This is the second part of a two-part interview, between Vanessa Rampton, Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, and the anthropologist Tobias Rees, Director of the ‘Transformations of the Human Program’ at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and author of the new monograph, After Ethnos (Duke). The discussion took place following a workshop on Rees’s work at the Zurich Center for the History of Knowledge in 2017. You can read the first part of the interview here.

4. Uncertainty and/as Political Practice

Vanessa Rampton (VR): I want to continue our conversation by asking you about the implications of foregrounding uncertainty and the ‘radical openness’ you mentioned earlier for aspects of life that are explicitly normative. Take politics, for example. Have you thought about the political implications of embracing uncertainty, and what could be necessary to facilitate communication, or participation, or what it is you think is important?

Tobias Rees (TR): For me, the reconstitution of uncertainty or ignorance is principally a philosophical and poetic practice. These concepts are not reducible to the political. But they can assume the form of a radical politics of freedom.

VR: How so?

TR: For a long time, in my thinking, I observed the classical distinction between the political as the sphere of values and the intellectual as the sphere of reason. And as such I could find politics important, a matter of passion, but I also found it difficult to relate my interest in philosophical and anthropological questions to politics. And I still think the effort to subsume all Wissenschaft, all philosophy, all art under the political is vulgar and destructive. However, over the years, largely through conversations with the anthropologist, Miriam Ticktin, I have learned to distinguish between a concept of politics rooted in values and a concept of politics rooted in the primacy of the intellectual or the artistic. I think that today we often encounter a concept of politics that is all about values, inside and outside of the academy. People are ready to subject the intellectual –– the capacity to question one’s values –– to their beliefs and values.

VR: For example?

Tobias Rees: This is much more delicate than it may seem. If I point out the intellectual implausibility of a well held value … trouble is certain. Maybe the easiest way to point what I mean is to take society as an example again. We know well that the concepts (not the words) of society and the social emerged only in the aftermath of the French Revolution, under conditions of industrialization. We also know perfectly well that the emergence of the concepts of society and the social amounted to a radical reconfiguration of what politics is. I think there is broad agreement that society is not just a concept but a whole infrastructure on which our notions of justice and political participation are contingent. If I point out though that society is not an ontological truth but a mere concept – a concept indeed that is somewhat anachronistic in the world we live in, people become uncomfortable. Many have strong emotional reactions insofar as they are vetted to the social as the good, and as the only form politics takes. When I then insist, as I usually do, the conversation usually ends by my interlocutors telling me that this is not an intellectual but a political issue. That is, they exempt politics as a value domain from the intellectual. I thoroughly disagree with this differentiation.

In fact, I find this value-based concept of politics unfortunate and the readiness to subject the intellectual to values disastrous. Values are a matter of doxa, that is, of unexamined opinions, and as long as we stay on the level of doxa the constitution of a democratic public is impossible. Kant saw that clearly and made the still very useful suggestion that values are a private matter. In private you may hold whatever values you prefer, Kant roughly says, but a public can only be constituted through what is accessible to everyone in terms of critical reflection. He called this the public exercise of reason. So the question for me is how, in this moment, we might allow for a politics that is grounded in the intellectual, in reason even, rather than in values. The anti-intellectual concept of politics that dominates public and especially academic discussions is, I think, a sure recipe for disaster. Obviously this is linked, for me, to the production of uncertainty and to the question of grounding practice in uncertainty.

VR: I am very sympathetic to your desire to avoid confusing the tasks of, say, philosophy with political activism, but how does this go together with uncertainty and ignorance?

TR: Yes, it may seem that my work on the instability of knowledge or on uncertainty amounts to a critique of reason. But in fact the contrary is the case: for me, the reconstitution of ignorance, the transformation of certainty into uncertainty is an intellectual practice. Or better, an intellectual exercise. It is accomplished by way of research and reflection; it is accomplished by thinking about thinking. Another way of making this point is to say that uncertainty –– or the admission of ignorance –– is the outcome of rigorous research, it is the outcome of a practice committed, in principle, to searching for truth. If I am at my most provocative I say that uncertainty implies an open horizon –– it opens up the possibility that things could be different and this possibility of difference, of openness, is what I am after. So one big challenge that emerges from this is how can one reconcile the intellectual and the political, and I do think that’s possible. That would lead back to what I called epistemic activism.

