Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  38

  LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

  In 1979 the U.S. space probe Pioneer 11 reached Saturn and travelled through its surrounding rings, which were found to be made of ice-covered rocks. The business use of personal computers was vastly expanded after the first software for spreadsheets was introduced. In the same year the Phillips Company launched its Laser Vision video disc system, and Matsushita brought out its pocket-size flat-screen TV set. Physicists at Hamburg observed gluons – elementary particles that carry the strong nuclear force that holds quarks together. Science and technology were continuing to make impressive advances, though there was one blot on the landscape – almost literally, in the form of a major accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania, which lost its water buffer through operator error, allowing the escape of a small amount of radioactive material, with the reactor itself undergoing a partial meltdown. No one was injured, but everyone was chastened.

  Although science was, far more often than not, offering material advance and intellectual excitement for those who wanted it, by 1979 there were also many countervailing voices. This was not simply antiscience in the old-fashioned sense, of the creationists, say, or the religious fundamentalists. By the end of the 1970s the critique of science, the scientific method, and science as a system of knowledge had become a central plank in postmodern thinking. The Postmodern Condition, by Jean-François Lyotard, was the first in a whole raft of books that began to question the very status of science. It is important to give the subtitle of Lyotard’s book, ‘A Report on Knowledge’, for he was a French academic, at the Institut Polytechnique de Philosophie of the Université de Paris VIII (at Vincennes), who was commissioned by the Conseil des Universités of the government of Quebec to prepare an investigation.’ Though a philosopher, Lyotard had begun adult life in postwar Paris as a left-wing political journalist. Later, while completing his academic qualifications in philosophy, he had developed an interest in psychoanalysis, trying to marry Freud and Marx, as so many colleagues were doing, and in the arts. His early writing he had grouped into the ‘The Libidinal,’ ‘The Pagan,’ and ‘The Intractable.’2 The first category clearly carried psychoanalytic overtones, but beyond that the use of the libidinal was meant to imply that, as he viewed the world, motivating sources were personal, individual, and even unconscious, rather than overtly political, or deriving from some particular metanarrative. Similarly, in using the term pagan, Lyotard intended to imply not so much false gods as alternative gods, and many different varieties, that one’s interests in life could be satisfying and rewarding even when they had nothing to do with the official, or most popular ‘truths.’ By intractable he meant that some areas of study, of experience, are simply too complex or too random ever to be predicted or understood.

  In The Postmodern Condition, however, Lyotard’s specific target was science as a form of knowledge. He wanted to know in what important ways scientific knowledge differs from other forms of knowledge, and what effects the success of scientific knowledge is having on us, as individuals and as a society. ‘Simplifying to the extreme,’ he begins, ‘I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.’3 He goes on to compare different kinds of knowledge – for example, that contained in a fairy story, that produced by the law, and that produced by science. For many scientists, as Lyotard concedes, scientific knowledge is the only form of knowledge there is, but if so, how then do we understand fairy stories and laws? The most important form of knowledge that isn’t scientific – in the sense that most scientists would accept the term – is, he says, knowledge about the self. The self, Lyotard says, has a history, is in part at least a narrative, and like no other. It is, therefore, unavailable to science, which produces knowledge that is essentially abstract in character.

