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 understanding 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 simplify 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
Although he doesn’t develop the point, Rorty uses the words défaillance and progress. One translation of défaillance is extinction. Rorty is, therefore, marrying postmodernism to evolutionary theory, and in two ways. He and other philosophers are concerned partly with whether the nature of science, and the knowledge it produces, is in any sense different in kind from other forms of knowledge, whether and to what extent science itself may be regarded as an example of cultural evolution; and partly with whether postmodernism itself is an ‘evolved’ concept.
Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, likes to give his books arresting titles: Mortal Questions, What Does It All Mean? The View from Nowhere, The Last Word. Nagel stands out because, in a postmodern world, he considers traditional problems of philosophy. He uses new, clear language, but they are the old problems he is considering. He even uses words like mind without hesitation.
In Mortal Questions (1979) and The View from Nowhere (1986) Nagel’s main focus is the objectivity-subjectivity divide, how it relates to the concept of the self, and to consciousness.19 Nagel is one of those philosophers, like Robert Nozick and unlike John Rawls, who takes the world as he find it: ‘I believe one should trust problems over solutions, intuition over arguments, and pluralistic discord over systematic harmony. Simplicity and elegance are never reasons to think that a philosophical theory is true: on the contrary, they are usually grounds for thinking it is false.’20 Nagel’s view is that there are such things as mental states, the most important of which is experience of the world. He doubts whether the physical sciences will ever be able to explain what experience of the world is, or the sense of self, and asks therefore whether we can ever have a concept of ‘reality’ that is anywhere near complete. Aren’t we better off accepting these limitations, and shouldn’t we just get on trying to understand experience and subjectivity in other ways? There is no law that says that philosophy shouldn’t be useful. But Nagel shares with Lyotard, Rorty, and others a fascination with what science has done to us, in the sense of whether the knowledge that science produces is or is not some kind of special knowledge, more ‘objective’ than other kinds. His approach might be termed ‘taking intuition seriously.’ ‘Objectivity of whatever kind is not the test of reality. It is just one way of understanding reality,’21 he writes; and, ‘The difference between mental and physical is far greater than the difference between electrical and mechanical.’22 Just as the world of physics, and the way we understand objectivity, was changed by James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein, so, Nagel believes, we may one day have a psychological Maxwell and Einstein who will change our understanding of reality in equally fundamental ways, though at the moment we are nowhere near it. Not only is Nagel dismissive of the kind of objectivity provided by physics, he is also sceptical of the claims of evolutionary theory. Darwinian theory ‘may explain why creatures with vision or reason survive, but it does not explain how vision or reasoning are possible. These require not diachronic [historical] but timeless explanation…. The possibility of minds capable of forming progressively more objective conceptions of reality is not something the theory of natural selection can attempt to explain, since it doesn’t explain possibilities at all, but only selection among them.’23
Nagel does not have an alternative explanation to, say, evolutionary theory, but he says he doesn’t need one to cast doubt on the grand claims that are being made for evolution. That is Nagel’s charm and, maybe, his force: he is not afraid to tell us what he doesn’t know, or even that some of his views may be absurd. His aim is to use language, and reason, to think in ways that haven’t been done before. In his view, his intuition (as well as his powers of observation) tell him that the world is a big, complex place. Any one solution is extremely likely to be wrong, and it is intellectually lazy not to explore all possibilities. ‘The capacity to imagine new forms of hidden order, and to understand new conceptions created by others, seems to be innate. Just as matter can be arranged to embody a conscious, thinking organism, so some of these organisms can rearrange themselves to embody more and more thorough and objective mental representations of the world that contains them, and this possibility too must exist in advance.’24 Nagel describes this view as rational but anti-empiricist.25 Since agreement is only possible to us through language, Nagel says, echoing Wittgenstein, there may well be things about our world – in fact, there probably are – that we cannot conceive. We are almost certainly limited by our biological capacity in this respect. In time that may change, but this also should change our view of what objectivity and reality are. ‘Realism is most compelling when we are forced to recognise the existence of something which we cannot describe or know fully, because it lies beyond the reach of language, proof, evidence, or empirical understanding.’26 So for Nagel we may some day be able to conceive what things were like before the Big Bang.27
For Nagel, ethics are just as objective as anything science has to offer, and the subjective experience of the world easily the most fascinating ‘problem,’ which science is nowhere near answering. The objective fact of our subjective lives is a conundrum that we don’t even have the language or the right approach for. Empirical science as we know it is nowhere near an answer. Nagel’s books are difficult, in the sense that one feels he is on the edge of language all the time, questioning our assumptions, throwing up new possibilities, rearranging (as Wittgenstein counselled) the familiar in new and exciting ways. One is reminded of Lionel Trilling’s hope for fiction, that it would/should seek to remain outside any consensus and continually suggest new – and hitherto unimaginable – possibilities. And so Nagel is difficult, but exhilarating.
