Philosophy as Rational Understanding of the Lebenswelt

But how has Agazzi sought to conceive philosophy? And how does he understand the precise meaning of the conceptual work peculiar to philosophical reflection?

I conceived it - recently replied Agazzi himself - as the effort to rationally understand the complex ‘world of Life’ in order to find a rationally justified solution to the ‘problem of Life.’ By the world of life I mean the totality of whatever falls within experience and sur­rounds us, namely the set of material, natural, historical, social and cultural conditions in which we are immersed and conduct our lives.

This quotation enables us to immediately attain a detailed framework of reference within which the conceptual work of philosophy (at least according to Agazzi’s approach of overt rationalist aspiration) is confronted with a highly articulated complexity of problems and open questions directly connected with life and its pragmatic problematicity.

Critical, because our philosopher relies, in the first place, on the intrinsic rea­sonableness of the solutions gradually developed and applied in different historical and theoretical situations. In other words, Agazzi sees human reason as certainly, to put it again in Kantian and Husserlian terms, a precious and irreplaceable func­tion of the critical integration of experience, but Agazzi then adds to this heuris­tic, Aristotelian function, the ability to always develop open and dynamic critical solutions, capable of finding his own strategic Archimedean point of reference pre­cisely in the reasonableness of the solutions adopted. In other words, for Agazzi critical rationality is configured as a balanced heuristic instrument for the concep­tual understanding of the complex articulation of reality. A “reasonable” heuristic instrument which, in each specific case, identifies a possible emergent solution as the most suitable and, indeed, the most “reasonable”, namely as the solution most capable of understanding the rich articulation of the real, without however ever slipping into prejudicial, rigid or abstractly dogmatic positions. For this reason the critical rationality to which Agazzi increasingly appeals is always configured, in all his works, as a patient art of knowing how to unravel problems, weaving rational arguments that always analyse the whole of reality, seeking to offer the light of rational understanding as a dynamic and plastic reason that illustrates the complex aspects (phenomena) of reality.

Metaphysical, because Agazzi does not neglect to deal also with “the point of view of the Whole”. In his philosophical argument we can in fact see that, within this specific critical perimeter of conceptual understanding, the reason which Agazzi addresses constitutes, at the same time, a peculiar practice (an argumen­tative praxis) which does not ignore the “point of view of the Whole” or of the Absolute. Precisely on this ground is then delineated the second component of this rationality, namely the explicitly metaphysical component, whose Aristotelian root, however, is critically mediated through the whole history of Western thought, without of course neglecting the specific formation of Agazzi himself at the school of Bontadini which, on this specific point, emerges very clearly (because on this point Agazzi agrees with Bontadini’s critique, 1947, 1952, 1996 of the so-called “dualistic metaphysical realism”, namely the “naturalistic assumption of the tran­scendence of thought”, introduced by Descartes which is seen as surviving even in Kant, see Agazzi 1996). In fact, as has been noted, in Agazzi the requirement of the Whole (with a capital initial, just as the word “Life” is also capitalized in his text) is one with the “Absolute” and in this same ambit significantly emerges the aspiration to a “totality of experience” that constitutes, in fact, an explicit and sys­tematic metaphysical requirement. In fact, if one bears in mind what Kant writes about the Transcendental Dialectic, in his first Critique, in which the philosopher of Konigsberg brings out just the fact that the “aspiration to the totality of the requirements for the single reality”, “opens, inevitably, to the metaphysical dimen­sion” (in the worst sense of the term, meaning the illusion of knowledge) one can perceive how on this particular point a significant divergence exists between Agazzi’s program of philosophical research and that opened up by the revolu­tionary Kantian transcendentalist breakthrough.

On the other hand, this twofold rational need, at the same time critical and met­aphysical, enables him also to avoid two opposite uncritical dogmatisms that often occurred in the history of Western thought: namely the dogmatism of scientism (which transforms science itself into an absolute and a sort of taboo, above all pos­sible criticism) and conversely the dogmatism offideism, (which is opposed in an abstract and prejudicial attitude to scientific knowledge and pursues an alleged absolute symbolic knowledge of reality).

This enables us to better understand the original epistemological approach with which Agazzi has always analysed the peculiar nature of scientific knowledge. Our philosopher, in fact, has not only always defended the precise cultural value of the scientific tradition (see Agazzi 2008a, b), but has always grasped the nature of sci­entific knowledge, highlighting both its criticality and the nature of its rigour, and its intrinsically objective scope (Agazzi 2014). In other words, for Agazzi science constitutes objective, critical and rigorous knowledge that is such precisely because it delineates, at the highest possible level (albeit always within a certain technical-cognitive patrimony historically configured) an objectivity, a criticality and a rigour which are conceptual and dynamic paradigms of reference. However, Agazzi, while recognizing the fundamental role of this threefold characterization of modern scientific knowledge, at the same time points out its insufficiency in providing a critical understanding of the very patrimony of knowledge available to us from the history of scientific thought. In other words, in his view, objectiv­ity, criticality and rigour are necessary components but certainly not sufficient to characterize the entire nature of scientific knowledge as a whole. Agazzi feels, in short, the need to supplement these characteristics with the consideration of the foundation and sense of these same kinds of scientific knowledge. Again Agazzi feels, in short, the requirement that an adequate understanding of the philosophi­cal critique of science entails, in turn, a recognition of how much lies “outside” science itself, because, in his view, value judgments themselves cannot find their adequate justification within science (for the critical analysis of this complex prob­lem of contemporary philosophical and epistemological reflection, I allow myself to make reference to the collective work that we jointly edited, see Agazzi and Minazzi 2008).

In any case, precisely this particular epistemological-critical approach has ena­bled Agazzi, from his earliest studies on the philosophy of physics, to avoid, criti­cally, both every possible phenomenalist outcome and any drift that has led many epistemologists to talk about a hypothetical science of the unobservable.

If the epistemological position of Agazzi is set in relation to the, albeit promi­nent and complex, traditions of the conventionalist phenomenalism (from Duhem to Poincare, to give just two emblematic names), of the logical empiricism that grew out of the Wiener Kreis (which then went through various epistemological phases and seasons, in which Carnap has, however, always been a key point of ref­erence, and so coming down to Hempel’s most mature reflections) and Popperian falsificationism itself (not to mention the outcomes of his school, from Lakatos to Feyerabend), it is now easy to understand the originality and uniqueness of the realist position supported by Agazzi. In the first place, because in his reflection on science Agazzi has always defended the reasons of realism, so finding himself in a position of substantial isolation and originality. In fact, much of the epistemo­logical debate of the twentieth century has been decidedly anti-realist. And even when it has defended the reasons of realism—as, for example, a philosopher like Popper did, throughout his life—it was a minimal realism, closer to that typical of common sense. In short, it was configured as an uncritical realism that failed to develop a philosophical vision, critical and fully articulated, of its own perspec­tive. To clearly grasp all the reasons and also the theoretical and philosophical features of Agazzi’s epistemological realism, it would suffice to bear in mind the intense and memorable discussion, theoretical and dialogic, that he (and the pre­sent writer) conducted with a long-standing realist and acknowledged father of the Italian philosophy of science like Geymonat (with whom Agazzi himself had stud­ied, immediately after his early training under Bontadini: see Agazzi et al. 1989, but see also Agazzi 1985, 2001, 2009, as well as Geymonat 1977, Mangione 1985, Minazzi 2001, 2009, 2010). In this regard we should not overlook the influence on Agazzi’s thought exerted by an original thinker like Mathieu, in particular by the valuable study that Mathieu devoted in the sixties to the problem of objectivity in science and modern and contemporary philosophy (Mathieu 1960).

In any case, in relation to the different positions that interpret objectivity as mere intersubjectivity, as invariance, or, again, as correspondence to the objects dealt with in a scientific theory, Agazzi, ever since Temi e problemi di filosofia della fisica, has had no doubts in stating that, in his view, “the right position of correct realism is rather that which, between objective and real, sees a relationship of inclusion: all that is objective is real, even though not all that is real is objec­tive” (Agazzi 1974: 365). Agazzi is thus induced to support a position of original critical realism (see Agazzi 2014: 243-312), precisely because he has clearly in mind an observation that has instead often been overlooked or removed from the philosophical debate of the twentieth century, namely the critical awareness that

The concept of truth is never, in practice, absolute but relative, in this precise sense: a proposition (or set of propositions) is almost never true or false simpliciter, but true or false of a certain universe of objects, so that the question itself concerning its truth is not formulated completely until one says of what objects it must be true. In practice, there­fore, the truth is always a truth within a theory, because only within it are objects, as we know, given (Agazzi 1974: 369, italics in the text).

