Plurality and theoretical desire:

on the different methodologies of philosophical action and their political consequences. Written by Hypatia of Sva from the 16th to the 18th of May, 2024

Reflecting about a number of ways in which we, as a system, have reacted to the question of action as such as a result of thought, or as its prerequisite - that is, to the fundamental question, if thought, if not affirmative, should be resistance or retreat - we came to think about the false notion within that question, that there need be one specific notion of philosophical action, or of a "goal" of thinking, or what that should mean, We will present here a number of different ways of presenting this idea of directedness, or of the intentionality of the whole system of intentional thought; and will then try to connect, even in limited ways, these various methods or approaches of thinking to the real subjective system, which they all try to be a theory of, but in a different sense - not so much a different sense of "theory", but in a different meaning of "try".

1. One obvious way of trying to act in the way of thinking is that of finding the truth of the world. In this sense, the goal is to find a notion of groundedness, of that what-something-is, of its substance. "Truth" here marks both an action of creating such a substance, a decision about what's important in a particular way of understanding, as well as that thing it is connected to or decided about, and their correspondence, that is, that a decision actually happened. In this sense, we need not give up the idea of correspondence to reality when understanding that truth is a subjective category; namely, if we understand that it is a category that marks a specific action of that subject within/towards that part of the world that the truth wants to be the truth of. Constructivism, even the most radical, still has a reference to what it constructs; and fundamentally, it seems to me to be an equivalent notion to think of truth as a decision or as a correspondence, since correspondence always needs a speech act whichs contents can correspond, and this act precisely entails the decision that creates the truth the correspondence was about, as a general kind. (That is: the general kind of such-and-such-an-action (say, seeing) creates the type of correspondence the act was about (say, looking-alike). Each individual act, referring to general types of this form previously estabilished such, do not need to create any new kind of truth; but for that reason, they also don't decide about a new general area of interest in conscious activity, and merely continue the previous decisions to see such-and-such-a-thing as a category of being-for-me, that is, they reproduce the manifestation that is the category of being in thought, if understood with the frightening power of all its generality.) The aspect of it that "creates" this reality can however at the same time distance it from it. I can try to not influence that what I observe and try to understand, even myself; I can try, for example, not to manipulate my own, even sometimes painful experiences, to understand their truth. Understanding the truth is not something, as some people say in the traditions of analysis and deconstruction, meaningless or only methodological; there is a transcendent sense there, that corresponds to that what I constructed or manifested as an object of my interest or intellectual lust. The delicacy of handling it is the duty of contemplative thought; of actually understanding what I want to know, without letting this wanting take over and construct an illusion, of what it _might_ be, in its place, to falsely satisfy that desire for truth. In other words: Falsehood and self-delusion, prejudice and too simple answers, simplistically rejecting questions because of "meaninglessness" etc, is wrong here, not simply because it might give a wrong answer in a practical sense, but because it cuts short that time of interest in truth; and that desire, and the will to be entangled in it, is what contemplation, or philosophical meditation, ultimately is about. That is one way of trying to create an action out of thinking: of thinking _about_ something, circling it, trying to understand its truth, always distancing myself from answers given to create new, deeper ones, to find the "real truth", which ultimately is the desire of mine to think it, to be interested in it, and to keep this cycle and the perpetual complications of concepts going until I'm bored of it. The length and depth of reflections about ideas is about stamina and willpower, about being able to sustain interest about a single point of thought; the goal is to break that interest, and to see what made me satisfied with it, in the hope, the faint, unclear, confused, but still persistent hope, that at some point my will to think something's truth will be stronger than it, and that I will be bored not by my own incompetence and inability to capture its essence, but by the simplicity of a true essence truthfully understood, which, beyond its truth, shall offer little to actually justify the amount of interest and persistence put into figuring out its reality in exactness. The goal then, is to find a world which shall satisfy my desire to know, without exceeding my capacity to want to know; and that this world than would be one I can truly be said to be knowledgable about, even only in disappointment of its reality; a world not too bleak for me to realize, to even want to know, but not yet too confusing that it still would only fascinate me; a gloom having no power in its melancholia.
