This is a synopsis of the last chapter of our study on "Descartes's World". A much lengthier version of this study will be posted as soon as possible. Cheers.
Science and Technology as
the Nihilist Ideology of Capitalist Enterprise.
The almost
ubiquitous approach to the study and analysis of philosophy and science is to
see them as the spontaneous offspring of the human faculty of thought and of experimentation.
What we are seeking to do here instead is to present both disciplines as
products of determinate historical social relations of production. Broadly, our
aim is to show that whilst philosophizing is a faculty co-generate with human
action, there is no such human aptitude or faculty as “science and technology”,
but that these must rather be deciphered as “scientific enterprises” or praxes
that play a highly functional role in the development of capitalism as a system
of mass production. More specifically, here we are trying to interpret
Cartesian idealism and the reaction to it in the British empiricism of Bacon
and Hobbes as byproducts and emblematic of the struggle between the old feudal theocratic
social order that prevailed in the Middle Ages and the commercial and
industrial capitalism that began to emerge forcefully in northern Europe between
the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.
In this
historical-materialist perspective, Cartesianism represents the first valiant
attempt by philosophy to accommodate and integrate the incipient nihilism of
bourgeois scientific ideology within the boundaries of the essentialism embedded and ingrained in Classical philosophy,
Scholastic theology and Renaissance humanism. (Later attempts principally
centre on and spring out of German Classical Idealism from Kant to Cassirer.)
For this reason, it may be useful to call Cartesianism, with Antonio Negri, “the
reasonable ideology”: - ideology, because it constitutes a rationalization of industrial
capitalist exploitation in the guise of scientific research and technological
progress; and “reasonable”, because it seeks to identify this ideology as, and
to reconcile it with, the practical application of Substantive Reason as
distinct from Instrumental Reason.
The transparent
aim of this Cartesian reasonable ideology
was to seek to preserve the millennial and millenary values of Judaeo-Christian
and Hellenistic theology and philosophy, above all the omnipotence and
benevolence of the Divinity and the centrality of humanity in the created
universe, whilst at the same time integrating and absorbing into these values
the novel and revolutionary productive techniques of the nascent capitalist
industry. Descartes’s goal proved to be unachievable because he burdened Instrumental
Reason in its formal components (logic and the understanding) with the task of
reconciling the Freedom of human thought with the ultimate ethical values of Substantive
Reason and with establishing the existence of Reason itself as an entelechy or
Substance (in line with Platonic realism).
It ought to be obvious
that any formal Reason whose evaluative criteria are deemed to be inconfutable
and irrefutable (or “irresistible”, with Arendt) is immediately incompatible
and contradictory with the very “freedom” that the human faculty of thought, of
awareness or conscience, entails! Worse still, Reason as a formal faculty is obviously unable to confirm the existence of ontological entities or
substances and is also incapable of identifying and prescribing any Values or
Substantive Reason which, instead, are the exclusive province of human agency
and reflection. Simply stated, Instrumental Reason (known as “the intellect” or
“the understanding” or “logico-mathematics”) cannot dictate ultimate values to Substantive Reason because
these values are the exclusive province of the latter. (This is the basis of
Max Weber’s genial distinction between Wert-
and Zweck-Rationalitat [Goal- and
Purpose-rationality].) Yet this impossible task – the determination by means of
logical analysis (notably the syllogism and apodosis) of ultimate ethical
entities (God, the soul) and their implicit values - is precisely what
Descartes attempted to do! The consequent dualism between res cogitans and res extensa,
Subject and Object, Reason and Nature, Soul and Body, or Mind and Matter, was
the unfortunate by-product of this Cartesian attempt to integrate bourgeois ideology
and capitalist industry within the dictates of Christian values and the
imperative aim of preserving the primacy of the Divinity and the centrality of
human beings in the universe.
