Found Sci (2012) 17:5–7 DOI 10.1007/s10699-010-9213-8 COMMENTARY

Friends of Wisdom? Gertrudis Van de Vijver

Published online: 23 December 2010 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This commentary addresses the question of the meaning of critique in relation to objectivism or dogmatism. Inspired by Kant’s critical philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, it defines the first in terms of conditionality, the second in terms of oppositionality. It works out an application on the basis of Salthe’s (Found Sci 15 4(6):357–367, 2010a) paper on development and evolution, where competition is criticized in oppositional, more than in conditional terms. Keywords

Objectivity · Objectivism · Constitution · Kant · Part-whole

In “What is philosophy?”, Deleuze and Guattari (1996) argue that the space of Western philosophy opened by the Greeks is intrinsically a space of competition: the “friends” of wisdom are in the first place peers competing for the highest wisdom, for truth, for pure thinking. As such, they can no longer wish to equal the figure of the Wise. On the contrary, they must agree to bury precisely him, turning their focal attention and rivalry to “die Sache”, the thing or the object. Modern science is a continuation of the Greek project: it operates within the very same space of competition between peers and attempts to victoriously constitute stable and reliable, objective, knowledge. However, since Modernity the quest for objectivity has more and more turned into a form of objectivism or dogmatism, according to which science has the exclusive rights to describe and explain the things as they are in themselves, and in which the question of the constitution of objectivity largely disappears out of sight.1 In “Development (and Evolution) of the Universe” Salthe is critical about the idea of competition. His focus is in particular on evolutionary theory, that narrows down the idea Fairlamb (2010) did also comment on Salthe (2010a) paper. See Salthe (2010b) for replies. 1 Husserl (1970) has described this process and its potentially devastating consequences in The Crisis of the European Sciences.

G. Van de Vijver (B) Centre for Critical Philosophy, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] URL: www.criticalphilosophy.ugent.be

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of change in Nature to differential persistence, “where it plays out as competition between genotypes for representation in future generations of a population” (p. 2). Salthe seems to agree with Deleuze and Guattari in underlining that differential persistence has been elaborately constructed as competition in our Western thinking. He even speaks of “our Western cultural ideology” (p. 2) in this regard. To him, however, competition is only a small part of the big picture of change in Nature; it needs nuance and supplementation. His proposal calls for a more “phenomenological” acknowledgment of the World, an acknowledgment of that which is experienced and phenomenal, beyond that which can be objectified into a Nature that functions as an operating manual for the World. His developmental viewpoint is inspired, so he states, by Schelling. We won’t challenge the value and necessity of critical accounts of objectivist discourses and of the role competition plays in them. But what is it to be critical? More precisely, what can it mean to be critical with regard to objectivism or dogmatism? Kant (1997) was the first philosopher in Modernity to have introduced the idea of Critique. He pointed out in his Critique of Pure Reason that the objectivity of scientific knowledge is not the result of an object in itself in some sense out there in nature and as such dictating appropriate ways of apprehension. Objectivity is on the contrary the result of a very specific questioning activity that gives rise to objects that have a validity only within the range of that activity. If universality and necessity are to be related to scientific knowledge it is because the questioning subject succeeded in constituting the answering potentiality of nature as a point of invariance, of exactness, of necessity and universality. The contingent perspective of the questioner is the possibility of any objectivity: it is from within that contingent perspective that objectivity witnesses of the possibility of a stabilized, non-contingent, necessary relation between questions and answers. In this regard, there seems to be something paradoxical about Stan Salthe’s critical discourse. At first sight, it is a critique on the idea of competition. But at closer inspection, there are a number of elements that suggest that Salthe’s thinking is operating within the very competitive space it criticizes. For instance, his proposal to distinguish Nature from the World, the one being an operating manual, symbolic and mediated, the other referring to the phenomenal, to what is not ‘known’ symbolically, indicates a kind of dualism between, roughly, language and biology, between the symbolic order and the body. What remains unquestioned here is the possibility or the conditionality of this opposition. Wouldn’t a critical questioning of that aspect be crucial in an understanding of change in Nature, certainly when a complex viewpoint is envisaged? Because indeed, if there is complexity, involving local interactions at various levels and with various elements, as well as historicity and vagueness (pp. 5–6), to assume that there are two different “orders of being” such as Nature and World is certainly not evident. In his effort to criticize the one-sidedness of evolutionary theory—that we identify here as objectivism—what Salthe seems to do, is to defend the opposite viewpoint—subjectivism. This can remind us of Schelling’s reaction to Kant: romanticism as a response to a position (wrongly) perceived as objectivism. What is it then, to be critical? As Kant has shown, critique is not a matter of oppositionality, it is a matter of conditionality. Not A versus −A, but the possibility of that distinction is the heart of the matter. Kant’s viewpoint is different from the nostalgic, romantic, dream of getting out of, or supplementing, the very space within which all thinking can take place. The main reason is that the sensitively and conceptually engaged subject is an intrinsic part, co-constitutive, of that thinking space. No way to get out of this human condition and fly high up to the godly heaven, neither so in living praxis, nor in symbolic discourse. Salthe’s statement “(…) now that we are becoming buried in complexity, we may need any tool we can find” (p. 5) suggests that there was a time of less complexity, a human condition in

