‘The love of Truth’ is the Love of Chains

Facts Care About Your Feelings

The representationalist view (realist metaphysics more broadly) rears its ugly head once more in the rhetorical phrase common in right-wing neoconservative circles ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’. Let's momentarily accept the supposition that underlies this viewpoint, which posits that there are these chunks of "factoids" that exist independently and hold value in their own right, irrespective of human goals and interests.

This perspective falters on its own terms as even within the most rigorous sciences, there are extra-theoretical (and theoretical) assumptions made when interpreting empirical data. Our preferences for simpler theories, certain mathematical methods, or what we consider as evidence, in addition to our cultural backgrounds and individual psychologies, all play mediating roles in interpretation. Scientific theories are laden with the interests (or feelings, you could say) of various parties; the funders, the sponsors, the personal values of journal editors, and end users. The acceptance of scientific theories is often swayed by aesthetic criteria, the rhetoric of the scientists, and even the use of propaganda. What’s more, if two or more competing theories account for available results, there would never be enough experimental verification alone to choose one over another: adherence to things like simplicity or aesthetics will play a decisive role in the choice - making it abundantly clear that facts do not, in fact, speak for themselves.

All that scientific inquiry offers us, all that it can offer, are conditional statements about the implications of adopting specific descriptions and social arrangements; if we talk in this way, such and such will happen. If we use use Galilean-talk over Christian-talk, we are better able to predict the movement of the stars. It does not dictate which vocabularies we should adopt, nor do the picked vocabularies read off the intrinsic nature of the world. That choice is driven by our institutional values and auxiliary motives. A racist society, for instance, might favour educational structures rooted in race essentialism and race science given that such vocabularies further the desired social inequalities, as was indeed the case during Nazi Germany.

The slogan “facts don’t care about your feeling” is therefore simply a falsehood. Even when adhering to some idea of their being such things as facts independent of our linguistic constructs and our pragmatic considerations, these facts still nevertheless do care about our feelings.

However, I take it that the idea behind the phrase is more so that, in principle, there are presuppositionless Truths waiting to be discovered, and their pursuit is an end in itself, even if we are forever fallible with respect to some of these more metaphysical Truths. And, moreover, that there is a virtue called “the love of Truth” - distinct from the love of happiness - which the conservative mind possesses more acutely. This is a socially sensitive world we live in, a world full of pesky social, normative and pragmatic issues that can often muddle up this pursuit, so it is a very good thing indeed that we are in the midst of these truth-seeking minds that are able to penetrate what are otherwise vexing barriers towards the Truth. The progressives - so the thought goes - have chosen the love of happiness over the virtuous love of Truth, which is a grave sin when pursued for its own sake. They have it all backwards. Truth always supervenes over happiness and not vice-versa; indeed happiness is merely a derivative of Truth, a byproduct. This virtue of the love of Truth, especially prevalent in the conservative mind, sits within a gamut of other conservative virtues such as manly bravado and authoritarianism.

I do not mean authoritarianism in the political sense (though that may also be relevant). I mean it in the sense in which many conservatives often adopt a representationalist understanding language as being subordinate to some non-human entity that goes by the name capital T truth. Truth is in this sense a juvenile subordination and obedience to a non-human authority, whether it be the Will of God or Intrinsic Reality, rather that a product of a cooperative activity with our fellow discursive human partners. On this account, our social norms are reified, taken to be ontologically determined by the objective nature of the world. Pragmatist philosopher Robert takes note of this authoritarian nature of representationalism, saying that it

…is a hierarchical ontological structure of superiority and subordination, in which superiors have the authority to command and subordinates the responsibility to obey. In its later Christianized form, it is taken to have been instituted by the supernatural fiat of the ultimate superior and authority, God. Thence derives the “divine right of kings,” devolved through the various feudal ranks, bottoming out in the righteousness of man’s dominion over the beasts. In both forms, those that take the norms to be read off of the natures of things and those that also take those normatively significant natures to be supernaturally ordained, the ultimate source of our responsibilities and obligations lies outside of us, in something non-human, in the way things anyway are, apart from and independently of our practical activities and attitudes. Our job is to conform our attitudes and practices to these normative statuses of superiority and subordination, authority and responsibility, about which we don’t have a say.

This authoritarianism view also manifests in the neoconservative’s frenzied obsession with ‘free-speech’, come what may in terms of social harms, such as in talk of divulging the ‘truth’ on the correlations of skin colour with intelligence (or the decision to split the atom, nuclear winter be damned). Many like issues are framed as though metaphysics and ‘the fact of the matter’ supervene on social practices, and not vice versa. In tapping into these old Platonic assumptions about toughness as opposed to a perceived wimpiness when one is being socially sensitive, and about a disciplined moral crusade for the Truth at all costs that appeals to something overarching, non-human and deep, this advertising slogan “facts don’t care about your feelings” has recently brought a lot of rhetorical wins to the neoconservative movement, often at the cost of marginalised members of society calling for language reform.

