Critical theory and epistemology

The politics of modern thought and science

Anastasia Marinopoulou

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526105387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

This volume in the Critical Theory and Contemporary Society series explores the arguments between critical theory and epistemology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Focusing on the first and second generations of critical theorists and Luhmann's systems theory, the book examines how each approaches epistemology. It opens by looking at twentieth-century epistemology, particularly the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt). It then moves on to discuss structuralism, poststructuralism, critical realism, the epistemological problematics of Foucault's writings and the dialectics of systems theory. The aim is to explore whether the focal point for epistemology and the sciences remain that social and political interests actually form a concrete point of concern for the sciences as well.

1

Phenomenology and hermeneutics

Alas, there are no absolute certainties and there are no definitive resolutions of fundamental ‘crises’.

‘Phenomenology and Sociology’ by Thomas Luckmann in Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, vol. I¹

The means selected become intermediate goals.

Mary F. Rogers, Sociology, Ethnomethodology, and Experience ²

Introduction

Phenomenology and hermeneutics: the modern passage to epistemology

It always appears very fruitful, scientifically, to consider arguments in relation, rather than in opposition. Such a view does not necessarily imply that differences should be ignored or eliminated, or that relativism ought to prevail as a sign of good faith within a scientific field of thought. Contrary to relativism, criticism and disagreement are said to promote better research. Unless a continuity of problematics is identified, we would probably be unable to trace related arguments adequately and understand fully their wider implications.

Whereas sciences set their questions in advance, epistemology deals with the questions that need to be answered by both science and society. On a conceptual level, I maintain that sciences question their own relations to society or, to put it more distinctively, they question what is social in their scientific oeuvres. Throughout the chapter, I present the argument that epistemology shapes such questions by way of a reminder of the social impact of the sciences on both their own object and subject of research, namely society itself.

On a methodological level, science never becomes socially obsolete or redundant. We never know which alternatives science can demonstrate when society allows science to flourish without the formation of prevailing theories or authoritarian priorities. If scientific dialogue is to thrive and produce research, then it has to be uncoerced and equal without references to scientific criteria of obviousness or social criteria of common sense. The main tasks of science and epistemology are to identify ideological influences and to articulate critique, in a wide social and scientific context, by means of scientific dialectics.

The aim of this chapter is to trace to what extent dialectics is an epistemological concern in Dilthey, Husserl, Simmel and Weber. I enquire into their conception of dialectics as a method, as well as an epistemological process. Throughout the course of these thinkers’ work, it becomes clear that dialectics is not a concrete innovative element for the sciences but a peripheral method; dialectics is not the pivotal process that serves as the royal scientific path to normativity for the sciences and society. Such concerns limit science to (a) a deficit in normative theory and rational praxis, and, moreover, (b) a lack of accountability criteria for science. The reductionist function of the sciences thus attained may articulate some theoretical arguments, but it remains at a loss when considering the accountability of praxis.

The line of thought that begins with thinkers such as Dilthey, Husserl, Simmel and Weber, at the end of the nineteenth century and towards the beginning of the twentieth,³ extends to the ethnomethodology of the mid-twentieth century, and reveals itself as having had a major influence on Gadamer’s work on hermeneutics. The following sections of this chapter trace the course of arguments that begin with Dilthey’s philosophy of a rigorous science, develop with Husserl’s phenomenology, Simmel’s and Weber’s interest in the scientific element within the social, and conclude with the ethnomethodological concerns on the everyday as a method of scientific advance.

Phenomenology: Husserl, his predecessors and the epigones

The pivotal consideration of the chapter can be mostly inferred from the implications of the German language that were so meticulously presented by Immanuel Kant in his renowned essay on the Enlightenment. The German word ‘Mündigkeit’, namely responsibility, derives from the word ‘Mund’, namely mouth. The irresponsible personality can be easily associated with the lack of communication. The absence of either dialectical or dialogical concerns, which to a large extent coincide, signifies the epistemological negligence of the thinkers included in this chapter towards theory and practice and their disregard for normative theory that derives from dialectics.

Dilthey prepared the way for Husserl with a series of arguments, some of which Husserl would agree with, whereas from others he would diverge. Both thinkers attempted to establish philosophy as a rigorous science with a specific methodology, significantly different from that of the natural sciences. Dilthey differentiates philosophy from epistemology, and attempts to designate the particular significance, lucid and dissimilar, of both branches of knowledge. From a study of methodology, Dilthey proceeds to the philosophical contribution of epistemology and the epistemological contribution of philosophy to science. Philosophy and epistemology are pivotal parts of his theoretical concerns, without ever losing their conceptual equality in his work.

Dilthey’s notion of scientific understanding (das Verstehen) clarifies on an epistemological level the form of scientific interface among different scientific scopes. Nevertheless, the method of Verstehen reaches essential levels of profundity when it is linked to societies and sciences, and is based within their interrelation.

The pursuit of knowledge – insofar as the Geisteswissenschaften in particular, namely the humanities, are concerned – aims at producing a critique of the sciences, human beings and their interrelation. Dilthey lived in an era during which the popularity of humanities’ studies was receding, and the brave new world of technology and industrialization were advancing to the detriment of critical thought, rational argumentation and social dialectics. In this respect, his epistemological concerns can be compared to Kant’s attempts to redefine criticism and rationality. Positivism started to take shape, as the safeguard of scientific theory and method. The distinctive character of human studies, for which all the aforementioned philosophers argued fervently, underwent a negative critique; it was seen as superfluous and detrimental to real knowledge (represented by the natural sciences and technology).

