KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA31 (Feyerabend / van Fraassen)

CONQUEST OF ABUNDANCE:
A TALE OF ABSTRACTION VERSUS THE RICHNESS OF BEING
by Paul Feyerabend, edited by Bert Terpstra
REVIEW by John Preston
October 2000*, posted 31 October 2000

<1>
Paul Feyerabend died before he could complete the work he intended to be his last, whose title he at various times envisaged as being The Rise of Western Rationalism, Stereotypes of Reality, Reality, and Conquest of Abundance. The first part of the book under review, on which I shall concentrate here, comprises the unfinished manuscript of that last work. Almost all the articles collected in the second part, which forms an extremely valuable complement to the manuscript, have been previously published, and commented on, elsewhere.

<2>
According to Feyerabend, the book would be 'intended to show how specialists and common people reduce the abundance that surrounds them and confuses them, and the consequences of their actions. It is mainly a study of the role of abstractions - mathematical and physical notions especially - and of the stability and "objectivity" they seem to carry with them. It deals with the ways in which such abstractions arise, are supported by common ways of speaking and living, and change as a result of argumentation and/or practical pressure' (p.viii).

<3>
'Rationalism', 'objectivism', 'falsificationism', and 'the method of counterexamples' are Feyerabend's code-words for the target he mainly has in mind, whose principal representative is Karl Popper. Popper is given the honour of presenting what Feyerabend thinks of as the usual story of the rise of Western rationalism. (Quite remarkable, when one considers the reception of his work on the pre-Socratics, and Plato). The beginning of this story, as Feyerabend presents it, is that certain pre-Socratic thinkers broke away from tradition, overwhelming the naïve worldview of their predecessors by force of superior argument, and replaced it with a "rational" account. Xenophanes' critique of traditional religious ideas about the Gods is supposed to have been devastating, bringing on the realisation that such ideas cannot be taken seriously. Parmenides, 'by the sheer power of his mind' and unmoved by any external agencies, attempted to prove that what exists is a single stable and indivisible block: Being. But Democritus and Leucippus refuted his monism by research, finding a counterexample to his conclusion, and replacing it by a better one (atomism).

<4>
Feyerabend's alternative story is complicated and fragmentary, but seems to be roughly as follows. The world contains an enormous variety of things, and of kinds of things. But most people block off this abundance, unconsciously and consciously. 'For them the world is still too complicated and they want to simplify it further' (p.4). The urge to interfere with nature could not be confined to material culture, but entered the domain of belief. A 'search for reality' accompanied the growth of Western civilisation, and 'played an important role in simplifying the world' (p.5). It is usually presented as something positive. But it has a strong negative component: it does not accept phenomena as they are, but changes them. These changes involve simplifications, in which the particulars and relations which distinguish things one from another are removed by abstraction. But what remains is then called 'real', and regarded as more important than the original totality! In this respect, the actions of intellectuals are as destructive as those of their more brutal contemporaries. Science destroyed spiritual beliefs, traditions, relationships between man and nature, and put in their place nothing but an anxious quest. Was it worth it? Is the 'modern world' sufficiently wonderful to make us reconfirm the decisions that allegedly led to it?

<5>
According to Feyerabend,

it is strange and somewhat frightening to see with what enthusiasm many intellectuals, then and now, embraced [the single God of Xenophanes] and other monsters, regarding them as first steps towards a 'more sublime' interpretation of the ground of Being. But they should not be blamed for it: the idea was 'in the air'. Only a very strong and emotionally articulated commitment to traditional ways of living could have evaded it. The common people, especially in rural areas, had such a commitment. Intellectuals, who were city people, and looked down on conventional habits, and whose connection with the lower strata of humanity [sic] was never close, lacked it. They lacked the ability to preserve the abundance they and their contemporaries had been entrusted with. (p.54)

<6>
Intellectual life reduces the abundance that surrounds us primarily by supposing that underlying the variety of apparent things is reality, a more unified and law-governed set of 'principles' which are responsible for the appearances. The resulting world-view 'arranges phenomena in a hierarchy reaching from solid and trustworthy 'reality' via more fleeting occurrences to entirely spurious events' (p.9). But, Feyerabend argues (in a way reminiscent of one of his erstwhile bêtes noires, J.L.Austin), there is no single grand dichotomy between appearance and reality. The notion of reality only makes sense when applied with discretion and in the appropriate context (e.g. dreams vs. waking events). There are many different types of events, and 'reality' is best attributed to an event together with a type, not absolutely. Common sense, traditional religions, and other well-entrenched and practically effective forms of life are built in this way. Feyerabend's critique of the idea that underlying appearances is a thoroughly law-governed reality (see, especially, p.219) bears comparison with Nancy Cartwright's (The Dappled World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)).

<7>
The 'search for reality' makes sense only if what is real is assumed to be hidden, not manifest. Western scientists, philosophers, and theologians have developed this assumption into various forms of 'realism'. But the entities unearthed by science are important only if the resulting world is pleasant to live in, and if the gains from the manipulation more than compensate for the losses. The objection that the entities and laws that connect them are 'real' and that we must adapt to them, has no weight. The products of nonscientific culture would have been just as instrumentally successful as those we now have. (These claims, and the (social constructionist) idealism about material things associated with them, are perhaps the weakest part of Feyerabend's case. Here, I believe, philosophers such as Cartwright and John Dupré (The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)) have developed a far more plausible view).

