AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS UNITY. AN IMPRESSION
Let us examine impressionistically a few intellectual cliches and their transformations - remembering that in the present case, at least, cliches are not necessarily of the vulgar.
17th- and 18th-century philosophy entertained an optimistic mood that was largely2 shared by 19th-century philosophy, though it hardly agrees with out present apprehensive mood. We are now as a matter of course worried about tasks which may be beyond human capacity. H. G. Wells stand on the watershed, as the author of The Shape of Things to Come, who foresaw the possibility of a return to the Middle Ages, and as the author of Joan and Peter where he puts in the mouth of God the declaration, “There isn’t a thing in the whole of this concern of mine, that man cannot control if only he chooses to control it. It’s arranged like that.... But... men... are too lazy....” It’s arranged like that, he says. Today we turn to apprehensive preEnlightenment cliches suggestive of an inflated intellect and a deflated morality; Russell echoes Rabelais’ saying “Science without conscience is damnation.” Yesterday the cliche was Spinoza’s: the rational man knows that it is the best policy to react to hatred with love; or Kant’s: the sense of respect for the law, the desire to universalize, is what makes one moral. For Kant, even love and friendship and so on, were either derivative of rationality, or peripheral to morality since, eo ipso, the problem of ethics is, how should I, as a rational being, act in the present circumstances.How far this is from the Christian disquisitions on ethics, where love was central and all else peripheral!3
The optimistic doctrine of rationality as a doctrine of total proof - in principle of all truths - of total control - in principle of all circumstances - and of total propriety - in principle of all conduct - is not easier but harder to grasp than the old problematic idea of an omniscient, omnipotent omnibenevolent deity.
Yet the idea of man-God is what I am trying now to present as historically powerful, as an idea advocated by Descartes and Spinoza, by Kant and Laplace, by Comte and Marx, as the most significant regulative idea in the post-medieval period.Admittedly, this idea was seldom discussed fully and openly. Yet its pervasiveness is symbolized in the overpowering optimism of Condorcet and of Madame Roland even when persecuted by the French Revolution itself. The optimism Condorcet displayed was hardly a matter of temperament - it was a case of an ideology which overrode any temperament. A young man by the name of Berthollet, known merely because his father was a famous chemical philosopher, was so depressive that he was driven to suicide. He sealed himself off hermetically, retaining a candle, pen, and paper, and resolved to record his own observations of his dying self. His writing, incidentally, soon became illegible; as an act of faith it strikes us as remarkable, perhaps at the time it was less so.4
The optimism, then, of the idea of the unifying supremacy of reason was not in the psychological domain but in the intellectual, as was the reluctance to discuss it; indeed, both factors still persist. Even nowadays, when the idea is so much more tempered than it used to be, it is seldom clearly and lengthily discussed; it is often alluded to, but no more. We still are very ambivalent about it. In the opening paragraphs of The Identity of Man, Jacob Bronowski hits it exactly. The fundamental wish man has to be at home in the world, the intuitive assumption so-to-speak that man is a part of nature, he says, has a strong intuitive appeal and also clashes head-on with the equally strong intuition that man is unique, in a sense above inanimate matter and even above all other creation.
This ambivalence can be further illustrated by Freud’s personal attitude. The feeling man has of being part of nature he called the oceanic feeling, and this feeling plays quite a significant role in his metapsychology.
Yet in the very beginning of Civilization and its Discontents he expresses an ambivalence towards it. His ambivalence at least in part derives from his fear that there might be a kernel of truth in the idea that the oceanic feeling is associated with the need for religion. When he comes to technology he exults - but he first creates a barrier; he identifies oceanic feelings with narcissism and religious needs with a sense of helplessness, the need for mother’s womb, for father’s protection. These needs, he tells us, give rise to the religious ideas of omnipotence and omniscience. And these same ideas come impressively near to realization, he adds, in modern technology which has rendered man almost Godlike. Yet the connection between narcissism and a sense of helplessness could not escape Freud. “There may be something behind that”, he admits, “but for the present it is wrapped in obscurity.” “For the present” means when he discusses oceanic feelings; elsewhere he easily connects helplessness with narcissism. Freud usually allows for the fusion of psychological extremes, which may replace each other in a variety of mental mechanisms; and the same goes for the fusion of their symbols. Freud’s theories of all dreams, of many neuroses, and of schizophrenia, are instances. We have the axis impotenceomnipotence, and its symbols demonology-religion; we have the axis of insecurity-security or alienation-oneness, and its variety of symbols of selfhate and of narcissism. If you allow impotence, omnipotence, demonology, and religion, to mix together, you might just as well allow impotence and insecurity to mix together, especially since, according to Freud, a sense of insecurity is what gives rise to a sense of impotence. Indeed, this mixing is the core idea of Freud’s theory of (paranoid) schizophrenia (where insecurity leads to the deluded sense of omnipotence rather than of absolute security).Freud cannot tell us why a sense of impotence, in its transformation to its opposite, may lead one person to a religious vision of omnipotence and another to a technological vision of power. Nor does his doctrine enable us to tell why a sense of insecurity and alienation, in its transformation to its opposite, to the sense of security and integration, may drive one person to a mystic dissipation of his soul, through rituals of purification, into unity with the soul of nature and another person to a technological dissipation of his body, through a control panel, with a panorama of bulldozers devouring the landscape and transforming it into a human artifact.
