Intellectual Ambition: A Discussion with Samuel Kimbriel
APA Substack Newsletter: Public Philosophy Digest
This inaugural Public Philosophy Digest begins with a discussion about intellectual ambition with Samuel Kimbriel, a political philosopher, Editor at Large at Wisdom of Crowds, and director of the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society Initiative. Samuel’s essay, Thinking is Risky, was a call for intellectual ambition in our age of specialization and he recently explored the case further with Tom Barson in The Experts Are Out of Ideas: A Debate. I appreciate the opportunity to join the WCrowds fray, further exploring the nature and ends of intellectual ambition and whether there is greater cause for hope in the current environment.
Samuel, thanks again for extending the dialogue with the APA Blog Newsletter. To bring intellectual ambition into focus, let me start by highlighting several distinguishing characteristics of risk. In your essay, you initially frame ambition in conventional terms, seeking genuine creativity and inspiration, but then stress the importance of unease and the risk of grappling with the strangeness of the world. You wonder whether, for instance, contrary to Plato and Aristotle, philosophy begins in “confusion” rather than “wonder”. Your allusion to Nietzsche highlights the question of the ’prejudices of philosophers’ - whether we can in fact understand the coherence of the world and our place in it (“what strange, wicked, questionable questions!”). Please expand on your call for intellectual risk and discuss the prospects for answering consequential questions about existence, knowledge and the good.
Charlie, first of all, thank you very much for curating such an excellent blog in general, and for also for inviting me to what I’m pretty sure will be a very exciting exchange.
The case that I’ve been making this summer has to do with intellectual stagnation. I’ve been particularly concerned with two sites:
· public intellectual debate which I charge as being distracted away too easily away from curiosity about the world into concern with social rank (my image has been the court gossip at Versailles)
· academic philosophy which (for very plausible reasons having to do with the incentive structures of publishing and tenure) seems to have had a hard time recently incubating scholars willing to take large risks.
For this venue, let me sharpen this case on a couple of points. I remember vividly when I first started my PhD, finding two features of philosophy particularly intoxicating. The first was the sense that this was a discipline in which the utter strangeness of the world was faced directly. Metaphysics in particular has this quality. It is a discipline in which one is encouraged to consider with complete seriousness that perhaps there is no such thing as change (Parmenides), or that all thought is derivative from one primary mind (Ibn Sina), or that possible worlds are as real as our own (David Lewis).
Secondly, in philosophy I found something which I’ve never seen as fully manifested in other academic disciplines, namely a stubbornness to be fully accountable to anything and everything at any moment. No premise from the top level (give me your view of economic equality?) to the most basic (is there an external world at all?) is barred from being debated; no feature of existence excluded as irrelevant.
Let’s call these the “pro-disorientation” and “no-bracketing” criteria respectively. At least in aspiration, philosophy is relentless in refusing to shy away from the full difficulty of questions and the range of things that might impinge on them (I should say, for impressionable graduate students, that this relentlessness is not necessarily the most ideal advice for other parts of life, like dating relationships).
And as one final preliminary point, I’d like to suggest that we have grown particularly timid in one place. One of the features of the philosophical tradition that I value most is its reflexivity. If you tweak a premise about the structure of the world (say deciding that the inferences around causation are complicated, as Hume does) you are immediately going to have to start tracing out the implications of that tweak for one’s theory of knowledge. One is observing the world, but one also exists in it, and there is a high standard of consistency that must be met to sustain claims of knowledge.
I’ve gradually come to think that my argument about intellectual ambition is a descendent of Thomas Nagel’s claims about how much that reflexivity requirement has broken down. In trying to think rigorously—often for good reason—about the implications of natural science, philosophy has been tempted to laziness in tracing back how the claims it is making about the world are themselves consistent with being knowers in that world.
