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Introduction

The Crisis in Science: Where it All Began

The tendency to replace experience with facts about experience wasn’t always so routine. Indeed, scientists used to compare observations about the universe with experience of the universe throughout their research. But this forever changed in 1934.

Let me set the stage. It’s 1934 and we’re in Prague for the eighth International Congress of Philosophy. The Congress, which convenes once every five years or so, reviews the continuing relevance of philosophy in the academy and beyond. In 1934, the Congress had much to celebrate. But what sorts of exciting things ever happen at a philosophy congress? In order to understand the gravity of such a meeting, it is important to back up half a century to re-examine the relationship between philosophy and science. At the close of the nineteenth century (1800–1899), philosophy and science were inseparable.

You see, in the nineteenth century it was understood that philosophy was the cornerstone of the sciences. Most people find this statement to be ludicrous today. We do, however, still have some relics from Philosophy’s heyday. The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), coined in the middle of that century, is still recognized as the highest degree that can be held in any scientific field. It was the philosophers who examined the methods, questions, and areas of emphasis for scientists to explore. Philosophy is how you determine which questions can be asked and how they might be most meaningfully answered. Philosophy is how you determine how to test a method to determine its validity. It was to philosophy that scientists had to look for direction. Today, philosophy is seldom held in such high esteem—a problem that will be explored throughout the duration of this work.

Today, students hapless enough to declare a philosophy major are repeatedly tormented with obligatory and unsolicited advice regarding the limitations this would place on their work-résumés. What might one do with a philosophy degree?! What gets accomplished in a philosophy building?! Indeed, the buildings that house the physical sciences—departments of micro-biology, chemistry, and physics, among others—are the buildings where the frontiers of science are being pushed forward. The physical sciences are where the hard work is being done. Now one finds that departments of philosophy are across the quad (if they even get their own building). This is where the ineffable questions are being asked: what is the meaning of life? Which is is the is that I mean when I say that this cup is red or this earth is round? These questions are answered by thinking through an endless variety of thought experiments, carefully engineered haikus, or until patience for such questions runs out. Then it’s back across the quad to do some real work. Philosophy is where we sort through our own shit, but the sciences are where actual work gets done. After all, I’m not going to think my way through my enormous pile of student loan debt. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—the STEM disciplines, that’s where the jobs are. Philosophy has been secreted away in the humanities to be spoken of only with the cautious skepticism that was once reserved for the sciences (try to remember what happened to Galileo and other “crazies” in the seventeenth century). We have forgotten that philosophy is responsible for the status of science: philosophy supplies the courage, creativity, and criteria for scientific action. Today it gets ignored.

It wasn’t always ignored though. Indeed, modern science—that practice to which we have all piously pledged our scholastic allegiance—is indebted to philosophy. Science is incapable of transforming its own foundations. This transformation must come from without. Philosophy was responsible for the modern scientific revolution, and in 1934 this was still recognized.

Take meteorology as an example. In the medieval era, of what did meteorology consist? Remember that in medieval Europe, only a handful of people were allowed to ask such questions. Indeed, only a select few could read and write. Such education was indistinguishable from theological convention. There are many instances of rainfall in the Bible. Conveniently, there is even a theme that is common to each of them: God is responsible for rain. So here’s the medieval meteorological puzzle; see how you do: It is raining. Why might it be raining? and what might you do about it?

Entire communities gathered behind the learned folks for their understanding of the cause behind the rain: God is responsible. The meaning that the rain (or lack thereof) might have for the people: we have been bad/good and have been cursed/blessed. You can also imagine how such an understanding of meteorology might influence the behavior of the communities’ members: now they might spend an extra hour praying each day; now they might make an additional sacrifice each week; now they might cut out certain other punishable behaviors; and so on.

Present day meteorology has benefited from a number of scientific discoveries. Each of them seem arbitrary or meaningless in their own right, but taken together and with an understanding of how they fit together, they give us a deep understanding of the relationship between atmospheric composition, pressure systems, temperature, air flow, and fluid dynamics.

