technical images and linear text

In the process of doing my research for a presentation I gave a couple weeks ago, I came to a (very old) review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, written by the erstwhile Richard Dawkins, whose Selfish Gene was actually an important source in this presentation. Shockingly enough, Dawkins quotes Deleuze and Guattari: not something you will probably ever see elsewhere. (Although I did also find an article on JSTOR about this little trio, written in a style Dawkins would almost certainly deem abhorrent.) He more or less discards them out of hand as obscurantists, on the basis of one citation from Guattari and one from Deleuze, which he certainly just picked out of Sokal and Bricmont, taking them at their word. All the better for these scientific ideologues; all the worse for Dawkins’ grasp of philosophy. What follows is a brief ‘meta-review’ of Dawkins’ review, which seeks to ask some pose some basic philosophical questions about the unstated premises of scientist-demagogues like Dawkins, and the prejudices to which they give rise.
To begin by revealing my cards, if only to reassure any (more or less dogmatic) scientists within this hypothetical readership that I’m not concealing any larval creationist argument: ‘Science’ as a pure abstract ideal of disinterested knowing is a wonderful thing. I have no desire to debate this question with anyone, since it seems like anyone who seriously disagrees with this position is being silly and ideological (and is almost certainly concealing some pious conviction).

The perennial problem with science, though, is that its practitioners can often (unwittingly or otherwise) turn it into something that resembles religion a great deal more than it properly should. Religious conviction is, after all, in no way the sole province of the pious: when ‘rationalism’ or pure science simply takes the place of the divine, reason necessarily takes on many religious characteristics. I tend to believe that this is because scientists generally make rather weak philosophers (with the evident exception of the greats, and likewise anyone who practised science when it was still literally ‘natural philosophy’). But we ought to consider Einstein’s famous aversion to the notion of God playing dice as indicative of a certain onto-theological prejudice, one which intrudes into the proper domains of both philosophical science and scientific philosophy (‘pseudo’ or otherwise). This prejudice is simple, and eminently understandable. In fact, it is the fundamental prejudice of the understandable itself: It just has to make sense! Which is a decent metaphysical presupposition for a scientist to hold, so long as they’re not dealing with any of the touchy, nondeterministic situations in which things just don’t entirely make ’sense,’ or at least ‘common sense’ and uncritical intuition begin to fall apart.

The solution to this tetchy problem of scientific reasoning is, I think, philosophy. And I shall set out a very brief argument for why in the paragraphs to follow. You’ll notice, however, that I’m not going to be quoting anyone in particular. Unfortunately, contemporary philosophy is often just as problematic as science or religion. This is fairly clearly expressed in Dawkins’ review, but also in The Selfish Gene, where he has relatively few kind words for philosophers, suggesting that “Philosophy and the subjects known as ‘humanities’ are still taught almost as if Darwin had never lived. No doubt this will change in time.” (lost the citation, too lazy to look it up.) This is really an excellent point, even if it casts its net a little wide of the mark. Philosophy is still in many ways stuck in a pre-Darwinian idealism, a basic anthropocentrism that is anathema to what we know about evolution: this, I think, is often especially true of analytic philosophy, specifically when it attempts to leave its comfort zone of formal logic and make some claims about the real world. (Of course, I’m being over-general here myself, and the greatest philosophers in the analytic tradition have some extremely compelling insights.) Analytic philosophy, particularly when it stays within its comfort zone, isn’t really problematic for scientists, although they may tend to be rather uninterested in what it has to say. Continental philosophy is (as Sokal, Bricmont, et al. love to remind us) equally problematic, tending as Deleuze states to introduce all manner of theological fictions and transcendental breaches within reality, occasionally coming to oppose itself in principle to all manner of materialistic, scientific, realistic thinking.
Hubris is the problem not only of every Heraclitean, but of every scientist. Science discards one onto-theological fiction (namely, God) over the course of its ‘naturalistic’ inquiries, and yet it tends to uncritically position itself upon the very throne so recently vacated by theology. Why is Dawkins so opposed in principle to the work of continental philosophy? (or rather, why does he, the critical reasoner, so quickly and unquestioningly take Sokal and Bricmont at their words about an entire discipline?) Oh, pooh pooh, French philosophers tend to use mathematical concepts rather casually, and they often fail to express themselves in your closely-held ‘common sense’ vernacular. The appeal to common sense is a necessary component of any demagogy (a term which I deploy in the most classical sense here) and so I don’t begrudge Dawkins his manner of speaking. But one would expect from a scientist a little more attention to principles. Scientists (for those who know Kuhn, I would specify here ‘normal scientists’) are saved from their own flights of fancy by their hypothetical/experimental methodologies, but once they enter a more decidedly thetic, philosophical mode of discourse their proclamations become increasingly less worthwhile. For this is what Dawkins really does when he argues so vehemently for the applicability of science to the ‘God hypothesis,’ and the delusional quality of religionists and Continental philosophers alike: he takes a philosophical position! He, along with so many other ideological scientists admit, all the while, their ignorance of ‘high-flown’ philosophy – by which they (perhaps unbeknownst to themselves) mean anything that doesn’t fully disavow Hegel’s tradition – but they begin to make claims for a sweeping materialism which is, itself, a philosophical presupposition and not a scientific fact.