Once we are alerted, through Freud, to the ability of insecurity or alienation to transform itself into security and oneness, we may notice this transformation occurs fairly frequently. The connection is all too obvious even from a seemingly casual example which Wittgenstein carefully analyzes in his lectures on ethics. Consider a remark, such as, “I feel so safe, as if no harm will happen to me no matter whatever else may happen.” Wittgenstein analyzes the verbal formulation of such statements, and shows that the above statement should read, “I feel so safe, as if nothing can happen which may harm me.” He does not explain why he first formulates it in the objectionable manner except to say it is common. In the light of Wittgenstein’s and Freud’s analyses we can say, it is common because it expresses - adequately - both the oceanic feeling of oneness, and insecurity or alienation. Wittgenstein himself, however, centered on the religious aspect of the matter alone.5
My stress on ambivalence here is not a digression to psychology but a running explanatory theme. I wish to explain why the idea of unity which, as I claim, is so common, is so rarely expressed and never analyzed in the cold light of reason.
Let me give an example from recent philosophy before going to the history of the treatment of the topic. In the first monograph of the Encyclopedia of Unified Science Carnap briefly formulates the thesis of the unity of science which is substantially almost identical with Bacon’s. This is a remarkable fact, particularly in view of the absence of literature on the topic - even Bacon’s presentation is all too brief. Now Carnap admits that his thesis cannot be proven, but he consoles himself by saying that at least it cannot be refuted. He adds that a precondition of the idea of unity of science is the idea of the unity of the language of science and he is thus able to conclude his discussion in a few sentences. He does not even notice that his own philosophy makes it possible to have diverse languages of science developing into a unified language as they go along.
All this is amazing. Even the slightest acquaintance with Carnap’s philosophy, or of the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, suffices to raise an alarm: ideas which cannot be proven or refuted surely sound dangerously metaphysical and hence meaningless. The alarm may turn out to be a false alarm; my point is that Carnap does not even notice it! He really wishes to take the unity of science so much for granted as to have to say about it the barest minimum.6Bacon’s conduct is almost identical. For Bacon metaphysics is evil not in itself but in its methods. The proper method is inductive. From facts we conclude inductively some laws; from the laws the more general, and hence fewer, laws - the axiomata media; from these we conclude inductively the few laws of metaphysics; and from the few laws of metaphysics we conclude, by induction again, the single law of natural theology. This natural metaphysics and natural theology are proper, as they are based on induction and thus scientific. But they belong to the future. Traditional metaphysics is bad due to its speculative methods, due to its being based not on induction but on speculation! And yet, the very idea of the unity of science just outlined is highly speculative. And Bacon freely admits this. “And therefore the speculation was excellent in Parmenides and Plato”, he says unabashed, “although but a speculation in them, that all things by scale did ascend to unity.”7
If the idea of unity had met with a single critic, surely his task would not have been hard to perform, especially since in the Western tradition of methodology the dominant school was inductive, not deductive.8 Yet there was hardly a critic around.
The deductive version of the idea of unity was more consistent - especially in the work of Spinoza; but it was even more optimistic in that version. To believe that already now we possess in essence all knowledge, and that knowledge is a sufficient basis for ethics, already makes us uncomfortably Godlike - in reality: in principle, Spinoza claims, he possesses the knowledge of the essence of all things.
In all the literature against the Cartesian apriorist school, however, this point is never taken up: the apriorism of the school was attacked, and specific scientific views - yet what it shares with Bacon’s speculations was curiously left unmentioned; on the contrary, one feels that the quarrel between inductivists and apriorists was a family quarrel just because of so much unmentioned common ground and mutual understanding.(I should like to mention that this explains a quaint historiographic fact. However Baconian the French thinkers of the Enlightenment have declared themselves, again and again certain historians of ideas cannot avoid declaring them Cartesian. Indeed, the further away from the Age of Reason we get, the harder it becomes to distinguish between Bacon and Descartes, and the latter’s private letter to Mersenne in which he declares almost full agreement with the former sounds commonplace; yet when we meet this communication immediately after the standard sophomore course in the history of philosophy from Descartes to Kant we feel numbed as though we had had intellectual shock. Incidently, Descartes does not explain his agreement with Bacon: as I have said, high pitched rationalistic optimism was seldom fully articulated.9)
II.