Philosophy After Gaza

 

Doing Philosophy After Gaza

Farid Saberi

 

History is going through one of its darkest hours. Since Oct 2023, a defenseless population in Gaza has been the victim of an ongoing assault that many world-renowned genocide scholars have described as a genocide. The storm of misinformation and propaganda has been ruthless; however, the facts are quite straightforward. There is an occupying apartheid regime backed by Western countries that freely commits these acts of war crimes and genocide. Ironically, the official ideologues of the West have found it increasingly challenging to sell the old picture of the civilized and democratic West against the barbaric and uncivilized Arabs or the global south in general. This was yet another sign of the failure of the capitalist democracy where the apathetic and marginalized public could not even raise the question of whether they should vote or effectively debate their participation in this supreme war crime. It was not up to the public to think about these sorts of staff. The political establishment and its procedures are run by the game of coalition of statemen, capitalist pressure groups, and military-industrial agents.

1- A well-designed system without the designer: Capitalist democracy

The political apathy and cynicism are just too obvious to shock anyone. The system has carefully evolved through decades of capitalist experimentation and trial and error to be most resilient to outsiders, that is, to the public mind and interests of the working poor and the exploited classes. Western capitalist democracy is not an insecurely supervised and enforced tyrannical system of elite disregard for the opinion of the people. Rather, it is an effective evolved system of legal and political procedures that stops opposing views from getting a chance. The metaphor of evolution is a meaningful one. Natural selection as one of the main mechanisms in evolution does not have that much power over the genetic and phenotypic variation in a population. However, it can select some fit types of variations and gradually root out others or make them conform to the selected traits. Similarly, capitalist tyranny does not have to feel insecure about the diversity of views and interests like underdeveloped totalitarian systems. Instead, it can make sure that only those people and ideas will be effective that are filtered through the procedures, that is, the right elite school education, the right clubs, the right jobs, the right lobbyist, the right candidate, and funding support and the right party system. In fact, most biologists are well aware that selection does not happen only in Darwinian populations. Under an extended notion of selection, (what has been called “Sample Selection”), we can see that selection happens at two levels in political life. Firstly, among the variety of political institutions, figures, parties, and practices, those have been selected and enforced that served the stability of the capitalist society and kept the exploited in their place. Secondly, these evolved political systems act like a filter and only select those views or people to be effective and influential that conform to the rule, that is, capitalists should be kept as the ruling class at any price. This is a well-designed system without a master designer. It is not hypocritical mainly because of the psychological dispositions of its members. Instead, it is institutionally hypocritical. It has been cumulatively selected to have inside and outside world. Elite Insiders have an interest in the game and identify with it. Outsiders are kept silent and subordinated by keeping up the glittering political rituals, American and Canadian dreams, and slogans.

2- Philosophy in the face of desperation

Now, it is time to bring in philosophy. The worst atrocities in the history of the world, that is, massacring children and civilians (tolls are around 250 thousand till now) are happening and we are left with desperation. Those countries who are participating in it and are whitewashing it suffer from capitalist democracy and marginalized populations and those who are critical of it are either powerless to intervene or themselves are tyrannical and invested in their elite interests. As Chomsky has said Palestinians are left as rightless people. How can philosophy deal with this desperate situation? To make sense of this question some caveats are in order. By no means, do I intend to give a distinctive status to philosophy in asking this question. It is not meant to imply that only philosophers and people familiar with philosophy are in a place to address questions like this. Genocide is a burden on the human conscience and everyone is in a place to face up to this question. What should one do in such desperate situations? The question normally involves some level of self-reflection, there are things that one needs to stop doing or do differently to face up to the challenge of overcoming this desperate situation.

