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Author : Murray Bookchin
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Postmodernism is a concept that has been applied not only to philosophy but to architectural, literary, cultural, and behavioral styles as well. To be postmodern is to be ‘hip’ today, to an extent that the word has become part of the very contemporary culture it professes to criticize. This might render it quite harmless, indeed ludicrous, were it not for its impact on what has been called the sociology of science. In the scientific realm, relativistic moods nourished by postmodernism’s antihumanism are corrosive not only of popular attitudes toward scientific research but, as we shall see shortly, toward reason itself.
By science, let me emphasize, I am referring to the real stuff: physics, chemistry, biology, physical anthropology, and their offspring, such as astrophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and archaeology. What minimally defines these disciplines as sciences is the fact that they presuppose that external reality is relatively orderly, and many of its facets or levels of development can be discovered and systemized into verifiable, testable, and predictable laws, which in turn may have a direct practical application to human needs and desires.
Studies of society, human behavior, economics, and the like, that deal more with the speculative uncertainties of theory than with the more tangible facts of the natural world, are so dependent upon vagaries of human volition and arbitrary human interactions that they can be called sciences only by undermining the integrity of sciences dependent upon lawful and predictable behavior. To regard ‘social studies’, including economics, sociology, and psychology as ‘sciences’ is to make the word and its criteria for truth meaningless.[287]
Nor should science, let me emphasize, be confused with scientism. Scientism is a state of mind or even a creed that claims that the scientific techniques and criteria used typically in physics can be applied to all domains of knowledge and human activity. Advancing the idea that the full wealth of experience can be encompassed by scientific analysis, with a view toward achieving the effective control (rationalization) of human beings as well as the natural world, it emphasizes efficiency and value-free ‘objectivity’ in social affairs. Although scientism has been prevalent over the past two centuries, it is a naive failing of the Enlightenment thinkers and of many nineteenth-century writers on social theory and politics, even Utopians like Charles Fourier — a failing that persists in words like social science and political science.
The distinction between science and scientism should be strongly emphasized, since the two are very commonly confused, with the result that science as such is blamed for the harmful effects of scientism on social life, notably for fostering the dehumanization and mechanization of everyday life.
The distinctions between science and scientism bear directly on the ‘sociologies of science’ that are fashionable today. Postmodernists and antihumanists alike make a strong point when they criticize the ‘scientization’, more properly the rationalization of everyday life and work. Such criticisms have been made for generations — not exclusively by the romantics from whom antihumanists draw so much of their inspiration but also by humanistic social thinkers, from Marx and Max Weber to C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse.
What gave a major impetus to postmodernist and antihumanist assaults on the objectivity of science was Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, initially published in 1962[288] — a work that Paul Hoyningen-Huene, in his survey of Kuhn’s ‘philosophy of science’, has described as ‘among the most influential academic books of the past quarter-century’, one that ‘has given rise to what is now an unmanageably vast secondary literature’.[289]
An essential thesis of Kuhn’s book is that the scientific understanding of truth and its advances come in paradigms, by which he means certain ‘universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners’.[290] Major scientific ‘revolutions’ consist not simply of piecemeal accretions of theories and facts; rather, they are radical ‘paradigm shifts’ that are brought about when a prevailing scientific consensus changes. A new consensus may be caused by the appearance of more explanatory hypotheses and supportive data for them, or even by mere swings of opinion among scientists themselves.
After a sufficiently large number of ‘anomalies’ emerge in the ‘normal science’ that marks an established paradigm, a ‘new paradigm’ is called for that, in effect, constitutes an entirely new way of thinking about a specific field of science — after which a new ‘normal science’ consolidates itself within the newly accepted paradigm. Specifically, Kuhn’s book examines the conservative behavior of scientific communities over history: their tendency to hold on to the prevailing ‘paradigm’. Kuhn, whose definition of a paradigm is fairly restricted, can hardly be held responsible for the fact that the word has been expanded to mean a veritable world outlook by New Agers, deep ecologists, and other ideological children of the 1960s ‘counterculture’.
But to what extent did Kuhn lay the basis for a ‘sociology’ or ‘philosophy of science’?
The sizable literature that has grown up around Kuhn’s writings variously characterizes his views as neo-Kantian, phenomenological, empirical, and in a broad sense postmodernist. But a closer look at The Structure of Scientific Revolutions suggests that it is largely a psychological& account of how science undergoes ‘revolutions’ or ‘paradigm shifts’. It is decidedly not a study in epistemology, still less an analysis or modification of‘scientific method’.
Kuhn himself has not been shy about citing the psychologists who inspired a good many of his reflections, notably ‘Jean Piaget [who] has illuminated both the various wodds of the growing child and the process of transition from one to the next’; similady, his reading of‘papers in the psychology of perception, particularly [those of] the Gestalt psychologists.’ He also credits the influence of B. L. Whod’s ‘speculations about the effect of language on world view’ and W.V.O. Quine’s ‘philosophical puzzles of the analytic-synthetic distinction’, which appear to have sensitized him to psychological behavior rather than a philosophical outlook.[291]
So far as the methodologies of science are concerned, Kuhn’s contributions have largely been marginal and descriptive. Kuhn, in fact, did not write a book on ‘scientific method’, despite the general misconceptions on this score. Explorations about the merits of induction and deduction date back to Aristotie’s day, some 2,300 years ago, and were formalized during the Middle Ages by Christian scholastics. The importance of experimentation (Francis Bacon), of combining speculative hypotheses with a deductive approach (William Whewell), and of using canons of agreement and difference to determine the causes of natural phenomena (John Stuart Mill) — all of these methodological points have a long pedigree. In recent times, even more sophisticated and abstruse views of scientific method were advanced by the logical positivist principle of verifiability and Karl Popper’s method of falsification, which contends that a scientific hypothesis has to be capable of being proven false before it is worthy of consideration as possibly true.