How do we get from theological interpretations of reality to scientific ones? How do we get from medieval to modern? The answer is metaphysics. Metaphysics supplies the ways by which we may come to know the universe. In the medieval period in Europe, the metaphysical principle was simple: everything is God. My obnoxious neighbor, seasonal depression, periwinkle, cumulonimbus clouds, and pinecones—they’re all God. How do we understand them better, change them, or influence them? Through God. Do you see? The medieval metaphysic is actually quite thorough. No stone is left unturned. By understanding God, we understand everything (and the reverse). Moreover, nothing falls outside of this metaphysical perspective, and if it does, it is necessarily wrong because it doesn’t fit with the primary principle that everything is God.

This changes with the modern revolution, which may be summarized in an equally simple manner: everything is not God, not one; they are just independent things! That is, the world is not made up of a bunch of manifestations of God, but of a bunch of different things: hard things, soft things, organic things, heavy things, light things, highly reactive things, docile things, and so on. How do we understand them better? By isolating each single thing and learning everything there is to know about it. How do we change them? By carefully manipulating them and recording what we find. How do we test them? By making predictions based on earlier discoveries and testing those. Eventually, after looking at everything individually and then in combination, we will know everything. This is the modern scientific ideal.

The shift from “everything is God” to “everything can be understood by scientific fact” is a dramatic one. It changes the way the world looks. It changes the way we understand the weather, the way we educate our children, and the way we understand ourselves. Indeed, it changes everything. Auguste Comte captures this profound change in the first few pages of his 1844 work, A General View of Positivism. The positivist worldview is described at greater length in the introduction to Part III.

The modern shift was a remarkable one, and it cannot be viewed independently from the science that was rapidly developing through it. Alfred North Whitehead has written a very cheerful volume chronicling the development of science and modernity titled Science and the Modern World.

Philosophy allowed meteorologists to consider weather patterns as complicated combinations of things instead of as acts of God. When understood factually, the universe is understood to yield to the impressive hand of modern science. Consider a few examples from the century leading up to the eighth International Congress of Philosophy. Steam engines (1804) make the world more easily and efficiently navigable; refrigeration (1856) extends the shelf life of perishable foods; the telephone (1876) connects people who share no spatial proximity; airplanes (1903) allow humans to defy gravity. The metaphysics of modernity had not only changed the way we understand the world, it had transformed the latter in favor of humans.

In 1924, a group of philosophers dubbed the “Vienna Circle” doubled down on this matter-of-fact metaphysics. Why not? It had already accomplished so much. Before 1924, there were two places where scientists could look in order to understand the universe: physical quantities and phenomenal qualities. Physical quantities are those attributes of things that are measurable and quantifiable: a rock’s density, volume, hardness, and so on—that is, the thingliness of things which can be known in a matter-of-fact way. Phenomenal qualities are those attributes of things that are given in my experience of them: how a rock feels in my hand, how heavy it seems, and what it means for me and from my particular perspective—that is, my experience of the rock. These qualities are not so easily summarized through matters-of-fact because environmental context, time of day, and individual differences can change how heavy a rock feels to me. The Vienna Circle decided that scientists no longer needed to bother with phenomenal qualities. So these were dropped. After all, what kinds of breakthroughs had the examination of experience led to? Philosophers of science had cast their lot with the modern revolution. Philosophy and Science could now skip, arm-in-arm, through the fields of the universe over which they were slowly gaining complete control.

In 1934, it was time for the Congress to convene once again to review all that science—that they—had achieved. As I mentioned previously, the group had much to be proud of and much to look forward to! Indeed, nuclear physicists had been developing the ability to harness the enormous amounts of energy that held atoms together. The very structure and integrity of the smallest constituents of the universe were soon subject to the will and caprice of the scientist. What might they have to cheer about at this congress?