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which things could be ruled more simply and more adequately. His idea that “Nothing totally new can appear after the initial expansion of the primal singularity. And so all emergent features that appear later at higher integrative levels would have been implicit during earlier developmental stages” (p. 7, italics original) goes in the same direction. From which point of view is it possible to say that something is totally new? Isn’t it the case that the distinction between new and not-new is only possible from within the primal singularity? Salthe seems to underscore here the idea that the constraint is the possibility—it is from within the expansion of the primal singularity that things have to be grasped—but meanwhile, it is not clear in what kind of historicity his own discourse is to be situated. Current configurations are only gradual evolutionary diminishments, specifications, individualisations. Salthe states that this is a mode of finality, which I agree with. But he seems to refrain from questioning his own perspective in making this statement, and to that extent, we might wonder whether he is not faithful to the classical scientific operation of excluding teleology from the scientific practice. It is true that the ideology of Western science has put much effort in excluding final cause. It is part of its objectivist development, excluding the perspective of constitution of objective knowledge, to focus solely on the object as it is in itself. In objectivism, the questioning activity, and thus the teleological implementation of subjectivity and objectivity, can no longer have a place, except then for heuristic or pragmatic purposes, where, as Salthe correctly notes, “human intentionality trumps other possible entrainments” (7). Teleology might then be excluded from science, it does return in a most uncritical form, namely in the unquestioned subjective capacity to know, to be directed upon, the capacity of intentionality, entirely and exclusively concentrated in the human, conscious, subject. I am in favour of putting the question of final cause back on the scientific agenda, but I doubt that Aristotle will do the job, as the configuration of objectivism, in dichotomous opposition to subjectivity, was not at all present at his time, neither epistemologically, nor ontologically. I believe that philosophers like Kant and Husserl are more adequate to deal with that topic, in as far as they attempt to give a place to the idea of teleology as “a place amidst other places”, as well as in their focus on the need to take up, as philosophers, as scientists—“friends of wisdom”—, the present, experienced and lived, moment as part of a more encompassing whole. That movement of “taking up” is what introduces human beings into history, as part of a history of a certain kind. It is what constitutes history as a history. And isn’t it there, in that singularised history, that new singularities can emerge?

References Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1996). What is philosophy (p. 256). New York Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press. Fairlamb, H. (2010). Must complex systems theory be materialistic? Foundations of Science. doi:10.1007/ s10699-010-9212-9. arXiv:0912.5508v2. Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology—An introduction to phenomenological philosophy (David Carr, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kant, I. (1997 [1781–1787]). Critique of pure reason (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salthe, S. N. (2010a). Development (and evolution) of the Universe. Foundations of Science 15, 4(6), 357–367. doi:10.1007/s10699-010-9181-z. arXiv:0912.5508v2. Salthe, S. N. (2010b). Materialism: Replies to comments from readers. Foundations of Science. doi:10.1007/s10699-010-9214-7. arXiv:0912.5508v2.

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