Kuhn does not engage these methodological issues. Rather, he examines how scientists come to accept ‘normal science’ in their specific fields, how they conservatively try to integrate anomalies’ into a dominant paradigm, how alternative paradigms that deal more adequately with troubling anomalies shake them into doubt, and finally how scientists undergo a kind of ‘religious conversion’ or ‘political revolution’ (Kuhn’s own expressions) in achieving a ‘shift’ from an old paradigm to a new one.
Essentially what Kuhn shows is that scientists are like most people. Far from being omniscient and objective intellectual mandarins, they are typical human beings. Like most people, they tend to resist change when they have been schooled into a specific paradigm or outlook. They quarrel (sometimes quite unreasonably) over the validity and significance of obvious anomalies that challenge entrenched beliefs. They enter into ‘crises’ about the competing views they face; but in time they accept a new paradigm as ‘normal science’ — until they are obliged to undergo the agonies of another paradigm shift. They are subject to all the fiery passions, conditioned reflexes, entrenched customs, mental blocks, and agonistic compulsions that mark ordinary human behavior.
Yet after all is said and done — and Kuhn gives it litde attention — they significantly do something else that is not frivolous. In contrast to religious fanatics, befogged mystics, and confirmed anti-rationalists, scientists are obliged to respond, sooner or later, to the imperatives of facts, logical inferences, and rational evaluation. They may not follow ‘scientific method’, in all of their experimental procedures; but minimally they have to prove their claims mathematically, experimentally, or both, without recourse to supernatural or mystical factors.
In this connection, the various specific scientific methods — inductive, deductive, or hypothetico-deductive — are not merely a set of procedures for arriving at the truth of a given hypothesis. Very significantly, they serve to support larger experimental criteria for establishing the validity of scientific hypotheses. That is to say, no matter how scientists arrive at their hypotheses — whether through intuition, chit-chat, dreams, fantasies, or systematic thinking — they must subject them to carefully formulated, experimental, and logical standards of proof before their hypotheses are acceptable in the scientific world.
Nor have these criteria — with their demanding naturalism, reality principle, and logical consistency — been surpassed by any of the criteria advanced by the supernatural and mystical critics of science, still less by gossipy postmodernist and antihumanist accounts of ‘how’ scientists behave in and out of their laboratories, libraries, class rooms, conference rooms, cafeterias, or bedrooms.
In short, what we often call scientific method — an ideal procedure at best — might more appropriately be called scientific criteria — namely, standards of proof that, however idiosyncratically scientists arrive at their conclusions, still oblige them to formulate them as verifiable — not intuitive or mystical — speculations and facts.
Kuhn, to be quite fair, was not so crude as to explore the private fives of scientists in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Rather, he examined how, as a community, scientists often confront anomalies in ‘normal science’ , new paradigms, and paradigm shifts. Alas, Ms demonstration that scientists commonly do not follow step-by-step procedures based on icy canons of objectivity touched off a literature that was intended to subvert scientific methods of verification as such, indeed of the integrity of science as a source of knowledge about the real world.
The passionate endeavor of many antihumanists — particularly New Age mystics, anti-rationalists, self-styled ‘counterculturalists’ , and postmodernists — to deny the capacity of science to explain even limited aspects of reality has generated a stormy debate that actually turns more on how scientists do science rather than the criteria for scientific verification. That is to say, the debate focuses on the ‘idiosyncratic’ way in wliich scientists engage in doing science instead of on the ultimate criteria that justify or disqualify their work. In an ideological leap that can be regarded as an amazing non-sequitur, antihumanists often use these scientific behavioral idiosyncrasies to reach the facile conclusion that science itself is a myth.
One would suppose that antihumamsts who stake out tins crassly illogical claim might thereafter welcome science into their fold, inasmuch as the procedure they impute to scientists closely resembles the intellectual chaos that marks their own fields, variously Taoism, BuddMsm, and a pot-pourri of Californian and Stonehenge mysticisms.
This phenomenon, let me note, is not strictly American or British; it has found a rich spawmng ground in Paris, the home of postmodermsm and its ‘discourse’ . For its rising star, Bruno Latour, the confusion between how scientists behave and what they discover has generated a postmodermst uproar. Latour, a professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines in Paris, gained a measure of repute as an ‘anthropologist’ of science when, in collaboration with Steve Woolgar, a British ‘sociologist’ , he produced a ‘field study’ — Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts — that describes the behavior of scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies at La Jolla, CaliforMa.[292] Latour seems to have done most of the ‘fieldwork’ , going into the jungles of a scientific laboratory with the mental outlook of a Franz Boas or a Claude Levi-Strauss. At times he assisted in scientific research and interviewed the scientists and members of the Institute, as well as listening to them and observing their interactions.
Clearly influenced by Kuhn’s book, Latour found precisely what he was looking for — namely, that scientists behave like human beings. Designating the Institute’s scientists as a ‘tribe’, our fieldworker notes that every few minutes his subjects exchange remarks about a new scientific paper here, an old one there, and a new word-of-mouth scientific finding elsewhere; in short, how they interact with each other, not unlike gifted primates in a cage.
As the trivial observations of our worthy ‘anthropologist’ mount in number, he perceives descent from ‘order to disorder’, in which ‘the routine work carried out’ in the laboratory rests — surprise! — ‘on the routinely occurring minutiae of scientific activity’.[293] We soon learn, based on observations of this nature, that ‘scientists’ statements ... systematically conceal the nature of the activity which typically gives rise to their research reports.’[294] The use of the word activity rather than results seems to assume the worst about the behavior of scientists, notably that they hide their behavioral waywardness in formal observations or analyzes.
Having settled into his behavioral study of scientists at work, Latour makes a quantum leap to assert that scientists do not live up to their claims of practicing an orderly methodology. Facts are ‘socially constructed’, not discovered, he concludes, as a consequence of the microrelational give-and-take that makes up laboratory routines; their validity seems to hinge more on subjective interplay in the social world than the realities (if any) of the natural world. This conclusion seems to support the postmodernist notion that reality is actually chaotic and is only organized by disorderly scientists into orderly schemes.
