The number of publications dealing with the embodied nature of all knowledge and, therefore, with the latter’s sensual roots, has increased exponentially over the past two decades. Simultaneously, a so-called “affective turn” seems to be gaining momentum in the panorama of contemporary thought. All this is very remarkable of course, as the relation between mind and body has often been overlooked, when not overtly denied, in modern Western culture. Yet like any reactive gesture, this one also presents a number of problems. To begin with, it is doubtful that it truly breaks with what it rather seems to reproduce: a dominant cognitive paradigm.
For why is it – one may ask – that when, today, we show some interest to know how is it that we know in the first place, we seem to only pay attention to the material processes involved in the production of the most basic forms of knowledge (e.g. the perception of sensible qualities, the iconic association of forms, or the indexical inference of events)?
We would like to venture the following response: because, whether we like it or not, we are under the subliminal influence of modern science, modern economy, and modern politics, or, what amounts to the same, of their combined ideology; subliminal means: taking place below (sub-) the threshold (limes) of our consciousness.
I. Modern Science
As Heidegger observes, modern “science only . . . encounters that which its manner of representing has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.” Put differently: it acknowledges to investigate what it has previously (re)defined (for things are always-already somehow) according to its own normative parameters (e.g. a jar is a material container with specific chemical properties as per its material composition and whose internal emptiness is made of air particles).
In the image of (British) empiricist philosophy, which laid its theoretical foundations back in the 17th century, modern science abandons complex ideas to (a) logics, to police them, and (b) literature (including philosophical literature) to eventually play with them. Its interest focusses, first, in how our minds perceive the qualities, forms, etc. that our senses find disseminated throughout the world; for example, colours. And from there it examines how we form basic ideas like, say, the ideas of causality, universality, and exceptionality (e.g. if I put my hand on the fire it will get burnt, since fire has the property of burning whatever comes close to it, except water and other liquids).
In this sense, modern science makes no distinction, for instance, between the thinking process of Donald Trump and that of Gilles Deleuze. But more on this equality on the section on politics below.
What relevance can more complex ideas be said to have, then? Very little indeed. There are other sciences, whose strict scientific status, nonetheless, remains somewhat problematic (i.e. the so-called social sciences), that may, of course, study them. But, more often than not, here, too, rather-simple explanations of the type X determines Y, or Φ echoes Γ, etc. are the rule. What particular types of affectivity correspond to such and such modalities of thought?, or what social-cultural gender model does a given cinematographic character replicate? We are happy to get to know this, at most.
II. Economy (a.k.a. Capitalism)
Complex ideas, like those one finds in the works of Kant, Schelling, Leibniz… or García Márquez and Borges, are totally offside here. There is some mystery in why people continue to read philosophy, which is something as mentally demanding as it is useless in practical terms. But there are two possible things one can do with this, granted that to have departments of philosophy and to publish books of philosophy is fine, anyway, since some people seem to like it all the same, and that means there is a market for it after all. You can spend your time – like you would do with your body in a gym – checking the logical validity of such and such arguments, i.e. how much they conform to or deviate from a series of pre-established logical rules. There are clubs for this, in fact most departments of philosophy in the UK and the US seem to be clubs of this kind. Or else you can just relax on your sofa and enjoy Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, or the cheap admixture of literature and pseudo-philosophy that is so very much en vogue today, or the poetry of Paul Éluard, or Joyce’s narrative, just like you would taste an exquisite French or German wine. For capitalism is our best friend: it allows us some time to sit down comfortably (after disconnecting our mobile phones, or in between checking Facebook and Instagram) and read a bit, especially in times of COVID-19. Hence, in the end, complex ideas are just good to consume.
I. Modern Politics
Besides, the source of complex ideas, which is pure thought (what other source could there actually be for them?), cannot be compared to the observable sources of the much-more-accessible basic ideas we all have. For we do not all have complex ideas, evidently. Put otherwise, complex ideas are insufficiently democratic. Like philosophy. Conversely modern science is much-more democratic. For it investigates our basic ideas and their material sources. Paying too much attention to thought in itself sounds too idealistic and undemocratic. And ultimately as something laughable. But does not the legend have it that philosophy began by provoking a hilarious reaction on a Thracian slave?
A truly-contemporary representation of thought in itself: unnecessary complicated, arrogant, and eventually comic