2. This desire however seems rather bleak; there are others, and other ways of acting on "thinking", of attempting a theory of the world. One is set about the idea of that what is good, and how we can see the world, and reality, as something that is or at least contains the good. One can also here speak about the idea of beauty, or of elegance, rhetoric, of the form in which all world can be seen: the transcendental horizon as a metron of thought. Truth is here not good, because it is what I want; but in the opposite, I want truth, because truth is good. In some way it is beautiful to know that there is truth, whether constructed in a method or shining me into the face. Even those ideas I was born with and that are necessary to me don't restrict me, much like the kinds of ways words rhyme in a particular language don't make poems feel more arbitrary or construed. It simply is. Truth exists. That alone is powerful. And the beauty of truth is the most powerful. After all, it can give me the most elegant understanding of geometries and equations, paint nice pictures and show the origin of the universe at once, only in understanding a few proofs and equations and applying them to visualization. There is something imminently delightful in that, and something deeply good in that fun. In a world so distraught with pointless bickering, it is good to settle down and read some distinctions about truth, or some scientific result, or anything really that focusses on truth rather than on interest; because it shows a kind of goodness for the world, that alone can also show the goodness of the world: that it is true. Even within the most horrible events, and amidst the strangest of circumstances, I can look out the window and say: the sun, moon and stars are here, I can see, hear, draw it in my mind, calculate and sing and write a doxography; this world is real! Even if it is a dream, it is a _real dream_! This reality, this effervescent, shiny reality, is something that draws me to think, that incites me to investigate: to find that light that is reality, to find that beauty that is truth. And also to find me in that reality: to find my actions as true, and truthful, and as approaching this very truth that they are a part of, and that they, as approaching and trying to understand it, thus embody and reflect back; that by trying to understand truth I shall become a mirror of truth, shining back to the world that light that it, as a whole, is and creates. But even if I fail at that, I can still see my failure as part of a lucid, shiny world, as something, that even in being bad or mistaken, is good in that it is; is good in being true, not only to itself or some desire I might have, but to the world, and to that world that is beautiful truth. Even falsehood itself, in this way, embodies beauty in the way of truth: in that it is. But at the same time, truth is beautiful, in a way falsehood isn't by itself; falsehood is beautiful only as the falsehood we truthfully are within the world, but the world itself is truth, and that truth, by itself, without any reference to the world, is beautiful, because it is good, because it is shiny.
3. Another desire to think, which is quite different in its outlook, but similar in its style, is that of erotic theory, of the interest of _achieving_ beauty, to have it. This also presumes that there is some kind of good and beauty, but it is not presumed that we are simply to admonish it; instead, we are to seize it, to have beauty, to become beautyful and good - but not in the sense of morality, of decisions about an abstract idea of goodness, and how to achieve it. Rather, this is about a way of thinking that in its very style embodies this strive towards greatness and beauty, and is in this very general sense erotic. Since this is in fact very similar to the other notion, it bears explaining where precisely the difference is: The idea that the world is good contains a generally affirmative position, in as much as the contemplative idea contains a form of distance. Eroticism includes both: the good exists, but is not everything; I want to achieve it, but don't have it, etc. In thinking specifically (in difference for example to erotic style of clothing or attitude etc.) it does not need to have any connection to the body or to a kind of action, but rather to this way of looking at the world as containing beauty, that I as of yet not am, that I want to be or to have. In this sense, one could also say it is the mode of intellectual longing, of trying to capture in the mind the beauty out of reach for practical life, to have an idea of how to think about that, what one has, in a beautiful way, of trying to reach the good.