We have seen that
a first response to Descartes came from Francis Bacon. Essentially, Bacon’s
“novum organum” is the first major animadversion against the mainstays of the
feudal-theocratic absolutist social order, that is, the Classical (Platonic and
Aristotelian) and Scholastic insistence on the centrality of God and
consequently of the human soul in the cosmic order – and therefore also of logic
and rhetoric – the Ratio - as the
quintessential tools of human scientific
advancement – where “science”, episteme or gnosis, is understood as the adaequatio rei et intellectus (the congruence
of intellect and thing). British empiricism is really the combined fruit of a
pre-existing sceptic Pyrrhonistic tradition in European thought (see R. Popkin,
The History of Scepticism) with what
will soon become an incipient nihilism that replaces the theo- and
anthropocentrism of Christianity and the Renaissance with the nihilism of what
Nietzsche called “an undefinable X”. (Cf. F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies, where science is rightly seen as an attempt to pinpoint
a cosmic order that, in reality, is filled “…with no forms and no concepts, and
likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us”.)
Yet again, as we saw in our study on Bacon,
the substitution of Cartesian deductive rationalism with the inductive
empiricism of Bacon’s “new organon” method is itself guilty of this dual
fallacy – namely, first, that no amount of induction (or, in Descartes’s case,
of deduction) can ever lead to a “scientific method” or to “laws of nature”; and
second, that any such “laws”, if taken to be “objective”, would be inconsistent
with our awareness of them! Viewed “objectively”, the cosmos has no “laws” (cf.
Nietzsche, “Viewed morally, the world is false!”): - it is what it is. The
claimed “legality” of scientific observations is itself the ultimate ineluctable
proof of their conventionality, of their
being mere rules of thumb aimed at
rationalizing human interests. There is no “scientific truth” outside of what
suits human interests, be they “good” or “evil”. (This is the reality behind
Nietzsche’s acute observation in The
Genealogy of Morals that the object of all scientific experimentation is…the
human body!)
Bacon’s claim that
human beings are subject to the “laws of nature” clashes with the
insurmountable objection that if indeed such “laws of nature” existed, they
would have to correspond (a) with scientific knowledge or evidence that is immediately evident, and (b) with the immediate
perception by human senses of the “objective reality” to which these “laws”
presumably referred. Yet this “immediate certainty” is precisely what is
lacking in any and all scientific evidence and indeed is quite impossible for
humans to attain! Hobbes’s “annihilation thesis” illustrates quite
devastatingly the untenability of Bacon’s naïve empiricism – not just because,
if human ideas are taken to be separable from the “external world”, then ideas
survive the annihilation of this external world, and are therefore
conventional, ideal; but also and above all else because the hypothetical
annihilation of the external world must entail the annihilation of all human
ideas as well!
The vacuum left by
scientific empiricism as the handmaiden of industrial capitalism will be filled
by the mechanistic materialism of Thomas Hobbes which remains to this day the
ideological hard core of the bourgeoisie and of the society of capital. Hobbes’s
philosophy, however, is in this regard almost a carbon copy of Bacon’s and is
subject to the same objections. Already in the Elements, Hobbes wavers between the twin untenable positions of
scientific laws that are the products of “logical” deductions and laws that are
instead inductive conclusions based on empirical observations. Equally,
Hobbes’s mechanicist materialism whereby every event in the universe is the causal
product of the interaction between bodies and motion clashes with the
insurmountable objection that such objective laws of mechanical causation, if
real, could never be accessible to human conscious
knowledge – because human awareness would itself
be the unconscious effect of causal
interaction between bodies and motion!
Hobbes’s attempt
to present a unified materialist philosophy starting with physics and the body
(De Corpore) and proceeding to
politics (De Cive) comes unstuck on
this fundamental fallacy – namely, the impossibility of a purely “formal”
reason or understanding to comprehend deductively, or be conscious inductively of,
what are supposedly “objective” laws. A science that purports to understand the
universe mechanistically is in direct
contradiction with the very mechanical formal reason or understanding that
presumes to formulate the scientific laws themselves!