However, it is still a well-informed question to ask how should "doing philosophy" differ after Gaza? Even though a well-informed question, there is no straightforward general answer to it like most complex moral questions. People in different places with wildly different backgrounds are doing philosophy. It is only up to them and the particularities of their situations to answer this question for themselves. Still, some general points are worth making:

1.         Philosophy should not be considered a uniform historical tradition or a coherent category. There is no inherent timeless logic that makes doing philosophy similar in all historical and philosophical contexts. Even in the case of our sciences, the coherent logic that makes doing science a uniform practice has been very rare. Scientists for most of history have rarely agreed on what are the fundamental or right questions in a specific science and what are the right ways to answer them. It is only in some of our hard sciences like physics and chemistry that in the last two centuries relative coherency has been achieved. Still, in some of our sciences like psychology, sociology, and economics, people can reasonably disagree on what are the right questions to ask and what are the right ways to answer them. Thomas Kuhn's heuristics to study the history of science was in fact very illuminating (Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)). The idea of the chaotic flux of pre-paradigmatic competition and thin coherence and relative stability of scientific paradigms before suddenly being replaced by the next paradigm are the main patterns governing this history. As for philosophy, the diversity and divergence have been much more. What are well-informed philosophical questions, how do they differ from scientific and religious questions and how should one address them are radically different. Institutional settings under which philosophers have been trained and worked have also been radically different. Therefore, the question of "philosophy after Gaza: should always be addressed as if it is a domain-specific question. Here, I focus on doing philosophy after Gaza in the Anglo-American academic philosophy. That is, people who get paid to be philosophers of these societies.

2.         At least since Wilfred Sellars, philosophy has been understood in relation to what he has called a "synoptic vision." On the one hand, we have the manifest image of the world in which some commonsense concepts like free will, intention, human value, and meaning of life make sense, and on the other hand, we have the "scientific image of the man and the world" in which these commonsense concepts are not easily translatable. Philosophers have to keep the manifest image and reform it the the face of the scientific image. (Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man (1962)).

3.         Whether one should agree with this metaphilosophical picture or not (I do not), it is true that most contemporary philosophers in the contemporary Anglo-American academic world have been doing philosophy along these lines, that is, in the fault line of the two divergent images. One dominant philosophical trend (among others) has been to save the manifest image of man and the world. For example, compatibilists have been arguing for decades now that free will is consistent with the determined world described by our sciences.

4.         Let us assume for a second that philosophers have achieved Sellars's wet dream. They have figured it all out. They have articulated and argued for the validity of all the main concepts in the manifest image. Have they made human life meaningful and worthwhile? Will the public run to the philosophy departments to celebrate well-paid philosophers for their great achievements? Will they thank philosophers for saving them from the dangers of the domination of "the scientific image" and nihilism without updating the "manifest image"? Obviously not. What deforms the public's sense of orientation and their idea of a meaningful life has never mainly been the metaphysical worries of analytical philosophers. The daily exploitation and being left alone by alienated society for vulnerable families, neighborhoods and unemployment defies people's sense of orientation more than any metaphysical obsession. What about a synoptic vision between these two images: the minimal expectation of human life in a free and equal society the real situation of alienation, wage slavery, and the ever-present threat of unemployment. Philosophy has to make sense of the contradiction between what we expect to be a fair and meaningful life and how we actually live our lives. Some political philosophers have tried to address this question conceptually. Some others have argued that this new synaptic vision will take us to the limits of mainstream philosophy. This is where interpreting the world in different ways stops. This is where one thinks about ways to change the world. Marxian metaphilosophy in his 11th Feuerbach Theses, in this sense, lies on the conceptual limits of the dominant philosophical tradition. It encourages philosophers to acknowledge that there is no contradiction between the manifest and the scientific image (or if there is, it is not urgent for the meaningfulness of living life). Under this view, philosophers should try to save the meaningfulness of the manifest image against the social threats that deform it, that is, daily alienating life under modern capitalism. This saving involves fighting these elements and changing them. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways, the point, however, is to change it."

5.         Alongside the daily deformations of the aspects of meaningfulness of human life (friendships, love, justice, political participation, and artistic creativity) under exploitative and profit-centered capitalism, there are specific historical traumatic events that defy our sense of orientation in personal and social life much more radically. Genocide is one of these cases. Philosophy aimed at saving the meaningfulness of human life has to face up to the challenge. How does social life with its "manifest image" concepts like justice and rational coexistence make sense in the face of a deforming element like genocide?

6.         My claim is that Genocide is not an external question for philosophy. It could be understood as central philosophical questions (like free will) if one understands philosophy to be primarily geared toward saving the meaningfulness of human life.

