Author: Des Fitzgerald

Matthew Drage is an artist, writer and postdoctoral researcher. He lately completed his PhD at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, and is now Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London. His first article from his PhD, Of mountains, lakes and essences: John Teasdale and the transmission of mindfulness, appeared in December 2018, as part of the HHS special issue, ‘Psychotherapy in Europe,’ edited by Sarah Marks. Here Matthew talks to Steven Stanley – Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, and Director of the Leverhulme-funded project, Beyond Personal Wellbeing: Mapping the Social Production of Mindfulness in England and Wales – about the article, and his wider research agenda on mindfulness in Britain and America.  

Steven Stanley (SS): This article is your first publication based on your PhD research project, which you recently completed. Congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about your PhD project?

Matthew Drage (MD): Thank you! So yes, my PhD project was a combined historical and ethnographic project which focused on the emergence of “mindfulness” as a healthcare intervention in Britain and America since the 1970s. My main question was: why was mindfulness seen by its proponents as such an important thing to do? Why did they seek to promote it so actively and vigorously? I focused on a key centre for the propagation of mindfulness-based healthcare approaches in the West: the Center for Mindfulness in Health, Care and Society at the University of Massachuestts Medical Center. I also looked at the transmission of mindfulness from Massachusetts to Britain in the 1990s – this is an episode I narrate in the article.

I had a real sense, when I did my fieldwork, archival research and oral history interviews, that for people who practice and teach it as their main livelihood, mindfulness was something like what the early 20^th century sociologist Max Weber called a vocation. I had a strong impression that this devotion to mindfulness as a way of relieving suffering was what helped mindfulness to find so much traction in popular culture. While my PhD thesis doesn’t offer empirical support for this instinct, it does focus very closely on why mindfulness seemed so important to the people who propagated it. I argued that this was because mindfulness combined some of the most powerful features of religion – offering institutionalised answers to deep existential questions about the nature of human suffering and the purpose of life – while at the same time successfully distancing itself from religious practice, and building strong alliances with established biomedical institutions and discourses.

Maybe the real discovery – which is something I only mention briefly in this article – is that religious or quasi-religious ideas, practices and institutions, especially Buddhist retreat centres – were crucial for making this separation possible. Mindfulness relied heavily on Buddhist groups and institutions (or, at least, groups and institutions heavily influenced by Buddhism) for training, institutional support and legitimacy, whilst at the same deploying a complex array of strategies for distancing itself from anything seen as as potentially identifiable (to themselves and to outsiders) as religious.

More specifically, most mindfulness professionals I met sought to distance themselves from the rituals, images, and cosmological ideas associated with the Buddhist tradition (for example chanting, Buddha statues or the doctrine of rebirth). But at the same time, many “secular” mindfulness practitioners shared some fundamental views with contemporaneous Buddhist movements. Many held the view that the ultimate goal of teaching mindfulness in secular contexts was to help people to entirely transcend the suffering caused by human greed, hatred and delusion: that is, reach Nirvana, or Enlightenment, the central goal of Buddhist practice. And the sharing of these views between Buddhist practitioners and secular mindfulness teachers was helped by the fact that the latter frequently attended retreats with local Buddhist groups – indeed, often helped lead those groups! In my project I try to show how blurry the lines were, and that this blurriness was really at the heart of what the secular mindfulness project – at least in its early stages – was about: trying to keep the transcendental goal of Buddhism intact whilst shedding aspects of it that were seen as mere cultural accretions, deliberately blurring the boundaries between the religious and the secular. 

SS:How did this project come about?

MD: I came across secular mindfulness in 2011 through my own personal involvement with religious Buddhism. It was clearly on the rise, and while I wasn’t that interested in practising meditation in a secular context, I could see it was probably going to get big. Mindfulness seemed part of a more general cultural trend towards using science and technology to reshape the way the individual experiences and engages with the world around them. Technological developments like personal analytics for health (tracking your own fitness with wearable devices, say), and increasingly personalised user-experiences online, also seemed to exemplify. When I decided to do a PhD in 2013, I was interested in a very general way in questions of subjectivity and technology in contemporary Western culture, and I picked the one that seemed to fit best with my existing interests.

