Epistemology? It's all about commitment
4 Jul 2000
[1005w]
Credo : I believe
ut : in order that
intelligam : I may understand
... roughly.
This was a slogan of St Anselm, an early Norman Archbishop of Canterbury. I think it is very much the ticket for our troubled times. You see, we have postmodernism. This is like one of those great diseases where you actually feel wonderful and light-headed, but you can't do anything. How to understand postmodernism? Well, as a distinguished academic once told me, 'the way to understand it is to concentrate on the "post" bit, rather than the "modern" bit'. Postmodernism is really post-everything-ism. Modernism was just the last ism to come along before we got bored with them all.
Here's how it happened. First, we all believed in God and did what the king told us. Then about the middle of the millenium scientists started dropping apples on their heads and looking through telescopes. After a while they found that if you think about everything according to a particular system, which we call the scientific method, you can work out how to go faster bigger better louder.
This caught on. Then some bright sparks (a Mr Descartes of France being much to blame) had the idea you could use this new way of thinking to figure out about all kinds of completely different questions, like 'why are we here?', 'what should I do now?' and so on.
What they didn't realise was that the end goal of technology was one we all pretty much agreed on - the bridge falls down = BAD, the bridge stays up = GOOD. But the end goals of moral enquiry turned out to be not nearly so consensual. And, indeed, by digging down through more and more layers of unspoken presuppositions, and bringing them out into the light, the scientific method broke down what consensus there was.
So every generation had a scientific way of working out what was good and what was bad, and they wrote a long book saying how you could work it all out from first principles. And then after a few years some other trouble maker writes another book saying how these first principles aren't any good and you have to start from the REAL first principles which are... and so on and so on.
Then at the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche pointed out that there WERE no first principles. All this dancing around with moral systems was just a way to get what you want by bamboozling the yokels. And he was right: the kind of first principles you have in science are not the kind of first principles you have in moral inquiry.
Now we are all Nietzsche's grandchildren. Postmodernism is the jokey whimsical descendant of Nietzsche's attack on scientifc morality.
Well, that's all fine and dandy, but now we have a situation where nobody agrees about anything and we all go off and live in our self-selecting special interest communities and nothing binds us together and there's no reason not to behave badly (after all, what do I mean by 'badly' - it's just bad from MY POINT OF VIEW).
And yet, you can't fault Nietzsche for putting the boot into the smug certainties of the scientific moralists. It's just, he used the wrong boot. This is where Anselm comes in.
As I suggested, the rot started with M Descartes (1596 - 1650) who was the first to try and put our beliefs about life, the universe and everything, on a scientific footing. Interestingly enough, he too had a nifty Latin slogan, which makes for an interesting comparison with Anselm.
Cogito ergo sum.
Cogito : I think
ergo : therefore
sum : I am
What he means is, 'do I exist? - why yes, for if I did not exist, then I should not be able to wonder whether or not I did'. From this point he goes on to prove a whole lot of other stuff that (you will not be surprised to learn) he already believed.
Now, just as with postmodernism the interesting bit was 'post', I think the interesting point of difference with Anselm is in the little word in the middle. Descartes says, in a noble and neutral way 'ergo'; whereas Anselm is not afraid to 'fess up to what he wants by saying 'ut'. Descartes wants to believe that you can sit in the spectator's gallery and work out how things fit together without being involved: 'I think... THEREFORE (inevitably, and not because of anybody's will) I am'.
Anselm knows that we are all on the stage, that what we do makes a difference to how things are, that our point of view matters, that we all submit to one kind of authority or another so that there is no way to avoid choice. 'I believe... IN ORDER THAT (because I am brave enough to step out in this direction rather than another) I shall understand'.
My point is, that Nietzsche was right to criticise Descartes and all those other smug geezers. He was right to say they couldn't get scientific understanding of right and wrong. But he was wrong to despair as a result. Indeed, by despairing, he showed that he had bought into their project. Because their project wasn't just about a way to get scientific understanding of morality. It was above all the idea that scientific morality is the kind of morality we want.
And it isn't. Because it doesn't make any sense at all. Morality involves choice; but if it's all proven beyond scientific doubt then there is no choice. In the moral arena there is no spectator's gallery: we all have to come down onto the stage and decide which side we're on. We have to be ut people, not ergo people.
Well, blah blah. I'm sorry: this is a long and complicated subject and I don't understand it well, and this is too small a space to write about it. But I think these ideas are true and valuable, and I hope that, at least, you find the questions important enough to think about.
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JJE wrote on 10 Jun 2007
This sounds great and makes a lot of sense, up until the point where you claim: "if it's all proven beyond scientific doubt"
One of the most important thing to understand about the nature of science is that it can;t "prove" ANYTHING beyond all doubt. It can only change our degree of certainty regarding the validity, or lack thereof, of various claims about what is going on in the universe.
So, we still can have morality and choice and such coexist with a modern view of science. And boot the postmodernists out the door where they try to console themselves about the cold by arguing that "cold" is just relative to one's arbitrary viewpoint.
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Well expressed! But without some moral consensus or 'Golden rule' to guide us intuitively (i.e. first principle), there'd be a weird moral anarchy - though not necessarily a violent and ruthless kind like Hobbes envisioned in his 'State of nature'. Kant says this Golden rule is essentially "Treat others as you want to be treated" and this also applies to moral judgements in general. Finally, the post-postmodernists have played with a rather more pragmatic and real-world - on the stage so to speak - moral system called Virue Ethics which is worth researching. Thanks for your article.
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