Some Heresies in the Unfolding of Modern Thought: Passages from Toulmin’s COSMOPOLIS
I’ve recently read a book by the very recently deceased philosopher, Stephen Toulmin, entitled COSMOPOLIS: THE HIDDEN AGENDA OF MODERNITY.
In large measure, the book is a critique of a form of “modernity” that emerged in the 17th century, particularly with the thought of Descartes, and that led into and through Newtonian physics. This form of modernity was fixated on the idea that CERTAINTY was necessary for knowledge, and that therefore knowledge should unfold as “rationally” as, say, Euclidean geometry.
Although I have some reservations about the book, I was glad to read it and am glad to recommend it.
Here is a passage from pp. 123-4 I thought would be of interest here. It deals with just one piece of the “scaffolding of Modernity”:
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“[A]round 1700, this framework left no room to speculate about any deep-seated historical changes in the order of nature. God had apparently created the world a few thousand years earlier, and it had presumably had the same structure throughout this time; so it was unreasonable to look for any significant geological changes in so limited a time. When speculatively minded 18th-century travelers in the Massif Central of France remarked that the mountains had silhoutettes like those of active volcanoes today, and asked if they might be the remains of extinct volcanoes, most French readers were incredulous. (If the Mont Dore had erupted during the millennia since the Creation, this surely would have been noted and remembered.) Issues in the history of Nature were thus embraced with difficulty, and could readily be addressed only away from the centers of scientific orthodoxy. [On this point, see the final paragraph below-- ABS.]
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“The argument about the legitimacy of a scientific history of Nature was only aggravated, not initiated, by the appearance of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. As a student at the University of Edinburgh in 1819, Darwin had been exposed at first hand to the controversy about William Lawrence’s Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man, which was denied copyright protection on the ground that a ‘materialist’ view of human physiology was blasphemous; and this memory stayed with him for the rest of his life. There he learned to keep his head down and do his work alone. A family friend of the Darwins was afflicted by aphasia: he was unable to understand in words the message that it was ‘time for dinner,’ though he could recognize it visually, if shown a watch or a clock. In his private reflections, Darwin explored the possibility that such a cognitive deficit was a result of brain injury following, for example, a stroke, but he knew better than to put his speculations into print, and confined them to his personal Notebooks, from which they were published only in the 1970s.
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“Another field dismissed from the new world view was psychology; and, once again, it was no accident that psychological issues were first discussed with real seriousness in Germany and Scotland. Scotland had lost its national autonomy de facto in the 1600s, when King James VI of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth I and moved his base to London, and de jure in 1707, on the passage of the Act of Union that established Great Britain. Germany, too, was a patchwork of larger and smaller units without a tradition of cohesion and centralization, until the 19th century dominance of Prussia and the politics of Bismarck launched it, late in the day, on the road to nationhood. By escaping political centralization, both Germany and Scotland also escaped the cultural pressures that national centralization created; and this ensured greater freedom for scientists and public alike, to pursue speculations of a kind frowned on elsewhere as being ‘offensive’ to respectable opinion.”
March 1st, 2010 at 7:12 am
The important thing in ‘our’ explorations of the seemingly apparent (or even obvious) is to keep foremost in mind our heritage also of demonstrable and demonstrated TRUTH of our own human connections to “THE SOURCE’
and so then, we look carefully to see how new (to us, ie, the current understandings) observations fit or illuminate rather than contradict.
It is important to remember that the God of our fathers is always known to be ETERNAL with whom a thousand years is but a day and a day as a thousand years. Indeed, what is ‘time’ when we think of ‘eternity’?!
A sense of certainty (or structure) is necessary for an reasonably orderly society and absolutely for successful enterprise, PERIOD !
So, it is foolish to fly in the face of an ongoing social order and system of ‘understanding’ (or belief) with a contradictory interpretation of supposed ‘new’ light.
The key expression here is ‘ contradictory interpretation’.
That, I observe, is the greatest error of so called ‘science’ which I see as somewhat divorced from the whole of reality.
A-men
March 1st, 2010 at 4:28 pm
It is true that there are many people who are incapable of functioning amid uncertainty. We simply shouldn’t place such persons in positions of significant responsibility or authority.
March 1st, 2010 at 4:47 pm
The problem of course is, Jim Z., that the kinds of people who are “incapable of operating amid uncertainty” are also highly represented among those who are willing to sacrifice anything for power. (The link is, the power is another way –besides a posture of certainty– about the anxiety these people experience if they don’t feel that they feel in CONTROL.)
So it isn’t so easy to keep them away from “positions of significant responsibility,” since they’re among the most motivated and most adept at accruing power.
March 2nd, 2010 at 4:17 pm
I agree, Andy, and this only reinforces the importance (the seriousness) of people evaluating those “who would be king,” to borrow from Kipling, those who pretend to power in our nation. We’ve obviously done a terrible job of this of late if we enabled a GW Bush in the highest office, and a S. Palin to come perilously close to door #2.