the alienation of reason: A history of positivist thought

by Leszek Kołakowski

This succinct account of positivism from Hume to the Vienna Circle, by contemporary Poland's most brilliant and provocative philosopher, is a complete survey of "positive philosophy", the term coined by Auguste Comte, which has persisted down to the present in the shorter form of "positivism".

Genres: Philosophy

221 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Distinguished Polish philosopher and historian of ideas. He is best known for his critical analysis of Marxist thought, especially his acclaimed three-volume history, Main Currents of Marxism. In his later work, Kolakowski increasingly focused on religious questions. In his 1986 Jefferson Lecture, he asserted that "We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.”

In Poland, Kołakowski is not only revered as a philosopher and historian of ideas, but also as an icon for opponents of communism. Adam Michnik has called Kołakowski "one of the most prominent creators of contemporary Polish culture".

Kołakowski died on 17 July 2009, aged 81, in Oxford, England. In his obituary, philosopher Roger Scruton said Kolakowski was a "thinker for our time" and that regarding Kolakowski's debates with intellectual opponents, "even if ... nothing remained of the subversive orthodoxies, nobody felt damaged in their ego or defeated in their life's project, by arguments which from any other source would have inspired the greatest indignation."

Reviews

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Positivism is a philosophical movement with a scientistic bent. It is best known for its austere theory of knowledge, in which all that we can legitimately know are logical truths and empirical observations. The logical truths can be derived by anyone with pencil and paper, and the empirical observations can be confirmed by anyone who cares to look. Ethical, religious, and metaphysical claims are either dismissed as nonsense or passed over in silence.

The self-presentation and animating ethos of positivists joins together a just-the-facts seriousness and a tear-it-all-down rationalism. It attracted laboratory drudges, revolutionaries with blueprints for a new society, and empiricist philosophers impatient with irresolvable speculation.

One of their heroes is the empiricist philosopher David Hume. Although he antedated the self-described positivists, he captured their spirit when he wrote, "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion."

Kolakowski's historical account of positivism begins by identifying a few of its common principles and attitudes and then looking for their earliest historical predecessors. The book proceeds roughly chronologically from ancient and medieval thinking through logical empiricism in the 1950s. In each era the emphasis is less on the internal development of ideas and more on the external ideological context they drew from and the external uses to which those ideas were put. Kolakowski has a taste for irony, and the links between religious thinkers and positivists provide him with plenty. In retrospect, these links aren't surprising as both parties had an interest in drawing a clear line between the domains of science and the church.

His account concludes with a summary argument that there are two important variants of positivism. One variant defended science as having dominion over empirical knowledge, vigorously guarding its borders against religion and politics, and along the way articulating a few valuable insights about scientific methodology. The other more radical variant of positivism Kolakowski sees as imperial and denying non-science has any legitimate claim to knowledge. Ironically, the second, radical variant tends toward a self-undermining pragmatic interpretation of truth as "whatever works," letting religion and metaphysics in through the back door; its hardcore defenders end up biologizing cognition, so that thought is something like a secretion of the brain, and capital-R "Reason" is conceived of a maladaptive cancer in the human organism.

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Below I share some interesting historical tidbits I gathered.

Nominalism, the denial of the existence of abstract objects or universals, is a characteristic idea of positivists. William of Ockham's famed razor (1300s) was an instance of severe nominalism, but medievals wielded it not to do science but mainly to cut back the tendrils of clerical control of knowledge, manners, custom, and government. This cutting back by nominalism results in the withering away of doctrines of natural religion and arguments from design. Luther's "faith alone" view is inspired by nominalism, for example.

Pragmatism is another positivist attitude or tendency. It shows up in inverted form in Francis Bacon's "knowledge is power" (1500s). This is close, but positivists would sooner put it the other way around: power is knowledge. The pragmatic attitude and nominalism offered a defense of Copernicus's heliocentrism (also 1500s): if the astronomical calculations are convenient, it doesn't matter which body revolves around the other.

The early empiricists credited mystical experiences--they are *experiences* after all!

