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What is visceral idealism? It is the name I am giving to the thesis that the peculiarly human features of our reality - those features which make that reality fit for human habitation - owe their existence to the human mind. First and foremost among them are the myriad normative phenomena that structure our existence and render it intelligible, with the most central of these being our concept of truth and the idea of the good. It is the doctrine, in other words, that normativity, the original and most consequential of human technologies, is a product of the human mind itself and neither would nor could exist without it. Hence the idealism. And without the technology of truth and the good, ‘reality’ as such would be inconceivable. So the normative is real if anything is and, perhaps most profoundly, it is experienced as real. Hence the visceral.

Nomenclature aside, this is a very old idea. In the Western philosophical tradition, it seems already manifest in the “measure principle” attributed to Protagoras:

“A human being is the measure of all things - of things that are, that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not.”2

This (ignoring a fair amount of nuance) is relativism, and no less old are objections to it, which are of broadly two kinds.

1. The view is not simply false but untenable, subject to self-refutation.

2. The view is politically pernicious, being incompatible with the truly just society (and perhaps incompatible with any society at all).

The classical presentation of the first criticism is Plato’s Theaetetus, while his Protagoras, Gorgias, and of course Republic, in varying ways take up the second. Such philosophical critiques (followed by those of Aristotle and most of the subsequent two-thousand year tradition) were eagerly accepted, appropriated, and amplified by the great religions, and generally confirmed by unreflective common sense. Collectively, these distinct and often conflicting sources of belief collaborated in providing a world well situated within a universe of truth, and if humans could not necessarily (and perhaps not at all) grasp that truth, they were certain of that truth being out there.

That world is no longer, having gradually, and then suddenly, receded into a suspect past. In its wake was left a very different and often unfamiliar world that drifts unmoored within a multiverse without a center and without truth but rather has an everything bagel that is everywhere all at once. Nothing is true, everything is permitted, as the saying (and the song) goes. Welcome to the Age of Protagoras.

Now with every world there is a philosophy, and whether it is the world that determines the parameters of its peculiar philosophy or whether the philosophy conditions the appearance of its proprietary world, it seems clear that visceral idealism is the philosophy for this world that we’re in. And whether that is for the better or for the worse, whether it is ultimately incoherent and/or morally bankrupt or provides the (dis)solution of the epistemic and ethical puzzles intrinsic to objective truth, is what this project is ultimately about. I want to chart philosophically the age we are in and probe our ability to comprehend it. I think this is worth doing, for like all philosophical work, the aim is to understand who we have become and who we might yet still be. I hope you find it worth doing and worth your subscription. And while a free subscription will provide access to each new post (for a month), I would not be a good Protagorean if I did not ask that you consider supporting this work with a paid subscription. Your support allows me to dedicate more of my time and effort and allow you to contribute to the discussion and further the work through the comments. Thank you for considering it.

Who is JS Biehl?

I am a philosopher, which is to say that I want to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. I strongly suspect, though, that things in the broadest possible sense of the term are (sometimes slowly and sometimes suddenly) continuously rearranging themselves (in the broadest sense of the term). The truth, therefore, has many faces. It presents itself at times as eternal and at others fleeting; frequently as solid ground yet often as fragile and ephemeral; at one moment threatening to hurt and the next to set us free; as the merciless destroyer of our finely wrought illusions and as the loving promise of our salvation.

The pursuit of it is perpetual.

I am an assistant professor at St. John’s University (Queens) and founder/executive director of the Gotham Philosophical Society, an idea-bank for New York City.

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