Yet it is
precisely here that Hobbes’s novel worldview comes into its own – and what
provides the very nexus between his physics and politics that many critics have
claimed is inconsistent or absurd. If humans are confined to their imperfect
perceptions of the life-world, then it is inevitable and undeniable that any
“laws of nature” that we may identify amount to nothing more than “conventions”
on how to proceed in the world, on how to attain particular goals that are set
by human beings themselves! The so-called “laws of nature” then amount to
nothing more than a “convention”, an agreement among humans about what practical
goals to achieve and on how to achieve them. Scientific laws become mere
agreements on interacting with the human and natural environment – with our
life-world – in a manner consistent with the goals that humans have set for
themselves. Indeed, this is true even to the extent that humans transform and “stage-manage”
their life-world so as to render it amenable to exploration and exploitation
(“scientific experimentation”) through the metaphorical “laws” that they think
they can identify as “objective laws of nature” corresponding to a mythical
“objective reality”.
The key to
understanding Hobbes’s entire philosophy – ranging from his ontology to
epistemology and finally to his political theory – lies exclusively in this
exquisite Hobbesian realization – one that is stunningly revolutionary for his
time and that will be enucleated with even greater cold-blooded ruthlessness by
Nietzsche two centuries later. Of course, if we took Hobbes’s professed materialist
mechanicism at face value, then his philosophical system, which extends from atomic
structures to political theory, would turn out to be hopelessly inconsistent.
But in reality Hobbes’s philosophy is a genial mixture of convention and hypothesis
that on one hand allows for the conventionality of social reality, which
encompasses scientific enterprise, whilst on the other it latches this “free”
conventionality around a “coercive” hypothesis founded on the ineradicable
conflict of human self-interests. The “freedom” of convention is tied
indissolubly to the “free-dom” of conflict, of the universal Eris. Thus, the conventions that arise from human
epistemology – how we theorize our perception of the world “scientifically” –
hinge and are pinned on the central fundamental hypothesis that human beings must preserve their own lives in a
world in which humans are equal in their ability to threaten one another.
It is fair to assert that Hobbes’s worldview
starts from his politics and percolates down to his physics rather than the
other way around! That is the crucial reason why Hobbes abandoned his initial
project to publish the Elements sequentially beginning with the De Corpore and
ending with the De Cive – hence, from physics to politics – and preferred
instead to begin with the politics based on “experience” (Thucydidean
historicism) and end with the physics based on logic (Euclidean axiology). (Recall
that Hobbes translated both Euclid’s Elements
[same title as his opus magnum] and Thucydides’s Peloponnesian Wars.) Hobbes’s worldview hinges on the absolute paramountcy
of the self-interest hypothesis whose
only logical requirement to avoid annihilation in the physical as in the
political sphere is convention. The
rigid Euclidean-geometric hypothesis is needed for the discursive convention to
have any social force at all. Hobbes’s philosophical system as laid out in the Elements is contradictory only if we
begin from his physics and proceed to his politics – because then the initial
premise is that of atomistic materialism (as in Democritus) from which the
politics do not follow logically. But if instead we start from his political
theory – universal conflict -, then the uncanny and diabolical consistency of
Hobbesian nihilism emerges in its full crushing immediacy to permeate and
percolate from the dira necessitas of
the politics to the conventionality of the scientific experimentation and
theorization on which physics is based.
The
paradox implicit in Hobbes’s theorization of the life-world is that unalloyed
self-interest is by definition incompatible with the ability (a) to reach the
consensus necessary to reach a “con-vention” (coming together of minds) between
conflicting self-interests, and (b) to allow for the rationality required for
self-interested agents to reach any consensual convention. Of course, Hobbes’s axiomatic
assumption is that self-interest is logically
subordinate to self-preservation, given that each agent is equally likely to destroy
each other agent. (We have shown elsewhere that the axiom of universal conflict
is vital to general equilibrium theory in neo-classical economics.) But once
these assumptions – (i) self-interest as (ii) the war of all against all (bellum omnium contra omnes) – are allowed
as a matter of realistic necessity (or of “experience”, as Hobbes argues in the
De Cive) then Hobbes’s initial
paradigm becomes unassailable.
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