Michiel Leezenberg and Gerard de Vries

History and Philosophy

of the Humanities
An Introduction
History and Philosophy of the Humanities
History and Philosophy of
the Humanities
An introduction

Michiel Leezenberg and Gerard de Vries

Translation by Michiel Leezenberg

Amsterdam University Press

Original publication: Michiel Leezenberg & Gerard de Vries, Wetenschapsfilosofie voor
geesteswetenschappen, derde editie, Amsterdam University Press, 2017
© M. Leezenberg & G. de Vries / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2017

Translated by Michiel Leezenberg

Cover illustration: Johannes Vermeer, De astronoom (1668)

Musee du Louvre, R.F. 1983-28

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout

isbn 978 94 6372 493 7

e-isbn 978 90 4855 168 2 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789463724937
nur 730

© Michiel Leezenberg & Gerard de Vries / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019
Translation © M. Leezenberg

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 Table of Contents

Preface 11

1 Introduction 15
1.1 The Tasks of the Philosophy of the Humanities 15
1.2 Knowledge and Truth 19
1.3 Interpretation and Perspective 23
1.4 Unity and Fragmentation 26
Summary 35

Part 1  Standard Images of Science

2 The Birth of the Modern Natural Sciences 39

2.1 The Scientific Revolution 39
2.1a Aristotle and the Medieval Sciences 42
2.1b Renaissance Humanism: Eloquence and Learning 46
2.1c The Rejection of Humanism and of Aristotelian Science 50
2.1d What Was the Scientific Revolution? 57
2.2 The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Classical Natural
Science; Immanuel Kant’s ‘Copernican Turn’ 61
Summary 69

3 Logical Empiricism and Critical Rationalism 71

3.1 Logical Empiricism: The Vienna Circle 71
3.1a Rudolf Carnap: The Logic of Science 74
3.1b The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and Reductionism 79
3.2 The Vienna Circle and the Humanities 84
3.3 Karl Popper: The Logic of Refutation 88
3.3a Induction, Deduction, Demarcation 90
3.3b Testing Theories 93
3.3c Explanation, Prediction, and the Laws of History 97
Summary 99
4 Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 101
4.1 From Empiricism to Pragmatism 101
4.1a The Duhem-Quine Thesis 103
4.1b Willard Quine’s Meaning Holism 105
4.1c Wilfrid Sellars and the Myth of the Given 111
4.2 The Development of Scientif ic Knowledge According to
Thomas Kuhn 114
4.3 Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science: Empiricism, Neo-Kantianism,
or Pragmatism? 121
4.4 The ‘Anthropological Turn’ 126
Summary 129

Part 2  The Rise of the Humanities

5 The Birth of the Modern Humanities 133

5.1 Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of the Human Sciences 133
5.2 Philosophical Backgrounds: Immanuel Kant and Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 140
5.2a Kant: Subject and Object 141
5.2b Hegel: Geist and Historicity 143
5.3 Cultural-Historical Backgrounds 147
5.4 Institutional Transformations: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s
University Reforms, Bildung, and Nationalism 152
5.5 Conclusion 155
Summary 156

6 Developing New Disciplines 159

6.1 Hegel’s Philosophical History 159
6.2 The Rise of Modern Philology 164
6.3 Historiography and Genealogy 169
6.3a Leopold von Ranke 169
6.3b Friedrich Nietzsche 172
6.4 The Emergence of Sociology and Its Rivalry with the
Humanities 174
Summary 178
7 Between Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences: In Search
of a Method 179
7.1 Introduction 179
7.2 From Biblical Exegesis to General Method: Friedrich Schlei-
ermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey 182
7.2a Schleiermacher and Hermeneutics 182
7.2b Dilthey and the Humanities 184
7.3 Psychoanalysis between Hermeneutics and Natural Science 186
7.4 Neo-Kantianism: Heinrich Rickert and Ernst Cassirer 191
7.4a Rickert 191
7.4b Cassirer 193
7.5 Understanding in the Social Sciences: Max Weber 196
7.6 Hermeneutics as an Ontological Process: Hans-Georg Gadamer200
7.7 Conclusion 204
Summary 205

Part 3  Styles and Currents in the Humanities

8 Critical Theory 209

8.1 Karl Marx and Dialectics 209
8.2 Marxism, Language, and Literature: György Lukács, Valentin
Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin 211
8.3 Antonio Gramsci 217
8.4 The Frankfurt School 221
8.4a Walter Benjamin 222
8.4b Theodor Adorno 226
8.5 Jürgen Habermas 231
Summary 235

9 Positivism and Structuralism 237

9.1 Introduction 237
9.2 Émile Durkheim’s Sociology 239
9.2a Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge 244
9.3 Ferdinand de Saussure and General Linguistics 247
9.4 Noam Chomsky and the Cognitive Revolution 253
9.5 Structuralism in Literary Theory 258
9.6 Structuralism and Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan 261
9.7 Conclusion 265
Summary 267
10 The Practice Turn 269
10.1 Introduction 269
10.2 Words as Deeds: J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein 270
10.2a Wittgenstein on Language Games 270
10.2b Austin’s Speech Act Theory 272
10.3 Michel Foucault’s Genealogy 275
10.4 Pierre Bourdieu’s Reflexive Sociology 279
10.4a The Notion of Habitus: Beyond Structure and Agency 280
10.4b Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture: Fields and Capitals 282
Summary 285

Part 4  Modernity and Identity

11 Critique of Modernity 289

11.1 Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postmodernism
 289
11.2 Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and the Philosophy of
Difference: ‘French Theory’ 293
11.2a Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction 294
11.2b Gilles Deleuze: The Philosophy of Difference 298
11.3 Thinkers on Postmodernity 302
11.3a Postmodernism and the Legitimation of the Humanities:
Jean-François Lyotard 302
11.3b Richard Rorty’s Postmodern Bildung 304
11.4 Conclusion: Beyond (Western) Modernity 309
Summary 311

12 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality 313

12.1 Introduction 313
12.2 Gender and Gender Metaphors 318
12.3 Foucault and the History of Sexuality 321
12.4 Gender and Performativity: Judith Butler and Queer Theory 324
Summary 329
13 Postcolonialism 331
13.1 Introduction 331
13.1a Frantz Fanon 331
13.2 Postcolonialism and the Humanities: Edward Said and Martin
Bernal 334
13.2a Said and Orientalism 334
13.2b Bernal and Classical Philology 336
13.3 The Subaltern Studies Group and Its Offshoots 337
13.4 Beyond Postcolonialism: Globalization and Global History 343
Summary 348

Further Reading 351

Glossary 359

Index of Names 383

Index of Subjects 387

 Preface

Philosophy of science textbooks tend to restrict their attention to the natural

sciences, which allegedly represent what ‘real science’ is. In some other cases,
the epistemological and methodological problems of the social sciences
are dealt with as well. Textbooks that cater to the needs of students in the
humanities, however, are few and far between. The present book aims to
fill this lacuna. It provides humanities students with the necessary means
to reflect on the character of their field of study as well as on the place
of the humanities in the world of science at large and their position in
contemporary society and culture.
This book neither propagates a particular view on, or approach to, the
humanities nor gives advice about how to conduct research. Rather, it
discusses the development of the Western humanities and the diverging
views that exist with regard to their tasks, character, and methods. These
views – and with them the very distinction between the natural sciences,
the social sciences, and the humanities – have taken different shapes in
the course of history. By not only discussing general epistemological and
discipline-specific methodological questions but also paying ample attention
to the historical developments that have contributed to the development of
the humanities, this book hopes to be of interest to scholars in the humani-
ties (both current and future) as well as readers primarily interested in the
natural and social sciences.
The book consists of four parts. In Part One, we discuss humanism, the
scientific revolution, and a number of standard views on science, including
logical empiricism and critical rationalism. Several epistemological no-
tions that are relevant for understanding the humanities are introduced,
including Kant’s version of the subject-object scheme, the implications of
the Duhem-Quine thesis, and the rejection of the so-called myth of the
given. Finally, we discuss the historicization of the philosophical view of
the sciences that occurred in the 1960s.
In Part Two, we discuss the emergence of the modern humanities. For
didactic reasons, we take the periodization of Foucault’s archaeology of
the human sciences as guiding: it enables us to clarify the philosophical
developments that made the very idea of the modern humanities or ‘human
sciences’ possible; to discuss how the development of the humanities was
encouraged by social and political factors such as the rise of bourgeois society,
nationalism, and the European colonization of large parts of the world;
and to show how and why the humanities received a distinct institutional
12  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

position within universities. After this, we discuss how the new disciplines
distinguished themselves in terms of their character, object, or methods
from the ones that had already been established.
In Part Three, we present the main currents and styles of inquiry within
the humanities that developed in the course of the twentieth century,
together with their intellectual background: critical theory, structuralism
and positivism, and the so-called practice turn that occurred after the
Second World War. Two other influential currents – hermeneutics and
neo-Kantianism – are already discussed in detail at the end of Part Two
in the context of the questions that had emerged around 1900 concerning
the character and methods of the humanities and the social sciences, in
particular in the German-speaking academic world.
Finally, Part Four discusses a number of issues that have set the tone
of debates in the humanities in recent decades: critiques of modernity;
postcolonialism; and debates concerning gender, sexuality, and identity.
In Parts Two, Three, and Four, we also review relevant developments in
the social sciences that have shaped debates concerning the character and
methods of the humanities or that have supplied the terms in which specific
themes (for example, modernity) have been – and continue to be – discussed.
As a result of this structure, the focus of this book gradually shifts from
general epistemological and methodological questions to topics specific to
the humanities, and to substantial debates concerning present-day humani-
ties research. Philosophically, the book follows two main lines. The first
concerns the way in which the Kantian and Hegelian heritage deeply affected
the humanities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
second concerns the so-called linguistic turn brought about by a number
of twentieth-century authors who – to some extent independently of each
other– reformulated questions concerning knowledge and consciousness as
questions concerning language, language use, and meaning. The linguistic
turn is usually associated with logical empiricism and analytical philosophy,
but a similar turn also occurred among authors in the German and French
traditions.
This book does not require prior philosophical knowledge. Inevitably, be-
cause of considerations of space and accessibility, some of the questions and
answers discussed had to be presented in somewhat oversimplified terms.
Professional philosophers may well deplore this. This textbook, however, does
not aim to be a specialist philosophical exegesis but rather to present and
clarify conceptual problems for a non-specialist audience. Finally, it should
be noted that specific contemporary research programmes and controversial
questions in the humanities are discussed purely as illustrations of abstract
Preface 13

or general themes in the philosophy of the humanities. To the extent that

the authors have strong views concerning such questions and programmes,
they have tried not to bother the reader with them: no philosophical or
methodological parti pris should be read into these lines.
For a number of years, Dutch-language versions of his book, originally
written by Michiel Leezenberg and Gerard de Vries, have been in use in
several universities in the Netherlands. This English-language edition, which
apart from minor details is text-identical with the third (2017) Dutch edition,
was prepared by Michiel Leezenberg. The translation was copy-edited
by Gioia Marini. Sigmund Bruno Schilpzand played an important role as
editorial assistant. Over the years, many colleagues and students who have
used previous editions of this book in class have shared their experiences
and made valuable suggestions for revisions. All of them are hereby thanked.

Michiel Leezenberg
Gerard de Vries
Amsterdam, June 2019
1 Introduction

1.1 The Tasks of the Philosophy of the Humanities

The *humanities1 include disciplines as diverse as literary theory, history, art

history, musicology, linguistics, film studies, religious studies, and philosophy.
The German term for these disciplines, *Geisteswissenschaften, was coined in
the nineteenth century. In the Anglo-Saxon world, many of these disciplines
used to be referred to as moral sciences; nowadays, alongside the term humani-
ties, terms like humane sciences and the broader liberal arts are also used. In
France, they belong to what is generically known as the sciences humaines.
In many universities, the disciplines gathered together under these labels
are united organizationally within a single university section or *faculty.
What, if anything, do these different disciplines have in common? Do they
share some unity at the level of content; do they have a common core? Do
they have a particular object or a particular method in common? Are they
fruits from the same tree? At first sight, the differences seem to predominate.
Academics working in the humanities conduct their work in a wide variety of
settings such as university institutes, archives, museums, libraries, excavation
sites, at home, and, increasingly, also on the internet and on social media.
The topics they occupy themselves with diverge just as widely, as do the
sources they refer to and the tools they employ. For many, it suffices to
have a computer with a word processor, an internet browser, and perhaps a
PowerPoint application at hand, and to have access to a good library, archives,
or museum collections. Practitioners of other disciplines, however, will also
need access to laboratories or to specialized software for their research.
Researchers in the various humanities disciplines often maintain more
professional contacts with colleagues in their own discipline living abroad
than with the members of their own faculty working in other fields. They
publish their work in separate journals, and their books appear with dif-
ferent publishers. Even the languages in which their work is published may
differ: whereas in some disciplines, only publications in English will be
taken seriously, other disciplines do not have this tacit or explicit demand.
Likewise, funding agencies and professional organizations may differ widely
across disciplines.

1 Key terms are marked with * in this book. They are explained on the spot and briefly defined
in the glossary at the end of the book.
16  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

What, then, justifies the use of the single term humanities, humane sci-
ences, or Geisteswissenschaften for all these diverging disciplines? How much
similarity is there between them, and how much continuity in approach can
one find within each of them? Some disciplines appear to radically change
course every few decades. Where, then, should we locate their unity, and
where their diversity? Do they constitute one common object of study on
some abstract level – even if they study quite different topics? Do all of
them perhaps pursue the same knowledge ideals? Or does one argue in
these disciplines in the same way and can one speak of a characteristic
‘scientific method’ that distinguishes research in these fields from, say, art or
journalism? Do the humanities differ from the natural and the social sciences
in their approach, and if so, exactly what does this difference consist of? Do
publications in these fields all have to meet the same criteria, or are there
important differences between them? Can we speak of progress or growth of
knowledge in the humanities in the same way as we do in other disciplines?
The discipline that studies such questions with regard to the natural sci-
ences is called the philosophy of science. It studies the approaches of various
disciplines such as physics and biology, and in particular the ways in which
practitioners of these fields formulate their arguments. Its counterpart,
which studies the disciplines on which this book focusses, we will call the
philosophy of the humanities.
Philosophers of science have a double task. In the first place, they are
expected to paint a picture of science that captures the particular character
of scientific knowledge and scientific styles of reasoning. This should help
us in justifying the *epistemological claims that are traditionally associated
with scientific knowledge, such as the claim that such knowledge allows
for a better approximation of the *truth – or that such knowledge is more
objective, more certain, or more reliable – than opinions based on common
sense, intuition, or hearsay, for example. Claims in the philosophy of science
thus have a normative character and therefore should be assessed on the
basis of their *philosophical adequacy.
In the second place, philosophers of science are required to present an
image of the sciences that, at least in outline, corresponds to what has
historically been accepted as good scientific practice. On this point, the
position of the philosopher of science differs from that of philosophers
working in, say, ethics. Whereas the ethical norm ‘thou shalt not kill’ remains
a meaningful statement even in a situation where nobody actually abides
by it, a theory of scientific method that is not in any way related to the
actual practice of acknowledged bona fide researchers from the past or
the present can immediately be discarded. In other words, discussions in
Introduc tion 17

the philosophy of science should also meet a demand for *descriptive and/
or *historical adequacy.
Among philosophers of science, opinions differ as to the further speci-
fication of both demands. There are also major differences with respect
to the balance between both tasks. Roughly speaking, before 1970, most
philosophers of science focused on the first task, and the history of science
was used primarily as a source of illustrations. Since 1970, however, the
tide has turned. Sketching a historically adequate picture of science has
become the leading concern, and it is from this that the task of explicating
the philosophical aspects of this picture is derived. The turning point can
be linked to one name in particular, namely that of Thomas S. Kuhn, whose
seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), more than any
other work, triggered this shift in focus (see § 4.2).
In other dimensions as well, shifts in interest have occurred. Tradi-
tionally, philosophers of science have focussed on the natural sciences
and particularly on physics, which provided a model of what one should
understand by ‘science’. In recent decades, however, alongside ‘pure’ sciences,
‘applied’ or practically oriented sciences like medicine and environmental
sciences have gained increasing attention. Moreover, the very distinction
between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ sciences has lost relevance in many disciplines.
Practical problems have become a major stimulus for the development of
knowledge and have at times had important theoretical implications. Thus,
the developmental model of science that presumes that we have to develop
pure theories first and subsequently apply these to practical problems is no
longer as self-evident as it used to be. As we will see, this holds even more
strongly for the modern humanities.
Nonetheless, the philosophy of science has retained both a descriptive
and a normative task. Among the central topics it explores are the *styles of
reasoning or *methods that play a role in scientific practice, and the question
of which standards of correct argumentation are worth defending. In other
words, a central topic is *methodology, that is, the study of the procedures for
quality control in the production of knowledge that claims to be ‘scientific’.
This implies directing one’s attention to diverging topics such as:
– the tasks of scientific disciplines, their approach, their relations to their
objects of inquiry, and their philosophical foundations and development;
– the way in which control over scientif ic knowledge production is
legitimized and organized, and the way in which it has been achieved;
– the influence of societal and cultural developments on the growth of
scientific knowledge and, conversely, the effects that various forms of
scientific practice have on society and culture.
18  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Behind these topics, more fundamental questions loom. For example, how can
scientific knowledge be distinguished from other knowledge claims such as
beliefs based on common sense? Can we only speak of ‘scientific knowledge’
when insights are explicitly captured in statements, or can there also be forms
of legitimate knowledge that cannot be written down or even formulated such
as practical know-how or intuitive insights? Or may we only speak of ‘scientific
knowledge’ when statements are, or can be, ordered in a particular manner,
into a system, or are formulated in a specific way, e.g. as testable statements?
Should these statements have a solid foundation, and if so, what might count as
such? What should we understand by ‘truth’, and is ‘seeking the truth’ the sole
or primary goal of scientific practice? Should science be treated as a relatively
autonomous sector of culture and society, or should we instead emphasize its
interrelations and interactions with the arts, education, religion, the economy,
politics, etc.? And should philosophers of science focus on knowledge, that is,
on the products of scientific research, or instead concentrate their efforts on
scientific practice and thus on the question of what practitioners of science
are actually doing in the process of doing research?
We may expect the philosophy of the humanities, like the philosophy
of science, to meet the same two demands and to address tasks and topics
similar to those mentioned above. And here too, we may expect differences
of opinion with regard to the balance between the demands of philosophical
and descriptive adequacy. Similar shifts like the ones that have occurred in
the philosophy of science can be detected in the philosophy of the humani-
ties too. For example, there is a growing interest in the rise of new disciplines,
for example in disciplines that study film or popular culture rather than the
*canon of established Great Works; in the role of practical applications in
the formation of theories, e.g. in argumentation theory; and in the mutual
relations between innovations in linguistics, the philosophy of language and
logic, information theory, and artificial intelligence. Even on a meta-level,
one may discern a shift in the attitude towards the achievements of the
human sciences. For a long time, natural-scientific developments were wel-
comed as self-evidently true and as marking progress. Dissatisfied with the
progress achieved in the humanities and social sciences, many philosophers
then attempted to formulate recommendations and prescriptions for these
fields on the basis of insights from the philosophy of science. Some schools,
like *behaviorism in the social sciences and in linguistics, were developed
in part under the influence of this methodological interference. However,
this has by no means always proved the royal road to scientific success. In
recent decades, philosophers have therefore become rather more modest
on this point, abandoning philosophical advice for descriptive analysis.
Introduc tion 19

