More poems about philosophers

Last June, I noted some poems about philosophers. Here are some more.

Robert Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology makes reference to Schelling, Fichte, and D. F. Stauss. 

Delmore Schwartz was one of the most philosophical poets of the 20th Century. Among his poems that name philosophers are 'In the Naked Bed, In Plato's Cave', 'Socrates Ghost Must Haunt Me Now', and 'For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Hands' (which mentions Socrates and 'knock-kneed Hegel'). Here are more of Schwartz's poems.

Schwartz's best philosophical poem is 'The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me', which, while its epigraph quotes Alfred North Whitehead, has no proper names in the poem itself. Here's an excerpt, in which the heavy bear (the poet's body)

Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,   

A caricature, a swollen shadow,

A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive

Last September, I mentioned Edgar Lee Masters' poem 'Imanuel Ehrenhardt', which mentions Sir William Hamilton, Dugald Stewart, Locke, Descartes, Fichte, Schelling, Kant, and Schopenhauer in its first five lines, after which Masters sets aside these philosophers in favour of John Muir.

In search of 'scientism' in 19th-Century periodicals, I happened upon a dismissive poem about John Stuart Mill. It was said to have been originally published anonymously in Blackwood's Magazine but I can't locate it in that source. Here's the poem as re-produced in the American Presbyterian Review (1871, pgs.  613-614):

His system by some very shallow is reckoned;
  Three facts, or three fancies, fill up his cast;
Sensation comes first, Recollection is second,
  And then Expectation, the third and the last.
    We feel something present
    That's painful or pleasant —
We repeat or recall it by memory's skill;
    What happened before,
    We look for once more —
  And that's the whole Soul of the great Stuart Mill.

At a glimpse of things real we never arrive,
  Nor at any fixed truth that we try to explore;
In some different world two and two may make five,
  Though appearances here seem to say they make four.
    Our mental formation
    Has small operation;
  The mind, if we have one, is passive and still.
    We are ruled by our senses
    Through all our three tenses —
  Past, present and future, says great Stuart Mill.

What we never have witnessed, we can not conceive;
  What we can not conceive must a nullity be;
In a God or a Devil can any believe,
  When the one or the other they don't feel or see?
    A future existence
    Had best kept its distance
  Till there's ocular proof that the thing" s a true bill.
    Any childish emotion
    Of faith and devotion
  Is fully explained by the great Stuart Mill.

Three different stages of changing opinion
  Are traveled by men in this planet of ours;
In the first, Superstition exerts its dominion;
  In the next, metaphysical forces and powers.
    When these two are passed,
    Comes the best and the last —
  Comte's positive laws every purpose fulfill;
    But about the Great Cause,
    That founded those Laws,
  There's nothing in Comte, and as little in Mill.

Yet without any God a religion may be,
  Which in priesthood and power with its rivals may cope;
Which in dead men and women may Deities see,
  And have Comte for its prophet, and Mill for its pope;
    But what's called Right and Wrong,
    Is just an old song;
  Nor tell me of Duty, Good Actions, or Ill;
    Being useful or not,
    Determines the lot;
  So Bentham found out, and so thinks Stuart Mill.

Now, let all men have freedom to speak and to write,
  And let others who differ stand up for the truth;
But I think we should pause as to those we invite
  To make laws for the land, or to train up our youth.
    To the helpless and young,
    You do a great wrong,
  To give them a teacher, false views to instill;
    And I won't by your leave
    Pin my faith to the sleeve
  Of so godless a guide as the system of Mill.

'Scientism' 8 - Early uses (1870s)

Eighth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The English word 'scientism' came to be used in its modern sense in the 1870s. In these early uses, those who are said to be guilty of scientism are not positivists. Instead, the guilty parties are the supposed materialists, T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall. Huxley and Tyndall were not, strictly speaking, materialists. Still, they did take the position that states of matter determine mental states and that the latter appear to be entirely dependent upon the former (so that there can be no independent mental substance). This stance sufficed at that time to secure the designation 'materialist'. Of course, Huxley and Tyndall were closely associated with Darwin's evolutionary theory, a theory which was taken by Huxley and Tyndall to imply a wholly physical origin of animal minds.

