Review essay: The quest for meaning

Abstract

This essay is a review of Raymond Geuss’s book, Seeing Double. The review discusses the seven essays that comprise the book, which is concerned with the implications of the fact that the world never makes complete sense to us and that there are only fragments of meaning without any higher order or authority to make sense of the world. The book explores the consequences of abandoning the idea of a unity view of the world. The review essay discusses some of the issues around an alternative perspective that prioritizes plurality.

This is a collection of seven essays, two of which have appeared in English and three others in German. In a short Preface, Raymond Guess, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Cambridge University, outlines a theme running through the essays. As suggested by the title of the book, the essays deal with the need to see the world from different positions rather than seek a single synoptic view. The quest for a bird’s eye view of the world is misguided, not because it is not possible but because human vision is always from a particular position. We cannot alter that fact about cognition, but we can instead seek to see the world from different positions, ‘to see double’ (I will discuss this somewhat problematical metaphor later in the essay.).

Geuss is preoccupied with the problem of how we can gain knowledge of the world and what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the absence of a higher position from which we can view things. His target is the philosophical position that there is a final view of the world and that all our beliefs, hopes and aspirations can be made consistent. This, what he refers to as a ‘very cosy view of the universe’, might once have made sense as a view of the natural world but is today untenable as a model to understand the social world. ‘What if things don’t finally all hang together or fit together? What if plurality of vision and conflict of desire are permanent states’. The essays explore various aspects of such possibilities.

The essays are rich in insights on the specific topics discussed and written in lucid prose, though at times with a structure that is difficult to follow. The reader learns much, especially from the author’s erudition and knowledge, above all of the classics works of antiquity and Renaissance thought. This strength perhaps reveals a weakness in that there is very little contemporary theory discussed and the essays have few references. Major problems that pertain to the human predicament today have to be seen though authors who lived in very different times.

The first essay is about the invention of the essay itself as a literary mode of expression to try out new ideas. In this chapter, which is on Michel de Montaigne, who invented the genre of the essay in a work published between 1571 and 1592, the spirit of Renaissance thought is perfectly captured as anti-dogmatic and sceptical of the scholastic view of there being a natural order that dictates how people should live. Montaigne celebrated leisure and something approaching idleness as the best way to gain self-knowledge rather than living one’s life according to the dictates of an imposed order, which would have been the received scholastic view at this time. Montaigne’s essays offered a stark contrast, for instance, to Augustine’s Confessions, which while also concerned with self-reflection was based on a fixed conception of the self. Montaigne’s scepticism and anti-dogmatism anticipates a current in modernity, which can also be seen as challenging a new kind of dogmatism that came later with modernity in its quest for certainty. This in fact was an argument made by Toulmin (1992) in an acclaimed book (see also O’ Neill, 2001). However, Montaigne was ultimately a product of Renaissance humanism. As Guess points out, he does still adhere to the need to accept that which cannot be changed, such as what he called ‘the general law of the world’. So, there was a tension in Montaigne’s thought between acceptance of the world as it is and the need to explore possibilities for self-knowledge. The self can undergo change but the world cannot. For Guess, the value of Montaigne’s work is as a vehicle to explore ‘the shifting and plural ways of seeing the same thing’.

The next chapter concerns a similar theme, which might be described as the anticipation of modernity in Renaissance thought. His focus here is Rabelais whose writings were written before the standardization of French and present major problems of translation, which in turn raises questions of interpretation in the context of a situation in which we have texts with an ‘irreducible variety of languages and dialects’. Guess makes a very interesting observation that much of Western literature presents action as if it were occurring in a monoglottal world when in fact it was the contrary. The characters in the Aeneid, for instance, were not speaking in flawless Latin but in Greek or in Punic. The problem of translation was especially pressing for 16th century France and relates to issues of power and interpretation, which are deeply intertwined. Rabelais, unlike for example Thomas More, did not write in the patrician language of Latin, but in the vernacular, which itself was a challenge to ecclesiastical authority. For Guess, this all concerns the problem of how standards arise and what may be deemed permissible. Rabelais was censored by the Sorbonne, which banned his books.

