In a single day I will traverse the intellectual expanse of philosophy from transcendental idealism to a skeptical naturalism, to a radical empiricism, all in a quest for some intellectual consistency, some philosophic understanding of that which gives rise to our world. It is indeed a contemplation of mystery, of unfalsifiable metaphysics, of the philosophy of science and the question of truth. Is truth relative, subjective? Are constructions and mental models actively creating the reality I perceive, or can I rely on my perception and trust the faculties I was indeed born with, that they are grasping a reality which is really there, exactly as I perceive it? Enter issues of reductionism, enter daily life, enter the flood of podcasts, articles, Wikipedia pages, Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and all the different levels of intellectual gallivanting that occur throughout the landscape of this particular moment and what you end up with is less of a grip on anything, less sure of any theory on truth, less assured of much at all.
Ideology, Morten Tolboll writes, is a psychic disease, of which critical thinking is not involved. I would disagree, ideology is a lifeboat which people cling to – to rescue themselves from confusion. We live in an age of people trying to find out what age we live in, that is, we live in an age of “we live in the age of (blank)” a never ending groping of ourselves and our own intellect, of our own behaviors and our own needs, wants, desires, an age of confusion. If we are sick with any disease, it is not ideology, it is the disease of commodified introspection, the disease which wants to submit ourselves to understanding ourselves through punditry and intellectual excess. What it produces is not truth or understanding, what it produces is a factory of superfluous knowledge production, a machining of intellectual products which are consumed for the sensation of intellect, but care little about much else. Its consequences are not a more free and interesting society full of liberated individuals, but, as I wrote in “the dizziness of freedom”, confusion, mass confusion. We bounce around from task to task, one day fantasizing of being this, another day we will become that, today we read this, another day we’ve read that, little do we realize the dozens of psycho-spirit-science sentiments we read in mass media are contradictory, next thing you know we hold a variety of truths in our hands and struggle to expound on a single one. A quest for the truth is less and less a priority for us collectively than it is for us to create truth in an individual life. Indeed, we either create some inconsistent and contradictory syncretism of truth, or we adhere to an already defined ideology. But truth of any kind is harder to come by in an age of mass confusion.
In this sense then, truth is neither the construction of our inner models of thought, nor is it the concrete destination which we may comb the landscape to discover, it is more like the garden whose seeds we have indeed sewn, but not created for ourselves, it is not reducible, but expanding, and enveloping. The decay of this garden is not due to the fragmentation of the truth which it represents, but the fragmentation of the gardener who must tend to it. The privatization of life, the atomization and universalization of the individual, who becomes master to his or her own private domain, expedited by the internet, has lost means and reason to tend to a collective garden which is largely irrelevant to their own private needs. The factory production of intellect is representative of this privatization, the cultivation of the individual and their intellect becomes the principle goal rather than a collective tending to truth. As for science, the increased specialization and silos of knowledge which exist in that realm are increasingly less obvious to the layman, meaning the gulf between those apprehending the physical universe and those who must resign themselves to the consumer universe is widening, making the former evermore irrelevant unless it creates a product for consumption. That being said, the decay of our garden is inevitable, any attempt to rescue it would most likely be totalitarian.
As time goes on it gets harder and harder to defend our old conception of truth, of static truth, against the disorientation of relativism and subjectivism. When a system becomes fragmented and complex, it becomes harder to derive conclusions. The privatization of the individual has led to this exact fragmentation, the garden is indeed in full disrepair. Is the truth relative? It seems to be ever more so, as the collective garden is abandoned for many disconnected discreet ones. Was the truth always relative? Perhaps not. What is more inconsistent than; that the truth can be both concrete and relative at the same time? The principle of non contradiction in the real world of human affairs is effectively null. Contradiction is everywhere, consistency is a story of a lost treasure at the bottom of the sea, we will dive again and again, expending all the effort of our lives in search for it, for a taste, for the sensation it gives us, the tickling of our higher faculties, for no other reason than that it feels good. Inconsistency is banal, and it does nothing, in a world predicated upon the triumph of the private individual, to rescue the individual from their nothingness, that can only be done by gripping something.
gregorykelsh 