Samuel, I appreciate you sharpening the case in the context of your experience in the discipline, as I was also absorbed by the fearless nature of philosophy. Your last point is critical because we can lose the subject in all the systemic rigor and intellectual risk is also a personal journey. I would like to explore whether accounting for and grappling with the knower should temper our intellectual aspirations, leading to a more subjective form of ambition. To continue to use Nietzsche as an exemplar of the fraught quest, I want to start by emphasizing the limits of objectivity, reflected in his challenging the value of truth itself:
“The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement: it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgements a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live - that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.”(Beyond Good and Evil, The Prejudices of the Philosophers))
I am not sure whether Nietzsche could have foreseen how the “falsifications” of mathematics would transform the earth and raise living standards, but the prescient passage should make us wary of intellectual ends.
At a minimum, we must first acknowledge the limits of objectivity, that science is purely descriptive. The primacy of objectivity can be traced to the scientific framework itself, which is founded on extinguishing the subject in order to achieve a neutral standpoint. In the Postscript, Kierkegaard highlights the stultifying effects of abstraction, leaving behind the subject. Objective reflection makes the subject accidental. Abstract thought ignores the temporal and “can get hold of reality only by nullifying it…”.
Since you brought up Thomas Nagel, in The View From Nowhere , he frames the limits of objectivity, which follow “directly from the process of gradual detachment by which objectivity is achieved. An objective standpoint is created by leaving a more subjective, individual, or even just human perspective behind; but there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint”.
However, I would like to go a step further, asking whether this limitation is not a function of our current state of understanding, but an absolute constraint. To cite a passage from Jacob Howland in a APA Blog post on knowledge and faith, reason is “only negatively a basis for faith. In clarifying its own limits, it affirms the necessity for a decision, a “leap” of faith. In particular, the incarnation of God as man is neither a necessary truth nor a historical fact, and so cannot be an object of knowledge. Kierkegaard therefore completely disassociates certainty from faith…to the effect that the highest truth for an existing person is an objective uncertainty held fast with the most passionate inwardness”.
My question, then, is whether your call is ultimately an intellectual exercise? Do the limits of objectivity and your challenge to account for the knower fundamentally shift expectations? Even if the discipline can chip away at consequential questions, does intellectual ambition ultimately lead us to more subjective truths?
There’s a specific kind of interaction I’ve really come to enjoy at the intersection of the worlds of public conversation and philosophy. I now very frequently get into a conversation in which it gradually dawns on the other person that they’ve always been doing philosophy, or at least rely upon assumptions that are completely philosophical.
It’s interesting how we teach philosophy. A number of times, I’ve come across undergraduate courses that talk about the “great battle of realism and idealism”—with the former standing in for scientific objectivity and the latter for someone like George Berkelely. What’s worth noting, however, is that the two terms are actually not at all parallel.
When we are looking for a single self-contained term to which everything might reduce, ideas—at least potentially—might fit. Perhaps it is the case that as Berkeley himself claims “When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas.” First is subjectivity and that’s all there is is not an easy position, but it is a logically possible one.
Realism—especially when we mean materialist realism—is actually not a parallel type. There’s a strong reflexivity problem to it that doesn’t exist in quite the same way for the Idealist. When the idealist says “the world is all ideas” that is itself an idea, and one that can potentially be true or false. Materialists have an extra step in that they can say “the whole world is material” but then they need to explain both what that sentence itself is, and why it can be potentially truth bearing under the terms of its claim about the world (all complicated questions!).
This is a roundabout way of responding to your prompt. Part of my call for ambition is that the dichotomy of subject and object has never been real as the hackneyed story would have it. Existence without subjects is a coherent possibility, it is just not one that we as subjects could ever know or claim to describe. If our great projects of exploration are to have internal salience it is going to be because we find that existence is such that there are real, mind independent things and we can know them.
I recognize that my call for consistency here makes philosophy a very difficult discipline indeed, but that difficulty is not arbitrary. Rather, it seems to me that existence itself seems to require the full strain of that task and nothing less.