SS: Your article makes an important contribution to the historiography of recent developments in clinical psychology in Britain, especially the development of so-called ‘third-wave’ of psychotherapy (that is, approaches that include mindfulness and meditation). In particular you highlight the perhaps unexpected influence of alternative religious and spiritual ideas and practices on the emergence of British mindfulness in the form of Williams, Teasdale and Segal’s volume, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, in the 1990s. You have also unearthed some fascinating biographical details regarding living pioneers of British mindfulness. Did you know what you were looking for before doing your study? Were you surprised by what you found?

MD: The simple answer is sort of, and yes! I kind of found what I was looking for, and (yet) I was surprised by what I found. 

When I began my research I was convinced that mindfulness was just another form of Buddhism, slightly reshaped and repackaged to make it more palatable. My supervisor, the late historian of psychoanalysis Professor John Forrester, warned me about taking this approach. I remember him telling me, “If you keep pulling the Buddhism thread, the whole garment will unravel!” And unravel it did. After about three years, I realised that the most central metaphysical commitments of the mindfulness movement were not especially Buddhist, but owed as much, if not more, to Western esotericist traditions. By this I mean the 19^th century tradition that includes the spiritualist theologian Emmanuel Swedenborg, the American Transcendentalists (e.g. David Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson) and, in the 20^th century, people like the countercultural novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley. These thinkers shared, amongst other things, the idea that there is a perennial, universal truth at the heart of all the major religions. The influence of this view was often, I found, invisible to mindfulness practitioners themselves. Indeed, it was invisible to me for a long time. They, like me, had often encountered Buddhism through the lens of these very Western, esotericist religious or spiritual ideas, so they just appeared as if they’d come from the Buddhist tradition. So while I wasn’t surprised by the influence of spiritual ideas on mindfulness, I was surprised by their source.

I was also surprised by the conclusions I reached about its relationship with late 20^th century “neoliberal” capitalism. I’m not quite ready to go public with these conclusions yet, but watch this space. I’ll have a lot to say about it in the book I’m working on about the mindfulness movement.

SS: As you say in your article, mindfulness has become a very popular global phenomenon, which in simple terms is about being more aware of the present moment. When we think of mindfulness, we tend to think of ‘being here now’. What was it like studying mindfulness as a topic of historical scholarship? And, vice versa, mindfulness is sometimes understood as referring to, as you say, a ‘realm beyond historical time’. What lessons are there for historians from the world of mindfulness?

MD: A really great question. There is a fundamental conflict between my training as an historian and the views I was encountering amidst mindfulness practitioners. They tended to use history in very specific ways to legitimise their views. Mindfulness was taken as both about a universal human capacity (and thus beyond any specific historical or cultural contingency) and primordially ancient, a kind of composite of the extremely old and the timeless. If mindfulness had a history at all, so the story within the mindfulness movement tended to go, it was coextensive with the history of human consciousness. 

I spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the history of this view of the history of mindfulness. This was challenging because it often left me feeling as though I was being somehow disloyal to my interlocutors within the mindfulness movement; as though I was – in a way that was very hard to explain to them – undermining a key but implicit pretext for their work. In the end I tried to present a view of mindfulness which takes seriously its claims to universality by examining the historicity of those claims. I do not want to assume that there are no universals available to human knowledge; and if there are, then – as feminist science and technology studies scholar Donna Haraway argues in her incredible 1988 essay, “Situated Knowledges,” universals are always situated, emerging under very specific historical conditions. My main theoretical concern came to be understanding and describing the conditions for the emergence of universalising claims about humans.

To answer the other part of your question: I think mindfulness teaches historians that time is itself a movable feast; that we should take seriously the possibility of a history of alternative or non-standard ways of thinking about time. Mindfulness practitioners often talk a lot about remaining in the “present moment,” a practice which you could think of in this way: it takes the practitioner out of the usual orientation to time, to past and future, and creates quite a different sense of the way time passes. I found that institutionalised forms of mindfulness practice, to some extent, organised to support this change in one’s approach to time. I suspect this is also linked to an idea that I talk about in my article, the idea that mindfulness is somehow “perennial” or “universal.” There is a sense in which by practising mindfulness, and especially by practising on retreat, one is removing oneself from the usual run of historical time.  I think that it would be extremely interesting to think about how to do a history of this phenomenon; a history of the way people, especially within contemplative traditions, have sought to exit historical time.