Thus we learn that
scientific activity [sic] is not ‘about nature’, it is a fierce fight to construct reality, The laboratory is the workplace and the set of productive forces, which makes construction possible . Every time a statement stabilizes, it is reintroduced into the laboratory (in the guise of a machine, inscription device, skill, routine, prejudice, deduction, program, and so on), and it is used to increase the difference between statements . The cost of challenging the refed statement is impossibly high , Reality is secreted.[295]
Alas, very litde in Latour and Woolgar’s book supports so sweeping a conclusion, which is far more mystifying than the alleged ‘reified statements’ that scientists ostensibly fear to challenge. To the contrary, seemingly ‘reified statements’ are repeatedly subjected to enormous challenges these days, and furious debates are waged in scientific journals from issue to issue, obviously at odds with Latour’s claim that reality ‘is secreted’.
Indeed, I fail to see that Latour’s fieldwork reveals more than the flow of gossip about the comings and goings, vagaries and interactions of scientists. Yet with ‘philosophical’ aplomb, Latour and Woolgar render a verdict of stunningly relativistic proportions:
Our account of fact construction in a biology laboratory is neither superior nor inferior to those produced by scientists themselves. It is not superior because we do not claim to have any better access to ‘reality’, and we do not claim to be able to escape from our description of scientific activity: the construction of order out of disorder at a cost, and without recourse to any preexisting order. In a fundamental sense, our own account is no more than a fiction.[296]
Stripped of their postmodernist verbiage, Latour and Woolgar almost pride themselves in acknowledging that their work is merely a fiction. Inasmuch as they offer no criteria at all by which to judge our suppositions about the natural world, we are deprived of all ‘preexisting order’ as a basis for formulating truthful statements about reality. Thus we are condemned to an ongoing and unresolvable problem — one that apparently angered the book’s original publishers, who rightly declared that ‘they were not in the habit of publishing anything that “proclaimed its own worthlessness’”![297] Accordingly, in the revised edition the authors added a postscript that, after considerable wordplay, concludes that scientific ‘interpretations do not so much inform as perform’. Having turned scientists into actors, with performance as their criterion, Latour and Woolgar dismissively declare that ‘our scientists are obviously better equipped at performing the world we five in than we are at deconstructing it.’[298]
One might suppose that Latour would hereafter have found silence the better part of valor, but instead he undertook an even more ambitious work, Science in Action, Here he conceives the world of science as a war of all against all, wherein each white-coated participant parries one ‘fiction’ against all the others, until the battle of papers, alliances, and histrionics becomes too formidable to provide any reliable truths about the natural world. Hence: ‘[sjince the settlement of a controversy is the cause of Nature’s representation, not its consequence, we can never use this consequence, Nature, to explain how and why a controversy has been settled.’[299] Not only science but now the natural world itself is a social artifact. Trapped in a no-man’s-land in the scientific battleground, we are at a loss as to how to determine the objective validity of any scientific conclusions whatever.
As Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt have aptly observed, if we accept Latour’ s notion of science as a form of conflict resolution rather than as the investigation of truth, ‘we must believe that William Harvey’s view of the circulation of the blood prevailed over that of his critics not because blood flows from the heart through the arteries and returns to the heart through the veins, but because Harvey was able to construct a “representation” and wheedle a place for it among the accepted conventions of the savants!’[300]
Beneath much of the ‘analysis’ in Latour’s postmodernist engagement with science, he seems to be intent on trying to deny science’s ability to understand the natural wodd but conceivably to a denial of the validity of reason itself This deprecation of science can easily pass over into theism, a conclusion to which wandering minds at the end of the twentieth century seem to be particularly vulnerable.
The anti-scientific literature is almost too diverse to categorize with any subtlety. Given its mixed messages and its appeal to various constituencies, much of it is blissfully contradictory from book to book, chapter to chapter, even page to page. Some feminists have tried to genderize everything from algebra to biology, with results that verge on the hilarious. Spiritualists and mystics have tried to place science in the service of largely religious ends, even as their theistic brothers and sisters flatly condemn science as the source of the ‘disenchantment’ of humanity and the natural wodd. Still others confuse what science is with the fact that: science is often used for ends that are patendy destructive, such as weapons research and the exploitation of labor. Epistemological anarchists, too, have edged their way into this terrain, denying that science has any valid rational grounds and supporting an intellectual ‘liberality’ that verges on chaos — indeed, the more chaotic the better.
Among feminists who try to genderize science, rhetoric often seems to replace insight and intuition is often celebrated as a source of a chthonic wisdom to which males are more or less impervious. Maryanne Campbell and Randall K. Campbell-Wright have, for example, called for what they refer to as a ‘feminist algebra’, which involves no advance beyond existing algebraic studies but rather demands a restatement of problems in college algebra textbooks that presumably involve ‘gender stereotypes’ and where ‘mathematics is portrayed as a woman whose nature desires to be the conquered Other’. As a corrective, students should be asked to calculate how ‘Sue and Debbie’, a lesbian couple, will finance their new home, rather than ‘Tom and Debbie’. Whether rewriting textbook questions in this manner will induce female students to take a greater interest in algebra is arguable; but to assume that using female names can lure women into solving logical problems that they otherwise resent entertaining is not without aspects demeaning to women.[301]
The now-abundant literature on uniquely female ways of thinking, living, feeling, and understanding might well make women seem like the overly sensitive beings that Victorian males and patriarchs of old regarded them. Rather than segregate women into a ghetto, this traditionally patriarchal image of their capabilities must be dispensed with altogether. What is troubling is that far too many self-styled ‘feminists’ not only allow for these updated Victorian stereotypes but actually celebrate them!