  In an historical excursion Lyotard explains how, in his view, the traditional scientific approach originated at the University of Berlin in the nineteenth century; he argues that science has essentially been a child of universities ever since, and therefore has usually been paid for by governments. This is important to Lyotard as the central fact in the sociology of (scientific) knowledge, what Nietzsche called ‘the paranoia of reason,’ though Lyotard prefers the ‘tyranny of the experts.’ This is why a certain kind of knowledge (such as, ‘The earth revolves around the sun’) came to have a higher status than others (such as, ‘The minimum wage should be set at x dollars’). After 150 years of state-run science, we find it much easier to prove the former than the latter.4 Is that because of the science we have pursued, or because the latter statement is intractable, incapable of proof? If there are certain categories of problem, or experience, or simple ways of talking that are intractable in principle, where does that leave science? Where does that leave the universities and the optimism (in those who possess it) that, given time, science can solve all our problems? Much influenced by Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Godei, and Thomas Kuhn, Lyotard was impressed by the new ideas being broached in the late 1970s and 1980s, in particular catastrophe theory, chaos theory, and the problems posed by incomplete information, ‘fracta’: ‘It is changing the meaning of the word knowledge. … It is producing not the known but the unknown.’5 Lyotard adds that many areas of life are language games – we manipulate language in relation to experience, but that relation is incomplete, complex, and in any case it is only one of the things we are doing when we use language. Perhaps the very notion of self is, in a sense, a game.

  Lyotard’s conclusion was not antiscience. But he argued that other forms of knowledge (including speculation, which scientists have been known to go in for) have their place, that science can never hope to provide anything like a complete answer to the philosophical problems that face us (or that we think face us). Science derives its power, its legitimacy, from its technological successes, and rightly so. But science can only go so far; there are many areas of life that will always remain intractable to science in principle. Of these the most important is the self.

  Like Lyotard, Richard Rorty of Princeton is a philosopher fascinated by the status of scientific knowledge. This led him to write two books, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1980) and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991), in which he offered a radical reinterpretation of what philosophy can ever hope to be.6 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty accepts that science has proved amazingly successful in producing a certain kind of knowledge. And he agrees, with Rudolf Carnap, that science has correctly destroyed a certain kind of speculation – traditional metaphysics. He agrees with Lyotard that scientific knowledge is not the only form of knowledge there is (he uses literary criticism and politics as other forms). His main point, however, is to try to prevent philosophy from becoming a mere adjunct of science. ‘Some day,’ thanks to science, he says, we shall be able ‘in principle to predict every movement of a person’s body (including those of his larynx and his writing hand) by reference to microstructures within his body.’ But even when we can do this, says Rorty, we shall still not be able to predict what these people will say and/or mean. He says this with some confidence because it is his argument that people, persons, continually ‘remake’ themselves ‘as we read more, earn more, and write more.’ People are constantly ‘edifying’ themselves and in the process becoming different persons. It is in this sense that Rorty synthesises – for example – Freud, Sartre, and Wittgenstein. Freud (like Marx) realised that people could change when their self-consciousness changed, a change that could be brought about by words; this concept of a changing self was central to Sartre’s existential notion of ‘becoming’ and to Lacan’s idea of ‘success’ in treatment; and Wittgenstein’s focus on the central aspect of language, and that metaphysics is a ‘disease’ of language, underpins Rorty’s reevaluation of what philosophy is.7 For Rorty, the central mistake of philosophers has been twofold – to see philosophy as an extension of science, to try to speak in a scientific language, and to see philosophy as a system, which offers a more or less complete explanation or under
standing of the world. Rorty, on the other hand, sees philosophy as an activity attempting to reach areas of human experience that science will never be able to conquer. Philosophy should be ‘edifying’ in the following sense: ‘The attempt to edify [ourselves] … may … consist in the “poetic” activity of thinking up such new aims, new words, or new disciplines, followed by, so to speak, the inverse of hermeneutics: the attempt to reinterpret our familiar surroundings in the unfamiliar terms of our new inventions…. [T]he activity is … edifying without being constructive – at least if “constructive” means the sort of co-operation in the accomplishment of research programs which takes place in normal discourse. For edifying discourse is supposed to be abnormal, to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings.’8 But, says Rorty, ‘on the periphery of the history of modern philosophy, one finds figures who, without forming a “tradition,” resemble each other in their distrust of the notion that man’s essence is to be a knower of essences. Goethe, Kierkegaard, Santayana, William James, Dewey, the later Wittgenstein, the later Heidegger, are figures of this sort. They are often accused of relativism or cynicism. They are often dubious about progress, and especially about the latest claim that such-and-such a discipline has at last made the nature of human knowledge so clear that reason will now spread throughout the rest of human activity’.9 ‘These writers have kept alive the suggestion that, even when we have justified true belief about everything we want to know, we may have no more than conformity to the norms of the day. They have kept alive the historicist sense that this century’s “superstition” was the last century’s triumph of reason, as well as the relativist sense that the latest vocabulary, borrowed from the latest scientific achievement, may not express privileged representations of essences, but be just another of the potential infinity of vocabularies in which the world can be described…. The mainstream philosophers are the philosophers I shall call “systematic,” and the peripheral ones are those I shall call “edifying.” These peripheral, pragmatic philosophers are skeptical primarily about systematic philosophy [italics in original], about the whole project of universal commensuration. In our time, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger are the great edifying, peripheral, thinkers.’10