Some quick observations about these early uses:

• While the English word 'scientism' may yet have a French origin, its 1870s uses give no indication of a French source. 
• 'Scientism' was at first used primarily to signify a metaphysical doctrine (materialism); its epistemological dimension, the connotations that would implicate the positivists (and which are implied in the passage from Canon Barry [below]), came to the fore later in the 1870s. (The epistemological sense of 'scientism' is prominent in Dawson's 1877 attack on W. K. Clifford.)
• The following passages appeared in semi-popular magazines. Huxley and Tyndall, in addition to being scientists, were populizers of science. 'Scientism', then, was first used in pop-science contexts.
• In 1870, Huxley published Lay Sermons: Addresses and Reviews. I wonder if that title suggested to critics the idea that Huxley championed an alternative religion, which they then called scientism. The positioning of scientism as a religion is evident in the following quotations of Frothingham ('credo of a new religion') and Hecker ('votaries'). [Added, Jan. 10, 2015: Interestingly, in January of 1870, R. H. Hutton published a piece in the Spectator called 'Pope Huxley'.]

In 1871, D. R. Goodwin (a professor in Philadelphia's Episcopal Theological Seminary) published an article called 'Huxley's Writings' in The American Presbyterian Review. On its last page, we find this passage:

If, in the face of the increasingly triumphant exultations of modern scientism, in the face of its sneering sarcasms and insolent taunts, strangely mingled with insinuating appeals to a friendly and charitable judgment, any of the friends of Christian philosophy, morality and religion, are dismayed and despondent, let them be reassured by the patent fact, that with all its boasted progress towards the annihilation of the Christian Faith, modern speculation has not yet got one step beyond the positions of Benedict Spinoza and David Hume. (Goodwin, 'Huxley's Writings' American Presbyterian Review New Series, v. 3 [1871]: 302-333, at 333)

Here, 'scientism' needn't be given its more recent interpretation. Indeed, Goodwin might have taken the term's meaning, strictly speaking, to be no different from that of 'science'. Still, he at least associates the word with its more recent anti-religious implications.

'Scientism' next appears up in an 1872 book review in the Methodist Quarterly Review (Fourth Series, v. 24 [1872]: 339-342). The review is of Martyn Paine's Physiology of the Soul and Instinct, as distinguished from Materialism. The anonymous reviewer remarks that 'with modern scientism the problem is how to account for the system of things without a God' (p. 340). Here, the author seems to take atheism (or at least agnosticism) to be part of the meaning of 'scientism'.

In 1876, Frederick Frothingham used 'scientism' in his contribution to a Unitarian magazine. He asks,

Is it not so plain as to be well-nigh self-evident that the true Radicalism can have no sympathy with that spirit which, however it may claim the name of Radicalism, is not radical, and though boasting of scientism is not scientific,—which identifies itself with, and declares as scientific truths, what are yet, and perhaps for ages, if not always, must remain surmises, and proclaims these as the credo of a new religion?' (Frothingham, 'Our Work in the Light of Some Present Demands' The Unitarian Review and Religious Magazine 6 [1876]: 117-133, at 128) 

Also in 1876, Father Isaac Thomas Hecker uses 'scientism' three times in his review of St. George Jackson Mivart's book Lessons from Nature as manifested in Mind & Matter. The word appears twice on the first page and once on the final page of the review.

On the first page, Hecker writes, 'Yet it is sadly true that the votaries of scientism are on the increase, and that Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, and Tyndall usurp ... a place lately held by Mill, Renan, Strauss, and Hegel' (Hecker, 'Mivart's "Lessons from Nature"' The Catholic World, 24 [1876]: 1-13, at 1). Hecker then dismisses the view that matter harbors the 'promise and potency of every form and quality of life'. (The quoted phrase [unattributed by Hecker] is from John Tyndall's 'Apology for the Belfast Address', Tyndall's defense of a very influential talk given in 1874 [which was ridiculed by James Clerk Maxwell in some poems].) Hecker then says, 'It is evident that scientism is more rigorously skeptical than rationalism or the materialism of the eighteenth century -- in a word, that it is supremely nihilistic' (Ibid.).