The nine coauthors of the Biology and Gender Study Group, for example, regard scientific depictions of mammalian fertilization as gender-biased. Sperm, after all, are portrayed as active, while the egg is supine and passive. In such masculinized biology, the study group observes, ‘the fertilizing sperm is a hero who survives while others perish, a soldier, a shard of steel, a successful suitor, and the cause of movement in the egg. The ovum is a passive victim, a whore, and finally, a proper lady whose fulfillment is attained.’[302] Such interpretations bring the quarrel between dogmatic feminists and the masculine world down to the cytological level, where epithets like victim and whore verge on the ridiculous — and are actually cheapened in meaning. Reductions of patriarchy to gynecology did indeed exist in earlier times, but such views have long since perished, and what fragments remain of them are under serious assault. Indeed, the majority of new students in American medical schools are now female. It is hard to imagine that women find any comfort in learning, as David Freeman puts it in the June 1992 issue of Discover ; that there is an ‘aggressive egg’, one that, ‘pins [a spermatazoon] down in spite of its efforts to escape’, then ‘yanks’ it in, engaging in what some might compare to rape.
Equally silly are the attempts to genderize physics and chemistry — and in the process lessen their validity as serious disciplines. These attempts are often made on epistemological grounds. Women, some feminist ideologues argue, have a deeper, more organic, intuitional, and neurosensitive apparatus for understanding the cosmos, in contrast to males who are mechanistic, ‘logocentric’, and rather dull neurologically. Accordingly, women view physical reality with insights that are alien to their gender counterparts. Such views have nourished the revived appreciation of Hermetic and Gnostic ‘wisdom’, occult, magical, and mystical notions that date back to ancient times.
Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution has done more to stimulate this interest than any single book in recent memory.[303] Finding that the rise of science, industrial capitalism, and modern patriarchy was historically accompanied by a decline in a more female-oriented, nature-friendly culture, Merchant expresses strong affinities for prescientific cosmologies, which were among those more ‘feminine and ‘ecological’ oudooks. What we learn horn Merchant is that ‘the Scientific Revolution’ is an ‘ideology of “power over nature”, an ontology of interchangeable atomic and human parts, and a methodology of “penetration’’ into her [first nature’s] innermost secrets.’[304] Thus to know first nature, to ‘probe’ the ‘secrets’ of the natural world, becomes an enterprise more like rape than discovery — let alone discoveries that could benefit humanity and the rest of first nature as well.
This drama has its villains and heroes — and the book gives precarious interpretations of their views, with considerable equivocation. Its most notorious villain is Francis Bacon, whose ‘science’ is basically demonical — fixated on technology and the ‘rape of the Earth’, to use the parlance of ecofeminism. Merchant ‘deconstructs’ Bacon from a late-twentieth-century vantage point as a brutal misogynist for seeking to ‘wrest’ the ‘secrets’ of a feminine ‘Nature’ as though ‘She’ were a witch subjected to the tortures of the Inquisition. If Bacon’s call for scientific experimentation is entangled with the mechanical torture of witches, we have reasons to doubt diat this view can really be supported; unlike witch prosecutors on the Continent, the English in Bacon’s time did not subject women — or men — accused of witchcraft to mechanical torture, which has not prevented the sizable readership of Merchant’s book from regarding Bacon as the archetypal scientist-misogynist.
That Bacon lived in an England riddled with hunger, superstition, brutality, an enormously high mortality rate, and the economic dispossession of its yeomanry; and that his explicit goal, so clearly revealed in his utopia, The New Atlantis, was the alleviation of poverty and the certainty of early death — problems which he hoped, with good reason, could be removed by technological advances and improved living conditions owing to the application of science to technics — all of this gains little, if any mention, in The Death of Nature. Nor does the fact that one of Merchant’s heroes, Paracelsus, was an avowed misogynist who expressly disdained women.
Today, many key feminist voices deprecate science qua science, and indeed, ‘masculine’ forms of reason. Not only does this message echo traditional patriarchal images of women as brainless bundles of hormonally induced emotions who must invent uniquely female ways of knowing and innately possess ‘organic wisdom’, but these trends in feminism feed directly into anti-rationahsm. Women who attend many American universities are being fed messages that divest them of the insights they need to deal with the uses — morally and social beneficent — to which scientific discoveries and rationality can be put. No less disturbing, antihumanist and postmodernist images of science are now associated with what remains of the Left, which in former years fervently heralded scientific as well as technological advances with the deep conviction that in a rational society they could be placed in the service of human freedom and used to diminish the impact of theism and superstition.
The general deprecation of science so rampant these days has not prevented many mystics from trying to bring twentieth-century science into conformity with various theisms or spiritualisms.
Perhaps among the most successful such effort, at least in terms of book sales, is Fritjof Capra’s Tao of Physics.[305] Celebrating the extent to which modern physics conforms to mysticism, particularly the Eastern genres, the book has reached up to a million readers since its publication in 1975. Scientists — least of all Capra, who holds a doctorate from the University of Vienna and has done research in various highly regarded institutions around the world — should not be mistaken for science. As Latour has shown, they are people — and their heads may be filled with bizarre notions as well as sound truths. Thus it should not surprise us to learn that Niels Bohr, J. Robert Oppenheimer (the ‘father’ of the atom bomb), and Werner Heisenberg (whose relationship with Nazi military projects has yet to be clarified) believed that there were affinities between modern physics and Eastern religions. Einstein was a pantheist of a Spinozist variety — and quite a few Nobel prize winners were supporters of Nazi ‘spirituality’. That brilliant scientists are sometimes ideological naifs tells us nothing about science as such.
Fritjof Capra, for example, is a mystic. The stated purpose of his work
is to explore [the] relationship between concepts of modern physics, and the basic ideas in the philosophical and religious traditions of the Far East.... The two foundations of twentieth century physics — quantum theory and relatively theory — both force us to see the world very much in the way a Hindu, Buddhist or Taoist sees it, and how the similarity strengthens when we look at the recent attempts to combine these two theories in order to describe the phenomena of the submicroscopic world: the properties and interactions of the subatomic particles of which all matter is made.
