I taught philosophy from roughly 1965 to 2006, some 41 years. I didn’t know very much to teach at the outset, but, all things considered, I think I slowly improved through the years. After I retired, I didn’t consciously attend very much to philosophy, but apparently there was some processing going on below the surface. I shared one conclusion from that sub-conscious churning in the first few posts on this blog. I want now to discuss some others.
I taught mainly the “theory of knowledge,” a bit of metaphysics, and the early modern period of the history of philosophy. These three areas were luckily complementary. The “theory of knowledge,” also called “epistemology,” deals with basic questions concerning our knowledge. Most central to this study, of course, is the question of what knowledge actually is and how we know when we have it; a corollary question that immediately arises is what belief is, and how belief is related to knowledge. Necessarily involved in all of these discussions are questions concerning the nature of justification and evidence.
Metaphysics, on the other hand, is a subject best described by W.V.O. Quine’s felicitous phrase: “what there is.” This is not a study of what individual sorts of things there are; a metaphysician doesn’t occupy himself with questions like “are there any more passenger pigeons?” or “is there an Abominable Snowman?”. The metaphysician wants to identify the sorts of things that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. Thus, when Descartes tells us that the universe contains both Mind and Matter, he is doing metaphysics, and mind has nothing material about it, nor matter anything mental. When Berkeley tells us that it contains only Mind, he is doing metaphysics. When Marx tells us that the universe contains only matter, ditto. Of course, the full metaphysics in each case involves much more than that, since it also includes their reasons.
What should be clear is that answering metaphysical questions is dependent on first having answered epistemological questions. No matter what metaphysical position one takes, one will face the inevitable question: How do you know that there are xs or ys or zs? And, before one can answer the “How do you know?” question, one must be able to say what is to count as knowledge.
And this leads to the central epistemological puzzle, first posed by Roderick Chisholm:
In order for us to discover when we know, we must examine some clear cases where we know; but we can’t examine any clear cases of where we know, unless we already know when we know.
It would seem that in the face of this problem, we simply can’t know anything. But drawing that conclusion seems premature because it ignores the fact that some of our beliefs seem absolutely certain and thus do appear to provide an example of knowledge. Descartes famously held that each of us was absolutely certain of his own existence whenever he questions it.
Which brings me to my retrospective rumination. All of the above was no more than courteous foreplay. Now, I mix in the history.
The last three hundred years or so have been so dominated by science and scientistic thinkers that truth and knowledge have been associated exclusively with the word “objective.” A common way of dismissing someone’s opinion these days is to characterize it as “merely subjective.” If, on the other hand, one wants to praise an opinion, one describes it as “thoroughly objective.”
The objective point of view is one that does not belong to any one in particular; it is “no one’s” point of view. This is one of the reasons that, for a long time, scientific writing manuals favored the “passive voice”: “the experiment was conducted,” “fires were lit,” and so forth. But, by whom? Well, by someone, but no one in particular; an anonymous someone. It should be clear that the “objective point of view” is a fiction; a methodologically useful fiction, but nonetheless a fiction for all of that.
The reason for all of this in scientific method is quite clear: the idea is to eliminate bias, and bias is something associated with people. The method, therefore, is designed, not to eliminate people from the experimental environment, but at least to pretend that they have been eliminated. If we didn’t already know that the elimination of bias from science is a sham, we need only reflect on the behaviour of the scientists in the current global warming ponzi scheme being imposed on a credulous citizenry.
But clearly the objective of reducing bias in science is a very worthy one, and if using the passive voice in research articles helps to accomplish this, well, that’s little enough to pay for progress.
At the same time, we don’t want a useful methodological fiction to lure us into metaphysical commitments that we can’t defend. Remember, the question is “What can we know?” And the arguments of the various sceptics make it pretty clear that we can’t know anything about an “objective” world that exists independently of our (subjective) selves. Maybe it’s also true that we can’t know much about our selves, but we certainly can’t know anything about the “objective” world. This is not just the view of cloud-cuckoo-land out-dated philosophers, it was the view of a nearly current pragmatist like W.V.O. Quine. For Quine, the objective world is a “construction” that is kept for as long, and only as long, as it produces accurate predictions. The only reality with which we are in any sense “directly in touch” is that of our own “inner” states; the “outer” reality is no more than a convenient conjecture.
