What Happens After Philosophy Eats its Tail?

The Liar Paradox and peak subversion in philosophy

If I were to tell you that I always lie, should you believe me then or not?

This is the liar paradox which goes back to ancient Greek philosophy. If I’m lying when I say I’m always lying, as I should be if I’m a liar, then I’m not a liar after all because in that case, at least, I’m telling the truth about myself.

And if I’m telling the truth about myself when I say I always lie, then that generalization about me must be true, which means I’m a liar so you shouldn’t believe anything I say, including that generalization.

Thus, my statement that I’m always lying seems both true and false, which is impossible.

The paradox is that in attempting to undermine my credibility, or in explaining why I shouldn’t be believed because I’m a liar, I seem to re-establish that credibility. How, then, can an unremittingly negative viewpoint be expressed without presupposing its positivity? How can an extreme skeptic or pessimist repudiate all knowledge without building back up at least some knowledge, namely the negative or subversive kind?

Isn’t the liar or the skeptic somewhat like the morose person who claims to be sad all the time, but who finds that she’s suddenly happy when she’s relieved to admit her mental problem?

The Challenge for Subversive Philosophy

This paradox is at the heart of philosophical skepticism and antirealism, so it’s relevant to any relentless form of criticism that seems to eat its tail. Must there, then, be such a thing as objective truth after all, despite the dubious magical thinking implicit in the correspondence theory of truth?

Elsewhere, for example, in “Saturated in Fiction: Consensus Reality as a Web of Stories,” I’ve argued for just what the title says: everything we say seems like just fiction, from an enlightened standpoint. The more absurd life is, the more even our serious endeavours seem scripted and game-like, in which case nothing should be taken at face value. There are no literal truths, but only naïve or ironic, self-destructive takes.

According to an exoteric perspective, we can trust in authorities and take their word for gospel. As scientists tell us, for example, we’re in objective contact with the facts of nature. But according to hyperskeptical philosophy, that consensus view is sustained by delusions and by massive self-deception or ignorance.

As I explain in “Transhuman Epistemology: Knowledge in the Cosmic Scheme,” even science which indeed puts us in touch with the facts, if anything does, is largely an instrumental process of the inhuman world’s humanization. Our mind isn’t a neutral mirror of nature; rather, we’re biologically, psychologically, and socially locked in conflict with everything that’s foreign to us, and we mean to rectify that by understanding and controlling all foreign elements until they become familiar or second nature to us.

And as I say in “Beyond the Consumer’s Dream of Ultimate Knowledge,” our search for knowledge is likely endless because knowledge isn’t a neatly packaged product but is an expression of our open-ended minds and cultures.

The challenge for anyone who levels these kinds of charges is to show that they’re not self-refuting like the liar’s confession. If all statements are fictional, mustn’t that very generalization too be just a fiction? And a fiction isn’t literally true, so if I’m right that we’re “saturated in fictions,” that very claim can’t be literally correct.

Or if all inquiries are pragmatic attempts to “humanize the inhuman,” that very claim must likewise be just such a coping mechanism rather than an objectively correct statement that neutrally agrees with the facts. And if all knowledge just “expresses our minds and cultures,” that very generalization must be just as relative to my mind and culture, which means it’s not objectively true and can seemingly be dispensed with like any other mere cultural idiosyncrasy.

The challenge for the subversive philosopher, then, is to avoid cutting down the branch he or she is sitting on.

Fiction and the Suspension of Disbelief

We can begin to meet this challenge by looking more closely at how fictions work. Fictions may not be literally true, but neither are they entirely false. At least, no interesting work of fiction will consist of nothing but falsehoods, because the artistic calling is to reveal the deeper truth. Instead of telling you what the truth is, as in a work of nonfiction such as an academic article, the novelist, poet, musician, or filmmaker means to show you the truth. And the greatest stories don’t address just surface truths but uncover deeper, universal, or unexpected ones.

What, though, is the nature of these universal truths? More precisely, can they be literally, objectively, or factually represented? When you translate a great poem into dry academic commentary, do you necessarily pass over the core meaning? Are the ultimate truths ineffable, however much art may hint at them or indirectly inform us in a way that no rigorous argument or theory can?

The key to all of this may be the reader’s mechanism of suspending her disbelief. To enjoy a story, you wrap yourself up in it: you don’t overanalyze what’s on the page or the screen, but you pretend the story is real. That’s what generates the catharsis; you identify with the fictional characters, as though they weren’t just being performed by actors or conjured by the author’s imagination. Although you know the story isn’t real, you trick yourself into treating the story like nonfiction, like a factual report.

