Q&A with Pedro Brea on time, process philosophy, and the meaning of goodness...

"My metaphysical commitment to materialism also implicitly committed me to nihilism."

I’m always on the lookout for interesting thinkers to share with you. Recently I happened upon Pedro Brea’s Substack and read his recent essay on the limitation of “instrumental reasoning” in contrast to “authentic reasoning” which “necessarily involves a moral transformation of one’s being”. In that post he does a fabulous job of synthesizing the ideas of Henri Bergson, Pierre Hadot, Karl Jaspers, Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and Plato. I was so impressed I thought I’d introduce him to all y’all.

Enjoy!

~Tina

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Q&A

Have you ever abandoned a position that you strongly believed in? What made you change your mind?

PEDRO BREA: I majored in physics as an undergraduate and my education tacitly taught me to look at the world from a materialist point of view. I can’t say it was a very sophisticated form of materialism though (the reductive kind) since, having not taken any philosophy courses until my senior year of undergrad, I was unaware of any alternative metaphysical frameworks—I didn’t even know what metaphysics was! This made it so I couldn’t even fathom accepting any other point of view: I was like a fish and physics was my water. I began to question this perspective over the course of a crippling spell of depression in the second half of my undergraduate education.

I didn’t know it then, but reading Nietzsche would allow me to see that my metaphysical commitment to materialism also implicitly committed me to nihilism. There was no place for values or meaning within my original materialist commitments, so I had implicitly chosen to deny them outright as subjective fictions. Reading Nietzsche did two things for me: 1) his work was my first exposure to a philosophical critique of materialism; and 2) his critique of science as a form of the “ascetic ideal” showed me that the nihilist can deny the existence of all values except one: truth. I will never forget the day and the feeling of reading the last sentence of the Genealogy of Morals for the first time: “man would rather will nothingness than not will.” These words hit me like a freight train. I realized that my commitment to the “truth” of materialism committed me to nihilism, and that nihilism is a philosophically confused position because it lies to itself about its commitment to truth—I think this is an example of what Sartre called “bad faith”?

Although I no longer identify as much as I used to with Nietzsche’s ethics, when I needed it most his work helped pull me out of my depression by showing me that there are other philosophically compelling ways to understand the world, and that I would only find value in life once I stopped looking for meaning outside of myself and started being the creator of my own values. (Lately, I’ve been undergoing another major transformation in how I understand ethics and values, which I have recently written about, but that’s a subject for another time.) This isn’t to say that I moved away from physics just so I could feel better. I have always been aware of the danger of choosing a truth that is comfortable instead of what I honestly think to be the case given the evidence, but I finally felt like I had the tools and permission to set about exploring other metaphysical frameworks. I currently think process philosophy offers the most compelling picture of reality I have ever encountered, and it has been a joy to learn more about it and compare it to other philosophies.

What question initially seems trivial but reveals unexpected depths when seriously examined?

The question “what is goodness?” sounds extremely trivial but might be the most profound question there is. I have often been dissatisfied with how the philosophers and other scholars I have interacted with just take this question for granted. An example might help here. I once attended a critical theory workshop where one of the speakers was a Marxist historian. After his presentation, I basically asked what his metaethical basis was for thinking it was more just to write history from the perspective of the proletariat and the oppressed? Now, I personally have no qualms with this and recognize the importance of resisting the weaponization of historical narratives that serve oppressive power structures, but I wasn’t satisfied with philosophically taking ideas of goodness and justice for granted. I was very disappointed, however, when the question seemed to fly right over his head—maybe it was unfair to ask this of a historian—but no one else at the workshop seemed to care about my question. Most people seemed to take their ideas of social justice for granted without thinking too hard about what basis there was in reality for believing in their values in the first place. But I could not help but wonder: what metaphysical grounds did we have for believing in these values?

I must emphasize that this wasn’t just an issue I had with critical theory folk, but feels common in many academic and non-academic circles. The feeling I get is that many people behave as if they have pretty strong commitments to objective ideals of goodness and justice, but speak as if they were moral relativists when asked about the objectivity of their values (by objective here I just mean the idea that some answers to ethical questions really are better than others.) Yes, it seems like most people generally have some sense of what it means to be a decent person, but that doesn’t reflect how deep the question of goodness runs. Once you start really thinking about it, you’ll find that pursuing this question is inherently tied up with how we understand the meaning of life, the mind, intersubjectivity, and their relation to the cosmos. I don’t think we can ever fully exhaust this question, but thinking deeply about what the good is can only enrich our moral life and provide an intellectually rigorous framework for articulating what it means to be a good person.

