ENLIGHTENMENT AND SELF-RELIANCE
We now come back to our chief question, “Can religion complement science as enlightenment?” with the attempt to demarcate enlightenment in an improved fashion. What, then, is enlightenment? What prescription do we make when we advocate enlightenment? Enlightenment is, first and foremost, being self-reliant as opposed to being guided, blindly obedient, and servile.
Is commitment independence of mind, or is it servitude to a principle? Is the committed person more or less self-reliant? Can we answer this question without being empirical, or, if we must be empirical, without mixing science with metaphysics?A. Traditionally, enlightenment was viewed as independence and as freedom, as opposed to voluntary servitude, as the refusal to be led by the nose - essentially, as self-reliance. The self-reliant person, the enlightened person, consults his own judgment and taste, or, if need be, opens his own judgment or taste to criticism; he will not simply take it
from the Vatican or Moscow. He may take it, but not simply take it; that is, if and when he does take it, he will have a reason, he will find it acceptable.
Old-fashioned rationalists are ready with an arsenal full of the weapons of psychoanalysis and of socioanalysis and of political analysis. They will sneer ta the Catholic (Communist) who accepts the judgment of the Vatican (Kremlin) only after consideration. They will call such considerations rationalizations, ratiocinations, self-deceptions, pseudorationality, pseudo-intellectualism, fake self-reliance, mere gloss and varnish of rationality on old and defunct irrationality. It is not unusual to find such people compared to a dog on a leash who divines the direction his master is heading for and keeps ahead of the master in that direction. These people are, says the old-fashioned rationalist, the most useful arm of the Vatican (Kremlin) for the purpose of deceiving the half-sophisticated and the half-dissatisfied.
There are such people. But here we are talking of the true avant- garde, of a small portion of the self-declared avant-garde, which is for the Vatican (Kremlin) much headache and many a sleepless night; and which is for the rationalists a living refutation of the equation of the committed-obedient with the slavish-guided. We should ignore the slavish-guided and their ratiocinations and discuss the committed who claim to be self-reliant in the sense that they claim responsibility for their own commitment.
The new positivists are thus a serious faction. Though the Establishment may wish to dismiss it as too small and too intellectual, time and again this turns out to be not so easy. Such an inner strenght rightly becomes influential and does deserve close study.
B. The religious person who claims that in his very commitment he is self-reliant has, above all, to explain his allegiance to one religious establishment among many competing ones. Affiliation entails some sort of a package deal, of course, which includes some less desirable aspects of any given set; and so the religious who claim self-reliance have to explain not only their allegiance, but also their affiliation to a given sect, their readiness to take the rough with the smooth.
No; they will declare affiliation to be a practical matter, subject to empirical study. If they can do more to reform the sect by a struggle from without, they say, they would leave their sect even if this would take them to Hell. I do not know how seriously this terrible boast is made, but I have heard it made frequently. On second thought, perhaps the boast is not so serious after all: Where is the Hell referred to by the party boasting readiness to land there for the sake of the common welfare?
The answer depends not on affiliation - which in this stage of the discussion is subject to some superior pragmatic criteria - but on allegiance: how much of the official doctrine of the sect does the self-reliant religious person really endorse? We do not know.
He may be committed to one doctrine really and to a somewhat different doctrine demonstratively - as loyalty prevents broadcasting one’s criticism of the doctrine of one’s sect. So it is hard to rely on empirical evidence and so the debate must close here, or we may venture an a priori reconstruction instead.First, consider the believer who accepts the metaphysical doctrine of his sect about the nature of God and his world, about nature and morality; and then the positivist who has no faith, no metaphysics, only a moral sense and a sense of ritual (aesthetic and/or social).
Commitment, say those who claim to be self-reliant believers, is the necessary conclusion to all discourse on self-reliance and on rationality. Justifying one’s own view by one’s own arguments makes one hop from one defense to the defense of that defense, from one criterion to the criterion which leads to its choice, and so on ad infinitium. This is the well-known critique of classical rationalism from infinite regress. One takes one’s fate in one’s own hands, says the modern postrationalist, and makes a decision which prevents this: One commits oneself to a standard and acts in the light of the standard one has chosen oneself. This is the only possible road to true self-reliance.
C. Here we come back to the old theme of disappointment: The religious avant-garde come to religion from the classical view of science as rational; in the sense of justified; in the sense of its resting firmly on final evidence by a final criterion. Sir Karl Popper has treated the irrationality of this “despair of reason” in chapter 24 of his well-known work, The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper suggests that the minimal standard of rationality should be openness to criticism, and that the commitment, necessitated by the breakdown of the classical overoptimistic view, should be minimized into the minimal faith in reason, to wit, the faith in the fruitfulness of criticism. Popper calls the classical view uncritical rationalism, and the one he proposes in its stead, critical rationalism.
A similar, though much more detailed, and epistemologically more sophisticated, view was developed by Bartley in his Retreat to Commitment (1962) which, though a few years old, is not yet the bestseller it deserves to be. Bartley centers on the tu quoque argument. The irrationalist says to the rationalist - you too are committed to some dogma. And Bartley answers, no; whatever view of mine you criticize effectively I shall reject - even my view of enlightenment as the fruit of critical debate; if you, too, are willing to accept criticism of your commitment, it may thereby cease to be an irrational commitment, it may cease to be a commitment at all, and merely become a tentative opinion. This is how I read Bartley.
It is important both for Popper and for Bartley to distinguish between the standards of science and the standards of rationality, and to argue that the latter support the former. Popper, Bartley, and others, have tried to develop this point; I shall only briefly state it here in two parts.3
The first part is that criticism may be of diverse kinds; in empirical science criticism is ideally a new experiment which criticizes a good theory. The second part tells us what is a good theory. It tells us, first, that rational action is directed toward diverse ends, even that enlightenment can be constituted of diverse aims; and that, second, the end of science is comprehension of the world, so that a good scientific theory - which is what we wish to characterize - is that which explains much. And so, empirical science concerns a very special kind of enlightenment, namely, comprehension of the empirical world. The aim of science is the search for new theories which explain empirical facts and for newer empirical facts to criticize these theories. Enlightenment, however, may be of diverse kinds, aimed at diverse ends, criticized in diverse manners, with the proper correlations between the intended aims and the construed criticisms.
So much for the Popperian or neo-Popperian view.
For my part, I prefer a new variant of the classical idea of self-reliance. Classically, a self-reliant person accepts an idea on its own merits as he understands it with his own mind. Classically, and subsequently to the previous claim, a self-reliant person accepts a view after considering its proof satisfactory. This, we saw, leads either to infinite regress or to commitment! Alternatively, a self-reliant person has forever to cope not so much with proof and acceptance as with quest, trials, criticism, rejection, modification, new quest, and so on, as long as life permits. Subsequently, justification cannot rest on proof or knowledge, and likewise - when these fail - justification cannot rest on commitment; suffice it if justification be given by showing that certain criteria lead to the conclusion that such and such a theory is the best available. Thus, whereas the classical justification is that Newton’s mechanics was demonstrably true, the new justification of the fact that Newton’s mechanics was endorsed at the time is that at the time it was the best available explanation of the then-known phenomena, and one which remained, then, impervious to criticism. This, of course, may lead to doubting the criteria; but we may claim that thus far the criteria, too, are the best available; that when they have serious competitors we may well reject them too, as, indeed, I think we should.Self-reliance is the reliance on one’s own judgment, on one’s own criteria, etc. Now, in judging quantum theory, Einstein and Heisenberg had the same criteria and reached the same conclusions. Yet Einstein, but not Heisenberg, rejected quantum theory out of a metaphysical commitment. Commitment enters science very forcefully: He who is committed to causal metaphysics conducts one research program, he who is committed to chance metaphysics conducts quite a different research program.4 Hence, if we wish to avoid a retreat to commitment, we had better attempt various commitments. Admittedly, life is short, and too many possible commitments, then, have to be ignored as not very promising - of course, with no proper justification! We must go back, I fear, to the philosophers of commitment and consult them on such matters.
X.