There’s the liar’s Janus-face right at the heart of fiction’s consumption. The double-sidedness that generates the liar paradox is apparent from the pretense needed to entertain a fictional story. We deceive ourselves for the fun of it, in the case of formal fiction, which means we both know and don’t know the nature of what we’re reading or viewing.

Fictions are artificially set aside as a genre. In a bookstore, for example, there are the fiction and nonfiction sections, and the book’s cover may even explicitly identify whether it falls under one or the other category. But suppose a sneaky author writes a fiction and passes it off as nonfiction. In that case, the audience members are misled but they don’t deceive themselves because they don’t know any better. Only the author might know the truth that at least many of the events she depicts in the story never happened.

Or take The Truman Show (1998), a movie about a man named Truman who grows up as the star of a long-running television program he can’t help but mistake for reality. The whole town is a filmset and everyone he’s ever interacted with is a paid actor, including his parents and best friend. His world is a fiction, but he thinks his life is real.

Eventually, Truman discovers the truth and is driven to escape the confines of his artificial world. At that very moment of Truman’s enlightenment, we can imagine himself thinking, “I’ve been fooling myself this whole time. My whole life is a lie. I’m nothing but a liar.” Here, though, we can solve his liar paradox. Truman’s life would be a lie relative to the rest of the world, but not to himself since the fiction was so artfully produced that he couldn’t help but treat his life as real.

The paradox dissolves, then, when we add some relativity. When you suspend your disbelief in reading a novel, the novel becomes both true and false. It’s true, relative to your willingness to pretend for the fun of it, and the novel’s false relative to your background knowledge that you’re reading a work of fiction. Part of your mind is enlightened compared to the sandbox you’ve prepared for your amusement.

Reflective Elites and the Naïve Mob

Now we can apply these distinctions to knowledge in general. Again, we need the division between the enlightened and the duped, between the more and the less informed minds. Rationally justified arguments and theories, for example, might be literal truths, relative to a naïve consensus, but they might be fictions according to a higher, philosophical perspective.

How, though, could the enlightened person think that all human thoughts or utterances are at best fictionally true, without conceding that that very thought would likewise have to be a mere fiction? What happens when this subversive enlightenment eats its tail? Or must the enlightened person make an exception of her mental output, so her claim would be that only the pseudo-knowledge of the unenlightened mob is fictional?

Elitism would be one way to resolve the paradox, but that’s not the solution I’m offering here. I’m not going to say just that there are two kinds of truths, the fictions for the mob and the literal facts known only by subversive philosophers.

Rather, the relevant difference between those two types of people is that the vulgar mob presupposes the correspondence theory of truth and thus trusts in the unproblematic truth of at least some assertions. By contrast, the intellectual elites are more humbled by the destructiveness of their knowledge and of their alienated perspective, so they lack that trust even in their elite mental achievements.

All truths are fictional, so we’re all liars, as it were. But only the enlightened can make the gestalt switch like Truman or can recognize the social mechanisms with which we suspend our disbelief even when we’re absorbing that which is supposed to be nonfiction.

The Nonliterality of Scientific Models

Take, for example, what’s supposed to be the uncontroversial, scientific, commonsense truth that gravity exists. Certainly, we all experience gravity, so how could it be “enlightened” to attempt to subvert that experience by denying the literality or objectivity of affirming that gravity is real?

At this point, the unreflective person would trust in the facts that are presented by her senses and that are explained by experts, and that would be the end of it. But the philosopher doesn’t take anything at face value. The philosopher asks what “objectivity” means and tries to understand scientific progress.

It may turn out, then, that objectivity isn’t something like transhuman neutrality but is a technique that clever mammals like us have for coping with our environment by analyzing the elements of our experience into manageable processes and mechanisms. In applying reason, we interrogate the perceptions that seem to be assembled by our brain and our senses. Objectivity is the depersonalization of our experience, the detachment from our preoccupations that’s supposed to let the facts speak for themselves. But even if the facts themselves speak more through some representations than others, there’s no understanding of the raw facts without re-imposing a human gloss on them.

The ordinary concept of gravity is a gross simplification, a filter we employ to make sense of how what goes up must come down. The scientific concept is much more sophisticated, but the drive is the same: scientific models are just more rigorous and empowering tools that don’t neutrally depict reality but place the world in our grasp.