Finally, in 1877 Canon Barry rejects the 'scientism' of T. H. Huxley. Barry uses the term on p. 114 of A modern symposium. Subjects: The soul and future life, by Frederic Harrison [and others] and, The influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief, by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen [and others]. Interestingly, Barry applies the label not to the Comtean positivist Frederic Harrison but, instead, to the supposed materialist Huxley:

Mr. Harrison's earnest and eloquent plea against the materialism which virtually, if not theoretically, makes all that we call spirit a mere function of material organization ..., and against the exclusive 'scientism' which, because it cannot find certain entities along its line of investigation, asserts loudly that they are either non-existent or 'unknowable,' is strong, and (pace Prof. Huxley) needful. (Barrry, A Modern Symposium [1877], p. 114)

Incidentally, the first use that I've found of 'scientism' in a literary context is in George Bernard Shaw's marathon 1921 play (90 000 words long), Back to Methuselha, which includes this line: 'On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid.'

'Scientism' 7 - Dawson on Clifford (1870s)

Seventh in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found an 1877 piece called 'Scientism' in a Canadian magazine. Here's a passage from the opening paragraph of 'Scientism' by S. E. Dawson (1877):

Although the word we have placed at the head of this paper [scientism] is not to be found in that repertory of neologisms, Webster's Dictionary, it is one nevertheless much needed concisely to denote a phase of thought which has seized upon the current literature of the day and is imposing its one-sided truths upon the world as a complete system of philosophy. Precisely as the sacerdotalist would compel all belief and duty to bow before his supernatural authority, so the professor would narrow the whole field of truth by ignoring or repudiating every belief and duty which is not commensurate with his methods. Naturally, there is bitter war between these two classes of thinkers, and the scientist, having found a suitable pulpit in the Fortnightly Review, deals out his monthly modicum of denunciation and sneers at the religious faith of others with the arrogance of a mediaeval prelate; and, in truth, considering how short a time it is since the scientists have got control of the leading channels of thought, it is amazing how quickly they have attained to the fullest measure of dogmatism ever reached by their antagonists during the many centuries of their domination. Apt scholars, as many of them are, in dogmatism, they have imitated also the unnecessary offensiveness of by-gone ages, and whether it be Mr. Morley, spelling God with a little 'g,' or Professor Clifford, imputing 'immorality' to everybody not belonging to his school, one can hardly take up a number of the Fortnightly without being struck with some instance of this literary brutality, showing how little the apostle, even of the new evangel of 'sweetness and light,' has been able to charm the native fierceness of the scientific Philistine. When the 'Great Being' — the 'Goddess Humanity' of Comte, or 'Man' of Professor Clifford — (all with capital letters) is duly installed, and society is reorganised on the most advanced principles of Sociology, we fear that the 'hierarchy of science' will be found as intolerant of heresy as their sacerdotal prototypes. (Dawson, Belford's Monthly Magazine 3 [1877]: 903-920, at 903)

W. K. Clifford is the main focus of Dawson's ire. A few pages on, Dawson has this to say against Clifford's epistemology:

It is, however, assumed too readily that, in scientific matters, we believe only upon demonstration, whereas in fact men receive the chief part of their knowledge upon authority alone. There are very few who have gone over the proofs of the heliocentric theory in astronomy, and the reasoning upon which it is based is beyond the powers of many, but yet it is believed contrary to the evidence of our senses, solely upon the authority of a few. Not one thousandth part of our daily working beliefs are actually verified. We are always ready to give faith to the chemist, biologist or geologist, working out results in their special spheres. Professor Clifford himself is incessantly using such phrases as 'Huxley has shown,' 'Tyndall has said,' 'Darwin has taught,' 'Haeckel has demonstrated.' He is willing enough to accept authority and to lend faith to those distinguished specialists, not only in their demonstrations, but in their metaphysical theories upon these demonstrations. (Ibid., at 906)

'Scientism' 6 - a Chicago School? (cold war)

Sixth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I looked in the New York Times archives for that publication's first use of 'scientism'. Excluding an earlier use in connection with Christian Science, the term 'scientism' first appeared in the Times on July 15, 1923, in a story about William Montgomery Brown, an Episcopal Bishop in Arkansas who was later deposed for heresy after he became a Marxist materialist. Here's the cover of one of  Brown's later books:

In 1920, Brown published Communism and Christianism, in which he embraced 'naturalistic scientism in its socialist form' (p. 127). He contrasted scientism, according to which 'only scientifically demonstrated facts count in any argumentation' (p. 91), with 'supernaturalistic traditionalism' (p. 127), which he repudiated.