SS: Many researchers of mindfulness also practice mindfulness themselves. Did you practice mindfulness as you were studying it? If you did, how did this work in relation to your fieldwork?

MD: Yes, I did. I was reluctant to do so initially, mainly because I had my own Buddhist meditation practice, and didn’t want to add another 40 minutes to my morning meditation routine. However, when I started meeting people in the mindfulness movement, they were very insistent that mindfulness could not really be understood without being experienced. While carrying out my PhD research I went to a lot of different teacher training retreats, workshops and events, and even taught an 8-week mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course to students at Cambridge. I think that this was an indispensable part of my research, to experience first hand what people were talking about when they spoke about mindfulness. Participating in a shared sense of vocation that I encountered amongst many mindfulness professionals showed me just how emotionally compelling  mindfulness was.

SS: Mindfulness is often presented as a secular therapeutic technique which has a scientific evidence based – and that it has completely moved away from its religious roots. Does your work challenge this idea and if so, how? And, related to this, what do you mean in your article by the ‘Buddhistic milieu’?

MD: As I say above, I do mean to complicate this idea that mindfulness is a straight-up medical intervention, moving ever-further from its religious roots. I think perhaps the development of mindfulness as a mass-cultural phenomenon roughly follows this trajectory. But this trajectory is also in itself complex: the parts of the mindfulness movement that I studied were also an attempt at making society more sacred, using the secular biomedical discourse, institutionality and rationality as a means of doing so – although most people wouldn’t have talked about it in this way. Secular biomedicine, at least for the earliest proponents of mindfulness, was seen as a route through which a what we might think of (though they didn’t think of it like this) a special kind of spiritual force (a force which, in my view, has very much to do with what we normally call religion), could be transmitted.

I mean by the ‘Buddhistic milieu’ to refer to something fairly loose – the constellation of communities, institutions, texts and practices which are strongly influenced by the Buddhist tradition, but which do not – or do not always – self-identify as Buddhist. It’s a coinage inspired by sociologist of religion Colin Campbell’s idea of a “cultic milieu,” a term he used to describe the emergent New Age movement in the 1970s. For Campbell, the cultic milieu is a community of spiritual practitioners characterised by individualism, loose structure, low levels of demand on members, tolerance, inclusivity, transience, and ephemerality. When I talk about a Buddhistic milieu here, I mean something like this, but with Buddhism (very broadly construed) as a focus. Some traditions, such as the Insight meditation tradition, which did much to give rise to the secular mindfulness movement, especially encourage this type of relationship to Buddhist practice, emphasising their own secularity, and insisting on its openness to practitioners from any faith tradition.

SS: You suggest that the transmission of mindfulness follows a ‘patrilineal’ lineage which is captured by terms like dissemination, essence, seminal and birth. Your focus is very much on the male ‘founding fathers’ of Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) rather than the women pioneers of the movement. Given that such stories of male founders have been troubled by feminist and revisionist historians of science and psychology since the 1980s especially, can you tell us more about the gender politics of the mindfulness movement and give us a sense of the role female leaders have played in the movement?

MD: An excellent but difficult line of questioning! When I first wrote this paper – and when I started my PhD – I took a much more explicitly feminist perspective. But as I started to write, I was confronted by how incredibly sensitive a topic this is, and I’m still not quite ready to say anything very definite. Mindfulness was not, nor do I think we should expect it to have been, impervious to the tendency towards patriarchal domination that permeates society in general. And, as you suggest here, we might fruitfully read some of the key symbols of male power I identify in my article as a sign of this tendency. I can’t say much more for now by way of analysis, but I’m aiming to tackle this issue more directly in the book.

I can give a couple of cases, though, which I plan e to explore in more detail in the future. The first is the role of meditator and palliative care worker called Peggie Gillespie who worked with Jon Kabat-Zinn in the very earliest days of his Clinic in Worcester, Massachusetts (where he first developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction). Gillespie joined Kabat-Zinn as co-teacher in 1979, either in the very first mindfulness course he taught to patients at the University of Massachusetts Medical, or not long afterwards. She then acted as his second-in-command for the first couple of years of the Stress Reduction Clinic’s existence. She was certainly involved in developing MBSR (which was called SP&RP – the Stress Reduction and Relaxation Program, for the first decade of its life), and even wrote the first ever book about MBSR, her 1986 work Less Stress in Thirty Days. To my knowledge, however, Gillespie only gets a single mention in any writing anywhere about the history of MBSR – in the foreword to Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living. The second example is the relative neglect of Christina Feldman. It wasn’t until the very end of my research period that I realised just how influential a figure Feldman has been – she had led the retreat on which Kabat-Zinn had his idea for MBSR, and went on to be the primary meditation teacher of one of the main early proponents of British mindfulness, cognitive psychologist John Teasdale. Although again she’s rarely mentioned, in a sense she oversaw the birth of secular mindfulness both in Britain and in America. I’m hoping that she’ll grant me an interview, so that I can write her into the book!

