In response to requests from multiple readers.
I have written multiple articles that critique ideologies and point out the dangers of assumptions. Several of my readers have asked me to follow up with an article about philosophers’ critiques of scientism — the assumption that science is the sole source of knowledge, establishing an ideology that places science beyond questioning.
But science is just one approach to gaining knowledge, and its exclusive and elevated status has been questioned by a number of philosophers. In this two-part article, I will share a sampling of some philosophers’ critiques of scientism—edited excerpts from my book, How We Are and How We Got Here: A Practical History of Western Philosophy. These philosophers had in common the goal to rein in the hubris of scientism and keep the quest for knowledge within the boundaries of open-minded critical inquiry.
Montaigne — “What Do I Know?”
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) is most famous for his book, Essais, publishing multiple editions beginning in 1580. The significance of The Essays for philosophy is Montaigne’s new approach to the questions of knowledge, truth, and human nature and his new style of first-person perspective writing. The French word, essais, means “attempt,” and to Montaigne, his book was an attempt at understanding, a personal confession of what he thought. Montaigne’s Essais was the first blossoming of subjectivity, demonstrating an individual’s attempt to understand the world. The literary style of the Essais is the origin of our word “essay,” meaning a literary composition of moderate length on a particular subject.
Montaigne’s Essais helped move natural philosophy (what science was called back then) from a formulaic exposition of past writings to a free process of forming judgments. He accused Scholasticism (still dominating intellectual activity in his time) of pedantry, its philosophers suffering from their thoughts being stifled by their excessive knowledge of archaic dogmas. Montaigne was one of the first to view philosophy as being connected to and a part of our daily life, rather than as an isolated academic pursuit. He did not offer a systematic method of conducting natural philosophy. He instead wanted to put it into what he saw as its proper role. Practiced with restraint, he said, philosophy is a useful exercise, but in excess, it leads to eccentricity and unsociability. The rational theorizing of the Scholastics will not tell us about human life, Montagne believed.
What will tell us about life, Montaigne said, is experiencing the world. He saw philosophy as learning how to live. We never stop learning, Montaigne said, and the most important learning comes from asking questions: “What does this mean?” “Is it true?” and so on. Montaigne’s most important question is, “What do I know?” He practiced a positive skepticism, in that he rejected theory and dogmatic certainty and instead continually questioned his own thinking to move toward greater understanding.
Reason alone cannot decide questions; one must practice the skill of making judgments that identify the best choices among many options. Our use of reason should be to ask questions, of ourselves and of the world, consider alternative opinions, and exercise natural judgment to find the best answers for use in our lives. Montaigne’s skepticism was not a bitter or dour one but a celebration of open-minded thinking and use of the human mind.
Montaigne did not target his philosophical approach directly on the matters of science, but his rethinking of human reasoning and its limitations and potentials was influential in the development of science. His Essais inspired many thinkers, particularly in its expressive approach to life’s questions. His method of using skepticism to work toward greater judgment and knowledge directly inspired philosophers of the new scientific method.
Jane Addams — People-centered Science
Jane Addams (1860–1935) made significant contributions to sociology and social philosophy, but sexism has reduced her role in history to simply being a radical activist. That’s not to suggest that Addams’s activism was at all small. In 1889, she founded Hull House in a slum near downtown Chicago. It was a settlement house, a concept she learned about while visiting London, and it was one approach to progressive social reform designed to help poor, marginalized people. Like the British settlement houses, Addams’s Hull House provided educational, recreational, and supportive social services to the neighborhood. More importantly, for Addams, activities at the house addressed the social and environmental factors connected with poverty. Hull House became a renowned working laboratory for progressive social reforms, a working class version of a salon in which people from all areas and circumstances could come and interact, including at regular meetings of the Hull House philosophy group.
