On scientific and political thinking

Someone who writes only to prove their claim is thinking like a lawyer or sophist (the original Sophists were lawyers) and not a scientist or thinker. You can certainly start with a hypothesis, and even set out to demonstrate it, but thought is not productive when it is only justification. Or if ideas are first 'produced' and then distributed for consumption. I find it interesting that a dominant model of academic essay writing in America is rhetorical, as in the University of Chicago's Little Red Schoolhouse method. The idea there is that the essayist aims to prove something to the reader, but the reader is liable to doubt every claim asserted either out of the blue or in support of a higher-level claim, every bit of observational evidence or argumentative warrant backing a claim of justified inference. The Master knows, or thinks he does, and the Hysterical subjected pupil says I doubt it, but is willing to be conquered in the end, and wants to be. And that's the game they play (the winner gets his claim made public, and if he's a scientific worker, he may get a promotion, the team leader may take up the idea, or it may even get patented and sold; and the student gets a grade that symbolizes such ends for future employers or pedagogues training future workers for them). This is the modern English scholarly essay model, unlike the literary essay whose founder is Montaigne. The French model is the 'dissertation' (a kind of essay, not the American doctoral thesis), in which the project is to think. One tries to make the question one starts with as precise as possible, then to approach thinking about it as systematically as possible, and as soon as a position seems to be demonstrated and sure, it is questioned. The role of doubt is not to demand that the writer as master proves that his thinking walks the talk, and fills it with beef, but to question. The role of questioning is not to demand a demonstration that manifests truth and so commands allegiance, and perhaps more dutiful work, or warrants a sale. It is to continue the inquiry. Curiosity is not a demand for true speech or an account to be rendered, as a witness in a law court or a suspect in a police investigation may be asked to do. It is a desire not to understand more of the true story about the thing so much as to perfect the thinking. It is not polemical, and the writer and reader are not in a war-like game. It is to find the best way of thinking about the matter at hand in a process that is essentially open, not closed on a referent to be revealed or represented. The idea of a right answer is impossible because the meaning of things (or of Being, of what is or is there considered as it is or appears or is given) is not a thing that is definite and can be simply found. It is not a search for a thing. It is an attempt to think about matters at hand in the best way. That normally entails complexity, not simplicity, and lends itself to a language built more on syntactic relationships, those between phrases being quasi-logical or inferential, than on representational relations between names and things they represent.

What is given prior to thinking about it is always an 'incoherent multiplicity' (Badiou). They are grasped contextually in what can be best thought of as situations. Situations are modeled as problems to be understood. Practical 'problems' to be solved are a sub-model of this mode of inquiry that starts with a need or demand for a particular object or end; such are business problems which use science as technology, which is always a means to a pre-given end, rather than an inquiry. Science models situations, saying how they can be pictured or thought. Mathematics is the science of such models and how ones are derived from others by correct patterns of inference and development of the formal elements of the models.

The dominant American model of science, held particularly by non-scientists, is that it is a machinery or useful technology for the discovery of facts (not the invention of models for representing or configuring them). Since this subordinates theories to things, this empiricism is anti-political, because 'facts' representing 'things' are, if they exist, incontestable. This gives the sovereign authority in place the means to rule, to manage things and people, hoping thereby that things will get done, and go well and not badly with the persons involved as a consequence. That is the task of governance, which is equally one of government agencies and business enterprises. They produce wealth through capital's use of labor.

American empiricism and pragmatism are therefore 'bourgeois', but the alternative is not a differently owned and managed system of technological production. As to what the alternative really looks like, in the social world, we don't exactly know, though we know a lot about past errors, and the forms they took in the sciences of thinking. All science is a way of thinking about Being, normally restricted to some domain of things. The world of ideas at its best is well in advance of social forms and arrangements. That is probably hopeful. But much of American and English society are based on outdated styles of thought. Our intellectual world in the humanities has been borrowing from European intellectual production, mostly French, for decades now. The investment has been mainly in technology for business and war, and science as subordinate to it, and the arts secondarily. The thinking that drives criticism in the arts is marginalized in America. It became hugely popular, but it remained a kind of mandatory extracurricular work or unpaid labor requirement for professionals in the humanities, and those in the social sciences with ambitions that were political and not just professional, as many professionals want to improve the world and not just have a nice life. In recent times, American academics have been mostly proletarianized, and the right wing and the business world have both been moving to defund the humanities in terms of more creative work, which they might also consider political suspect (the deviance of creative workers who are experimental or avant-garde, what could it be but moral degeneracy weakening the national fiber, or outright treason in behalf of a foreign conspiracy by an enemy dynastic, national, or business force?). Intellectual culture in America is weak and the dominant mentality is tied to antiquated models, which seek authority, power, or simply money, perhaps out of need and the sad conviction of men and women, who live lives of quiet desperation in service to the Man, that 'there is no alternative'. Liberals and left-liberals often fight against real enemies on behalf of dubious friends or causes, and, lacking a stronger thinking, wind up mirroring mimetically what they oppose. For example, liberals who oppose telling school kids to believe that the truth is what the church, government, or other bosses say it is, because you most obey, by merely contesting the particular content this form of thinking is given by the right: as in the Bible is said to tell us the true theory of nature, but that's not true, the true Book with the True Theory is written by 'Science', a different Name of God. Or we get the well-justified wish to avoid another Trump administration at all costs, combined with belief in a leader like Biden. I have to admit I don't even know what to do about that; like many voters, I wish it were possible to just vote against the candidate I most dislike, and have that vote counted as much in the tally as a vote 'for' some other. Trump says loud and clear that he is a fascist; Biden that he is opposed to that; the government may still harass dissidents and conduct murderous wars, and in the one case, the situation will be even worse. I leave my reader with this claim: Philosophy is political! Not by just studying and writing it, but by doing that and.... and doing things that are even more uncertain, risky, and error-prone than the work of science, art, and philosophy as a process of laboring and not just producing a product to be exchanged and bought and put on your shelf to look at. Philosophy/science/art and a real politics that aims to change the world are part of the same logic. And especially in America, most people are clueless about both, thanks to an establishment determined to keep it that way. What will change this is probably not an event to be hoped for or a single action to be taken, but a long, continuing process on a hard road. (Which is why the famous 'reform/revolution' opposition is no longer so relevant. What matters in politics and inquiry is more like the positions of work vs. capital. What is scientific work? It may think in ways that are not what you think.

I joined the DSA partly because it is a 'progressive' organization which has both an electoral and 'extra-parliamentary' strategy, the latter comprising organizing and all kinds of things, which can include the work of scientists, artists, critics, and other professionals. This starts with refusing the normal professional thinking that is merely obedient to the demands of the 'profession', 'career', job, or boss.