SS: If a teacher or practitioner of mindfulness is interested in your research, and wants to know more about the history of mindfulness, what texts would be in your History of Mindfulness 101?

So, when it comes to straightforward history, I’d go for Jeff Wilson’s (2014) Mindful America, Anne Harrington’s (2008) Cure Within, Mark Jackson’s (2013) The Age of Stress, and David McMahan’s (2018) The Making of Buddhist Modernism. These books all do important work in both narrating episodes the history of mindfulness since the 1970s, and in situating those episodes amidst broader currents in the history of science, medicine, and religion. Finally, Wakoh Shannon Hickey’s forthcoming book Mind Cure: How Meditation Became Medicine, was published a couple of weeks ago in March 2019. I haven’t read it yet, but I know something of her doctoral research into the history of MBSR, and suspect it will provide a much more in-depth and focused exploration than has yet been seen.

Matthew Drage is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the History of Art, Science and Folk Practice, at the Warburg Institue, in the School of Advanced study, University of London.

Steven Stanley is Senior Lecturer atthe School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University.

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.

In his recent books, Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms (University of California Press, 2016) and After Ethnos (Duke University Press, 2018), the anthropologist Tobias Rees explores the curiosity required to escape established ways of knowing, and to open up what he calls “new spaces for thinking + doing.” Rees argues that acknowledging – and even embracing – the ignorance and uncertainty that underpin all forms of knowledge production is a crucial methodological part of that process of escape. In his account, doubt and instability are bound up with a radical openness that is necessary for breaking apart existing gaps and allowing the new/different to emerge – in the natural but also in the human sciences. But are there limits to such an embrace of epistemic uncertainty? How does this particular uncertainty interact with other forms of uncertainty, including existential uncertainties that we experience as vulnerable human beings? And how does irreducible epistemic uncertainty relate to ethical claims about how to live a good life? What is the relation of a radical political practice of freedom with art? After a workshop on his work at the Zurich Center for the History of Knowledge in 2017, Vanessa Rampton, Branco Weiss Fellow at the Chair of Practical Philosophy, ETH Zurich, explored these themes with Rees.

1. The Human

Vanessa Rampton (VR): Tobias, your recent work aims to destabilize and question common understandings of the human. I wonder how you would place your work in relation to other engagements with ‘selfhood’ within the history of philosophy, and the history of the human sciences more widely. Because there are so many ways of thinking of the self – for example the empirical, bodily self, or the rational self, or the self as relational, a social construct – that you could presumably draw on. But I also know that you want to move beyond previous attempts to capture the nature and meaning of ‘the human self’. What are the stakes of this destabilization of the human? What do you hope to achieve with it?

Tobias Rees (TR): In a way, it isn’t me who destabilizes the human. It is events in the world. As far as I can tell, we find ourselves living in a world that has outgrown the human, that fails it. If I am interested in the historicity of the figure of the human –– a figure that has been institutionalized in the human sciences –– then insofar as I am interested in rendering visible the stakes of this failure. And in exploring possibilities of being human after the human. Even of a human science after the human.

VR: When you say the human, what do you mean?

TR: I mean at least three different things. First, I mean a concept. We moderns usually take the human for granted. We take it for granted, that is, that there is something like the human. That there is something that we –– we humans –– all share. Something that is independent from where we are born. Or when. Independent of whether we are rich or poor, old or young, woman or man. Independent of the color of our skin. Something that constitutes our humanity. In short, something that is truly universal: the human. However, such a universal of the human is of rather recent origin. This is to say, someone had to have the idea to begin articulating an abstract, in its validity universal and thus time and place independent, concept of the human. And it turns out that this wasn’t something people wondered about or aspired to formulate before the 17th century.