So, already in 1920 scientism is associated with Marxism (this time by someone who affirms the doctrine).

There's quite a gap between this occurrence of 'scientism' and its next appearances in the Times, which were prompted in the early 1940s by two figures: Robert Maynard Hutchins and Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Hutchins led the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s as its President and then Chancellor. He's known for having pioneered the 'great books' model of education. In his book Education for Freedom (1943), he warned that 'the cults of skepticism, presentism, scientism and anti-intellectualism will lead us to despair' (p. 38).

In the Nov. 16, 1942 issue of the Times (p. 22), a Times reporter summarized Archbishop Sheen's presentation at St. John's University in a report titled 'Mgr. Sheen Assails Worldly Philosophy'. Sheen is there said to have called for 'stamping out the barbaristic barnacles of misdirected progress, scientism, and relativism.' The Times reporter says that according to Sheen, 'the seed of Japanese aggression was sown in the training given Japanese exchange students by American universities that espouse utilitarian philosophic systems.' Sheen is then quoted as saying, 'Pearl Harbor ... had the effect of killing every pragmatic philosopher in the United States.'

The reference to 'every pragmatic philosopher' is intriguing. John Dewey was charged with scientism by Hutchins and by Hans Morgenthau, who met Hutchins at the University of Chicago. (For more on Morgenthau, see the 2nd post in this series.)

Another opponent of Dewey's, the early Chicago-school economist Frank Knight, preferred a term even uglier than 'scientism'. Here's Knight in a 1933 paper:

On the one hand, as Scylla, is the absurdity of Behaviorism. ... On the other side is the Charybdis of Nihilism, perhaps momentarily the nearer and more threatening of the two reefs. Of course, the two are related; nihilism is a natural correlate of "scientificism." (Frank H. Knight, contribution to 'Six Criticisms of "The Arbitrary as Basis for Rational Morality"', International Journal of Ethics 43 (1933): at 148)

In 1936, Knight again used 'scientificism', this time in a discussion of Dewey's book Liberalism and Social Action, where Knight wrote: 'From the standpoint of human liberty, a rationalistic philosophy will virtually begin where scientificism is bound to end.' (Knight, 'Pragmatism and Social Action', International Journal of Ethics 46 (1936): at 235) Later, in the 1940s, Knight switched to the more popular 'scientism'. He used that word twice in his 1946 paper 'The Sickness of Liberal Society' (Ethics 56 (1946): at 94-95).

[Added (Dec. 24): It turns out that William James used 'scientificism' in at least two of his papers: 'The Dilemma of Determinism' (1884) and 'Reflex Action and Theism' (????), both collected in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897).]

So, the popularization of 'scientism' owes partly to three influential authors who overlapped at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 40s. Two of them (Knight and Hutchins) began using the term (or something like it) in their 1930s polemics with John Dewey. The third (Morgenthau) adopted the term later and also applied it to Dewey's views.

Added (Jan. 22): For more about Dewey and James, see post 12.

'Scientism' 5 - Vienna Circle and Thomists (cold war)

Fifth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Already in 1951 we find a Vienna Circle positivist (and physicist-philosopher) reacting against claims about 'scientism'. Philipp Frank wrote:

All of these groups have attempted to limit science to the collection of material and to enforce a 'philosophical interpretation' which supports the 'way of life' which they regard as a 'good' one. For this reason, they will insist upon an autonomous philosophy that will provide decisions where science, in the narrower sense, has reached a stalemate. Organizations like the Roman Church or the Third Reich in Germany [yes, he just did that] have denounced in the strongest possible terms the claims of 'active positivism' or, as Maritain puts it, of 'scientism' to discuss the high-level generalizations of science in scientific terms. We find the same attitude toward 'active positivism' in the announcements of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. They require positively a philosophy which is to control scientific work. (Frank, 'The Logical and Sociological Aspects of Science', Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 80 [1951]: at 28-29)

In his Ransoming the Time (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941), Jacques Maritain had written about 'the pseudo-metaphysics of scientism' (p. 54). Maritain had been condemning scientism in his French works as far back as 1910 (in 'La science moderne et la raison', Revue de philosophie) though I don't think he used the term 'scientisme' that early. According to James Schmidt, Maritain used 'scientisme' in books published in 1927 and 1936.