Rabelais was, like Montaigne, a humanist scholar in the footsteps of Erasmus and like all humanists of the era they saw Cicero as establishing the basic tenets of what had become Renaissance humanism and its core idea that ‘man is the measure of all things’. While he made fun of the Christian worldview, he did not necessary depart from it. He had contempt for the scholastic mediaeval worldview, which was the contrary to humanism, which was also in tension with the Gothic world. With latter he had an ambivalent relation, since it was also associated with the mediaeval past. Reading this chapter, one is struck by the fact that this period prepared the rise of modernity, not just in the scepticism that it fostered, but by creating a rupture with the period that preceded it. Unlike modernity itself, it did not define itself by the orientation to the future as such but by the attempt to recover something from a past anterior to the recent past. The modern worldview when it finally emerged in the 18th century inherited this sense of rupture, as well as reverence for antiquity. Guess warns of the danger of finding too much in these 16th century authors for the present. Figures such as More, Erasmus, Rabelais and Montaigne ‘exhibited an ability to accept a relatively high degree of uncertainty and ambiguity in human affairs. They all seemed to cultivate a mildly sceptical ability to distance themselves from, and laugh at, themselves and their own necessities’. Guess does not mention it, but according to the Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt, ¹ Montaigne influenced Shakespeare who would have been familiar with his work and the general humanist spirit of the age, which was also a European movement and not a national one. Rabelais and Shakespeare also shared a common concern with comedy (McLoughlin, 2000). A contrast though emerges with Cervantes, who did not share Rabelais’s recognition and toleration of ambiguity. Against the background of the Reformation, which overlaps with the humanist Renaissance, it may be the case that these figures were outliers in an era that witnessed the rise of Christian authoritarianism and neo-Latin, which made possible the consolidation of the European intellectual elites.

Chapter 3 is on Nietzsche and especially Beyond Good and Evil [1886]. As with his concern in the previous chapters, Guess sees Nietzsche as an anti-dogmatizing philosopher in the sense that he sought to over-come dogmatism in philosophy, in this case the dogmatism of modernity. The surprising method for this in Nietzsche was through ethnography, which Guess shows is absolutely essential for an understanding of Nietzsche as is his philological background. Indeed, philology as the interpretation of ancient texts waved the way towards ethnology, which in effect is the German tradition of anthropology. While neither are normally seen as cultivating scepticism and anti-dogmatism, that was precisely what Nietzsche found in these disciplines. Ethnology is used by him to bring about a move from the philosophical search for self-knowledge to knowledge of the Other. To know ourselves we need to know our history, but to do this we need to travel – to experience displacement (see also Mota, 2023) – and learn about the lives of others. So, Nietzsche does not believe that self-knowledge can be acquired through introspection or self-contemplation alone. What he offered was a different kind of hermeneutics as a relation with a radical otherness. ‘I can learn something about myself through cognitively alert interaction with the Other’. It allows us to correct deep-seated views we have of ourselves. However, as Guess points out, Nietzsche was uncritically following a deeply flawed notion common in 19th-century Europe that native people in other parts of the world are what we in the modern West once were. This is because it was uncritically assumed that history unfolds sequentially through phases, such that we can study past versions of ourselves in other cultures which are still ‘primitive’. But of course, history is much more varied and dispersed such that ‘one should not expect to see one’s own exact past externalized in the Other’. In the end it does seem then that Nietzsche was concerned with self-collection, except in this case collective self-knowledge, but different in how he thought it could be arrived at. Geuss’s essay offers a very interesting account of Nietzsche and the different meanings of ‘travel’, which can also be to view one’s own world through the eyes of travellers and that the philosopher is also a kind of traveller even without travelling to foreign lands. For Guess, the lesson of Nietzsche’s philosophy, especially in Beyond Good and Evil, is about locating oneself in one’s world through the eyes of the foreign traveller. This displacement will reveal a multiplicity of perspectives rather than a single unitary one.

