A history of materialism, Part 2: Strict empiricism
The second of a four-part series on Marx's science and epistemology.
This is the second of a four-part series on the history of materialism. The first part is here.
It is doubtful that prehistoric man bothered to articulate an explicit theory of epistemology, and even if he did we of course have no record of it. Still, granting the standard anthropological premise that indigenous peoples often live much as they did thousands of years ago, we can gain some insight into their praxis.
In that light, consider what Claude Levi-Strauss describes as “the wealth and precision of native observations and…its methods: long and constant attention, painstaking use of all the senses”. One finds among indigenous peoples (and presumably their prehistoric counterparts) the usual intellectual strategies of abstraction, taxonomy, and so on; but what most distinguishes their investigation into the natural world is its extraordinary de facto commitment to empiricism. One can see evidence of this in the famous Crossed Bison of Lascaux cave painting for example, which expresses all kinds of minute detail: cleft hooves, proportional calves and thighs, panting mouths. The knowledge of the ancients relied on acute observation.
Like them, the Sumerians and Egyptians seem to have simply taken for granted that the senses were useful or reliable, and often seem to associate them with knowledge. In The Instruction of Ptah-hotep, for example, the author explains that if the reader heeds his advice,
His knowledge shall be his guide…his eyes shall see, his ears shall hear…
Similarly in Gilgamesh, hearing is associated with knowledge: thus the titular character “longed to hear the voice of one / Who still used words as revelations”.
Even into the age of the early Greek philosophers we find only an implicit empiricism. Anaximander, for example, is often held to be an early empiricist, but if he ever reflected on his method it was not preserved in the historical record. Instead, we can only infer from Hippolytus that his search for knowledge leaned heavily on observations:
Winds come into being when the finest vapors of air are separated off, collect together and move. Rain comes from vapor sent up by the things beneath the sun. Lightning occurs when wind breaks out and parts the clouds.
It is not until the great physician Hippocrates that we encounter the first true strict empiricist. In the very first passage of his Ancient Medicine we find a direct critique of blind reason. Taking aim at the mysticism and speculation of folk medicine, he rejects theories “which are occult and dubious” since “the reader or hearer could not find out whether what is delivered be true or false”. They are specifically unfalsifiable because “there is nothing which can be referred to in order to discover the truth” – they are, that is, completely detached from the material world. Hippocrates then claims that medicine was discovered by eating different things and observing which were “manifestly beneficial” to the sick. This, he argues, is a superior method of inquiry; indeed, “discoveries cannot possibly be made in any other way.”
This argument has none of the skepticism of the senses that defines blind reason. On the contrary, Hippocrates is more concerned about the unconstrained exercises in conjecture and imagination that characterized prescientific medicine. What makes Hippocrates the first true empiricist is that he reflects on these issues – here, for example, arguing that falsifiability is a criteria of legitimacy.
Let us move on to Sextus Empiricus, who belonged to the Pyrrhonian school of ancient Greece. The Pyrrhonians are generally regarded as radical skeptics who doubted the possibility of any certain knowledge, including, as Sextus notes himself, the knowledge of the senses. But I would argue that this is a serious misreading, at least of Sextus himself; as he writes in Outlines of Pyrrhonism, “Those who say that ‘the Sceptics abolish appearances,’ or phenomena, seem to be to be unacquainted with the statements of our school.”
In Pyrrhonism, Sextus advances a fascinating critique of blind reason. When we taste honey, he writes, it tastes sweet. Even the skeptic must admit that it tastes sweet, for the sensory impression forces itself upon us involuntarily. But whether it is sweet, Sextus adds, is another question, and one that the skeptic will refuse to answer either way.
This conclusion is often read as a kind of radical rejection of empiricism, but Sextus then adds, almost in passing:
And even if we do actually argue against the appearances, we do not propound such arguments with the intention of abolishing appearances, but by way of pointing out the rashness of the Dogmatists; for if reason is such a trickster as to all but snatch away the appearances from under our very eyes, surely we should view it with suspicion…?
This is not a radical rejection of empiricism at all - it is a radical affirmation of empiricism, and a ferocious attack on blind reason. For Sextus, “the appearances…under our very eyes” are the ultimate criterion of trustworthiness; and if some philosopher has so turned himself around intellectually that we cannot even trust them, this is evidence that we should not trust the philosophy. If the practitioner of blind reason doubts appearances and relies on a system of reasoned beliefs, Sextus’s position held the exact opposite: “Holding to appearances, then, we live without beliefs”.
