Philosophy of Nature

Paul K. Feyerabend

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780745694764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Philosopher, physicist, and anarchist Paul Feyerabend was one of the most unconventional scholars of his time. His book Against Method has become a modern classic. Yet it is not well known that Feyerabend spent many years working on a philosophy of nature that was intended to comprise three volumes covering the period from the earliest traces of stone age cave paintings to the atomic physics of the 20th century– a project that, as he conveyed in a letter to Imre Lakatos, almost drove him nuts: "Damn the, Naturphilosophie." The book's manuscript was long believed to have been lost. Recently, however, a typescript constituting the first volume of the project was unexpectedly discovered at the University of Konstanz. In this volume Feyerabend explores the significance of myths for the early period of natural philosophy, as well as the transition from Homer's "aggregate universe" to Parmenides' uniform ontology. He focuses on the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity, which he considers a disastrous development, and the associated separation of man from nature. Thus Feyerabend explores the prehistory of science in his familiar polemical and extraordinarily learned manner.
The volume contains numerous pictures and drawings by Feyerabend himself. It also contains hitherto unpublished biographical material that will help to round up our overall image of one of the most influential radical philosophers of the twentieth century.

1
PRESUPPOSITIONS OF MYTHS, AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR INVENTORS

[1] We can reconstruct the development of views of nature in three different ways. Archeology familiarizes us with material products that enable us to draw conclusions about the ideas and knowledge available to the associated cultures. Mythology in the broad sense – that is, the study of legends, fairytales, rituals, sayings, esotericisms, chants, epics, and dreams – enables us to identify and partially decode fragments of bodies of archaic knowledge supplementing those indirectly discovered ideas. Finally, comparative cultural anthropology teaches us how contemporaneous preliterate small societies link ideas, “facts” of nature, social conditions, artifacts, and so on, and offers an analogy to supplement the findings of archeology and mythology.

To collect and interpret their rich and enigmatic material, these three basic disciplines rely on assistance from all of the other sciences, that is, from astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, geography, etc. We need these branches of knowledge to date and analyze material (such as the origin and conditioning of the materials used in the creation of pieces of art, buildings, jewelry, and so on), and even more to interpret the information thus obtained. For how could we understand the astronomical information conveyed in a myth, or the astronomical function of a building, if we lacked precise knowledge of the events happening in the starry sky? Nor does a mere rudimentary mastery of auxiliary sciences suffice. The assumption that humans of the Stone or Bronze Age could have had only the most primitive knowledge of nature may be flattering to our progressivist self-image. But it has little plausibility, since Stone Age humans were already fully developed members of the species Homo sapiens, and it is incompatible with recent research. The environmental and societal problems that the early Homo sapiens had to face were incomparably greater than the challenges facing our contemporary scientists. These problems had to be solved with the most primitive means, often without any division of labor or specialized skills, and the solutions arrived at indicate a level of intelligence and sensitivity that is clearly not inferior to ours.

For the longest time, anthropology and related disciplines maintained a terminological distinction between “barbarians,” “savages,” or “primitive peoples” on the one hand, and “civilized,” “sophisticated,” or “advanced” peoples, on the other. This terminology originates with the fairly primitive evolutionary notions of the nineteenth century, according to which a linear evolutionary development in the animal kingdom (which today is very much in doubt) is reflected in an equally linear evolution of human skills and cultures. Evans-Pritchard has revealed the pseudo-empirical nature of evolutionist theory in very clear terms. The evolutionists proceed by stipulating specific lines of evolution, which are then illustrated in a large volume of material collected in a way that is anything but impartial: “In spite of all their talk about empiricism in the study of social institutions the nineteenth-century anthropologists were hardly less dialectical [. . .] than the moral philosophers of the preceding century” (Evans-Pritchard 1964: 41). The empirical foundation drifts away even further when one considers that the missionaries who supplied Frazer and Tylor with reports often were enthusiastic supporters of the evolutionist theory. The theory entirely determined the questions they asked, the questionnaires they put together, and the choice of material to be collected.² In addition, they stipulated an evolutionary stage at which humans were still entirely natural beings untouched by the blessings of culture. Research has not confirmed that such an evolutionary stage ever existed, and even a priori its existence at any time is quite unlikely. Rousseau, who is often quoted as a witness to evolutionist theory, explicitly rejected the notion of such a stage. He “directed his energy toward discovering not a state of nature without culture but a culture that would realize man’s true nature” (Gay 1970: 95). Rousseau’s prize essay of 1750 on the question “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?” as well as his “Last Reply” to M. Charles Bordes confirm this: “[A]ll barbarous Peoples, even those that are without virtue, nevertheless always honor virtue, whereas learned and Philosophic Peoples by dint of progress eventually succeed in turning virtue into an object of derision and despising it” (Rousseau, Reply: 67). Social unions, social collaboration, and discoveries and their dissemination occur even in the animal kingdom – for example, in the chimpanzee communities that Jane Goodall observed (Goodall 1971).³