Samuel, that was perhaps a circuitous route, but your rigor, respecting the challenge of reflexivity, has led us to the heart of the matter. If I may recall Nietzsche one last time - on how Kant did not solve the storied dilemma of modern philosophy:
“But let us stop and reflect: it is time we did so. Kant asked himself: how are synthetic judgements a priori possible? - and what, really, did he answer? By means of a faculty: but unfortunately not in a few words, but so circumspectly, venerably, and with such an expenditure of German profundity and flourishes that the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such an answer was overlooked.” (Beyond Good and Evil, The Prejudices of the Philosophers)
We are left with the existential and philosophical challenge of what can be known about the world we inhabit. With my last question, I would like to flip the script and inject hope by asking whether the discipline can draw on the physical sciences to make progress - along the lines of Tom’s great example of the cross-disciplinary ambition of 17th century natural philosophers:
“The European philosophers of the seventeenth century…didn’t typically gather all their work in different areas into single-titled, knowledge-spanning summae, but their work arched over the entire intellectual landscape. Descartes, Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz were all, in various combinations, every bit as much scientists, mathematicians, and inventors as speculative philosophers.
The difference was that these figures (and their great “natural philosophy” contemporaries) not only sought to extend knowledge, they succeeded in doing so in a way that both changed the world and also began to feed back into traditional philosophical questions. Their successors knew more things and began to take that knowledge as a starting point.”
A good example of recent philosophy that could lead to inter-disciplinary insights is the work of Michael Della Rocca, reflected in his book The Parmenidean Ascent. Michael makes the case for a very uncompromising version of monism in which there are absolutely no distinctions and there is no multiplicity whatsoever. Imagining nature without distinctions is a theory which effectively collapses the world. Michael’s uncompromising, radical view of monism echoes the latest scientific frontiers where physicists sound like Spinoza.
Indeed, there have been a variety of important developments in modern physics that align with this philosophical vision, as it grapples with the quandary of entanglement, violating the principles of Relativity. Recent advances in modern physics suggest that the notion of space itself is incoherent. The upshot is that there is actually no such thing as place or location.
Another example is associated with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, demonstrating that nothing is locally real. Objects are not influenced by their surroundings, and they may also lack definite properties prior to measurement.
The philosophical import of these radical theories was recently synthesized in a book by the particle physicist Heinrich Pas, The One. Heinrich makes a comprehensive case that monism follows logically from certain principles of quantum mechanics applied to the entire universe.
The second philosophical development, citing another example you recently mentioned, are bold theories in Philosophy of Mind, grappling with “hard” questions but also drawing on recent advances in other disciplines. A good example is the purveyors of the Simulation Argument, who are even more directly influenced by science through technological advances. Modern artifacts - AI and virtual reality - are concrete drivers in the outlandish theory that we are living in a simulation - bearing a resemblance to Della Rocca’s strict Rationalism.
My last question is, then, whether current dimensions of philosophy are daring and triangulating toward progress with consequential questions? As our modern technological and scientific upheaval mirrors the 17th century naturalist environment, I believe the discipline can draw on the sciences to better describe nature, and thereby, however haltingly, our place in it.
Monism, simulationism, non-localism—well, at very least, we’re deep into the territory of my “disorientation” principle!
What is very intriguing in the literature you cite is the way that certain contemporary disciplines—and I think you have your finger on the correct ones, physics, cognitive science/ philosophy of mind—have pushed very hard at that objective perspective. Gradually from within that inquiry, we see the boundary between subject and object destabilizing in important ways. I would say that in both cases, it’s far too early to tell where this will all go, but the signs are promising.
But I want to step back and emphasize what a difficult problem this is. Or rather, just how deeply ingrained our (troubling!) habits are.
It’s worth constantly remembering that we live in a weird culture. All cultures are weird but it’s easy to forget that about one’s own. One of the features that seems to me to be a particularly unique outlier is the severity of our divide between our theoretical disciplines and our capacity to make judgements about how to live.