Second, I mean a whole ontology – that the invention of the human between the 17th and the 19th century amounted to the invention of a whole understanding of how the real is organized. The easiest way to make this more concrete is to point out that almost all authors of the human, from Descartes to Kant, stabilized this new figure by way of two differentiations. On the one hand, humans were said to be more than mere nature; on the other hand, it was claimed that humans are qualitatively different from mere machines. Here the human, thinking thing in a world of mere things, subject in a world of objects, endowed with reason, and there the vast and multitudinous field of nature and machines, reducible –– in sharp contrast to humans –– to math and mechanics. The whole vocabulary we have available to describe ourselves as human silently implies that the truly human opens up beyond the merely nature. And whenever we use the term ‘human,’ we ultimately rely on and reproduce this ontology.

Third, I mean a whole infrastructure. The easiest way to explain what I mean by this is to gesture to the university: the distinction between humans on the one hand and nature and machines on the other quite simply mirrors the concept of the human, insofar as it implies two different kinds of realities, as it emerged between the 17th and 19th century. Now, it may sound odd, even provocative, but I think there can be little doubt that today the two differentiations that stabilized the human –– more than mere nature, other than mere machines ––fail. From research in artificial intelligence to research in animal intelligence, en passant microbiome research or climate change. One consequence of these failures is that the vocabulary we have available to think of ourselves as human fails us. And I am curious about the effects of these failures: what are their effects on what it means to be human? What are their effects on the human sciences –– insofar as those sciences are contingent on the idea that there is a separate, set apart human reality and insofar as their explanations, their sense making concepts are somewhat contingent on the idea of a universal figure of the human, that is, on the ‘the’ in ‘the human’? Can the human sciences, given that they are the institutionalized version of the figure of the human, even be the venue through which we can understand the failures of the human? Let me add that I am much less interested in answering these questions than in producing them: making visible the uncertainty of the human is one way of explaining what I think of as the philosophical stakes of the present. And I think these stakes are huge: for each one of us qua human, for the humanities and human sciences, for the universities. The department I am building at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles revolves around just these questions.

VR: What led you to doubt the concept of the human and the human sciences?

TR: My first book, Plastic Reason, was concerned with a rather sweeping event that occurred around the late 1990s: the chance discovery that some basic embryonic processes continue in adult brains. Let me put this discovery in perspective: it had been known since the 1880s that humans are born with a definite number of nerve cells, and it was common wisdom since the 1890s that the connections between neurons are fully developed by age twenty or so. The big question everyone was asking at the beginning of the twentieth century was: how does a fixed and immutable brain allow for memory, for learning, for behavioral changes? And the answer that eventually emerged was the changing intensity of synaptic communication. Consequently, most of twentieth-century neuroscience was focused on understanding the molecular basis of how synapses communicate with one another –– first in electrophysiological and then in genetic terms.

When adult cerebral plasticity was discovered in the late 1990s the focus on the synapse –– which had basically organized scientific attention for a century –– was suddenly called into question. The discovery that new neurons continue to be born in the adult human brain, that these new neurons migrate and differentiate, that axons continue to sprout, that dendritic spines continuously appear and disappear not only suggested that the brain was perhaps not the fixed and immutable machine previously imagined; it also suggested that synaptic communication was hardly the only dynamic element of the brain and hence not the only possible way to understand how we form memory or learn. What is more, it suggested that chemistry was not the only language for understanding the brain.

The effect was enormous. Within a rather short period of time, less than ten years, the brain ceased to be the neurochemical machine it had been for most of the twentieth century, but without – and this I found so intriguing – without immediately becoming something else. The beauty of the situation was that no one knew yet how to think the brain. It was a wild, an untamed, an in-between state, a no longer not-yet, a moment of incredibly intense, unruly openness that no one could tame. The whole goal of my research was to capture something of this irreducible openness and its intensity.

Anyway, when trying to capture something of the radical openness in which my fieldwork was unfolding, I began to wonder about my own field of research: if the taken for granted key concepts of brain science, that is, the concepts that constituted and stabilized the brain as an object, could become historical in a rather short period of time, then what about the terms and concepts of the human sciences? Which terms might constitute the human in such a situation? These questions led me to the obsession of trying to write brief, historicizing accounts of the key terms of the human sciences, first and foremost the human itself: when did the time and place independent concept of the human, of the human sciences we operate with emerge? And this then led me to the terms that stabilize the human: culture, society, politics, civilization, history, etc. When were these concepts invented –– concepts that silently transport definitions of who and what we are and of how the real is organized? When were they first used to describe and define humans, to set them apart as something in themselves? Where? Who articulated them? What concepts –– or ways of thinking –– existed before they emerged? And are there instances in the here and now that escape the human?

