The problem with positivism

"Positivism states that all authentic knowledge allows verification and that all authentic knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge is scientific."

What is truth? A simpler, and more frequently used word could hardly be imagined, but philosophers differ over it, probably because of sentimental attachments to beliefs that may not be true. In the hands of theologians, idealists, and artists, truth often stands for "something I believe". If a novel stirs a deep emotion, it is true, even while it is false. If an artwork reflects and expresses a facet of the human condition in a surprising or powerful way, it is true. And if a belief in a deity is beautiful, socially bonding, and morally edifying, it is also true. At least one athelete is the truth.

This definitional issue remains quite confusing and misleading. The subjective uses of "truth" have little to do with the canonical correspondence truth, (i.e. the equation of the thought and reality), in that what is corresponding to the feeling of truth is a feeling it agrees with, not a condition of the outside world. Subjective states surely deserve the recognition of their existence and texture. But the word truth may not be the best way to describe them.

In contrast, science and the law take a more blinkered view. If something is true, it actually happened, or is part of the real world verified by observation and continually available for re-observation, and / or other forms of close analysis. While the sciences are edging into regions traditionally part of the humanities, they still regard truth as objective, and separate from personal state, wishes, ideology, etc. The DNA reads one way, and not another. The defendent was at the scene of the crime, or not. Evidence may not exist, and the truth may not be known, but that does not impair the idea of truth- its definition and possibility.

In this regard, our minds are truth engines, working very hard to model reality with accuracy. Eyesight is the most dramatic example, bringing us incredibly rich and accurate scenes with no apparent effort. But on more abstract levels too, we are constantly trying to figure things out, particularly other people, the object of so much of our intuitive acuity. But there are limits.. we have no intuitive grasp of physics on any large or small scale, and nor is our introspection particularly effective. The self is a black box that we struggle our whole lives to understand.

And one tool of all this modeling is imagination, which both consciously and unconsciously conjures all sorts of worlds and images, sometimes as hypotheses to be pursued, sometimes as warnings to be avoided. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately), the line between sober analysis and imagination is not all that clear, leading to the establishment of the scientific method as a general and organized way for communities of people to figure out the difference, in fields where real truth is at least conceivable.

This was the hope of the postivists, to put all knowledge on the this same footing, by setting verificationist, empirical standards for knowledge and truth, and keeping all else outside the door. They tried to define everything else as "nonsense", or as not meaningful. But unfortunately, most of human experience happens in far more nebulous realms of subjective experience, vague judgements, and hopeful propositions. Which are often very highly meaningful indeed. So this re-definitional part of the project was as futile as it was repugnant.

For instance, not even the most airy metaphysical questions are entirely meaningless, which is one of the propositions of positivism. Rather, their resolution, after thousands of years of speculation, does not lie, typically, with the speculators. Philosophers provide the service of keeping some of these questions alive, at least in the academy, and of trying out various intuitive solutions to them. But the remaining problems of philosophy are clearly ones where both data and intuition are lacking. Whether data ever arrives is the main question. Whether intuition will ever resolve them is much less of a question.

More technically, the word positivism signifies positive proof, and by various skeptical arguments, (such as Hume's and the problem of induction generally), and by historical experience, it is clear that proof (i.e. verificationism) is a mirage in science, not to mention other fields. The most that can be hoped for is a provisional model of reality that doesn't violate too many observations- a coherentist model of truth.

So Karl Popper, for instance, who was altogether sympathetic to positivism, came out with his falsificationist principle, in opposition to the verificationist principle of positivism- becoming formally an anti-positivist, or at least a post-positivist. But even falsificationism is too stringent, since a contradictory observation can as easily be erroneous as damning. Judgement and interpretation are always called for, on the appropriate level of analysis.

A positivist temple, with Auguste Comte out front.

My take on all this is that positivism was overly ambitious. The point can be well-taken without setting up a new altar to absolute truth. All truth is, on our level, probabalistic, and exists on a spectrum from the precise and well-attested to the hearsay and ludicrous. That is what the contemporary Bayesian revolution in statistics and science generally is getting at, and what was lost in the positivist's rather extreme, utopian, project, for which they were bickered out of existence. Far larger lies and absurdities, however, were (and are) rampant in the field of philosophy than the shades of truth-i-ness found in the scientific literature or the history of science. To whit, a quote from Nietzsche:

"The other idiosyncrasy of philosophers is no less dangerous; it consists in confusing the last and the first things. They place that which makes its appearance last ... the 'highest concept', that is to say, the most general, the emptiest, the last cloudy streak of evaporating reality, at the beginning as the beginning. This again is only their manner of expressing their veneration: the highest thing must not have grown out of the lowest, it must not have grown at all ... thus they attain to their stupendous concept 'God'. The last, most attenuated and emptiest thing is postulated as the first thing, as the absolute cause, as 'ens realissimum'. Fancy humanity having to take the brain diseases of morbid cobweb spinners seriously! - And it has paid dearly for having done so."
-Quoted by Max Horchheimer, in Eclipse of Reason.

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de Maistre and Radical chic

Theists daydream about crushing modernity, in favor of "Radical Orthodoxy".

One of Isaiah Berlin's finest works (see the side-links) was his essay about the intellectual outlook of Joseph de Maistre, the staunchly conservative Catholic Savoyard who lived through the French Revolution and wrote whitheringly against it, against modernity, against rationality, and against all points un-Catholic.

