Woke epistemology

The theory behind the war on reality

For René Girard, we are desiring beings above all else, and our desires are always borrowed. We emulate others to figure out what we want and take on their desires as if they are our own. For starters, as the Girardian story goes, this causes no trouble. This capacity for mimicry is how we learn; it’s how we train our interests and find our way. But as Girard constantly stresses, sharing in the desires of others also leads to discord. There is much in our world to confirm that he is right, at least to a significant degree. One has only to look at the culture war to notice that shared desires are part of the reason for all the conflict. But is this the primary frame through which we should interpret the culture war? Here’s Girard in Evolution and Conversion:

“We have experienced various forms of totalitarianism that openly denied Christian principles. There has been the totalitarianism of the left, which tried to outflank Christianity; and there as been the totalitarianism of the right, like Nazism, which found Christianity too soft on victims. There will probably be some thinkers in the future who will reformulate this principle in a political correct fashion, in more virulent forms, which will be more anti-Christian, albeit an ultra-Christian caricature. When I say more Christian and more anti-Christian I imply the figure of the Anti-Christ. The Anti-Christ is nothing but that: it is the ideology that attempts to outchristianize Christianity, that imitates Christianity in a spirit of rivalry. You can foresee the shape of what the Anti-Christ is going to be in the future: a super-victimary machine that will keep on sacrificing in the name of the victim.”

He said this long before the great awokening and he was clearly not wrong. But whenever ideas like Girard’s are found to be so intuitively true, so alluringly without apparent contradiction, I cannot help but ask a few hermeneutic questions: What does it mean that we regard this as true? What conditions inform the fact that there is such a strong interpretive resonance here? Are we overlooking something? Certainly, mimeticism is a powerful component of our psychologies and biologies. But is desire necessarily so haphazard and arbitrary? Is all desiring as relative as the Girardian perspective seems to render it? Girard even disparages the role of objects in desire. Desire itself is the thing, especially the metaphysical desire to be.

Girard’s entire system would not be so intuitively plausible and so obviously applicable to our time if it had not been for the modern capitulation to theological voluntarism, which emerged back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. To easily conceive of desire as having primacy would be impossible if at some point in history the will hadn’t been allowed such a prominent place in Western thought. In older theological and metaphysical systems, the primary human relationship with the world of meaning was one of knowing. Desire was a feature, and a vital one, but understanding was foundational. Even in matters of love, knowing was primary, not desiring. Sexual intimacy was knowing, not merely a casual diversion or a bit on the side.

We find a subtle shift away from knowledge as primary in the work of the medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus. At first, this changed the way people saw God and then instigated a change in how we see ourselves. Another Franciscan named William of Ockham also contributed significantly to incepting this shift in the consciousness of the West. Since this is no scholarly treatise, I must be absurdly brief. The shift in question would end up with God being viewed not as Being but as Absolute Power. More than this, these theologians stood in opposition to others who saw the possibility of knowing God by analogy. By doing away with the doctrine of the analogy of being and adhering to the idea of the univocity of being, Scotus and Ockham ensured that God—and especially God as having an absolute and even fairly arbitrary will—was utterly inscrutable. The will of the Divine could have no limits placed on it, even rational limits.

I am aware of the complexities of history here, and I do not think that either Scotus or Ockham necessarily intended their theologising to have such detrimental results. It was not inevitable that their ideas would end up wreaking so much havoc. And yet, in their work, we find the seeds of modernity and even postmodernity. They created an opening, no doubt supported by various historical happenings and misinterpretations and hermeneutical exaggerations, by which the world could be reframed as the domain of wills. Knowledge was demoted. And if God could be defined by will, then we as creatures made in his image can also be defined by will. Voluntarism took root and, what with the death of God and all that, which left ‘us’ with no God and only our will, here we are with will’s waywardness firmly grasped in our hands.

I know how silly it is to rush over such complex subject matter in two paragraphs. I am aware of debates around the so-called Scotus Story. Scotus wasn’t a villain, some say, and that may indeed be so. Nevertheless, what I don’t think is so easily contestable is that we live in an age in which will is primary—and there is more than a little support for seeing this as a theological and not merely philosophical development that began with that subtle doctor. This is to say that it suggested a way of rethinking the entire order of the cosmos and human life in relation to the cosmos around the will.