Edmund Husserl was invited to give a talk on the state of philosophy for the Eighth Congress. It would be given during a session titled “The mission of philosophy in our time.” In the previous decade, the mission of philosophy had already made itself quite clear: its mission was to supply modern science with exacting methods to finish its task of knowing everything. Husserl was a mathematician who became a philosopher. If anybody understood how easy it would be to speak of the universe in the exacting terms and objective methods of science—that is, mathematics—it was Husserl. The plot actually gets a bit more complicated than this. With the rise of Nazism in Europe during that time, the Congress was nervous about where their five-star civilization was heading. They were looking for a distraction—something to remind them of all of the wonderful things their scientific outlook had brought them, and not where it was inevitably leading. The mathematician would certainly put it into impressive figures for them.

Husserl was not granted a visa to travel, so he was unable to deliver the paper in person. His paper begins “Science is in Crisis!” We can imagine that this was not what his audience had anticipated. The paper continues,

A crisis of our sciences as such: can we seriously speak of it? Is not this talk, heard so often these days, an exaggeration? After all, the crisis of a science indicates nothing less than that its genuine scientific character, the whole manner in which it has set its task and developed a methodology for it, has become questionable. (1970, p. 3)

In his address, Husserl would carefully outline this thesis statement, arguing that the foundations upon which modern science had been built—the very foundations that had given us the technological marvels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—were in desperate need of review.

* * *

To be sure, much had happened in the last eighty years that has now challenged the nineteenth century brand of modernist metaphysics against which Husserl was arguing in 1934. Indeed, there are circles of continental philosophy and social science that now speak of modernity in the past-tense, recognizing that its impact was impressive but no less limiting and narrow-minded as the medieval thinking it supplanted. Unfortunately, it is my suspicion that the majority of readers never make it that far in the history and philosophy of science. There are social and political reasons for this which I will get to in the chapters that talk about contemporary education. There are many advantages of pretending that philosophy of science ended in the nineteenth century. For one, it allows science to proceed with blinders on, and it gives college students the sense that they have gotten their money’s worth.

This book will examine some of the advantages for the assumption that modernity was the last amendment to science. But above all, it is an attempt to reverse the piece of ontological legislation that was passed by the Vienna Circle in 1924. To be fair, the legislation itself merely echoed the consensus of scientists and philosophers at the time, but this little event gives the travesty a time and place. The travesty is simple, and it frames the structure of what Husserl called The Crisis of European Sciences; it will also frame the structure of this book.

The travesty may be understood as follows: nature is made of processes and things. Processes are complicated systems that are constantly changing and are thus difficult to know in fact. Processes must understand how they work. Things are simple and easy to know in fact because it is believed that they are unchanging. The Vienna Circle eliminated “processes” from the list, leaving only things. The consequences of this are lived by each of us every day.

Before heading into the fields of education, philosophy, and science, I describe what happens when it becomes customary to replace processes with things. Because it is easier to reduce the world to facts about the world, replacing processes with things is commonplace. This is called abstractification. I have borrowed this term from Erich Fromm in his book Sane Society. Fromm, a Marxist scholar and practicing psychoanalyst, describes the psychopathology that necessarily accompanies capitalism. Like Marx, Fromm argues that men and women have become alienated from their own experience, and that it has become perfectly normal to treat yourself and others as though they are things. Fromm calls this psychopathological; Husserl calls this a crisis; I’m simply calling your attention to it.

* * *

This book is really about abstractification, but the word was too cumbersome for a title. You might recognize the root word in there: abstract or abstraction. If you noticed this then you’re on the right track; you defied the odds and managed to learn something despite all of your years of schooling. If in the end you understand the difference between abstraction and abstractification, then you will be able to talk about another person as a thing without forgetting that they are more than this. Indeed, if you understand this, then you can anticipate the chapters that come.

Abstraction is an instance of referring to a process as a thing. For instance, I might call my 2005 AWD Toaster a car. In the South, it’s called a truck. My car has a unique history with me; I have many concrete experiences with it. To understand what this car is to me, you will have to investigate each of these concrete experiences which includes the many trips from Georgia to Michigan, the countless times I have left the windows down before a flash-flood, and the stratified layers of dirt, clay, mud, and grass left there by trail-running shoes. When I call it “the orange car,” I place it into an abstract category that includes a whole assortment of others. You see, this category says nothing of the concrete experiences just mentioned. The abstraction is helpful in a parking lot because you would have some difficulty finding the “one that I have driven back and forth between Georgia and Michigan”; when I say it is “the orange car” then finding it in a parking lot is much easier. You and I understand that I don’t simply mean “the orange car,” but that I still have in mind the many concrete experiences when I talk about my car. It is just that the abstraction is a useful placeholder for now.