The platonic tradition which it borrows from holds that there is a metaphysical “truth”, say, about the nature of gender, which must be uncovered. Never-mind about the social relevance of this “truth” because the goal of enquiry is to discover as many truths as we can—like Super Mario collecting gold coins—and the more truths we collect, the more we will understand how things necessarily are—like fitting pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together! Ontology matters over and above social cooperation all the way.

The challenge for us language reformists then becomes, how can we shift societal focus towards valuing social justice over essentialist and foundationalist beliefs? How can we redefine social justice from being seen as wimpish - as I myself once did - and make essentialism look old fashioned and, at times, sadisitc?

Pragmatism and Cultural Politics

Pragmatism holds that the problem with grasping truth, and indeed the very journey towards it, lies in our inherent predilection for determining the context within which it reveals itself. Whether it's truths of physical, social, psychological, mathematical, or theological nature, they only manifest as 'truths' within contexts we have antecedently constructed. Consequently, we've constructed the truth and, interestingly, only retrospectively invest in it as if it's 'out there', a fundamental aspect of the world.

This is not what is sometimes called ‘global scepticism’. Pragmatist philosophers rebuff scepticism as it insists on a naive belief in the 'out-there'-ness of concepts and categories, only to develop a spectrum for scepticism. This scepticism inherently undercuts the value of self-constructed contexts and, in turn, negates or obscures the potent process of belief investment.

Rather, pragmatists perceive truth as a process of self-construction that requires comprehensive embracement. It's not something we naively indulge in as divinely or universally granted “factoids”, merely to be passively recognised and later described as part of a truth-seeking enterprise. Pragmatism involves claiming responsibility for, and proactively overseeing, the entirety of truth as a process: from context creation and knowledge organisation within that context, to the development of methodologies for determining validity within a given context, to investing in the logical outcome of that knowledge organisation as dictated by the approved methodology.

The classic 'quest for truth' described earlier is an endeavour the pragmatists find fundamentally flawed because it shies away from acknowledging our inherent capacity to construct truth from scratch, and hence fails to enable proactive use of the truth-building process in a way that bridges people with their socio-environmental conditions, cultural knowledge base, and equitable interconnections. Far from being sceptics, they firmly believe philosophy should drive practical changes, reshape societies, economies, and psychologies. However, this pragmatic role of philosophy can only take shape by acknowledging that we are active participants in constructing our shared reality and not that we are, in some way, subordinate to it. We, language users, are thoroughly entwined, through our explicit and subconscious linguistic processes, in all procedures of world-modelling and meaning-making.

Once we acknowledge this, the goal of inquiry then becomes not to ‘represent reality’ but rather to find more useful descriptions from the least useful ones. Not capital T truth, but justification and intersubjective agreement are the elements that are sought after, and these elements are always indexed to specific audiences and not to something called “reality” or “truth”. This anti-representationalist view is a philosophy of hope, grounded in the belief that through social cooperation, the future will be better than the past - in whatever way we happen to define the future. It is egalitarian through and through in that it requires hope in an indeterminate future and faith that deliberate human action can improve human lives.

Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty's notion of "philosophy as cultural politics" is a useful elaboration of these points. Rorty first distinguishes "real" politics from "cultural" politics, though “real” is not used in the metaphysical sense. The former kind of politics is short-term, engaging a practical moral vocabulary (e.g., initiatives like constitutional amendments or passing significant legislation like the Civil Rights Act, or decisions about elections, legislation, and resource distribution), while the latter is long-term, stimulating imaginative discourse about potential utopian futures. “Cultural” politics could involve such matters as language reform on pronoun usages and changing how different racial or sexual groups are described. And it is “long term” in the sense that it aims at such things as reshaping the language used by future generations. While real politics is transparent and routine, cultural politics can potentially transform society by creating new and imaginative - in the sense of ‘imagining what it’s like to be in a group’s shoes’ - descriptions.

This is not to say that real politics is more “important” - on the contrary. Rorty doesn't see these two types of politics - real and cultural - as contradictory, rather, they can coexist, with one addressing immediate, banal and practical concerns and the other aspiring toward yet unrealised utopian hopes.