Indeed, Capra finds wall-to-wall similarities between particle physics and mysticism: ‘The parallels to modern physics appear not only in the Vedas of Hinduism, in the I Ching, or in the Buddhist sutras, but also in the fragments of Heraclitus, in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, or in the teachings of the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan.’[306]
If Capra had failed to meld quantum theory and relativity theory, given their sweeping generality, to such a sweeping array of mystical ideologies — with their many variations, nuances, and idiosyncrasies — it would have been a miracle. Modern physics does indeed defy commonsensical perception, and proponents of the mysticisms that Capra cites are all too ready to celebrate astonishing similarities. Like mystics, physicists are indeed ‘now dealing with a nonsensory experience of reality’ (although with sophisticated technical equipment).[307] And like mystics, physicists often do ‘experience’ the universe ‘as a dynamic, inseparable whole which always includes the observer in an essential way’ (although at different levels of organization).[308]
After parading his various Eastern religions — Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese thought, Taoism, and Zen — Capra returns us to the ‘Unity of All Things’, ‘Beyond the World of Opposites’, and ‘The Cosmic Dance’, wherein he matches richly formulated truths or discoveries in particle and relativity physics with quotations from Eastern mystical texts, even when they read like metaphors rather than insights. In this eclectic jumble, the Eastern sages talk in vague phrases drat often have multiple meanings, as befits most religious teachers, who normally hedge their statements lest a prophecy fail to materialize in reality. Meanwhile, Western physicists seem intent on providing rational explanations of their theories and discoveries with mathematical formulas and experiential evidence. It may help followers of the Tao to know that ‘Man follows the laws of the earth; / Eardr follows the laws of heaven; / Heaven follows the laws of Tao; I Tao follows the laws of its intrinsic nature,’[309] but it will hardly help them understand the insights of modern physics. In later,’ years, Capra’s Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising Culture, published in 1982, went on to eclectically wed modern physics, PrigogineY; systems theory of chemical dissipative structures, ‘holistic’ health, and solar energy — a bouquet of dubiously related areas of knowledge in which it would be hard to find at least one idea that did not constitute a palliative for our psychic discomforts.
One can, of course, try to reconcile modern science with a homemade theology that fits its advances. Thus: ‘The breakdown of classical science and the rise of modern physics,’ observes James W. Jones, ‘provide resources for a new theology of nature.’ And if Jones has his way, this will be theology with a vengeance.
The physical world is grounded in and arises out of the immaterial divine Spirit; events that make up the physical world are given their form by the free act of God; the universe is a unity in diversity.... God’s immanence is the presence of the Spirit within matter; his transcendence is his freedom to give the universe the form that it has (through the imposition of certain symmetries) and to constitute the events of the universe, not in a chaotic or arbitrary way ; but as the product of free and careful choice by which one possibility among many is brought to fruition.[310]
On the whole, this Christological work with Spinozistic tendencies avowedly agrees with Capra’s thesis on the oneness of the universe, although Jones seems eager to stress its diversity as well. More explicitly Christian and expressly antiscientific, Philip Sherrard warns us that ‘man’s sovereign faculty or organ of knowing it not the [sic] reason and ... his knowledge is not consequently confined to the sphere of the rational.’ In addition to reason, he possesses a ‘supra-rational faculty or organ, one through which he is capable of entering into direct communion with the divine, of experiencing directly spiritual or metaphysical realities, and so of knowing the truth or nature of each thing.’[311]
Where, then, have we gone wrong? Wliy have we failed to exercise our ‘supra-rational faculty’ for ‘entering into direct communion with the divine’ and experiencing reality direcdy? The snake in our garden is, of course, ‘modern science’, which ‘presupposes a radical reshaping of our whole mental oudook. It involves a new approach to being, a new approach to nature, in short, a new philosophy.’ We have been warped into believing that science ‘represents a great break-through, a marvelous advance on the part of mankind, even a sign of our coming of age’.
But now that we are beginning ‘to see the consequences of our capitulation to [science] — and we are only now beginning to see these consequences’ — that is, our loss of direct communication witii the divine and the natural, and — ‘we are not so sure’. Among the ‘fruits’ of this misadventure, ‘clear for all to see, and implicit in the philosophy on which it is based, is the dehumanization both of man and of the society that he has built in its name.’[312] Sherrard, let me emphasize, is no holy roller in a Chautauqua tent, nor a televangelist; more than half of his small book is based on lectures he gave at King’s College, University of London, bespeaking respectability, authority, and intellectual probity.
No discussion of science and its travails would be complete, however, without taking into account Paul K. Feyerabend, whose anti-rationalism is so explicit and whose relativism is so extreme that his support for a methodological anarchism consists of little more than peans to chaos in the realm of thought. Whether wittingly or not, Feyerabend establishes the premises for a universal ethical nihilism. Accordingly, his work, taken at its face value, would represent a hopeless dead end for ‘scientific method’ — or even scientific criteria.
The book that catapulted Feyerabend to public attention, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, published in 1975, advances a seemingly ‘radical’ critique of any method for determining scientific truth, and of any criteria for judging its validity.[313] Not that Feyerabend is against scientific method as such, any more than he is against scientific research. But he challenges its claim to exclusivity as a source of truth about the natural world.
In itself, this challenge would not be objectionable — or unusual — if Feyerabend had seriously explored other ways of pursuing knowledge in which scientific criteria may or may not have a place. E. A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science, published in 1923, remains to this day an exemplary account of early science that unearths its metaphysical. presuppositions widi clarity and responsibility.[314] Similarly, various evolutionary schools of philosophy have explored approaches to the natural world that are more qualitative than the largely quantitative approach favored by most scientists — which is not to reject the enormous contributions that the physical sciences have made.