In what sense, then, would even the scientific concept of gravity be a fiction? Not in the sense that the concept provides us with no truth at all, since again, no worthwhile fiction is so empty or misleading. No, our concepts show us what the facts are, by displaying or filtering them, which enables us to understand them. There’s no such thing as “telling” the facts if by “telling,” as opposed to “showing,” we mean that the representation corresponds neutrally (“factually,” objectively, or literally) with some state of the world.

There’s no such correspondence because there’s no reason to think the world is concerned about our exploits. Thus, there’s no two-way agreement between facts and their human representations. We may orient ourselves towards the rest of the world, but not as though we had a mirror that reflects only the facts while leaving us out of the picture. Instead, if our mind or our language is a mirror, it’s a funhouse one that humanizes the reflections, distorting them according to our mental and phenotypic capacities, and to our personal, cultural or species-wide preoccupations, prejudices, biases, fears, agendas, and so on.

To be sure, we want our thoughts to agree with the facts, but to say that the facts agree with our thoughts in turn is already to indulge in an animistic fantasy. We personify nature’s inhumanity when we posit such happy, harmonious fellow-feeling.

The Conceits of Human Knowledge

How, then, does the concept of gravity simplify or humanize by showing us the facts without exhaustively or neutrally telling us what they are? Again, I suggest the key to an answer lies in how fiction works. How does your favourite story or poem show you what the real world is like? With metaphors, emotional resonance, and plot devices that reinforce or challenge your deep-seated expectations and that add to a useful mental map, known as a worldview or a culture.

Of course, scientists don’t speak of gravity the way JK Rowling speaks of Harry Potter. Scientists don’t take themselves to be writing fiction. Nevertheless, the model of gravity doesn’t exist in isolation since if it did, the model would be meaningless and wouldn’t count even as nonfictional knowledge. Instead, scientific knowledge is part of the whole humanistic, promethean enterprise that stretches back in the West to the Presocratics. The model of gravity becomes fully meaningful only in the context of philosophical naturalism, which is to speak of the entire self-supportive endeavour of civilizations.

Instead of a character like Harry Potter, then, with gravity we have the simplification involved in a scientific model. This model is much more complicated than the commonsense notion of the phenomenon but is nevertheless much simpler than gravity itself. All our representations of nature are humanizations of facts that we had relatively little if anything to do with. The model of gravity is something we throw up to wrap our minds around what’s out there. Even when we affirm that gravity is a cosmic reality we might never fully understand, we’re only working with our mental models which are so many characters in our inner or social narratives.

Is it literally true, then, that even the scientific concept of gravity is a tool that can’t help but falsify its referent by simplifying it and by fitting it into our mindset and our plans? You might take that subversive, pragmatic statement to be such an exception to its subversion, but only if you cease philosophizing.

We can imagine a fully enlightened posthuman intelligence that refuses to indulge in any trace of self-deception. Presumably, this posthuman would deny there’s any such thing as literal truth. All truth would be partly metaphorical and thus fictional. But this posthuman wouldn’t make an exception of that very subversive, “antirealist” principle. Instead, this person’s knowledge would begin with the assumption that all she has are tools that are ill-equipped to mirror reality. You can’t frame ultimate truth with a screwdriver, but neither can you do so with an array of neurons or with English, science departments, or the history of human civilization.

We can refrain from being content with phony, animistic literality if we instead sustain our inquiries by suspending our disbelief — not for the sake of amusing ourselves, but to survive and to triumph over the monstrosity of the natural universe. That’s the conceit of even our most rational knowledge, just as every fiction has its conceits.

When I say, for example, that perception is explained by scientific theories of how the brain and the sense organs work, I’m not saying that those theories are literally true. Instead, I take them for granted the way I take up a passive role in relation to a story. This time, however, I assume the theories for the sake of argument, not entertainment. If you want to understand how perception can be sustained or enhanced, you turn to scientific and technological tools. In short, you get your head into that game, as it were, just as you submit to the rules laid down by any work of fiction if you plan to find meaning in that pursuit.

How, then, can it be meaningful to speak of “fiction” if there’s no such thing as literal truth to draw the contrast? The contrast would be between enlightened skepticism and the illusion of literality or of two-way agreement between facts and human representations. That illusion is due to the relative naivety of the unreflective folks who are like Truman before he learns the apocalyptic truth.

Truman’s world seems undeniable to him before that moment, but afterward he knows that that world was all along a fraud. Likewise, the nonphilosopher thinks the facts are what our species’ best minds say they are. But were that unreflective person to start reading about all the ways in which modernity subverts or problematizes the average secular and religious self-images, she might realize that there are no such facts. What she thought was the simple fact of the world’s agreement with a statement is instead the stuffing of an inhuman, intergalactic monstrosity into the hubristic confines of the human mammalian mentality.

