It's the wisdom to know the difference between what we can change and what we can't

Drop a hammer and a feather at the same time. What happens?

In my last post, I offered a tool for assessing the efficacy of a political act: the fantasy/strategy heuristic. Does your action take place atop the cold hard ground of reality, or the dreamy vapor of wishful thinking? At its best, the relationship between fantasy and strategy is dialectical. Good strategy opens up new possibilities that previously existed only in the imagination; fantasy fans the creative spark that fuels good strategy. If strategic politics lives at the left wing of the possible, to quote mid-century socialist Michael Harrington, then leaders on the left need to stake their position in reality while fighting to expand their terrain in the political imagination.

But it takes a good deal of wisdom to discern the difference between what we can’t change and what we can. Forget the serenity prayer: the search to discover where nature ends and freedom begins has been the source of philosophical inquiry for millennia. 

I see two major traditions that this form of inquiry has taken in Western political thought. One is metaphysics — a term I’ve never really been satisfied by because of its slipperiness (is it just a dressed-up synonym for “philosophy?” Sort of?). The other is phenomenology — another five-dollar word that describes a way of thinking popularized at the start of the 20th century, in part as a reaction to the dead ends of metaphysics.

I’m writing this to work out the difference between these theoretical approaches for myself, because I suspect they can tell me something about how I look at politics. With apologies to every professor I’ve ever had, here goes:

What matters is where you start — up in the stars, or down here on earth.¹

Metaphysics is celestial. Phenomenology is worldly. Metaphysics is suspicious of appearances. Phenomenology is suspicious of apparitions. What is, in metaphysics, tends to be what is essential, eternal, and universal.  What is, in phenomenology, tends to be what is present and particular. 

Metaphysics prioritizes the abstract in the attempt to ground our understanding of reality on rational first principles. This often occurs through the diligent removal of variables until a thing’s essence is revealed. Critics charge this approach is otherworldly, describing some version of reality, but one that is slightly off, like the image in a mirror. Phenomenology begins with the concrete, the world as it is, in the attempt to understand relations between things within a system. Critics mistrust the naturalism of phenomenology, finding it naive or shallow.

If metaphysics is mind, then phenomenology is matter — or better, body (you get a lot of body metaphors in philosophy in the second half of the 20th century when phenomenology was popular). While metaphysics strives for unity, phenomenology prefers totality. Metaphysics thus has a better time at handling universals, which can exist in lofty terms, while phenomenology is primed to deal in messy particulars. 

One way to think about the difference between these approaches is the distinction between the real and the ideal. 

An example I find illustrative involves the principle of air resistance. If you drop a hammer and a feather at the same time here on earth, the hammer hits the ground before the feather. Aristotle took an observation like this to mean, not unreasonably, that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. But in 1971, an astronaut named David Scott went to the moon. He dropped a hammer and a feather together, and in the absence of atmospheric drag, the two objects fell at the same time. This confirmed what scientists like Newton and Galileo had known for centuries: in the vacuum of space, that is, under ideal conditions, objects do not fall in proportion to their weight. Aristotle’s theory of physics was lacking. 

Aristotle might respond — who cares what happens in space? Nature abhors a vacuum.² The atmosphere will slow the feather’s descent under the real conditions that exist in the world. That’s where we should concern ourselves.

What sticks with me here is that in order to confirm the effect of air resistance on falling objects, we had to literally leave the earth behind. Aristotle, bless him, did not have that luxury. He had to observe the hammer and the feather as the rest of us might, in the natural system of the world, air resistance and all. We might call this approach phenomenological, taking the totality of natural conditions and concluding that hammers and feathers do not fall at the same speed. This is not wrong, but it hides something, a deeper understanding of the interactions between objects that Aristotle missed as he extrapolated a law from an observation. 

Galileo’s law of falling bodies — which states that objects will fall at the same rate regardless of their weight or shape — holds under the ideal conditions of a vacuum. If it is a universal law, then it is also a metaphysical truth: a truth that does not appear in the world, but goes beyond it. This is what I mean when I say that metaphysics is suspicious of appearances. An astronaut had to go beyond this world in order to confirm a secret law of the universe. 

What this example demonstrates, I hope, is the metaphysical method of modern science: it systematically removes variables to create conditions of unreality — conditions that do not appear in the world — in order to derive universal laws. By moving beyond the world, metaphysics hopes we can return with a greater understanding of its secrets.

The challenge, I think, is that going to the moon tends to change you.³ Coming back is hard. The ideal conditions no longer exist. The hammer and the feather will no longer fall together.

If you have ever attained a state of higher consciousness, if the scales have ever fallen from your eyes, if something has ever radicalized you — in short, if you have ever reached the metaphysical plane — you might understand the shock of the astronaut returning to earth. This is not the way things are supposed to be. But it is the way things are. And until the secrets of the universe are applied, atmospheric drag will always bring the hammer down to earth faster than the feather.

What do you do? Do you spend your time trying to create the vacuum of space here on earth? Do you account for the external conditions of the world, knowing the equations to solve for air resistance will be messy? Do you fly back to the moon? Do you pretend that maybe we do live under ideal conditions after all? What do you do?

1. Regardless of where you start, you still have to return to earth. That’s what makes it politics and not simply philosophy. See Hannah Arendt’s essay “What is Authority?” (1954) where she discusses Plato’s ambivalence to the fallen world of politics:

In the parable of the cave in The Republic, the sky of ideas stretches above the cave of human existence, and therefore can become its standard. But the philosopher who leaves the cave for the pure sky of ideas does not originally do so in order to acquire those standards and learn the “art of measurement” but to contemplate the true essence of Being–βλєπєιν єίς τό άληθєστατον. The basically authoritative element of the ideas, that is, the quality which enables them to rule and compel, is therefore not at all a matter of course. The ideas become measures only after the philosopher has left the bright sky of ideas and returned to the dark cave of human existence.

2. This is the notion of horror vacui, which is obviously a Latin phrase that Aristotle would not have used. I don’t know what the rendering in Greek would be. The idea is that nothingness — a vacuum — does not and cannot exist.

3. c.f. the lyric “Love is an astronaut, it comes back but it’s never the same.” I thought maybe this was a Dave Berman lyric, but no, somehow it’s from the LCD Soundsystem song “Drunk Girls.”