Why is this so? Here I might appeal (for a more specialized audience, a more specific and certain finite readership) to an arithmetical result like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or a logical one like Tarski’s indefinability theorem; admitting all the while, like Dawkins confronted with philosophy, that I don’t yet grasp the complete formal significance of these results, or the true mathematico-logical significance of the ‘ungraspability’ of logical and mathematical meaning to which these results refer. But I do comprehend what I take to be the definite philosophical-conceptual meaning of results like these, which is simply that from withinone formal, rigorous system for determining meaning, truth, facts, evidence, or …, one cannot justify the system’s methodological assumptions. In order to demonstrate this more concretely, we might refer to the practical (if not theoretical) irreducibility of the ‘human sciences’ to the physical sciences, or of any particular physical science to any other. Generally speaking, in order to study phenomena (empirically or otherwise), one must accept certain basic axioms which cannot, by definition, be ‘proven’ as true within the system or by any particular observation-theorem complex. As creationists love to remind scientists, science excludes creation and divine intervention by method and not by virtue of any absolute confirmation of God’s inexistence. Dawkins has his own dogma, it seems. This is very much of a piece with the dogma that leads him to follow Sokal and Bricmont in refusing to grant any validity to the obscure philosophies of people like Deleuze and Guattari. Of course, as I said, I’m not intending here to lend any credence to the creationist argument! As presented by theology, the God hypothesis is eminently absurd, and its predictions are testable. They have been tested, and they have been refuted, simply by the unerring success of the materialistic method: science doesn’t exclude divine intervention by method for no good reason, as creationists might like to believe. We might remember that science began as natural philosophy, as the work of very religious men! The scientific tradition has discarded the hypothesis of divine intervention simply because divine intervention can’t explain shit. It doesn’t happen.
But while considering the relative merits of science vs. creationism and ‘common-sense’ philosophy vs. obscure French philosophy, we might gain some useful insights by thinking a little more about the meaning of Gödel and Tarski’s proofs. ‘Analytic philosophy’ — in the least formal (ie. ‘philosophical’) sense, as that brand of philosophy which dominates the Philosophy departments of Anglo-American universities — seems to have inherited from Frege and Russell a methodological tendency to privilege our intuitions of common sense over the sublime and the paradoxical. (Russell and Frege inherited this intuition in turn from Plato, but that’s another topic altogether.) Indeed, the entire logicist project is essentially a holocaust of paradoxes: mathematics and geometry, which seemed to have been functioning in perfect rigor since the days of Homer and the Upanishads, found themselves beset with paradoxes at the end of the nineteenth century, an infestation of the aporetic for which logicism offers the Final Solution. And indeed, their project met with a great deal of success. Totalitarianism of this kind, especially in fields that require logical rigor, isn’t a bad idea – in fact, it’s almost necessary. After Gödel’s tumultuous proving, the logicians eventually died out (though a few remain), and arithmetical logic worked out a compromise with the infinite and ineffable in the form of ZFC.

But the onto-theological spirit of the logicist aspiration lives on, it seems, in the palpable loathing with which scientific thinkers and analytic philosophers often confront the aporetic and paradoxical manner of speaking which Deleuze, Derrida and their ilk have inherited from Spinoza, Hegel, Heidegger, Levinas, … (and all kinds of other roguish folks in a line that stretches back to Zeno). Dawkins, Sokal, and Bricmont are only the tip of the iceberg here. Chomsky’s vitriolic reaction to Derrida, assuming it’s not apocryphal, is evidence enough, and it’s something that deserves a lengthy reading in conjunction with ‘Postulates of Linguistics’ from Mille plateaux. (Chomsky calling Derrida a ‘postmodernist’ is for me evidence enough that he’s got no idea what he’s talking about.) The disciplinary divide between analytic and continental philosophy has always been for me one of the most productive ways of understanding the work of both traditions. Right now, actually, I’m working with Levinas’ Totality and Infinity and Cantor’s set theory, and seeing how great analytic philosophers like Adrian Moore have brought the work of people like Wittgenstein and Quine into conversation with Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida is as instructive as it is inspirational. Derrida’s aporetic monologues are not intended to undermine reason or logic, nor are they utterly incommensurable with a thoroughly logical rationality. (This, for me, is especially clear when reading Rogues.)

