Last week's three entries had a common theme: the liberation of the mind, or "bodymind," which has always been the spirit moving this newsletter.
The first entry was on midwits, urging intellectual humility.
The second entry was on intellectual servitude, spurring intellectual courage.
The third entry was on psyops, advocating intellectual sovereignty.
Overtrusting one's intelligence, other's intelligence (or intelligence itself), and our fallible and manipulable minds only leads to foolishness. The main two biases presented in those entries are toward intelligence and the mind. I'll add a third bias, one related to truth. I'm not referring to just any truth, but a specific kind: the “correspondence theory of truth,” a philosophical answer to the question, “What is truth?”
The theory is fairly intuitive; it asserts that the truth or falsity of truth claims is determined by how accurately they correspond to reality. There are other theories of truth, such as the coherence theory, consensus theory, epistemic theory, pluralist theory, pragmatic theory, deflationary theory, and redundancy theory. A survey conducted among contemporary academic philosophers indicated that the correspondence theory is the most popular one, and I sense the same holds for public intellectuals.
I don't see the theory itself as problematic. However, it's accompanied by an underlying, sometimes unacknowledged “living premise” that many contemporary philosophers and public intellectuals adhere to, subsequently exerting influence over those who demonstrate intellectual servitude to them. The premise can be phrased like this: public thinking, theorizing, and philosophizing must always be instrumentalized toward truth-seeking.
This premise is widespread, and I sense it underneath the words of people who write about ideas, fancying themselves as some kind of truth-loving intellectual. Indeed, this assumption only sometimes aligns with their true motivations, which often revolve around ego and status. However, it is conveyed nonetheless as an existential given of what intellectual writing is expected to aim toward.
I see this premise resulting in the following cultural algorithm:
With the correspondence theory serving as the definition of truth, the sciences are now deemed to be the domain where reality is best accurately described. Academic philosophers are no longer in the business of determining what is true but are now intellectual housekeepers, helping truth-seekers clean up their reasoning.1
With the living premise influencing many philosophers and public intellectuals, their truth-seeking must always reference scientific expertise.
An expert class emerges, along with (corruptible) systems that determine what expert consensus is. This emergence results in two broad intellectual domains: “institutional knowledge,” where truth claims are deemed validated by expert consensus, and what political scientist Michael Barkun calls “stigmatized knowledge,” any truth claim that falls outside of that validation.
Some would call this cultural algorithm “scientism,” the elevation of science as a religion. The problem with this algorithm is that it promotes midwittery and intellectual servitude en masse, leaving the populace vulnerable to psyops through being shamed for having stigmatized knowledge. In John 8:32, the famous line is “The truth will set you free.” I agree with this, but not when one understands the truth only through the correspondence theory, with the living premise driving many minds. In this case, the truth will put one in prison, a prison of other minds who deem themselves arbitrators of what reality is.
The highest leverage move in overcoming this cultural algorithm is to dislodge the living premise from one's body. Overall, I find the premise unconvincing. Sometimes, perhaps many times, those who enjoy having an intellectual life can have their words oriented toward something other than truth-seeking. Personally, that something is beauty. I am not pressuring myself to write beautiful words, especially in the superficial understanding of the word. Rather, I want the fingers tapping on this keyboard to move toward beauty in the transcendental sense, the holy attractor that puts me into a state where time does not exist, and where I am always already whole.
Now, I have a genuine affinity for the truth. My writing style revolves around honoring it because honoring it is beautiful. I also think science and scientific inquiry is wonderful and wonder-inducing. It is correct thinking to engage in the appropriate epistemic methodologies to determine truth, as having a truth orientation within certain life domains is critical. I would not want a poet to be my doctor, diagnosing me with a haiku, or a painter to teach me biology by showing paintings of animals.2
However, one will need appropriate epistemic outsourcing methodologies, which practically nobody has, besides the unconscious knee-jerk trust or distrust toward experts, which the “Covid Moment” perfectly put on display for anyone with enough meta-sense to see.3 Also, some subjects fall outside the domain of scientific expertise, such as the perennial problems of philosophy, all the mysteries that have yet to be revealed by scientific research, and the ones that may never be.
Call it a form of intellectual laziness, but I am not going to engage in a literature review to determine what the scientific consensus thinks before writing something here. Instead, I will trust “the daemon,” punching out words that deeply feel true, sensefully theorizing toward beauty. Maybe I'll hit upon what is true by doing this, and maybe I will not. Truth-seeking is not why I am writing here. Besides, I don't possess the arrogance to assume my theorizing is always accurate.
This aesthetic cartography allows the attractor of beauty to guide one's words, having the courage to create beautiful maps of reality and be wrong about them, with an intellectual humility that invites the truth-seekers to correct them if needed. This epistemic position is partly inspired by the post-rationalist motto: “It is better to be interesting and wrong than it is to be right and boring.”
Biasing one’s theorizing for interestingness, or in this case beauty, will open up more people to risk writing at their edge, allowing a deep guarding of premises, freeing their minds from the slavish adherence to all the failure modes of thinking mentioned in the previous three entries.
I am not suggesting that one should always write like this or that everyone should write like this, but I believe that an aesthetic cartography that allows beauty to unfold should be an option for those called to become less foolish.
For a complementary read that further sketches out this argument, I recommend checking out my guide on how to create “theory sketches”:
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An good recent expression of this position is from an interview in
: “I think of philosophy as something like reasoning in the pursuit of truth, but I don’t think that philosophy has the resources to determine what is true.”Actually, maybe I would.
Refer to “The Source Wars” entry for a more extensive exploration of this premise.