<8>
Along the way, Feyerabend discusses (in chapter 1) an episode which might be thought of as an instance of the discovery or invention of the real/apparent dichotomy, and argues (chapter 2 and 3) that the ideas which reduced abundance (including the real/apparent dichotomy) were not invented by a single stroke of thought, but evolved slowly from a more uniform material. The pre-Socratic philosophers 'accepted them, even froze them with the help of a new instrument, proof, but in doing so they followed history, not reason' (p.40, emphasis added). So, in the end, Feyerabend does not lay the responsibility for the cancerous growth of Western civilisation at the door of the intellectuals. These thinkers, he argues, were not the cause of the break with tradition, but were merely following certain already-present social trends. It was not they who conquered abundance, even though they egged on and joined in the conquest, and then tried to take credit for it.

<9>
Nevertheless, I think Feyerabend feels that there is still something more seriously wrong with intellectuals: they are the only members of successful cultures whose views can really be incorrect. His former unrestricted theoretical pluralism has here developed, via the invocation of 'Aristotle's principle' that what is real is what plays a central role in the kind of life we identify with, into the view that although there is more than one way of living and, therefore, more than one type of reality, only successful cultures latch on to reality, since it is only to them that Being responds positively. (So the 'principle of tenacity' which he earlier argued for has been toned down). Feyerabend never does anything to support his willingness to say that things that some people believe in, such as gods, exist (not merely that they exist 'for' those who believe in them, whatever that means). One gets the impression that he thought that merely pointing out that some people believe in them, or that enough people believe in them, was enough. His reluctance to take sides between those who do and those who do not believe in such things sometimes takes the form of supposing that everything believed in by anyone from a 'successful' culture exists. But he doesn't seem to recognise that his own ontological pluralism represents a preference for one ontological belief over against others. 'Physicalists', for example (like an earlier Feyerabend) believe that all that exists is purely physical. According to the later Feyerabend, they are wrong. But why should people's views about what the world contains be taken seriously only when they don't try to support them by 'abstract' argument, as physicalists do? Why is it only the intellectuals, specialists, experts, whose views are wrong? Just because those views have led to, or arise from, a world which Feyerabend dislikes? Don't intellectuals comprise one of the more 'successful' (sub-)cultures ever known? Why is it that one can always disagree with the ontological views of a philosopher, or a scientist, but never with those of a layperson? Is Feyerabend's attempt at populism merely the latest form of the trahison des clercs: agree with the laypeople just because they are laypeople, and we (parasites?) ought not to offend them? His example reminds us that anti-intellectualism is by no means confined to the British, or to those who aren't themselves intellectuals. The romantic rural idyll (and the accompanying disdain for intellectuals, perceived as urban) was a theme in post-Kantian German philosophy, and has been a preoccupation of intellectuals (urban or otherwise). Feyerabend's later thought might profitably be seen as an expression of reactionary romanticism, the desire to return to (what he thinks of as) a prior stage of culture, a golden age in which people got on with their lives untroubled by intellectuals and their tendency to universalise concepts and forms of thought (e.g. logic). (All this from the person who translated Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies into German!). 'Aristotle's principle', which is in blatant conflict with the Austinian conclusions about reality mentioned earlier, is undoubtedly one of the culprits here.

<10>
From what has been said so far, one can surmise that Feyerabend's critique of the claims of science ultimately boils down to the accusation that science isn't comforting: it doesn't satisfy certain human desires. Some of those whose job is to promote the public understanding of science would undoubtedly reply that scientific conclusions aren't meant to be comforting. But the ensuing debate is often a result of a flawed premise shared by both parties, the assumption that science can legitimately address all our questions. Too often, for Feyerabend, our choice is between a completely scientific culture (or part of a larger culture) and a completely non-scientific one. He fails to recognise that within a culture or sub-culture, philosophers can help confine science to those questions and areas which it can usefully address, and to unmask its pretensions to address other questions. In this respect, I don't think he got far enough away from another flawed premise which he himself identifies here: that forms of life are well-defined, clearly separated, or monolithic. His was (perhaps unsurprisingly) the pluralism of the USA, a melting-pot in which views and/or cultures bump up against one another while retaining their autonomy. If he had imbibed the deeper pluralism that he advertises here, in which cultures are open, interact, and are transformed via their interaction with others, he might have seen that science and 'rationalism' may be coped with and exploited in ways other than eradicating them, or confining them to ghettos.

<11>
Although Feyerabend did not live to complete the manuscript, Bert Terpstra has done an excellent job of showing us what much of it might have looked like. Conquest of Abundance, Feyerabend hoped, would be 'a simple book, pleasant to read and easy to understand' (p.viii). Terpstra has done as much as Feyerabend to ensure that it is. Along with the papers collected together in the book's second part, I think the result is probably a better volume than the one now regarded by many as Feyerabend's magnum opus, Against Method.

-------------------------------------------------

* Review written for the British Journal of Philosophy

-------------------------------------------------

John Preston

John Preston is Senior Lecturer, Dept of Philosophy, Univ. of Reading, UK.

<http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/Id/Philos/jmp.htm>