Somewhere along the way, while doing fieldwork at the Gates Foundation actually, I recognized that the vocabulary the human sciences operate with didn’t really exist before the time around 1800, plus or minus a few decades, and that their sense-making, explanatory quality relies on a figure of the human –– on an understanding of the real –– that has become untenable. I began to think that the human, just like the brain, had begun to outgrow the histories that had framed it. You said earlier, Vanessa, that I am interested in destabilizing common understandings of the human. Another way of describing my work, one I would perhaps prefer, would be to say that through the chance combination of fieldwork and historical research I discovered the instability –– and the insufficiency –– of the concept of the human we moderns take for granted and rely on. I want to make this insufficiency visible and available. The human is perhaps more uncertain than it has ever been.

VR: Listening to you, I cannot help but think that there are strong parallels between your work and the history of concepts as formulated by, say, Reinhart Koselleck or Raymond Williams. I can nevertheless sense that there is a difference –– and I wonder how you would articulate this difference?

TR: First, I am not a historian of concepts. I am primarily a fieldworker and hence operate in the here and now. What arouses my curiosity is when, in the course of my field research a ‘given,’ something we simply take for granted, is suddenly transformed into a question: an instance in which something that was obvious becomes insufficient, in which the world or some part thereof escapes it and thereby renders it visible as what it is, a mere concept. From the perspective of this insufficiency I then turn to its historicity: I show where this concept came from, when it was articulated, why, under what circumstances, and also how it never stood still and constantly mutated. But in my work this history of a concept, if one wants to call it that, is not end in itself. It is a tool to make visible some openness in the present that my fieldwork has alerted me to. In other words, the historicity is specific: the specific product of an event in the here and now, a specificity produced by way of fieldwork.

Second, my interest in the historicity –– rather than the history –– of concepts runs somewhat diagonal to presuppositions on which the history of concepts has been built. Koselleck, for example, was concerned with meaning or semantics and with society as the context in which changes in meaning occur. That is to say, Koselleck –– and as much is true for Williams –– operated entirely within the formation of the human. They both took it for granted that there is a distinctive human reality that is ultimately constituted by the meaning humans produce and that unfolds in society. Arguably, the human marked the condition of the possibility of their work. It is interesting to note that neither Koselleck nor Williams, nor even Quentin Skinner, ever sought to write the history of the condition of possibility of their work: they never historicized the figure of the human on which they relied. On the contrary, they simply took it for granted as the breakthrough to the truth. If I am interested in concepts and their historicity, then it is only because I am interested in the historicity of the concept of the human as a condition of possibility. How to invent the possibility of a human science beyond this condition of possibility is a question I find as intriguing as it is urgent: how to break with the ontology implied by the human? How to depart from the infrastructure of the human, while not giving up a curiosity about things human, whatever human then actually means?

2. Epistemic Uncertainty

VR: I am wondering if all concepts can outgrow their histories. Isn’t this more difficult in the case of, say, ‘the body’ or ‘language,’ than for our more doctrinal concepts – liberalism and socialism, for example?

TR: Your question implies, I think, a shift in register. Up until now we talked about the human and its concepts and institutions but now we are moving to a more general epistemic question: are all concepts subject to their historicity? And if so, what does this imply? Seeing as you mentioned the body, let’s take the idea –– so obvious to us today –– that we are bodies, that it is through our warm, sentient, haptic bodies that we are at home in the world. Over the last fifty years or so, really since the 1970s, a large social science literature has emerged around the body and around how we embody certain practices and so on. Much of this literature, of course, relies on Mauss on the one hand and on Merleau-Ponty on the other. And if one works through the anthropology or history of the body, one notes that most authors take the body simply as a given. It is as if they were saying, ‘Of course humans are, were, and always will be bodies.’

