§116. Finally

At the beginning I said I would use historical and comparative arguments to elucidate the value of experience and arrive at some idea of what is living and dead in philosophical empiricism.

Empiricism is the idea that the knowledge most worth knowing is learned from experience rather than derived by ratiocination, intellectual intuition, or ancestral wisdom. After the seventeenth century, empiricisms add the qualification that the learning be methodical, specifically experimental. One does not have to perform an experiment to be experienced, but it was Bacon's tireless message that if we organize experience in the form of experiments, it becomes a more effective organon for inquiry. He was heeded, and intro­duced what remains the vital, futural moment of empiricism. There is more to this “experience” than sensations, impressions, or self-authenticating awareness; above all there is memory, especially the memory of trials and surprises.

Sense perception is not in itself any kind of knowledge; under experi­mental discipline, though, the senses become instruments of an inquiry that typically terminates in knowledge, even knowledge of the imperceptible. Bacon was eloquent on this point. “Although the senses often deceive or de­sert human beings, nevertheless, they can meet the requirements of know­ledge when they are assisted by assiduous activity; and this may happen not so much by applying instruments (although they contribute to this end), as through that kind of experiment which is able to produce objects that are subtler than the ones that can be grasped by the senses.”⁶

Experimental empiricism is problematic rather than theorematic, and has no use for a concept of ultimate evidence. Experiments neither employ nor discover anything ultimate, and the best ones only discover new problems.

Maybe that is why the Higgs boson finding was disappointing. From a the­orematic point of view it should have been sublime, though from a problem­atic perspective the vast experiment confirmed what most scientists expected and had accommodated in their thought, so little changed. Maybe that is also why Feynman performed his unauthorized stunt—because he wanted to land that surprise and start up change. A memo to the chair of the commission might be neglected, as was his dissenting opinion in the commission's final re­port (consigned to an appendix), but everybody remembers the experiment. It was a surprise from which his audience learned, not “the truth,” but rather the urgency of redirecting the inquiry along hitherto disregarded lines.

Radical empiricism does not restrict philosophy to the experimentally verifiable; instead, it is the philosophy of experiment and experience unre­stricted, and is in this respect consistent with what Nietzsche called froliche Wissenschaft. The values of experimentation are not limited to labora­tory routines, nor is experimentation a single rule or method, there being experiments of many kinds: existential experiments; experiments of dis­covery; experimental observations; experiments in experimentation; con­trolled and uncontrolled, problematic experiments. The best experiments are interesting, bold, beautiful, fecund, surprising, but demonstrate no truth, and truth (actually being true) is not a problematic value, an experimental value, or an empirical value.

Radical empiricism returns experience to ontology and the philosophy of nature.

The comparison with traditional China accentuates a distinction of European empiricism in nearly all its phases and expressions (especially before the radical empiricists), which is to attribute the value of experience to the advance of knowledge. European empiricisms tend (with prominent exceptions such as Epicurus and Hume) to fix on problems of knowledge, in­consistently limiting experience to its value for such problems.

Nietzsche saw this bias birthing in Socrates, whom he associates with the conviction that “thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being,” and is capable “not only of knowing being but even of correcting it.” The truth will be known, the knowledge will be effective, and thereby human virtue made complete. Nietzsche recalls the Phaedo death­scene. “The image of the dying Socrates, as the human being whom know­ledge and reason have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission—namely, to make existence seem comprehensible and thus justified.” He names Socrates as “the prototype of the theoretical optimist who, with his faith that the na­ture of things can be fathomed, ascribes to knowledge and insight the power of a panacea.” Later, Nietzsche generalizes.

The Chinese also noticed the exaggerated esteem for knowledge in their first experience with ambassadors of European civilization, the Jesuits whom they allowed to settle in their capitol in 1582. In 1631 a Chinese translation appeared of Aristotle’s Categories, entitled Ming li tan, by the Chinese liter­atus Li Zhizao in collaboration with the Jesuit Francisco Furtado. It is not known why Li undertook this work or why Categories was selected for trans­lation. What he wants to explain in his preface is this unexpected thing the foreigners call philosophy. “In the West the study which loves knowledge is called ‘philosophy’: it is actually the general name of all studies which inves­tigate principles. '1 he translation of the name is ‘addiction to knowledge’ (zhi zhi shi)” '1 he English translation, “addiction,” is not gratuitous, the Chinese term shi distinctly connoting the intemperate, addicted, and compulsive.

The struggle to describe what Aristotle accomplished reduces Li to stammering. Aristotle has “distinguished true and false, and banished all deluded error,” clearing the way for a “return to the road of unique correct­ness: it is called luo ri jia (logica)” He has no word for “logic,” and resorts to a meaningless phonetic transliteration, printing the Latin word beside in pa­renthesis. A scholar who studied Li’s work thinks at least part of the strange­ness Chinese readers would feel about the Ming li tan compared to native philosophical texts is the idea of correct, explicit reasoning as the way to truth. Chinese history teems with self-proclaimed experts keening to advise the emperor and rectify the world, but China had never had “knowledge­addicts threatening to undermine conventional beliefs and mores just be­cause their inquiries are inconclusive and open-ended.”⁹

Writing about Hume, Deleuze says that knowledge “is not the most im­portant thing for empiricism, but only the means to some practical activity.” '1 hat is true of Hume, for sure, and Epicurus, but not true of empiricism gen­erally, not true of Democritus, Gassendi, Condillac, or Carnap, for instance, or even Nietzsche, for whom the best sort of knowing is practical activity, with experience, especially experimental experience, valued not for the con­summation of knowledge, but for a gay science that begins unknowingly baffled and culminates in self-overcoming.

Empiricism is anything but dogmatic. Nothing in philosophy has been as protean or insistently radical, not just changing but driving its own change, with no empiricists happy with empiricism as they found it. At the beginning of this tradition, medical empiricists were unhappy with the compromised empiricism of their colleagues. Later, Galen was unhappy with these med­ical empiricists. 'then Bacon was unhappy with Galen, Locke unhappy with Bacon, and Condillac unhappy with Locke. James was unhappy with Hume, Bergson unhappy with Spencer, Dewey unhappy with Mill, Quine unhappy with Carnap, and Deleuze unhappy with what Kant made of Hume. Every empiricist dreams of a superior empiricism.

Empiricism has also been a history of polemics, beginning with a polemic among physicians that spilled into philosophy and eventually made “empir­icist” another word for a skeptic. Democritus and Epicurus drew the prob­lematic experience of medical empiricism into natural philosophy, setting followers in polemic with the theorematic rationalism of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Later, the neo-Epicurean empiricism of Bacon, Gassendi, and Newton met the same rationalistic opposition, combined with the new threat of theological opprobrium. Empiricism went into eclipse with tran­scendental and absolute idealism, but came roaring back when those bubbles burst, first in the scientific philosophy movement, which savaged philos­ophy for its pseudo-problems, then in radical empiricism, which shook off six hundred years of nominalism to return empiricism from epistemology to ontology.

This experience has made empiricism the most fertile alternative to ra­tionalism in European tradition. History's empiricisms repeat and renew the criticism of the reified intellect, the deified logos, the elitist disparagement of technics, and ascetic disdain for sense and affect. Empiricism began as an antidote to rationalism, and that remains its vocation as long as rationalism remains an insidious tendency of our thought.