Scientism as Philistinism

An article published last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a recent debate at MIT between a couple of physicists from opposite ends of Massachusetts Avenue.(1)

The participants were Harvard astrophysicist Lisa Randall and MIT nuclear engineering professor Ian Hutchinson, and they addressed a very interesting topic: “Can Science Explain Everything?”

Well, can science explain everything? That depends on what we mean by “science,” what we mean by “explain,” and what we mean by “everything.”

By “science,” do we mean the ensemble of methods and theories we have today, or what these might someday become in the future? By “explain,” do we mean quantify, reduce, and explain away, or discover how equally real entities of different qualitative kinds depend upon one another and connect up? By “everything,” do we mean only the material world as it is in itself, or also our experience of it? Much depends on how we answer these questions.

The article is notable for drawing renewed attention to the term, “scientism.” I had not heard it used much lately, and I am delighted to see the word getting more attention. It is a valuable addition to anyone’s vocabulary.

So, what is scientism? American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars summed up the idea as well as anyone.

First, scientism begins with the idea that we are presented with two competing accounts of the world, our everyday understanding and scientific understanding. Here is how Sellars put it:

For the philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world.(2) (original emphasis)

Second, scientism takes this notion of a conflict between the manifest and the scientific images of the world, and accords absolute priority to the scientific image. Later in his life, Sellars came to believe that a “synoptic vision” was possible, but his name is forever linked with his earlier robust faith in what he often called the “primacy” of the scientific vision, and most famously expressed in these words:

. . . science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.(3)

That may sound rather abstract, and even fanciful, so let me bring the discussion down to earth by quoting a living scientist, rather than a dead philosopher.

The famous entomologist and evolutionary theorist, E.O. Wilson, has defined scientism in our day as palinly as anyone may require:

The transition from purely phenomenological to fundamental theory in sociology must await a full, neuronal explanation of the human brain. Only when the machinery can be torn down on paper at the level of the cell and put together again will the properties of emotion and ethical judgment become clear. . . . Cognition will be translated into circuitry. Learning and creativeness will be defined as the alteration of specific portions of the cognitive machinery regulated by input from the emotive centers. Having cannibalized psychology, the new neurobiology will yield an enduring set of first principles for sociology.(4)

This vision of the New Jerusalem glowing—or the gaping maw of Pantagruel, depending on your politics—is completed, naturally, by bringing in genetics and evolutionary theory, the crowning glory of which is Wilson’s own insatiable invention, sociobiology, that will finish off the meal by gobbling up ethics, the humanities, and whatever other scraps the physical sciences may have left on the table.

Wilson’s scientistic vision of the wholesale “cannibalization” of the humanities by physics and biology is by now a common-enough trope—not to say a commonplace—of contemporary culture. Reams of books are being written at this very moment reducing not only ethics, but religion, and literature, and art, and music, and God knows what else to the competition of our “selfish genes.” All these things, they assure us, are “illusions” or “delusions”; only science is competent to tell us the truth about ourselves.

Must we, then, accept that scientism is correct, after all—that science can explain everything?

Of course not. For, according to this line of reasoning, science itself can be nothing more than a kind of dancing to the tune of those selfsame genes—which is evidently absurd. If E.O. Wilson believes what he believes, and writes what he writes, merely because he cannot help himself—because he is some sort of hard-wired, Darwinian robot—then why on earth should you or I or anyone else pay attention to a word he says?

All this talk about reducing human beings to their neurons and their genes ignores the simple fact that it is we who know about them. They know nothing of us. The distinguished novelist and essayist, Marilynne Robinson, has put the matter more elegantly than I could hope to do in her book, Absence of Mind. (I note that “Hamilton’s rule” is a mathematical formula underpinning sociobiology, and “parascience” is Robinson’s term for the metaphysical pretensions of science.)

How are “we” to be located in all this? What are “we” if we must be bribed and seduced by illusory sensations we call love or courage or benevolence? Why need our genes conjure these better angels, when, presumably, the species of toads and butterflies whose ways are said to demonstrate the power of Hamilton’s rule flourish without them? What are “we” if our hopes of ourselves are higher than, or contrary to, the reality by which we are in fact governed? . . . If these ingratiating deceits and delusions were called by kinder names, they might seem to argue for the kind of thing theology calls ensoulment. The so-called illusions, delusions, deceptions, and self-deceptions about which parascience as a project is so inclined to fret make up a great part of the margin between ourselves and the other creatures that we call our humanity.(5)

I have already spoken at some length in a previous post about the notion of spirit that Robinson alludes to in this passage. Here, let me just add a few words from a couple of my betters: the great logician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, and the eminent biochemist and mystic, Erwin Chargaff, whose concept of “base-pairing” provided Watson and Crick with a vital clue in their search for the structure of the DNA molecule.

Whitehead had his own term for what Sellars later called the manifest and the scientific images of the world. He called it the “bifurcation of nature.” For Sellars, the scientific image had primacy over the manifest image. For Whitehead, both were equally real and both equally constituted data that natural science must take into account:

For natual philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and the electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. It is for natural philosophy to analyse how these various elements of nature are connected.(6)

And here is Chargaff’s take on the proper attitude of the scientist towards his subject:

It is the sense of mystery that, in my opinion, drives the true scientist; the same force, blindly seeing, deafly hearing, unconsciously remembering, that drives the larva into the butterfly. If he has not experienced, at least a few times in his life, this cold shudder down his spine, this confrontation with an immense, invisible face whose breath moves him to tears, he is not a scientist.(7)

The humility and common sense of Whitehead and Chargaff are poles apart from Sellars’s and Wilson’s arrogance and triumphalism. But the main thing that separates these two diametrically opposed visions of what science can, and ought to, be is the recognition by the former type of scientist that science is itself a manifestation of the human spirit, and the utter obliviousness of the latter kind to this fact.

A better word than “scientism” for the reductionist vision of the world is “philistinism.” A philistine is someone who is blind to the spiritual side of human existence, who thinks that all that matters is tangible, all that exists, material. It matters little whether the materials in question are dollars and cents or atoms and molecules. The fault in the vision is precisely the same.

In the end, the only way to combat philistinism is to show the philistine what he is missing. You take him to the Met to see the “Young Woman with a Water Pitcher”; you go with him to listen to the “St. Matthew Passion”; you give him an audiotape of David Copperfield; you buy him tickets to The Cherry Orchard; you loan him your copy of Tokyo Story.

Similarly, the only way to combat philistinism in science is to demonstrate that a different way of doing science is possible, one that finds ways to integrate the human spirit with the scientific image of the world, rather than reducing it to something else entirely alien, or explaining it away altogether.

Needless to say, this is primarily a job for scientists, not philosophers. And in any case, it is a job for future generations.

Nevertheless, it is a theme I will be returning to often. For, there is no more important task for philosophy today than diagnosing, and contributing to a cure for, scientific philistinism.

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(1) Thanks to my colleague, Denyse O’Leary, for drawing this article to my attention.
(2) Sellars, Wilfrid, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in idem, Science, Perception, and Reality (Humanities Press, 1963); pp. 4–5. (Reprinted by Ridgeview Publishing in 1991.)
(3) Sellars, Wilfrid, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Harvard UP, 1997); p. 83. (Originally published in 1956.)
(4) Wilson, Edward O., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard UP, 1975); p. 575. See also the same author’s Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
(5) Robinson, Marilynne, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (Yale UP, 2010); pp. 61–62.
(6) Whitehead, Alfred North, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge UP, 1920); p. 29.
(7) Chargaff, Erwin, Heraclitean Fire: Sketches from a Life before Nature (Warner Books, 1978); p. 114.