VR:  How would that work in practice?

TR: My personal response unfolds along two lines. The first one amounts to a gesture to Michel Foucault: with Foucault one could describe my work as a refusal to be known or to be reducible to the known. Hence, my interest in that which escapes, which cannot be subsumed, etc. A second way of responding to your question, with equal gratitude to Foucault, is to say that the political is for me first of all a matter of ethics, that is, of conduct: how do you wish to live your life? And here I advocate the primacy of the intellectual –– katalepsis –– over values. Based on these two replies one can approach the political on a more programmatic scale: whenever someone speaks in the name of unexamined values or claims to speak in the name of truth and thereby closes the horizon and undermines the primacy of the intellectual, I can make myself heard and ask questions and express doubt. And when I say doubt I don’t mean a hermeneutics of suspicion. I also don’t mean social critique. I mean radical epistemic doubt that tries to reconstitute irreducible uncertainty.

VR: So this would involve calling out the truth-claims of other actors?

TR:  I am not fond of the term calling out. The phrase tends to hide the fact that what is at stake is not only to confront the truth claims someone is making, but also to avoid the very mistakes one problematizes: to speak in the name of truth. I am more interested in speaking in the name of doubt: not a doubt that would do away with the possibility of truth and that would leave us with the merely arbitrary, but a doubt that transforms the certain into the uncertain, while maintaining the possibility of truth as measure or as guiding horizon.

5.Uncertainty as Virtue

VR: Let’s talk about the normative implications of uncertainty beyond politics. I was interested in a review of your work by Nicolas Langlitz in which he accused you of wanting to radically cultivate uncertainty, and he had arguments for why this wouldn’t work. Actually this reminds me of a passage in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov where the Grand Inquisitor condemns Christ for having burdened humanity with free choice, and claims that actually human beings cannot cope with freedom, nor do they really desire it. Rather they prefer security or happiness: having food, clothes, a house and so on. And one question would be, how do we acknowledge uncertainty, acknowledge its importance, but not cultivate it in a way that could potentially be destructive?

TR: I have several different reactions at once. Here is reply one: I am deeply troubled by the idea of decoupling happiness from freedom. As I see it now, uncertainty is a condition of the possibility of freedom –– and of happiness. Why? Because the impossibility to know provides an irreducibly open horizon. This is one important reason for my interest in cultivating uncertainty.

My second reply amounts to a series of differentiations that seem to me necessary or at the very least helpful. For example, I think it makes sense to differentiate between the epistemic and the existential as two different genres. To make my point, let me go to the beginning of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant says that human reason (for reasons that are not its fault) finds itself confronted with questions it cannot answer. I am thoroughly interested in this absence of foundational answers that Kant points out here. What answers does Kant have in mind? He doesn’t actually provide examples and most modern readers tend to conclude he meant the big existential questions of the twentieth century: why am I here? What is the meaning of life? Stuff like that. However, I think that is not at all what Kant had in mind. He simply shared an epistemological observation: whenever we try to provide true foundations for knowledge, we fail. In every situation –– whether in science or in everyday life –– we cannot help but rely on conceptual presuppositions we are not aware of. What is more, there are always too many presuppositions to possibly clear the ground. The consequence, pace Kant, is that knowledge is intrinsically unstable and fragile. I am interested in precisely this instability and fragility of knowledge. Of all knowledge. Let’s say for me this instability is the condition of the possibility of freedom.

Up until this point I simply have made an epistemological observation. Now Langlitz, whose work I admire, asks if my epistemic cultivation of uncertainty is productive in the face of, say, climate change deniers. To me, he implicitly confuses here the epistemic –– which remains oriented towards truth and is an intellectual practice –– with the doxa driven rejection of the epistemic and the intellectual that is characteristic of the climate change deniers. What you are asking about though is of a different quality, right? You are asking about a more existential uncertainty.

6.Uncertainty and Medicine

VR: My question is motivated by thinking about cases such as medicine. For example, does the epistemic uncertainty you are concerned with require special measures in the clinical encounter? After all, physicians’ perceived ability to cope with uncertainty has a well-documented placebo effect. So for example physician and writer Atul Gawande – I’m thinking of his books Complications (2002) and Better (2007) – writes about all the things modern medicine doesn’t know in addition to what it does know. But he emphasizes that this self-doubt cannot become paralyzing, that physicians must act, and that action is – in many cases – in patients’ interests. So this doesn’t contradict per se what you were saying before, but it does show how epistemic uncertainty is seen as something that has to be managed in this particular professional setting, and that a kind of simulacrum of certainty may also give patients hope in a difficult situation.