Galileo was one of Copernicus's champions and inaugurated the phenomenalist program in science, seeing our task as not discovering concepts like "heaviness," but instead finding out how to measure and calculate how a body falls. The highly-connected Marin Mersenne (as in "Mersenne primes") was influential in the adoption of scientific phenomenalism in the same era.

A couple of nice religious ironies are worth mentioning. Mersenne was Catholic, and he used phenomenalism to defend Catholic doctrine against pantheists, astrologers, and alchemists. His thought was: their purported discoveries cannot, even in principle, tell us about the nature of things, so they should just defer to the Church on that stuff. Conversely, around the same time Christian mystics take a pragmatic stance toward doctrine: none of it is literally true of God (what could be?), but it does urge worship and reverence, and that's all we need. Ha.

If we are looking for the closest thing to a proto-positivist by this time (1600s), it has to be Pierre Gassendi. According to him, there's no reason for anyone (scientist or theologian) to engage in metaphysical disputes since the matters aren't easily settled. He wasn't knocking religion (like later positivists) but simply urging everyone to cool it. This easygoing phenomenalism was widespread among the learned. It did not urge atheism but simply recommended dogmatic indifferentism. Some core beliefs at the intersection of Christian denominations (God, Providence, immortality of the soul) were accepted, and everything else wasn't worth getting upset about.

An awkward fact is, those vibing with beginnings of positivist thinking at this time didn't produce any particularly good science. Instead, the scientific stars of the era were Descartes and Leibniz, both of whom were obsessed with settling strange-seeming metaphysical issue and demonstrating necessary truths about the world.

What comes next are two very different kinds of phenomenalism, based on two different views of our relationship to nature. Berkeley exemplified the first kind: we are spiritual beings in an alien world, and what we find there is a diversity of phenomena without any unifying explanation in substance. Condillac and other Enlightenment thinkers exemplified the second kind: we are an integral part of the world, and both we and the phenomena we observe are explicable in terms of a material substrate.

David Hume is the first thinker that positivists can claim. His project was theirs. If we are going to bring order and clarify to our knowledge, he thought, we should start by roping off as illegitimate and unknowable all those matters that lead to irresolvable disputes.

What makes positivists ambivalent about their predecessor Hume is that the matters he ruled out of bounds were not just the divine but also the self, physical substances, and even causal laws. All of these were born of reflexive habits not reason, he says, and while they may be useful they are not known to be true. The only empirical matters we can know without doubt are individual observations; inductive generalizations from these can never be certain, Hume infamously concludes.

Positivists will agree with Hume that we should do away with heated debates over irresolvable other-worldly nonsense and instead pursue coolly collaborative accumulation of this-worldly knowledge. However, they will be concerned that he has lowered the temperature so much that it chills even legitimate scientific generalization, leaving us with only sterilized individual facts.

Comte was the first to call himself a positivist. His project was a reform of all spheres of life, which included the sciences. He took a sociological view of the sciences, seeing each as evolving historically, progressing along similar tracks at different rates by meeting the needs for each "state" (ie, stage) of the human mind's development.

The three states of the human mind, according to Comte, are the *theological*, the *metaphysical*, and the *positive*. The theological state seeks answers to "why?" questions in a divinity that is like humanity itself; Pythagorean mathematics is an example. The metaphysical state still seeks answers to "why?" questions, but now inquiring into the natures of things: powers, properties, forces. The positive state brushes aside all "why?" questions and instead addresses only "how?" questions--Newton's "hypotheses non fingo" statement is illustrative.

In Comte's hierarchy of the sciences sociology is topmost. This is because true science serves society's needs, and sociology is what illuminates those needs. Comte believed positivism, with his three states model, completed the work of sociology and that social revolution would follow once it was widely understood. One consequence of that revolution would be the expulsion of metaphysics from all sciences.

Comte also detailed a Catholic-like model for a kooky positivist secular religion, complete with amusingly specific names for months and days of the week. Some churches actually were built, and Wikipedia tells me one of the cofounders of The New Republic magazine was raised and baptized in it. Comte's messianism and utopian socialism aren't aspects of thought that had much influence on later theories of science, but it does exemplify how positivist philosophies have tended from the beginning to incorporate elements of ambient ideology.

In the decade after Comte died, Claude Bernard, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer all published major works that carried the positivist spirit forward.

Bernard was an important medical scientist, not a philosopher. But he wrote about the methods used in his own laboratory investigations, and those had an affinity with Comte's theory of science, especially his rejection of ultimate "Why?" type questions that invite metaphysical answers. Bernard was also noted for being an early advocate, predating Karl Popper, of a "scientific morality" that included striving to falsify ones own theories.

Mill was an empiricist like Hume in most respects, but he pushed a bit further (overstepping, most think) and argued that even mathematical truths were empirical. Like Comte he was a social reformer who wanted to banish superstition and useless tradition; though he was more of a meliorist than the revolutionary Comte. Mill's most important contribution to positivist thought was his utilitarian ethics. Setting aside its worth as an ethical theory, utilitarianism is characteristically positivist in its anti-Romantic desire to measure all values and eliminate evil by public enlightenment.

Spencer represented another strand of positivist thinking that sought to reduce the social world to biological laws and to synthesize the sciences. The history of morality and custom were accounted for in terms of the survival of the fittest; a few principles explained the evolution of stars, the earth, life, races, castes, grammar, institutions, and the fine arts. (And Spencer thought Comte was a crank!)

In this era a number of thinkers were burdened by a contradiction between positivism's insistence on empiricism and its desire for unity in the sciences. Kowlakowski writes: "Unity in
the sources of cognition as a premise and unity in the results of cognition as a postulate--these two aspirations could not always be harmonized" (p. 98).

Around the year 1900 positivism took an interesting bio-psychological turn in the independent development of *empiriocriticism* by Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. According this theory of knowledge, we are not passively shaping our concepts and theories to reflect the contents and laws of the universe; instead Mach says, we are actively shaping them to bring them into equilibrium with our central nervous systems, minimizing the expenditure of intellectual labor in accordance with a more general principle of economy of energy. All human cognition is an organic, spontaneous response to our environment; science is not qualitatively different from everyday thinking, just a refinement of it. The entities that populate scientific theories do not have an absolute significance; they are merely humanly-useful encodings of our recurring experiences, data that is itself given in terms of humanly-perceived qualities like color, sound, extent in space, duration in time, and so on. Science does not offer a means of transcending our biological nature and tracing the truths of a neutral reality; science is better than prescientific thinking only in its being more effective at serving our human needs.

Empiricocriticism's attempt to exorcize the "metaphysical ghosts" in science by renouncing metaphysical "truth" was regarded by its critics as a giving up, a dereliction. Husserl and Bergson alleged that Mach in particular had substituted a utilitarian and technologically-oriented "knowledge" for the more important "understanding" of the world and the essence of things.

Around this time some French thinkers developed ideas independent of but similar to empiricocriticism, but they used them to critique traditional positivism. This line of thought was known as *conventionalism*, and it was associated with Henri Poincaré, Pierre Duhem, and Edouard Le Roy. The argument was that a vicious circularity undermined the pretensions of scientific theory to describe the world: theories summarize experimental facts, and facts cannot be articulated without theoretical presuppositions. The conventionalist upshot is that the resulting body of scientific theories is discreditably arbitrary, shaped by criteria like convenience or aesthetic appeal. There is no "brute fact" to be peeped through a telescope that will show Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong. Or again, the temperature read off of a thermometer depends on our believing thermic expansion is uniform, a theory that itself relies on reading a thermometer.

Positivists appreciated and incorporated some of the conventionalists' insights but also insisted their dizzyingly relativist conclusions were overstated. In particular, conceding a mutual dependence between fact and theory does not show science to be arbitrary. What it shows is that science is using an experimental give-and-take process that aspires toward (but is never guaranteed to reach) a body of theories in equilibrium with theory-informed observations.

