Education in a Postfactual World - Patrick M. Whitehead

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wasn’t always ignored though. Indeed, modern science—that practice to which we have all piously pledged our scholastic allegiance—is indebted to philosophy. Science is incapable of transforming its own foundations. This transformation must come from without. Philosophy was responsible for the modern scientific revolution, and in 1934 this was still recognized.

      Take meteorology as an example. In the medieval era, of what did meteorology consist? Remember that in medieval Europe, only a handful of people were allowed to ask such questions. Indeed, only a select few could read and write. Such education was indistinguishable from theological convention. There are many instances of rainfall in the Bible. Conveniently, there is even a theme that is common to each of them: God is responsible for rain. So here’s the medieval meteorological puzzle; see how you do: It is raining. Why might it be raining? and what might you do about it?

      Entire communities gathered behind the learned folks for their understanding of the cause behind the rain: God is responsible. The meaning that the rain (or lack thereof) might have for the people: we have been bad/good and have been cursed/blessed. You can also imagine how such an understanding of meteorology might influence the behavior of the communities’ members: now they might spend an extra hour praying each day; now they might make an additional sacrifice each week; now they might cut out certain other punishable behaviors; and so on.

      Present day meteorology has benefited from a number of scientific discoveries. Each of them seem arbitrary or meaningless in their own right, but taken together and with an understanding of how they fit together, they give us a deep understanding of the relationship between atmospheric composition, pressure systems, temperature, air flow, and fluid dynamics.

      How do we get from theological interpretations of reality to scientific ones? How do we get from medieval to modern? The answer is metaphysics. Metaphysics supplies the ways by which we may come to know the universe. In the medieval period in Europe, the metaphysical principle was simple: everything is God. My obnoxious neighbor, seasonal depression, periwinkle, cumulonimbus clouds, and pinecones—they’re all God. How do we understand them better, change them, or influence them? Through God. Do you see? The medieval metaphysic is actually quite thorough. No stone is left unturned. By understanding God, we understand everything (and the reverse). Moreover, nothing falls outside of this metaphysical perspective, and if it does, it is necessarily wrong because it doesn’t fit with the primary principle that everything is God.

      This changes with the modern revolution, which may be summarized in an equally simple manner: everything is not God, not one; they are just independent things! That is, the world is not made up of a bunch of manifestations of God, but of a bunch of different things: hard things, soft things, organic things, heavy things, light things, highly reactive things, docile things, and so on. How do we understand them better? By isolating each single thing and learning everything there is to know about it. How do we change them? By carefully manipulating them and recording what we find. How do we test them? By making predictions based on earlier discoveries and testing those. Eventually, after looking at everything individually and then in combination, we will know everything. This is the modern scientific ideal.

      The shift from “everything is God” to “everything can be understood by scientific fact” is a dramatic one. It changes the way the world looks. It changes the way we understand the weather, the way we educate our children, and the way we understand ourselves. Indeed, it changes everything. Auguste Comte captures this profound change in the first few pages of his 1844 work, A General View of Positivism. The positivist worldview is described at greater length in the introduction to Part III.

      The modern shift was a remarkable one, and it cannot be viewed independently from the science that was rapidly developing through it. Alfred North Whitehead has written a very cheerful volume chronicling the development of science and modernity titled Science and the Modern World.

      Philosophy allowed meteorologists to consider weather patterns as complicated combinations of things instead of as acts of God. When understood factually, the universe is understood to yield to the impressive hand of modern science. Consider a few examples from the century leading up to the eighth International Congress of Philosophy. Steam engines (1804) make the world more easily and efficiently navigable; refrigeration (1856) extends the shelf life of perishable foods; the telephone (1876) connects people who share no spatial proximity; airplanes (1903) allow humans to defy gravity. The metaphysics of modernity had not only changed the way we understand the world, it had transformed the latter in favor of humans.

      In 1924, a group of philosophers dubbed the “Vienna Circle” doubled down on this matter-of-fact metaphysics. Why not? It had already accomplished so much. Before 1924, there were two places where scientists could look in order to understand the universe: physical quantities and phenomenal qualities. Physical quantities are those attributes of things that are measurable and quantifiable: a rock’s density, volume, hardness, and so on—that is, the thingliness of things which can be known in a matter-of-fact way. Phenomenal qualities are those attributes of things that are given in my experience of them: how a rock feels in my hand, how heavy it seems, and what it means for me and from my particular perspective—that is, my experience of the rock. These qualities are not so easily summarized through matters-of-fact because environmental context, time of day, and individual differences can change how heavy a rock feels to me. The Vienna Circle decided that scientists no longer needed to bother with phenomenal qualities. So these were dropped. After all, what kinds of breakthroughs had the examination of experience led to? Philosophers of science had cast their lot with the modern revolution. Philosophy and Science could now skip, arm-in-arm, through the fields of the universe over which they were slowly gaining complete control.

      In 1934, it was time for the Congress to convene once again to review all that science—that they—had achieved. As I mentioned previously, the group had much to be proud of and much to look forward to! Indeed, nuclear physicists had been developing the ability to harness the enormous amounts of energy that held atoms together. The very structure and integrity of the smallest constituents of the universe were soon subject to the will and caprice of the scientist. What might they have to cheer about at this congress?

      Edmund Husserl was invited to give a talk on the state of philosophy for the Eighth Congress. It would be given during a session titled “The mission of philosophy in our time.” In the previous decade, the mission of philosophy had already made itself quite clear: its mission was to supply modern science with exacting methods to finish its task of knowing everything. Husserl was a mathematician who became a philosopher. If anybody understood how easy it would be to speak of the universe in the exacting terms and objective methods of science—that is, mathematics—it was Husserl. The plot actually gets a bit more complicated than this. With the rise of Nazism in Europe during that time, the Congress was nervous about where their five-star civilization was heading. They were looking for a distraction—something to remind them of all of the wonderful things their scientific outlook had brought them, and not where it was inevitably leading. The mathematician would certainly put it into impressive figures for them.

      Husserl was not granted a visa to travel, so he was unable to deliver the paper in person. His paper begins “Science is in Crisis!” We can imagine that this was not what his audience had anticipated. The paper continues,

      A crisis of our sciences as such: can we seriously speak of it? Is not this talk, heard so often these days, an exaggeration? After all, the crisis of a science indicates nothing less than that its genuine scientific character, the whole manner in which it has set its task and developed a methodology for it, has become questionable. (1970, p. 3)

      In his address, Husserl would carefully outline this thesis statement, arguing that the foundations upon which modern science had been built—the very foundations that had given us the technological marvels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—were in desperate need of review.

      * * *

      To be sure, much had happened in the last eighty years that has now challenged the nineteenth century brand of modernist metaphysics against which Husserl was arguing in 1934. Indeed, there are circles of continental philosophy and social science that now speak of modernity in the past-tense,

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