The conclusion we are forced to draw is that if there is anything that can be known, it can only be the knowing subject himself. And this is the turn that the philosophers known as “phenomenologists” have taken. These philosophers include Edmund Husserl and the Nazi, Martin Heidegger, but, as I’ve suggested above, the line of thought that leads to the phenomenologist's “subjective world” began as early as Rene Descartes. This is, of course, why Husserl’s fine introduction to his philosophy was entitled “Cartesian Meditations.”
Descartes began with the very Protestant intuition that each thinker had necessarily to certify his own beliefs in the communal project of science. He did this because the methods for acquiring knowledge that he had been given by the Jesuits of la Fleche disappointed him. Being unable to trust authority for knowledge, he had no recourse but to try to find it for himself. He therefore produced what was arguably the world’s first systematic scientific method. It’s not the scientific method we now use, but he must be credited with the astonishing achievement of recognizing the need for such a thing. And this was a method that began the search for knowledge within the knowing subject himself.
But, Descartes did believe in an objective, enduring material reality and he tarried not long in his exploration of the inner life of the subject; just long enough to satisfy himself that he could achieve certainty in his researches into objective reality. As it happens, he was very likely wrong that he had found certainty in his belief in a material world. This was understood by his successor, Leibniz, who made the objective external material world a “construction” of the subjective mind. Kant followed on that line of thought and made of the material world no more than a possibility. Husserl was certain that Descartes was in far too much of a hurry to leave the exploration of the subjective world behind. He made it his life’s work to make up for this deficit and developed a method for exploring the inner world, a method that included the description of the inner world’s perception of an outer world. Heidegger followed on Husserl’s work, further applying the “phenomenological method.”
What is important about this phenomenological turn is not what it has to contribute to science, but what, if it is true, it can contribute to undoing the influence of the scientific world-view in places where it has exceeded its applicability. Those places include the subject matters of religion, of humor, of aesthetics, of politics, and possibly of psychology itself. It is not a small thing, if it can be made plausible that the scientific approach to all of these important domains brings it own bias to those subjects.
The point, then, of the phenomenologists is that the method whose inner imperative is to exclude bias, actually constitutes a bias when applied beyond the physical sciences to human affairs.
For just a few examples, let’s consider the inventory of human experiences and emotions. Various scientific or, some would call them “pseudo-scientific,” accounts of aesthetic experience would attempt to assimilate them to, perhaps, biologically rooted “drives.” Thus, perhaps, the pleasure in art would attempt to be reduced or assimilated to sexual drives. The phenomenologist, on the other hand, would attempt, successfully or not, to approach the experiences in question from a “presuppositionless” prespective, developing a description that is driven only “by the phenomenon itself.” The original phenomenology, then, has all the characteristics of a taxonomic discipline, identifying and describing distinct human experiences, without bring any theoretical or scientific assumptions to the process. It is possible, therefore, that we discover here that human life has more variety and nuance in its inner life than post-Enlightenment thinking has allowed. Religious experience, for another important example, may turn out to be a unique human affect, not reducible to any other, any more than the experience of “funnyness” is reducible to any other. Thus, there could be a sense of the divine in the same sense that there is a sense of humour. The fact that not everyone enjoys religious experiences could be no more surprising than that there are people with little or no sense of humor. And just as there are different senses of humour, there may well be, as James entitled his book, Varieties Of Religious Experience.
It is true that phenomenologists have, as a rule, been guilty of appalling bafflegab, most of which was unnecessary and self-indulgent. I’m convinced that Sartre, for one, actually enjoyed the verbal tricks he played on his readers with a sadistic delight. That said, I do suspect that there is a core of content in this line of thought that deserves to be taken seriously, if not too seriously.
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