But then how can we qualify the “objects” of scientific knowledge? For Agazzi, the best solution to this challenging question lies in recognizing that “the object is nothing more than the sum of all its determinations” (ibid.: 370, italics in the text), with the result, then, that if we agree to grasp the determinations of objects as real and existing, consequently the objects must also be thought of as real and existing. The realism proposed by Agazzi, however, is “critical” precisely because it never overlooks the fact that, in the history of thought, the twilight of a determined and genuine scientific theory does not mean recognizing that it was false (as would claim the Popperian falsificationism which is thus forced to offer a cemeterial vision of the history of science^[5]), but rather that it was partial. As a result, its replacement by a new theory always involves the development of a new approach that will be better than the previous one, precisely because it will enable us to seize a larger number of determinations of the reality that is the object of our study.

On this plane we therefore see how Agazzi agrees with the Kantian approach, according to which human knowledge is always circumscribed and delimited, because, to quote again Agazzi,

an absolute truth could not be anything but a truth that applies to all possible objects, that is, a truth that by holding true for all possible objectivities, focuses on reality no longer as objectified, but as such, which, therefore [... ] goes beyond the ambit of consideration of science and rather concerns philosophy (which, characteristically, when it wishes to give itself a cognitive task, proposes the study of reality as such and is configured as metaphys­ics) (Agazzi 1974: 369-370, italics in the text).

With this we can clearly see that Agazzi’s significant proximity to the epistemo­logical horizon of Kantian transcendentalism is characterized, however, by a spe­cific and wholly decisive difference. Indeed, though admitting (with Kant) that all human knowledge is always confined to certain specific objects within pre­cise cognitive boundaries, Agazzi yet seeks also to recover the “point of view of the whole”, as a characteristic and specific investigation of philosophical inquiry which, in his view, leads to that metaphysics which Kant instead intended to defi­nitely banish from the epistemological plane (reserving it only a different function within the world of practice and our ethical choices).

In any case, for Agazzi it is the predicates that define operationally the object of scientific knowledge, precisely because the object, by its intrinsic epistemolog­ical nature, is configured as “a structure of relations, most of which can be the result of operations but whose ‘being together’ is not justified by any operation, despite having to be objectively verifiable” (Agazzi 1974: 374). The very pres­ence of this conceptual framework (as rightly pointed out, among others, by Weyl (2009), explicitly mentioned by Agazzi) stresses how the nature of the objects studied by science cannot be deduced solely from the experimental dimension. Indeed the conceptual determination of the said structure depends on a theoretical component that is not reducible, without residuals, to the plane of experimental experience (pace all the systematically reductivist dreams variously cultivated and replicated, by the tradition of classical empiricism, and Viennese logical empiri­cism). Also Geymonat in Filosofia e filosofia della scienza states that “the history of science shows us that in many cases progress was achieved by the replacement of principles, immediately suggested by observation, with others, seemingly much more contrived and more distant from the facts” (Geymonat 1960: 60). For this reason Agazzi concludes by observing that

experience, in other words, by itself ‘does not speak’; it is rather like the oracle of Delphi, of which Heraclitus said that it ‘neither speaks nor conceals, but gives signs’, i.e. it provides the basis for the constitution of the semantic logos, but does not explicitly indicate an apophantic logos. Just like the response of the oracle, experience has to be “interpreted” and this interpretation is primarily an intuitive act: ‘In science,’ Goethe wrote, “everything depends on what can be called an apergu, on a recognition of what underlies phenomena. And this recognition is infinitely fruitful (Agazzi 1974:376).

In other words, the real world that we want to know is always, in Galileo’s words, “deaf and inexorable”: experiences become significant not so much thanks to experience as such, but thanks to that particular “point of view” (the apergu Goethe speaks of) by virtue of which we can construct a theory with which, in the words of Kant, we interrogate nature in the same way as a judge examines a defendant or a witness, forcing nature to answer our questions, though we know that nature’s answers are also decisive for our own theories since they can, in fact, verify or falsify the predictions derived from our particular theoretical framework.

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