By now it may be clear that the themes discussed in the philosophy of

science or the philosophy of the humanities are not entirely innocent or
inconsequential. After all, scholars and scientists who fail to abide by the
standards of a particular discipline will have difficulties getting their work
published in major journals or with important publishing houses, and in
applying for funding for further research, they will have trouble convincing
sponsors that their research is worth investing in. That is not to say, however,
that there is consensus among philosophers concerning the rules for doing
serious research. As with any other living and lively discipline, both the
philosophy of science and the philosophy of the humanities know different
schools, tenacious controversies, and clusters of acknowledged problems for
which diverging solutions have been sought and formulated. Put differently,
one should not expect these disciplines to supply cookbooks one merely
has to read in order to become a three-star chef in the scientific cuisine,
or Michelin guides that tell one where to find the best meals being served.
Their ambitions are rather more modest: like the philosophy of science, the
philosophy of the humanities offers various conceptual tools and frameworks
for seriously reflecting upon the origins and status of one’s own discipline,
and for helping one in formulating one’s choice for a particular approach
explicitly and in a more reasoned manner.
Throughout this book, topics are discussed with a focus on the humanities.
Part One discusses a number of general insights from the philosophy of sci-
ence that have been developed on the basis of studying the natural sciences.
Next, Part Two discusses the rise and development of the humanities in the
nineteenth century. Part Three presents a number of dominant currents in
the humanities that have emerged in the course of the twentieth century.
And finally, Part Four explores a number of themes that are prominent in
contemporary research in the humanities. Thus, as we go along, the focus of
attention will shift from methodological debates to the philosophical back-
grounds of the various forms of research in the contemporary humanities.

1.2 Knowledge and Truth

Ever since Greek antiquity, a fundamental distinction has been made

between knowledge (*épistémè) and opinion (*doxa). Épistémè stands for
timeless necessary truths, for insights into the reality behind deceptive
appearances, and for answers to the question of why things are as they
are; doxa, by contrast, stands for beliefs that are bound to a particular
perspective and that are characteristic of a particular period, group, or
20  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

individual. Authors of classical antiquity argued that serious researchers

should strive for épistémè; doxa is a matter for the uneducated masses or
for talkative minds. The path to truth, however, is difficult, since deceptive
appearances hinder the acquisition of knowledge. Those who aim for true
knowledge should therefore take the measures necessary for liberating
themselves from the received opinion and its delusions. That is, they must
proceed rationally and methodically.
As a result of developments in the seventeenth century that have become
known as the *scientific revolution (see § 2.1), these ideas received a new
formulation. ‘Scientific knowledge’ became associated with on the one hand
mathematical methods and experimental techniques and, on the other, with
insights into a reality that exists independently of the mind; that is, scientific
knowledge is concerned with *objective reality, not with *subjective impressions.
Science should thus tell us what the objective *facts are and what relations exist
between different phenomena and events. Put differently, science should aim
for statements that are true according to the definition of *truth formulated
by Aristotle: ‘To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false,
while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true’.2 Put
differently: scientific statements should correspond with the facts.
Initially, a rather oversimplified view as to how to reach this goal predomi-
nated. By systematically collecting simple and evidently true statements
and by combining these in a careful and correct manner into ever-larger,
more complex wholes, it was believed that one would slowly but inevitably
construct a well-founded edifice of knowledge. The evidently true statements
would be acquired by deriving our knowledge from a pure source, and
subsequently, this information had to be processed with impeccable means.
By ‘pure source,’ the pioneers of the scientific revolution meant pure
*sensory experience; hence, one speaks of *empirical science. This experi-
ence is to be acquired through controlled or controllable observations, or
experiments, and should be systematically freed from subjective influences.
One can eliminate such influences by observing a number of rules. The first
requirement is that, in reporting one’s observations one avoids as much as
possible any vagueness and/or ambiguity. Hence, researchers are required to
report their sensory experience in a plain but detailed manner; accordingly,
there is no place in science for rhetorical elegance or eloquence. Moreover,
one’s findings should preferably be presented in a quantitative form.
A second requirement is that the experience we are talking about can
be *reproduced. This demand is motivated in the first place by a juridical

2 Aristotle, Metaphysics, book IV (1011b25).

Introduc tion 21

metaphor: one can only speak of a ‘fact’ if the event or phenomenon has
been observed by several reliable witnesses. Moreover, this view is informed
by the idea that truth is universal. If a factual statement is ‘true’, it is true
for everybody and at all times and places. Researchers who claim to report
‘facts’ should therefore be prepared, so to speak, to let others watch over
their shoulder. Hence, the manner in which experiences are acquired – that
is, the research method employed – should be made explicit. Anyone should
in principle be able to produce the same results: that is, under the conditions
given, they must have the same sensory experience. Thus, science becomes a
self-correcting process. If a researcher reports facts that cannot be observed
by others, he has apparently been misled by illusions. Only what passes the
test of collegial inspection and critique escapes the sphere of subjective
beliefs and provides a basis for objective knowledge.
Likewise, particular measures must be taken in the subsequent processing
of the sensory experiences that form the basis of scientific knowledge. We
will have to make sure that no untruths are introduced in the process. Put
differently, we must ensure that we only draw true conclusions from true
premisses. The ‘impeccable means’ suitable to this purpose are supplied
in the first place by logic and mathematics, as these meet the relevant
demands. Other measures have to be taken as well, however. For example,
since scientific debates are supposed to increase the purity of argumentation,
ad hominem arguments are out. After all, we should be concerned with the
matter at hand, not with the persons involved. Therefore, scientific practice
insists on rigour and the control of one’s emotions.
Traces of the beliefs about natural science developed in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries can still be found in many contemporary disci-
plines, where separate courses are taught on ‘methods and techniques’ that
pay explicit attention to measuring instruments, statistical data process-
ing, and methodologically pure argumentation. Moreover, it has found an
enduring expression in the specific style in which scientific articles are
supposed to be written and in the manners of scientific communication.
In other words, serious scientific practice presupposes a number of specific
*norms and values.
Whenever these norms and values are respected, we are told, we will be
able to contribute to the growth of knowledge, that is, to the progressive
mapping of the world. Once we possess a reliable map, we can subsequently
use this map to find our bearings. A good map, after all, enables us to make
predictions; it tells us where we will end up if we move in a particular direc-
tion. Thus, we can also employ such maps for determining how particular
effects or phenomena can be brought about. The question of whether or not
22  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

these effects are desirable or whether the effects aimed for are worth the
effort in view of the road to be taken, however, is a question that maps cannot
answer for us. On this view, science can only inform us about the means for
action but not about its aims. Put differently, scientific knowledge is *value-
free. Thus, the early twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein
concludes: ‘We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered,
the problems of life have still not been touched at all.’3
Although the humanities have to an important extent developed along
their own lines, as we shall see, they too reflect the influence of these notions
and ideals derived from the natural sciences. One example of this influence
is Time on the Cross, a 1974 historical-economic inquiry into slavery on
plantations in the southern United States by R.W. Fogel and S.L. Engerman.
The publication of this book created quite a stir, since Fogel and Engerman’s
findings were hard to reconcile with the conventional image of the slave
economy. That image included the belief that slaves lived under extremely
poor material conditions and that agricultural production based on slavery
was economically not efficient. According to Fogel and Engerman, the
facts showed something else: a model-based and statistical inquiry into
the housing, alimentation, and health of slaves and the management of
the plantations where they were employed revealed that the conventional
image was incorrect. Although there were undoubtedly exceptions, they
argued, slaves generally lived under better circumstances than is often
thought. In the period immediately following the abolition of slavery, they
were even better off than part of the white population. Likewise, they
calculated that agriculture in the South was 35% more efficient than that
of the Northern states, partly as a result of slave labour. Hence, Fogel and
Engerman concluded, the conventional image of American slavery should
be rejected as a myth, that is, as a survival of beliefs found in the ideological
writings of proponents of the abolition of slavery, which cannot pass the
test of scientific critique.
Fogel and Engerman did not deny that there are good moral arguments
against slavery, but the economic and sociological arguments adduced by
abolitionists are invalid, they claimed. However, Fogel and Engerman not
only had something to say to those who based their views on an ideological
image of slavery; they also had a methodological lesson for historians.
The latter should abandon their traditional literary forms and acquire the
techniques required for processing extensive data sets in a serious – i.e.
statistical and model-based – manner.

3 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (London 1922), 6.52 (emphasis added).

Introduc tion 23

The publication of Fogel and Engerman’s book was welcomed as a major

scientific achievement. Given the book’s topic and tenets, it should not come
as a surprise that the non-scientific press also paid ample attention to the
book. ‘If a more important book about American history has been published
in the last decade,’ a reviewer wrote in The New York Times, ‘I don’t know
about it.’4 Two years later, however, the tide had turned completely. This
change was caused neither by traditional historians nor by commentators
who contested the book’s political implications. Rather, criticism came from
colleagues who did have a command of the techniques to which Fogel and
Engerman appealed. On closer inspection, various errors in their interpreta-
tion of data and in their statistical processing of data were detected, as well as
numerous hidden – and debatable – assumptions. Thus, the attempt to avoid
ideological bias and historical error by explicit methods and technological
refinements merely appears to have led to a new kind of distortions and
errors, one that is more difficult to trace by non-specialists. The ‘hard facts’
the authors claimed to have uncovered thus turned out to have been illusions.
What lessons can or should we draw from this? That the kind of his-
toriography based on natural-scientific methods proposed by Fogel and
Engerman leads nowhere? Or that, on the contrary, the kind of historiography
represented by Time on the Cross deserves support and further elaboration,
since it shows that whenever authors claim to use accurate methods and
achieve precise results, errors can be effectively exposed, whereas such
criticism is impossible when only vague and non-quantitative statements
are involved? Or that the ideals of objectivity, truth, and facts that guided
Fogel and Engerman’s study have been shown to be overly naive? Or that
proposing such methods for the historical sciences turns them into an issue
for debate among experts, thus making it impossible for the public to check
politically relevant conclusions? Or …
As soon as we enter into debates about these types of questions, we are
venturing into the territory of the philosophy of the humanities.

1.3 Interpretation and Perspective

A venerable tradition rooted in the natural sciences thus argues that the
primary task of science is to find the truth. This allows us, in principle, to
rate scientific statements according to the degree to which they approach

4 P. Passel (1974) ‘An Economic Analysis of that Peculiarly Economic Institution.’ New York
Times Book Review (April 28): 4.
24  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

the truth. Scientific research thus automatically acquires the character of

a competition over truth claims. If Fogel and Engerman are correct, others
are mistaken; if Fogel and Engerman’s critics are right, the claims made by
the authors of Time on the Cross do not correspond with the facts. After all,
when a new statement cannot be logically reconciled with our earlier views,
we face two options: either we decide that the new assertion is closer to the
truth and that we should thus drop our earlier views; or we conclude that
our earlier views approach the truth more closely, in which case we must
reject the new claim.
But does all academic work have this character? For much of the humani-
ties, this appears not to be the case. In the humanities, it is not so much
‘truth’ that is sought after, but rather explications of the ‘meaning’ of texts,
works of art, or cultural artefacts. This introduces rather different relations
between rivalling claims. After all, a new interpretation of a novel need not
contradict earlier ones: both may very well coexist alongside each other
because they study the work under investigation from different *perspectives.
Scholars giving a psychoanalytical interpretation of Hamlet need not fear
that literary-historical, or a Marxist readings refute their understanding
of Shakespeare’s play.
Important developments in the humanities often do not consist of uncover-
ing new facts, but of introducing new perspectives or new *techniques of
interpretation that do not necessarily exclude or contradict existing interpreta-
tions. Whereas striving to discover the truth is an activity with a clear end
goal – the Truth – interpretation is in principle a never-ending undertaking.
When interpreting something, we are not concerned with recovering the
uniquely correct hidden meaning of a literary work of art, for example, but
rather with adding new meanings to already existing readings. At stake is not
a competition over truth claims but instead a proliferation of interpretations.
With this observation, however, the philosophically relevant questions
are only beginning. For what should we understand by ‘interpretation’
and ‘meaning’? What role do the text, the author, and the reader play here,
and what are the roles of the traditions and contexts in which a work is
created and received? Is interpretation subjective, or can we also formulate
objectively valid norms and standards? Are there interpretative perspectives
we may reject as irrelevant? And under what circumstances can one speak
of incorrect interpretations or over-interpretations of a work? And exactly
what is the difference between a new scholarly interpretation of a work and
a new artistic interpretation by an artist, say, that elaborates on themes and
elements from the work of their predecessors? What do we hope to achieve
with a novel interpretation in the first place?
Introduc tion 25

In Interpretation and Overinterpretation, Umberto Eco (1932-2016) – the

author of The Name of the Rose (a novel in which the breaking of secret
codes plays an important role) – objects to one specific interpretation of
the work of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) which argued that
Dante was both a Freemason and a Rosicrucian. These are remarkable
assertions indeed since as far as we know, the ideas of the Rosicrucians
were only developed from the early seventeenth century on, and the first
Freemasonic lodges were not established until the eighteenth century. This
interpretation would thus shed new light not only on Dante’s works but also
on the history of both societies.
The author trying to achieve this remarkable feat, Gabriele Rossetti,
claimed he had found sufficient evidence for his hypothesis in Dante’s texts.
These texts, Rossetti argued, contain a number of symbols and references
to practices specific to Freemasons and Rosicrucians. Thus, Rossetti found
a symbol that he claimed harks back to a common predecessor of both
Freemasons and Rosicrucians – a rose with a crucifix inside, underneath
which a pelican is depicted feeding its young with the flesh it tears from its
own chest. These different elements do indeed occur in Dante’s text. They
never occur jointly, however, but are spread out over the text as a whole.
In Rossetti’s view, Dante has hidden the symbol under consideration in his
text, and only the initiates who have deciphered the secret code can find
the connection between them, he argued. Subsequently, he went to great
lengths to suggest that there is indeed an – indirect – connection between
these different parts of the symbols involved.
Eco is not convinced. We need not be surprised, he argues, to find roses,
crucifixes, and the occasional pelican in Dante. In the Christian mystical
tradition, all these symbols occur frequently. The auxiliary constructions
suggested by Rossetti to show the connections between these elements,
however, are rather shaky. Although Dante is known to be the first author to
have emphasized that his poetry carries a non-literal meaning, we appear to
have hit upon an interpretation that has gone astray, one that does violence
to both text and author. In other words: a text is not interpreted here, but
used or – to put it less diplomatically – abused.
But what considerations can lead us to such a conclusion? What kind
of arguments can support an acceptable interpretation? Does ‘intuitive
plausibility’ provide sufficient ground for interpreting something? If the
natural sciences were to employ intuition as a criterion, we would prob-
ably still believe that the sun revolves around a flat earth today. Is it then
sufficient to refer to the author’s *intentions? In many cases, we do not
know these intentions independently or only from or through the text; or
26  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

we would have to admit that a text may have meanings that had not been
foreseen by its author. But if we reject certain interpretations as the product
of ‘over-interpretation’, do we not implicitly presuppose that there is in fact
such a thing as a correct or true but possibly hidden meaning obscured in a
text, namely ‘What the Text Really Says’? But if we set out in search of this
meaning, do we not risk falling into the same trap as Rossetti did? Is it really
possible to strictly draw Eco’s distinction between interpreting, using, and
abusing a text? Or should we also in this context follow the adage that the
later Wittgenstein had formulated for the meaning of words: ‘the meaning
of a word is its use in the language’?5 Is a good interpretation merely a
redescription of a text that we can fruitfully use? Should we perhaps then
conclude that Eco rejects Rossetti’s interpretation of Dante because he has
no use for it? Or is such a conclusion too cynical?
Here, too, it emerges that as soon we engage in such discussions, we
venture into the territory of the philosophy of the humanities.