Clifford Geertz, at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, shares very firmly with other postmodernists like Lyotard the view that the world is ‘a various place’ and that we must confront this uncomfortable truth if we are to have any hope of understanding the ‘conditions’ by which we live. In two books, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) and, even more, Local Knowledge (1983), he detailed his view that subjectivity is the phenomenon for anthropologists (and others in the human sciences) to tackle.28 ‘The basic unity of mankind,’ according to Geertz, is an empty phrase if we do not take on board that drawing a ‘line between what is natural, universal, and constant in man and what is conventional, local and variable [is] extraordinarily difficult. In fact, it suggests that to draw such a line is to falsify the human situation, or at least to misrender it seriously.’29 The hunt for universals began with the Enlightenment, says Geertz, and that aim directed most Western thought, and has been a paradigm of Western science, and the Western notion of ‘truth,’ ever since. Pursuing fieldwork in Java, Bali, and Morocco, Geertz has dedicated his entire career to changing that view, to distinguishing between the ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ interpretations of cultures around the world, where ‘thick’ means to try to understand the signs and symbols and customs of another culture in its own terms, by assuming not, as Lévi-Strauss did, that all human experience across the globe can be reduced to structures, but instead that other cultures are just as ‘deep’ as our own, just as well thought out and rich in meaning, but perhaps ‘strange,’ not easily fitted into our own way of thinking.30
Geertz’s starting point is palaeontology. It is wrong in his view to assume that the brain of Homo sapiens evolved biologically and that cultural evolution followed. Surely, he argues, there would have been a period of overlap. As man developed fire and tools, his brain would have still been evolving – and have evolved to take into account fire and tools. This evolution may well have been slightly different in different parts of the world, so that to talk of one human nature, even biologically speaking, may be misleading. Geertz’s own anthropology therefore involves the meticulous description of certain alien practices among non-Western peoples, where the examples are chosen precisely because they appear strange to ‘us.’ He chooses, for example, a Balinese cockfight (where people gamble with their status in a way literally unthinkable in the West); the way the Balinese give names to people; Renaissance painters in Italy (a sort of historical anthropology, this); and certain aspects of North African law, tribal practices overlaid with Islam.31 In each case his aim is not to show that these processes can be understood as ‘primitive’ versions of customs and practices that exist in the West, but as practices rich in themselves, with no exact counterpart in the West. The Balinese, for example, have five different ways of naming people; some of these are rarely used, but among those that are, are names that convey, all at the same time, the region one is from, the respect one is held in, and one’s relation to certain significant others. In another example, he shows how a Balinese man, whose wife has left him, tries to take (Balinese) law into his own hands, but ends up in a near-psychotic state since his actions cause him to be rejected by his society.32 These matters cannot be compared to their Western equivalents, says Geertz, because there are no Western equivalents. That is the point.
Cultural resources are, therefore, not so much accessory to thought as ‘ingredient’ to it. For Geertz, an analysis of a Balinese cockfight can be as rich and rewarding about Bali thought and society as, say, an analysis of King Lear or The Waste Land are about Western thought and society. For him, the old division between sociology and psychology – whereby the sociology of geographically remote societies differed, but the psychology stayed the same – has now broken down.33 Geertz’s own summing up of his work is that ‘every people has its own sort of depth.’34 ‘Thinking is a matter of the intentional manipulation of cultural forms, and outdoor activities like ploughing or peddling are as good examples of it as closet experiences like wishing or regretting,’35 he writes; and, ‘The hallmark of modern consciousness … is its enormous multiplicity. For our time and forward, the image of a general orientation, perspective, Weltanschauung, growing out of humanistic studies (or, for that matter, out of scientific ones) and shaping the direction of culture is a chimera…. Agreement on the foundations of scholarly authority, old books and older manners, has disappeared…. The concept of a “new humanism,” of forging some general “the best that is being thought and said” ideology and working it into the curriculum, [is] not merely implausible but Utopian altogether. Possibly, indeed, a bit worrisome.’36 Geertz does not see this as a recipe for anarchy; for him, once we accept the ‘depth of the differences’ between peoples and traditions, we can begin to study them and construct a vocabulary in which to publicly formulate them. Life will in future be made up of a variety of vivid vernaculars, rather than ‘forceless generalities.’ This is the way the ‘conversation of mankind’ will continue.37
