All is Water
The History of The Philosophy of Everything
Some of my best friends have theories of everything.
It used to be thought of as de rigeur to have a grand, unified theory of everything. In modern times, this aspiration has fallen on harder times. Folks like Levinas, Arendt, and before them, Rosenzweig, argued that totalising theories somehow drove the West to totalitarianism—the desire for a complete view of the universe turns the individual into a mere cog in the machine. Totality is just another word for ideology. In addition to the ethical and political challenge of totalising thought, a more modest critique from Popper argued that philosophy can only progress through falsification—theory must remain tentative. We can posit things as true, but really they are only true for now. Ironically, both the Levinasian view that totality ignores the human face and the Popperian view that totality ignores the opportunity for falsification can be formulated in totalizing terms themselves.
Popper is just Heraclitus 2.0: all is flux. Levinas, Arendt, and Rosenzweig are just following Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelian insistence that “truth is subjectivity.” In short, metaphysics is totalizing and it’s impossible to avoid it, even when you think you are.
But some totalizers are more adamant than others and that’s where the difference comes into play—do you think the goal of thought is consilience or do you think it’s more like bricolage, more like style, more like Midrash, where the goal is less to have a view of the All, and more to have a unique character, a particular take, a stance, a signature?
I find both compelling and limited. Consilience risks idolatry—making a model and then trying too hard to fit everything into it. Style risks idolatry in the other direction, producing a factory of sycophants and copy-cats who attempt to elevate the signature of the thinker into some kind of holy writ. The oracular quality of the thought becomes an intoxicant you either ascribe to or shun, with no middle ground.
In Jewish terms, I take the destruction of the Temple as a metaphor for the inability fo arrive at the total view—but the longing to rebuild the Temple is legitimate and important. To turn our backs on consilience altogether and to celebrate the loss of the theory of everything is callous. So we have to hold the tension between an aspiration for complete knowledge with the awareness that insisting on having found it has historically led to disappointment and catastrophe. We must learn to wait for the Messiah, but not be too hasty that we welcome the wrong one. That’s a heavy load of cognitive dissonance to bear, and one reason why intellectuals tend to divide up either into grand theorists or anti-theorists.
Perhaps the antidote is to study the theories of others and so appreciate their longing. The sheer diversity of attempts is itself an induction into a conversation that has yet to resolve. Is it all just a game, as Wittgenstein thought? Yes, but the game can change, and we can make it so that all is not games, but something else that we wish to emphasize. The less obvious, the more poetic. Thus, Dante and Hafiz insist that all is love. How will you complete the mad-lib?