1.4 Unity and Fragmentation

If we return to the question of what binds the various humanities dis-

ciplines together in the face of their apparent diversity, it is tempting to
answer this in terms of a common object of study, which differs from the
objects of investigation of the natural and social sciences. The German
term, Geisteswissenschaften, suggests the seemingly obvious answer: the
humanities are all concerned with the products of the human mind (Geist).
Put in somewhat less solemn terms, they study *culture, or aspects or parts
of culture. Instead of ‘sciences of the mind’, we could then speak of ‘cultural
studies’. There is much to be said for such a position, even though the term
‘cultural studies’ sounds odd or awkward for humanities disciplines like
linguistics and philosophy, and perhaps even out of place to the ears of, say,
theologians. Nonetheless, this answer is informative only if we can explain
more precisely what we mean by ‘culture’ or ‘the mind.’
If, for the time being, we stick to the more or less everyday notion of
culture as including literature, music, and the visual arts, then we may
already note that traditionally, the humanities have tended to pay attention
to only a specific part of culture. For a long time, scholarship focused on
the *canon, or on what is usually called ‘high culture’ – that is, what are
conceived as the greatest achievements in the arts, the art works produced

5 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 43.

Introduc tion 27

for the nobility, and, later, the bourgeois elites in Western societies. In the
humanities, scholarly interest in popular media like film, television, pop
music, and non-literary fiction is relatively recent and still controversial.
Not that long ago, scholars studying Donald Duck, Madonna, or The Lord of
The Rings instead of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, or Der Ring des Nibelungen
would have been openly accused by colleagues of searching for easy topics of
investigation. Perhaps the works of the Bard and Wagner were too difficult for
them? In academia, received opinion held for a long time that scholars should
concern themselves with the highest peaks of human cultural achievement
and not with vulgar trash. In order to distinguish themselves from these
conventional and ‘old-fashioned’ humanities, researchers studying popular
culture with the help of social-theoretical and philosophical concepts and
techniques of analysis often chose *cultural studies rather than ‘humanities’
as a label for their field of study.
Nonetheless, the curricula of the average history, musicology, or literature
department speak volumes. The emphasis is on ‘high culture’ rather than on
what is popular or fashionable. In spite of various theoretical frameworks
that undermine or relativize the distinction between high and low culture,
many humanities disciplines still show a marked preference for the higher,
the complex, and the elitist. Ironically, this also holds for much work in
the field of cultural studies, where insights into popular culture are often
phrased in arcane, high-flying prose accessible only to the initiates.
History as a discipline is, at least in part, an exception to this tendency.
Although for a long time, attention was focused almost exclusively on the
achievements of Great Men, more recent historians have studied the history
of mass movements and of the everyday lives of the many who did not
become king, general, or minister. Moreover, many historians do not (or
not exclusively) publish their work in the form of articles but rather as
books, which, moreover, have a narrative rather than an argumentative or
analytical style. As a result, many of these studies are also accessible to a
larger audience.
A second way to identify the elements common to the different humanities
disciplines would be to look for a specific and common method or approach.
As we have seen already, however, this suggestion is problematic as well.
Linguists employ very different techniques from historians and literary
scholars, as becomes immediately clear from even a cursory inspection of
their publications. The sources or materials for study are no less different.
Where many linguists proceed from the intuitions of native language users,
historians and others have to use archival materials. Even within individual
disciplines, there may already be considerable variation. For example, if one
28  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

compares a philological and a deconstructivist analysis of, say, an English

novel or a Greek tragedy, one will encounter fundamental differences from
the very first page, concerning not only the question of what exactly should
be studied but also the style of argumentation and the methods and norms
for good research.
What, then, constitutes the unity of the humanities? In order to be able
to answer this question, we will have to look at the birth of these sciences.
We will do so in more detail in Part Two below, where it will emerge that,
although topics like history, language, and music had obviously also been
studied in earlier times, the humanities as we know them today are of
remarkably recent origin – they were not to emerge until the early nineteenth
century, primarily in Western and Central Europe. The social sciences,
including sociology and anthropology, emerged even later, towards the
end of that century.
The thesis that the humanities have a relatively recent and geographically
specific origin may raise an immediate and obvious objection: haven’t
products of the human mind or culture been studied since long before the
Common Era and also outside Europe? For example, already in the fifth
century BCE, the Indian linguist Pânini had formulated the grammatical
rules of classical Sanskrit; the Chinese philosopher Confucius had already
established a canon of classical Chinese poetry in the fourth century BCE;
and among the ancient Greeks, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) had already carried
out literature-theoretical research. If the latter’s discussion in the Poetics
does not qualify as humanities research, then what does? And isn’t the
Renaissance known precisely for its new, intensive interest in (classical)
literature and the arts and for the rise of humanism, which put man at
centre stage and propagated the historicizing study and critique of texts?
Up to a point, all that is correct; but ancient Chinese, Indian, and Greek
scholars and Renaissance humanists would probably have found the very
idea of Geisteswissenschaften as bizarre as we do the ancient theory of
humours. Aristotle had no distinct science of man, let alone of the human
mind. And during the Renaissance, literature and the arts were objects of
admiration rather than research. Individual works of art were not seen as
expressions of a particular, national, or time-bound culture – in fact, the
very concept of ‘culture’ in this modern sense was simply not available.
In order for us to be able to speak of the humanities, Geisteswissenschaften,
or cultural studies in the modern sense, we first need to make a strict and
fundamental distinction between man and nature on the one hand, and
between man and the supernatural on the other. But neither Aristotle nor
the early humanists made such distinctions. For them, humans occupied at
Introduc tion 29

most a special place within the cosmos or within creation, but they did not
display any radical discontinuity with it. In the classification of things, the
difference between human and non-human things was no more important
than that between living and inanimate matter, or between material and
spiritual substances. All that was to change around 1800.
Until the early nineteenth century, there was no distinct space for
knowledge concerning man, mind, or culture in the ordering of knowledge,
that is, in the classification of the sciences. Put differently, Aristotle had a
completely different *classification of the sciences than the modern one, and
the various humanities disciplines did not form a coherent unit within it.
Aristotle divides the sciences into the *theoretical, the *practical, and the
*poetic sciences. The theoretical sciences are concerned with pure knowledge
or contemplation; the practical sciences with action; and the poetic sciences
with the making (Greek: poièsis) of things, in particular of works of art.
Moreover, Aristotle distinguishes the *organon, or auxiliary disciplines such
as logic and rhetoric, which examine questions like the truth of statements,
the validity of arguments, and the persuasive power of speech.
In this classification, the modern-day humanities is not one united whole
either in terms of method or object of study. Aristotle would have included
part of modern-day philosophy and theology among the theoretical sciences;
ethics, law, and political philosophy would have been part of the practical
sciences; and literary theory, musicology, and art history would have belonged
to the poetic sciences. He would probably have classified logic and parts of
modern linguistics such as syntax, semantics, and argumentation theory as
organon sciences, that is, as propaedeutic for, that is, an introduction to, the
‘real,’ or substantial, sciences. For Aristotle, history does not even qualify as a
science at all because it deals with individual persons and events rather than
general laws or patterns. Things become even more complicated with new,
interdisciplinary fields such as film science and gender studies, which would
have been even more difficult for Aristotle to classify, since in these fields the
aspects of creating, acting, and contemplating are often difficult to pry apart.
In the Middle Ages, the curriculum of higher education, comprising seven
so-called ‘liberal arts’ (*artes liberales), did not have a clearly delineated
subfield for the humanities either. It consisted of two parts, the propaedeutic
*trivium and the *quadrivium. The former consisted of grammar, dialectic
(applied logic, or what would nowadays be called ‘argumentation theory’),
and rhetoric; and the latter consisted of music, arithmetic, geometry, and
astronomy. Humanities disciplines such as philology and historiography thus
had no distinct place in the Medieval curricula. Moreover, unlike today, music
theory was seen as a branch of mathematics rather than the humanities.
30  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Margarita Philosophica (1508): The stages of Medieval higher education

The thesis that the humanities did not arise until the early nineteenth
century and specifically in Western Europe poses a second, more abstract
problem as well. Why did those who studied literature, history, or the arts
before the nineteenth century or elsewhere in the world not see that their
activities had a unity that could be captured with the label humanities? Why
were they blind to the topics that would be studied after the year 1800? Was
this merely a matter of the short-sightedness of all the scholars living before
1800, or was man, as the central object of study for the humanities, simply
not present yet? Can we perhaps say, as the French philosopher and historian
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) did, that before 1800 there were humans but
Introduc tion 31

that ‘man’ did not yet exist? Could perhaps the birth of the humanities be
paired with the realization – or should we say discovery or invention – of
a new entity, identified as ‘man’, ‘human spirit’, ‘mind’, or ‘culture’, which
only now could become the object of scientific investigation?
This thesis is not as bizarre as it may seem at first sight. Indeed, there have
been a number of philosophical, institutional, and societal developments that
have made it possible for ‘man’ or ‘spirit’ to become the object of scientific
knowledge. In that sense, we can say that before the nineteenth century,
‘man,’ ‘spirit’, and ‘culture’ as studied in the modern humanities did not exist.
Before the nineteenth century, what we would nowadays call the humanities
did not have a distinct place in the whole of knowledge. Around 1800, a kind
of intellectual revolution occurred which in many respects is comparable
to the (natural) scientific revolution that took place in the seventeenth
century. We will describe this ‘humanities revolution’ in chapter 5.
How can a profound change in (philosophical) thinking form the basis
of the variety of disciplines we nowadays label the humanities? The answer
to this question may be roughly formulated as follows: new philosophical
frameworks and ideas made the humanities possible; societal develop-
ments made them desirable; and eventually, institutional changes made
them real. They were realized in the university reforms introduced by the
German philosopher, linguist, and government administrator Wilhelm
von Humboldt (1767-1835), who set the task of the university as that of sup-
plying future elites with *Bildung, that is, a broad intellectual formation
that involved both factual knowledge and the capacity to judge and act.
This was to be achieved by confronting the future elites with the brilliant
cultural – canonical – achievements from the past. Proceeding from the
thought that a nation-state has a shared culture that is worth passing on
to new generations and should therefore be researched and taught, Von
Humboldt realized both a humanist ideal and a political programme (see
§ 5.4 for more details). Put differently, the rise of the modern humanities
was closely linked to the birth of the modern nation-state. Moreover, as
we shall see, modern forms of humanities knowledge developed in close
interaction with the European colonization of large parts of the world.
For centuries, European universities had hardly changed in structure.
They were commonly organized into four faculties: philosophy, medicine, law,
and theology. They were primarily if not exclusively institutions for teaching,
and research was conducted not in the universities but in *academies.
In these academies, the most important ones of which were established
already in the seventeenth century, scholars and scientists gathered who
were amateurs in the true sense of the word. Scientific research, in other
32  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

words, was not yet a profession. Usually the members of academies did
not have a teaching position in a university. Many of them had capital of
their own, which liberated them from the necessity to work. Others were
sponsored, often in the role of domestic teacher, by members of the courts
or the nobility – and not uncommonly by female patrons – blessed with
both extensive financial means and a broad and inquisitive mind. Many
academies published their own proceedings. The Proceedings of the Royal
Society in England is the most famous of these. All of this changed in the early
nineteenth century when Von Humboldt introduced his university reforms.
Alongside the ideal of Bildung, he introduced the principle of the unity of
teaching and research: henceforth, the professors of the new university were
expected to be researchers as well. The university also acquired academic
freedom, that is, it was no longer financially dependent on rulers. These
views became a source of inspiration for people far beyond the borders
of the German-speaking areas, forming the basis of the reorganization of
universities in both Europe and the United States.
The principle of the unity of teaching and research had major conse-
quences. For natural scientific research, laboratories were required; hence,
the natural sciences broke away from the faculty of philosophy where they
had hitherto been housed, residing in an autonomous faculty of science
from the middle of the nineteenth century. The departure of the natural
sciences from the faculty of philosophy also had major implications for the
remaining disciplines. The natural sciences legitimated their autonomous
position in the university by highlighting their distinct methods and objects
of research. The disciplines remaining in the faculty of philosophy were
therefore forced to look for a similar legitimation. Somewhat later, the *social
sciences, including sociology, economics, and anthropology, also demanded
a faculty of their own. The modern distinction between the natural sciences,
the social sciences, and the humanities – nowadays considered self-evident –
is in part a product of this institutional innovation. An important part of the
discussions concerning the character, object, and method of the humanities,
and later the social sciences, that emerged from the late nineteenth century
on are partly the result of this. Even in philosophy, we find the traces of
these developments: the methodological debates that led to the birth of
the schools of *phenomenology and *analytical philosophy may be situated
here as well. These schools may be seen as answers to the question of what
the task of academic philosophy was after the natural-scientific disciplines
had split off from the faculty of philosophy.
In the twentieth century, scientific knowledge underwent a steady process
of further fragmentation, especially after the Second World War, when
Introduc tion 33

the number of people occupying themselves professionally with scientific

research increased exponentially. As a result of the increasing number of
researchers, the number of publications also rose. In many disciplines, this
number doubled every five to ten years. Nobody could claim to oversee the
whole of scientific knowledge any longer. The same held for the humanities:
publications in academic journals could only be appreciated, or even under-
stood, by colleagues trained in the same specialism. Unity and overview were
lost, and the humanities became both socially and cognitively fragmented.
Whether we focus on the methods used, the way in which the object of
research was characterized or constituted, the sources employed, or the
style of argumentation, the ideal of exchanging knowledge and ideas – let
alone achieving consensus – has progressively dwindled.
This fragmentation of knowledge has become the topic of many wor-
ried discussions by concerned scholars. Often, it is depicted as a cultural
shortcoming or even as an outright danger, and as proof of the failure of the
vocation of the humanities. Over the past decades, debates have raged in
each of the humanities disciplines on whether they have not neglect their
‘proper’ task. Have not the historical sciences degenerated into a finely
subdivided system of specialisms, which are subdivided by period and region,
producing an infinite amount of historical details but no longer capable of
presenting a coherent overview? Is it really the main task of philosophers
to write primarily for the roughly 100 colleagues who can understand and
appreciate their technical philosophical publications? Does the public
function of philosophy not cease to exist as a result? And has the increasing
specialization in the literary and cultural disciplines not degenerated into
an exaggerated focus on highly theoretical questions formulated in esoteric
jargon, replacing attention for the works of culture themselves, that is,
the novels, poetry, visual art, and music that are their original objects of
interest? And hasn’t the exponential growth in the number of researchers
in the field of the humanities, combined with the demand for university
employees wanting to make a career out of publishing regularly, led to
excessive interest in forms of culture that do not merit much attention?
The style and tone of debates concerning these themes show that much
more is at stake than the future of humanities research alone. Modern
specialist humanities research is hard to square with the tasks originally
formulated by Von Humboldt to supply Bildung. But is Bildung still a task
for a university in a postcolonial, neo-liberal, and/or globalized world? Is the
desire to distinguish between higher and lower culture which appears in
many of these publications still defensible? What is the task of the humanities
nowadays, if it is no longer to supply Bildung? These debates about the role
34  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

and place of specialisms in the humanities and the task of the university
are informed by new cultural-political and economic assumptions.
In short, the humanities do indeed form a very complex whole of ap-
proaches and topics. When it comes to philosophical questions concerning
the value of work in the humanities, and hence questions of why it is worth
the effort to conduct humanities research and become well-acquainted with
its publications, we need not expect simple or straightforward answers.
Philosophical questions concerning the humanities may be stimulated by
other considerations as well. Sometimes the problems researchers face are so
complex that only methodological innovations or more precise formulations
of methodological criteria may offer a way out. In other cases, the confronta-
tion of traditions that seem irreconcilable invites philosophical reflection.
Moreover, the cultural and societal implications and responsibilities of the
sciences invite philosophical reflection.
Diverging answers are given to such questions, depending on the disci-
pline in which they develop; in addition, national differences emerge. In
England and the US, philosophy has traditionally taken a different course
than in continental Europe. In different parts of Europe, the historical
disciplines have taken diverging styles; likewise, the sociological tradition
that developed in France is based on different principles than the German
sociological tradition. And even within individual countries, different
traditions and schools have emerged. Alongside qualitative considera-
tions, quantitative factors may play a role. After the Second World War, in
the United States, English language and literature started drawing larger
numbers of students, and hence the number of employees in this discipline
steadily increased, thus changing the organization of the field. More and
more academic journals started to appear, ever larger conferences were held,
and new forms of competition for theoretical innovation emerged. These
developments have also had substantial intellectual consequences: according
to some authors, the rapidly increasing focus on theory in the Anglo-Saxon
humanities during this period should at least partly be explained by these
quantitative developments: with increasing competition, scholars diversified
their interests and proliferated theories.
In order to get an overview of the landscape of these currents that exist
alongside each other and sometimes intersect, it is useful to distinguish in
a rough and preliminary way between the traditions that consider the ideal
of all sciences to be the acquisition of true knowledge and those traditions
that see the task of the humanities and the social sciences in terms of the
proliferation of interpretations. The philosophical traditions that developed
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries supplied the instruments
Introduc tion 35

necessary for developing these two ideals of knowledge. Although we will

soon discover that this binary division requires modification, for the time
being it offers a structure that will be followed in the ensuing chapters. First,
we present the notions concerning scientific knowledge that focus on truth
and knowledge of the facts. Then we turn our attention to the currents that
formulate humanities practice primarily in terms of producing interpreta-
tions. The philosophical frameworks underpinning these discussions will
be introduced as we go along.

