Philosophy is Conceptual Hacking
What role does philosophy play in today’s world? What role can philosophy play? Philosophy, it is often thought, trades in simplicities. The modus operandi of philosophy often proceeds in accordance with a principle of reductionism. Underneath the parade of phenomena and the surface-level flutter of activity reigns a simple ‘One’, whether a fundamental level of reality or a metaphysical unity.
Philosophy is ultimately concerned with problems and the concepts we create to solve said problems. In fact, if you want a glimpse of the variety of philosophy, just corner a philosopher and ask, ‘Hey. What’s your problem?’
Hidden in this simple question will emerge a complexity worthy of the most beautiful fractal. Committing to philosophy means accepting an adventure the outcome of which has no transcendental assurances. Thus, the philosopher as a conceptual adventurer lacks the assurance that her problems are well-founded.
Philosophy has a Jazz structure. It trades in open-ended questions and answers, a dance that pivots around this call-and-response structure. It invites a dialogue intrinsically plural, suggestions for revisions, and proposals for further improvement or completely new alternatives.
Philosophy is conceptual hacking. ‘Hacking’ is often understood as a technical skill possessed only by those high-level computer engineers whose software and computer know-how facilitates a relationship with the internal logic of computer software. For example, provide a piece of software to a computer hacker, and she’ll find not only its actuality but, more importantly, the inherent possibilities lying dormant therein. Give a hacker a pair of glasses. The ‘normal’ mind sees a technology for vision correction. However, a hacker sees not only a technology for vision correction, but sees its inherent possibilities. The question isn’t merely What is this? or What does this do? but, it’s also What can I make this do? What possibilities are inherent to these objects and its relations? Thus, hackers gave us Google Glass and Oculus Rift.
Hacking should be understood more generally as any attempt to infiltrate and dissect a particular domain and, first, exhibit its internal structure , that is, all that domain’s facts. But, second, and this is the creative, constructionist part, the hacker must find those virtual possibilities lying dormant in that particular domain’s actuality. The proper tools here — the philosopher’s technology — are concepts. Thus, conceptual hacking comprises the philosophical investigation into a particular concept (‘Knowledge’, ‘Reality’, ‘God’, ‘World’, ‘Privacy’, ‘Digital’, etc.) and the determination and exhibition of how that concept is understood and employed. The positive, creative aspect of conceptual hacking consists in the construction of solutions or dissolutions that attempt to render that concept coherent within a larger, more general worldview.
Hacking is thus a necessary condition of the achievement of freedom.
Hacking is ultimately concerned with abstraction and abstractions. While most flee in the face of abstraction, the hacker welcomes, even seeks its intrusion. Hackers produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, all hacked of out raw data: they are abstracters of new worlds. One might venture to designate the task of hacking as double: preventing the existence of ‘the system’ by debugging the inherent contradictions within any theory of everything and, subsequently, putting its intellectual and conceptual firepower in the service of creating new worlds. The hacker displays the proclivity to take things apart, getting an overview of a system or object’s internal structure and governing mechanisms, and implementing the resultant insights positively for newer, better creations. Thus, philosophical hackers resent any attempt to obstruct disassembling a system of thought, regardless of its sedimentation into current “common sense”. As Stephen Levy writes in Hackers, “And wouldn’t everyone benefit even more by approaching the world with the same inquisitive intensity, skepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in sharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements, and desire to build as those who followed the Hacker Ethic?”
This task promotes the hacker to a cultural position of fundamental importance. Computer hackers, to be sure, have received the most attention in virtue of domestic surveillance programs and the heroic efforts of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning. However, the original hackers had little to anything to do with computers. Instead, ‘phone freaks’ were the original hackers. Phone freaks sought to disrupt and short-circuit the communication and phone systems of AT&T and Bell. The point was to short-circuit the telecommunications world by finding inherent loopholes, gaps, and glitches.
Thinkers tinker, and the fruit of a hacker’s labor is the alteration of representational worlds. Concerned with the abstract, by implication, hacking is concerned with the virtual. For in virtue of abstraction the virtual is identified, produced and released. I belabor these points because it underscores the hacker and the philosopher’s relation to Being.
“Those rebellious, unhygienic tinkerers and thinkers tarry on the tangent of chaos.”
Philosophy and hacking appear to be therapeutic activities; not because, as Wittgenstein thought, it cures the hubris and gullibility of human reason to mistake linguistic and grammatical complexities for metaphysical entities. Philosophy and hacking can provide the “kick” to propel us into a reflective relation to our default settings, both epistemological and ontological, in order that the worlds and situations in which we find ourselves, and their constitutive rules and laws, are made an object of reflection. Most importantly, higher-order reflection on the structure and laws of domains exposes the radical contingency of those constitutive rules. Those rules could be otherwise. Philosophy and hacking can illuminate the radical contingency of the formal structures and laws governing all domains. This is precisely what makes both endeavors so radical.
Human freedom consists not in the freedom to do what one will; human freedom designates the higher-order recognition of one’s role in a particular state and the ability to hack this state and elicit and entangle and short-circuit one’s position. Humans, like all entities, are engineers and hackers. Hacking is a necessary condition of the achievement of freedom. Homo hackus.