Wittgenstein and Gödel’s introductions of nonsense and paradox into logic show how logic and common sense are in themselves incomplete, a set of axioms whose worth cannot be proven from within their system. And as Moore’s dialogue with Derrida in the Ratio conference whose proceedings are collected in Arguing with Derrida (“usually ships in 1-4 months”!!!!) so usefully demonstrates, logical-scientific thinkers need not always confront paradoxical ones with their guns ablaze. As much as they may wish to save their cherished doxa, or present them as incontrovertible truths, this is not only an unjustifiable totalitarianism of reason, but a fundamentally irrational prejudice. How’s that for a paradox? And so the creationists do conceal a grain of truth beneath their theological arguments, the very same grain of truth that led Einstein to believe in a God (who didn’t play dice). Materialism, physicalism, logic: none of these methods can justify themselves from within themselves. This is the domain of the philosophical claim, and it will always remain the sovereign domain of philosophy. When scientists intrude upon that domain – which is indeed their right, for methodological pluralism is the only proven path to truth – they still, unfortunately, tend to consider themselves to be ‘doing science.’ And so they expect that the French philosophers like Derrida whom they deride should simply speak in their language, in the language of (their) common sense, when in fact Derrida’s entire project is to show (and here I follow Moore in appropriating Wittgenstein’s terminology) his readers the paradoxes and aporias that erupt within every system of sense – whether ‘common,’ ’scientific,’ or ‘philosophical.’ If it weren’t for these aporias, common sense would neither exist nor would it progress. But these paradoxes, inherent to any system of doxa, must serve to remind us that no method – however ‘common sense’ – can aspire to justify itself. Science can and should retain the materialist hypothesis because it works very well in its domain, and yet scientists could lose some of their hubris by recognizing materialism as just that: a hypothesis. It stands beneath all the specific theses and theorems of science, but science cannot itself prove that hypothesis. (The very fact that scientific thinkers sometimes think it can, treating it as absolute and inviable, proves that they’re not philosophers. Any real philosopher knows that materialism is a position that demands justification.) But as science expands to include things like cognitive science, it must begin (and indeed it has begun) to reflect on its method to a much greater extent, and not simply because of the recursive structure of cognition and expression. A good first step in this respect would be to consider its attitude towards paradox in general, and toward the aporetic style of French philosophy in particular. Ultimately, we must conclude as philosophers that Sokal, Bricmont, and Dawkins don’t oppose the philosophers they deride for any good scientific reason, but simply because of their own ill-considered philosophical prejudices. Dawkins is right to be suspicious of philosophy and its latent transcendentalism, but this doesn’t mean that he and Chomsky and Sokal and Bricmont are entitled to discard in principle a huge portion of the discipline. As the vulgar response would go, I don’t tell them how to do science. (Nor does Derrida, although Irigaray certainly does, in as far as I can tell the most idiotic and puerile fashion.) The paradox here is equally evident, and it’s a bad one: the kind of ‘intervention’ that Sokal and Bricmont make into the discipline of philosophy justifies in principle the very same interventions they critique, including the very perceptive ones of philosophers like Latour and Feyerabend.

Once again, this is not an attempt to undermine scientific hypotheses, but simply to demonstrate the sense in which they can be said to function. Myself, I have no intention of remaining within the kind of pre-Darwinian, idealistic and anthropocentric tradition dismissed in such a cavalier fashion by Dawkins and his ilk. But this does not entail that I accept the blind dogmatism and evident lack of philosophical sophistication of he and his cohorts. Instead, I think that the answer to the problem of philosophy pointed out by Dawkins is to be found in the very philosophy he so blindly discards, especially in the work of Deleuze. In the work of his interpreters (de Landa, for instance), we see expressed in Deleuzeanism an incredibly useful ’scientific’ philosophy. This brand of philosophy, one which I’m currently enjoying a great deal, points toward a philosophy of the future (cf. Agamben, ‘Absolute Immanence,’ and Dan Smith’s excellent piece in Between Deleuze and Derrida). Such a philosophy might be considered in equal parts post-darwinian idealism, and post-idealist materialism: a philosophy which recognizes the evolution and materiality of ideas themselves (in the Kantian, Platonic, or as far as I know any philosophical or colloquial sense you might choose), in spite of the fact that our techniques and technologies for analysing the matter and evolution remain (and perhaps shall always remain) inadequate in many respects. This is what Dawkins discards when he so blindly accepts the polemic of Sokal and Bricmont! Alas. I can’t suppose that I’d convince such a demagogue with my petty philosophy. In my eyes though, it’s just one more little affirmation of Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchism, showing (like Mill showed so long ago) that it’s never a good idea to close off debate, even if only by accepting a given methodology as universally valid.

Also: I’m really digging the idea of reviews of reviews, after having seen a couple really terrible film reviews in recent weeks. Perhaps I’ll work up the inspiration to write some more of these!