I was listening to a podcast a few weeks ago when a guest mentioned Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. I have only read parts of the book, but am familiar with the argument presented: violence, measured across centuries and continents, has been falling, not because we became kinder in some private, spiritual sense, but because reason got applied, slowly and imperfectly, to how we organise power: states monopolised force, commerce made strangers useful to one another (Pinker, 2011). What struck me wasn’t the data on violence; it was the claim behind it: when human beings govern each other by dogma, charisma, or raw intuition rather than by argument and evidence, the result is usually bad for whoever has the least power in the room. While that seems to be mostly true, I think it is also part of something bigger.
There seem to be, broadly, two “types” of philosophy at work in a human life, and they want almost opposite things from it. One, Pinker’s object of study in The Better Angels of Our Nature, is the philosophy of the empiricist, the ecologist, the contractualist: the discipline of stepping back from what I want to be true, subjecting a claim to evidence and argument, and remembering that I am one node in an ecosystem of other nodes with equal standing (Taylor, 1989). Let’s call it “outer philosophy”. Outer philosophy asks what it is to be a citizen, a species, a part of a broader system. The other is the philosophy of the romantic, the Nietzschean outcast, the absurdist hero: the conviction that what is truest in me is found by going inward, trusting intuition, feeling, and the raw particularity of being one unrepeatable self (Taylor, 1989). We can call this one “inner philosophy”. Inner philosophy asks what it is to be a self, what is true to this self, and how this self can resist a whole that wants to engulf it.
Both are useful in their own territory, helping us navigate life with other people, and life with ourselves. But it seems that the moment they wander into the other’s territory, both turn dangerous. Outer philosophy, applied to my inner life, tells me my grief is a cognitive bias to be corrected, that my art is a data point in an aggregate preference set and that my spiritual life is a category error dressed up as experience. Inner philosophy, applied to how a society should be run, tells a leader that their intuition, will, felt sense of destiny, or anything else that their personal worldview presents them with, is a legitimate substitute for reason, argumentation, science, empirical data, and the equal standing of the people they govern.
One can see this taking place in our past and present-day society. Isaiah Berlin traced how romanticism’s central conviction, that the highest human act is the unconstrained, intuitive assertion of will against a world of dead convention, migrated from the individual artist to the nation itself (Berlin, 1999). The nation became the romantic hero: a will, a destiny, a blood-and-soil authenticity standing above the “effete” universalism of law and argument. When a nation views itself as a hero, citizens become the background against its story. There is a real irony here: a philosophy built on reverence for the individual, exported wholesale into the domain of the state, ends by requiring the individual’s dissolution into the mythic will of the collective. No individual expression is allowed, unless it advances the ideology of the state; no differences are allowed; no innovations that do not advance the will, itself usually grounded on a mythical past, of the supposedly “greater good.”
Outer philosophy’s contribution is more complex than “empiricism gone wrong.” It carries two commitments that usually travel together, but that do not have to: a commitment to scientific, collectively verifiable knowledge, and a commitment to universal ethical standing. Soviet communism kept the first commitment and discarded the second. It retained outer philosophy’s own ideas: history as science, consciousness as a function of economic conditions, religion and art as ideologies to be corrected. It wrongly applied them to the individual’s inner life. What one believed, made, held privately and sacred became the “property” of the state and, as it had already discarded the ethical commitment that might have restrained it, there was nothing left to stop the state from deciding, on its own authority, which inner lives were worth protecting.
While the natural diagnosis from this analysis is that the right philosophy is needed for the right domain, there is a deeper lesson implied here: the recognition that whatever we do must also take into account our individual and collective inner dimension. This is not what has happened in our recent history. Our focus has correctly been on the outside world, on getting everyone shelter, water, food, sanitation, and other basic needs (Maslow, 1943), and this is where a philosophy that is built entirely on what is publicly observable, measurable, third-person excels.
But that philosophy has no internal resources for telling us that a person’s inner experience matters in itself rather than as data; so when it colonises that inner domain, it doesn’t just get it wrong; it is incapable of even registering what it has lost. Similarly, a philosophy built entirely on intuition, will, and first-person conviction has no internal resource for reminding one that their view of the world is not shared by all, or that one’s certainty is mistaken, or why anyone else’s claims should constrain theirs; so when it colonises the outer domain, based only on its own private understanding of the world rather than data, nothing inside it objects.
This is the same pattern I keep finding whenever I look closely at how a mind, or a culture, goes wrong: data being expected to provide inner values and inner values being tasked with delivering effective solutions to real-world problems; one, usually the data part, promoted to the whole of knowing, with no resources left to catch any errors. We have mistaken partial ways of knowing — either the inner or the outer — for a complete one.
It seems that, as is often the case, one solution may be to educate ourselves to identify and deliberately remember which domain one is actually standing in. Every day we forget that the way we navigate our inner world may work for ourselves only: we are indeed the heroes of our own inner stories of spiritual development, fighting heroic battles with neglected parts of our ever-evolving selves, trying to find existential and/or artistic expression in the world. But that is where that ends. The outer world requires that such endeavour accommodates — and, where possible, supports — everyone else’s heroic battles and stories, and this requires clear communication, evidence-based collaboration, and values-aligned compromises. The two must keep talking to each other, without ever confusing one’s proper domain for the other’s. Inner philosophy is what gives me the crucial recognition that another person’s inner life is as rich as my own: that they can suffer as I can, and are owed the same consideration. Outer philosophy is what turns that recognition into action: the institutions, the evidence, the collaboration required to actually deliver on what inner philosophy has shown me matters. Neither can stand by itself.
References
Berlin, I. (1999) The Roots of Romanticism, ed. H. Hardy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Maslow, A.H. (1943) ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, 50(4), pp. 370–396. Available at: https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm (Accessed: 15 August 2026).
Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking.
Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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