The main contribution of the philosopher Hilary Putnam, from Harvard, was an examination of the impact of science on our notions of reason and rationality. Putnam’s argument is that what we call ‘“truth” depends both on what there is (the way things are) and on the contribution of the thinker … there is a human contribution, a conceptual contribution, to what we call “truth.” Scientific theories are not simply dictated to us by the facts.’38 This view had important implications, in Putnam’s mind, for he felt that by now, the end of the twentieth century, the ‘scientific method’ had become a very ‘fuzzy’ thing, an idea that for him had peaked in the seventeenth century and had been gradually dissolving since, making the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle anachronistic. By this he meant the idea that science, and therefore reason, could only apply to directly observable and neutral ‘facts,’ which led to easily falsifiable theories. Many modern scientific theories, he pointed out, were by no means easily falsifiable – evolution being a case in point.39 He therefore agreed with Rorty that ‘reason’ ought to mean what most of us mean by it, how a reasonable person behaves in his/her approach to the world. But Putnam went further in arguing that there is much less distinction between facts and values than traditional scientists, or philosophers of science, allow. He agreed with Kuhn and Polanyi that science often proceeds by some sort of intuitive or inductive logic, because not all possible experiments are ever tried, merely the most plausible, ‘plausible’ itself being derived from some ‘reasonable’ idea we have of what we should do next. Arising from this, Putnam argued that certain statements, traditionally taken to be values, or prejudices (in the widest sense), are also facts just as much as the facts produced by science. Two examples he gives are that Hitler was a bad man and that poetry is better than pushpin. In the case of pushpin, for example, Jeremy Bentham said in the eighteenth century that expressing a preference for poetry over the game is a mere prejudice, subjective – an argument much loved by the relativists, who believe that the subjective life of one person, and even more so of one culture, cannot be fruitfully or meaningfully compared to that of another. Putnam’s refutation was not anthropological but philosophical, because the argument gave credence to ‘prejudice’ as a mental entity while denying it to, say, ‘enlarged sensibilities,’ ‘enlarged repertoires of meaning and metaphor,’ ‘self-realization,’ and so on: ‘The idea that values are not part of the Furniture of the World and the idea that “value judgements” are expressions of “prejudice” are two sides of the same coin.’40 Value judgements, Putnam is saying, can be rationally supported, and it is time to get away once and for all from the idea that scientific facts are the only facts worthy of the name. ‘Even the distinction between “classical” physics and quantum mechanics, with their rival views of the world, is itself observer-dependent.’ ‘The harm that the old picture of science does is this: if there is a realm of absolute fact that scientists are gradually accumulating, then everything else appears as non-knowledge.’
Willard van Orman Quine, another Harvard philosopher, took a very different line, while still retaining the importance of science, and the scientific method, for philosophy. In a series of books, From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Roots of Reference (1974), Theories and Things (1981), Quiddities (1987), and From Stimulus to Science (1995), Quine set out his view that philosophy is continuous with science, even part of science, and that there are essentially two aspects to reality: physical objects, which exist externally and independently of us, and abstract objects, notably mathematics. Quine is a dedicated materialist, holding that ‘there is no change without a change in the distribution of microphysical properties over space.’41 This approach, he says, enables him to eschew dualism, for ‘mental’ events are ‘manifested’ by behaviour. In other words, the understanding of mental events will ultimately be neurological, whether or not we ever reach such understanding. Mathematics, on Quine’s formulation, has a twofold importance.42 First, the existence and efficiency of numbers in helping describe and understand the universe is fundamental, the more so as numbers exist only as an abstract concept. Second, there is the idea of sets, the way some entities group together to form higher-order superentities, which imply similarity and difference. This, for Quine, relates number to words and words to sentences, the building blocks of experience. In zoology, for instance, living organisms have evolved into different genera and families – what does that mean philosophically? Are there genuine families and genera in nature, or are they a figment of our brains, based on our understanding of similarities, differences, and the relative importance of those similarities/differences? What goes on in the brain, at the microphysical level, when we think or talk about such matters? How closely do words, can words, correspond to what is ‘out there,’ and what does that mean for the microphysical processes in the brain?43 When words that mean similar (but not identical) things in different languages are translated, what does that involve for microphysical properties in the brain? Quine is an unusually difficult philosopher to paraphrase, because many of his writings are highly technical, using mathematical notation, but broadly speaking he may be seen in the tradition of Bertrand Russell, the logical positivists, and B. F. Skinner, in that for him philosophy is not a discipline as Rorty or Nagel would have it, beyond science, but is a part of science, an extension that, although it asks questions that scientists themselves might not ask, nevertheless talks about them in ways that scientists would recognise.