Summary

– Both the philosophy of science and the philosophy of the humanities

have a descriptive and a normative task: they describe which methods
or styles of argument play a role in scientific practice, and they explore
and justify the standards for good research.
– In the classical empiricist view, science is characterized by the way it
founds its knowledge on a ‘pure source’ (i.e. unprejudiced observation,
sensory experience) and the way it processes the information from this
source by ‘impeccable means’ (in particular, logical and mathematical
methods). One question is whether this characterization is correct;
another is whether, if it is correct for the natural sciences, it also applies
to the humanities.
– According to a widespread view, the natural sciences aim for explana-
tions and for uniquely correct representations of facts, whereas the
humanities aim for interpretations of cultural products. Whereas in the
natural sciences, theories compete with each other and the acceptance
of one theory implies the rejection of others, in the humanities, different
interpretations may well coexist alongside each other.
– In this view, the natural sciences and the human sciences have distinct
knowledge ideals: the natural sciences aim to find the truth, while the
humanities aim to generate or proliferate interpretations.
– The classification of the sciences into the natural sciences, the social
sciences, and the humanities that prevails today is of quite recent origin.
Aristotle distinguished between theoretical, practical, and political
sciences. In this classification, there was no room for objects, methods,
or knowledge ideals specific to what today are called the humanities.
 Part 1
Standard Images of Science
2 The Birth of the Modern Natural
Sciences

2.1 The Scientific Revolution

The image of science that still holds sway in public debate is based on the
classical natural sciences that arose in the seventeenth century during the
so-called *scientific revolution. One is likely to encounter this image while
reading about scientific research in newspapers or in high-school physics
textbooks. Views that became influential later on, such as those of Popper
or the Vienna Circle (see chapter 3), have only partly replaced it.
According to the classical image, scientific insights are formulated as
*theories and are based on experience or facts. Such theories contain laws
that specify relations between measurable quantities (in other words:
*empirical regularities). Moreover, they have a *universal character: they
state that the relations formulated apply to all cases within a specific domain
of phenomena. A good example of this is Boyle’s law, which is part of the
theory of gases and can be found in any physics textbook. It states that for
all gases (at a constant temperature), the pressure (p) and volume (V) of a
given amount of gas are inversely proportional: p · V = constant.

5
Boyle’s law
40  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

According to the classical view of science, scientific theories are justified

because – within the boundaries of precision one may expect – they agree
with the facts. These facts have become known to us through systematic
observations or *experiments. Such agreement is often specified in a chart or
graph in which the values one expects on the basis of a theory are compared
with one’s findings. Whoever holds a well-founded theory can subsequently
use this theory to deduce *predictions about new facts. For example, we
can deduce from Boyle’s law that when the volume of a given amount of
gas decreases, its pressure will increase. When such predictions prove
correct, the theory receives a new *confirmation. Especially when a theory
expresses such relations in mathematical form, it is easy to formulate
predictions. Hence, the classical view of science emphasizes the coupling
of mathematical methods with experimental techniques or systematic
observations. The insight that science should be pursued in this manner
is attributed to the great seventeenth-century natural scientists such as
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), Isaac Newton (1642-1727), and Robert Boyle
(1627-1691).
According to the classical view, these and other scholars caused a revolu-
tion in our knowledge of nature. But what makes modern natural science
so special? This question is often answered in rather grandiose terms. The
scientific revolution, we are told, has freed humanity from superstition and
religious dogmatism. We are also told that we owe the achievements of our
industrial and technological society to the scientific revolution, and that
science is rational, science is modern, and science is Western.
Such answers, however, suggest that before the scientific revolution,
people lived in a dark, irrational world in which people were trading
indulgences and burning witches, rather than investigating nature in
a dispassionate manner. This image is certainly false. Already in Greek
antiquity, the great philosopher Aristotle had conducted extensive, sys-
tematic research in biology, physics, meteorology, and other fields. Another
ancient tradition, which goes back to the Greek philosophers Pythagoras
(570-495 BCE) and Plato (427-347 BCE), used mathematical principles and
methods for the description and explanation of the perceived world. The
most famous exemplar of this tradition is the astronomy developed by
Ptolemy (c. 100-170 CE).
Intensive and high-quality scientific research was conducted outside
of Europe as well. In the Medieval Islamic world there was substantial
scientific activity, which in part – but not entirely – derived from the tradi-
tion of Aristotle and Ptolemy and which allowed such subjects as logic,
mathematics, astronomy, and medicine to flourish. China could boast of an
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 41

impressive scientific and technological tradition that had started well before
the Christian era and had developed independently of Western science.
Apparently, the revolutionary character of modern European natural
science does not lie in either the use of mathematical techniques or
systematic observation but rather in the specif ic combination of both.
From the sixteenth century onward, experimental research was encour-
aged by the development of new instruments such as the telescope, the
thermometer, and the vacuum pump; and from the seventeenth century
onward, new mathematical techniques such as differential and integral
calculus were developed. The rapid and widespread distribution of the
new scientific knowledge was facilitated by the accessibility of printing
technology and by the fact that authors including Galileo and Boyle no
longer wrote exclusively in Latin but also in vernacular languages such
as Italian and English.
In this period, institutions were also founded in which new scientific
knowledge was produced. In various countries, scientif ic societies or
*academies were founded with the express purpose of acquiring and
furthering experimental scientific knowledge. The most famous of these
academies is undoubtedly the Royal Society, founded in England in 1662. In
France, the Académie des sciences was founded in 1666 on the authority of
Louis XIV. Similar societies also arose in various other Western European
countries, and slightly later also in Eastern European countries, including
Russia.
These academies emphatically distinguished themselves from the
*universities, which since the Middle Ages had been the most important
institutes of higher learning in Europe. The members of the academies
pursued scientific progress through cooperative research and by limiting
themselves to discussions about matters of natural philosophy. They rejected
the scholastic tradition of the universities, with its emphasis on theological
debate and the study of ancient texts. In their opinion, such an approach
could only lead to fruitless or even socially dangerous disagreements about
sterile (theological) questions. The founding fathers of the new natural
sciences rejected not only the Medieval Aristotelian sciences but also the
humanist tradition of the Renaissance. They thought that rhetorical elegance
would only distract attention from the facts. In their view, the mere study
of ancient texts could not possibly lead to knowledge. This was not only a
scientific but also a political choice. The defenders of the new science lived,
after all, in a time of civil wars and violent religious disagreements. They
feared that fierce public debates about metaphysical matters would lead
to renewed unrest.
42  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

2.1a Aristotle and the Medieval Sciences

In order to gain a better understanding of the scientific revolution, we will

first examine Medieval conceptions of science in which Aristotle’s works
played a dominant role, before discussing Renaissance humanism. Aristotle
had formulated an immense and coherent body of knowledge that covered
virtually everything observable or thinkable. Until the nineteenth century,
his groundbreaking work in logic was seen as impossible to improve upon.
Aristotle had also conducted systematic research in metaphysics, physics,
biology, political theory, and rhetoric, among other subjects. The results of
these efforts were for the most part accepted, used, and transmitted to future
generations by virtually all scientists and scholars up until the Renaissance.
Aristotle also formulated a general theory of science in which no strict
distinction was made between the natural sciences and the humanities, as
mentioned above (§ 1.4). At the basis of this conception lies the *organon, that
is, the auxiliary sciences that define the logical and conceptual principles
and the styles of reasoning of the Aristotelian sciences. According to Aris-
totle, science formulates universal statements or sentences – for example,
‘human beings are mammals’ – which, through a process of *induction or
generalization, are derived from individual observations. At the same time,
however, scientific statements should also be organized *deductively – that
is, in a logically binding or valid manner – into a coherent whole. It is only
then, Aristotle argued, that a theory has explanatory power. Aristotle
placed special demands on the principles upon which observation should
be explained, and he insisted that these principles not only be better known
than the observation itself but also be self-evident. In other words, unfamiliar
phenomena should be explained in terms of principles that themselves are
better known.
For Aristotle, some of these self-evident first principles are:
− all natural motion is directed towards a natural end point, at which the
moving body will come at rest;
− all forcible motion requires a continuous exercise or effort by the mover.

For us, these principles are no longer self-evident. We will return to this
point below. For Aristotle, however, they were sufficient to explain everyday
observation – for example, the fact that a cart only continues to ride for as
long as we keep on pushing or pulling it.
Aristotelian science, in other words, is a systematization of the knowledge
yielded by common sense and everyday observation. More precisely, state-
ments about observations are deduced from indubitable first principles and
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 43

from definitions in a *logically valid way. Thus, we can achieve indubitable

knowledge about nature. Science provides certainty, Aristotle proclaimed,
as its conclusions are indubitable. Moreover, it is able to explain phenomena
that are less immediately evident. For example, he gave a number of power-
ful logical, conceptual, and natural-philosophical arguments against the
possibility of an empty space or vacuum. He also defended the view that the
Earth stands in the middle of the cosmos. These arguments were likewise
partly empirical, partly conceptual, and partly logical. For Aristotle, celestial
bodies like the sun, the planets, and the stars move in a circular motion
around the Earth, and these celestial bodies were moreover perfect, eternal,
immortal, and indestructible. By contrast, the realm of the Earth and its
inhabitants and phenomena – literally the sublunar sphere – was material,
perishable, and imperfect.
According to Aristotle, we know a thing if we know its *causes or *prin-
ciples. Famously, Aristotle distinguished four types of causes. Take, for
example, a marble statue representing the Greek god Zeus. The marble, that
is, the matter from which the statue is made, is in one sense a cause of it,
since the statue cannot exist without it. Aristotle called this the *material
cause. The second cause, which he called the *formal cause, is the principle
that makes the statue into what it is – in this case, a representation of
Zeus. In the third place, the statue also requires a source that realizes or
‘actualizes’ it – in this case, of course, a sculptor. This is what Aristotle
called the *efficient cause. Fourth and finally, every thing has an aim or
*final cause for the sake of which it exists – in this case, for example, for
the sake of expressing beauty. This example, it will be noted, is a work of
art, but according to Aristotle, what we would call natural objects could
be described in exactly the same terms. The material cause of a man, for
example, is constituted by the physical elements of which his body consists,
and his soul is what makes man into what he is – a living, speaking, and
rational being – and thus his formal cause. The parents are the efficient
cause of individual humans, and man’s final cause is the good life.
Because of his emphasis on final causes, Aristotle may be said to have
maintained a *teleological view of explanation: he explained observed
objects and phenomena in terms of the aim (telos) they strive for. For him,
all motion consisted of the realization or actualization of the moving object’s
potential and in its striving toward a particular goal. For Aristotle, the term
‘motion’ stood for a qualitative change and not only for a displacement in
physical space, like the modern concept. In this teleological perspective,
the growth of the tree out of a chestnut or the development of a child into
an adult are just as much examples of goal-directed change as the fall of an
44  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

apple from a tree towards the ground. The motion of the apple, Aristotle
argued, aims at its natural resting point: a point as close as possible to the
centre of the cosmos.
This distinction between different kinds of causes enabled Aristotle
to formulate a systematic critique of his predecessors. According to him,
Democritus’s atomism, which reduces all phenomena to the movements
of invisibly small particles or atoms, failed to provide full explanations,
because atoms only represent the material and efficient causes of things and
events. Aristotle also rejected the Pythagorean tradition, which, in reducing
the observable world to abstract mathematical forms and relations, limits
itself to formal causes. Thus, Aristotle rejected the Pythagorean-Platonic
conception that ideal mathematical forms and relations are more real than
the observable world of phenomena. Here, too, it appears that for Aristotle,
scientific knowledge should not stray too far from everyday observation;
hence, mathematical and experimental methods played no great role in his
conception of science. Experiments cannot lead to general knowledge of
nature, Aristotle contended, because they do not rest on the observation of
nature but involve an artificial intervention, and hence a change, in nature.
In other words, in experiments one observes not natural facts but artefacts.
The Aristotelian sciences were complemented by the medical tradition,
which went back to Galen (129-199CE), and by the astronomy and astrology
of Ptolemy. This corpus of sciences was further developed both in Medieval
Europe and in the classical Islamic world. From the eleventh century on,
Arabic translations of Aristotle and other Greek scientists were translated
into Latin, thus heralding the so-called High Middle Ages. They were seen
as one single coherent body of knowledge that covered all areas of human
experience.
Galen’s doctrines proceeded from the four *humours in the body: blood,
phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile. These humours corresponded not only
to the elements of physical matter (that is, fire, water, earth, and air) but
also to the dominant character types and diseases of humans. For example,
a person in whom black bile (melaina kholè) predominates is melancholic,
that is, in a sad state of mind, while someone with an excess of phlegm is
phlegmatic, that is, slow-witted and insensitive, and so on. According to
the Galenic tradition, both physical and mental health consisted of the
balance between the different humours in the body. Diseases that were
related to an excess of one of the humours could be cured by particular
diets to restore the balance but also by working on the human soul with
particular kinds of music, which appealed to one part of one’s character or
one particular kind of humour. Hence, medicine and the medieval sciences
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 45

Ptolemy’s model with epicycle and equant

as a whole were not based on an absolute opposition between body and soul
or between matter and mind. Both were determined by the same kinds of
principles. The health of the soul corresponded to the balance of humours
in the body, which in turn corresponded to the elements of matter. Thus, a
human being was seen as a *microcosm, that is, a reflection or analogy of
the *macrocosm, the order of the universe. Man took up no special position
within this order but was governed by the same laws and principles as the
natural world at large.
Ptolemy’s astronomical model accepted the Aristotelian principle that
the celestial bodies revolve in a circular motion around the earth. As this
principle did not agree with the actually observed movements of celestial
bodies, Ptolemy suggested that the planets not only move in a circle around
the earth but also make a secondary circular motion. This second motion
he called the *epicycle. Likewise, he suggested, we should describe celestial
bodies as revolving not around the earth, that is, around the exact centre
of the cosmos, but around a point slightly different from this centre; this is
what he called the *equant.
Ptolemy’s model required complex calculations, but its results corre-
sponded fairly well with the observed positions of the celestial bodies.
46  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Of course, the epicycle model was difficult to reconcile with Aristotelian

cosmology and in particular with its conceptual and logical foundations;
but as long as it did not pretend to be more than a convenient tool or instru-
ment for predicting observations, nobody had any great problems with it.
In other words, people maintained an *instrumentalist view of Ptolemy’s
astronomy: his model was a useful instrument for practical purposes. There
was no need to interpret the model *realistically, that is, as a physically
and metaphysically correct description of the real motion of the planets.
Ptolemy was also the author of one of the most widely used books of
astrology of the Middle Ages, the so-called Tetrabiblos. Among the sciences,
disciplines like alchemy and astrology had a problematic position, but for
other reasons than we would think today. Nowadays, we see alchemy and
astrology as *pseudosciences, or at best as precursors of modern chemistry
and astronomy, respectively, that have not yet been emancipated from pre- or
unscientific superstitions. In the Middle Ages, however, the objections
against alchemy and astrology were of a different and primarily theologi-
cal order: alchemists were criticized for their efforts to create gold out of
base materials, which were seen as attempts to reproduce or imitate God’s
creative powers. Likewise, the astrological view that the position of the
stars and planets determined the character and behaviour of humans was
put in doubt, particularly because by postulating secondary causes in the
celestial sphere, it undermined divine omnipotence.

2.1b Renaissance Humanism: Eloquence and Learning

Already before the scientific revolution, late or high Medieval learning

confronted its first challenge in the form of *Renaissance humanism, a move-
ment that prevailed from roughly the fourteenth century to the sixteenth
century. More than the Aristotelian sciences and medieval scholasticism,
this humanism is seen as the precursor of the modern humanities. Some of
its features are equally relevant for the revolution in the natural sciences.
Philosophically, the Renaissance marked the rediscovery and revalua-
tion of Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions at the expense of Aristotelian
philosophy, which had dominated scholasticism, but of particular cultural
importance was the rediscovery of literary texts from classical antiquity.
Initially, primarily Latin authors were studied during the Renaissance,
first and foremost Cicero (106-43 BCE). Later on, interest grew in ancient
Greek texts as well, not only for the original text of the New Testament –
which had been written in koinè Greek – but increasingly also for classical
Greek pagan authors. More than any other author of antiquity, Cicero came
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 47

to be seen as a grammatical, rhetorical (or stylistic), and philosophical model.