But were humans always bodies? At the very least one could ask when, historically speaking, did the concept of the body first emerge? When did humans first come up with a concept of the body and thus experience themselves as bodies? What work was necessary –– from physiology to philosophy –– for this emergence? To ask this question requires the readiness to expose oneself to the possibility that the category of the body and the analytical vocabulary that is contingent on this category is not obvious. There might have been times before the body –– and there might be times after it. For example, if one reads books about ancient Greece, say Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind, one learns that archaic Greek didn’t have a word for what we call the body. The Greeks had a word for torso. They had two words for skin, the skin that protects and the skin that is injured. They had terms for limbs. But the body, understood as a thing in itself, as having a logic of its own, as an integrated unit, didn’t exist.

One version of taking up Snell’s observation is to say: the Greeks maybe did not have a word for body –– but of course they were bodies and therefor the social or cultural study of the body is valid even for archaic Greece. What I find problematic about such a position is that it implies that the Greeks were ignorant and that our concepts –– the body –– mark a breakthrough to the truth: we have universalized the body, even though it is a highly contingent category. Perhaps a better alternative is to systematically study how the ‘realism of the body’ on which the social and cultural study of the body is contingent became possible. A history of this possibility would have to point out that the concept of a universal body –– understood as an integrated system or organism that has a dynamic and logic of its own and that is the same all over the world –– is of rather recent origin. It doesn’t really exist before the 19th century. In any case, there are no accounts of the body –– or the experience of the body –– before that time and philosophies of the body seem to be almost exclusively a thing of the first half, plus or minus, of the twentieth century. Sure, anatomy is much older, and there were corpses, but a corpse is not a body. The alternative to the realism of the body that I briefly sketched here would imply that one can no longer naively –– by which I mean in an unexamined way –– subscribe to the body as a given. The body then has become uncertain. I am interested in fostering precisely this kind of epistemic uncertainty. To me, epistemic uncertainty is an escape from truth and thus a matter of freedom.

VR: Perhaps a kind of taken-for-granted approach to the body is so bound up with what you call ‘the human’ that questioning it is necessary for your work.

TR: Indeed, although my work led me to assume that what is true for the human or the body is true for all concepts. Every concept we have is time and place specific and thus irreducible, instable and uncertain.  But to return to the human: we live in a moment in time that produces the uncertainty of the human all by itself. I render this uncertainty visible by evoking the historicity of the human, and this in turn leads me to wonder if one could say that the human was a kind of intermezzo – a transient figure that was stable for a good 350 years but that can no longer be maintained.

VR: I wonder what you would reply if I were to say: but isn’t that obvious? Concepts are historically contingent, so what else is new?

TR: In my experience, most people grant contingency within a broader framework that they silently exempt from contingency itself. For example, if contingency means that different societies have different kinds of concepts, then society is the framework within which contingency is allowed: but society itself is exempt from contingency. One could make similar arguments with respect to culture. If we say that things are culturally specific, that some cultures have meanings that others don’t have, or entirely different ways of ordering the world, then we exempt culture from contingency.

All of this is to say, sure, you are right, social and cultural contingency are obviously not new. But what if you would venture to be a bit more radical. What if you would not exempt society and culture from contingency? Talk to a social scientist about society being contingent, and they become uncomfortable. Or they reply that maybe the concept of society didn’t exist but that people were of course always social beings, living in social relations. This is a half movement in thought. It assumes that the word has merely captured the real as it is –– but misses that the configuration of the real they refer to has been contingent on the epistemic configuration on which the concept of society has depended. We could say that the one thing a social scientist cannot afford is the contingency of the category of the social.

What I am interested in is the contingency of the very categories that make knowledge production possible. To some degree, I am conducting fieldwork to discover such contingencies, to generate an irreducible uncertainty: as an end in itself and also as a tool to bring into view in which precise sense the present is outgrowing –– escaping –– our understanding and experience of the world.

3. Knowledge Production Under Conditions of Uncertainty/Ignorance

VR: I imagine there is a kind of parallel here with how natural scientists would react to the fact that their concepts no longer fit, for example by developing a more up-to-date way of thinking the brain to replace the synaptic model. But it strikes me that, if done properly, this task is much more radical for practitioners of the human sciences. This is because all of our concepts – including such fundamental ones as the human and the body – are historically contingent, that we have to do away with universal categories. Our task is to fundamentally destabilize ourselves as historical subjects, as academics, as knowers. And I guess a key question is how this destabilization, this rendering visible of uncertainties, can nevertheless be linked to the kinds of knowledge production we have come to expect from the human sciences.

TR:  The question, perhaps, is what one means by knowledge production in the human sciences. I think that the human sciences have been primarily practiced as a decoding sciences. That is to say, researchers in the human sciences usually don’t ask ‘What is the human?’ No, they already knew what the human is: a social and cultural being, endowed with language. Equipped with this knowledge they then make visible all kinds of things in terms of society and culture. In addition, perhaps, one could argue that the human sciences have established themselves as guardians of the human – that is, they have been practiced in defensive terms. For example, whenever an engineer argues that machines can think and that humans are just another kind of machine, the human sciences react by defending the human against the machine. The most famous example here would maybe be Hubert Dreyfus against Seymour Papert. A similar argument though could be made with respect to genetics and genetic reductionism.

Now, if one destabilizes the figure of the human neither one of these two forms of knowledge production can be maintained. I think that this is why many in the human sciences experience the destabilization of the human as outrageous provocation. If one gets over this provocation one is left with two questions. The first is: what modes of knowledge production become possible through this destabilization of the human? Especially when this destabilization means that the entire ontological setup of the human sciences fail. Can the human sciences entertain, let alone address this question, given that they are the material infrastructure of the figure of the human that fails? Or does one need new venues of research? I often think here of the relation between modern art and the nineteenth century academy.

VR: That reminds me of Foucault.

TR: Foucault was an anti-humanist –– but he remained uniquely concerned with human reality. I think the stakes here – I say this as an admirer of Foucault – are more radical. So my second question is: what happens to the human? I am acutely interested in maintaining the possibility of the universality of the human after the human. Letting go of the idea seems disastrous. So how can one think things human without relying on a substantive or positive concept of what the human is? My tentative answer is research in the form of exposure: the task is to expose the normative concept of the human in the present, by way of fieldwork, to identify instances that escape the human and break open new spaces of possibility, each time different ones, ones that presumably don’t add up. The goal of this kind of research-as-exposure is not to arrive at some other, better conception of the human, but to render uncertain established ways of thinking the human or of being human and to thereby render the human visible and available as a question.

VR:  So if you don’t want to talk about what the human is, I’m wondering if the appropriate question would be about what the human is not.

TR: I think such an inversion doesn’t get us very far. I would rather say that I am interested in operating along two lines. One line revolves around the effort to produce ignorance. That is, I conduct research not so much in order to produce knowledge but the uncertainty of knowledge. The other line wonders how one could conduct research under conditions of irreducible ignorance or uncertainty, or how to begin one’s research without relying on universals. A comparative history of this or that always presupposes something stable. As does any social or cultural study. In both cases I am interested in a productive or restless uncertainty –– or second-order ignorance –– not only with respect to the human. In a way, what I am after is the reconstitution of uncertainty, of not knowing, by way of a concept of research that maintains throughout the possibility of truth.

If you were to press me to offer a systematic answer I would say, as a philosophically inclined anthropologist, that I conduct fieldwork/research because I am simultaneously interested in where our concepts of the human come from, in whether there are instances in the here and now that escape these concepts, and in rendering available the instability –– the restlessness –– of the category or the categories of the human, both as an end in itself and as a means to bring the specificity of the present into view. It strikes me as particularly important to note that what I am after is not post-humanism. As far as I can tell most post-humanists hold on to the 18th-century ontology produced by the human but then delete the human from this ontology. What interests me is to break with the whole ontology. Not once and for all but again and again. Nor am I interested in the correction of some error à la Bruno Latour – as if behind the human we can discover some essential truth –– call it Actor Network Theory –– that the moderns have forgotten and that the non-moderns have preserved and that we now all can re-instantiate to save the world.

I am not so much interested in a replacement approach –– what comes after the human? –– than in rendering visible a multiplicity of failures, each one of which opens up onto new spaces of possibility. After all, how Artificial Intelligence derails the human is rather different from how microbiome research derails it or climate change. These derailments don’t add up to something coherent. As I see it, it is precisely this not-adding-up –– this uncertainty –– that makes freedom possible. Perhaps this form of research is closer to contemporary art than to social science research, that could well be. Anyhow, the department I try to build at the Berggruen Institute revolves around the production of precisely such instances of failure and freedom.

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.