The fact that so many debates around freedom and rights and dignity are now not considered in the light of knowledge first is one sign of how this new view of the cosmos shaped the world. Nowadays the law is less the force of understanding than the force of arbitrary rules and arbitrary will. Legislation runs rampant especially when there is no reference to the real. Freedom has become mainly negative, rights have become mere unreasoned expressions of personal desires, and dignity has been emptied of all rational content. Regarding the latter, for instance, now people have intrinsic dignity, as the Humanist Manifesto says, even if they are whining reprobates who want to destroy the world. Apparently dignity as being and acting in a dignified manner is a thing of the past.

You can clearly see this heavy emphasis on will at the expense of knowledge in Matt Walsh’s documentary What is a Woman? (Daily Wire, 2022). In that documentary, no one on the side of the identitarian left can define what a woman is. They cannot (or will not) even acknowledge basic differences between men and women that normal people know. Walsh himself seems driven by a quest to know; he is after the “truth”—which is, according to one interviewed professor, very transphobic. What is fascinating to me, though, is that often the central contest between wokism and realism is commonly framed in mimetic terms. This can only end up favouring identitarianism and why the contest often degenerates into trolling and ad hominems. This is a battle of wills, apparently; it is a battle of rights versus rights. The contest is commonly framed by the identitarian left as a contest between love and hate. How can you oppose love you hateful bigot? In other words: How can you, representing the wrong kind of power, oppose what the atomised individual wants quite apart from any shared conception of truth?

But I think it is a mistake to frame this debate in mimetic terms. Mimetic desire is not all we are. We aren’t only desiring beings and so this is not predominantly a moral contest even if morality is part of the issue. The primary conflict is between two irreconcilable epistemologies. It is really about the theories of knowledge at play. One epistemology can be traced back to the realist tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Aristotle, and Plato. The other can be traced back to the voluntarism of Ockham and Scotus and the Reformers and moderns who took their lead. To cut a long story short, to anyone even vaguely on the side of realism, Walsh’s question of what a woman is can be answered using distinct terms because knowledge is thought to have content. That content is real beings—real women, in this case. Realists see words as having referents.

This is not the case with the woke—by this word I mean social justice identitarianists or social justice identity politics ideologues; wokism, by extension, is simply social justice identitarianism. The woke are nominalists as well as voluntarists. Yet, I should mention that their epistemology follows Nietzsche more than Ockham or Scotus. Those two medieval figures at least had the decency to accept reality as reality. They inverted the relationship between will and knowledge but they did not do away with reality. Reality is known, they claimed, through revelation. Although there are problems with this substitution of pure revelation for natural knowledge, the real still clearly plays a part in their worldview. As if to outdo this trust in the real, woke epistemology offers a warped and radicalised version of Nietzsche’s idea of perspectivism. Whether Nietzsche expected his perspectivism to be taken so far is doubtful. Whether he would have endorsed the kind of perspectivism adopted by the woke is unlikely. 

The basic idea of perspectivism is found in Nietzsche’s belief that people look at the world in decidedly different ways, according to different perspectives. This, in itself, is nothing earth-shattering. People have always known and recognised something of this. But the novelty in Nietzsche’s idea is found in his declaration that people’s perspectives reveal their interests. Such interests, for Nietzsche, have roots in all kinds of accidents of biology and feeling and valuing and countless historical contingencies. He calls out philosophers, for instance, for doing little more than writing autobiographies under the assumption that they are seeking out the truth (BGE §6). Physics, in his view, is less an interpretation of the world than an “arrangement” of the world (BGE §14). Stated in its most extreme form, perspectivism means that what people ‘know’ about the world is not determined by the content of the world (i.e. what we know about it) but by biases, partisanship, intolerance, and even philosophical malice; that is, what we want or will in respect to it (BGE §7). It is our interests that determine what is real for us, and nothing much else. As this hints, there can be no separation of his idea of perspectivism from his idea of the will to power. Even where Nietzsche centralises the importance of love (WTP §1030 & §1031), this is not love in the sense of knowing but love as an expression of the will to power.

Wokies won’t bother to read Nietzsche in a careful and attentive manner, though. They won’t pay attention, therefore, to Nietzsche’s cautious analysis of just how contingent and shaky will itself is (BGE §19). Will is by no means a sufficient foundation on which to build anything, as Nietzsche was at least latently aware. By the time he declared that “the world is the will to power and nothing else” (WTP §1067), the poor man was not alright in the head. And yet, the seeds of woke epistemology are evident in Nietzsche’s perspectivism, ready to be taken to the furthest extremes by unsubtle minds. As is often the case with the ideas of elites, gradually the idea of the centrality of the will to power and of perspectivism has settled and sedimented in culture. It is now widely taken as a given that we cannot know the truth, only our perspective on it; that is, we can only be sure of how it interests us.