His speeches embodied the syntactic rules of what has become known
as ‘classical Latin,’, and literally became textbook examples of rhetorical
elegance. As a philosopher, Cicero was admired for his Stoic beliefs, which
elevated the importance of everyday life with respect to the hereafter.
Undoubtedly, the pioneer of Renaissance humanism is Francesco Petrarca
(1304-1374), the Italian poet who searched in the libraries of countless Western
European monasteries for manuscripts of forgotten ancient works, and who
tried to reconstruct the original texts from the manuscripts he found. He
did not proceed very systematically, nor did he base himself on any explicit
method, but the historical importance and influence of his undertaking
can hardly be overestimated. Almost as important were Petrarca’s contem-
poraries Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and Poggio Bracciolini (1318-1459).
Boccaccio has, of course, become famous as the author of the Decameron,
but he also pioneered efforts to revive instruction in ancient Greek in his
native city of Florence. Somewhat later, Bracciolini systematically searched
throughout Europe for texts from antiquity that had not yet been recovered.
A later generation of humanists, of which Lorenzo Valla (1406-1457)
and Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) are the most important representatives,
proceeded in a more systematic fashion and eventually on the basis of more
explicit methodological criteria. In doing so, they took an important step
towards a more systematic knowledge or science of ancient texts. Valla, for
example, wrote a Latin grammar that elevated Cicero’s style and syntax to
an absolute model of Latinity. Until today, the language of Cicero and his
contemporaries is seen as the purest and most beautiful form of Latin; it is
primarily this classical Latin that is taught in high schools and universities.
Valla also examined several documents that until then had been consid-
ered authentic – including the Donatio Constantini, according to which the
fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine had bequeathed the city of
Rome and the Italian provinces to the church, and a correspondence between
the Latin philosopher Seneca and the apostle Paul – and unmasked them
as Medieval forgeries. He succeeded in doing so by applying a historicizing
form of textual criticism, by means of which he could demonstrate, for
example, that the Donatio contained terms that either did not yet exist in
the fourth century or were used in different senses, and that the historical
events it described did not correspond to each other or to what was known
from other sources.
Poliziano’s discovery that not all manuscript sources are equally impor-
tant in determining the original text encouraged the development of a more
systematic form of textual criticism. In his view, one should first determine
48  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Desiderius Erasmus

which manuscript is the oldest and then establish the genealogical relation
between the transmitted manuscripts. Once one knows which manuscripts
are copied from an older source, one can discard such later and derivative
sources in the reconstruction of the original text. Thus, the medieval prin-
ciple of internal text coherence as a basis of textual criticism was replaced
by a more historicizing approach. We should not, however, exaggerate the
novel and systematic character of humanist philology, for methodological
principles were hardly made explicit or applied systematically, and alongside
historical textual criticism, Renaissance humanists often resorted to the
allegorical kinds of interpretation that had been popular in the Middle Ages.
The spread of humanism accelerated as a result of two important events
that took place in the fifteenth century: the fall of Constantinople and the
invention of printing with movable type. After the Ottoman conquest of
the Eastern Roman capital Constantinople in 1453, many Greek Orthodox
monks fled to Western Europe, bringing a large number of ancient Greek
manuscripts with them. This influx led to a steadily increasing interest in
and knowledge of the ancient Greek language and its literature. As a result of
the technology of printing, it also became possible to make copies of ancient
texts much more quickly and to make them accessible to a far wider public.
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 49

The first humanists had mostly been Italians; but in later generations,
northern Europeans such as the Dutchman Desiderius Erasmus (1466-
1546) played a leading role. One of the latter’s most important philological
achievements was the first printed critical edition of the original Greek
text of the New Testament in 1516. Until that time, the New Testament text
that had been in general use was the so-called Vulgate, a fourth-century
Latin translation by church father Hieronymus. For his edition, Erasmus
proceeded from the older Greek text and adopted a more historicizing
and critical approach to the Bible, which insisted that the Bible, just as
any other text, should be studied in the original language and interpreted
with the aid of logic and common sense. Erasmus’s edition also encouraged
the Bible to be translated into vernacular languages – starting, of course,
with Martin Luther’s famous and controversial 1522 rendering in a simple
German that was close to the spoken language, and therefore accessible
for the masses. Thus, humanists were not only popularizers of classical
antiquity but also pioneers of the vernacular languages. In the Middle Ages,
literary texts had mostly been written in Latin, and it was not until the
tenth century that authors started using French, Spanish, and English for
literary purposes. Renaissance authors including Petrarca and Boccaccio in
Southern Europe and Erasmus in the Low Countries propagated the use of
vernacular languages such as Italian and Dutch for literature and humanist
learning. For several centuries, however, Latin would continue to have a
dominant status as the language of liturgy and high culture.
Humanism was less a scientific movement than a way of life, which
included the literary glorification of pagan antiquity, eloquence as taught
and practiced by classical authors such as Cicero and Quintilian, and courtly
elegance. Petrarca and his contemporaries were mostly concerned with
the search for ancient texts and did not develop systematic and rigorous
methods to determine textual authenticity, nor were they concerned with
establishing a science that had texts, antiquity, or man as its object of study.
Put differently, in Renaissance humanism, man was an object of admiration
rather than of knowledge. As Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) wrote at the
tender age of 23 in his 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man:
I have read in the ancient texts of the Arabians that when Abdallah the
Saracen was questioned as to what on this world’s stage, so to speak, seemed
to him most worthy of wonder, he replied that there is nothing to be seen
more wonderful than man.6

6 Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, Ed. by F. Borghesi, M. Papio and M.
Riva (Cambridge 2012), p. 109.
50  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The idea of *humanitas or universal humanity, as formulated originally by

Cicero, received a more emphatically *secular meaning during this period.
The study of the liberal arts and of the pagan literature of antiquity was
liberated from its role as a servant of theology. Whereas before, only God
could be the object of praise, now man was praised as well, ever more often
and ever more eloquently. The secularizing tendencies of the Renaissance
show themselves not only in the reappraisal of the pagan classics and the
non-polemical references to Arab and Islamic learning but also in the way the
Bible was approached as a historically originated and transmitted document
rather than a sacred text to be accepted as is. Likewise, the unmasking by
humanists of supposedly ancient church documents amounted to a brazen
challenge to religious claims to authority.
In itself, the Renaissance in Italy and in Northern Europe was not a unique
cultural historical phenomenon. In Indian, Chinese, and Islamic traditions,
one may observe similar periodical rediscoveries and appraisals of the local
classical literary heritage, which usually occur alongside renewed attention
for the critical study of ancient texts and to more critical attitudes towards
religious authority. In other words, philology in the generic sense of the schol-
arly study of ancient texts crops up in many traditions. However, what makes
the European Renaissance special is primarily the novel use of the technology
of printing. This technology not only increased the possibility of reproducing
texts in large numbers and virtually flawlessly which had until then only been
hypothetical; it also made texts from ancient literary civilizations available
to a far larger public or market than before. Such a market, however, had to
be created first: in Erasmus’s lifetime, very few people could read ancient
Greek, and even fewer had the desire to buy books printed in that language.

2.1c The Rejection of Humanism and of Aristotelian Science

Precisely because the medieval sciences constituted such a closely knit and
coherent whole, it was difficult to reject individual parts of it. Thus, the belief
that the earth stands at the centre of the universe and that the sun revolves
around it was not merely an observation statement that could simply be
replaced by the statement ‘the earth revolves around the sun’. It depended
on all kinds of logical, conceptual, and cosmological principles concerning
motion, the division of the cosmos into celestial and earthly spheres, and
so on. Hence *geocentrism, that is, the belief that the earth is at the centre
of the universe, was for various reasons a central pillar of these sciences.
In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, almost the entire
Aristotelian edifice was torn down, but there was by no means consensus
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 51

concerning what should replace it. The first step in the demolition of the Ar-
istotelian sciences was taken by the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus
(1473-1543). In his seminal work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (‘The
Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres’), he proposed to replace the Ptolemaic
geocentric model of epicycles and equants with a simpler *heliocentric
model, which placed the sun at the centre. Such a model, he argued, fits the
observed motions of the celestial bodies more adequately.
Copernicus was hardly aware of the enormous consequences this step
would have. The preface to De revolutionibus, not written by Copernicus
himself, still emphasized that it does not matter whether the planets do in
fact revolve around the sun; what counts is that his model does justice to
observations. Neither Ptolemy’s geocentrism nor the heliocentric model
required a realist interpretation. For all practical purposes, both could be
interpreted instrumentally. Soon, however, it would become clear that,
alongside geocentrism, all kinds of other Aristotelian beliefs and concepts
would come to be doubted. Heliocentrism thus stands at the centre of the
so-called *Copernican revolution.
The next big step came from the Italian Galileo Galilei. Proceeding from
the belief that ‘the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics’,
he distanced himself from Aristotle in two central respects. First, he argued
that if one wants to acquire knowledge about nature one should start by
mastering the language of mathematics. This means that one can no longer
rely on everyday language, common sense, or ordinary sense perception or
experience. For Galileo, a gap thus appeared between everyday experience
and scientific knowledge.
Second, this belief led to a strict separation between what Galileo called
*primary and *secondary qualities. Primary qualities are those properties
that are essential for physical objects – like extension, location, and ‘quantity
of movement’. By contrast, secondary qualities like colour, flavour, and
sound are not properties of the things themselves but illusions, as they only
exist in the perception of the person observing these things. According
to Galileo, the natural scientist has the sole task of describing primary
qualities. Moreover, he rejected the Aristotelian notions of formal and
final cause as legitimate elements of explanations. Physical objects, he
argued, are described completely by their primary qualities, as they do
not have an essence or a formal or final cause alongside these properties.
This implies that a full explanation of physical events like the falling of a
stone can be described and expressed in purely mathematical, that is to
say quantitative, terms. Thus, Galileo replaced Aristotle’s teleological vision
with a *mechanistic one: he considered nature as a machine, like a clock
52  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

moving according to a predetermined and fixed pattern. Later, Isaac Newton

was to elaborate this mechanistic vision with his successful formulation
of the laws of gravity.
All these changes are so radical that one might speak of a so-called
*Gestalt switch. In a Gestalt switch, one suddenly sees a figure in a new
way, even though the visual data do not change. In watching the illustration
below – the famous duck-rabbit figure from Gestalt psychology – some people
will see a rabbit while others will see a duck. It is possible to switch from
observing a duck at one moment to seeing a rabbit at another moment – but
one never simultaneously observes a duck and a rabbit in the same figure.
So, observing the same phenomena, for example watching a falling stone,
Galileo and Aristotelian observers literally saw different things . Whereas
Aristotelians observed in the motion of falling a *qualitative change of its
place, a movement towards the stone’s natural endpoint close to earth,
Galileo observed a purely *quantitative change in the position of the stone
relative to the ground over time, a change he could formulate in mathemati-
cal terms. So, Galileo did not conduct a better or more precise observation,
nor did he discover something that Aristotle had overlooked – rather, he
thought differently about concepts like ‘physical object’, ‘place’, and ‘mo-
tion’. Where – so to speak – Aristotle had observed a duck, Galileo saw a
rabbit. Galileo introduced a novel, non-Aristotelian *conceptual scheme (or
conceptual frame) to describe the phenomena of moving bodies. Placing
the same bundle of visual data in a new system of relations, he put on what
the historian Butterfield called ‘a different kind of thinking-cap’.7

7 H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London 1949), p. 1

The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 53

Just like Aristotle, Galileo believed that scientific knowledge should

proceed from observation; but he acknowledged that our observations are
imperfect and unreliable. Hence, he preferred a theory that is formulated in
mathematical terms, which amounts to an *idealization of, or abstracting
away from, these observations. His own theory did not fully correspond to
all his observations, but he did not consider this a serious problem. Self-
evidently, he argued, a theory should attempt to correspond as much as
possible to observation, but in the final analysis, the mathematical model
takes priority. Here, he showed himself to be an heir to the Pythagorean-
Platonic tradition rather than a member of the Aristotelian school.
Galileo’s public proclamation that the heliocentric theory is physically
true soon got him in trouble. Cardinal Bellarmine (1542-1621) had informed
him already in 1616 that the church had no problem with his use of Coper-
nicus’s model as a mathematical tool or instrument. But the fact that this
model fit observations better than Ptolemy’s did not justify the conclusion
that it was also physically true, Bellarmine argued. After all, it was at odds
not only with common sense but also with the principles of Aristotelian
cosmology and church dogma. In 1633, Galileo had to stand trial in front of
the Inquisition. Under pressure, Galileo gave up the realist interpretation
of the heliocentric model. The writings in which he had proclaimed the
realist interpretation were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, a ban
that would not be lifted by the Catholic Church until 1835.
Another defender of novel scientific methods was Francis Bacon (1561-
1626). He, too, rejected an important aspect of the Aristotelian conceptual
scheme. If one wants to acquire knowledge, he wrote, one should not let
oneself be blinded by the authority of others but should try to make un-
prejudiced observations for oneself. That is, one should liberate oneself from
traditional presumptions, preconceptions, and prejudices (or what Bacon
calls idols). According to Bacon, Aristotle and his followers had not done this
sufficiently and hence had collected their knowledge in a disordered manner.
A more systematic approach to acquiring knowledge, he argued, should
proceed in a strictly inductive fashion on the basis of pure and controlled
observation, and it should also involve the conducting of *experiments, that is,
the creating of artificial circumstances in which one can observe properties
of nature that are normally hidden. As he allegedly put it, one has to ‘twist
a lion’s tail’ in order to know its true nature.8 Because of his conviction that,
through a joint effort, man could move beyond Aristotelian tenets, Bacon

8 Quoted in T.S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago 1977), p. 44. Later authors have contested
the authenticity of this remark.
54  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

was one of the first to entertain the thought that scientific knowledge can
and should be a collective activity that it can progress over time. The aim of
such knowledge, he believed, was to regain control over nature, for to know
nature is to have power over it. As a result of his fall from paradise, man had
lost this power; he could retake it by acquiring scientific knowledge, which
would enable us to improve the lot of our fellow human beings.
Like Galileo, Bacon rejected Aristotle’s teleological worldview in favour of
a mechanistic one, but he gave this view a different content than his Italian
successor. He attached more importance to experimental techniques for
the systematic gathering of observations and less to mathematical methods
than Galileo. This approach was also followed by Robert Boyle, one of the
most famous members of the Royal Society and the inventor of the gas law
mentioned above. For scientists pursuing the acquisition of pure knowledge
based on careful observation and experience, Boyle advised against turning
to the books of authorities from antiquity, as theoretical knowledge only
distorted and obstructed one’s observations. In his opinion, scientists should
remain modest and not impose their own theories on others but rather look
at ‘the facts themselves’. But what are those facts?
Contrary to Aristotle, Boyle argued that natural facts could be revealed
by conducting experiments, in which physical circumstances are carefully
controlled. Moreover, such experiments should be conducted in the presence
of a number of witnesses: more specifically, in the presence of the gentlemen
united in the Royal Society, who, in his opinion, were less easily fooled
than women and peasants. The reliability of the knowledge thus acquired
was enhanced because it was produced in public. Thus, Boyle relied on the
juridical metaphor already mentioned above, which implies that something
is a fact only if it has been observed by several reliable witnesses.
The most famous of these experiments is undoubtedly the one in which
Boyle tried to show that a vacuum can exist in nature. Under normal circum-
stances, a vacuum does not exist on earth; but Boyle tried to demonstrate
that it can be created artificially by pumping the air out of a glass bell jar.
He readily admitted that one cannot conclude with certainty from this
experiment that a vacuum can indeed exist in the jar; one could only make
its existence plausible. Using instruments did not lead to certainty, either.
Boyle acknowledged that only few reliable vacuum pumps were in existence
and thus that the successful reproduction of the experiment could not be
guaranteed. Moreover, Boyle claimed, it was better to avoid idle speculation
about underlying causes.
Boyle’s experimental way of gathering knowledge was fiercely attacked by
his contemporary Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who was to become famous
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 55

as the author of the political-philosophical treatise Leviathan. Like Boyle,

Hobbes was a proponent of the mechanistic philosophy, which rejects
large parts of ancient tradition as ‘fraud and filth’. But unlike his opponent,
Hobbes shared Aristotle’s belief that scientific inquiry should strive for an
indubitable knowledge of causes and should therefore not be founded on
artificially created data. He saw the existence of Euclidean geometry as
proof that this ideal can also be realized.
For Hobbes, therefore, the experimental knowledge produced by Boyle
in the Royal Society was not bona fide science, since it was at best plausible
and not indubitable. Moreover, it did not give any causal explanation, and it
was produced with the aid of unreliable instruments in circumstances that
could not easily be repeated or checked. For the same reason, he also rejected
the testimony of the members of the Royal Society. Whereas Boyle praised
experimental knowledge as public and hence reliable, Hobbes considered
such knowledge to be the artificial product of a closed community, the deeds
and observations of which could not be checked. For Hobbes, the Royal
Society was thus no better than a secret religious society whose cosmological
and theological claims the outside world was expected to accept on faith.
In the debate between Hobbes and Boyle that ensued, it was clear that
there were fundamental disagreements about the new science. What should
be considered a natural fact, and what can be rejected as merely an artefact?
Whose testimony is reliable? What is public knowledge, and what is merely
private opinion? In this debate, neither side could be said to be right from
the start. Both sides claimed to strive to acquire scientific knowledge, but
they disagreed on the question of what should count as scientific knowledge
or as natural facts in the first place.
According to two present-day historians of science, Steven Shapin and
Simon Schaffer, Boyle eventually managed to present his artificially pro-
duced vacuum as a natural fact – or, so to speak, to make a natural fact out
of an artefact – by using three kinds of instruments or techniques.9 First,
he managed to convince his audience that the existence of a vacuum was
not just based on human opinion but was proven by an instrument: ‘it is
not me who says that a vacuum exists; it is the pump that says so’. Thus, he
could represent the experiment’s success or failure in terms of the correct or
incorrect functioning of things rather than the correct or incorrect opinions
and observations of humans.
Second, Boyle had a very specific style of reporting. He described the
experience in a dry style stripped of all literary charm, which was supposed

9 Shapin, S. and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton 1985).

56  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

to give the reader the feeling of witnessing the ‘facts’ of the experiments for
himself rather than reading an author’s vision or opinion. With his particular
style of writing, Boyle thus tried to let things speak for themselves.
Third, Boyle managed to persuade his audience that the existence of
a vacuum did not rest on his individual observations and judgments but
on the consensus of a community. Experimental knowledge, he argued, is
public knowledge, which should be distinguished from the secret or esoteric
knowledge of alchemists, for example, and from the arguments of individual
philosophers. Thus, the role of witnesses in the production of experimental
knowledge became crucial.
Boyle eventually carried the day, but that did not alter the fact that Hobbes
raised a number of valid points and that for a long time the victory of the
experimental scientists was by no means a foregone conclusion. In short,
the confrontation between Boyle and Hobbes was not simply one between
on the one hand scientific truth and on the other irrational or philosophical
error; it concerned broader questions about what valid scientific knowledge
is, about what is a natural fact and what is an artefact, about who should
be allowed to acquire and proclaim knowledge, and even about what the
socially responsible practice of science amounts to.
The new scientists rejected not only medieval scholasticism but also
Renaissance humanism. With their emphasis on observation and on the
sober description of facts, they consciously distanced themselves both from
the more text-based philological methods and from the eloquence of their
scholastic and humanist predecessors. True knowledge according to Bacon,
René Descartes (1596-1650), and their contemporaries is not acquired by
studying dusty old books. In their view, humanists studied books rather
than nature. Moreover, they did so with methods that the new scientists
believed were unclear and that led inevitably to disagreement. Bacon self-
confidently proclaimed that natural history should be weeded of its ‘fables,
antiquities, quotations, idle controversies, philology and ornaments’.10 Instead
of rhetorical eloquence, the scientists espoused a neutral and unadorned
language style that was supposed to let things and facts speak for themselves.
The image the new scientists presented of themselves and their predeces-
sors was appealing if not persuasive in its simplicity, and it was reproduced
by many a historian of this period. The exegesis of ancient texts and the
authority of authors like Aristotle, they insisted, had to give way to ob-
servation, experiments, and mathematical techniques, and the rhetorical
eloquence of the humanists had to be abandoned for literal language and

10 The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol 4 (London 1901), p. 299.

The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 57

hard facts. Descartes, Boyle, Benedictus de Spinoza (1632-1677), and John

Locke (1632-1704) – who held in many other aspects quite divergent ideas – all
argued that rhetoric only appeals to the passions and not to the intellect
and therefore only leads us away from the truth, which is best formulated
in unadorned and neutral language.
Recent studies by Anthony Grafton and others, however, make clear that
the new scientists were much more heavily influenced by scholasticism than
they themselves acknowledged and that humanism continued to exert its
influence for far longer than the prevailing image would have us believe.
In that sense, it is not surprising that Spinoza, an enthusiastic advocate
of Descartes and of the new science of nature, also occupied himself with
humanistic and scholastic studies, such as historicizing Bible criticism and
the grammar of ancient Hebrew.

2.1d What Was the Scientific Revolution?

In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a number of

groundbreaking innovations were introduced, but there is no consensus
about their meaning and importance. Exactly what did the scientific revolu-
tion, which we nowadays take for granted as a self-evident historical rupture
in early modern Europe, amount to? Did it indeed represent a radical rupture
between the Ancients and the Moderns? Or was there a gradual process of
evolution, one that displays a greater continuity with the Aristotelian past
than some – clearly partisan – proponents of the new science would have us
believe? Present-day historians of science are increasingly inclined to draw
the latter conclusion. They point to continuities with pre-modern traditions
and to the often fierce debates among the new scientists themselves about
their findings and methods. In doing so, they have undermined the image of
an abrupt, coherent, and unambiguous revolution that supposedly marked
the beginning of early modern Europe.
For one thing, the scientific revolution emphatically did not amount to a
comprehensive conflict between scientific reason and the religious dogmas
of the church, as many still believe. Many scientists, including the members
of the Royal Society, tried to keep their scientific work strictly separated from
religious matters in order to avoid any clashes with or within religious groups.
Others, including Newton, in fact saw their work as supporting religious
belief. Likewise, the famous conflict between Galileo and the Inquisition
should not be seen in terms of a generic opposition between reason and
religious revelation or between science and the Church, since Cardinal
Bellarmine only objected to the realist interpretation of the heliocentric
58  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

model as a correct factual description of physical reality. The belief that

there was a pervasive conflict during the seventeenth century between the
science of nature and the dogmas of the church was actually formed in the
second half of the nineteenth century, when such a conflict did indeed exist.
The notion of the scientific revolution as a radical and unique world-
historical event only started gaining currency around 1940, especially
due to the work of the Russian-French historian of science Alexandre
Koyré (1892-1964), who characterized the seventeenth-century changes
as ‘the most profound revolution the mind has achieved or undergone
since Greek antiquity.’ Koyré focused on Galileo’s mathematical ideal of
natural science and emphasized that it implied a resolute rejection of the
demands of observation and common sense that had taken a central place
in Aristotle’s conception of science. He paid less attention to the inductive
and experimental methods proclaimed by Bacon and Boyle and to those
aspects of Galileo’s work that go back to older traditions.
Koyré describes the scientif ic revolution as the creation ex nihilo of
new ideals and doctrines and as a series of brilliant discoveries by heroic
individuals such as Galileo. As such, he gives an *internalist account of these
developments in that he treats scientific and other ideas as free-floating
entities that are completely independent from the time, place, and circum-
stances in which they emerge. In doing so, he makes it virtually impossible
to answer the question of why the scientific revolution, whatever it amounts
to, occurred during this particular time and in this part of the world.
For historians, such an unexplained and inexplicable event is, of course,
rather unsatisfactory. Hence, almost simultaneously with Koyré’s work, the
first *externalist accounts of the scientific revolution emerged that attempted
to explain it on the basis of social and historical factors. One early exponent
of such an externalist approach was the sociologist Edgar Zilsel (1891-1944),
who suggested that the rise of the new, experimentally and instrumentally
based quantitative thinking around 1600 was linked to the emancipation of
the social class of craftsmen and artisans. Until then, he argued, theoretical
knowledge had been the prerogative of the class of university professors and
humanists, who scorned manual labour and technology.
In this view, it was a social barrier rather than a scientific or a mental one
that blocked the integration of mathematical and logical knowledge with
the practical skills that were required for conducting experiments. It was the
decline of feudalism and the rise of mercantile capitalism that levelled this
barrier, Zilsel argued. In these new social circumstances, prejudice against
manual labour weakened, and thus authors such as Galileo and Bacon
encouraged their readers to get to work. They saw no shame in building
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 59

instruments and conducting experiments that could get one’s hands and
clothes dirty, and to do research jointly rather than individually.
Zilsel died before he could develop his interesting but still oversimplified
hypotheses. Undoubtedly, he presupposed an all-too-close connection be-
tween social class and specific ways of acting and thinking. But his ideas are
one possible explanation of why the scientific revolution occurred precisely
during this period and only in Europe rather than later, earlier, or elsewhere.
They were therefore warmly welcomed by the famous sinologist Joseph
Needham (1900-1995), author of the voluminous Science and Civilisation in
China. This study, of which 27 bulky volumes have appeared, describes in
great detail the scientific and technological inventions and discoveries made
in China since antiquity. These include the magnetic compass, block printing,
and the measurement of earthquakes. Impressive as these achievements
are, however, they do not make the connection between experimental
techniques and a mathematically formulated philosophy of nature.
According to Needham, the answer to the question of why the scientific
revolution (which he considers an unproblematic notion) occurred in Europe
but not in China was rooted in sociology. He himself offered a few sugges-
tions for an answer. Although China had a more elaborate experimental
tradition than ancient Greece, experiments in China seem to have had a
similarly low social and/or philosophical status, so that they could hardly
be incorporated into any kind of systematic philosophical knowledge about
nature. Moreover, in China it was the state that supported scientific inquiry,
while in seventeenth-century Europe, science was developed by the various
academies as a more independent, private enterprise. But Needham did
acknowledge that we have yet to arrive at a full answer to this important
question.
Another line of revisionist historiography suggests that the scientific
revolution may not have been as exclusively European an affair as has
long been thought. Thus, it was recently discovered that Copernicus in all
probability borrowed important parts of his model of planetary motion from
medieval Islamic astronomists such as Nasîr al-Dîn al-Tûsî (1201-1274) and
Ibn al-Shâtir (1304-1375). In particular, Copernicus’s formulation and proof
of deriving a unilineal motion from a combination of circular ones shows
remarkable similarities with the so-called ‘Tûsî couple’. No consensus has yet
been reached, however, as to how Copernicus may have become familiar with
this work or whether the influence of these Islamic scientists – whose work
remained within the Ptolemaeic framework – was more than superficial.
For a long time, debates about the scientific revolution were dominated by
the confrontation between internalists and externalists. This confrontation
60  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

was further polarized against the backdrop of the Cold War. Internalists were
generally ardent defenders of a liberal view of science as wholly independ-
ent from the outside world, whereas externalists often – but by no means
always – favoured a Marxist view of the relation between science and society.
More recent research into the history and sociology of science, however,
cuts through this opposition of internalist and externalist explanations.
It emphasizes that the development and transmission of scientif ic
knowledge can itself be seen as a social process and, conversely, that the
development of scientific knowledge shapes and changes the ‘external’
culture and society. In other words, the idea that scientif ic knowledge
develops independently from social factors is itself the result of the view of
a particular scientific – and social – research practice that emerged in the
seventeenth century. And vice versa, one can hardly deny that scientific
developments have deeply influenced society. If we acknowledge this
mutual relation, the strict separation between the ‘internal’ development
of scientific knowledge represented as non-social and the ‘external’ social
and cultural factors presumed to be independently given loses much of
its force, if not meaning.
Shapin, the historian of science mentioned above, illustrates this claim
using the debate between Hobbes and Boyle. He argues that there has never
been a ‘scientific revolution’ at all, at least not in the sense of an abrupt,
radical, and unambiguous revolution in scientific thinking. For a long time,
disagreement prevailed about the character of the new science, for example
between defenders of the more experimental approach and those of the
more mathematical approach. Moreover, many scientists who have been
categorized as revolutionary exhibited greater continuity with the past
than they themselves acknowledged. The Dutch historian of science Eduard
Jan Dijksterhuis also describes what he calls ‘the mechanization of man’s
worldview’ as a protracted evolutionary process.
Shapin emphasizes that the rhetoric of pure observation, which held any
textual or other authority to be suspect, obscures the fact that it was only
ancient texts that were rejected. After all, the bulk of the new science was
based not on one’s own observations but on descriptions of observations
made by others. Such testimonies were reliable, Boyle and others posited,
provided they had been given by respectable witnesses such as the members
of the Royal Society. These gentlemen were supposed to be serious, civilized,
and prudent men who would not frivolously accept other people’s stories. In
other words, the problematic of testimony and reliability, or of the authority
of written and oral sources, remained a key question, but the practitioners
of the new science represented it as a matter of lesser importance.
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 61

In the second place, the oft-repeated claim that our senses are unreliable
implies that only those who have been trained and drilled in making correct
observations according to the new scientists can be reliable witnesses.
That excludes not only women and people from lower social strata, it also
presupposes that observers should first learn to make observations that
are correct and reliable according to the new mechanistic philosophy.
Thus, they have to be introduced into the community of mechanist and
experimental philosophers, and that is a social process. If this is correct,
the empiricist idea that scientific knowledge is based on pure – that is,
unmediated – observation is an illusion. We will return to this point later.
These two points illustrate the extent to which the production, spread,
and legitimation of scientific knowledge is itself a social process. They also
highlight how the new scientists’ rhetorical emphasis on pure observation
and the rejection of traditional written sources of authority betrayed a very
particular and controversial attitude to that social process. The prevailing
ideal of scientific knowledge, which banishes societal and political issues
from the scientific debate, is itself a product and a legitimation of what was
at the time an entirely new social practice.

2.2 The Epistemology and Metaphysics of Classical Natural

Science; Immanuel Kant’s ‘Copernican Turn’

Having dealt with a brief history of the rise of the modern natural sciences,
we now turn to their philosophical interpretation. Exactly what the ‘scientific
revolution’ amounts to is less clear than we may have thought initially; it is
beyond dispute, however, that profound changes in the natural sciences took
place in the course of these two centuries. Since the seventeenth century,
the mathematical and experimental traditions within science have shaped
the predominant view of what natural scientific knowledge is or should be.
The experimental tradition along the lines of Bacon tries to gain insight into
nature by creating artificial circumstances that do not occur in everyday life.
The mathematical tradition of Galileo and Newton emphasizes that the book
of nature is written neither in the classical Latin of religious learning nor in
the vernacular but in the abstract language of mathematics. In spite of their
differences, the mathematical tradition and the experimental tradition have
one important trait in common: unlike the Aristotelian tradition, they are no
longer based on a close link between scientific knowledge on the one hand
and observation, everyday experience, and ordinary language on the other.
This, however, raises a new question, namely how scientific knowledge can
62  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

or should be legitimized if neither common sense, nor everyday experience,

nor our intuitions about what the world is like warrants it.
Henceforth, scientific knowledge is justified by pointing to the special
method that scientists are supposed to follow. Hence, the characteristics of
this method became a focal point in discussions about science. Until well into
the twentieth century, they were invariably presented along lines set out in
the writings of Newton and Boyle. The key idea is that scientific knowledge
is well-founded knowledge – an idea inspired primarily by mathematics, in
particular Euclidean geometry, in which a whole system of true propositions
is deduced from a small set of intuitively true, indubitable principles, known
as *axioms. This is the ideal of well-founded knowledge that modern science
strives for.
While embracing this ideal, many scholars, especially in the experimental
tradition, nevertheless emphasize that modesty is called for. After all, they
argue, empirical science is founded on sense experience, not on evidently
true or indubitable axioms. They acknowledge that sense experience can
be misleading; all too often we are misled by our senses. But, they argue,
this danger can be kept under control by systematically expanding and
controlling experience. Instead of reaching definitive truths directly, sci-
ence must therefore be developed following a cautious path of formulating
*hypotheses, or conjectures, that are increasingly underpinned by evidence.
This is not an unfortunate shortcoming, they self-consciously assert, but
rather a sign of prudence, caution, and modesty. By ensuring that the source
of our knowledge is pure and that the means by which the information is
articulated are irreproachable, one can gradually build up a coherent whole of
statements or propositions with an ever-higher degree of *confirmation, that
is, with an ever higher probability that these statements are true. Ultimately,
such a system of statements could claim to express true and well-founded
knowledge. A long and venerable philosophical tradition known as *empiri-
cism has devoted itself to developing and refining this line of thinking, which
locates the foundation of knowledge in sensory experience.
These developments in natural science in the seventeenth century not
only led to a new perception of scientific knowledge and to a new way
of justifying these knowledge claims, it also laid the foundation for the
worldview and philosophical thought of the *Enlightenment. In the words
of Koyré, this change in worldview can be described as:

the disappearance […] of the conception of the world as a finite, closed,

and hierarchically ordered whole […] and its replacement by an indefinite
and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 63

fundamental components and laws, and in which all components are

placed at the same level of being.11

In the classical natural sciences, a number of concepts and distinctions

were introduced that came to define Western culture over the following
centuries and that were codified and refined by philosophers from the
eighteenth century onward. These concepts and distinctions – such as the
distinction between on the one hand the realm of nature, the body, and
the material world and, on the other, the world of the human mind, reason,
and consciousness – have over the centuries become part of our everyday
intuitions. The first domain, we are told, concerns objective entities and
causal relations; the second hinges on subjectivity, meanings, and reasons.
In other words, in modern Europe, the *object that is known (that is,
nature) and the knowing *subject (that is, mind or reason) end up in two
philosophically separate domains, with philosophers speaking about these
two domains in radically different languages. Several humanities approaches
that we will be discussing in later chapters reflect the ambivalence between
man as a perceptible and knowable object of knowledge, on the one hand,
and man as a knowing and experiencing subject on the other. As we will
see in chapters 5 and 6, the French philosopher Michel Foucault claimed
that it was the distinction between subject and object that in part made
the birth of the modern humanities possible at the start of the nineteenth
century. An important part of modern philosophy is devoted to the further
elaboration and defence of this so-called *subject-object scheme.
In the writings of such scholars as Galileo and Boyle, the object of natu-
ral science is demarcated by the above-mentioned distinction between
primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities such as place, location,
and extension jointly constitute a world that is absolute, objective, and
mathematical in character. Secondary qualities, by contrast, are not part
of nature but are human illusions. Thus, according to Galileo, they do not
belong in scientific study. Natural science should concern itself with primary
qualities only, that is, with the world that behaves according to mathematical
laws. A new distinction was therefore introduced between the material
world of nature and the subjective world of the human mind or spirit, a
distinction that also appears in the famous opposition of body and mind
in Descartes. Now, it becomes the task of *epistemology – that is, the theory
of the justification of knowledge – and also of the philosophy of science to
explain how the gap between matter and mind can be bridged. How is it

