Exploring Wittgenstein's Fly Trap
With Ruben Nelson, June 13, 2023
Transcript
Ruben Nelson 0:04
I’ll explain the reference to Wittgenstein’s fly bottle. Wittgenstein was once asked, “What is your aim and philosophy?” And his response was somewhat enigmatic, “to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.”
0:20
Well, what the heck does that mean? Well, on the right hand side, you can see a fly bottle. But the bottom is cut out of two bottles, one inserted into the other. sugar water is placed in the bottle, so it flows down into the bottom bottle. And flies have evolved to the point that they can sense where there’s food, some distance away from it.
0:48
So they fly into the fly bottle from the top because it’s been cut out, and through that first bottle into the bottom, and they think they’re in heaven because there’s lots of food, they can fly around. The trouble is, of course, is that they’re trapped. That other than random chance, there is no possibility of escaping, and so they die. And fly bottles like this have been used for centuries to capture flies.
1:19
But how does that relate to us? My point is that the trouble that we know we’re in in our modern techno industrial societies, everybody in CACOR understands at least that we’re in trouble even if we disagree about some of the details. Many agree that ecological overshoot is a root of that trouble. And some see the root of that and biological determinism and others go other places.
1:53
Here’s my way of accounting for it, and why it matters. That we in modern technical industrial societies have evolved enough to get ourselves into trouble. To that extent, we’re like the flies, we’ve evolved enough to get ourselves into trouble that is the analog of a fly bottle. That is, we can discover that we’re in trouble. And we can fly around trying to get our way out. But we can’t find a way out.
2:26
And flies cannot evolve instantly. So flies can’t stand back and say, Well, what kind of a situation are we in? Is that a novel situation we’ve never been in before. And we have to reimagine where we are. But we as human beings can do that.
2:46
Now, mostly, of course, we don’t. That is virtually the whole of the sustainability industry and people who worry about existential risks and the kinds of things CACOR does. Use… we know that it was modern techno-industrial ways of thinking and being and knowing reality, presenting ourselves to it responding to it, that it’s our take on reality that got us into the place we’re in. Because it’s led us to be able to do things that we were blind to, and are now beginning to notice, and realize that we’re in very deep trouble.
3:31
But unlike the fly, we have some capacity for the kind of meta thinking that I’m demonstrating here. And therefore there’s a possibility that we may while we’re in a trapped situation, we may be able to evolve enough beyond our modern techno-industrial ways of knowing, being and living to get out of the fly bottle.
4:00
But that assumes that Einstein’s quip [attributed] that we can’t use the same levels and types of thinking that got us into a problem to get us out. It’s a quip that most people have used or at least heard, that that applies to us as modernity. In other words, we cannot, we moderns, cannot use a better version of modernity to get us out.
4:25
And if you stand back and think about it, that’s where we’re putting virtually all our time, energy and money, whether it’s in the form of artificial intelligence, or whether it’s in the form of the kinds of efforts that are now being made, whether through the Club of Rome, or other forms of the sustainability industry, that they virtually all depend on our modern techno industrial ways of being knowing and living.
4:53
And so the hope is that a better version of that which got us into trouble can get us out. And my use of the fly bottle is saying no, with this analogy, you can’t do that. As with the flies, what got us in will not get us out, flies unable to evolve die. The challenge for us is to outgrow our modernity, to learn to leave it behind, to learn to apprehend reality, present ourselves to it respond to it, to work with it, in ways that transcend modernity, or we die. Those are the choices.
5:43
This is not well understood. Yes, there’s some vague talk about ecological civilization. But you can read vast amounts of that literature, and you find that there’s very little other than kind of saying, we have to be more respectful of the earth and how it works. I’m I’m not against that. Except that doesn’t get you very far.
6:06
And so that’s the point I’m making, that we who are modern, are in a situation analogous to Wittgenstein’s fy bottle. We don’t know it yet, we haven’t come to terms with it. Not even the Club of Rome has advanced that thesis. And if that thesis is at all, closer to the mark, then we need to fundamentally change our attitude, change our understanding of the situation we’re in, because it means we’re in both a different kind of trouble and a deeper trouble.
6:53
So it means we’re not It’s not adequate to account for ecological overshoot by biological determinism. That we need a way of understanding the troubles we’re in that don’t in any way deny our biology, but that also take account of the fact that we are cultural creatures, and that our cultures exemplify particular forms of civilization. And that the form of civilization, modernity, modern cultures, exemplify, has now become lethal, and we need to outgrow it. That changes the focus and changes the agenda. or so it seems to me and of course, I’m happy to think with you and talk about these things.
7:43
I’ll stop there now. Thank you