Farewell to Reason

340 Pages·1987·42.83 MB·English

by  Paul K. Feyerabend

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Farewell to Reason
PAUL FEYERABEND
V
VERSO
London • NewYork
First published by Verso 1987
Reprinted 1988, 1990, 1993
©
1987 Paul Feyerabend
All rights reserved
Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London WIV 3HR
USA: 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 2291
Verso is the imprint ofNew Left Books
British Library Cataloguingin Publication Data
Feyerabend, Paul
Farewell to reason.
1. Relativity 2. Rationalism
L Title
153.4'3 BD221
US Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data
Feyerabend, Paul K., 1924-
Farewell to reason/Paul Feyerabend
p. cm.
Collection ofessays rewritten for publication in book form.
1. Philosophy. L Title.
B29.F448 1987
100—dcl9
ISBN 0-86091-184-5
ISBN 0-86091-896-3 Pbk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
Contents
Introduction 1
1. Notes on Relativism 19
2. Reason, Xenophanes and the HomericGods 90
3. Knowledge and the Role ofTheories 103
4. Creativity 128
5. Progress in Philosophy, the Sciences and the Arts 143
6. Trivializing Knowledge: Comments on Popper's
Excursions into Philosophy 162
7. Mach's Theory ofResearch and its Relation to
Einstein 192
8. Some Observations on Aristotle's Theory of
Mathematics and ofthe Continuum 219
9. Galileo and the Tyranny ofTruth 247
10. Putnam on Incommensurability 265
11 Cultural Pluralism or Brave New Monotony? 273
.
12. Farewell to Reason 280
Index 320

Introduction
The essays collected in this volume deal with cultural diversity
and cultural change. They try to show that diversity is beneficial
while uniformity reduces our joys and our (intellectual, emo-
tional, material) resources.
There exist powerful traditions which oppose such a point of
view. They concede that people may arrange their lives in
various ways; however they add that there must be limits to
variety. The limits, theysay, are constitutedbymorallawswhich
regulate human actions and by physical laws which define our
position in nature. Philosophers from Plato to Sartre and scien-
tists from Pythagoras to Monod have claimed to possess such
laws and have complained about the variety (of values, beliefs,
theories) that still remained.
In the late seventies and the early eighties these complaints
increased in urgency. 'Contemporary culture', we hear, is in a
'crisis'. It is torn apart by a 'profound contradiction between the
traditional humanist views of man and the world on the one
hand, andthe value devoidmechanisticdescriptionofscienceon
the other' while the humanities, philosophy, the arts, and social
thought are in addition corroded by a 'cultural cacophony', or a
'philosophical malady'. So extreme is the fragmentation per-
ceived by some critics that Jurgen Habermas recently spoke ofa
'neue Uniibersichtlichkeit' - a new unsurveyability: it is impos-
sible to find one's way in the flood of styles, theories, points of
view, that inundate public life. ^
1. Forthe 'crisis' andthe 'profoundcontradiction'see RogerSperry,Science
andMoral Priority, NewYork 1985, p. 6. Fortheclashbetweenthesciencesand
1
2
The complaints are surprisingly uninformed. It is true that
'culture' occasionally gets somewhat disorganised. But the trend
is not new and it is balanced by powerful contrary tendencies:
schools outflank, overrun, absorb other schools, scientists from
different fields create interdisciplinary subjects (examples:
synergetics; molecular biology), grand 'unifying schemes (evo-
lution; holism; dualistic solutions of the mind-body problem;
linguistic speculations) blur important distinctions, film,
computer art, rock music, high energy physics (cf. Andrew
Pickering's fascinating essay Constructing Quarks, Chicago
1985) combine business principles, artistic inspiration and scien-
tific discovery in a manner reminiscent of 15th century Renais-
sance practice. There is fragmentation; but there are also new
and powerful uniformities.
The lack of perspective displayed by the critics is even more
astonishing. They speak of 'the (!) crisis of contemporary
culture' or of 'world culture'; what they mean is Western
academic and artistic life. But the quarrels ofprofessors and the
contortions of Western art shrink into insignificance when com-
pared with the steady expansion of Western 'progress' and
'development' which is the spreading of Western business,
science and technology. This is an international phenomenon; it
characterises capitalist as well as socialist societies; it is inde-
pendent of ideological, racial and political differences and it
affects an increasing number of peoples and cultures. There is
hardly any trace here of the debates and disagreements that so
exercise our intellectuals. What is being imposed, exported and
again imposed is a collection of uniform views and practices
which have the intellectual and political support of powerful
groups and institutions. ^ By nowWesternforms oflife arefound
in the most remote comers of the world and have changed the
habits of people who only a few decades ago were unaware of
their existence. Cultural differences disappear, indigenous
crafts, customs, institutions are being replaced by Western
humanities cf. CP. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,
Cambridge 1959 and W.T. Jones, The Sciences and the Humanities, Univ. of
CaliforniaPress 1965. Jonescallstheriftbetweenthesciencesandthehumanities
'the crisisofcontemporaryculture'. The phrase 'culturalcacophony'occursinan
issue of the journal Precis, introducing a discussion of postmodernism at the
Columbia University School ofArchitecture; the 'malady' in K.R. Popper, The
Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 2, New York 1966, p. 369. Habermas's
observations arefoundin DieNeue Uniibersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt 1985.
2. Decisive amongthesegroups isa newclass, ascientific-technologicalelite
which, according to some writers (Daniel Bell and John Kenneth Galbraith