My Strongest Critic

It is 1974, and the world of academic philosophy is shattered. The oddly titled paper “What is it like to be a bat?” published in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 83, No. 4, crushes analytical philosophy, science, economics, and reductionism as a whole. Thomas Nagel’s essay is the best criticism towards my world view to date. I cannot reconcile the beautiful logic presented in that paper, with what I hold true in every single thought of mine. The criticism stands firm and I see no way out. Every time I theorize about an economic issue, or right about social models for this blog, there appears the imaginary 2003 Windows paperclip in the form of Thomas Nagel asking the question: “Is that what it’s like for a human to be a human?”

So why was this paper so revolutionary? It asks the simple question what it is like to be a bat. Nagel describes it like this: It can be imagined to have “webbing on our arms, to be able to fly, to have poor vision and perceive the world through high frequency sound signals, and to spend our time hanging upside down.” That’s probably what its like to be a bat. But wait a minute. That’s how I imagine it would to be like for a bat. Thus, that’s what is for a human to be a bat. But what is it like for a bat to be a bat? Now that’s a way harder question. Can we ever understand what its like for a bat to be a bat? Maybe a bit, but never fully…

Nagel now moves on to the revolutionary question: What is it like to be a human? We also have some clear answers here. “The brain works like this” says the neurosciencentist. “People work at the incentive margin” says the economist. “Genes, natural selection” says the biologist. That seems like a bunch of good answers. But wait a minute. That’s how it is for a scientific model to be a human. But the question we must ask is what is it like for a human to be a human. The thesis of this paper strikes in the heart of any scientific and thus reductionist enquiry. It questions everything I stand for.

I think in economic reductionist terms. I write about love as the exchange of attributes in a social market. I regard veganism as a costly signal equivalent to a tax equilibrating the benefits of adopting post-modern values. Protest and political actions are detached from ideology, and rather talk to a person’s benefits among friends, family, and co-workers. Higher education is not about knowledge or learning; it’s an arbitrary but necessary selection process.

This is what it is for an economic model to be a human, not for a human to be a human. People experience love, have political ideologies and encounter knowledge at university (So I have been told). Those are the phenomena that people face in every moment of their life, and economists cannot speak to it. Economists are good at explaining the what and why, but when it comes to human experience they are clueless.

To get on with my interest and the study of economics I tend to say things like “human experience doesn’t matter”, “phenomenology is the biggest pseudo-science of them all” and “human psyche doesn’t exist”. But Nagel is right: economics doesn’t know what it’s like for a human to be a human. My answer to this criticism is that being human isn’t a thing. It’s not a very good answer, but it’s the best one I got.

(In year 3 I took “Husserl to Heidigger”. It was a fantastic class taught by Alexis Papazoglou. He went the opposite way. He studied physics at imperial college, read the phenomenologists and then did his Phd in Philosophy at Cambridge. My essays on Husserl’s “Transcendental Pheneomenology” and Heidegger’s “Being and Time” were my exploration into metaphysical philosophy. Being able to discuss these matters with Papazoglou in his office hours was fantastic. In the end, economics won the battle for me, and phenomenology became to me what Tokio Hotel become to girls my age, an ecstatic experience felt by someone that isn’t me anymore.)

(At this point also a shout out to my dear friend Konsti, who keeps telling me that I should, at least once in a while, leave my economic models behind and think of the real experience of humans.)