4. These ways of thinking require us to have a clear idea of what is good, and that we can find that goodness in thinking. But what if we don't quite think we can be that sure about that? Well, there are other reasons to think. Maybe we don't embody what is good within our thoughts; but we could find out where goodness lies. Maybe thinking itself isn't already the good life, but it could tell us about how to live a good life. This understanding of thinking is that of philosophical ethics: of finding out what is good, and what "good" even means. Some people give up on this at some point: they maybe already cannot answer what "good" means, and end up meta-ethical sceptics; or they think they know what it means, but not how it apply it to real things, since they think they cannot know enough about reality to know which things exist, what qualities they all have, what ways there are to live and live with them, and then to decide what it would mean to live a good life, that is, a life that is good by finding goodness in the world, however hidden. Such a way of thinking understands itself to be always preliminary; it is neither darkly contemplative nor understanding in a shiny sense, but rather in the process of clearing up those ways of living that do not entail goodness, and those ideas of goodness that are not true to the idea of finding that what is good. The attempt of finding something is theoretical, but with a practical aim; I approach the cosmos, but only to learn at last what it might mean to live a happy life, to fulfill what the gods want of the world. I am questioning why I am doing anything, but see in that questioning the way of an answer, and ultimately, of that answer of life, of why I should live, of what is good and can be understood to be good. In other words: I do not seek my desires; I do not seek truth about the world as unrelated to me; rather, I seek the truth about what my desires ought to be to approach the truth of what is good, independently of what they are telling me now that it is supposed to be good, but also not disregarding them; they are an important fact, and fulfilling them might be good; but it will then be good, because it would be the truth of goodness to fulfill desires, and not the other way around, and there is no desire present in my search for goodness, other than this necessary urge to find out what I should do, what would be good, that itself describes the preliminarity of the notion of truth, and of desire and decision to know, that it is attached to; I want to think, in other words, because I want to know what I should want and then too what I should want to think; the mist clears itself with the answer. But occasionally, it may return; and for that reason, and for all others, I may want to write down and explain to everyone what is good and why, so, if I ever again fall into that confusion, or anyone else might be in a similar place, I can explain what would be a good way to live, and what the truth of ethics is; on the one side, that if I may be wrong about it, that I should not labour for the rest of my life under the misconception to have found the good life, and instead need to search once more; but if I am not disproven, that then those which attempted to see too the greatness of this result, which stems from the fact, that if anything shall tell me what is good, then there is only one thing I can no about it to begin with: that to do so is good, if only for not falsely believing that "good" means one thing while it does another or maybe (and in this way the failure from before might have been a success), that it might mean nothing at all. Which of these it is, will only experience within the world tell, and experience in searching the good and talking about it; but for the necessity of doing so (at least until having found out to the contrary while doing it), this also is, and a very different, desire to think, or one way of acting through thought.