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), by Alasdair Maclntyre, is perhaps the most subversive postmodern book yet, uniting as it does the work of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Geertz, Rawls, and Dworkin in a most original fashion.44 Maclntyre looked at notions of reason, and rationality, and their effects on ideas of justice, in earlier societies – in classical Greece, classical Rome, Saint Thomas Aquinas’s teaching at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century, the Scottish enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – and in modern liberal times. He looked at their arguments, as developed in political, philosophical, legal, and literary works, but also at their language and how it did, or did not, conform to modern notions. Rhetoric in Athens, for example, was regarded as the high point of reason, and its aim was to spur to action; it was not thought proper, therefore, to refer to rival points of view, to weigh both sides of the argument before deciding. Reasoning, as we would understand it, was kept to a discussion of means toward an end, not about the end and the justice of that end, which was understood implicitly to be shared by all. Only people who possessed the virtues were felt to be capable of reason in Athens, says Maclntyre, and this concept was even given a special name, boulesis, ‘rational wish.’ In this context, the rational person in Athens acted ‘immediately and necessarily upon affirming his reasons for action … very much at odds with our characteristically modern ways of envisaging a rational agent.’45
Saint Thomas Aquinas believed, along with all Christians, that everyone had the potentiality to act in a reasoned way, which would lead to a moral life, but that only education in a certain order – logic, mathematics, physics – could bring about full realisation of those potentialities. There was, for him, no difference between being rational and being moral. The Scottish enlightenment, on the other hand, turned back to an emphasis on the passions, David Hume distinguishing between the calm passions and the violent passions, which take priority over reason. ‘Truth in itself according to Hume … is not an object of desire. But how then are we to explain the pursuit of truth in philosophy? Hume’s answer is that the pleasure of philosophy and of intellectual inquiry more generally “consists chiefly in the action of the mind, and the exercise of the genius and understanding in the discovery or comprehension of any truth.” Philosophy, so it turns out, is like the hunting of woodcocks or plovers; in both activities the passion finds its satisfaction in the pleasures of the chase.’ For Hume, then, reason cannot motivate us.46 ‘And the passions, which do motivate us, are themselves neither reasonable nor unreasonable…. Passions are thus incapable of truth or falsity.’47 Hume himself said, ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’48
In the modern liberal society, on the other hand, Maclntyre tells us there is a rival concept of reason and of justice, based on different assumptions, namely that people are individuals and nothing more: ‘In Aristotelian practical reasoning it is the individual qua citizen who reasons; in Thomistic practical reasoning it is the individual qua enquirer into his or her good and the good of his or her community; in Humean practical reasoning it is the individual qua propertied or unpropertied participant in a society of a particular kind of mutuality and reciprocity; but in the practical reasoning of liberal modernity it is the individual qua individual who reasons.’49 Maclntyre’s conclusion is that our concepts of reasoning (and justice) are just one tradition among several. He offers no concept of evolution in these matters, and neither Darwin nor Richard Dawkins is mentioned in his book. Instead, Maclntyre thinks we continue to deform our relationship with the past by coarse translations of the classics (even when done by some scholars), which do not treat ancient words to their ancient meanings but instead offer crude modern near-equivalents. Quoting Barthes, he says that to understand the past, we need to include all the signs and other semiological clues that the ancients themselves would have had, to arrive at what Clifford Geertz (who is referred to in Maclntyre’s book) would call a ‘thick description’ of their conceptions of reason and justice. The result of the liberal conception of reason, he says, has some consequences that might be seen as disappointing: ‘What the student is in consequence generally confronted with … is an apparent inconclusiveness in all argument outside the natural sciences, an inconclusiveness which seems to abandon him or her to his or her pre-rational preferences. So the student characteristically emerges from a liberal education with a set of skills, a set of preferences, and little else, someone whose education has been as much a process of deprivation as of enrichment.’50
The tide of David Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity is strikingly similar to Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition. First published in 1980, it was reissued in 1989 in a much revised version, taking into account the many developments in postmodernism during that decade.51 Contrasting postmodernity with modernity, Harvey begins by quoting an editorial in the architectural magazine Precis 6: ‘Generally perceived as positivistic, technocentric, and rationalistic, universal modernism has been identified with the belief in linear progress, absolute truths, the rational planning of ideal social orders, and the standardisation of knowledge and production. Postmodernism, by way of contrast, privileges “heterogeneity and differences as liberative forces in the redefinition of cultural discourse.” Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or ‘totalising’ discourses (to use the favoured phrase) are the hallmark of postmodernist thought. The rediscovery of pragmatism in philosophy (e.g., Rorty, 1979), the shift of ideas about the philosophy of science wrought by Kuhn (1962) and Feyerabend (1975), Foucault’s emphasis on discontinuity and difference in history and his privileging of “polymorphous correlations in place of simple or complex causality,” new developments in mathematics emphasising indeterminacy (catastrophe and chaos theory, fractal geometry), the re-emergence of concern in ethics, politics and anthropology for the validity and dignity of “the other,” all indicate a widespread and profound shift in “the structure of feeling.” What all these examples have in common is a rejection of ‘metanarratives’ (large-scale theoretical interpretations purportedly of universal application).’52 Harvey moves beyond this summing-up, however, to make four contributions of his own. In the first place, he describes postmodernism in architecture (the form, probably, where most people encounter it); most valuably, he looks at the political and economic conditions that brought about postmodernism and sustain it; he looks at the effect of postmodernism on our conceptions of space and time (he is a geographer, after all); and he offers a critique of postmodernism, something that was badly needed.