For Dilthey, scientific methodology was not the central issue. That was bequeathed to Husserl to elaborate upon. Dilthey’s thought creates an argumentative platform on which the structure of the humanities can be based. For all the above-mentioned philosophers, dialectics, as a distinguished method and process of the human sciences, does not appear in the foreground. But, as I shall argue, it was not a fear of dialectics that prevented these thinkers from defending such scientific modus operandi; it was the conviction that there remains much to be done – especially with regard to the understanding of a concrete scientific process on which the humanities can base their existence – before we can proceed to dialectics.

Dilthey’s work paves the way for Husserl’s phenomenology to the extent that the former makes the important phenomenological distinction between phenomena, namely appearances, and noumena, namely real realities (reale Realitäten). Although Husserl later transforms Dilthey’s distinction, it is noteworthy to see that phenomena, for Dilthey, are the products of appearance, after the human mind has mediated them, to understand physical objects or the objects of knowledge. Noumena occupy the position of real knowledge, the inherent knowledge that the human mind bears, the motives behind human action, and the meaning that people attribute to human action.

The means by which people understand noumena, and particularly their existence which urges them towards the acquisition of knowledge, is provided by language itself. For Hodges, a meticulous scholar of Dilthey’s work, ‘The way to self-knowledge would be blocked if it were not for the inherent tendency of experience to find expression … what I think and feel is revealed to me first by what I say or do.’⁴ For Dilthey himself, the dialectical process of knowledge, although never mentioned in the same words, takes place in rediscovering something in something else or someone in someone else. Only when knowledge of something or someone is transposed into something else or someone else is the complete process of knowing fulfilled; otherwise it remains elliptical and, therefore, insufficient.⁵

Knowledge is the interactive process between at least two knowing subjects. It is not a steady, unchanged product of intellectual solipsism, nor is it a secluded activity in some unknown realm. Although Dilthey sets the bases for the understanding of the knowing subject, that is induced into intersubjectivity, he never centralizes human knowledge as being formed within social processes of intersubjectivity. He neither claims that knowledge is a product of only knowing individuals, nor does he transpose it within society. His understanding of human knowledge never includes the ‘but also’ perception that Husserl introduces in an attempt to avoid the aporetic theoretical conclusions of the exclusivity of the individual, as a potential knowing subject.

Horkheimer’s comment, on Dilthey’s avoidance of a socially based understanding of knowledge, demonstrates that it was less Dilthey’s ignorance or neglect towards knowledge formation processes, than that ‘the professorial disdain for the masses in the Wilhelmine era consisted not in enmity towards the system that produces the masses, but in hatred for the forces that could overcome it’.⁶

Considering knowledge as situated within and arising from socially multifarious processes, Horkheimer sees that the claim that human consciousness attempts solely to create cognitive constructs, and consequently gains knowledge, becomes an idealist and fruitless hypothesis, which contradicts itself. A Weltanschauung, that is, a worldview, cannot be perceived unless human consciousness exists within and reflects on the world. For Horkheimer, intellectual accomplishments are either associated with a certain social theory and political praxis or with fruitless hypotheses of ambiguous scientific, social and political content.

With Weber, writing almost at the same time as Dilthey but still thirty years his junior, the foundation of social theory and the methodology of the social sciences enter a new phase. As a result, their understanding becomes more socially focused. Weber opposed the idea of a subject as socially or even collectively understood. Moreover, he denied the possibility of holistic approaches towards the sciences, where the collective rules the scientific. However, his research into individual consciousness, as a source of knowledge, and into the methodology of the sciences marks a clear epistemological concern that relates to the whole current of epistemology in nineteenth-century German academia.

It is essential, in Weber’s case, to trace the development of the epistemological function of the category of concepts, which runs as a parallel, chronological line of thought, with his understanding of society. I mention that it is chronologically parallel because, in his work, the evolution of concepts, as epistemological pivots, meets sociological demands and a better understanding and influence of the sciences upon society. Concepts themselves, either true or false, according to Weber, or particular conceptualizations (such as ‘rationalization’ or ‘disenchantment’ or ‘iron cage’), are attributed to the effort of the individual to perceive concrete observations, which, in turn, result from human consciousness. In Weber, understanding by means of consciousness finds itself in constant tension with understanding by means of evidence, because the former has to be tested against the latter.

If consciousness is the critical and fundamental aspect of human knowledge, then a question arises as to the extent of evidence’s indispensability, in respect of the accomplishment of knowledge, and, to a certain extent, with regard to the attainment of rational certainty. If, for Weber, the aim for sciences remains rationality itself and the maintenance thereof, then the means to accomplish such a rational mode of thinking and acting is attributed to consciousness, and not to evidence or experience of reality.

Weber ascribes the potentiality for meaning to slightly different sources than Dilthey. In Weber, the methodological foundation of meaning lies not only in human consciousness, on a general basis, but also in the intention of specialists to follow the correct or valid meaning, which is incorporated into their subject matter. In order to achieve certainty of knowledge, one has to analyse the intellectual processes taking place within the self. The performance of an action remains in constant tension with the intellectual understanding, whereas consciousness, being distant from reality, becomes the source of clarity and rationality for the intellect realizing knowledge. In Weber’s work, it is consciousness, not action, which mediates knowledge. Weber considers action as the consequence of the mediating function of consciousness.

The methodology of Weber concerning the forming processes of human knowledge, and, therefore, of the sciences, evolves in his work as a basis for hi...