Nor do I wish to suggest that society does not exercise a major influence on the areas of research that scientists emphasize or the strategies they adopt in studying them. Quite to the contrary: scientists are not asocial beings, immunized from social life as a whole in their laboratories. The considerable attention given to mechanics as a field of investigation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, for example, cannot be divorced from Mediterranean society’s growing need for machinery, for artillery whose accuracy required a better knowledge of the trajectory of cannonballs, and for better fortification, as the notebooks and letters of Leonardo da Vinci reveal. Similarly, in the nineteenth century the development of theories of biological evolution stimulated a more developmental approach to phenomena diat had been preceded not only by Lamarck and by Hegel. Nor can we ignore the social uses to which scientific theories have been put, as social Darwinism and all its wormy offspring attest.
Nor are scientists immune to dogmas of their own. But scientific criteria still require experimentation and proof irrespective of the way in which scientists formulate hypotheses. How scientists arrive at their hypotheses is an interesting subject for psychological investigation, but it has no decisive bearing on whether their hypotheses can be validated, or on whether scientists are dealing with, facts rather than chimerical illusions.
Feyerabend radically shifts the ground of these central issues. Although he tries to show that there is no fixed way to formulate a particular hypothesis — an issue that by itself is rather trite — his account of why one proof is accepted in preference to another is often arbitrary. Science becomes a playground for all kinds of ideas. This arena could be highly creative, but in the anarchic marketplace of ideas’ that he celebrates, a crystal-gazer, a fortuneteller, and a shaman who offers occult explanations have no less standing in principle than a scientist who offers a carefully reasoned explanation of a phenomenon and proof of its soundness.
In the mundane world of everyday life, to substitute mystical numerology for trigonometry in constructing the steel frame of a building would lead to catastrophe. There is nothing like practice — and the results it yields — to decide the truth of an approach. Doubdess, broad areas of research and knowledge involve a great deal of speculation, like the origin and structure of the universe and problems in quantum mechanics. But if a crystal-gazer’s intuitions and rational inquiry are equally valid ‘methods’, reason has no special claim over divination. The ‘ecstatic trances’ of Rabbi Akiba, according to Feyerabend, yield ‘genuine observations once we decide to accept his way of life as a measure of reality, and his mind is as independent of his body as the chosen observations Cell him.’[315]
This is accepting a lot indeed, notably a Nietzschean perspectivism, which could validate any view once ‘we decide’ to accept any ‘way of life as a measure of reality’. It is no caricature of this line of reasoning to say that once we accept Torquemada’s ‘way of life as a measure of reality’, the Spanish Inquisition also yielded ‘genuine observations’ — and results. In fact, given Feyerabend’s radical relativism, who is to say winch observations are and which are not ‘genuine?
When advised that science ‘works’, Feyerabend anemically replies that ‘it often fails and many success stories are rumors, not facts.’[316] This Feyerabendian legerdemain simply side-steps a problem with which he apparently cannot cope — namely, that a science that does not work is eventually, often quickly, discarded, winch alas is not true of many other self-styled ‘disciplines’.
Nor does Feyerabend clarify very much by asserting that ‘the efficiency of science is determined by criteria that belong to the scientific tradition and thus cannot be regarded as objective judges’ — a sheer sophism that tells us nothing about the fact that science, when it is correct, must work in practice if it is to retain its legitimacy. This observation should make us wonder why the Rabbi Akiba’s visions should be regarded as reliable ‘once we decide to accept his way of life as reality’, to repeat Feyerabend’s case for the venerable sage. If we accept Stalin or Hider’s ‘way of life as reality’, on what ground can one complain about the horrors of the gulag or the monstrosities of Auschwitz?
Cannily, Feyerabend immunizes himself to critical evaluation by avowedly refusing to take himself seriously. The guiding maxim of Against Method can be summed up as (in the author’s phrase), ‘anything goes’. This maxim is apparendy meant to express militandy Feyerabend’s judgment that ‘the idea of a fixed method, or of a fixed theory of rationality; rests on too naive a view of man and his social surroundings.’[317]
Yet Against Method is not without a certain methodology’ of its own: that of grossly overstating the views against which Feyerabend often directs his criticisms. The ‘fixed’ methods and ‘fixed’ theories of rationality that bother Feyerabend are by no means as ‘fixed’ in the minds of scientists and rationalists as Feyerabend would have us believe. Science and reason have been extraordinarily open to variation and change: they have been among the most liberating forces in a history plagued by fanatical dogmatism and superstition. Indeed, Feyerabend demolishes straw arguments when he deals with ‘fixities’ in scientific method that are ostensibly sacrosanct but are transgressed in actual research — which in no way challenges the scientific criterion that proof is the ultimate arbiter of truth.
Nor is Feyerabend’s ‘method’ free of social influences in its own right. By the 1970s, in fact, almost anything did ‘go’ in Berkeley, California, Feyerabend’s academic habitat in the United States, where the ‘counterculture’ carried idiosyncratic behavior and irrationalism to the point of absurdity — with a great deal of public approval. Today, in fact, ‘anything goes’ in epidemic proportions, as anyone who visits a bookstore or dials a ‘telemystic’s 900 number will quickly determine. Feyerabend’s guiding maxim places superstition, Rabbi Akiba’s ‘ecstatic trances’, and even outright shamanism — like Carlos Castanada’s visions of ‘reality’ as expressed in The Teachings of Don Juan — on an equal footing with scientific criteria. Feyerabend’s work, in effect, is a socially conditioned account of the ‘deconstruction’ of science and reason in a mystical milieu, demolishing simplistic ‘fixities’ by using Dadaesque rhetoric rather than intellectual firepower. This seemingly provocative endeavor — so very much attuned to sociocultural changes in the Californian ‘scene’ — is more sensationalists than informative and, worse, is often misleading.
