[From the April 2004 _Harpers_. Originally excerpted from the Winter 2004 issue of _Critical Inquiry_.]
"Perhaps the danger no longer stems from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact -- which we have learned to combat so efficiently -- but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases."
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CB:
"Disguised" or rather "mislabelled" by post-modern zealotry ?
^^^^^ Perhaps the danger no longer stems from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact -- which we have learned to combat so efficiently -- but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases. While we spent years trying to detect the prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the objective and, incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? Entire Ph.D. programs are running to ensure that good American kids learn that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same arguments to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not?
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CB: Why the failure of these energetic philosophical scholars to notice or say that post-modernism repeated the path of Kant and then Neo-Kantians in the early 1900's ? The left arguments against the unknowability of "things-in-themselves" were made then.
Why invent "science studies" rather than ally with "Science for the People " , which dealt with care and protection of people ?
^^^^^ -clip- The critical mind, if it is to be relevant again, must devote itself to the cultivation of a stubborn realism, but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one's attention toward the conditions that made them possible. But this meant accepting too uncritically what matters of fact are. Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore-scratching. Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are only very partial and very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern. It is this second empiricism, this return to a realist attitude, that I'd like to offer as the next task for the critically minded.
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CB: Yes, matter of fact, or things-in-themselves, vs. matters of concern, or things-for-us ( See Uncle Fred)
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Whereas the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact -- which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions -- it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus.
^^^^^^ CB: But didn't Kant deal substantially with "debunking matters of fact " ? How did post-modernism get beyond Kant ? Wasn't it back to the future ?
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After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off, and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses. My question is thus: Can we devise another descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge to an ethos that adds reality to matters of fact and does not subtract from it?
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CB: Sure. With practice (not just "experience", empiricism) as the test of theory, with a practical-critical epistemology. Practice is the test of the correspondence of reality and "description". Fred defines practice as "experimentation and industry". See first, second and llth theses on Feuerbach.
Add "Reality" ? Conclude , a posteriori of centuries of human experience, that there is _objective_ reality, that notion of the crude Bolsheviki "wise guys" posing as philosophers :>)
What a breath of fresh air from Latour, a criticism-self-criticism, and authentic critical, critical, critical philosophy, criticism of The Critical philosophy.
May there blossom many post-modern Hamlets, like this one.
Charles
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