Thinking With David Krakauer

Listening to David Krakauer on Jim Rutt’s “Worldview” podcast while making dinner made a few things snap into place for me. You can listen to it here: https://www.jimruttshow.com/david-krakauer-3/

I appreciate how rigorously he avoids collapsing the epistemic into the ontological. Krakauer is very lucid about wanting to prevent effective theories from hardening into a metaphysics. His “Ouroboros” claim that you can start from physics, or from language, or from biology, and then close a circular explanatory chain is anti-foundationalist at the level of our knowledge of reality. There’s no privileged starting point, no one most fundamental science, but only different entry points into a loop of mutual constraint.

Krakauer:

“there is this linear conception of reality that’s a kind of a scale theory starting with very little things that we call fundamental, increasingly aggregated things that we call effective, and that’s the story. And what the Ouroboros says is is a bit more radical. It says, you know what? Here’s a funny fact. You start with language and mathematics. You conceptualize the universe in terms of mathematical principles, fields, forces, particles. You develop physics. You use your physical theory to develop chemistry, which explains some elements of biology and so on. So you started with the thing that should be the most derived state, mind, and you derive the most fundamental state, physics.

…you could [also] start with biology. You could say, well, look: Everything starts with evolution after all. We start as prokaryotic things, single celled organisms. They become multicellular. They develop tissue specialization, nervous systems, eventually material culture and language, eventually theories. Out pops physics, you know, and the circle continues. So… epistemologically…there is no such thing as fundamental. You can establish your foundations anywhere you like, and then you complete the circle. Right? And you come back and eat your own tail at some point.”

I am totally onboard with his anti-foundational epistemology. I don’t want to ontologize effective theories either. But listening to him made me realize more clearly where I diverge. 

My own philosophical inclinations have me seeking a post-Kantian onto-epistemic re-unification: I want to understand how natural scientific inquiry and metaphysical speculation can be integrated with everyday life, rather than leaving the three domains (inquired, speculative, prosaic) quarantined. I tend to look for the bridge not above or outside ordinary life, but in the prosaic itself, but only by rendering the prosaic poetic. That’s the Romantic move, of course: to find in the ordinary operations of thought, perception, and language the traces of a deeper cosmic drama (this is what Novalis meant by “romanticizing the world”). I’m not interested in rationalizing the prosaic into a bloodless system, but I’m also not content to safely tuck the “spiritual” side of life into an “irrationality” play pin, as if religious scripture is just “good literature.” Where Krakauer will happily treat Freud and Jung as brilliant novelists (to be fair, that was Rutt’s wording, but Krakauer did not protest), I keep feeling pushed to ask what ontological insights the “mythological process” (Schelling) might be groping toward, however clumsily.

I resist building absolute firewalls between the three domains. The fire of imaginative generalization only burns well if it has both wood and oxygen, ie, if it is fed by both careful scientific inquiry and model testing and a deep respect for the irreducibility of personhood and our soul-making projects. That’s where I am tempted to extend the ouroboros beyond where Krakauer leaves it. It is not only an epistemic circle, but as a way of thinking the dipolar mutual implication of being and thought, cosmos and consciousness. 

This divergence shows up politically. Krakauer leans heavily on Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between negative and positive freedom, and he clearly identifies with negative liberty because of a desire to protect individuals from imposed authority. This is an essential value that I share! But I think he caricatures positive freedom as simply reducible to “I choose to impose my religious orthodoxy on the world.” Berlin was rightly wary of its authoritarian misuses (eg, the state or church or theocracy claiming to know your life purpose better than you do). But if we abandon positive accounts of freedom altogether, we are left with the emptiness of the liberal minimum: freedom as non-interference, without a robust sense of what we are free for. The influences of Kant and German idealism (a tradition wherein freedom means not just the ability to do what I desire without outside interference, but the ability to question and reshape my own desires via Bildung and an inner alignment toward the Good, True, and Beautiful), and of process theology (wherein God is not a coercive authority but a persuasive lure) push me to think freedom not just as the absence of constraint, but as participation in a larger creative order. Again, this is a Romantic impulse to make the prosaic world of institutions, laws, and habits answerable to a deeper, more-than-prosaic vision of what humans are and might become. I recognize the dangers here, and the criticisms of Romanticism’s shortcomings that still need to be addressed (Hegel’s concerns about the beautiful soul chief among them!). 

More work ahead : )