As a scholar, Addams was active in the philosophical school of pragmatism and was a close friend and associate of John Dewey. Although they did not officially publish any philosophical works together, Dewey credited Addams with influencing his philosophy, and he assigned Addams’s books in his courses at the University of Chicago. Addams taught at the Extension Division of the University of Chicago for a decade, having refused offers to join the regular faculty. (She consistently refused to align herself officially with any company or organization.) The university faculty supported awarding Addams an honorary doctorate in 1916, but the administration vetoed the decision. A different administration did confer the degree in 1931. Addams also befriended and influenced sociologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and influenced his work on the power of symbolism in society. Although sadly largely ignored today, Addams positively affected American philosophy, sociology, and education.
In her philosophical work, Addams focused on the interchanges between theory and practice and between activities and perspectives. The idea that we learn from experience goes back to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, but Addams took the idea to a deeper level. People from different walks of life will have different experiences and will develop different perspectives on the world. From this, Addams developed an early version of what is now known as “standpoint theory.” Different people have different standpoints. Theorizing, no matter how rational, cannot tell us what people perceive and who they are; the practice of asking them about their experiences and activities and listening to their answers will tell us much more.
Up to the late 1800s, a serious blindness in philosophy, and scholarship in general, had been that the perspectives of only wealthy, privileged people (almost all men) were considered. Addams understood that philosophy and sociology, much less progressive social activism, needed to include the perspectives and experiences of underprivileged people. She grew up in a rural area in an upper-middle class family. She understood that although she now worked with and lived among marginalized people in an underprivileged urban neighborhood, she could never understand their lives and perspectives as fully and intimately as they did. She therefore sought not universal ethical theories but firsthand accounts of the lived experiences of marginalized people. For Addams, theory had to follow experience.
Addams demonstrated this methodology in her published articles. For example, her 1896 study of women domestic laborers, “A Belated Industry,” took testimonies from women who had lived at or had been involved with projects conducted from Hull House. She attempted, she wrote in the study, to tell the story of the plight of domestic workers “from the point of view of those women who are working in households for wages” (A Belated Industry” 536). This is standard methodology in social sciences today, but Addams was at the genesis of American sociology and was instrumental in instituting the practice of gathering information from personal interviews.
Henri Bergson Explains Process versus Positivism
French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941) was, for several decades, probably the most famous philosopher in the world. He is now tragically largely forgotten in English-speaking lands because his work is incorrectly dismissed as mere speculation because it is not reducible to the now-dominant methods of analytic philosophy. Bergson saw knowledge as an ongoing process of development, but he rejected the mechanistic causality of Hegel’s historicism. Bergson developed a highly original approach to philosophy that took into account elements of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and pragmatism.
Bergson proposes that in the quest for understanding the world, there are two methods of gaining knowledge of an object. There is analysis, which seeks to know an object absolutely, and there is intuition, which seeks to understand an object relatively.
Since Aristotle, philosophy had seen everything in the universe as discrete substances that maintain their identity even while undergoing change. When you look back at the philosophers we’ve covered so far, you can see how much of their work was dealing with the problems created by that assumption that everything is a substance — how objects are, how they are similar yet different, how they change, and how we can have knowledge about them.
Analysis is the method that comes from this assumption of discrete substances. It is the detached and disinterested method of separating the object from its surroundings, conceptually breaking down an object into parts, interpreting the divided parts, and reconstituting a view of the object after analysis. The method of analysis is how science and positivist philosophy think empirical knowledge of the world is obtained, and it is the habitual way that Western people have learned to think.
But, Bergson says, analysis depends on symbols that represent parts of the objects and then uses these symbols to mentally reconstruct a picture of the object. This is similar to Locke’s epistemology in which discrete simple ideas combine into complex ideas, but this is the approach that Bergson wants us to stop using. Symbols, words, and language are, he said, barriers between us and reality.