TR: I think that perhaps the best way to address the questions you are raising is a research project that attempts to catalogue the multiple kinds of uncertainties that flourish in a hospital. If I stress that there are different kinds of uncertainties then this is partly because I think that different kinds of uncertainties have different kinds of causes –– and partly because I think that there is no obvious link between the epistemic uncertainty I have been cultivating and the kinds of uncertainties that plague the doctor-patient relation in medicine.

VR: I am surprised to hear you say that, because I understood the relation between technical progress and the skill of living a life in intrinsically uncertain circumstances as a central feature of your work. In Plastic Reason, for example, you quote Max Weber who says: ‘What’s the meaning of science? It has no meaning because it cannot answer the only question of importance, how shall we live and what shall we do?’ And as you know Weber came to that idea via Tolstoy, who basically says: ‘the idea that experimental science must satisfy the spiritual demands of mankind is deeply flawed’. And Tolstoy goes on to say: ‘the defenders of science exclaim – but medical science! You’re forgetting the beneficent progress made by medicine, and bacteriological inoculations, and recent surgical operations’. And that’s exactly where Weber answers: ‘well, medicine is a technical art. And there is progress in a technical art. But medicine itself cannot address questions of life and how to live, and what life you want to live.’

TR: But why does Weber answer that way? You are surely right that he arrives at the question concerning life and science via Tolstoy. However, it also seems to me that he thoroughly disagrees with Tolstoy. In my reading, Tolstoy makes an existential or even spiritual point. He places the human on the side of existential and spiritual questions and calls this life –– and then criticizes science as irrelevant in the face of these questions. Weber’s observation is, I think, a radically different one. Tolstoy is right, he says, there are questions that science cannot answer. However, if you want to live a life of reason –– or of science –– then this absence of answers is precisely what you must endure. Or, perhaps, enjoy. In other words, Weber upholds science or reason vis-à-vis its enemies.

One can refine this reading of Weber. He answers that science is meaningless. And I think the reason for this is that, as he sees it, science isn’t concerned with meaning. Indeed, from a scientific perspective human life is entirely meaningless. However, Weber nowhere argues that science is irrelevant for the challenge of living a life. On the contrary, he lists a rather large series of tools that precisely help here –– from conceptual clarity to the experience of thinking, to technical criticism. His whole methodological work can be read as an ethical treatise for how to live a life as a Wissenschaftler. According to Weber, the Tolstoy argument requires a leap of faith that those of us concerned with reason –– and with human self-assertion in the face of metaphysical claims –– cannot take.

It is easy, of course, to claim that life is so much bigger than science. But then, upon inspection, there is no aspect of life that isn’t grounded in conceptual presuppositions –– and these presuppositions have little histories. That is, they didn’t always exist. They emerge, they re-organize entire domains of life, and then we take them for granted, as if they had always existed. Which they didn’t. This includes the concept of life, I hasten to add. Weber opts for the primacy of the intellectual as opposed to the primacy of the existential. And for Weber the only honest option is to accept the primacy of the intellectual. That may mean that some questions are never to be answered. But all answers he examined are little more than a harmony of illusions.

You see, I think that this is easily related back to my distinction between epistemic uncertainty and existential uncertainty. In Plastic Reason I quoted Weber not least because my fieldwork observations seemed to me a kind of empirical evidence that proves the dominant, anti-science reading of Weber wrong. If you are thinking that it is your brain that makes you human and if you are conducting experiments to figure out how a brain works, well, then you are at stake in your research. Science doesn’t occur outside of life. None of this is to say that the uncertainties that plague medicine aren’t real. But it is to say that I think it is worthwhile differentiating between kinds of uncertainty.

Tobias Rees is Reid Hoffman Professor of Humanities at the New School of Social Research in New York, Director of the Transformations of the Human Program at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles, and Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His new book, After Ethnos is published by Duke in October 2018.

Vanessa Rampton is Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Philosophy with Particular Emphasis on Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, and at the Institute for Health and Social Policy, McGill University. Her current research is on ideas of progress in contemporary medicine.

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