We Think When We Think a Thought to Its Failure
Inspired by Discussions with Dr. Filip Niklas in Honor of His Upcoming Class (Starts 10/16)
I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Filip Niklas two more times since our first conversation (with a fourth discussion planned soon), and I’m always amazed at how quickly time flies by: it feels like we’ve just started when suddenly three hours have transpired. As usual, Dr. Niklas raised a host of tremendous points, noting for example that we don’t tend to fight over material goods but metaphysical principles. Where worldviews are threatened, that’s where the real passions come out. Sure, we’ll fight to protect our homes, but we’ll die to defend our beliefs. In this way, we can see the wisdom of René Girard writing on “metaphysical desire,” not mere want, for it is our very “way of seeing” which can prove most frightening to lose.
Dr. Niklas also pointed out how “great books read us” as we read them, for it’s as if they “read aloud to us” how we are living our lives, what kind of beings we are, and how we think, often shocking us with their accuracy and prescience. We think we know why we are the way we are, but then we encounter a great book and realize we understand ourselves little. It can require someone we’ve never met, someone who might even be hundreds of years deceased, to help us understand ourselves today. Not only can the dead speak, but they can also speak truer to life.
Here, I want to touch on a particular idea that arose in our conversation, and that involves how in Hegel failure seems necessary and unavoidable. For Hegel, it seems as if thinking is inescapably “tragic,” which is to say that thought must eventually prove “lacking.” Where thought has not failed, we have not finished the thought, and yet what thought would undergo the effort required of it if thought knew it would ultimately fail? Indeed, this suggests “the paradoxical tragedy” of the thinking life.
All thoughts must eventually prove incomplete because “no map is the territory,” and that means if a thought hasn’t yet failed, the map isn’t complete. Until a map is finished, we don’t deeply experience how it isn’t equivalent to the territory, for there is still room for “plausible deniability” or a denial of the ramifications of this reality. Yes, we can know that a map will eventually prove incomplete, but unless we complete the work, we will likely not feel that incompleteness, and a thought of which does not transition into emotion is a thought that is unlikely to move us (as discussed in “Ideas Are Not Experiences” by O.G. Rose). And, funny enough, the thought we feel is the thought we know, because that is the thought which changes how we act.
Thoughts we only think are thoughts we can easily question, but thoughts of which change how we live cannot be so readily afforded the same “plausible deniability.” To really get that “a thought of x” is not the same “as the thing of x,” we need to think the thought as well and completely as we can to the point of failure, and that failure can change our lives. But this presents a problem: how can we make ourselves think a thought that we think precisely to find where it fails? Here, I think we can see why Hegel drew out a total “schema” for the development of thought, for in this Hegel shows how each “failure” of thought opens us up to the next stage of thought—on and on. Failures are doors, and perhaps only failures are doors.
If we believed that a thought was everything and that there was nothing more beyond it, and then we were told, “You should think that thought until it fails,” that might seem ridiculous to us (for if everything that “was” failed, there would be nothing). The act would hence be self-destructive and nonsensible. However, if instead we understood that “the failure point” of an idea was precisely where we could see “the door” which lead into a new thought (“The Gödel Point,” as I like to call it), then we might be willing to undergo this difficult challenge. And so this “schema” is what Hegel had to work to convince us of, and thus why in Hegel we find an entire “Phenomenological Journey” of thought which makes failure essential to its realization. Yes, thought must think to the point of failure for a thought to really complete itself, but that failure is (only) where we will find a door instead of a tomb.
To help illuminate the point, let’s take a value like “freedom.” Is freedom good? I would say so, which means we have ourselves a thought, mainly “freedom is good.” Wonderful, so I take it to mean that everyone should be free all the time under all circumstances? Well, goodness, when we put it that way, we might start to back off: yes, freedom is good, but that doesn’t mean freedom is always good in all circumstances. Oh, when should freedom be restricted? Well, people shouldn’t be free to steal from one another or cause one another physical harm (outside a sport or self-defense). Ah, fair enough, but that means “freedom is good” cannot mean “freedom is always good” (a point which suggests the work of Isaiah Berlin).
By taking a notion and imagining it applied in all circumstances without contingency, we can see that the notion is not as “obviously true” as we might think on first encounter. In fact, very quickly, we can start to see how discussions about “freedom” are inexplicably tangled up with ethics and morality, and that means freedom is limited by ethical considerations. And that means it is at these limits we find a kind of “door” leading from “considering freedom” into “considering morality”: the idea “freedom is good” leads us into questions of “What is good?” And if we try to respond to this with claims that we need to “keep it simple” and just focus on the topic of freedom, we find that this is literally impossible without risking “totalization” and ignoring important nuances and details that keep us from acting like an authoritarian. In this way, we cannot “keep it simple” without treating people “simply,” which means we must “simplify them”—an act of (totalitarian) control.
Hegel was brilliant to recognize the essential limits of notions, but Hegel went even further and applied the same schema to entire ways of knowing. Consciousness eventually ends up “reaching an extreme limit” and must transition into Self-Consciousness, which eventually reaches a limit and must “fail into” Reason—and so on. As principles like “freedom” and “equality” cannot be “autonomous” and singular without causing “oppressive simplification,” so the same applies to entire ways of knowing: if we try to understand everything “practically” (for example), we eventually reach a point where we are forced to confront that “just living practically” requires us to ignore relevant metaphysical realities. If we “just try to practice justice,” for example, we must avoid asking philosophical questions about, “What is justice?” which means we might end up acting on behalf of an “(in)justice” that we “practice as if” it makes the world better—a terrible mistake that, “purely practical,” we cannot realize we are making.
As with “an entire ways of knowing,” to really think a thought, we must think a thought until it unveils its shortcomings, but rather than dread this moment, Hegel can help us understand why this failure is an opportunity. We trace out a door, a door we would otherwise never encounter. Once we accept this, then failure is what we seek. Failure is victory. Humility is divine.
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