Bergson says that the true empiricism is intuition. Bergson uses “intuition” differently than we’ve seen previously. Philosophers from Descartes to Russell used “intuition” to describe an immediate knowing. Bergson used “intuition” as a sympathetic entering into what is observed, rather than going around it from the outside. By “sympathetic,” Bergson does not mean an emotion but operating through affinity and interdependence, as in a sympathetic vibration of two strings. Intuition is entering into experience to be a part of what is observed. Intuition is an integral experience, a series of acts within what Bergson calls “duration,” (explained soon) and thus a method of experience.
One of the examples Bergson gives of the difference between the method of analysis and the method of intuition is experiencing a city. Looking at photographs of a city, even a collection taken from every viewpoint and perspective, you can’t reconstruct what it is to be in the city. Only by entering the city and walking through it can you grasp what it is to be there. His other example is reading a commentary on a poem by Homer. No matter how many commentaries you read, you can never grasp the value of experiencing the poem’s original language. Analysis can give us photographs and commentary, but it can’t give us the experience of the things themselves. Analysis has its own value and provides us with some understanding, but knowing the things themselves requires the sympathetic entering into of intuition. Bergson says that by using intuition we can seize reality from within.
Duration — Bergson’s Philosophy of Time
Intuition begins with entering into the “duration.” Duration is Bergson’s conception of time and consciousness that he proposed to help correct the problems with the method of analysis. Bergson’s philosophy of time is an ingenious and highly innovative exploration of a difficult topic that few philosophers address.
Bergson identifies two ways that we can think about time. One he calls “scientific time” or “clock time.” This is time as conceived of by the method of analysis, discussed earlier. Science attempts to measure time with precision, but science’s concept of time is actually an abstraction based on the concept of space. Clock time disaggregates the flow of time into arbitrary atomized units — hours, minutes, seconds.
The other time is “duration” or “real time.” This is time as we experience and live it and is time as it exists in nature. Bergson realized that reality is not static substances but a continuous flow of activity. The method of analysis approaches our experiences in terms of quantitative multiplicity — separating discrete sense data from each other within a homogeneous space. We saw Hume separate sense impressions in that way, which is why with his billiard ball example he claimed there was no reason to believe in causation. Kant tried to solve this problem with the Categories of Understanding. Bergson views our experiences in terms of qualitative multiplicity — we organize conscious states into a whole; within the whole, our experiences permeate each other and become richer.
The concept of qualitative multiplicity attempts to bridge the gap between our experiences and reality, seeing both as fluid, continuous, and contextual activities. Duration is understanding both our experience and the world as qualitative multiplicity. Everything is constantly changing, and fundamental to the flow of reality is time. We experience time, Bergson realized, but not with our senses or by reason, but through an inner sense. Duration is the nature of time both as it is and as it is experienced by people.
Bergson’s first book on duration was Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). As the subtitle indicates, Bergson is studying the contents of consciousness, similar to Husserl’s project of phenomenology. Bergson accepted the reality of free will and said that other philosophers saw free will as a philosophical problem only because of their detached and disinterested method of analysis. Kant had to locate free will outside of time and space because he confused all time with immobile space that is subject to causality. Bergson differentiated time and space, removing time from mechanistic spatial causality and placing it within duration. Free will is located within duration.
So, what is duration? Our language isn’t fully adequate to define it, but Bergson gives some analogies. Bergson visualizes duration as being like two spools. The first spool is constantly unrolling as time flows forward, and the second spool is rolling up, continually collecting memories left by the other spool. The second spool is consciousness, symbolizing how we take up duration and gather experiences in it. Each moment in consciousness is different from all previous moments because the present is added onto the memories of the past. Over the first spool we have no control — time unwinds inexorably before us. The second spool, the past, we can control, to an extent, within our memory. Bergson was the first philosopher since Augustine who truly appreciated the wonder of our memory. We can rewind our spool of memory, playing it back in various ways and, most importantly for Bergson, not in the sequential order in which current time unwinds but in the order of meaning. We recollect and order our past not in clock time but in duration — arraying and living through our memories according to the qualitative importance we place on them. Our subjective and intentional experience and reexperience show that our consciousness is not a process of the material world.
