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September 7, 2003
This article on Spinoza is an important one. On the way to showing the centrality of Spinoza to the development of modern European thought, it makes three points:
1. That we should see the Enlightenment tradition as a universal movement---part of a global Republic of Letters--rather than a variety of national traditions with their own source materials and secondary sources. It is a concrete or nationally clothed universalism.
2. That Spinoza was a materialist philosopher, who rejected Descartes dualism between body and soul and instead regarded the whole of nature, including mankind, as consisting of a single substance.
3. That there is a conection between revolutionary ideas in natural science and philosophy and revolutionary ideas in politics with their opposition to the ancien regime and that the absolute state and support for liberalism or democratic republicanism.
The significance of the three points? They open up the Enlightenment tradition beyond the narrow conception of its current defenders----as a instrumental economic reason that dismisses all difference and criticism of economic science as a form of irrationalism.
So what? Well, it is then possible to get something like this going. It begins by rightly highlighting the flaws of the empiricist understanding of science--the failure to acknowledge the metaphysical assumptions---and moves on. Maxwell says:
"Nevertheless, science as such is not the problem, but rather science dissociated from the pursuit of wisdom, the result of our failure to put right the structural defects in academic inquiry, inherited from the blunders of the Enlightenment. Hence my conclusion: we urgently need to bring about a third intellectual revolution, one which corrects the blunders of the Enlightenment revolution, so that the basic aim of academia becomes to promote wisdom, and not just acquire knowledge."
Wisdom is an old word. It is difficult to use easily with feeling a bit shamefaced, shuffle our feet and look to the ground.
We can say that introducing wisdom opens up the introduction of ethics in relation to science so that we think about the ends of sceince, of what we use scientific knowledge for. Hence we would have an ethically informed science. Maxwell says:
"It deserves to be noted, finally, that it is above all a philosophical blunder – a philosophical disaster one should perhaps say – that has overtaken academia. For it is a blunder about what the overall aims and methods of academic inquiry ought to be. The responsibility to make clear what is wrong, and what needs to be done to put things right, lies above all with philosophers. This indeed, in my view, is the fundamental task for philosophy today: to shout out, loud and clear, that we urgently need to bring about an intellectual and institutional revolution in the aims and methods, the whole structure and character, of academic inquiry, so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to create a wiser world."
So wisdom means adjudicating between the conflicting aims/goals/ends of science that lie buried beneath the standard Enlightenment script of using science and technology to make social progress towards a civilised world. Conflicting ends?
Of course. The standard justification today is improving the standard of living of living through economic growth. Wisdom means introducing the words of ecological sustainablity.
There is no need to feel shamefaced, shuffle our feet or look to the ground.
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