The next three chapters are not organized around a key figure but instead explore the sheer impossibility of a central or single vision or cognition of the world. Chapter 4, ‘Autopsy and Polyphony’, explores how our view of the world is divided between the visual and the auditory structures of cognition. Guess wants to show that these do not overlap or necessarily complement each other. He argues that western culture is based on the primacy of vision. He makes the interesting observation that ‘theory’ (theoria) was originally Greek for a delegation of officials sent off to travel to a distant sanctuary to attend religious ceremonies in the name of the city that sent them. After it lost that specific meaning, it retained the sense of a visual mode of cognition and as form of observation. Despite the dominance of the primacy of vision, there are of course other human senses that have also been important in relating to the world as modes of knowledge, for example smell, taste and hearing. It is also true that much of what we know about the modern has not come from vision, which relies on direct personal experience. Nonetheless, the visual appears to have acquired epistemic dominance in the modern world, whether in science or in the law (as in the legal requirement for a witness to testify in person and the role of eye-witnesses). At this point some consideration of Foucault’s discussion of the ‘gaze’ – as in for example the Birth of the Clinic – would have provided additional testimony of the centrality of vision (Foucault, 1973 [1963]; see also Jay, 1993). Geuss is also aware of the importance of voice and thus of the auditory mode of cognition. He does not mention it, but arguably with Christianity ‘the Word of God’ is a reminder of the power of language and its relation with the primacy of the voice. He does note that ‘it is an auditory phenomenon – the hearing of a voice, whether human or divine – which gives us distance from the whole visual field’. Indeed, I think it is often said that the auditory function is that last of the human senses that the dying possess. Politics as he notes is mostly a matter of hearing and listening than seeing: Getting people to listen and act as you wish them is the basis of power. But when combined with the visual, more comprehensive forms of power can be mobilized. While Geuss does not come down on the side of either the voice or the eye, my view is that when all is said and done it is probably the case that in fact the voice has had the upper hand in shaping the modern world, at least if we take the history of protest and social movements as our guide. This has been one of the key insights of Habermas (1992 [1962]) and Touraine (1981).

The position that Guess ends up with in this chapter is not to say that the absence of a final unifying point means we are in a cognitive abyss, but the recognition of the role of polyphony and multiple forms of cognition. The authors that he is concerned with all recognized its place in human affairs, at least since the 16th century.

Chapter 5 deals with standards of correctness and incorrectness in language in the absence of definitive authority on what constitutes correct usage. English is a good example of this as, unlike German for instance, there is no definitive authority on what constitutes correct English. The Oxford English Dictionary does establish a limited authority but one confined to vocabulary and, as Guess points out, it is mostly historically directed in recording past usage. So how has it come about that, on one side, there is a view about correct/incorrect usage and yet, on the other, there is no authority to establish to it? The answer is that the social world functions without such forms of ultimate authority. Languages existed before their standardization and somehow custom and practice made them work. Yet, for 2000 years the idea of an ideal model of Latin persisted and that it should be the basis of humanistic knowledge. It also provided the model for the standardization of other languages, such as Spanish and later French. But the reality was that Latin was not quite so uniform. The body of literature that has come to define the language was produced in the late Republic and was exemplified by Cicero. Guess points out that in fact there were many languages spoken in Italy at this time and a uniform language was by no means self-evident. Latin grammar simply did not exist at the time of Cicero. This did not mean that they spoke in a totally random manner! ‘The rules of grammar that were later formulated to a very large extent describe regularities in the language of the texts that have survived’. The same can be said about Greek, which existed even in a far greater variety of vernacular forms with which different literary genres can be associated. For the ancient Greeks, rhetoric was more about imparting advice, and, with Plato, language was about the search for truth. Nor did Greek and Latin belong to separate linguistic worlds. It was a Greek speaking slave, who translated the Odyssey into Latin. Guess concludes the chapter with the claim that normative connections do not have an objective existence. ‘We construct them in complicated ways and then enforce them’. He acknowledges that readers may find this unsatisfactory as it is just an empirical argument, but there is nothing else, ‘only history’. As a sociologist I do not find it unsatisfactory and agree, but from a social science perspective it is somewhat uncontroversial to state this. There is one caveat though. Guess says this is not a complete account. This is correct since while normative structures are products of history, they also take on an evolutionary form in establishing standards and systems of reference that are not so easily thrown out. Table manners and tastes may change as new fashions are invented, but certain moral and even political standards take on a permanence that can be jettisoned only at the cost of societal regression.