7.         One of the pillars of the meaningfulness of human life is the promise of universality and reason, that is, as a species we can live together, bond, and flourish because we can figure out our differences and solve our disagreements. Genocide is undermining the very foundation of this promise. If genocide is inevitable, then homo sapiens is this pitiful species that cannot reason its way out of extinction like all other natural species. If we are such a miserable species, then what does it mean to be just? To love? to be a good friend? or a good wife? or a good mother? If we are deprived of our basic concepts of human language like justice, freedom, and beauty if we should give up on basic promises of reason, then we might as well be consistent and follow this logic to its conclusion. It is not love and reason but power and sex that regulate one's relationship with the other. We are not a human population anymore, we are a Darwinian population driven by differential fitness, reproductive success, and natural selection. It is an obvious fact, that, one cannot talk about justice and love in a merely Darwinian population.

8.         Noam Chomsky starts his famous Hegemony and Survival (2003) by quoting Ernst Mayr's ideas of the average life span of species. There have been roughly 50 billion species on Earth. However, roughly 10 million extant species are still around. The ratio is 0.02 percent. Very humbling. Mayr estimates that the average life expectancy of species must be 100 thousand years. As a general pattern, this is how much they get before they go extinct. Homo sapiens, as we know it, dates back to 100 thousand years ago. The question arises: are we at the time to face the doomed extinction of our species? In other words, are reason and promises of rationality (what Mayr calls "adaptive value of higher intelligence and civilization")  just another evolved biological trait that cannot override the verdict of regular patterns of the cycles of extinction? Are we overestimating the "adaptive value of higher intelligence" in the success of a species? Chomsky thinks that the best we can hope for is never to find a definite answer to this question. The reason for his approach is quite obvious. He has a very modest view of our sciences. We cannot never be sure about how intelligible our world is and we can only try to make our sciences more intelligible and unified. The answers our sciences give can never be definitive. If we say that promises of reason are not false and we will not run our species extinct, our answer is not definitive. The only way we can definitively know is to experience extinction in practice. To show in practice that we are not an exception to this general evolutionary pattern of life on earth.

 

9.         Chomsky has mentioned that he has been dealing with two basic questions his whole life. Firstly, the Plato's question and then the Orwell's question. Namely, how we could know so much with little stimuli (like the growth of knowledge of the language with a poverty of stimuli), and how could know so little and be deceived in the face of a system of oppression and thought control? Now, one could argue that Chomsky's question about survival or extinction could be considered as much of a radical and general philosophical question as the other two. This question is not only philosophical in nature but also central to doing philosophy after Gaza.

10.       Let us formulate what I call "Chomsky's question" in the following way: The aim of philosophy is to make sense of human life and concepts that make it meaningful including promises of reason like just and peaceful coexistence in our species. Genocide deforms and defies this meaningfulness. Genocide pushes philosophy to the real doubt: what if promises of rationality, agency, and concepts of the manifest image are false? What if we overestimated the adaptive value of higher intelligence? What if we are really just members of the Darwinian population with lofty illusions and not the human population? What if it is delusional to talk about human love, flourishment, and friendship as if it matters?

11.       Philosophers have tried so hard to show that free will, human love, intention, and other values are not illusions. They have devised philosophical arguments to show that we are not merely members of Darwinian populations but something beyond that. All these arguments and intellectual attempts are now in danger of falling apart. Not by counterarguments of skeptics but mainly by American Lockheed Martin bombs and jet fighters sent to Israel to facilitate the ongoing genocide. Genocide is the most direct symptom we have that shows our pitiful species is running toward its extinction and human rationality is overrated. It is ironic that it is real bombs and not skeptic doubts and abstract philosophical thought experiments that are threatening philosophical argumentation more than anything in our age. No serious philosopher can go without noticing this threat. Stakes are much higher today than the age of Marx. To update his 11th thesis: "Philosophers have only interpreted the world (tried to show we are more than a Darwinian population) in different ways, the point however is that their interpretation is getting disproven in practice by the threat of extinction and genocide. The point is not only to change our world, it is also the save it from going extinct."

This is the only way I can make sense of doing philosophy after Gaza. This is how I think we should do philosophy differently. By starting to interpret the world in a way that directly helps us to save and change the world. Doing philosophy as just "interpreting the world in different ways" is not only pointless (as Marx put it) but also dangerous. Philosophy is one of the few tools that we have left to uphold the values of human survival and reason against the forces of capital and capitalist states.