His great insight was about the dark side of human nature- how people want to be in chains, want to sin and be forgiven, want to sacrifice their lives on the altar of authority, and thus need and want to be led by their betters, or indeed by anyone with plausible authority. He saw clearly the acidic nature of rationality and atheism, which would wash away the veneration of throne and altar as divine manifestations, imperturbable and unanswerable, which best undergirds such patriarchal, hierarchical systems. He despised the French revolution, yet was fascinated by power, legitimate and illigitimate. One can see clear affinities with Machiavelli, even as de Maistre hewed devotedly to the Roman Catholic church (see fideism). He knew that to see through the contingency of such institutions and theistic rationalizations was to destroy everything- to destabilize the delicate threads of society, with no assurance that anything at all, or at any rate anything worthwhile, was ready to replace them.

Echos of de Maistre's philosophy, which was highly influential in its time, especially in reactionary Russia and restoration France, continue down to our day, through Fascism, opposition to Vatican II, Opus Dei, and most recently, in a curious phenomenon that calls itself "Radical Orthodoxy" (RO). Not coherent enough or palatable enough to be a philosphy, RO calls itself a "sensibility", and seeks the usual conservative dream of universal subservience to clergy and church- of stability promised by verities imbibed unthinkingly and enforced ruthlessly. A medieval world where being outside the church is literally unthinkable, and atheism but a rumor from far away and long ago.

de Maistre's views were a powerful antidote to the enlightenment faith in human rationality, which did indeed have an excessively sangine view of our (or at least revolutionary Frenchmen's) ability to reshape society to the ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, instead authoring a rather sanguinary episode that was saved (depending on one's view of him) only by the Machiavellian hand of Napoleon and his even more sanguinary excesses abroad (admittedly, in response to the relentless aggression of the horrified theo/auto-cratic enemies of the French revolution).

Optimism or pessimism about the human condition- that is the question. In the end, even de Maistre knew he was waging at best a holding operation, since the progress of the sciences and rational thought was so demonstrable and invigorating to so many, despite the missteps along the way. It was left to the next century for the full excesses of each extreme to be made explicit in the death-grapple between Germany, with its romantic religion of Volk und Blut, and the Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat. Each partook in some measure of both extremes, claiming rationalist sanction by way of various pseudosciences (race studies and eugenics on the one hand, and historical determinism on the other, among many others), while also feeding deeply on romantic irrationalist attitudes, including leader-cults and nationalism, to create updated terror-states.

Thankfully, other political systems have cast a less harsh light on the possibilities of reason in the guidance of human affairs, but the modern age remains deeply discomfiting to those who are not at home in the ultimately self-determined and meaningless nihilism of fully realized modernism. This nexus of self-made meaning, rampant liberty, and penetrating skepticism offend those who seek timeless truth and structure in their inner and outer lives, however illusory.

Thus Radical Orthodoxy, a minor theological revolt from the Anglican church that sidles up to Rome, (indeed holding a recent conference right by the Vatican, with the howlingly misleading title "The Grandeur of Reason"), and offers patently irrationalist mystical maunderings to communicate its "sensibility". A sensibility which offers a critique without criticism- a cry of protest against modernism without rational content, as far as I can tell (or Mr. J. Irwin either, who was there). Which seems, at base, to wish its way back into the early middle ages, when life was good for the clergy, everyone knew their place, and none of the doubts introduced by the Renaissance had yet reared their head, let alone the utterly corrosive skepticism of modernity. Indeed, they have something of a bone to pick with the eleventh century pre-scholastic Duns Scotus, [ed. note- a correspondent points out below that Scotus was 13th-14th century, and taught at the height of scholasticism] and his excessive use of reason! No community will be conceivable outside the church, and while the church will be perfectly humble and humanistic, somehow nothing could be done or authorized without its sanction.

What is the Grandeur of reason, in their eyes? Well to quote Irwin, "What brings this reductionism to pass, it is claimed by both [pope] Benedict and Radical Orthodoxy, is the ‘self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable’." The grandeur of reason turns out to be its extension and broadening into faith- thus giving blind faith the name "reason" just because, well, reason has a nice ring to it in this modern age, doesn't it? Apparently the outright proclamation of faith, pure and simple, is unappetizing for theologians who call themselves "thinkers", so their answer is to slap the sticker of reason on whatever they happen to hold as faith, and hope no one notices.

The self-applied moniker of "Radical" is not RO's only claim to chic, for they are self-avowedly postmodernist as well. Whatever claims to deconstruct modernism and reach beyond the horrors of penetrating rational thought is their friend, and postmodernism is certainly that, since in most understandings it attacks the very capability of humans to understand anything, as per Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault, to the point that their own writings demonstrate what they set out to prove. It is a fellow obscurantism with which the RO theists feel very much at home. All the same, they appear blind to how postmodernism is even more thoroughly critical of the "logocentrism" and other universal narratives that RO wishes to shelter from thought than it is of the residual certainties of modernism.

For that is the point of RO, isn't it? To proclaim, propagate, and enforce an orthodoxy (kerygmatically, as they would say) without skepticism, quarter or second thought. That is why they yearningly look up to the Catholic church, which stands as such a monolith of unappealable, unapologetic, infallible orthodoxy in a sea of doubt and skepticism, even as it quietly steers its ship with the times, claiming to be best friends with the Muslims and Jews after all, casting off limbo with a press release, settling pederasty case after case as quietly as it can, and otherwise reluctantly trimming its course to the critiques of enlightened reason and morality. And the ruby slippers, dresses, and hats- out of this world!

de Maistre would be deeply pleased by the continued appeal of ultra-conservative thought. His battle goes on and on, one golden age replaced by another in the rear-view mirror, and those who have authority based on nothing other than superstition and tradition deathly afraid that the winds of reason will lift up their skirts and blow them away.

Incidental links:

• Mullahs and the postmodernists.
• Fascinating and revolting tale of a postmodernist taking it to the limit.
• The Sokal hoax, uncovering postmodern pretensions and obscurantism.
• A theist puzzles over RO.
• A correspondent provides an excellent primer on RO.