The next chapter is concerned with the problem of how success and failure should be understood. The examples that are taken are mostly concerned with the aesthetic sphere. Many great artistic works, especially in music, were failures in their time but were later major successes. Success in artistic creations is often postponed to the future when the work acquires the stature of a classic. ‘The “present” of a work of art always lies in the future, in its future’. Wagner was writing not for his contemporaries but for the future. However, the problem of success and failure goes beyond artistic posterity and concerns major existential problems, such as how one judges whether one’s life was a success or not. In a vein similar to the argument developed in the preceding chapters, Guess believes that in the absence of a fixed or objective external criteria to judge what a success is, success can only be a matter of historically or culturally contextually shifting judgements. This does not lead to relativism in some radical sense, since it does not reject the possibility of judgement but does not lead to a view of judgement as universally valid, at least except for certain kinds of validity claims, such as those of the mathematics. The history of philosophy has led us to think that there is ultimately a goal or purpose to life that allows us to judge success and failure. This was the legacy of the ancient philosophers and has rarely been questioned. Schopenhauer is not mentioned but he would be an example of a thinker who questioned the ultimate value of human life, which he saw shaped by perpetual suffering. The chapter discusses literary and philosophical conceptions of failure. The title of the chapter, ‘Succeed, Fail, Fail Better’, invokes Samuel Beckett’s famous phrase that all that can be hoped for is to fail less badly. ‘Samuel Beckett is merely the latest in a string of authors fascinated by failure. Failure in his work becomes a self-reflective, self-intensifying process beyond tragedy and comedy, rooted in the human condition’.

The chapter offers interesting insights into the question of success and failure in the absence of definitive standards of judgement. Guess does not consider the distinction between the perspective of the social actor – let’s call it the first order perspective – and the perspective – the second order perspective – of the theorist or philosopher reflecting on first order interpretations of life and world. The second order perspective does at least allow some value judgements to be made, quite aside from explanations. I will not consider here the complex question of justification and explanation. ² The individual does not normally see their world as constructed, at least in their everyday life, for if they did their lives would fall apart, but that is a necessary perspective for the theorist to take.

There is an interesting recent literature of the question of successful societies and failed societies. Some consideration of the debates that have arisen around this literature would provide more tangible examples than the somewhat elusive cases Guess invokes. ³ To my mind, there was a missed opportunity to engage with this literature, since the conclusion seems to be simply that there are limits to how we judge the success and failure of our life. I had some difficult in linking the various points discussed in this chapter, which contains many fascinating points. One can be remarked on. For as long as the future remains open, it may lead to entirely different standards and criteria for judging such that it is possible in a distant time ‘what we call “modernity” will reveal itself retrospectively as a tiny provincial episode’. This view to the very distant future, is perhaps the only way we can ultimately judge the meaning and significance of the human condition.

The final chapter is a relatively short one on hope and has almost no discussion of the now wide literature on the topic. ⁴ Geuss characteristically identifies two philosophical positions on hope and which stand is sharp opposition to each other. On the one side, there are those who see the aim of philosophy not to offer hope but truth. Hope can be the enemy of truth. On the other side, is the opposite view that sees hope as springing from the human condition itself as a positive motivational energy. In this case the opposite to truth is cynicism. Geuss recognizes that hope is somehow intrinsic to human thinking and may be a condition of its very possibility. But the nagging reality of the first perspective persists, namely whether our capacity for hope may lead to illusions, some of which are necessary to live. Too much truth, as Nietzsche held, may be too much to tolerate and might lead to the death of culture, which rests on creativity, and make life meaningless. The result is an enigma, which Geuss brilliantly sums up in the concluding paragraph of the book: ‘Some philosophers think that life is so miserable that we have a vital need for the compensation which “hope” can provide. . ..Others think that while it is perhaps unnecessarily cruel to destroy the harmless illusions of whose who have nothing else. . . it is impossible for those who have come to see through palpable falsity to continue as before, and downright dangerous not to try to prevent politically noxious falsehood from being propagated’

The essays that comprise this book provide the reader which much to think about. One thing that comes across very strongly to me is that the notion of a western universalism is something of a myth, given the long history of scepticism and the celebration of perspectivism going back to the great figures of Renaissance humanism. Many of the thinkers Geuss engages with are critics of the idea of a universal and objective set of values or truths. However, I am also struck by the fact that Geuss’s critique of that notion also in a way gives it a stature that it does not have. In other words, Geuss made his task easy with a target that is easy to demolish, and which possibly never really existed – the culprits are not in fact identified. While he does not want to embrace a radical and meaningless relativism, he has to assume some order of universalism. It cannot be an objective fixed order of values or truths. Geuss ends up with a workable alternative, which is perhaps akin to the pragmatist position of shifting historical scales of values. I do not object to that but perhaps more can be ventured about what remains today of universalism. The sort of plurality that Geuss likes is compatible with a limited kind of universalism. There is hardly any mention of Kant in his book. Yet, Kant provided the basis of a viable universalism that has nothing to do with two redundant universalisms. The first we have to reject is the ‘false universalism’ of a particularism parading as universalism, as for example a western specific assumption taking a universalistic status. The second we have to reject is the position Geuss has argued against, an objective fixed conception of normative criteria and standards. The problem I have is that almost no one today adheres to the latter and the former has been much discredited, though it is undoubtedly all too often lurking in the background. But there is a different universalism which can be related to Kant’s critical philosophy, which can be seen to be in the footsteps of humanism. This is certainly the impression one gets from Manfred Kuehn’s remarkable biography (Kuehn, 2001). He was, for example, inspired by Montaigne, who he frequently mentioned in his lectures.