In the field of architecture and urban design, Harvey tells us that postmodernism signifies a break with the modernist idea that planning and development should focus on ‘large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban plans, backed by absolutely no-frills architecture (the austere “functionalist” surfaces of “international style” modernism). Postmodernism cultivates, instead, a conception of the urban fabric as necessarily fragmented, a “palimpsest” of past forms superimposed upon each other, and a “collage” of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral.’ Harvey put the beginning of postmodernism in architecture as early as 1961, with Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities (see chapter 30), one of the ‘most influential anti-modernist tracts’ with its concept of ‘the great blight of dullness’ brought on by the international style, which was too static for cities, where processes are of the essence.53 Cities, Jacobs argued, need organised complexity, one important ingredient of which, typically absent in the international style, is diversity. Postmodernism in architecture, in the city, Harvey says, essentially meets the new economic, social, and political conditions prevalent since about 1973, the time of the oil crisis and when the major reserve currencies left the gold standard. A whole series of trends, he says, favoured a more diverse, fragmented, intimate yet anonymous society, essentially composed of much smaller units of diverse character. For Harvey the twentieth century can be conveniently divided into the Fordist years – broadly speaking 1913 to 1973 – and the years of ‘flexible accumulation.’ Fordism, which included the ideas enshrined in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911), was for Harvey a whole way of life, bringing mass production, standardisation of product, and mass consumption:54 ‘The progress of Fordism internationally meant the formation of global mass markets and the absorption of the mass of the world’s population, outside the communist world, into the global dynamics of a new kind of capitalism.’55 Politically, it rested on notions of mass economic democracy welded together through a balance of special-interest forces.56 The restructuring of oil prices, coming on top of war, brought about a major recession, which helped catalyse the breakup of Fordism, and the ‘regime of accumulation’ began.57
The adjustment to this new reality, according to Harvey, had two main elements. Flexible accumulation ‘is marked by a direct confrontation with the rigidities of Fordism. It rests on flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products and patterns of consumption. It is characterised by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organisational innovation.’58 Second, there has been a further round of space-time compression, emphasising the ephemeral, the transient, the always-changing. ‘The relatively stable aesthetic of Fordist modernism has given way to all the ferment, instability, and fleeting qualities of a postmodernist aesthetic that celebrates difference, ephemerality, spectacle, fashion, and the commodification of cultural forms.’59 This whole approach, for Harvey, culminated in the 1985 exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, which had Lyotard as one of its consultants. It was called The Immaterial.
Harvey, as was said earlier, was not uncritical of postmodernism. Elements of nihilism are encouraged, he believes, and there is a return to narrow and sectarian politics ‘in which respect for others gets mutilated in the fires of competition between the fragments.’60 Travel, even imaginary travel, need not broaden the mind, but only confirms prejudices. Above all, he asks, how can we advance if knowledge and meaning are reduced ‘to a rubble of signifiers’?61 His verdict on the postmodern condition was not wholly flattering: ‘confidence in the association between scientific and moral judgements has collapsed, aesthetics has triumphed over ethics as a prime focus of social and intellectual concern, images dominate narratives, ephemerality and fragmentation take precedence over eternal truths and unified politics, and explanations have shifted from the realm of material and political-economic groundings towards a consideration of autonomous cultural and political practices.’62