1. INTRODUCTION
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| 1.5.4 The Triumph Of Positivism | ||||
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The
nineteenth century produced an immense proliferation of the methods of
scientific reductionism in the biological and social sciences, as the onset of
positivism led the way to a monolithic consolidation of scientific viewpoints. A
symbolic influence is seen in the figure of Comte
,
and his somewhat idiosyncratic Positivism, which influenced
It is significant that the formulation of
Darwinism and the so-called Age of Positivism followed directly in the wake of
the collapse of the great era of German philosophy. The end of the reign of
Hegelianism, which began with Kant, was very sudden and the history of the
1840’s shows us the drama of Feuerbach and Marx challenging the legacy of
idealism and championing the need for sciences of society. This period produced
a clear delineation of the human and natural sciences, with a challenge to the
reductionist implications of the expanding scientific revolution
. A
kind of amnesia has overtaken science in the stubborn regression, fueled by
spectacular, but misleading, technological wonders, to reductionist obsessions
dressed up in scientific methodological jargon. It is nonetheless true that
Darwinism thrived on this sense of the epochal transition of modernity
attempting to establish the foundations of a new age of secularism. This is not
an unreasonable view, once its tacit assumptions are brought out. The problem is
The earlier context of the idea of
evolution in the generation before
A philosophy of history such as Comte’s
becomes a kind of historicism, to use the phrase of Karl Popper, as it seems to
make a prediction about the future, and this sense pervades the ideological
futurism of the Scientific Revolution. But we may be in for surprises, as that
critic of historicism, Karl Popper, pointed out. And for good Kantian reasons,
the age of ‘metaphysics’ might prove more enduring than reductionists might
think. Man’s metaphysical limitations are themselves evolutionary, and it is
merely an assumption that man is sufficiently evolved to grasp his own
evolution. The irony is that man’s propensity for metaphysics might endure as
long as man, in his current phase of evolution, remains man. These metaphysical
limits are an evolutionary aspect of human nature. The point here is that
Darwinism has been taken as a defining shibboleth of modernism, its overthrow a
postmodern battle against secularism. But the theoretical reserve potential of
the idea of evolution far outstrips what should have been taken as the
operational hypothesis in a dialectical research program, the hypothesis of
natural selection.
It is useful to dwell on the historicism
of Comte, since a progression of age periods, in the classic cliché of many
philosophies of history, will prove a starting point for our look at historical
dynamics. The issue of an historicist progression of epochs might produce
derision in most scientists, who then make tacit assumptions about just such a
progression. Comte’s view of history itself constitutes an ‘evolutionary’ claim,
as a philosophy of history, and the question arises if this progression of
stages is simply another myth of historical inevitability, to use the phrase of
Isaiah
Age periods and the eonic effect
We will soon see the way in which our
discovery of the ‘eonic effect’ naturally divides world history in a series of
three age periods, with the rise of modernity being the transition to a third,
and the Axial Age
being the transition to the second. These
periods should have no labels and have no inherent content. But the rise of the
modern, while certainly keynoting the Scientific Revolution, achieves its
distinction more from a spectrum of contradictions than from the triumph of an
idea. But the significance of secularism remains to be understood. The
scientific master idea of causality is matched by the various liberal
consolidations of the idea of freedom. The keynote of an epoch might be better
the richness of its dialectical spectrum than the triumph of a particular
viewpoint, destined inexorably to its own negation.
In this context the triumph of the theory
of natural selection became a driving force to legitimate an immense passage of
culture across a threshold but in the process upheld a kind of naïvete about
culture, history, and evolution itself. The mechanization of the principles of
biology under the reductionist perspectives of positivistic science blinded its
champions to the sudden contraction of thought created by their own advance.
Just as science wished to take over a sudden narrowing of vision occurred, and
the result has produced many false starts, bogus paradigms in social science,
and the restive underground of puzzled dissenters watching the triumph of
secularism turn into a nest of adders. Many early critics of [i] Neal C. Gillespie, Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979). |
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