In the first place, Feyerabend is not an anarchist, as he observes in a rather confusing footnote. Anarchism ‘as it has been practiced in the past and as it is being practiced today by an ever increasing number of people has features I am not prepared to support,’ he explains uneasily. ‘It cares little for human fives and human happiness (except for the fives and the happiness of those who belong to some special group); and it contains precisely the kind of Puritanical dedication and seriousness which I detest’ — except, Feyerabend adds, for ‘some exquisite exceptions such as [Daniel] Cohn-Bendit, but they are in the minority.’[318]
To anyone who lived in 1960s and 1970s Berkeley and was not confined to a hermetic ivory tower, this portrayal of the anarchic, often highly personafistic tendencies that wafted through New Left and’ the ‘counterculture’ in 1975, around the time Against Method was written, is a gross misconception. A sizable corps of lifestyle anarchists were abandoning the socialistic content that serious social anarchists like Michael Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin had claimed for their anti-authoritarian beliefs and were preoccupied with their own egos and desires. Feyerabend’s view of Cohn-Bendit, moreover, is very naive. ‘Red Danny’s’ commitment to anarchic ideas was always tenuous and he is currently fulfilling his new ideals as a realo or pragmatically oriented officeholder in the German Green Party. Finally, Feyerabend’s observations reveal that too often his ‘antimethodological’ technique consists of tossing off irresponsible remarks and judgments ex cathedra, as though his own assertion of an idea were sufficient to give it validity.
In fact, the very essence of a Feyerabendian contention is its notable lack of seriousness and responsibility. Far from being an ‘anarchist’, Feyerabend, as it turns out, confesses he is really a Dadaist, who is ‘utterly unimpressed by any serious enterprise’, who ‘smells a rat whenever people stop smiling and assume that attitude and.those facial expressions winch indicate that something important is about to be said. A Dadaist is convinced that a worthwhile life will arise only when we start taking tilings lightly .... It is for these reasons that I now prefer to use the term Dadaism’ to designate his beliefs.[319] Alas, we would do well to take many enterprises very seriously these days, and there is no reason why anyone should care a fig for the facial expressions with which they are undertaken. Feyerabend’s own Dadaesque cuteness begins to wear thin, in fact, when he often delivers his harangues with extraordinary and labored seriousness, indeed, with a dense complexity that renders them very inaccessible to the general reader.
The paradox that suffuses Feyerabend’s Against Method is that its author insistently wants us to take him very seriously indeed, particularly when he impugns ‘fixed’ ideas, while at the same time he claims to be a happy-go-lucky bon vivant in the realm of ideas. Feyerabend, in effect, wants to have his cake and eat it too. His criticisms of‘method’ are very challenging indeed — and if they are found to be flawed, their author cannot be permitted to saucily hide behind a Dadaesque veil to avoid the challenges they are obliged to confront.
Yet, surprisingly, almost everything in Against Method that has historical importance was explored more significantly by Kuhn, such as the problems of how and why Ptolemaic cosmology gave way to Copernican cosmology and Aristotelian mechanics to Galilean mechanics. Feyerabend is at pains to advise us, as Kuhn, Latour and their confreres have done, that scientists use every ‘trick’ they can to advance our knowledge of the world, in contrast to conventional claims that they are ‘systematic’ in their formulations of hypotheses.
Moreover, Feyerabend, no less than Kuhn, is oriented toward psychology. His emendations of Kuhn tend to be more dizzying in their details than enlightening in their substance. His knowledge of science is so highly selective and esoteric that he seems to know a great deal about details, but surprisingly little about the overall picture which they yield when viewed together and coherently.
But the ‘Copemican revolution and its spinoffs are not reducible to matters of psychology nor do they allow for Dadaesque pirouettes. Galileo’s defense of the Copernican wodd view occurred at a time when astronomy was still embattled with the Church and trying to establish itself against theological dogma. Far from involving a mere difference in ‘perspectives’, the conflict opposed radically different approaches to facts about the nature of reality as well as the means for ascertaining them.
Similarly, when Darwin advanced Iris theory of evolution based on natural selection, science was still embattled with religion and superstition. The storm that followed the publication of The Origin of Species, and later, The Descent of Man, pitted rationality against faith, fact against illusion, and above all, conflicting ways of determining truth — in short, objective investigation and verification against mere tradition. By the time science came into its own at the end of the last century, Kuhn’s revolutionary ‘paradigm shifts’ were less stormy; indeed, they were extraordinarily placid compared with those times when science had yet to establish itself as truth rather than the work of Lucifer.
Generally, the emergence of science as a basic form of ascertaining truth in contrast to the claims of religion can be slighted only by risking a regression into superstition and cultural barbarism. What Feyerabend has to explain is the historical unevenness of these advances, not examine them as though they are intellectual artifacts that have no social context or history. Thus, to place the problems that confronted Galileo and those that confronted Einstein on a ‘level playing field’, as though scientific criteria that had yet to be accepted four centuries ago were confronted with the same problems they encounter today, is to parody history and battles long overcome. If anything, there are ‘paradigm shifts’ that happen so rapidly today that scientists scarcely have the time to assimilate a new one before anomalies have accumulated to produce the need for another one, as witness recent developments in cosmology.
As a historian, Feyerabend is essentially a postmodernist. He is no different in his treatment of data than Theodore Zelden is in his treatment of history, which presumably attempts to liberate the past from such annoying constraints as dates, causal accounts of events, discussions of class, and even the confines of nationality. In a somewhat similar vein, Hayden White turns history into an atemporal esthetic that views conventional events in the past as mere ‘texts’ in the present.
Feyerabend’s other complaints against ‘methodologists’ are trite. Thus: ‘[scientific investigation, says [Kad] Popper, starts with a problem and proceeds by solving it,’ we are told solemnly. One need not be an admirer of Karl Popper to see that this statement is a cliche. But for Feyerabend, Popper’s ‘characterization does not consider that problems may be wrongly formulated’ — how, if‘anything goes,’ can he know this? — ‘that one may inquire about properties of tilings and processes which later views declare to be non-existent’ — again, how can he be sure of this? ‘Problems of this kind are not solved,’ he adds, ‘they are dissolved and removed from the domain of legitimate inquiry’[320] — which provides us with more wordplay than insight.