Étienne Gilson's Elements of Christian Philosophy (Doubleday, 1960) has a section titled 'Materialistic Scientism', a view that, he says, is exemplified by Marxism (p. 94).

Update (Dec. 21): Frank's rhetorical strategy is interesting. Against the Cold War tendency to place scientism in the same camp as Marxism, Frank places scientism (or active positivism) in opposition to this ideology as well as to traditionalist and far right outlooks. His reply is similar to that of Seymour Martin Lipset (quoted by Tommi Uschanov in a comment on my 4th post in this series). It's also interesting that Frank doesn't actually speak in terms of ideologies; instead, he confines himself to claims about the observed behaviour of identified 'groups' and 'organizations'.

'Scientism' 4 - Brunner, Mills, Havel (cold war)

Fourth in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

I've found more mid-20th-Century uses of 'scientism'.

First, there is this passage from Emil Brunner's Gifford Lectures (1947-48):

Science and art serve men best if they remain true to their own laws. They must be 'autonomous'. But if this autonomy is ultimately final it cannot but degenerate into sterile inhuman intellectualist 'scientism' and into l’art pour l’art aestheticism. If however their autonomy is understood as theonomy they keep their independence and yet are united to natural life and ethical principles by a unity standing above all of them.

It looks like Brunner dropped 'scientism' from the book that was drawn from his Gifford Lectures. The book in question is Christianity and Civilisation (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1948). Interestingly, the latter portions (at least) of that book (beginning at p. 85) echo some of the themes connected with other mid-20-Century uses of 'scientism'. For instance, Brunner mentions Comte and Spencer several times and says that liberalism degenerates and leads to collectivist tyranny (pp. 139-140). Brunner discusses fascist and communist forms of totalitarianism and sees both as threats to individualism and freedom. It was in that context that he had (in his lectures) used the word 'scientism'.

'Scientism' appears once in C. Wright Mills' 1959 book The Sociological Imagination:

In the meantime, philosophers who speak in the name of science often transform it into ‘scientism,’ making out its experience to be identical to human experience, and claiming that only by its method can the problems of life be solved. With all this cultural workmen have come to feel that ‘science’ is a false and pretentious Messiah. (Mills, The Sociological Imagination [Oxford University Press,1959], p. 16)

Finally, the mid-20th-Century, Cold War linkage of scientism and Marxism resurfaces in this 1992 piece by Vaclav Havel. In it, Havel says,

The modern era has been dominated by the culminating belief, expressed in different forms, that the world -- and Being as such -- is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit. This era, beginning in the Renaissance and developing from the Enlightenment to socialism, from positivism to scientism, from the Industrial Revolution to the information revolution, was .... an era of systems, institutions, mechanisms and statistical averages. It was an era of ideologies, doctrines, interpretations of reality, an era in which the goal was to find a universal theory of the world, and thus a universal key to unlock its prosperity. Communism was the perverse extreme of this trend. (Havel, New York Times [March 1, 1992])

'Scientism' 3 - Observations (cold war)

Third in a series of fourteen posts (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Some quick observations about the mid-20th-Century use of 'scientism':

• It was used in a more overtly political way by both religious and non-religious authors who tended towards the right end of the political spectrum. 
• The term was generally used to brand its target as a Faustian, secular religion, implying that adherents of the targeted view, though they pretended to superior rationality, had in fact made their own leap of faith. 
• The destination of this leap of faith was in the first instance a 'liberal' ideology, in which a Whiggish belief in progress and an overly rosy view of human nature figured prominently. (This aspect of the term's function fades in the libertarian uses.)
• The phrase was rhetorically convenient for right-wing authors, since it assimilated secular liberalism with Marxism (a more obvious secular religion that was optimistic about history and human nature and that made a great show of being a purely rational science).

The overtones of imputed religiosity are especially clear in the quotations of Foerster ('devotion'), Morgenthau ('dogmatic'), and Voegelin ('creed' and 'dogmas').