Abstractification occurs when I forget that the abstraction is actually just a placeholder. Abstractification is what I do when I replace the concrete experience with the placeholder. For my 2005 AWD Orange Toaster, this would mean replacing all of my experiences with the single thing—“the orange car.” We had just agreed that learning that my car is orange is helpful for finding it in a parking lot, but that it leaves a lot out—most importantly, it leaves out any concrete experience or anything that makes it my car. That is, if you also drive an “orange car” then you know what it’s like to drive my Toaster. Abstractification leaves the concrete out permanently. Furthermore, it assumes that every experience can be understood in terms of things. It assumes that we are nothing but collections of things.

Interestingly enough, the terms “abstraction” and “concretion” seem to have gotten swapped. For instance, when I tell somebody that I study lived experience (that is, concrete experiences), I am often met with the reply “oh that’s too abstract for me.” I never quite know how to respond to this. I can only imagine that it has become unfamiliar to pay attention to one’s experience. Experience has been replaced by the procedure of identifying experiences as things (and then placing them into categories, and so on). Rather than feeling alien to the categories that are used to define us “professor,” “student,” “heterosexual,” “white,” and so on, we feel alien to our own experiences. “Professor” does not capture who I am as a person, and we shouldn’t expect it to. “What does it mean to you to be a professor?” Such a question should be followed by a pause of uncertainty. The uncertainty highlights the complexity (or unfamiliarity) of concrete experience. Instead we say, “I don’t know what that means; that’s too abstract for me.” However, we are often perfectly satisfied with a basic categorization when we meet someone; it is easier to think about them as a thing and not as a complicated process.

We buy coffee from the barista at the shop on the corner. We forget that the barista is a person with a unique biography, and that on this particular day our path crossed with theirs. At that moment, the manifestation of their being is in tandem with the actualization of your own.1 “But that’s too abstract for me.” No, “concrete” is the word that troubles you. The situation I am asking you to consider is “too concrete for you.” This means that you are uncomfortable when asked to participate in your experience. Indeed, we find such an examination of, or participation in, our own experience to be alienating: we are unfamiliar with that which is most personal to us. That’s tragic.

Finally, it is not an accident that Erich Fromm has supplied us with this term. Fromm used the theories of Karl Marx to develop his approach to clinical psychology. Indeed, his construction of the term “abstractification” can be understood within the framework of a Marxist critique of capitalism. A brief foray into this will follow as a first example of abstractification—the abstractification of money. Before getting to that, I will allow Fromm (1990) to introduce the term as he has engineered it:

In order to understand the abstractification process in modern man, we must first consider the ambiguous function of abstraction in general. It is obvious that abstractions in themselves are not a modern phenomenon. In fact, an increasing ability to form abstractions is characteristic of the cultural development of the human race. If I speak of “a table,” I am using an abstraction; I am referring, not to a specific table in its full concreteness, but to the genus “table” which comprises all possible concrete tables. If I speak of “a man” I am not speaking of this or that person, in his concreteness and uniqueness, but of the genus “man,” which comprises all individual persons. (113–114)

To review what has been meant by “abstraction” and “concretion,” let me summarize: Fromm explains that the process of moving from the specific instance (concrete) to the general case (abstract) is an instance of abstraction.