5. However, there might be quite different reasons one might be concerned with what is good, or with acting through thought, and one quite more practical. Let's say I know how I want to live, what the good is, and so on; how do I actually realize that? How can I fulfull my idea of what is good, how can I act on abstract ideas that don't have much to do with my day-to-day life? Let's say I am absolutely sure that lying is bad, and that being honest is something I should do; how can I be honest? And so with many other virtues: be it modesty, courage, justice, or forgiveness. Even if I do hold conventional opinions about them, or have my own understanding of ethical principles, I may not at all know how to practically make a decision about them. How do I decide when I am between evils? What should I do when I am asked if I should steal to save someone's life? This is not a theoretical question. Many decisions in my every day life are like that, be it less extreme. And I often don't know any other way than to decide by habit or convenience, neither of which is justified as an answer to moral paradoxes. Here, I might have a different way of thinking: I might imagine that in fact, I could come up with a moral theory that could answer this. Maybe, I can find the right preferences, the right decisions, to actually do what is good in an imperfect world. But that is quite a difficult task. I do, after all, not ask what is good; I already know that. I want to know how to actually act on it. I also don't ask something about reality; I already (mostly) know the options. The question really is, how to make that choice. Have I to leave it up to chance or fate, and if so, am I actually living my own life, or is the world? This is the fundamental unease at the root of it. It's about control; about freeing myself of other people's, and of the world's, influences on my decisions, to become free. And if thinking can help me do that, than this action of thought, which I hope to already be free, can expand its influence beyond its primary region into the rest of my life. All other ideas and mental capacities are great, but really mostly for this: as a tool to free myself from this confinement, from my freedom being imprisoned in pure thought; they may help me gain the strength to actually make a decision on my own, not living someone elses decision. Therefore, this method is mostly negative; it is about tearing down false beliefs, and really any influenced thought, anything externally constructed within me, that can prevent me from making those decisions by myself that I would have otherwise made only on the behest of other people's expectations of me; and in this negation, in the wholesale destruction of my image of their expectations, I am free to live through and by my thoughts, which have now become only an emblem of those desires in life which I in some sense am, but which don't control me, as they are choosen by me, and in a way that is not a mere "value", but a way of deciding, of overcoming the moral paradoxes within my own believes of what I and this world should be, and how I nontheless can exist within a world not of my own making, and with abilities and limitations maybe not originally reflected in my imigination of what the subject of the good life should be like.
6. But maybe this is still to small for me, not reflected at all. After all, why do I have to make these decision? Has the world to be as imperfect as it is, really? Is tearing down my _beliefs_ about how to act in imperfect situations not enough - should I not also tear down these realities? Is it even possible to live a good life in a bad world? Here I encounter a different way of thinking still. Not in the loud exclamations of despair about the world, as justified as they might be, but in the more reflected moments, when I start to think about what the world really would need to be like for people to be free, and to be able to act morally. What would be the social and political necessities of people to lead a good life, to be good, to not live in despair? If the moral paradoxes are not individual, not problems of decision theory, but of society, of politics, then the question becomes how to create a world in which we are not confronted gratuitously with moral paradoxes and impossible choices. But simply tearing it down is not enough. Again, similarly with how only _thinking_ about what would be a good decision can tear down the external influence and makes it possible for me to make my own decision, only _thinking_ about what would be a different system of the world that prevents these paradoxes actually does something. Complaining about the world being cruel does not make it less cruel, unfortunately; otherwise, it would not be since anicent times. The task here is to really think through the various political philosophies, and anwer basic questions like: should a state exist? It is necessary for people to have power over each other, or is it a decision, and if so, is it a good or a bad decision? How much stuff do we have, and can we survive on it, or will we destroy our basis of living first? Is pacifism possible or self-destructive? Is equality something I think is good, and if so, equality in what regard? Etc.etc. The point is not just to answer these questions individually (like in a seminar on the history of political philosophy, for a completely contemplative motivation), but to make a decision on what I want to persue in life more generally, beyond myself, as the good life; to ground ethics in politics, as Aristotle once said was necessary, and as is clear every day in political disasters has never seriously been succeeded in. All other theoretical efforts are then seen as merely instrumental for this goal; for the sake of political analysis, criticism and theory, of creating the idea of a world that is a possible place, where I could actually lead a good life, without having to sacrifice my ethical cocerns every day to the demons of practical function and lack of time to make a choice. But for that goal, it is worthy to think; for as much as it can achieve for that end, the better.