Some of the quoted passages seem haunted by a fear of Marxist communism, which is more pronounced in the passage by Polanyi ('soul-destroying tyrrany'). The fear also comes through as a concern about loss of freedom (esp. in the passages from Lewis and Polanyi), with the suggestion in Hayek's 1942 statement that there's something 'slavish' about scientism.

It's interesting to see how the French 'scientisme', originally directed against Saint-Simon and Comte (who really did envision secular institutions that mimicked religion), morphed into the English 'scientism', which was used just before and during the Cold War as an epithet for a broader array of secular views.

My sense is that today, 'scientism' has largely shed its overtly political connotations and is more often used simply to imply that someone has illegitimately applied phsyical-scientific method beyond its proper domain.

'Scientism' 2 - Sample of uses (cold war)

Second in a series of fourteen posts (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

Norman Foerster (1937):

By a belief in scientism I mean a more or less exclusive devotion to the methods, mental attitudes, and doctrines appropriate to science, ordinarily culminating in some form of naturalistic speculation. (Foerster, The American State University: Its Relation to Democracy [University of North Carolina Press, 1937], p.116)

Hans Morgenthau (1946):

The failure of the dogmatic scientism of our age to explain the social and, more particularly, political problems of this age and to give guidance for successful action calls for a re-examination of these problems in the light of the prerationalist Western tradition [p. 9]. ... Scientism assumes that the significance of nature and society for man exhausts itself in isolated sequences of causes and effects [p. 124] .... The quest for the technical mastery of social life, comparable to his mastery over nature, did not find scientism at a loss for an answer: the fundamental identity under reason of physical nature and social life suggested identical methods for their domination. ... There is only one truth, the truth of science, and by knowing it man would know all [pp. 125-6]. (Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, [University of Chicago Press, 1946])

Eric Voegelin (1948):

The scientistic creed ... is characterized by three principal dogmas: (1) the assumption that the mathematized science of natural phenomena is a model science to which all other sciences ought to conform; (2) that all realms of being are accessible to the methods of the sciences of phenomena; and (3) that all reality which is not accessible to sciences of phenomena is either irrelevant or, in the more radical form of the dogma, illusionary. (Voegelin, 'The Origins of Scientism', Social Research 15 [1948]: 462)

Michael Polanyi (1958):

Modern scientism fetters thought as cruelly as ever the churches had done. It offers no scope for our most vital beliefs and it forces us to disguise them in farcically inadequate terms. Ideologies framed in these terms have enlisted man's highest aspirations in the service of soul-destroying tyrannies. (Polanyi, Personal Knowledge [University of Chicago Press, 1958], p. 279)

C. S. Lewis (some time between 1946 & 1963):

'Scientism'—a certain outlook on the world which is usually connected with the popularization of the sciences, though it is much less common among real scientists than among their readers.  It is, in a word, the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it—of pity, of happiness, and of freedom. (Lewis, 'A Reply to Professor Haldane' in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories [Mariner Books, 2002]. at pp. 76-77; Lewis's 'Reply' was first published in 1966; posthumous)

'Scientism' 1

First in a series of fourteen posts (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, & 14).

The use of the English term 'scientism' echoes that of the French 'scientisme'. Both words have primarily been terms of abuse, implying the application of scientific methods beyond their proper domain. Peter Schöttler has traced the French phrase back to the 1840s. It seems to have arisen from disputes between Comtean positivists and more conservative, religious authors. Some of the Comteans embraced the label. Here, for instance, is Felix le Dantec in 1911:

I believe that science ... alone can solve all the issues that have meaning ... and I think it will penetrate to the mysteries of our emotional life and explain to me even the origin and structure of hereditary anti-scientific mysticism cohabiting with the most absolute scientism. But I am also convinced that men posed many questions that mean nothing."  (le Dantec, Le chaos et l'harmonie universelle [F. Alcan, 1911])

[Please excuse my linguistic feebleness, but the above rendering is my Google-assisted translation of le Dantec's French.]