What's the most dangerous idea in philosophy (or your discipline) today?

Having experienced depression and nihilism as a direct result of a reductive materialist worldview, and seeing the same tendency in some of my students and other people, I have to agree with Matthew David Segall who you interviewed before me that, not simply materialism, but the idea that consciousness is just in our heads, that we are essentially our brains, is perhaps the most dangerous idea in both academic and popular philosophy. It seems to come from a good place of wanting to uphold the credibility of science and a desire to attain an objective worldview, but, ironically, I think that commitment often goes too far and becomes dogmatic. Philosophically, I just haven’t found any attempt to reduce mental states to physical states convincing, and I think there are excellent grounds for doubting this; I’m thinking specifically about contemporary physics, embodied phenomenology, the enactivist approach to cognitive science, and radical behaviorism.

However, the real concern for me with this belief is an ethical one. The solipsistic idea that we are stuck in our heads and that consciousness is some sort of epiphenomenon often does lead to nihilism and depression, as it did for me. Seeing ourselves as cut off from the life around us, perhaps not even really living at all, is psychologically harmful and predisposes one to cynicism, apathy, and hedonism of the worst kind. I think many people are craving a greater sense of meaning and cosmic belonging but are held back by the idea that there is a categorical abyss between their experience and the world. One of my goals as a philosopher is to give people the tools to escape this solipsism in an intellectually honest way. Once we no longer see ourselves as cut off from the whole and not reducible to our physical parts, we can begin to take more seriously the idea that ethics has everything to do with the quality of our participation in the world and how we relate to other living beings, and that spending our lives learning to love is our highest ethical calling. It’s really commonsensical when you think about it, but such is the intellectual knot that this dangerous idea has left many of us with.

What truth do you believe in that society is not ready to accept?

I basically answered this in the previous question, but I do not believe that our minds are reducible to our brains. Henri Bergson argued that perception is not an inner faculty of representation, but “in the things themselves,” and that perception reflects our body’s capacity for action over its environment. This is a radical idea that I am still wrestling with, but I think Bergson was right to point us to the fact that perception is the temporal/relational nexus where our body and mind meet the world—it’s somewhere (when?) in between. If our bodies allow us to experience space, then consciousness allows us to experience time. Consciousness is always embodied and always comes with its world. It is misguided to treat consciousness as if it were like any other object of empirical investigation, or something that could be reduced to a particular physical process. I’m still thinking this through and finding the words to express it, but consciousness seems more like a temporal and relational phenomenon that, while surely being intricately tied to the physical behavioral circuits that exist between the body and its environment, cannot be studied like the spatial entities normally studied by natural scientists. The idea that our bodies and minds are utterly inseparable from our environment is so unorthodox that I think it will be a very long time before it really gains traction in popular consciousness.

If you had to compress your worldview into a single provocative statement, what would it be?

I usually don’t like one-liners because they are almost always gross-simplifications. This one is no exception, but I do like it: “Time is everything.” More than anything, I think that developments in contemporary physics have taught us that change is the rule of the cosmos. Relativity teaches us that space itself is dynamic; quantum mechanics has shown us that ambiguity and creativity reign supreme at the tiniest levels of reality; and consciousness is nothing if not a form of temporal extension that prolongs the past into the present and anticipates the future. The idea that the world is made up of solid physical particles that occupy absolute spatial coordinates in space has long been debunked, but our habits of thought sometimes seem like they haven’t caught up. It is a real intellectual effort to look at the world in terms of time instead of “stuff,” but I have found it to be the most worthwhile philosophical exercise for my understanding of reality.

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What do YOU think?

• Do you find believing “we are simply our brains” depressing? Does a world without values lead to nihilism?

• Has a particular philosopher or philosophy helped you navigate tough times?

• What is goodness?

• “Henri Bergson argued that perception is not an inner faculty of representation, but “in the things themselves…” What do you think this means? Do you agree?

• What are your thoughts on time and its connection to consciousness?

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PEDRO BREA, PhD, is a Lecturer at the University of Colorado (Boulder and Denver) working on the metaphysics and metaethics of process-relational thought. His doctoral dissertation and recent publications have attempted to reframe our understanding of the relationship between energy and time in light of developments in contemporary physics and process philosophy.

PhilPeople

• The Birth of Energy from the Spirit of Revenge: On the Genealogy of the Concept of "Energy" and its Relation to Time

• Critique of the Concept of Energy in Light of Bergson's Philosophy of Duration

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Thanks for supporting my niche literary endeavors and off-beat philosophical speculations. Cheers!

—Tina Lee Forsee