In fact, there is a certain measure of intellectual demagogery, here, which not even a claimed affinity for the disordering strategy of Dadaism excuses. I have no doubt that Popper understood only too well that problems must be correctly formulated before they can be solved; indeed, that problems raised by the notion of the Earth’s absolute velocity were ‘dissolved’ by relativity theory, an example diat in no way challenges how Popper or any rational person views the ‘problem’.
It is hardly stunning to learn that ‘changes of ontology ... are often accompanied by conceptual changes’, as Feyerabend thumpingly declares.[321] Such cliches, often elaborated with references to both known and virtually unknown figures in the history of science, abound throughout Feyerabend’s works and are woven into badly written, very serious, esoteric, and intramural arguments that are annoyingly at odds with his pretensions to be a flippant, fight-hearted, and ever-charming Dadaist.
Nor does the sound and fury generated by Feyerabend justify seeing science as a parochial dogma that somehow oppresses us all. In fact, science demands very much of itself — factual verifiability and rational speculation — to ever become dogmatized, however much its results are misused. For Feyerabend to tremble before the prospect of scientific abuses without telling us that scientific results are grossly misused in the modern world, most particularly by the corporate and political powers that control it, is to raise a problem that is as feckless as his asocial interpretations of scientific history. Nor is it news to learn, as Feyerabend tells us, that endless frauds have been perpetrated in the name of science. Stalin’s Trofim Lysenko is no more evidence of the failings of genetics, as Feyerabend suggests, than Himmler’s Josef Mengele is evidence of the failings of modern medicine.
Indeed, science is today more democratic in its tolerance of heterodoxy and more naturalistic in its criteria for proof than any other body of ideas around. For all tlie antihumanist complaints that science exercises too much power over the human mind, it stands almost alone in its commitment to an ingrained naturalism and free exchange of ideas. It was one of the earliest modern exemplars of the democratic spirit in the modern world. The scientific societies that emerged in England in the seventeenth century, followed rapidly by others on the Continent and in America, were generally open to anyone of any social class, based on the merit of their work and the extent of their achievements. Van Leeuwenhoek, for example, who as a mere lensmaker would hardly qualify for an appearance at the British court, was more than welcome in the British Royal Society, as were men of comparable stature. Debate was more open and free, Ert was more earnesdy accepted over opinion, than in any other institutions in the European world. The ‘commoner Benjamin Franklin was respected both for his scientific studies and for his social ideas, and he was greeted with no condescension by his scientific peers, whatever their social class and political beliefs. That this democracy and naturalism ultimately rest on stern evidence rather than hazy sentiment — ‘cold’ as science may seem in its claims to objectivity — is nonetheless a primary bulwark against superstition, ideological tyranny, and mysticism today. Its edifice, for all its social difficulties, should not be challenged on ideologically tendentious and ‘methodologically’ flippant grounds — least of all by injunctions like ‘anything goes’.
All of this brings us to what seems to be Feyerabend’s basic complaint: the ills of Western reason. The rationalist claim that ‘human beings are rational animals’, he reminds us, is merely ‘one view among many’. There is also, we are told,
the view that humans are misfits in the material world, unable to understand their position and their purpose and ‘with a distinctive need’ for salvation; there is the view, closely related to the one just mentioned, that humans consist of a divine spark enclosed in an earthen vessel, a ‘trace of gold embedded in dirt’ as the Gnostics were in the habit of saying, ‘with the distinctive need’ for liberation by faith. And these are not just abstract and capricious’ views — they have been, and still are, part of the lives of millions of people.[322]
In the Feyerabendian world, these views are all equally valid, including Don Juan’s alleged visions and Rabbi Akiba’s ecstatic experiences. Reason, in Feyerabend’s view, is merely one tradition among many to which he extends an earnest farewell.
Indeed: ‘[b]eing a tradition, [reason] is neither good nor bad, it simply is,’ Feyerabend observes in Science and a Free Society, a summing-up that expresses all that is repellent about postmodernism. ‘The same applies to all traditions — they are neither good nor bad, they simply are. They become good or bad (rational/irrational; pious/impious; advanced/”primitive”; humanitarian/vicious; etc.) only when looked at from the point of view of some other tradition.’[323]
From this expression of amoral subjectivity, Feyerabend goes on to declare:
‘Objectively’ there is not much to choose between anti-semitism and humanitarianism. But racism will appear vicious to a humanitarian while humanitarianism will appear vapid to a racist . Relativism (in the old and simple sense of Protagoras) gives an adequate account of the situation which thus emerges. Powerful traditions that have means of forcing others to adopt their ways have of course little use for the relational character of value judgments (and the philosophers who defend them are helped by some rather elementary logical mistakes) and they can make their victims forget it as well (this is called ‘education’). But let the victims get more power; let them revive their own traditions and the apparent superiority will disappear like a (good or bad — depending on the tradition) dream.[324]
Let me note that these remarks, which reduce ethical issues to a power game between equally subjective ‘traditions’ diat merely ‘are’, can no longer be regarded as a product of a naive relativism. Despite Feyerabend’s denunciations of the inhumanities of our time, they provide the groundwork for a cynicism that reduces every ethical outiook to a matter of taste. The ‘prevalence’ of one ethical judgment over another depends upon the power it can exercise — socially as well as intellectually. Like Jean Baudrillard’s capitulation to social and cultural conditions as they are, Feyerabend, with his anarchistic epistemology, leaves his readers to an amoral vacuum in which ‘anything goes’ — including, by his own admission, anti-Semitism and racism. And if ‘anything goes’ in this battle between racism and humanitarianism, Feyerabend’s ethically neutral maxim supports the side that wins.
It is not the enlightened Protagoras who is speaking through Feyerabend’s mouth, but rather Plato’s caricature of the crude sophist in the First Book of The Republic, notably Thrasymachus — whose view was that ‘might is right’.
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
January 02, 2021 : Chapter 8 -- Added.
January 16, 2022 : Chapter 8 -- Updated.
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