Kant showed how a limited universalism is present in what we have to necessarily presuppose in making claims to knowledge. His aim was to limit what could be claimed in the name of Reason. He demonstrated that knowledge is necessarily limited not just because of the fact of history and culture or that it is always from a particular point of view, but it is part of the very nature of adequate knowledge that is self-limiting. The Critique of Pure Reason [1781/1787] outlined the a priori categories of the understanding and the transcendental structures of sensibility that enable cognition. The implication is that universality is limited to such presuppositions, which along with the forms of Reason, constitute the transcendental (The concept of the transcendental in Kant refers to what is necessarily presupposed in the forms of the understanding, the forms of sensibility and the forms of Reason rather than, as in other uses of the term, to an external or higher authority.). In my view this is all relevant to the guiding question Geuss posed in the Preface of his book, ‘What if things don’t hang together? What if plurality of vision and conflict of desire are permanent states?’

We need something like this to explain how structures come into existence and yet how plurality is possible. The only way to deal with this is to identify structures that enable plurality to exist. Such a perspective is also necessary to explain how commonality is possible. In this latter case I am thinking of Habermas’s and Rawls’s argument – letting aside for now the differences between these two positions – for a minimal conception of normative order where only largely procedural norms need to be agreed along with some very basic values, such as recognition of human dignity. Such a position is compatible with stronger notions such as ‘unity in diversity’, where the only unity is the recognition of difference. There is also place for guiding ideas of Reason, in Kant’s sense of the term, as in the questions ‘What can I know?’, ‘What should I do?’ and ‘What may I hope?’, which he posed at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason (A805/B833). Such questions are surely universal, but the answers to them are particular and therefore various.

A limited universalism of this kind points towards a conception of ‘unity’ that precedes diversity. It is not above or beyond diversity but its logical basis. Diversity makes sense only in relation to something of which they are variations or components, as in states within Europe that make up the European Union or regions within a national state or the molecular structure of the atom or the essays that make up Geuss’s book. This also holds for a given phenomenon that undergoes differentiation. Variation surely requires a relation to something that is common. Geuss’s concern with defending diversity and multiple perspectivism against objectivist or fixed notions of an objective higher order loses sight of the lesser requirement for a minimal sense of commonality, which does not need an Archimedean point above the world. Without a notion of diversity – differentiation, a plurality of elements – it would not be possible to conceive of structure. Structures are comprised of elements that are constitutive of larger processes. These may be mental maps, such asonstellations of stars, or the system of relations that constitute the state or cultural structures that make social reality possible. So, to answer Geuss’s question, ‘things do hang together’ but do so without the need for a higher order guaranteeing order. Structures can be fluid and volatile but none they less are entities, whether tangible or intangible, with degree of integration and differentiation. In my view, the question Geuss posed and explored in his book cannot be adequately answered by the range of authors he has engaged with, as he himself acknowledges with respect to Montaigne whose sympathetic view of the world ultimately ran up against his resignation in the face of what he regarded as the ‘general law of the world’. My only complaint about this otherwise fine book is that it does not discuss or acknowledge modern social theory, which is centrally about the issues discussed in this book.

I will close with one minor critical observation. I don’t think the book is well served by the title. Seeing double is to see the same thing twice. This seems to be the wrong metaphor or form of words to capture the capacity to see things in multiple perspective. It is not about seeing the same thing from different angles. Double vision in any case is a disease, diplopia, whereby one sees two images of a single object (albeit not from different angles). Geuss thinks this is better than a bird’s eye view of the world. In this case, I think a bird’s eye view of the world would be better, as in Sagan’s (1994) famous phrase of the earth as a ‘pale blue dot’. Sagan was commenting on the photo taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 which showed the earth to be a minuscule and ephemeral dot in the vastness of the cosmos. The example ⁵ illustrates how an external perspective can provide new meaning to human life, except in this instance it ultimately revealed the transience of the human abode.