  For Rorty, philosophy is in a way a parasitic activity, a guerrilla mode of thought, achieving its aims piecemeal and as a result of what is happening in other disciplines. John Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Kuhn were ‘debunkers,’ and Rorty is perhaps the greatest debunker of all when he likens philosophy to no more than ‘conversation’ (the last section of his book is called ‘Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind’). ‘If we see knowing as not having an essence, to be described by scientists or philosophers, but rather as a right, by current standards, to believe, then we are well on the way to seeing conversation [italics in original] as the ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood…. The fact that we can continue the conversation Plato began without discussing the topics Plato wanted discussed, illustrates the difference between treating philosophy as a voice in a conversation and treating it as a subject.’11

  In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, Rorty’s two main areas of exploration are the objectivity of science and the relation of philosophy to politics.12 Objectivity – the sense that there is something ‘out there,’ irrespective of who is doing the thinking, or observing – he sees as a doomed notion. The idea that ‘green’ or ‘gravity’ exist in some way different from the way ‘justice’ exists is a misconception, and merely reflects that more people agree on what ‘green’ is than what ‘justice’ is.13 As Rorty puts it, there is more ‘solidarity’ in the practice. Think of the first person in early antiquity who first used the word green (in whatever language was spoken then); that person had to have a concept of green. The concept, and the word, have worked. But that is mere pragmatism. Think of the word gravity. This is an entity, whatever it is, that is still imperfectly understood. When and if it is ever understood, that word may prove to be inadequate, like phlogiston and ether in the past, and fall into disuse. In the end, Rorty thinks that the difference between truth and opinion is a matter of degree only, a question of solidarity, and we mislead ourselves if we think that there is some sense in which things are true for all time, and all cultures.

  In his earlier book, one of Rorty’s aims was to diminish our ambitions for what philosophy is, to make it more a ‘conversation’ than a system of thought. In the later book he did the same for reason. Reason, he says, is not an unalterable set of rules for thinking, which corresponds to reality ‘out there.’ Instead, it is much more like what we mean when we say something or someone is ‘reasonable,’ ‘methodical,’ or ‘sane.’ ‘It names a set of moral virtues: tolerance, respect for the opinions of those around one, willingness to listen, reliance on persuasion rather than force…. When so construed, the distinction between the rational and the irrational has nothing in particular to do with the difference between the arts and the sciences. On this construction, to be rational is simply to discuss any topic – religious, literary, or scientific – in a way which eschews dogmatism, defensiveness, and righteous indignation.’14 ‘On this view there is no reason to praise scientists for being more “objective” or “logical” or “methodical” or “devoted to the truth” than other people. But there is plenty of reason to praise the institutions they have developed and within which they work, and to use these as models for the rest of culture. For these institutions give concreteness and detail to the idea of “unforced agreement.” Reference to such institutions fleshes out the idea of “a free and open encounter” – the sort of encounter in which truth cannot fail to win. On this view, to say that truth will win in such an encounter is not to make a metaphysical claim about the connection between human reason and the nature of things. It is merely to say that the best way to find out what to believe is to listen to as many suggestions and arguments as you can.’15 As a pragmatist, Rorty admires the sciences for the qualities listed above, but it does not follow that he wants the rest of society to be organised in the same way: ‘One consequence of [the pragmatic] view is the suggestion that perhaps “the human sciences” should [italics in original] look quite different from the natural sciences. This suggestion is not based on epistemological or metaphysical considerations which show that inquiry into societies must be different from inquiry into things. Instead, it is based on the observation that natural scientists are interested primarily in predicting and controlling the behaviour of things, and that prediction and control may not be what we want from our sociologists and our literary critics.’16 There are no ‘different worlds,’ and all forms of inquiry – from physics to poetry – are equally legitimate.

  Rorty’s main aim when discussing politics is to argue that a political system does not need a concept of human nature in order to function. Indeed, Rorty says that this development is crucial to the existence of the bourgeois liberal democracies. He makes it clear that he believes the bourgeois liberal democracies to be the best form of government, and here he differs from many other postmodern scholars. He agrees with Lyotard, Jürgen Habermas, and other postmodernists that metanarratives are unhelpful and misleading, but he takes this farther, arguing that the very success of the American Constitution, and of the parliamentary democracies, stems from their tolerance, and that almost by definition this means that metanarratives about human nature have been eschewed. Rorty follows Dewey in arguing that the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, as for example in the loss of religion, has enabled personal liberation to replace it. As a result, history is made up of countless personal narratives rather than one great narrative. This is much the same as saying that the postmodern sensibility is one endpoint of bourgeois liberal democracy.

  On this score, Rorty is somewhat at odds with a figure like Clifford Geertz, whom we shall come to shortly. Geertz, an anthropologist, cultural historian, and philosopher, put forward the argument in several books in the 1970s and 1980s that – to si
mplify for the moment – we can only ever have ‘local knowledge,’ knowledge grounded in space and time, that other cultures and societies need to be understood in their terms rather than ours. While agreeing with Geertz up to a point, Rorty clearly believes that a bourgeois liberal democracy has something other societies don’t, if only because ‘its sense of its own moral worth is founded on its tolerance of diversity…. Among the enemies it diabolizes are the people who attempt to diminish this capacity, the vicious ethnocentrists.’17 Rorty emphasises that the very anthropologists, of which Geertz is such a distinguished example, are part of bourgeois liberal democracy, and that is the point. Their actions have drawn to ‘our’ attention the existence of certain people who were ‘outside’ before. This is an example, he says, of the principal moral division in a liberal democracy, epitomised by ‘the agents of love’ and ‘the agents of justice.’* The agents of love include ethnographers, historians, novelists, muckraking journalists, specialists in particularity rather than specialists in universality like theologians or, yes, the old idea of philosophers. In leaving to one side any overriding conception of human nature, liberal democracies have helped the ‘forgetting’ of philosophy as traditionally understood, i.e., as a system of thought: ‘The défaillance of modernity strikes me as little more than the loss of… faith in our ability to come up with a single set of criteria which everybody in all times and places can accept, invent a single language-game which can somehow take over all the jobs previously done by all the language-games ever played. But the loss of this theoretical goal merely shows that one of the less important sideshows of Western civilisation – metaphysics – is in the process of closing down. This failure to find a single grand commensurating discourse, in which to write a universal translation manual (thereby doing away with the need to constantly learn new languages) does nothing to cast doubt on the possibility (as opposed to the difficulty) of peaceful social progress. In particular, the failure of metaphysics does not hinder us from making a useful distinction between persuasion and force. We can see the pre-literate native as being persuaded rather than forced to become cosmopolitan just insofar as, having learned to play the language-games of Europe, he decides to abandon the ones he played earlier – without being threatened with loss of food, shelter, or Lebensraum if he makes the opposite decision.’18