What is it like to build a systematic perspective on the world? In real time? The Revenge of Reason is evidence of this path of thought, where I'm thinking about a lot of different things and showing how they relate to one another.
For example, there’s an essay in the book—for which I am very proud of, but it may seem trivial to a lot of people—called “What’s in a Game?” This is where I grapple with the question of what a game is. How do we define a game? It’s a more difficult philosophical problem than you might imagine. It has a long history of over 100 years of people trying and failing at it. My position is that games are the kind of artwork whose medium is freedom. In real life, we don’t get to choose what options we have. When we play a game, we create these worlds within the world, we choose what options we have. We choose our own freedom. Studying games as microcosms of choice tells us a lot about freedom and what it is to be a person. This is not just in video games, but board games, card games, and others.
The book also talks about politics and what I think of as the contemporary impasse of liberalism. There is this concept from Mark Fisher, this idea of capitalist realism, that we are stuck and unable to imagine a kind of future beyond it. I provide a bit of diagnosis of what I see as the deep philosophical errors of liberalism—as a political philosophy. I argue that liberalism demands freedom but refuses to understand what freedom is. Liberals think freedom is just not being interfered with, right? But that means they don't understand what the positive conditions that enable choice are, what enables people to actually be agents.
One assumption in neoliberal philosophy, along with economics and rational choice theory, is that choice is itself free—that it costs nothing to make choices. An ideal rational agent can just think about everything. The more information they have, the better. And they can just make the optimal choice. This is false. We need cognitive resources like attention to be able to process information and make choices. You can live in a world with too much choice, where the quality of choices you have is poor. You are forced to make all of these unnecessary trivial choices in a way that prevents you from making the important ones, or asking questions like: how do I want to live my life? What is my destiny?
Ongoing thread. More from Peter Wolfendale to follow.