Of course, rationally speaking, we can accept that our interests will play some part at least in what we are likely to find in the world. But still rationally speaking—that is, with deference to knowing—we also recognise that there are limits to how our interests will inform what we are able to find. I think of the story of the man at night in a dark street who spent hours looking for lost keys under a street light. When asked by a passer-by where he’d lost his keys, he said he was pretty sure he lost them somewhere back in a dark alley he’d been in a few hours before. The stranger was perplexed. He asked the man, “Then why are you looking for them here?” The man replied, “Because here there is light.” In other words, “Here is where I want to look because it’s convenient—to hell with the demands of reality!” You can want to find your keys in the place you didn’t lose them all you like but your will is ultimately powerless against reality itself. In fact, perspectivism is ultimately an admission of powerlessness against the world. The woke don’t know this—yet.

Woke epistemology substitutes for any rational knowledge and any knowledge with real content the idea that what we know is what we want and nothing else. This means that anything that places limits on desire must be a problem. No definition is needed that refers to real things or real identities because the force of will is everything. On one side of the multiverse, one scholar named Alison Bailey termed any appeal to reality “privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.” This is not an appeal to knowledge of reality at all but a sign of how “dominant groups are accustomed to having an epistemic home-terrain advantage.” This is a classic kafkatrap. Any argument against the position being asserted is somehow always proof of guilt. This is the core reason why it is impossible to really debate the woke. There can be no debate when people do not share any of the same epistemological assumptions.

For the woke, everything in the world is perceived as an endless power struggle between a dominant oppressor will-to-power and an oppressed will-to-power. Does this binary have to exist in reality for it to function placebo- or nocebo-like in the woke universe? No. Since wanting is ‘knowing,’ woke epistemology assures us that nothing has to exist in reality. For instance, the patriarchy does not have to exist, but it must still insist so that it can be fought against. That’s a Lacanian idea, by the way. His big Other doesn’t have to exist to exert pressure. In fact, the patriarchy must, in a sense, be invented before feminism can exist. Objective realities are less the issue than interests. Does this not mean that the central issue is in fact the feeling of oppression and not actual oppression? Of course, it does. Everything gets psychologised when will is primary. Even if the woke are not aware of this, it doesn’t really matter. What they want is everything. The world is the woke will to power and nothing else, you fascist bigot!

Again, it is impossible to debate anyone who sees will as having primacy. Every case of “self-identifying as” is a case of denying the idea that truth is shared and knowable by more than one person at a time. I mean every case. As this centralising of will would have it, sometimes our wills align and sometimes they don’t. With will as everything, there is no foundation in reality anymore. This means that nothing is there to stop anyone from self-identifying as anything they want or claiming any victim status they want or demanding any made-up rights as they want as long—as the existing mimetic consensus that generates legislation finds it acceptable or socially lucrative. 

A wise man named St. Augustine suggested way back that human desires have a tendency to be disordered. He was right. This applies to all of us, and not just to the ideologically duped. But what Philip Rieff has called the triumph of the therapeutic essentially means that our desires are only disordered if the dominant regime doesn’t like them. The loss of an ‘objective’ way to interpret our desires is replaced by the current consensus of wills. If you divorce will from knowledge and then render will absolute, mimeticism and mimetic rivalry become the only ‘realities.’ To abandon reality means that will, in a sense, should tyrannise reality. After all, reality threatens always to undermine will. Reality, to be desired, must be known first, even if it goes against what we want. Unfortunately, as I have tried to suggest here, this trend possesses the West in general. This is an echo of liberalism’s inversion of act and potency, which I have already written about. It is a mistake, then, to see wokism and woke epistemology as the anomaly set against an otherwise very sensible liberalism. It merely makes more tangible the dominant way that our Western anti-culture functions. The denial of reality has become normative in the whole West.

I realise how terribly bleak this picture is for those of us who have a concern for the real, and so I must mention that I do not believe that hope is lost. Already, I see signs everywhere that the narrative of pure will is being less and less supported. Consensus politics is failing catastrophically—as it must. Pride always goes before a fall. Always. In fact, not too long ago, when the great awokening was reaching a fever pitch, I already suspected that were not witnessing its triumph but its death throes. That said, again, there will be no return to reality if the terms of the contest remain fundamentally mimetic. To constantly reframe all happenings as happenings in the realm of desire is to keep the culture war going. Woke epistemology is the epistemology of the lie. It sets up an insistence on deceit and falsehood. The only way past this is to speak and live the truth. Seek understanding first and learn to want and love what is real. Ultimately, reality will get to have all the privilege-preserving epistemic pushback it deserves.