Aided by Google's Ngram, James Schmidt has charted the early development of the English 'scientism', noting a spike in its use around 1920. Schmidt identifies two sources of this increase. One was a 1919 theological book by Charles Gray Shaw’s (The Ground and Goal of Human Life [reviewed in The Personalist 4 (1923): 67-9]). Shaw takes Comte and Spencer to be paradigms of scientism (Comte's name appears more than twenty times in the index of Shaw's book). Here's Shaw: 'The attempt to socialize science or to make sociality scientific has been the undoing of scientism; so that who can deny that Comte and Spencer have made scientism appear silly?' (p. 177) Shaw regarded scientism as being inimical to 'individualism'. In one of his earliest uses of 'scientism' in the above-linked book, Shaw says,

The scientism which now attempts to interpret the world for man had its beginning with the inception of modern thought; but it was not until the science of the organic world advanced beyond the study of the inorganic that scientism gained the upper hand and drove the self from the world of things. How such scientism arose and how it achieved its victory over the self, must now become the subject of analytical investigation

Shaw's writing abounds in ill-defined abstractions, including not only scientism but, also, its putative contraries (among which are 'aestheticism' and the 'spiritual').

Schmidt says that the other source of 'scientism's' 1920 spike was an article by Charles Cestre on the plight of labourers. Cestre's use seems idiosyncratic, though he, too, sees a tension between scientism and individualism. (Here's Part II of Schmidt's history of 'scientism'.)

Among the most prominent uses of 'scientism' before 1950 was that of Friedrich von Hayek. In his 1942 paper, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I', Hayek introduced the term as follows:

To preclude any misunderstanding on this point we shall, wherever we are concerned, not with the general spirit of disinterested inquiry but with that slavish imitation of the method and language of Science, speak of 'scientism' or the 'scientistic' prejudice. Although these terms are not completely unknown in English, they are actually borrowed from the French, where in recent years they have come to be generally used in very much the same sense in which they will be used here. It should be noted that, in the sense in which we shall use these terms, they describe, of course, an attitude which is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed. The scientistic as distinguished from the scientific view is not an unprejudiced but a very prejudiced approach which, before it has considered its subject, claims to know what is the most appropriate way of investigating it. (Hayek, 'Scientism and the Study of Society. Part I' Economica 9 [1942]: 269 [italics added])

I've omitted Hayek's three footnotes from the above passage. In one of them, he cites two French sources re. the use of 'scientisme'. One of them is J. Fiolle's Scientisme et Science (Paris, 1936). The other one is André Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (4th ed.).

November philosophy links

Marilynne Robinson on 'Jonathan Edwards in a New Light: Remembered for Preaching Fire and Brimstone, He Was Actually One of the Great Intellectuals of His Era'.

'The Jewish Exiles Return to Germany -- Jürgen Habermas recalls philosophers and sociologists of Jewish background as returnees in the early Federal Republic Of Germany'.

Philip Bricker's new SEP entry on ontological commitment.

'John Stewart Bell: the nature of reality'. Bell's bio.
 
Debunking pop-science bogosity about Aristotle.

Interesting issue of Historical Reflections (on religion and the French Enlightenment).

At Philosopher's Zone, John Sellars and Kerry Sanders on the 'Return of the Stoics'.

'Remembering Derrida: A Forum by Peggy Kamuf, Gil Anidjar, Elisabeth Weber, Michael Marder and Luce Irigaray'.

The Dictionary of Untranslatables assumes the task of providing a comprehensive discussion of words significant in European philosophy whose "translation, into one language or another, creates a problem" (in the words of Barbara Cassin, its editor). In this it is astonishingly successful: comprehensive entries on hundreds of words, running to 1400 dense pages in the English edition, incorporating the work of 150 scholars in the original French and dozens more in the English translation.

'The most troublesome case is that of the expression “the priority of the right over the good,” which is untranslatable into French, and not solely because French lacks an equivalent for “right,” but also because of English’s lack of rigor.' (Translation by Jacques Lezra)

Added (Nov. 18): From the Partially Examined Life, 'Kant: What is Beauty?'

'Grace Notes: Eriugena and the Predestination Controversy'.

Siris has just posted a list of links: 'Links of Note, Noted'. [end of Nov. 18 addition]

Stellar performance of 'School Days' on YouTube (not a good video though).

Emmylou singing a Neil Young tune: