As an undergraduate i took my required philosophy courses. I suspect the instructors were better than average yet as a STEM major without any prior philosophy instruction I got pretty close to nothing from the 18c and 19c philosophers they taught, it was just beyond my ability to figure out what they were talking about most of the time.
I can now read those same texts and understand their points, in part because I am now free to disagree or see that we live in a very different time with very different contexts. And with that I can appreciate some the timeless truths they wrote about. I still feel a twinge of anger at the time wasted without a good introduction. Sigh.
The first thing I thought they were trying to say was to describe reality. Whether they thought they were describing reality or not, it is obvious they were not nor could they talk about reality in any objective sense. However what they did do was to think deeply about what we could KNOW about reality. In other words, best understood they were talking about what it means to be a conscious being in the world and their attempts to make sense of it. Now that I can understand.
Most thinkers put Kant at the transition to what we now call the modern era. Must of the dusty metaphysics of the middle ages was swept aside and God with it. Kant used reason to reason about reason. That meta attitude toward thinking opened the door to a greater respect for the subjective perspective and a dethroning of sense perception as the primary means of knowing. He recognized before most that the mind does not depend upon the eyes as cameras but are subject to a more complex process that brings images into the mind. He also recognized that the images are brought into the mind before we can react, or even perceive the thing we see.
I haven’t found a great set of quotes about how empiricists incorporated sense data mediated by instruments. After all this was a time of telescopes, microscopes and soon other instruments that gave us new information about the physical world. And as humans we needed to integrate this or reject it. Those who accepted it and successfully integrated it into a deeper understanding of the world opened the door to things that seemed untrue yet satisfied the needs of mathematical theories to explain the world in a way that was consistent with what we saw. We began to “see” the world in a very different way. Even inscrutable math equations were useful.
With Einstein and others our scientific understanding of the world collided with our common sense understanding of the world. This was the height of what some might call the modern era. A devastating world war that caused us to see the globe as far smaller than we had before along with the rapid growth of technology shook society. And the naive attempts to explain human affairs using the tools of the scientific revolution not only were unsuccessful, they caused damage we are still learning to understand. Humans and human affairs are so completely different from atoms and energy, we still struggle for parity with the hard sciences.
Regardless of the reasons, after the first world war, the arts and society, even the sciences, began to change into something else. We entered a post-modern period that led to so much inscrutable prose as to leave common people completely out of the intellectual debates. A pet theory of mine is that this disconnect between the “common man” who votes and the thought leaders at universities became much sharper in the US than it did elsewhere. But throughout all of the liberal democracies or those headed toward that, a new doubt or reaction developed which spawned many schools of thought and little coherence that could be explained easily. The arts, philosophy, and sociology followed the hard sciences that required years of specialized study and indoctrination into very isolating sub-societies. In short, university education became alienating from everyday life in a way not seen before.
The US has always been suspicious of an intellectual class (see
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter 1963). But with the popularity of the MAGA movement, we have lost all mooring to any semblance of authorities of true or false. Perhaps Stephen Colbert nailed it when he coined the term “truthiness”. Truth is what makes sense to me at this moment with what I see in front of me. It has the veneer of “doing my own research” or “critical thought” while in reality being a manufactured point of view immune to challenge. Far too many people who vote live inside a bubble of belief that guides them. And acting on that belief causes them no immediate harm unlike say, the belief that drinking bleach can cure COVID. This puts them beyond the leveling effect of winning a Darwin Award.
So the kind of enduring truth of philosophers of earlier centuries is what we call epistemology, what can we know. The scientific revolution was spurred ahead by the adoption of the scientific method. Yet even that success gets challenged as many will spout that the theory of gravity is only a theory, as if we can choose to ignore it in favor of flat earth or other “truths”. They reject any form of scientific truth that should not be questioned. Scientists are fallible so we can ignore their opinions.
I will offer one very tiny bit of justification for the origin of such nonsense. What the modern era instilled in us was a wonder at the technological progress. The 20th century began with buggy whips and ended with an international space station. How we did it was beyond the ken of 99.9% of humanity to understand in any depth. It depended upon belief and a near deification of science and scientific proclamation. And this lofty pedestal inevitably needed to topple.
The various frightening “scientific” predictions of the past never came about as they were predicted. The Malthusian starvation never happened. The hole in the ozone was fixed. Our rockets did not cause extra terrestrials to visit us to force us to stop. The fears raised by atomic weapons became background noise and helped to set the stage for widespread disbelief at the fear mongering of the most vocal opponents of challenges to our climate destruction. Using the democratizing of the internet, reactionary and contrarian voices convinced large swaths of America that it was merely another scare tactic. To do what was never clear. But the conviction that it should be ignored was clear. Epistemology of any kind could not stop that trend. Belief without knowledge seized the day.
Those who talk about the epochs of culture claim the modern era ended before World War Two and that what replaced it has been called Post-Modern with hundreds of small movements within it. Now some theorists suggest that the Post-Modern movement has been over for a few decades with no pithy label for the current time. MetaModern? Perhaps. But we won’t know for a few years at best. Regardless of how we come to understand our time the election in the fall will be a milestone and one that makes a mockery of the great philosophical thinkers of the past few centuries. For us it appears epistemology is dead.
Dale Fletter Blog Site 