Would you swallow the blue pill or the red pill?
The blue pill returns you to the invisible prison that is your artificially simulated reality, whereas the red pill allows you to discover the truth of your enslavement by the machines. Have you ever wondered why you only have two pills to choose between? If you buy a pack of chocolate M&Ms you also get brown, green, yellow, and orange options.
In a famous poem, Robert Frost described his moment of choice between two paths in a wood, knowing that he might never pass that way again he surmised that the choice he was about to make would later seem to him to have made all the difference. Did he never consider the possibility that he could reject both paths, and make his own, new track through the woods? In the mid-nineteenth century, the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote a famous book, Either/Or, in which he compared two approaches to the conduct of life, one primarily aesthetic the other ethical. Is there not a third way? And not just a third but, perhaps, a fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh way to live. What is the attraction of binary choices? In part, for the decision maker, choices become quicker and easier for there are only two option to consider. Our bodies and our language normalise this way of thinking: on the one hand, on the other hand. In part, however, the binary structure allows the person who is presenting our choices to us, to seek to persuade us to do something we might otherwise be reluctant to do, by making the alternative highly unattractive. There is significant rhetorical force in the design of a false dichotomy.
When I was a graduate student, I remember coming across the phrase, socialism or barbarism which enjoyed wide currency among left-wing thinkers during the First World War. The original form of this phrase comes from Karl Kautsky, the co-author of the “Erfurt Programme” that was adopted in 1891 by the German Social Democratic Party, then the largest socialist party in Europe. Kautsky published a book-length commentary on the programme – which advocated the introduction of socialist economic policies by means of democratic political participation – in which he wrote, as things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism. Although the “Erfurt Programme” was criticised by Lenin and other Marxist radicals, the phrase socialism or barbarism was taken up by Rosa Luxemburg as a rallying slogan for insurrectionary politics in 1915: the great imperialist powers were destroying European civilization, she said, which wa facing collapse just as the Roman Empire had fifteen hundred years previously. The only way to avoid this barbarism, she continued, was the imposition of socialism through the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war.
As it turned out, the country that was blessed with Lenin’s socialism was later cursed with Stalin’s barbarism, whereas the rest of Europe eventually recovered from the folly of war, although Luxemburg did not live to see the refutation of her dichotomy. In the following two decades, many right-wing thinkers in Europe adopted a comparable binary approach to politics, reasoning that the only people strong enough to stand up to the godless communists were the authoritarian nationalists. In Spain, Italy, and Germany the choice was said to be between support for fascism or capitulation to bolshevism. There were many conservative leaders in Europe who accepted this binary and gave support – often covert, sometimes over – to the fascists, including a former British king and a future pope. It is part of the political logic of the false dichotomy that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, a phrase which remains influential in some foreign policy circles despite the enormous mass of empirical evidence that demonstrates its falsehood.
My doctoral research involved studying the ideas of a group of philosophers who had been greatly influenced by the writings of Hegel. I have been thinking about his work this past week, after starting to read some lectures given by Alexandre Kojève in Paris in the 1930s, about the Phänomenologie des Geistes, which is Hegel’s most influential presentation of his philosophy, first published in 1807. Hegel is not an easy read, but I always find him a stimulating writer: he might not persuade me with his arguments, but he makes me think hard about the ideas he discusses. He is, I think, one of the best sorts of philosopher, that is, someone who asks the interesting and important questions but then fails to answer them satisfactorily, leaving the reader with plenty of further work to do.
Perhaps the most famous of Hegel’s arguments was his presentation of the dialectic process within the development of thought itself. It goes something like this. When we think, we start with a basic idea that seems clear and obvious to us, for example we are aware of our own existence, so we have the idea of Being. If we think about Being, about what it means to have life and existence, at some point our thoughts are drawn inevitably into thinking about the opposite of Being, that is Not-Being. The positive idea logically implies its negation, what is (Being) suggests what is not (Not-Being). We started with one idea and now we have two. In time, as our thoughts move between these two ideas, Being and Not-Being, they will be drawn inevitably to think about the relationship between these two ideas, and how the negation of the first by the second might in turn lead back to first idea. The movement of thought from Not-Being back to Being produces a third idea, Becoming, which is similar but not identical with the first idea, because it includes within it the overcoming of the second idea. The thesis of Being was negated by the antithesis of Not-Being, and this produced the synthesis of Becoming, a new, higher, and more complex idea, which in contemporary jargon we might describe as Being v2.0.
Hegel uncovers this dialectical process everywhere, not just in our thinking across the whole range of human knowledge but also in the development of our history, our society, our religion, and our culture. What I find appealing about the idea of the dialectic is its central feature: that initially one thought leads to its opposite, but in turn this opposition is overcome by the movement of thought to a new, higher level. Infamously, Hegel claimed that the whole movement of human intellectual history was directed towards the achievement of Absolute Knowledge, and that in his teaching and writings, Hegel himself had completed this process: after Hegel, there were no new thoughts or new movements of thought to be experienced. Not surprisingly, most subsequent philosophers have been sceptical about this claim. In my view, the movement of thought neither has an overt goal, nor comes to an endpoint. By that I mean that human thinking considered as a whole is neither teleological nor terminal. Despite the absence of a meaningful destination, our thinking keeps on moving and it is this idea of movement through history that I find attractive in Hegel’s work.
Marx borrowed Hegel’s idea of the dialectic for his own work, transforming it from a movement in thought to a movement in society, driven by the changing nature of the forces of material production. Any thoughtful reader of Marx would have understood that each dominant social form would inevitably have suggested its negation, and this negation would in turn have generated a new, higher dominant form by the process of synthesis. All of which makes it rather paradoxical that Kautsky, Luxemburg, and others claimed that we were confronted by the choice between socialism or barbarism. The whole point of the dialectic is to show that our choices are never truly binary: when we encounter two apparent opposites, we should know that a third option will in due course emerge, one that combines elements of both of its precursors. Likewise, those right-wing thinkers who championed fascism as the only sure bulwark against communism looked worse than foolish when, in 1939, Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin, and then again later, in 1945, after the end of the war, Anglo-American democratic capitalism emerged as the strongest force in global politics.
My first conclusion, reflecting on this history, is that when someone presents me with a binary option and asks me to choose, it is very likely that the dichotomy is false. It is because they are conscious of the weakness of the argument for their favoured option that they try to persuade me that the alternative is disastrous. There is a humorous feature to this way of thinking, illustrated here.
My second conclusion is that what might appear to be a dichotomy at first glance, often turns out not to be so if we allow ourselves time to think. If, like Robert Frost, we find ourselves confronted by diverging roads in the yellow wood, before we make our choice, we should stop awhile and think. Hegel’s insight is that thought is creative and not merely a rule-bound calculative process. By considering the nature of the choice, considering its limitations and what might lay beyond these boundaries, we might well come to see that there are other options open to us. Thinking beyond the binary, we might find a different, more attractive path to take.
For all the obscurities and self-aggrandisement in his writings, Hegel understood that our categories of thought are not fixed in the world. When they become fixed in our minds it is only because we have stopped thinking too soon. The phenomenology of thought never comes to an end, because every apparent end is only the start of another chapter. If Kierkegaard is the philosopher of Either/Or, Hegel is the philosopher of Both/And then some more. Choose the red if you want, choose the blue if you prefer, but don’t forget that there are also brown, green, yellow, and orange options.