And once the philosopher becomes sufficiently jaded, that last, deflationary sentiment won’t seem literally true either; rather, the final philosophical subversion will be a coda to the narrative of humanism, the bathos that honours the absurdity of our plight as alienated intelligent beings.

Kafkaesque Modernity and Enlightenment

You might be wondering, though, what motivates this subversive antirealism. Why go down this path in the first place?

We can leave aside the above abstractions and find some motivation in how the Kafka biographer Frederick Karl speaks of the essence of “Kafkaesque.” This is because Franz Kafka’s fiction helped pinpoint the downside of modernity.

For Karl, what’s Kafkaesque is

when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.

You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.

The surface meaning of this has to do with the heartless power of an invasive bureaucracy. This is the social megamachine but without the religious justifications that covered for the ancient regimes, leaving the victims of the modern form of this oppressive top-down structure to face the latter’s bare inhumanity.

But the deeper meaning recalls what I said in the earlier sections. It’s not just the totalitarian bureaucracy that overpowers us, but nature that does so. Of course, nature kills every one of us, if only by making us mortal and relatively frail. Eventually, nature will terminate our entire species.

On top of that, however, we can become aware of nature’s indifference towards history, morality, and our nation’s laws. The juxtaposition between what Thomas Nagel called the objective “view from nowhere,” and the subjective view of our meaning and importance creates this eerie, surreal sense that somewhere a gross cosmic mistake has been made.

Here again, with Karl’s explanation, we have that dreaded duality. First, there’s the sum of our limited powers that sustains our self-confidence as we go about our lives, following the usual scripts and indulging in our pastimes. Second, there’s the moment of clarity when we realize that our “equipment” doesn’t avail us. Our collective “progress” will likely be so limited as to be negligible, given the scale of the universe’s evolution. We struggle against that recognition, propping up the lifestyle that makes us happy, only by resorting to an array of self-deceptions and mass hallucinations.

Suppose you corner a spider in your house. The spider falls back on its web or dashes this way and that to avoid its demise. But if you wanted to squash the spider, you could do so. The arachnid’s fate is in your hands alone because the equipment the spider brings to bear is comically misplaced, and the spider has no business being inside a house built by and for people.

In just the same way, human societies have no business being in a godless natural universe. Our languages, stories, arguments, and theories may mean everything to us because they make sense of the world and make us feel rational, at home, and in charge of our lives. But that cognitive equipment means absolutely nothing to anything outside the confines of our artificial refuges.

Bugs Under the Universe’s Carpet

Perhaps this analogy is implicit in Kafka’s famous story, “The Metamorphosis,” in which a man finds he’s been turned into a huge insect. Kafka emphasizes how the rest of human society would be disgusted by the thinking insect, as the insect struggles to survive in the human world. But all people might as well be insects, as far as the universe at large is concerned.

As Vladimir Nabokov said, “In Gogol and Kafka the absurd central character belongs to the absurd world around him but, pathetically and tragically, attempts to struggle out of it into the world of humans — and dies in despair.”

Or as Kafka himself wrote in his journal, “Enclosed in my own four walls, I found myself as an immigrant imprisoned in a foreign country…I saw my family as strange aliens whose foreign customs, rites, and very language defied comprehension…though I did not want it, they forced me to participate in their bizarre rituals…I could not resist.”

Alienation sets in if we start to view the mind and its symbols as nature would if it could, as meaningless exercises in atomic interactions. But this is the essence of objectivity, so it’s modern science and philosophy that establish these humiliating implications of the naturalistic standpoint. And that’s what motivates the antirealist’s suspicions.

That’s not to say there’s no external world or no such thing as objective truth or rational justification. Again, stories wouldn’t interest us if they had no bearing on the reality we experience, and our technology couldn’t empower us if we had no understanding of how nature works.

It’s just that these modern powers collapse under their weight. The liberal metanarrative of the heroic individual, courageously facing the natural facts and progressing despite their alienness was a fine reaction to the mooting of the obsolete religious traditions. But can we sustain our faith in human nature in view of our dehumanizing knowledge of what we are and of where we stand, in deep time and in just one corner of one of many galaxies?

Modernity pushes us towards this mystical Kafkaesque revelation, when we resolve the liar paradox only by positing a deeper sense of truth in which our representations are only stories that are meaningful to us but meaningless beyond the noosphere.

If all we can do is spin fictions that have more or less power to enchant, we should adjust our mindset. We’re the magicians that can see through our magic.