11 A. Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore and London, 1968), p. 2.
64  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

possible for a knowing subject to form truthful representations of the world

of the object? We have already encountered the first attempt to answer this
question. If the knowing subject follows the proper scientific methods, that
is, if it bases itself on controlled sensory experience and processes these
experiences in an impeccable manner, it will eventually be able to form a
truthful representation of objective reality.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the German philosopher
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) realized that this answer is too simple. He argued
that the epistemological legitimations of knowledge given by philosophers
such as Descartes (1596-1650) and George Berkeley (1684-1753) lead to a form
of *skepticism, or radical doubt, concerning the existence of the outside
world. After all, if we only have access to the world via our senses and our
mental representations, the subject cannot possibly determine whether these
representations of the outside world are correct. This form of skepticism,
however, was unacceptable to Kant.
To answer this skepticism, Kant elaborated on the work of the British
empiricist David Hume (1711-1776). The latter had argued that the concept of
*causality, which is of fundamental importance to empirical natural science,
cannot itself be founded in or justified by experience. Hume posited that
we cannot perceive that the melting of a block of ice is caused by heating it.
What we can observe is merely the repeated simultaneous occurrence of
these two events. When people talk about causality, Hume concludes, they
speak not of a logically justifiable concept but of a psychological human
habit or custom to postulate a causal relation between two events if these
constantly co-occur.
Kant gave a different interpretation of this insight. What Hume considered
a habit, Kant held to be founded on the use of the ‘pure *category’ of causality,
which is not derived from experience but is contained in our thinking and
which is imposed on, or constructs, our experience. Without the notion of
a cause, he argued, it will never be possible to formulate a *judgment that
has objective validity rather than merely expressing a subjective experi-
ence. According to Kant, this holds not only for causality but also for other
fundamental notions such as space and time. We experience things as
ordered in time and space and in terms of causal relations not because
this ordering is imposed on us by nature, but because our consciousness
uses the so-called *forms of intuition (Anschauungsformen) – of time and
space and *categories such as causality – in order to be able to transform
perceptions into objectively valid judgments.
Thus, our knowledge has two equally necessary sources, Kant claimed:
our sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) or receptivity – that is, the ability to passively
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 65

receive sensory impressions – and our reason (Verstand) or ‘spontaneity’,

that is, the ability to actively grasp the things given to our receptivity and
to understand them in terms of *concepts. Empirical knowledge requires
not only both abilities, he contended, but also the connection of our reason
and our senses. Neither of these can yield knowledge by itself. As Kant
succinctly and famously put it: ‘thoughts without content are empty, in-
tuitions (Anschauungen) without concepts are blind’.12 We can only make
our particular and subjective perceptions ‘reasonable’, that is, into bits of
knowledge, by subsuming them under general concepts. Conversely, we
make our concepts sensible by connecting them with the objects given in
experience.
Applying the concepts of our understanding (Verstand) to the impressions
of sensory experience in our judgments is what Kant called the *schematism
of understanding. Our knowledge of the world not only rests on our observa-
tions, it can only become full-fledged conceptual and objectively valid
knowledge by the active intervention of our reason. Hence, we can only know
things to the extent that we can perceive them in the forms of intuition of
time and space originating in reason, that is to say as *phenomena. Strictly
speaking, we cannot form any empirical knowledge of what things are in
themselves. The thing in itself (*Ding an sich) can only be thought, not known.
Thus, the knowing subject does not know the world of things in them-
selves but only what Kant called the *phenomenal world, that is, the world
as it appears to our consciousness. If experiences were not ordered in a
framework imposed by consciousness, he asserted, we would not be able to
observe anything. Hence, experience and knowledge do not consist of the
passive absorption of information from the outside world but involve an
active judging – they require the active intervention of the knowing subject.
Kant did not attempt to directly refute skeptical doubts about the validity
of claims to objective knowledge. Rather, he assumed that generally or
objectively valid knowledge exists and subsequently posed the question
of how the object and the subject should be constituted in order to make
such knowledge possible. In other words, he asked what conditions were
required for the subject’s thinking and for the objects in question for us to
obtain objectively valid knowledge.
Kant’s solution thus lay in formulating a new kind of question, the so-
called *transcendental question concerning the conditions for the possibility
of knowledge. These were not simply empirical conditions or natural causes.
For example, the presence of oxygen is a condition for life on earth, but

12 I. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Riga, 1787), A51/B75.

66  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Immanuel Kant

that does not yet make it a transcendental condition of possibility. Rather,

transcendental conditions are what make objectively valid knowledge
possible. Unlike natural causes, this relation has an irreducibly normative
aspect. Furthermore, according to Kant, the transcendental conditions of
knowledge are *a priori (that is to say, formal and abstracted away from –
indeed, prior to – everything empirical); Kant conceived them therefore as
universal and timeless. Later *neo-Kantian philosophers were to conceive
these conditions as time-bound (cf. § 7.4).
The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 67

Similar to the *Copernican revolution in astronomy, which involved the

claim that the sun does not revolve around the earth but the earth around
the sun, Kant thus effected a second, epistemological ‘*Copernican turn’
which held that knowledge must not conform to the known object, but
rather that, conversely, objects must conform to our (a priori) knowledge.
We are able to construct a natural-scientific description of the world in
terms of phenomena that occur in time and space and between which
causal relations can be established, precisely because we use our reason.
Acquiring knowledge is not a matter of passively registering things or facts
but rather an activity in which the subject plays a constitutive role. For
Kant, the subject is itself not empirical but *transcendental, for it is precisely
what makes empirical knowledge possible. Thus, Kant did not formulate a
speculative psychology; he did not pose an empirical question of how the
human mind is actually constituted, but a normative question concerning
the justification of objectively valid knowledge.
Kant formulated this problem as the question of how *synthetic a priori
judgments are possible, that is, of how we can possess scientific, objectively
valid knowledge that cannot be deduced from experience but still adds
something to what we already know. Mathematical and metaphysical state-
ments express such knowledge, for this knowledge is true a priori, that is,
prior and irreducible to experience and observation, unlike so-called *a
posteriori knowledge, which follows from or comes after experience and
which is expressed in empirical statements. Nevertheless, these statements
provide ‘real’ knowledge, novel information, as they state what Kant called
*synthetic, not *analytic, judgments.
Analytic judgments – such as ‘a rose is a flower’ – are true by definition
and thus add nothing to our knowledge. According to Kant, however, most
mathematical statements – but also statements such as ‘every event has a
cause’ – are not analytic but synthetic, since they enlarge or expand our
knowledge. Hence, he argued, there exists a class of statements or judgments
that are a priori and at the same time synthetic. Synthetic a priori judgments
constitute the knowledge that is obtained on the basis of the categories
and other (transcendental) notions. It is knowledge about the sensory or
perceptible world, yet it is not derived from sensory experience. Examples of
such judgments are the statements of Euclidian geometry, which lay down
the structure of physical space, and Newtonian mechanics.
The active intervention of the knowing subject, however, does not imply
that scientific knowledge is ‘subjective’ in the sense of being individual and
not generally valid, because Kant proceeded from the assumption that the
role of the subject is universal. According to him, every reasonable subject
68  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

possesses the capacities that are involved in this process; indeed, they
constitute the instrument of reason itself. On the basis of such universal
notions, we can acquire or achieve indubitable knowledge of the sensory
world. Moreover, Kant pointed out that, even though we can never know or
observe things in themselves, we nonetheless have reason to think that they
do exist. Although there is a clear component of human mental activity in
knowledge, Kant was clearly concerned with knowledge of the world that
exists outside the human mind.
Next, these inquiries enabled Kant to answer the question of the limits
of natural science, and more generally of (scientific or objectively valid)
knowledge. What, if anything, can not be studied along the lines set out
by Galileo, Newton, and Boyle? How can the deterministic Newtonian
worldview of nature as behaving according to f ixed laws be united or
reconciled with the idea that humans are free?
‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and
reverence, the more often and the more steadily one reflects upon them:
the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.’13 This comment
opens the concluding section of Kant’s second major work, the Critique
of Practical Reason and was to be his tomb inscription. Once Kant had
explored the human capacity for knowledge of nature in the Critique of
Pure Reason, and found an answer to the question of how knowledge of
nature is possible, he was now in a position to answer the question of how
the idea of nature as behaving according to fixed laws and constituting a
predetermined and predictable universe can be reconciled with the idea
of human beings having freedom.
This freedom, he claimed, consists of the fact that beings who have reason
can impose laws on themselves. Human beings need not be slaves of their
passions and lower drives, for they have the capacity to let themselves
be guided by reason, to act according to a rule, or, as Kant put it, to act
according to a maxim of the will. In other words, as phenomena, human
beings may be subordinated or subject to the laws of nature, but as beings
in themselves, they are free and therefore responsible insofar as they follow
the laws of their own reason. Insofar as they can posit the moral law for
themselves, humans are free.
Kant did not explicitly address questions concerning the empirical study
of human conduct, as his primary interest was in ethics. Later commentators
do not agree whether he left open the possibility of an empirical scientific
study of human action and the human mind. We do know, however, that Kant

13 I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, tr. by M. Gregor (Cambridge, 2015), p. 129.

The Birth of the Modern Natur al Sciences 69

would have considered it impossible for such a study to be modelled on the

natural sciences. If we want to investigate the mental activities of man as a
thing in itself, that is, as a free and ethical being, we would therefore have
to develop another kind of science than that produced by Galileo, Boyle,
and Newton. It is here that we find the roots of the thought that there is
room for another category of sciences next to the natural sciences, namely
sciences that concern themselves with human action, human consciousness,
and the products of the human mind. From the start of the nineteenth
century and onwards, this was realized or institutionalized in the so-called
humanities, or, in German, Geisteswissenschaften, and, later, in a segment
of the social sciences.
The transcendental conditions of possibility of knowledge set out by Kant
are a priori, that is, purely formal and abstracted away from everything
empirical. In part for this reason, Kant’s analyses left little if any space
for language and culture as philosophically relevant phenomena. Indeed,
he displayed a remarkable lack of philosophical interest in language. His
undertaking can therefore be qualified as a *philosophy of consciousness, as
it describes knowledge in terms of a direct and individual confrontation of
the human mind or consciousness with the world, taking consciousness to
be given, that is, as not mediated or constituted by something else, such as
language. It is not at all clear whether and how there is any room in Kant’s
thought for man to be mediated or shaped in any significant manner by
language or culture either as a transcendental subject (that is, as a free and
reasonable thing in itself) or as an empirical natural phenomenon. Later
philosophers were to take a rather different view on these matters. The *lin-
guistic turn they gave to Kant’s work was to have far-reaching consequences
for the very architecture of the latter’s imposing philosophical edifice. These
developments will be elaborated in more detail in later chapters. In the next
chapter, we will encounter the first and most famous example of such a
linguistic turn: the so-called logical empiricist answer to the challenges to
the Kantian framework that emerged in the nineteenth century.

Summary

– The Aristotelian sciences formed a coherent whole that included concepts,

logical and metaphysical principles, and statements in different subdis-
ciplines. They featured a teleological – that is, goal-oriented – notion of
explanation and jointly constituted a conceptual framework or scheme,
the individual parts of which were difficult to replace in isolation.
70  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

– The Renaissance humanists tried to recover the original versions of

literary texts from antiquity. Their work valued rhetorical eloquence
and contained secularizing tendencies, and the new technology of
printing allowed their ideas to be spread widely and rapidly.
– During the seventeenth-century ‘scientific revolution’, key aspects
of Aristotelianism were rejected in favour of a new heliocentric and
mechanistic worldview and a new, empiricist conception of scientific
knowledge. Recent research has questioned the character, abruptness,
and coherence of this alleged revolution.
– Kant gave the classical formulation of the so-called subject-object scheme.
He showed that empirical knowledge requires the active contribution
of a transcendental subject. Kant thus effected a ‘Copernican turn in
epistemology: where earlier philosophers saw knowledge as conforming
to the known object, Kant put the knowing subject at the centre of the
construction of knowledge.
3 Logical Empiricism and Critical
Rationalism

3.1 Logical Empiricism: The Vienna Circle

In the first few decades of the twentieth century, the map of Europe went
through radical changes. By the end of the First World War, the three great
empires of Austria-Hungary of the Habsburgs, tsarist Russia, and the Ot-
toman dynasty had disappeared. They were replaced by a large number of
new states, most of which were based on the nationalist idea of ‘one people,
one state’. Because the borders between these new states were often drawn
rather arbitrarily, and because almost all of them had a heterogeneous
population, the seeds were sown for various new conflicts. The old societal
order was in the process of disappearing, as the power of the older nobility
and the church had been eroded or damaged beyond repair, and various
radical reformist and revolutionary movements arose.
In later chapters, we will return to this new nationalism and its impor-
tance for the humanities. But the natural sciences experienced equally
radical changes at the turn of the twentieth century. As late as the end of
the nineteenth century, people believed that man’s knowledge of theoretical
physics was virtually complete, just as the fin de siècle Austro-Hungarian
Empire seemed stable if not eternal. As a prospective physics student, Max
Planck (1858-1947), the future pioneer of quantum mechanics, was advised
to choose another discipline, for his teachers told him that nothing new was
to be expected in physics anymore. This belief, however, soon turned out
to be quite mistaken. The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed
the emergence of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, both of which
heralded a totally novel and unexpected kind of physical science. Also in
other disciplines such as mathematics and logic, major progress was booked
during this period. In logic what were arguably the most important new
discoveries since Aristotle were made, especially with the development of
so-called *predicate logic by Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), Bertrand Russell
(1872-1970), and others.
These radical innovations in the exact sciences constituted a major
problem for the epistemological justification of scientific knowledge that
Kant had provided more than a century earlier. As we have seen, Kant
held that our empirical knowledge rests on an invariable, indubitable,
and universal foundation of synthetic a priori judgments, among which he
72  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

included the theorems of Euclidian geometry and the laws of Newtonian

mechanics. Now, however, it appeared that these seemingly universal and
indubitable foundations could in fact be doubted or disputed after all. For
example, so-called non-Euclidian geometry proceeded from definitions and
axioms contradicting those of Euclidian geometry, yet it was formally correct
and consistent. A few decades later, Einstein’s theory of relativity upset the
very foundations of classical mechanics as developed by Newton. All of
this raised questions about the epistemological status of Kant’s synthetic
a priori statements and about how to account for the rapid growth and the
successes of the exact sciences.
The flourishing of the natural sciences, which engage in empirical
investigation rather than abstract metaphysical speculation, gave some
scholars the idea that philosophy should take science as its model. It was
felt that philosophy should reflect on and learn from the rapid growth and
progress in the sciences and perhaps even emulate the methods of science
to similarly achieve progress. In the German-speaking area, the so-called
neo-Kantians (see § 7.4) tried to retain the Kantian heritage by recasting it
in more historicizing terms, thereby adapting it to the new developments.
Others, such as the logical empiricists discussed in this chapter, proposed
a radical rejection of Kant’s foundation of scientific knowledge.
A major centre of this development was Vienna. Numerous outstand-
ing natural scientists and artists were active here around the turn of the
twentieth century. Likewise, many new scientific disciplines flourished
such as, most famously, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (see § 7.3). In the
years following the First World War, moreover, a philosophical and scientific
movement developed here that laid the foundations of the philosophy of
science that would dominate our thinking about science for a large part
of the twentieth century. In 1929, Otto Neurath (1882-1945) baptized this
movement the Vienna Circle: a name that he said was inspired by the Vien-
nese waltz, Wiener Würstchen, ‘and other things on the pleasant side of life’
that Vienna had to offer. The movement was inspired by the works of the
physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916), who enjoyed considerable
stature not only in science and philosophy but also in the cultural life of
his generation.
The members of the Vienna Circle were strict empiricists. They therefore
rejected the foundation that Kant had provided to knowledge (their main
philosophical motivations for this rejection will be discussed below). What
may have contributed is that in Austria, Kant’s philosophy was less domi-
nant than elsewhere in the German-speaking world. In the conservative
Austro-Hungarian Empire, where the Catholic Church had retained its
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 73

dominant influence also within the philosophy faculties, Kant’s extolling

of reason and his enthusiasm for the French Revolution were rejected as a
dangerous form of revolutionary and anticlerical radicalism. As a result, in
Austro-Hungarian universities, Kant’s thought had never established the
paramount position that it held in Germany.
The backdrop to the philosophical and scientific activities of the Vienna
Circle was the ‘Red Vienna’ of the interbellum, with all its societal and
political tensions. The members of the Vienna Circle saw it as their societal
duty to spread scientific knowledge among the working-class population.
With this in mind, they established the ‘Ernst Mach Society’ in 1928, which
organized popular scientific lectures for workers. Because of their activities
in Volksaufklärung, that is, the spreading of Enlightenment ideals among
the working-class population, they unmistakably took sides in the public
debate against the forces and powers of metaphysics and theology, which
were politically closely linked with the Church and with nationalist and
anti-Semitic movements.
The Vienna Circle was not a doctrinaire or closed community. The group
was marked by its openness to criticism and by the common search for new
solutions to philosophical problems, and its members had widely diverging
philosophical and political views and opinions. The group’s core beliefs were
not fixed and immutable dogmas; they were subject to constant refinement
and revision in the light of discussion and criticism. The only common
feature of the members was an anti-metaphysical attitude, which was
inspired by two factors. First, they considered the apparent lack of progress
in traditional philosophy, which stood in stark contrast to the rapid progress
of the natural sciences, as an indication that something was fundamentally
wrong with academic philosophy. Second, they saw the Catholic Church, a
source of traditional metaphysical and theological truths, as a reactionary
force that obstructed societal progress.
The Circle’s most radical and most polemical anti-metaphysician was
Neurath, who also took the most radical and revolutionary political position.
In 1917, he published a study about the war economy that had developed in
Germany during the First World War. This study described how the state had
strengthened its control over industrial production, decreased consumption,
and in order to increase production had mobilized new kinds of workers,
in particular women. According to Neurath, these conditions had created
new opportunities for the further emancipation of women and the working
class. After the war, Neurath served as a minister of economic affairs in
the ephemeral Bavarian Council Republic of 1919, where he participated
in attempts to realize a socialist economy.
74  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The intellectual leader of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), was
of an entirely different caliber. In many respects, he was Neurath’s opposite.
Schlick was a liberal from the upper bourgeoisie, and also philosophically, he
was less radical than Neurath. Another member, Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970),
who developed in great detail the epistemological ideas of the Vienna Circle,
considered himself a ‘scientific humanist’. Although he sympathized with
attempts to create a social-democratic or socialist society, he ultimately
remained an apolitical thinker. As Carnap’s work has exercised the most
enduring influence on the philosophy of science, we will now discuss some
of its main features.