7. This however is also not the last of it; for assume, I would already know the right answers to these questions, then it would still be a difficult task to fulfill them. Here again we are tasked with similar questions as for that of moral paradoxes, but in a more abstract sense; not: how should I even decide in an imperfect situation; but: what action gives me the best chance to better the world to what I see as a good goal? That is a much more concrete question for once, but also one that is less general. It does not ask for any possible way to act, but for likelihoods of reaching a set goal. Strategy and tactics are not influencing ideology, as that is either fixed or discussed in a different context altogether than that of real action. Also, truth appears in a new light. Whereas before, truth was necessary to understand what the goal is, now the goal shows us that truth is important - because it was necessary to reach the understanding of what what we (now) want. Thinking is once again a practical act, but an act of constructing or destructing intellectual edificies for the sake of reaching a goal, a goal we already understand to be correct by a truth that is higher than this practical measure of success or progress. What is useful to progress is measured in the result, how far it can actually change the world, end the conditions that needed us to decide to horrible things, not to live fulfulling lives. And that seems here rather obvious. I don't really need to reflect on if I really think war is bad to be able to do something about it. I simply know what I want, but maybe don't know how to achieve it. And here, thinking becomes necessary, creating theories becomes necessary. Theories are useful tools to map out my movement space, to know what options I truly have. That in itself is useful. And so I might focus on, for example, which people to talk to to convince them of a certain political goal; which diplomatic actions would be good; or which tax rate would be sensible. Because all that focusses on advancing that fundamental goal, of creating a world I find livable; of using my thinking capacity for what I understand to be good; and therefore, thinking as such is here seen not as good - and also not truth, in general! - only _for that goal_ it is good, and because it is for it.
8. There is a very different reason to think and create theories, which however, in the first light, might appear to be the same; that is the way of achieving utility, or of the gains of capacity to act in general. It is important to understand that we are here not talking about conscious choice of trying to implement utilitarian moral principles in general, as this is about utility of thought, not thought about utility. Thoughts about utility can appear in many places also, probably in most modes of thinking that don't take, that their result is matching their expectations, for granted. However, only this specific mode of thinking takes its _end_ in it, to create outcomes, to do something with thinking, and not either in thinking or in very specific (individual or political) outcomes. This reason to think makes a goal out of the measure of achievement in thinking, much like it is in sports or other games, and reifies the idea of progression towards something (that then is understood as either good or bad, and the action therefore accepted or rejected, but always in relation to that goal) into an idea of _progress_ as such, which is then often connected to the development of science, technology and industry, of the capacity of us all to act. Now, I cannot on my own create similarly powerful sources, but I can feel a certain creation, even if only slightly, contributing to it; and that way of contribution to a larger movement, of being productive for it, can be its own motivation of thought. It is perhaps the most dominating motivation in academic institutions, that often operate much more on social pressures and expectations around such processes than on ideas of truth as contemplative, artistic, ethical or political. However, it is only _one_ form of thinking; and the expectation that it should dominate is one only shared by it, and not by the other forms. This is because the fact, that it is dominating in these institutions, would only be relevant if other modes of thinking would be very interested in that; but given the small personal or political relevancy of academia, this interest really is only shared by the very mode of thinking that already reproduces it. That is also not to disparage the idea, of contributing to this movement as a whole, but to say that this interest is one of many possible motives of thought and theory creation.
9. Up to this point, all the modes shared one thing in common: that it treated the thought, as an action, as seperate from the mode or method of conducting it. This is different from the last two modes I want to present. In these, the action of thought, or the way of conducting it, is precisely not in that relation of intention, of wanting to think something for a particular reason; instead, it is in itself, as a method or an action as such. What I mean with that will become more obvious with the two cases. First, there is what I call purely constructive thought. This is not the same as productive thinking, as the last notion was; as that also includes criticism of past ideas, for the sake of moving towards a new future. Instead, this mode of thinking simply constructs the contents of an idea, only to stay within it. One could say it is a kind of cognitive stim: this reduction here is methodological, not constricting the contents of any idea. It simply is about recognizing, that this is also one way of thinking, that such ways of being exist. One could, in this sense, also regard this text as an example of it. And fundamentally, it is not about reaching any specific conclusions, or even about having fun or doing something of value, but about thinking as a mode of existence, of passing time. It is about the presentness that is being in thought.
10. There is however one other modification of that, that is typically called meditation in the western tradition, albeit in a very different way than the ways in which the western tradition tries to describe the east. This method is about thinking _something_ (not thinking or reflecting about it, but thinking it through) as both a mode of existence, or a cogntive stim, and a desire to understand what it truthfully is. This mode is perhaps the most mysterious; its point is in the creation of presentness not of the thinker, but of the thought; its end point is the manifestation of the idea, not as a clarity in someone's mind, but in itself; it is a form of theological thinking, but not as a theoretical contemplation about theology, but as the divination and revelation itself. However, it is also not in any way, in its content, mysterious; it simply is the focus on some idea or thing, in the hope that me thinking about it helps me to understand what it is, but not for any goal outside of it; the goal is that I want the idea, not myself, to be that what I focus on, that I don't loose myself in my own method (as in the case before), but in the content it is focussed on.

After this list of different kinds of reasons or modes of thinking, the question is what we can conclude about these ways of thinking. Any of them sees itself as good and the others as wrong (at least most of them in theory, but basically all in practice); any of them can be correct but not together. In a singular way of thinking, this creates the allusion of a contradiction in method, when really there is no contradiction, only a difference in points of view; but for a view of that kind, it cannot be put into another, and so any form of consciousness or any alter needs to have a particular way of thinking, one of these or another, at least at one time; a certain kind of motivation of thinking, or of certain goals. In this sense, for example, one can think of the question of valuelessness or of the distinction of facts and values as a question of motivation, of thinking in terms of values or not, not as a question, for a particular consciousness, to accept this distinction or not, that is, to accept one or the other kind of thinking or reason to think something. However, this also doesn't mean that there is a categorical distinction between these different kinds of thinking, that one and the other is correct, and that the question is to choose between them, or to categorize thinking into these different ways. Rather, they simply are different methods of thought, and reasons to think about a particular thing; and the best way of dealing with them is not to put them against each other, or to build a generalized form of meta-thinking about these ways to think, but to see each reflected into the other, and to make it possible to connect them in their contents, but to understand them to be distinguished in method or approach. That is, each might find in the other the contents of their own reflections.

This is an odd way of solving a methodological dispute; and in fact, it is not that at all. What I am trying to do here is distinguish two very different, but often confused things: the motivation or reason of thinking, the goal one has in a certain approach; and the means of achieving those ends. For certain goals, methodologies might be sensible which are deeply wrong for other goals. That is also not surprising, if we understand them as tools towards a truth that is the truth of a certain experience/choice we make; but it is not reconcilable with the notion that truth has to be one in order to exist at all. This can also be understood as a stance against methodological reductionism, and thus reductionism more broadly: just because A and B are also X, does not mean they are just X, that is, categorical reduction does not work, and neither does mereological reduction, the idea that if X is made of A and B it is just those, not X. Ways of thinking are reflected in each other, but they are not those reflections; and truth is a different reflection of the world, but that does not mean the world only is that truth, or shares the unity that truth needs to hold as a conception by that particular point of thinking that understands it as its concept of truth.

For many years, i tried to unify method and way of understanding within ourselves as a self, before realizing we were different, and still I often think about the idea of unity or of wholeness of the world. That idea is also not without use, but has to be understood as the wholeness of a particular act of consciousness within a connected subjective system, which houses very different such acts and self/ves-understandings. That multiplicity of goals thus necessitates it for us to write, alternatingly, in different styles, and to try to adapt them to each other only in what material they can take from each other. However, this form of anti-reductionism is not relativistic; it entails precisely the differences between them, unresolved, but also unpacified. It only opens the question: what way of thinking can be correct? by noting at first that these different notions of thinking are all legitimate, don't form a single coherent system with each other, but each on their own, and allows comparisons then not be made as of mistakes in a method or of methodological differences towards goals that are assumed to be shared, but as a comparison of attitudes that describes to us what the motivation and reason to think, and to reflect on that thinking, could have been in the first place.