The difference between nature and culture (wild versus tame; raw versus cooked; adorned versus unadorned), which even modern philosophers tend to pass lightly over,⁴ was for many “savages” a problem they tried to understand through myths and to solve through rituals.⁵ Occasionally a tribe would fall into the opposite extreme and reject “natural” functions with every indication of disgust.⁶

The opposition between primitive peoples and civilized peoples is to a large extent due to an overestimation of written language. Written language is often, but not always, linked to progressiveness (or greater intelligence). The languages of preliterate tribes often exceed the civilized languages familiar to us with respect to complexity. For this reason they cannot always be learned by adult Westerners (although children might still possess a certain talent to master them). We know of preliterate cultures with accomplishments comparable to the accomplishments of contemporary literate ones. We know that unrivaled pieces of art such as the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed and passed down by preliterate performers⁷ and that the Rabbinical traditions, the commentaries on the Torah prior to the fifth century, were not written down but were passed from one generation to the next by professional memory artists. The Greeks, surely not the least intelligent people on Earth, were opposed to the introduction of written language into literature, and even Plato opposed purely written expositions of philosophical problems.⁸

A situation like this urgently demands the introduction of a new terminology. In this essay I speak of peoples of culture and peoples of reason, industrial peoples and pre-industrial peoples, literate peoples and preliterate peoples. That is, I do not assume an ideal state (which, “of course,” would be the one realized in the West) to use as a basis for my distinctions; rather, my distinctions are based on relevant structural differences between the societies described. In each case the details become clear from their context. Yet even an “objective” baseline study using “neutral” questions remains incomplete and misleading. It does not give respondents the opportunity to use arguments to explain and defend seemingly nonsensical parts of their myths and so leads to an incorrect assessment of the myths and their followers. This is not at all the way to find out about the argumentative skill of indigenous peoples. It took researchers such as Evans-Pritchard, who treated the members of the examined tribes as normal people and thus attempted to use arguments to convert the “savages” to their own Western scientific ideology, to realize that such “conversion” is not an easy matter. Though the members of the tribe at first had no idea of the structure and function of critical arguments, they quickly caught on – if not very enthusiastically – and soon turned rationalism against their very teachers. The arguments were met with smart counterarguments, and it turned out that even the seemingly most absurd form of life possesses or can be given a strong rationalist core, if its members so desire: “I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any I know of” (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 270), wrote Evans-Pritchard about the Azande, who did detailed oracle consultations prior to performing even the most trivial acts. Last, but not least, many of the tribes examined were in a state of dissolution at the time of the study: the “primitive” traces found in them were a result of the catastrophic influence of Western intruders (Lévi-Strauss 1958: ch. VI). What would New York look like if gas, electricity, and fuel were suddenly suspended?⁹

1.1. Stone Age Art and Knowledge of Nature

[2] Evidence for the foregoing thesis in the domain of art can be seen in the astonishing rock images of the late Paleolithic era, which combine in a unique manner technical skills, keen observation, sense of style, desire for novel forms of expression, and ability to quickly realize novel ideas, to form a new whole. They display an economical form of representation, lovely details, and a mastery of isolated phenomena of perspective, alongside a magnificent wealth of colors and impressionistic features. The idea that naturalism is a late form of art that is always preceded by an archaic-infantile stage is thus defeated with one blow. Quite the contrary: the early stages are livelier and follow one another in quick turns (Lascaux), while the later ones, though better painted, are static and lifeless (Altamira). Overall it seems that conventionalism and schematization are later phenomena preceded by periods of stronger creativity. This goes for art as well as science (von Neumann).¹⁰

Paleolithic art has twice revolutionized a long predominant image of Ice Age humans, which was based on a naïve belief in the gradual, linear mental progress of humans from ultra-primitive “savage” – including contemporary “primitive peoples” as anachronistic relics of the past – to highly sophist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Paul Feyerabend, an Historical Philosopher of Nature
• Editorial Notes
• Paul Feyerabend: Philosophy of Nature
• 1. Presuppositions of Myths, and the Knowledge of their Inventors
• 2. The Structure and Function of Myths
• 3. Homer’s Aggregate Universe
• 4. Transition to an Explicitly Conceptual Approach to Nature
• 5. Philosophy of Nature through Parmenides
• 6. Western Philosophy of Nature from Aristotle to Bohr
• 7. Conclusion
• Paul Feyerabend: Previously Unpublished Documents
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement