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As feudalism made God the source and the justification of its particular social arrangements and the guarantor of their eternity, so the bourgeois/capitalist order that dissolved and supplanted feudalism has used nature, drawing science into its ideological orbit, using science to found the new era's dominant world-view. My complaint against the concept of nature that has thus been given God's work to do is that it does not present itself honestly as a religious notion. It covers its transcendental tracks and dresses in secular clothes. The notion of nature that has been imposed on us and the notion of its laws pretend both to stand over and yet to lie within, and even to constitute, the physical, secular world. That pretence to both a transcendental and a secular status cannot be maintained for long under examination, and what is surprising is how little critical examination it has been given.
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References
1 Oxford University Press, 1982. Also in Winch, Trying to Make Sense (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar
2 For Descartes the concept of the light of nature also had a political, polemical and secularizing role. It may even have been a quite conscious parody of the notion so often appealed to by the Jesuit theologians who denounced Galileo's works—The Light of Faith.
The concept of the light of nature had a political dimension too, and an important, progressive one, as something in the possession of each individual and not mediated by the keepers of the Faith, the Church and the clergy. Descartes was thus striking a blow for that swelling individualism whose rise marked the Seventeenth Century so distinctively. The light of nature was being proposed as standing to the natural order as Luther's inner light or conscience stood to the moral. One can hardly overestimate its importance, despite the fun I have made of it above in Descartes' bludgeoning use. It had a central role in the development of the new world-view that was growing out of the struggle of the new social and production relations mediated by the market to replace the feudal forms of social organization. That new world-view, appropriate to market mediated relations, had individualism at its base, democracy as its natural political form and science as the key tool available to the individual in trying to understand the world.
3 Though some cosmologists seem to think that the universe could create itself ex nihilo by ‘borrowing from the future’ so-to-speak. This seems to me to be a desperate attempt to turn science into a free-standing religion.
4 In The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat (London: Picador).
5 What is this but to tell us not to take these doubts seriously? Are we then to take seriously a philosophy raised on this base?
I have before now (‘Scepticism About Scepticism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Vol. LI 1977.) commented on the oddity of, and the assumptions underlying, this notion of Descartes' of ‘making use of’ our doubts in this way or that. What are we to make of this notion? I can make perfectly good sense of the idea of ‘making use of’ someone else's doubts, as Iago used Othello's and worked on them, but not of ‘making use of’ my own doubts. I may refrain from, or hold myself back from acting in some way my doubt moves me. But that is something quite different. The impulse may be resisted, and that is where the choice comes in. But when the impulse is not resisted it is both inappropriate and gratuitous to describe that as ‘using’ my doubt, or my fear, my admiration or my hunger (or whatever), and Descartes should not be allowed to get away with it.
It would be nearly as bad to say that my doubt ‘used’ me. Though one might have at least some idea what someone might be getting at in talking in this misleading and totally inappropriate way. Perhaps he just meant that I was out of control, irrationally paralysed by the doubt, or whatever.
It is here that the famous split between thought and actidn, between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ is introduced. It turns out to be a presupposition of the Cartesian method, not a consequence of it.
6 ‘Lusus Naturae’ in Wittgenstein: Attention to Particulars: Essays in honour of Rush Rhees Phillips, D. Z. and Winch, Peter, (eds) (London: Macmillan, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar And ‘Naturalism and Preternatural Change’ in Value and Understanding: Essays for Peter Winch (London: Routledge, 1990).Google Scholar As Holland points out, these expressions have (and had originally) a perfectly ordinary, and I should say, unproblematic sense to describe, for example, those ‘sports’ that the plant-breeder seizes on and those sideshow freaks that may make the bumpkin's jaw drop but do not challenge science as a whole nor limit the run of its writ.
7 In The Open Society and Its Enemies. This sort of view would lead to a ridiculous regress. If we took nature to be really some kind of internal entity distinguishable (almost like an organ) from the thing itself in a way that allowed us to talk of a causal relation, to say that this internal entity caused the thing to behave somehow, then we would be able to ask questions about that entity's nature and just how it was that the entity caused its host to behave in this rather than that way. And so on.
In his 1908 Gifford Lectures, the biologist Hans Driesch did a similar job on Aristotle's concept entelechy turning it into a phantom organ, a director of operations in the reconstruction of the unfortunate polyps he cut into bits or turned inside out, something that would explain their remarkable ability to regenerate.
8 ‘Creation’ implies an agent, but Descartes needs an agent (not of this world, like his parents) to bring him into existence out of nothing. The disappearance into nothing he can manage himself without help, so that ‘destruction’, the normal opposite of ‘creation’ would not be appropriate here.
9 ‘Scepticism About Scepticism’ PAS Supp. Vol. LI, 1977.Google Scholar
10 Trying to Make Sense, 105.Google Scholar
11 In Science and Hypothesis (New York: Dover Publications, 1952).Google Scholar (Readers of this edition should be warned that in the penultimate paragraph of the essay there is a serious, even ridiculous mistranslation or misprint which transposes ‘start’ and ‘end’, making a nonsense of Poincaré's argument. The sentence should read
‘We see that we start with an experiment that is very particular and as a matter of fact very crude, and we end with a perfectly general law, perfectly precise, the truth of which we regard as absolute.’)
12 Proposed concretely, that is, as a basis for testable theory building, not just speculatively as with Democritus and his Seventeenth Century followers whose atoms had hooks and sharp points and all sorts of marvellous properties that could not be brought to the test. The Seventeenth Century atomists had only the dogma of Transubstantiation in its militant Counter-Reformation formulation by the Council of Trent to contend with. Not quite the same thing as an empirical test.