While I’m certainly no philosopher (much as I wish it were otherwise), I greatly enjoy dabbling in the topic on occasion. At present, I’m reading On Religion by John Caputo, a continental philosopher of religion at Syracuse University.
Although it comes as no surprise to hear that the book is predominantly about religion, it has got me thinking about the strident and defensive tone that many scientists use when the boundaries of their discipline are encroached upon, and about the frequent assertions of the primacy of scientific knowledge over other forms of knowing.
In chapter 2, Caputo races through a history of Enlightenment modernity. Through the work of philosophers from Descartes to Kant, the Mediaeval idea of the “self” as a “sinful, self-questioning, passionate, prayerful, weepy being, of restless heart and divided will” has been displaced by a “sovereign, self-possessed, dispassionate ‘thinking thing’, fully in charge of its potencies and possibilities, surveying the contents of its mind to sort out which among them represents something objective out there in the external world and which should be written off as merely internal and subjective.”
According to Caputo, “the moderns have a rigorous sense of boundaries, limits, and proper domains, and they make everything turn on drawing these boundaries neatly and cleanly. They insist on drawing sharp lines between subject and object, consciousness and the external world, science and religion, faith and reason, public and private, rational and irrational, empirical and a priori, cognitive and non-cognitive, fact and value, is and ought, descriptive and normative, sacred and profane, religious and secular.” In all, reason is king.
Then along come Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who wake the world from its rationalistic slumber. “In both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world is a chaotic tumult, a senseless game into which we did not ask to be entered. … In Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world of Enlightenment Reason … is left far behind.”
In place of universal reason, “Nietzsche … argued for the historical contingency of our constructions, the revisability and reformability of our constructions, all of which, as he said, are ‘perspectives’ that we take on the world and that have emerged in order to meet the needs of life.” Famously responsible for the “death of God”, Nietzsche “thought … that the death of ‘God’ implies the death of ‘absolute truth’, including the absolutism of scientific truth; physics too is a perspective.”
As Caputo sees it, thanks to the post-modern insights of thinkers following the trail blazed by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, “knowledge … does not require freedom from presuppositions, but … is seen as uniquely structured by presuppositions that should be as supple and fertile as possible.” Indeed, many of today’s philosophers now “think that disciplined learning in the sciences and the humanities has a lot more to do with the insights and instincts of the well trained, the suggestions and questions of the initiates, imagination, a measure of good luck, and an ability to cope with an utterly unexpected turn of events than with the much-vaunted ‘method’ of modernity.”
In light of Caputo’s argument, I can’t help wondering why the very contingency of all human knowledge – that is, its dependence on cultural, historical, economic, political, religious, and social factors and contexts, among others – including (as the preceding quotes suggest) scientific knowledge, is not more widely acknowledged within the scientific community. It seems that we’re stuck in a perpetually defensive mode, singing the praises of our superior way of knowing while any and all challenges to scientific rationalism and reason are quickly pounced upon and discredited by the scientific establishment. A closer look at our philosophical heritage, however, might suggest that we don’t have quite the unshakable grounds for claiming the universality of scientific knowledge and truth as we think we do.
Of course, none of this is welcome news to an activity that must survive by forever extolling its virtues to funding agencies – just read the opening paragraphs of practically any grant application and you find all manner of self-justification and self-aggrandizement of the nature and status of science. However, I wonder whether the stentorian claims one regularly hears about science and its ability to plumb the depths of reality, to teach us anything and everything there is to know, should perhaps be toned down a little.