We are actually a very cerebral—very research laden—culture. Data play a central role in our public arguments; we fund large corporate and university research departments; science and technology both have real (though contested) social status.
I’m not arguing against specialization as such. Our technical research and experimental disciplines do seem genuinely to discover things about the world, and also tend to yield new technologies at a quick clip. Many of the discoveries underpinning our AI boom for example are genuinely fascinating insights into the nature of mathematics.
But this is where it’s strange. Paired with those exploratory disciplines is a remarkable inability to think through our society level ethical questions. To take AI again, we are very far from any serious discernment about “why”—why should society engage in this specific type of innovation? What the technology might be good for, and what should be avoided? Where does this fit in the deeper purposes of society and where it might thwart them?
My call for ambitious public philosophy arises in part from my frustration with this divide and the suspicion that it is itself an intellectual mistake—or, to be even more frank, it comes from intellectual complacency. We’ve grown content letting our arguments stop far too early. It seems to me perfectly acceptable to have very specialized scientific disciplines, working in their own domains, uncertain what insights it all may yield on decade long timespans. But it also seems to me that those disciplines likewise need to be constantly reminded that nothing holds together unless eventually we come to understand the link between what we discover about the world and what we ourselves are in that same world.
So, there’s a very strong ethical imperative to pushing ourselves much harder than we have been doing.
There is also an epistemic imperative. To return to the quote from Nagel you mentioned, “the limit of objectivity with which I shall be most concerned…[is the way that] there are things about the world and life and ourselves that cannot be adequately understood from a maximally objective standpoint…the attempt to give a complete account of the world in objective terms detached from…[our particular place in the world] inevitably leads to false reductions.”
He's putting his finger on this strange temptation in the recent history of philosophy to occlude the humanity of the specific person who is doing the knowing. As one gets drawn into the apparently objective observation of the world, one forgets oneself. This is, as I emphasized above, a strict problem logically. If one cannot return to reflexive consistency, all the rest falls apart as well. It is also a problem ethically as one finds one’s apparent understanding of the world, and one’s capacity to live in it falling apart.
None of this is inevitable, and perhaps the counter-examples you are citing are signs that the stability of the old object subject divide is starting to break down of its own weight. But I do think, whatever the case, that it’s high time we start pressing.
Samuel, you have taken a powerful turn to advance your call, moving from diagnosis to prescription. First, by construing philosophy as a moral project, the challenge moves beyond an intellectual exercise. The normative dimension brings us full circle back to the inception of Western philosophy and the questions of human nature and the meaning of life.
Perhaps more importantly, noting our cultural blinders, you are pushing the epistemic boundary by understanding authenticity in less cerebral terms. Modern tools can create the illusion of progress, as if descriptive science and specialization (taxonomies) represent exhaustive answers. If objectivity untethers the subject, your humanistic approach insists on the primacy of an embodied and embedded knower.
The good life and a vital society must grapple with the strain of existence, but it is a predicament without a technical solution. I want to finish by highlighting how your related, engaging podcast with Ross Douthat framed a more practical, yet still metaphysical vision. You discussed a naturalistic and holistic approach to big ideas. A need for theories which make sense of our place in nature that enrich ordinary lives - intuitive narratives that place us in the cosmos and sustain everyday meaning.
Perhaps the central takeaway from this exchange is the difficulty of that possibility. In the spirit of WCrowd’s, where progress is uncertain and driven more by dissent than agreement, perhaps success begins with acknowledging our limitations and still confidently opening the aperture to grapple with the fragility and meaning of life. Thank you so much for taking the time to extend the dialogue on your call for ambition. It was an absolute privilege to tease out the challenge and I hope we can use this venue again to hazard into other demanding territory!
Further Reading:
Samuel Kimbriel on Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation
From the APA Archive:
Clare Carlisle on Spinoza's Religion
Interview with Sean D Kelly on the Genealogy of Redemption in the Western Tradition
What else I’m Reading/Listening/Watching
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