The tradition of strict empiricism was not as robust as blind reason. In the figures of both Hippocrates and Sextus it appears to have emerged as a kind of radical overcorrection to blind reason’s epistemological extremity: Hippocrates was primarily concerned with overcoming superstition in medicine, while Sextus wanted to extend the principle of skepticism as far as he could. But for the most part, empiricism was in the beginning a more moderate position, defending a basic role for the senses as a path of knowledge while admitting various other approaches as well. The Empiricist school, for example, explicitly called for the use of analogical reasoning in medical practice; later, in the Neoplatonic tradition, the testimony of the senses stood side-by-side with divine revelation.
One might argue that the physicist ibn Haytham, who wrote around 1000 AD, adhered more closely to something like strict empiricism; we are told for example that “he criticized Aristotle for the meagreness of his contribution to the method of induction, which he regarded as superior to syllogism. He considered it to be the basic requirement for true scientific research.” But we also learn that
He held that knowledge combines the substance of the intellect with the content of experience, and thus, reconciled rationalism with empiricism.
In this regard he was less a strict empiricist than a positivist – a designation that would better describe many of the so-called empiricists of his time. So it went with most intellectuals up through the Renaissance. Francis Bacon, for example, is often held to be a trailblazer of empiricism; but of strict empiricists, he writes that they
are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes the middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.
Nevertheless, Bacon was one of the first to lay out a critique that would become crucial in our discussion of materialism: the critique of “occult forces,” that is, of imaginary forces of nature used to explain things that have not been empirically explained.
Prehistoric humans, we have noted, were instinctive empiricists – but this does not mean that they could empirically explain everything. To fill in explanatory gaps, they often relied on their imagination and wild speculation; so we find appeals to nature gods, magical principles, and so on. We also find this explanatory habit among more “rational” philosophers; so Aristotle, for example, ends up inventing a divine “First Mover” in order to explain causality.
Bacon advanced multiple critiques of this sort of explanation, but his primary objection was that the appeal to occult forces “hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and kept men back from progressing in true knowledge.” That knowledge could only be gained through the senses: “All depends on keeping the eye steadily fixed upon the facts of nature and so receiving their images simply as they are.”
Like Bacon, John Locke rejected “the supposition of essences that cannot be known” through the senses. This was primarily because he thought this “wholly useless and unserviceable to any part of our knowledge”; the appeal to occult forces, he argued, was like the man
who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on; to which his answer was, a great tortoise: but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what.
But the appeal to occult forces also contradicted Locke’s core belief that the mind was a tabula rasa, a blank slate, which derived all of its knowledge through the senses. “Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge?” he writes. “To this I answer, in one word: experience.”
Locke’s strict empiricism steered him clear of the errors of blind reason, but it came with its own explanatory problems. Because he rejected immaterial occult forces, for example, Locke was presented with a dilemma: how to explain the sense perception of distant objects? How does something about a tree at the top of a hill encounter my eye such that I am able to perceive it?
The explanation for this kind of problem, he decided, had to be mechanical. “It is evident,” he writes, that material particles “that are too small to be seen individually must travel from those bodies [that are seen] across to the eyes”.
Mechanism – the notion that the entire universe operates like a material machine – was the explanation of choice for strict empiricists. It rid the world altogether of imperceptible occult forces and promised one that relied entirely on material objects and their “primary qualities” (such as their size, shape, and weight). Explanations like Locke’s were common. Hobbes, for example, links empiricism directly with mechanism, insisting that
there is no conception in a man's mind which hath not at first, totally or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of sense…The cause of sense is the external body, or object, which presseth the organ proper to each sense…
Similarly, Robert Boyle explicitly declared that his aim was “to beget a good understanding between the chemists and the mechanical philosophers” since the world was, as he put it elsewhere, “an automaton”. Thus in his attempt to explain chemical interactions, he rejected the “occult forces” of alchemy and its strange “elemental spirits”. Instead, Boyle argued, chemicals interacted or failed to interact based on the shape of their constituent “corpuscles”.
In this way, Boyle’s strict empiricism saved him from the error of blind reason, but ultimately led him into another. Rejecting the possibility of immaterial forces, he would never have been able to accept the actual explanation for chemical interactions: electromagnetism.
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