The importance of narratives and language reform cannot be understated. We don’t think in thoughts (i.e., in intentional mental states) first and then look for signs and symbols to map them on to; to think is to use signs and symbols. To have thoughts, we have to have meanings; we can’t have the belief that cats are mammals without having an understanding what the meanings of those signs are. Those signs and symbols are passed on to us by past and present sign and symbol-using humans, thereby linking us to a linguistic community. And though many signs and symbols will be the same across linguistic communities given that they will be produced by very similar causal pressures, some others will be more contingent and sensitive to the particular linguistic habits of the community, including of the people the community want its members to be like and those who it does not want its members to be like and wish that they distance themselves from. So when the activist asks the ‘transphobe’, for instance, to redescribe the way she refers to others as to refer to them with their preferred pronouns, the activist is not only asking the transphobe to speak differently out of courtesy, but—because our choice of language shapes us—the activist is implicitly asking her to literally alternate who she is and change her moral identity, her community loyalties, commitments and affections.

Rorty also presents a radical perspective on human self-perception and its relation to other animals, rooted in Darwinian evolution. He suggests that recognising ourselves as "slightly-more-complicated-animals"—creatures that differ from other animals only in complexity—liberates us from feeling beholden to nonhuman forces (Reality, Truth, God etc.). By accepting our place as one product of evolution among other products such as the amoeba and the fish, we become open to the possibility that our descendants may exceed us, as we have “surpassed” these other life forms. This hopefully helps us progress to a point where nothing is considered quasi-divine, and everything, including language, conscience, and community, is seen as a product of time and chance.

Though language ability is the primary attribute that distinguishes humans from other animals, seen from another angle, the gap between creatures who can use language and those who can't isn't all that big. Whether through scientific breakthroughs, eloquent prose, or abstract theories, humans, like mollusks, mice, or moose, are merely responding and adapting to the world around us. All human activities, from the most basic to the most complex, are just varying degrees of coping, such that the idea that there's a permanent truth or final answer to life's biggest questions seems juvenile. Instead, life is a continuous process of finding better ways to cope, as our habits and beliefs evolve.

This background makes it easier to understand the pragmatist slogan which Rorty famously articulated, "There is no such thing as the search for truth, as distinct from the search for happiness." This is to say that happiness is not a final state to be achieved, something that can exist eternally for everyone everywhere, once and for all, but rather it is an ongoing process since it is always possible to be happier than we were in the past. And thus pragmatists are concerned with the journey towards continuous improvement of methods to make life better than it was in the past. This outlook aligns with Rorty's sentimental view of moral progress which sees morality not as a set of absolute rules but as a negotiation between conflicting human needs. This view rejects the idea that there is a moment when we stop merely responding to the world and start representing it, and likewise, rejects the idea that there is a point where our interactions with others transcend from mere sentimentality (again, or ‘feelings’) to “morality” or “justice” or “truth”.

Along with other pragmatists, Rorty proposes this post-Darwinian view where there's no absolute division between empirical and non-empirical knowledge, facts and values, feelings and truth, empirical and non-empirical. All forms of inquiry, from nuclear physics to art and ethics, are attempts to enrich our lives and bring us more happiness. And all of these judgments are provisional and susceptible to error. In this context, Rorty promotes the idea of “moral progress” as an expansion of our moral community, embracing more and more diverse people as part of "us." The evolution from Neanderthal communication of grunts and nudges to complex philosophical treatises is as gradual and continuous as the biological evolution from amoebae to anthropoids. Likewise, there's no sharp transition from tribal provincialism to global cosmopolitanism, from specific clan, race, or religious loyalties to universal human rights.

Taken as a whole, pragmatist moral progress is about increasing our sensitivity and response to a broader variety of people and situations which, “we” the moral community, have previously ignored and failed to include as “one of us”. Morality is therefore understood as expanding this circle to include more and more people which were thought of as not us. Pragmatists see moral progress as a shift from a morality of obligation to a morality of love, to increase in feelings and sensitivity to the needs and interests of others. Fortunately, this shift has already taken place and accounts for why today’s younger generations are less likely to harbor prejudices compared to their predecessors. It explains why today’s white males are less likely to hate gays, oppress racial minorities, subordinate women, in comparison to their parents and grandparents. It's not because they have a greater understanding of moral principles or are better at moral calculations, but because they possess a more developed imaginative capacity to empathise with others' suffering. Their moral horizons are broader, and their sense of shared identity is more inclusive.

Addendum: An Historically and Socially Conscious Philosophy

I have argued that we need to stop asking bad questions that assume essentialism and representationalism in matters in which those frameworks are simply unproductive, cruel, and sadistic—such as in our discussions of how to treat transgender people. This means following Wittgenstein in seeing our marks and noises we make as tools and not mediums of representation of the intrinsic nature of reality, or mediums of expression of the intrinsic nature of humanity.

Today’s academic philosophy is still under Plato’s spell. It is still in the habit of dividing cultural practices into ‘natural kinds’ and ‘social kinds’, into the ‘necessary’ and therefore really real, and the ‘contingent’ and therefore merely human. It must stop treating issues such as gender and sex as exercises in conceptual analysis. So, in returning to the discussion in our opening section, philosophy must lead by example in giving up the tantalising search for platonic forms and essences within our cultural practices. It needs to rejoice with its golden boy Wittgenstein that philosophers are interpreters rather than bricklayers of foundations, and that “philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything”.

To do this is to also abandon the ahistoric and non-social way of ‘doing philosophy’, and to say, with Hegel, that philosophy is its own time encapsulated in thought, that philosophers merely summarise current forms of life. For my reading of Hegel is one where, in the end, the ultimate “self-legislating” spirit is irreducibly social, normative, pragmatic—and not representationalist. This more humbling view of philosophy rejoins with Hegel’s famous warning that

When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old . . . The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.

That is to say that early Christians were not reflexive of the fact that Christianity was conceived for the purpose of ameliorating much of the suffering of the time through notions like ‘love is the only law’; it was rather taken to be the discovery of Truth. Likewise, Newton did not reflexively take his theories of Newtonian mechanics as a means towards creating our current leisure through modern technology, he was likewise taken to be discovering capital T truths. And so on for all ‘philosophies’. It is only retrospectively that we can see them as tools of moral, social, pragmatic progress; only the generations who arrive afterwards can, in Richard Rorty’s words,

tell the kind of story of progress which those who are actually making progress usually cannot. We can view these people as tool-makers rather than discoverers because we have a clearer idea of what was shaped by the use of those tools. The product is us – our conscience, our culture, our form of life. Those who made us possible could not clearly describe the ends to which their work was a means. But we can.

The new “shape of life” partly describes itself through the language of the old one (as when Enlightenment liberalism borrowed from Christian foundationalism), and only when this new shape of life “has grown old” where newcomers ‘refute’ it using its own language (as when rationalism and foundationalism are contested using Enlightenment scepticism), that it then properly comes into full shape. But by then it is too late, another new shape of life has been created (e.g. mature post-enlightenment liberalism).

In much the same way, the advocacy for transgender rights initially found itself expressing its goals through the established language of biological essentialism, a kind of mind-body dualism in which the issue was a “female/male brain” in a “male/female body”. They engaged with the language that was available to them at the time, and viewed figured that they were expressing some intrinsic nature of humanity. But that initial language of biological essentialism is in the process of “grown old” refuted using its own terms. It is only now that we can look back on these changes and see them not as the unfolding of pre-existing truths, but as tool-making – as the development of ideas, languages, and discourses that facilitate moral, social, and pragmatic progress. The evolution of transgender advocacy - as with all parts of our culture - is thus not as a move from "falsehood" to "truth," but as an ongoing, iterative process that serves to shape our form of life.

There are myriad ways of ‘doing philosophy’ that isn’t hackwork, ways that work towards creating a new “shape of life”. Much of the philosophy I’ve critically reflected on in this essay has been trying to either reach out from under our discursive practices into something transcendental, or has invented an internal language game among practitioners that has no public use, or has maintained reverence to old questions posed by fifth-century Athenians living in fifth-century Athens, for other fifth-century Athenians.

Some of these questions strike me as aesthetic and fun to engage in and do not need justification for posing (e.g., ‘what is free will’ or ‘how do we know what we know?’), just as much as no one asks for a justification of “doing art”. Sometimes I come across beautifully constructed arguments on qualia or on free will or on modal realism etc., and although I often dislike that they retain and conceal epistemological foundations and the old platonic metaphysical dualisms of mind/body, subject/object, fact/value, absolute/relative, appearance/reality, discovered/invented—which I think we are better off abjuring lest it stretch to our general mode of thought—they are nevertheless harmless if we acknowledge them as nothing less than fun little riddles which Wittgenstein and Co. offered us a therapeutical escape away from.

But when they do in fact stretch into our general mode of thought and we start looking for essences in words to justify retaining old language games on the basis that they ‘correspond to Reality’ even when they cause unnecessary suffering to thousands of people, then we need to take a step back, re-evaluate, and start asking socially conscious meta-philosophical questions, such as ‘what is the goal of philosophy?’. I think, at this time, these meta-philosophical questions should be proffered much more frequently.

Philosophers can, and regularly do, go further posing riddles and retaining old language-games. They do so by proposing new ways of talking about current forms of life, demonstrating the possibility of imagining alternative ones, showing us that what we have now is just one option among many other possible options, and defamiliarising us with the present in hopes of a better future. Specifically, the kind of philosophy I am talking about is one that is irreducibly social and historically conscious, the type of philosophy that, as one example, the late-Foucault was nested in.