transgression we have the intellectual equivalent of war when science becomes a continuation of philosophy pursued by other (i.e., scientific) means and philosophy becomes a continuation of science pursued by other (i.e., philosophical) means.

Tagged: clausewitzFoucaultsciencephilosophyDaniel N. Robinson