Bergson’s next analogy is how we experience time like we experience the color orange, which also illustrates how duration is connected with intuition. If we make the effort to enter into the experience of orange, we would sense ourselves between red and yellow. We would perceive a variety of shades of orange between red and yellow. Further effort opens us up to perceiving lighter and darker shades of each color and the whole spectrum of colors and saturation. Similarly, we can be introspective and enter into our own duration. When we do, we can sense ourselves among many other durations. Making an effort, we can expand our intuition to come into contact with a community of durations of different shades and saturations. We can follow durations upwardly toward spirit and downwardly toward inert matter — indeed, in a manner similar to that of Plotinus.
Reality is fluid, not a sequence of discrete units, so, for Bergson, duration is not a perception of images as an empiricist would understand it but is instead the entering into a flow. We can, to use a contemporary analogy, “dial up or down” our experience of time. We do this unconsciously, as indicated in the old saying, “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Also, you know how time can drag when you have to wait for an unpleasant experience to finish, like listening to a dull professor lecture. Not a philosophy lecture, of course; philosophy is riveting fun! (Just seeing if you’re still paying attention.) Time is a flowing, indivisible continuum. Clock time is an artificial abstraction created by humans. We can and do divide time into distinct, measurable units — hours, minutes, seconds — and these divisions are useful, but an hour does not in itself exist. We have to stuff ourselves into these artificial units of clock time, and Bergson adds that these units of clock time become harmful to us when we mistake them for reality.
Experiencing Process
When we don’t treat objects as substances and don’t treat time as a sequence of discrete units, we open ourselves to experience how reality truly is. When we understand that process, spontaneity, and creativity are fundamental to reality, we can understand order and stability in objects as patterns within the flux of the dynamic flow of reality.
This reality is mobility. Not things made, but things in the making, not self-maintaining states but only changing states, exist. Rest is never more than apparent, or, rather, relative. The consciousness we have of our own self in its continual flux introduces us to the interior of a reality, on the model of which we must represent other realities. All reality, therefore, is tendency. (An Introduction to Metaphysics 65)
Bergson’s idea that reality is mobility and tendency, a process, is incredibly influential in continental philosophy and all of the sciences and humanities that take inspiration from it. Bergson’s process philosophy finds resonance in quantum physics and chaos theory, among other branches of the hard sciences. Like other critiques of scientism, Bergson is not rejecting science, he is rejecting the closed-minded reductionism within the ideology of scientism.
Through intuition and duration, we see that we aren’t dealing with substances. The question, “What will the weather be tomorrow?” is not inquiring about a substance. A friendship, a vacation, a university, an ecosystem, and public opinion are all concepts we can think about and use meaningfully in sentences, but they aren’t substances. Such concepts are expressions of collections of more primary activities and events. Rain is not a quality of a substance called weather; rain happens in the course of weather as a result of the interplay of various forces and objects. Weather is a dynamic process, ever changing as one set of events gives way to a new set of events. There are recurring patterns (it rains more in the autumn than in the summer, perhaps) but not permanent qualities.
The core of Bergson’s philosophy is that we will better understand objects when we consider them as dynamic processes, like weather, rather than as static substances. You might think that a university has a static geographical location, but is a university a set of GPS coordinates? Would it cease to be if it moved location? Or if it changed its name? What universities are, and most of what we experience and think about, are entities not reducible to substances. A friendship does not have a static character, no matter how strong it is; it has its ups and downs, its ebbs and flows. Public opinion is ever changing within shifting demographics. An ecosystem is a community of living organisms interacting and flowing as a system with no exact boundaries. Even inanimate objects have identity within a set of relations and events.
With reality being a dynamic process of change, we do well to make the effort to put aside the habitual method of analysis and enter into the process of reality, allowing our mind’s categories to be shaped by reality. Entering into the duration, we can expand our awareness to experience the reality that each duration that comes into existence must be related to others.
Next, Part 2 will discuss some other philosophers’ critiques of scientism after Henri Bergson’s philosophy.