Why Philosophers Can Just Make Shit Up And It’s Fine: A Defense of Philosophical Autonomy

Philosophy can be autonomous, totally distinct from the hard sciences and other areas of research, and there is no good reason why it shouldn’t be. The importance of the autonomy of philosophy is hardly damaged by Analytic claims about philosophy’s necessary relevance to science. That is, unless their use of “science” describes a particular “aggregation” of established work, or worse yet, a discipline itself, however broad. But if the criterion of scientific relevance refers only to the imperative that philosophy not be unscientific, that it not present claims directly at odds with what is known about the structure and components of reality, it is perfectly permissible for philosophy to deal in conceptual spheres that do not appear within science—and even permissible for philosophy to deal in constructs of its own making from top to bottom. 

What philosophy often does is try to describe what is experientially ineffable, from an ordinary subject’s point of view. Science does not adequately explain phenomena on terms set by one’s actual or possible experience of it, nor does it adequately explain phenomena which are impossible to experience—except, in both cases, by way of formal and institutionalized structures of reasoning, proofs, experimentation. These are obviously critically necessary in their introduction at certain technical spheres of the social order, but it is unclear what exactly it is about the use of independent mental constructs, by non-scientist observers, of the subjective and objective world that threatens these processes. 

Philosophy should not be unconcerned with truth. But it is fundamentally the case that what is designated as “true” in scientific discourses is often simply true in a different sense than philosophical conclusions are true. Philosophy mostly explores mediation, in all of its subjective and objective senses, or all of its static and transitory senses, whereas the practice of science discovers the composition and behavior of immediate objects. By mediation I mean that relation “between” the self and world which is always a bit awkward. It is awkward because it is by no means necessarily able to be formally signified based on static rules, and is often—even despite protestations to the contrary—examined in terms of its sense, its subjective or experiential impact. 

Regardless of exactly how such mediation is finally explained, philosophy must often—still more awkwardly—adjoin to the analysis itself novel rules which themselves are not cross-applicable to analyses of all philosophical objects. Yet behind what sometimes comes as abstruse jargon, these rules base their legitimacy in commonsense delimitations of the categorical boundaries in which any given philosophical object exists. And if consistency across contingent changes is one strong criterion that demonstrates the validity of a scientific rule (the rule being the object here), the same holds for subjective recognition of phenomena described in philosophy—recognition that transcends individual determinants and takes hold of masses of disparate people. For if many different people are seized by moments of spontaneous recognition within one and the same philosophy text, the recognized phenomenon is at least true enough. If it is false, it is relevantly false. The only case in which this could potentially fail is a case in which a large swath of humanity is operating under a literal mass delusion and recognize illusory objects in philosophy texts as real. Yet even then, it would be hard to conceptualize a mass delusion that manifests in the mass recognition of conceptually unstable things. This appears to be a contradiction in terms: what is to be recognized in such a case? 

Now, I say “spontaneous” recognition in order to draw an important distinction. I do not mean that the object encountered must spur a totally reflexive reaction or anything of the sort. I only mean that the recognition, to pass muster here, must be a recognition of some phenomenon previously encountered outside the philosophical text or the corpus in which it exists. 

Here is a hairy example. Bear with me. It would not count as spontaneous recognition if a reader recognized Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the plane of immanence because she previously heard of it in a lecture on Gilles Deleuze. It would count if she recognized in that concept something which empirically or conceptually conformed to something or several things that existed in her cognition pre-theoretically. Such an encounter could go something like this: “Okay, I understand the distinction between what is immanent or immediate and what is transcendent or other-worldly. This distinction has been named and I have absorbed the name for such a distinction, but I am and was already able to understand it because I am able to process and apply some sort of image, heuristic, or example. Alternatively, it may be because I am able to deduce from the strength of the binarily opposed concept of transcendence what the reverse means here: it refers to immediacy. A pure plane thereof is recognizable as a concept because I can picture or conceptualize a “plane.” The plane of existence is spoken of in the abstract, so it is not embedded within a particular worldly context. So the plane of immanence refers to a plane of existence itself comprised purely of the immediate. I know that this must be a plane without “qualities” because it is specifically qualified as something that is “purely” itself. While this is not easy to recognize as image or heuristic, “purely itself” is easily recognizable, and therefore parsable, on a semantic level and simply is meant to exclude that which is outside of the thing designated. Therefore the plane of immanence is a pure plane consisting only of the immediate in and of itself.” 

I deliberately chose a difficult and empirically implausible example to show that even the most whacked-out constructs can induce spontaneous recognition through the aggregation and piecing together of more rudimentary and plainly recognizable concepts which are purported to comprise the construct in question. I chose this particular example, even further, to show how philosophy posits modes of understanding the mediation between the world and self that may be philosophically valid even if they are quite alien to the world of science. 

There is bad philosophy and good philosophy: the reader may review the above concept (probably more charitably and accurately understood in the original or in serious secondary texts) and decide for themselves whether or not it enhances understanding. But something like the “plane of immanence” is a vehicle for giving conceptual coherence to something that is intrinsically slippery and difficult to put into speech: here the idea of the immediate itself. We experience what is immediate, and we may feel moments of existential or conceptual bewilderment at features of the world like linear time as we experience them, and thus cognitively possess an elusive sense of something like immanence itself without being able to pin that sense to a concept in language. A construct is born.

From the apparent success of an unwieldy example like this, one ought to be able to see a fortiori how more directly recognizable concepts explain and give a sense of concrete reality to phenomena. Further, by seeing how such recognition works, one hopefully is helped to the conclusion that philosophy can be autonomous and work all to itself and possess descriptive validity by virtue of its enhancing the understanding and recognition of difficult concepts that are often inherent to the relationship between the self and world. When many people spontaneously recognize the same thing in a philosophical construct, the philosophical construct works. We can deduce from mass recognition that it refers to something that exists, and the fact that it produces mass recognition means that it possesses internal consistency irrespective of the subjective particularities of the reader.