There’s an early Philosophy Bites episode with Anthony Kenny in which he talks about the degree to which contemporary philosophers can claim to be doing the same thing as Plato, Aristotle, etc. Contemporary philosophers investigate the same kinds of problems that ancient philosophers did and they do so – crucially, for Kenny – using the same methodologies. Zoologists and astronomers, in contrast, read the ancients purely as history. Modern methodologies have become so advanced and specialized that all of the old interesting questions have been answered and all of the old ways of investigating those questions have been surpassed.
So far that’s a fairly standard take on the sociology of knowledge. There are questions that we’ve always kind of known were empirical – “how do plants make energy,” “when will that comet appear again,” etc – but we didn’t have the methods to answer them, and so they were reserved (and preserved) for philosophical speculation. Once sufficiently robust methodologies developed to investigate those questions, specialization took hold and fields split off.
What’s striking about the pace of current scientific and methodological innovation, though, is that questions which always seemed analytical are now becoming amenable to experimental investigation. There’s a sense in which we never thought we could test that, but now we can.
Being-toward-death is a deep concept in the Heideggerean architectonic. It’s critical to Dasein’s authenticity, and an appropriate orientation towards the “possibility of impossibility” is the condition for dealing with the shattering facticity of finitude. Those are more or less axiological claims, albeit with a psychological undertone. But Heidegger also unpacks the ontic and ontological properties of death and comes up with some fairly precise claims about how it’s experienced: non-relational, certain, indefinite, and not to be outstripped. Those look like analytical claims but they’re actually empirical claims in drag. They’re empirical claims, more over, that are not beyond scientific investigation:
Psychologists Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University ran three experiments to study existential dread in the laboratory. They prompted volunteers to think about what happens physically as they die and to imagine what it is like to be dead. It’s the experimental equivalent of losing a loved one and ruminating about dying as a result… The results, as reported in the November issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, are intriguing.
The volunteers who were preoccupied with thoughts of death were not at all morose if you tapped into their emotional brains. Indeed, the opposite: they were much more likely than control subjects to summon up positive emotional associations rather than neutral or negative ones. What this suggests, the psychologists say, is that the brain is involuntarily searching out and activating pleasant, positive information from the memory banks in order to help the brain cope with an incomprehensible threat.
These kinds of findings have a complicated relationship with so-called experimental philosophy. Some experimental philosophy is obviously inapt. There’s something not quite right, for instance, with taking the moral intuitions of a sufficiently large sample of undergraduates from a large Southern college, and then elevating the results to “ethics.” That’s not what ethicists are investigating, and it wouldn’t work anyway since people’s moral sensibilities are demonstrably incoherent.
But even in the moral sciences there are places where empirical data can be helpful. It’s a challenge to line up elegant theoretical systems – e.g. utilitarianism – with our moral intuitions, and data can be helpful there. There’s something incongruous with insisting, for instance, that it’s immoral for a first world citizen to only give 90% of their money to those in poorer nations – but it’s very difficult to explain why from within utilitarianism. So something in utilitarianism needs to be tweaked. That’s a kind of data-driven philosophizing.
But that’s a different dynamic than the being-toward-death issue, which is one in which a question that didn’t seem empirical turned out to be at least partly empirical. There’s nothing particularly deep about the discovery that there is a deeper way to probe a particular question. But it does serve as a warning to critical theorists – at the very least – who would be too quick to make sweeping statements about causal relationships or about the direction of political change, confident that those questions are analytical questions up for analytical debate as such. It turns out, even in the deepest parts of phenomenology, that that’s not always the case.
Photo:
* Actress Constanze Priester in Berlinby Juliana da Costa José [Wiki Commons]
References:
* Anthony Kenny on his New History of Philosophy [Philosophy Bites]
* Association for Psychological Science. “From Terror To Joy: Faced With Death, Our Minds Turn To Happier Thoughts.” ScienceDaily, 23 Oct. 2007. Web. 19 Jul. 2011. [Science Daily]
* Trolley problem [Wiki]
Related Icon Index Symbol Categories:
* Rhetoric and Philosophy
* Critical Theory
* Cognitive Science
