The dominant forms of contemporary Anglo-American ‘analytical’ philosophy tend to take their orientation from the success of the modern natural sciences in generating theories which enable the prediction and control of events in the physical universe. The dilemma for philosophy in the face of this success has been to establish a role which takes appropriate account of the power of the sciences while justifying philosophy’s own right to existence. The extreme response to this dilemma is suggested by Martin Heidegger, who, in his late work, especially the essay ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ (1969), claims that the natural sciences have actually become what philosophy sought to be, by explaining the nature of what there is. This means philosophy has come to a certain kind of ‘end’. As a successor to philosophy Heidegger calls for ‘thinking’, which is concerned with ‘unconcealment’; the fact that the world comes to make sense at all, before it can become the object of true theoretical and other judgements. Such sense he associates with the ways in which major art changes how we relate to the world.
Views like this have been largely ignored in mainstream analytical philosophy, where the focus on epistemology and the revival of a metaphysics concerned with ‘what fundamental kinds of things there are and what properties and relations they have’ (Timothy Williamson) rarely involves reflection on just how unsuccessful the attempt to establish philosophical foundations for the scientific knowledge which determines the nature of our world has been. Agreement in epistemology and metaphysics seems only to be local and pretty short-lived, unlike agreement on many of the core scientific theories that underlie modern technology.
How should one respond to this situation? It is not that the history of epistemology is just to be seen as a history of error: it has real effects on how the world is understood and on how people act in and respond to the world. Descartes’ dualistic conception of a separation between mind and the material world still, for example, influences social practices and theories in many domains. The history of epistemology therefore should be seen in the perspective of how sense is made of the world, in which that sense changes with history. This is one reason why art takes on a greater significance in the sort of philosophy that concerns me than does reflection on what makes scientific theories true, or the construction of theories of ethics, metaphysics, and the like.
It is not that such construction of theories is pointless: it should, though, also include meta-reflection on what significance the claims it results in actually have. What is at issue in paying more philosophical attention to art is exemplified by the fact that the history of modern music – this is particularly manifest in the rapid development of jazz – can be seen in terms of the ways in which notes and sounds which made no sense to one era, which were just ‘wrong’ for that era, come to be ‘right’ for a subsequent era. Something analogous can be observed in all the arts, where, by being put into new forms and new contexts, previously forbidden or senseless material, and modes of expression and articulation, become the norms for new developments in the arts which help frame how the world comes to be understood.
Issue 46, 28th February 2016
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