Quietism (philosophy)
Quietism in philosophy is a view that sounds almost like a dare. Crispin Wright put it bluntly: "Quietism is the view that significant metaphysical debate is impossible." Its defenders practice philosophy without offering grand theories, and they consider that the honest way to do the job. Why would anyone choose restraint over a system? What is left of philosophy once its big claims are set aside? And how far back does this habit of holding back reach? The answers run from ancient skeptics, through a famous circle of twentieth-century language philosophers, to arguments about truth and consciousness that are still being made.
Quietist philosophers treat their discipline less like a science and more like medicine. They give philosophy a broadly therapeutic or remedial role. On this picture, philosophy has no positive thesis of its own to contribute. What it can do is defuse confusions buried in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects. Those subjects include non-quietist philosophy itself.
Settling debates is not the task, say quietists, and neither is advancing knowledge. This applies most of all to the long argument between realists and non-realists. The real task is liberation. The mind is freed by diagnosing the concepts that confuse it.
One description frames the stance as avoiding substantive philosophical theorizing. It is usually linked with certain forms of skepticism, pragmatism, and minimalism about truth. It stands against putting forward positive theses and building constructive arguments.
That makes quietism an odd entry among philosophical movements. By its nature it is not a school with a systematic body of truths. Its aim is to show that philosophical positions or theories cannot solve problems, settle debates or advance knowledge. The earliest identifiable version in the West may belong to the ancient Pyrrhonists.
Sextus Empiricus described Pyrrhonism as a form of philosophical therapy, which makes the Pyrrhonists perhaps the earliest identifiable quietists in the West. He traced their skepticism to talented people troubled by the anomaly in things. These people were puzzled over which accounts they should accept. So they set out to investigate what is true and what is false. They hoped that deciding such questions would bring ataraxia, a state of being unperturbed.
The turning point, in his telling, was the chief constitutive principle of scepticism: "to every account an equal account is opposed". From this, he said, the skeptics come to hold no beliefs.
Some have identified the Epicureans as another early quietist camp. Their goals were aponia, which means freedom from pain, and ataraxia again. Both aims are decidedly quietist, and the Epicureans even dismissed Stoic logic as useless.
The neo-Confucian philosopher Cheng Hao is also associated with quietism. He argued that the goal of existence should be calming one's natural biases and embracing impartial tranquility. Yet this aversion to bias remains quite distinct from the position of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the figure behind most modern talk of quietism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein stands behind nearly every contemporary discussion of quietism, even though he did not advocate it himself. He did express sympathy with the viewpoint. His work greatly influenced the ordinary language philosophers, who carried its therapeutic spirit forward.
Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind was one of the early ordinary language works. It argued that dualism arises from failing to see that mental vocabulary and physical vocabulary are different ways of describing one and the same thing, namely human behaviour.
J. L. Austin's Sense and Sensibilia took a similar approach to skepticism and the reliability of sense perception. Austin argued that these problems arise only from misconstruing ordinary language. In his view there is nothing genuinely wrong with empirical evidence.
Norman Malcolm, a friend of Wittgenstein's, took a quietist approach to skeptical problems in the philosophy of mind.
More recently, John McDowell, Irad Kimhi, Sabina Lovibond, Eric Marcus and Gideon Rosen have taken explicitly quietist positions. Richard Rorty belongs on the list to a certain degree. Pete Mandik has argued for qualia quietism on the hard problem of consciousness. McDowell and Rosen also built quietist arguments about realism, which is where the stance meets its sharpest opposition.
Realism can be asked about subjects ranging from ethics and aesthetics to science and mathematics. Realists claim that a given concept exists, has particular properties and is in some way mind independent. Non-realists deny this claim. Quietists take a third position, which is that there is no real debate between the two camps on a given subject.
John McDowell's version holds that the debate hinges on theses about the relationship between the mind and the world around us. Those theses, he argues, are unsupported or unsupportable. Remove them and there will be no debate left to have. Gideon Rosen argues more specifically against individual cases of the realism debate.
These local quietisms can be separated from the larger project. A philosopher may be quietist about realism or about truth while holding any view on quietism about philosophy as a whole. Truth is another subject where such a narrower quietism has been developed.
Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell defend a quietism about truth, which is a version of the identity theory of truth. Their claim is that when we think truly, there is no ontological gap between what we think and what is actually true.
This puts them against a familiar pair of terms, truth bearers and truthmakers. Quietists about truth resist the distinction because it leads toward a correspondence theory of truth. They want it eliminated. On their account, a true statement is simply someone thinking truly about the world.
The target of those thoughts is not a truthbearer at all. What a true thought reaches, according to this view, is the facts of the world themselves.
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Common questions
What is quietism in philosophy?
Quietism in philosophy is the view that philosophy is broadly therapeutic or remedial and has no positive thesis to contribute. It aims to defuse confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects rather than advance knowledge or settle debates.
What did Crispin Wright say about quietism?
Crispin Wright said that "Quietism is the view that significant metaphysical debate is impossible." The line is often quoted as a short statement of the stance.
Who were the earliest quietist philosophers in the West?
Pyrrhonism represents perhaps the earliest identifiable quietist position in the West, and Sextus Empiricus described it as a form of philosophical therapy. Some have also identified the Epicureans as early quietists, given their goals of aponia and ataraxia.
What is the connection between Wittgenstein and quietism?
Contemporary discussion of quietism can be traced back to Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work greatly influenced the ordinary language philosophers. Wittgenstein himself did not advocate quietism, but he expressed sympathy with the viewpoint.
What is quietism about realism?
Quietism about realism holds that there is no real debate between realists and non-realists on a given subject. John McDowell argues that the debate hinges on unsupported or unsupportable theses about the relationship between the mind and the world.
What is quietism about truth?
Quietism about truth is a version of the identity theory of truth, defended by Jennifer Hornsby and John McDowell. It holds that when we think truly, there is no ontological gap between what we think and what is actually true.
All sources
16 references cited across the entry
- 1BookThe Oxford companion to philosophyDavid Bakhurst — Oxford University Press — 2005
- 2JournalQuietismStelios Virvidakis et al. — 2013
- 3RealismAlexander Miller — Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2019
- 4BookTruth and ObjectivityCrispin Wright — Harvard University Press — 1994
- 7BookThe Oxford dictionary of philosophySimon Blackburn — 2016
- 8BookThe Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyMetaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2019
- 10BookEncyclopedia of philosophyThomson Gale/Macmillan Reference USA — 2006
- 11BookEncyclopedia of philosophyBrad Inwood et al. — Thomson Gale/Macmillan Reference USA — 2006
- 12EpicurusDavid Konstan — Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2018
- 13BookEncyclopedia of philosophyWing-tsit Chan — Thomson Gale/Macmillan Reference USA — 2006
- 14Gilbert RyleJulia Tanney — Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University — 2015
- 15JournalThe New Loud: Richard Rorty, Quietist?Hanne Andrea Kraugerud et al. — 2010
- 16JournalMeta-Illusionism and Qualia QuietismPete Mandik — 2016
- 17JournalThe Identity Theory of TruthStewart Candlish et al. — 1996-03-28