I’ve just got back from How The Light Gets In, “the world’s largest philosophy and music festival”. It has grown enormously since its first outing in 2009 and has come back twice as big as it was in 2016 after taking a year off to freshen itself up. In September it’s launching its first London weekend and I very much recommend it.
I took part in several panel discussion, one of which was on the “New Enlightenment”. This invited the question: what’s wrong with the first one? It has become fashionable to dismiss Enlightenment ideals as naive and outdated. Our discussion brief suggested that the “dream of objective knowledge” was over, we cannot “rely on reason alone” and that “truth is an impossible goal”.
One thing I have learned from coming to virtually every iteration of How The Light Gets In is to ignore such all-too common absurd and badly-framed blurbs. The event works despite, not because of, attempts by keen young producers to tightly frame the discussions. Put interesting people together with a good chair, give them an interesting topic and a few debating points, and usually it takes off.
My scepticism about planning was further vindicated by the fact that two out of the four speakers due to take part in our debate couldn’t make it and the best participant, Amie Thomasson, was drafted in at half an hour’s notice. Amie and I were singing pretty much from the same hymn sheet, the key of which was the idea that the best Enlightenment never had a simplistic and exaggerated belief in the power of reason. Kant, for instance, believed the world as it is in itself is completely unknowable. So much for the hubris of human reason.
My own philosophical hero, David Hume, was even more sceptical. He attacked the rationalism of Descartes, completely rejecting the idea that reason alone can tell us anything about how the world works. Even our knowledge of cause and effect, upon which our entire understanding of the physical world depends, is not established by reason or even observation. Hume was as sceptical about the power of reason as anyone. And yet he believed that we ought to think as clearly as possible, and proportion our beliefs to the evidence.
Without wanting to put words into her mouth, I think Amie and I were both arguing that of course an absolute “Archimedean” objectivity is impossible; of course no one can know the absolute, final truth; of course reason is an imperfect and limited tool. But we can and should seek to be more objective, to get closer to truth, to be as reasonable as possible. That is the true spirit of the Enlightenment and it is as valuable today as ever.
Our third interlocutor, festival founder and “post-realist” philosopher Hilary Lawson, would rather jettison all talk of objectivity and truth, believing that their function is to close down debate and create an illusion that we have the one correct way of seeing.
What was interesting about the debate is that I have seen similar ones in the past and they often descend into a somewhat polarised brouhaha. This time, however, we managed to find much we agreed on, in particular the need to argue our positions and attend to the evidence.
I think this was largely down to the personalities involved. But after the debate Hilary wondered aloud to us whether the surprising degree of agreement also said something about the intellectual climate. We didn’t have a chance to discuss it further but I think he was onto something.
Not so long ago, we were deep in the first “truth wars”, which preceded the current post-truth skirmishes. Academics and intellectuals were divided between defenders of notions such as truth and objectivity, and “deniers”, often labelled as “post-modernists” but actually much more diverse. This war had many colourful battles, most notably Alan Sokal’s hoax in which the physicist parodied the nonsensical and scientifically illiterate writings of some in Science and Technology Studies.
More recently, however, I think there is an increasing realisation that what unites both sides in this dispute is more important than what divides them. Despite their often divisive rhetoric, all were always committed to settling debates by argument and by evidence. They shared a belief in the practice of reason even as some tried to debunk the concept of it.
Today, as we see many trying to advance their causes with no attempt to meet the demands of reason or evidence at all, those who have been feuding can see that they share a much greater common enemy. Some (notably Bruno Latour) have even had the honesty to admit that their own attacks on the concept of truth have inadvertently helped the cause of climate change sceptics and populist politicians who promise what they can never deliver on the basis of claims that were never true.
If there is such a mood of detente, I hope it continues and deepens. Intellectually, it is often important to focus on what are in some ways small differences in order to delve deeper and sharpen our understanding. But to sustain a culture in which intellectual enquiry is valued and supported, people on all sides of every debate have to stand together to defend the shared intellectual values that make it possible.
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