Try this exercise: Draw a square on the margin of this page. Is it a square? Chances are that the concrete figure that you have drawn is actually no square at all. The side-lengths probably aren’t all equal, and the angles probably aren’t exactly 90-degrees. But we can fit it into the category nonetheless. “Square” is an abstraction of the concrete “whatever” you’ve just drawn (or imagined because there wasn’t a pen handy). The terms “abstraction” and “concretion” come from the categorizing procedures of logic. There will be more spoken on the system of logic in the chapters that follow. Now back to Fromm’s quote. He alludes to the biological classification system with examples of the terms genus and species. You are a person. Not many people know you very well, perhaps nobody does. To say that you are a human tells them a little bit, but it hardly captures you. How about your Facebook profile? Sure, this tells them a bit more, but does it really capture you or does it leave some important stuff out? This will be the topic of the first chapter.

Fromm also explains how abstractions alone are not inherently problematic. They are in fact very helpful. He explains that, without them, contemporary civilization would certainly return to a more primitive form. You might find yourself introduced to somebody else online, perhaps even mediated by a social network like Facebook. Rather than having nothing but a name to go off of, the information provided on a Facebook profile might be helpful in determining any potential similarities between yourself and this new contact. Abstractions are useful. But reading the information on somebody’s profile does not mean that you have met them. This is an abstractification. This is what would happen if the concrete social introduction were replaced by the abstract social introduction; this would be as if meeting somebody meant nothing more than exchanging names, occupations, alma mater, and favorite bands. Once again, the haunting familiarity of this kind of social introduction demonstrates the pervasiveness of abstractification. Fromm notes how this process has gotten out of hand in his introduction of the term “abstractify:”

Instead of forming abstract concepts where it is necessary and useful, everything, including ourselves, is being abstractified; the concrete reality of people and things to which we can relate with the reality of our own person, is replaced by abstractions. (114, emphasis added)

You see how fitting Fromm’s term is for the present work? Abstractification is the replacement of processes with things. This even includes ourselves. That is the overarching thesis of this book. The process of being human has been replaced by (that generic category) human being.

Overview

Part I. In order to accomplish the task of demonstrating the deficits of fact-mindedness, I will have to outline the metaphysical framework of how we look at our universe. This is how it became possible to speak about things in fact—that is, without greater skepticism or personal insight. This begins with epistemology, or what it means to “know” something. It wasn’t always possible to know something “in fact,” and before that, you only knew something if it was divinely inspired. Incidentally, both of these epistemologies (theories about knowledge) place the responsibility of understanding outside of the person. The next part will describe certain ontological assumptions—assumptions about whether or not something can or does exist (and what that might mean). To state something as fact requires not only a certain level of predictability in the universe, but also an unquestionable way of making observations.

Part II. Fact-mindedness has important consequences for education. I argue that it has created the scenario where people can begin to take the word of a fabricated newsstand’s regarding current events. Two important things happen between the early years of primary school and the later years of secondary school. 1) Students lose the creativity, curiosity, and unique insights that are their personal way of understanding and interacting with their world. 2) Students become less sensitive to, and eventually completely lose touch with, their intrinsic motivation. These two things amount to a student losing the skills for discernment and understanding, and then the sense of personal initiative in these processes (that is, they completely lose the desire to learn). That this occurs between pre-school and high school is not news and can be seen in the shift from “school is fun” to “school is boring” to finally “why am I even doing this?” Concluding Part II is an argument for why education has proceeded this way. Following the Marxist Louis Althusser, I argue that schooling does not simply result in the loss of motivation of students, but it is specifically engineered to accomplish just this! It requires that we take a long and hard look at who benefits from an education that encourages students to abdicate their own sense of understanding, and to take the word of others instead.

Part III. I will examine the fields in which these ideologies seem to dominate: physics, biology, and psychology. I’m going to do my best to keep these as simple as possible. I will try to demonstrate how, in each of these topics, it has become customary to take its subject matter to be a collection of things. Physics is concerned with particle things; biology with organic things; psychology with, well, more organic things; and so on. Moreover, the reduction of processes to things has been embraced and taught with an almost dogmatic fervor. I suspect that you know this approach (knowing things) quite well—you might even be good at it in some cases. I also suspect that you are intimately familiar with the second approach (understanding processes). This is because it is as close to you as your experience.

1For me, getting an afternoon cup of coffee is tantamount to self-actualization.