Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John McCumber is Distinguished Professor of Germanic Languages at UCLA. His most recent books are Time in the Ditch: American Philosophy and the McCarthy Era (2000) and Reshaping Reason: Toward a New Philosophy (2005).

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ON PHILOSOPHY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................................................................ixABBREVIATIONS.........................................................................................xiIntroduction..........................................................................................11 From Scientific Revolutions to Boston AA: Philosophy and the Speaking of Matter.....................222 What Is the History of Philosophy?..................................................................473 Matter, Form, and Oppression in Aristotle...........................................................764 Modernism in Philosophy: Fulfillment and Subversion in Kant.........................................975 The Malleability of Reason: Hegel and the Return to Heracleitus.....................................1256 The Fragility of Reason: Earth, Art, and Politics in Heidegger......................................1537 Dialectics, Thermodynamics, and the End of Critique.................................................1778 Critical Practice and Public Language: The Role of Philosophy.......................................202Epilogue..............................................................................................227NOTES.................................................................................................235REFERENCES............................................................................................249INDEX.................................................................................................263

Chapter One

PHILOSOPHY AND THE SPEAKING OF MATTER

To begin formulating a less problematic, less Kantian version of Enlightenment requires formulating an alternative to its temporal beginning. This is, for Kant, the state of "self-incurred tutelage" (AA, 8:35), that is, an inability (Unvermögen) to think and act for oneself for which one is oneself responsible (verschuldet). Vermögen is one of Kant's standard terms for a faculty or power of the mind, the set of which is the object of critique itself. His use of this word, plus his characterization of the tutelage as something for which one is "responsible," brings the unsurprising insight that Kant is, from the outset, thinking of Enlightenment in the terms of his own moral theory. When he goes on, as he immediately does, to say that "self-incurred" means not due to lack of mental capacity (Verstand), he has (as we saw in the Introduction) excluded women and people of color from the process. Their incapacity is not self-incurred but due to nature.

We are looking, by contrast, for an "unenlightened" state to which issues of mental capacity and incapacity, and of responsibility and its absence, do not apply. In sketching this, I will draw, briefly, on some recent developments in the philosophy of science, some not-so-recent developments in feminism, and the account of "Boston AA" in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

Philosophy of Science: From Discovery to Shakiness

The best-known part of my story tells how Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions put paid to the tidy distinction, associated with Hans Reichenbach, between the contexts of discovery and justification (Reichenbach 1938, 7–8). The "context of discovery" for Reichenbach concerns how scientists obtain data and come up with hypotheses to explain it. These matters vary from scientist to scientist and from case to case and so are ineluctably subjective. The context of discovery is therefore excluded from philosophical reflection on science, which is restricted to the context of justification: the ways in which scientific objectivity is established for a theory or an hypothesis after someone has advanced it. These center, for Reichenbach, on the use of a fixed set of logical rules to guide the inferences, usually probabilistic, made from the data.

For Kuhn, what philosophers of science needed to do was not to approach science in terms of preestablished dichotomies like this one but to understand the ways in which it actually develops. The facts of history, he argues, teach that scientific change includes components of both contexts; indeed, they are often so intertwined that the very distinction between the two becomes questionable. In particular, for Kuhn, justification itself has historically variable components: what counts as justification to one group of scientists may not do so for another.

The practices of justification accepted in a particular scientific community are an important part of what Kuhn calls its "paradigm," the sum of its governing doctrines, principles, and practices. The history of science then appears as a succession of paradigms in which the shift from one paradigm to a newer one, because it involves the acceptance of new and different practices of justification, cannot proceed in accordance with the rules of either the older or the newer paradigm. It therefore appears as "irrational"; and indeed, any new paradigm must appear as irrational to a scientific community defined by an older one.

At the moment of a paradigm shift, then, the rules and procedures of science itself become unstable—or, as Arthur Fine has put it, "shaky":

Without firm foundations or rigid superstructures, their outcome is uncertain. Indeed not even the rules of play are fixed. It follows that at every step we have to be guided by judgment calls. (SG, 2)

These judgment calls, for Fine, can be decidedly unscientific in character; Einstein's rhetorical dismissals of the quantum theory are an example (SG, 2). Nor are they always made with a view to objective truth—for that would constitute a fixed rule of play (SG, 9). Moreover, in a decisive move beyond Kuhn, Fine argues that the shakiness involved in paradigm shifts is not restricted to certain "revolutionary" moments but is an ingredient in "all the constructive work of science" (SG, 2).

Shakiness can be generalized not only to science as such, as Fine does, but beyond it altogether. A first step in this is provided by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's account of Robert Boyle's scientific method. The heart of this is experimentation, and at the heart of a scientific experiment stands a machine (classically, for Boyle, the air pump). When an experiment is performed, "the machine constitutes a resource that may be used to filter out human agency ... as if it were said, 'It is not I who says this; it is the machine'" (Shapin and Shaffer 1985, 56).

Human agency needs to be "filtered out" because it brings with it prejudices, prepossessions, and interests which could bias the observation (see Shapin and Shaffer 1985, 218). In that it eliminates these things, the machine seems to have the role of eliminating subjectivity in general, including everything belonging to the context of discovery. In fact, as Shapin and Schaffer argue at length, this is not the case. The machine filters out individual idiosyncracy, but such issues as what a machine is, how its movements are to be interpreted, and who gets to interpret them are variable matters within the experiment and are, if not individually "subjective," socially constructed.

Important here is that the machine operates as the only "actor" in the experimental space. The humans are...