There is a historical resonance here with earlier religious thought on positivism. Duhem thought conventionalism held the line against the encroachment of science into the religious domain, preserving a place for Catholic dogma. Le Roy, jibing with Bergsonian thought, argued that conventionalism demonstrated that science and religion were separate and equally legitimate intellectual activities: science is the schematization of discursive thought by its experimental means, and religion (a la his Catholic modernism) is the domain of the non-discursive experiences accessible by mystical contemplation, allegory, and so on.

Another school of thought with affinities to empiricocriticism was American pragmatism as developed by Charles Sander Pierce, William James, and John Dewey. Pierce and James differed significantly, despite what James thought, in their understanding of the relationship between truth and practical effectiveness.

Practical testability was for the scientistic Pierce the dividing line between meaningful and meaningless statements. For him the differing Protestant and Catholic interpretations of transubstantiation were a paradigm case of meaninglessness.

For James by contrast, the practical effectiveness of believing a statement was identical with its being true. James was more consistent than adherents of empiricocriticism in his radical biologism: thought is like something secreted from the brain, as insulin from the liver, and we evaluate these secretions the same way: we ask, Is this useful or harmful to the organism? So religious conviction is *not* ruled out. This aspect of Jamesian pragmatism construes "the true" as a subset "the good." James recommended its application by individuals, resulting in something embarrassingly like a Success Mindset program.

John Dewey turned this attitude in a more social direction, evaluating our social and political institutions according to their social utility. As a result Dewey, unlike James, was able to condemn religion as false because he saw it as socially harmful.

The radical biologism branch of positivism that began with Mach and Avenarius and ended with James was sawn off in the next decades.

Positivism returned to its scientistic roots in the 1920s with its last major phase, known as logical empiricism. It's early center was a seminar run by Moritz Schlick that came to be called the Vienna Circle. Rudolph Carnap and Karl Popper were associated. Other thinkers associated with logical empiricism were Hans Reichenbach, Richard von Mises, M. Dubislav, and the early Wittgenstein.

The logical empiricists worked on developing criteria for exhaustively partitioning all meaningful statements into tautologies and statements of fact. As usual for a positivist program, it was down on metaphysics. Logical empiricism was distinct in a few regards: casting philosophy in a reduced role as a "metascience," tasked with the logical analysis of scientific language; searching fruitlessly for basic statements of fact; working out some competing criteria for the meaningfulness of scientific statements (a method of verification or falsification, and probabilistic variants); and attempting to reduce all other sciences to physics.

Kolakowski characterizes the logical empiricists as combining a technocratic attitude, a social democratic politics, and a utopian faith that scientistic rationalism could spread tolerance and deter fanaticism.

[Ethan Rogers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Positivism, as Kolakowski understands this word, refers to a philosophical position that seeks to define the scope of what can count as a legitimate scientific idea on empirical and nominalist grounds. Such a tendency has been widely influential in the modern world, but, as Kolakowski shows, its meaning varies widely with the cultures in which it appears. Some proponents of positivism seek to deny any consideration of ideas that fall outside the scope of experimental science. But others, having denied that the notion of truth is relevant to such ideas, and having observed that the very notion of truth is equally "metaphysical" and incapable of experimental verification, conclude that ideas should be chosen based on their usefulness rather than their truth. Thus, the positive project has been used to justify and protect such systems as Roman Catholicism, just as much as it has been used to attack them.

Kolakowski's conclusion reveals deep (and it seems to me justified) disquiet about the implications of this project. In Kolakowski's opinion, it has resulted in the "alienation" of reason. Either reason, the faculty for determining truth independently from utility, is a simple error and a sign of an intellectual perversion of the human species. Or it is, as it were, a second soul in human nature that is utterly impractical and is actually hostile to the soul of utilitarian science represented by the pragmatists.

Although I may not agree with the severity of Kolakowski's concluding dilemma, I must admit that this is a much-needed history of one of the most important movements of modern thought. Anyone who wants to make sense of modern science in its connection with philosophy should be familiar with the subjects covered in this book.