3.1a Rudolf Carnap: The Logic of Science

Carnap and his colleagues in the Vienna Circle attempted to recover the
logic of scientific knowledge. Their aim was not to give a psychological or
historical description of scientists’ activities but to logically reconstruct
the normative justification of the results of that work, that is, of established
theories and hypotheses.
The key question posed by logical empiricists is how we can account for
both the success and the change or growth in scientific knowledge. Kant’s
foundation of science was no longer adequate for this purpose, as it assumed
that the laws of Aristotelian logic, Euclidean geometry, and Newtonian
mechanics were a priori and hence not subject to change or improvement.
In the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, this belief
became untenable. One by one, these apparently immutable foundations
of knowledge were undermined or rejected. The predicate logic developed
by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell marked a major step forward with
respect to Aristotelian syllogistic logic; mathematicians such as Nikolai
Lobachevsky (1792-1856) and Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) developed
what came to be called non-Euclidean geometry; and Einstein’s (1879-1955)
theory of relativity as well as Planck’s quantum mechanics dethroned
Newton’s mechanics.
The members of the Vienna Circle were especially impressed with the
immense progress that logic had booked in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century. This logic was so much stronger than its predecessor that
it even carried the promise that mathematics might be reduced to it – or, to
put it in Kantian terms, that the seemingly synthetic a priori statements of
mathematics could in fact be shown to be analytic statements of logic. The
new predicate logic also offered the means to judge the merits of scientific
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 75

The Looshaus at the Michaelerplatz in Vienna

and other languages. Before proceeding, therefore, we will first introduce

and define some basic logical concepts.
Logic investigates the structure of and relations between statements,
sentences, or propositions; in particular, it studies the *validity of arguments
or chains of reasoning. Logically speaking, all assertive statements (or
*propositions) are either universal or singular. *Universal statements concern
an entire class of entities. ‘All ravens are black’ is thus a universal statement.
*Singular or *existential statements, by contrast, concern individual entities,
as in the statement ‘there is at least one black raven’. We can clearly indicate
the empirical circumstances in which assertive statements are true, that is,
their *truth conditions. Thus, universal statements like ‘all ravens are black’
are true if all ravens are indeed black and not true if at least one non-black
raven exists. Singular statements such as ‘there is at least one black raven’
are true if indeed at least one black raven exists, and not true if no raven is
black or if there are no ravens at all.
Alongside the different kinds of statements and their truth conditions,
logic also explores the different possible relations between statements,
especially in arguments. Two statements *contradict each other if they
cannot be simultaneously true. Thus, ‘it is raining’ contradicts ‘it is not
raining.’ Two statements that do not contradict each other are *consistent
with each other. A statement is the *logical or *deductive consequence of
one or more other statements (put differently, it is the logical *conclusion
76  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

from one or more *premisses, or if the premisses *entail a conclusion) if

the premisses cannot be true without the conclusion being true as well.
Thus, the statement ‘the streets become white’ logically or deductively
follows from the premisses ‘if it snows, the streets become white’ and ‘it is
snowing’. And finally, two statements are *logically equivalent when they
are true in exactly the same circumstances. Thus, ‘all ravens are black’ and
‘no raven exists that is not black’ are logically equivalent, as both are false
if at least one raven exists that is not black. Thus, it is not only the case that
grammatically different statements (like ‘all ravens are black’ and ‘no raven
exists that is not black’) may have the same logical structure, but also that
apparently identical sentence constructions may differ in logical structure.
By means of the *logical analysis of statements, such logical similarities
and differences can be exposed. Carnap famously illustrated this in discuss-
ing a notorious statement of the German metaphysician Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976): ‘Where do we seek the Nothing?’14 Superficially, this question
seems to have the same logical structure as the question ‘Where do I seek the
book?’, as both questions have the same grammatical or syntactic structure.
However, Carnap contends that this impression rests on a misunderstanding.
Both statements seem to assume or assert the existence of a particular
thing (respectively the Nothing and the book), of which subsequently the
location is asked. The ‘Nothing’, however, is precisely not an entity or thing
that can have a location at all, but truly no thing. Thus, the statement ‘I want
something’ has the logical form ‘there is a thing that I want’, but ‘I want
nothing’ has the form ‘there exists no thing that I want’.
According to Carnap, such a logical confusion is typical for metaphysical
statements: they appear to be meaningful because they have the same
grammatical form as meaningful everyday statements, but in reality they
rest on a misunderstanding or misuse of the imperfect grammar of natural
languages such as German or English and thus they are meaningless *pseudo-
statements. Carnap posits that one of the tasks of logic is the construction
of an artificial logical or formal language with a fully precise and explicit
grammar that rules out such misunderstandings or abuses.
Inspired by the rapid progress in formal logic, mathematics, and the
natural sciences, Carnap and the Vienna Circle’s other members promoted
a scientific approach to philosophy that was meant to lead to a similar type
of progress by eliminating unsolvable metaphysical debates. Their approach
had two main features. First, they shared the empiricist principle that only

14 Rudolf Carnap (1932), ‘Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache’,
Erkenntnis, 2, 219-241.
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 77

perception or experience is a legitimate source of knowledge, rejecting all

other presumed sources of knowledge such as intuition, self-analysis, or
(oral or written) tradition. Second, they used the method of logical analysis
to determine the exact meaning or empirical content of an arbitrary state-
ment, or rather, to determine whether a statement had any meaning at all.
Thus, inspired by Frege, Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1921 Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, they regarded formal logic as the method that could
strictly demarcate what can be meaningfully expressed in language. In doing
so, they effected an important change in philosophy, which has become
known as the *linguistic turn. Instead of the foundation or justification of
knowledge, this new philosophy studies or investigates the meaningfulness
of statements. Carnap and his colleagues no longer posed the question of
whether a particular philosopher or scientist is right or has correct knowl-
edge, but rather whether his statements have any meaning. Just as Kant’s
critical philosophy explored the boundaries of valid knowledge, the logical
empiricists explored the limits of meaningful language.
Using these technical tools, the logical empiricists tried to recover the
logical structure of scientific knowledge, that is to say, they explored the
logical relations between scientif ic statements. However, they did not
pretend to be able to describe, let alone prescribe, how scientific discoveries
are made in practice. After all, such discoveries may be influenced by all
kinds of arbitrary or coincidental psychological and other factors. Thus,
the fact that, as a famous story asserts, the German chemist Friedrich
Kekulé (1829-1896) first saw the ring structure of the benzene molecule in
a dream, is irrelevant to the question of whether his theory is correct. For
the justification of knowledge, it is not the process of scientific discovery
but the result that counts. The logical empiricists thus made a fundamental
distinction between the descriptive *context of discovery, that is the factual
process of the acquisition of scientific knowledge, and the normative *context
of justification, that is, the logical or epistemological justification of that
knowledge in hindsight.
In addition to the logical analysis already mentioned above, the main
instrument of the logical empiricist critique is their *verification criterion
of meaning. According to this criterion, the meaning of a statement consists
of the method of its verification: we know what a statement means when
we can point to a method to decide whether it is true or false, for example,
via an experiment or an observation. The meaning of a statement, thus
viewed, consists of nothing more or less than its empirical truth conditions.
According to Carnap and his colleagues, verifiability was a necessary and
sufficient condition for qualifying a statement as empirically meaningful.
78  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Metaphysical statements, they argued, are not empirically verifiable and

thus meaningless.
Soon, however, it appeared that the verification criterion in its original
formulation was far too stringent. Scientific theories, for example, mainly
consist of universal statements, which we call ‘laws of nature’, but such
statements concern an infinite number of individual cases and thus can
strictly speaking never be verified. The universal statement ‘all ducks have
a beak’ concerns an infinite number of ducks, but we can only make a
finite number of observations. No matter how many beaked ducks we have
observed, we will never know for sure that indeed all ducks have a beak.
For this reason, in the course of the 1930s, the strict verification criterion
was replaced by the slightly weaker criterion of *confirmation, or the measure
in which a theory is confirmed or strengthened by observation. The logical
relation between individual observation statements and general or universal
theoretical statements, however, is then no longer deductive or logically
necessary but *inductive. A large number of true observation statements may
make a universal statement plausible or probable but they do not logically
or deductively entail it. Even from a very large number of true singular
statements of the type ‘this is a duck with a beak’, the universal statement
‘all ducks have a beak’ does not deductively follow.
In his later years, Carnap therefore maintained the view that the logic of
the empirical sciences was not deductive but inductive and that philosophy
therefore had to develop an inductive logic that could model the actual
process of argumentation of the sciences. In his view, inductive arguments
– that is, generalizations of universal statements from a limited number of
singular statements – are nothing but reasoning in terms of the probability
of statements. According to him, general statements or universal state-
ments become more and more probable as they are confirmed by ever more
observation statements. Suppose we check all ponds in the neighbourhood
and check all ducks we find there for the possession of a beak: if all these
ducks indeed appear to have a beak, then it becomes more plausible or
probable that the universal statement ‘all ducks have a beak’ is true.
Initially, the logical empiricists had doubts concerning the concept of
truth that is presupposed by the verification criterion. Isn’t such a concept
itself unverif iable and hence an inadmissible metaphysical notion? If,
following philosophers such as Aristotle, we define or characterize truth
as a ‘correspondence to the facts’, we seem to be smuggling metaphysical
concepts back in. For what is a ‘fact’ exactly? And what kind of relation is
this ‘correspondence’ between a thought (or a sentence, or a statement) and
the outside world? Alongside these questions, other puzzles and paradoxes
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 79

around the concept of truth appeared. These doubts, however, were removed
by the Polish logician Alfred Tarski (1901-1983), who developed a so-called
*semantic concept of truth. On this account, truth is no longer seen as a
mysterious metaphysical relation of ‘correspondence’ between thoughts and
the world but a relatively down-to-earth *semantic property of sentences
in a particular language. The earlier objections against Aristotle’s concept
of truth thus disappeared. However, discussing the technical details of
Tarski’s theory here would lead us too far afield.

3.1b The Analytic-Synthetic Distinction and Reductionism

In addition to the verification criterion, logical empiricism has two main

features. First, it makes a novel distinction between *analytic and *synthetic
statements. As we already saw in § 2.2, analytic statements like ‘a rose is a
flower’ are true by definition, that is, on the grounds of the meaning of the
terms used, whereas synthetic statements such as ‘this rose is red’ are true on
the basis of experience, observations, or extralinguistic facts. According to
Carnap, analytic statements have nothing to do with the perceptible outside
world. They are true or false on the basis of conventions or agreements, and
hence we can choose them freely based on the practical question of which
ones ‘work’ best in or for empirical theories. In this view, a theory change,
or the growth of scientific knowledge, can occur not only by extending and
making more precise our observations in confirming our statements but
also by introducing a new language, that is, by introducing new concepts
and choosing new analytic statements that have more practical success in
the ordering, gathering, and predicting of empirical statements.
For Carnap and other logical empiricists, the semantic notion of analytic-
ity coincided with the epistemological notion of a priori knowledge. As a
consequence, the need for a distinct class of synthetic a priori statements
as formulated by Kant disappeared. In Kant’ philosophy, synthetic a priori
statements provided an indubitable foundation for experiential or empirical
knowledge. Carnap, however, rejected this idea. For Carnap, all synthetic or
experiential statements as dubitable. He argued that the empirical sciences
yielded no certainties about the perceptible outside world. Carnap approv-
ingly quoted a famous remark by Albert Einstein: ‘so far as the theorems
of mathematics are about reality, they are not certain; and so far as they
are certain, they are not about reality’.15 In other words, to the extent that

15 R. Carnap, Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (New York, 1966), p. 183.

80  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

knowledge is a priori and thus indubitable, it cannot concern or relate to

the empirical outside world, and vice versa.
The logical empiricists thus argued that Kant’s synthetic a priori knowl-
edge – that is, knowledge based on the indubitable and unchanging features
of human reason but still applying to the outside world – is impossible, for
this notion presupposes a distinction between the notions of analyticity
and a priori knowledge. And in the light of the verification criterion, such a
distinction is untenable, for this criterion precludes the meaning, and hence
the knowledge content, of a statement from consisting of anything other than
empirical truth conditions. Mathematical statements, for example, do not
have empirical conditions of verification and thus do not yield knowledge
concerning the empirical world – instead, they form part of a purely formal
play. Inspired by the work of Frege and Russell, the logical empiricists
believed for quite some time that mathematical statements – which Kant
saw as synthetic a priori statements – may eventually be reduced to purely
logical, that is, analytical, statements. Thus, Kant’s system, which proceeded
from the question ‘how is synthetic a priori knowledge possible?’, is not so
much rejected or refuted but ‘overcome’ by the logical empiricists, according
to members of the Vienna Circle:16

The fundamental thesis of modern empiricism consists precisely in

the possibility of the rejection of ‘synthetic judgments a priori’ […]. The
scientific world conception knows only empirical statements about things
of all kinds, and analytic statements of logic and mathematics.

A second central feature of classical logical empiricism is its emphasis on

*reductionism, that is, the insistence that every meaningful and therefore
empirical statement can be reduced or ‘translated’ into a statement about
pure or direct observation. According to Carnap, we know the meaning
of a term or expression when we know under what directly observable
circumstances this term can be applied to an object. Thus, the meaning
of the term temperature is determined by the way the variable denoted by
this name is measured – that is, by reading of a thermometer. Thus, when
we put a kettle with water on a fire, the empirical meaning of the statement
‘the temperature of the water is rising’ is ‘the reading of the thermometer
that has been put into the water is rising’. The second statement, which
explicates the conditions and circumstances of the application of the term

16 H. Hahn, O. Neurath, R. Carnap, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung – Der Wiener Kreis (Wien

1929).
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 81

temperature, is what Carnap called a *reduction statement. According to him,

we should be able to reduce all scientific statements to statements about
direct observation. More generally, all meaningful statements can thus
be reduced or translated into a combination of purely analytic and purely
synthetic or empirical statements, which can be tested, that is, directly
confronted with experience.
This holds not only for statements in physics, chemistry, or biology but
also for those in psychology, for example. If psychology wants to qualify
as a full-fledged science, Carnap argued, we should be able to indicate the
exact circumstances of applicability of its concepts. In other words, we
should be able to reduce a sentence such as ‘Tony Soprano is angry’ to a
statement about observable entities that do not appeal to any inner and
hence unverifiable notions such as emotions, visual impressions, etc. A
reduction of this sentence can only contain physiological terms (for example,
a rise in adrenaline level) or behavioural terms (becoming red in the face,
raising one’s voice), even though neither of these observable phenomena
can give us full certainty as to whether Soprano is indeed angry or not.
For example, he can merely pretend to be angry or, conversely, he may be
hiding his anger in self-control.
According to Carnap, therefore, in contrast to the term ‘temperature’
which can be fully defined in terms of reading a thermometer, we cannot
strictly define the concept of ‘anger’ in observable terms. But he believes
that it can be reduced to observational terms, provided we can establish
a procedure for using the term which specifies observable behaviour or
physiological processes that would enable us to determine whether or not
a person is angry.
In this way, logical empiricism is closely related to *behaviourism, an
approach in psychology that emerged around the same time and was espe-
cially influential in the United States. Behaviourist psychologists resolutely
reject the use of terms such as soul, thought, consciousness, and so on in
the sciences because these do not correspond to any observable entities or
phenomena. They also do not consider introspection – that is, the observation
of one’s own inner affects –a legitimate source of scientific psychological
knowledge. When I say that my arm hurts or that I can hear a melody in my
head, after all, nobody else can check whether this observation is correct. A
truly scientific psychological theory, according to behaviourists and some
logical empiricists, should be formulated rigorously in terms of observable
behaviour only.
With the aid of logical procedures such as giving a definition or a reduction
statement, we can thus establish the empirical content of a scientific theory.
82  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

A stronger variant of this thesis of reductionism is that every meaningful

statement can be analyzed and broken up into a purely theoretical and a
purely empirical part – that is, a purely analytic and a purely synthetic part.
Thus, logical empiricist reductionism amounts to another elaboration of the
classical empiricist belief that pure observation is the source or foundation
of all real knowledge. The reduction of a statement would then amount to
its translation into a language of pure observation that is not shaped or
distorted by theories or expectations, or into a language of pure, theory-
independent natural facts that can be characterized as *given, that is, as
directly and naturally, or immediately (i.e. not mediated by a language or
a theory) given to our senses.
Initially, it might seem plausible to present a language of observable
physical entities and facts as the ‘universal language’ of such reduction,
and indeed, Carnap entertained this possibility for some time. This form
of reductionism, which is also called *physicalism, takes the pure facts – or
rather, the facts that can be described in the language of physics – as its
basis. Another option, however, is *phenomenalism, which takes ‘pure’ or
‘elementary’ experiences as the basis out of which the whole of knowledge is
constructed. The latter version is more purely, or strictly speaking, empiricist.
The former sees the basis of knowledge as ‘positive facts’ and is accordingly
often labelled *positivist, hence the approach of the Vienna Circle is also
labelled ‘logical positivism’, alongside ‘logical empiricism’.
Reductionism is sometimes presented as the enduring core of logical
empiricism. In reality, however, in its extreme form it was adhered to only
briefly and was the object of fierce discussion among the members of the
Vienna Circle, both in its phenomenalist and in its physicalist guise. One
problem for phenomenalism is that observations are ‘private property’, so
to speak. My observations are strictly mine, and I do not have direct access
to other people’s observations, but this makes it difficult to explain how
*intersubjective or shared knowledge can exist. In its turn, strict physicalism
ran into problems when the hope of reducing or describing all language in
one and the same common language turned out to be too optimistic. The
terminological diversity of the different disciplines was immense and obvi-
ous, and all attempts to do away with this variety encountered significant
practical difficulties. Even the reduction of chemical statements to physical
ones soon appeared to be far more complicated than people had initially
expected. Shortly thereafter, more principled objections against the very
possibility of reductionism were to be formulated as well (see § 4.1).
The discussions about the possibility of reductionism suggest that
the members of the Vienna Circle saw the ‘given’ of experience not as an
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 83

unproblematic starting point for constructing knowledge but rather as an

endpoint of logical analysis. Indeed, Carnap himself described the ‘given’ as
a ‘useful fiction’: for him, it was no more than a useful tool in the rational
reconstruction of scientific knowledge. The ease with which Carnap re-
peatedly switched from a phenomenalist to a physicalist position already
indicates that he did not see the question of an ‘observational basic language’
as essential and that the logical analysis of concepts and statements was
more central to his undertaking. Later, he would even formulate a ‘principle
of tolerance’ that explicitly and emphatically allows different languages in
the sciences to exist alongside each other. The sole criterion for accepting a
language is the question of whether it is convenient and successful in practice.
Carnap’s pragmatic attitude also appears in his opinions concerning
*realism and the concept of causality. Because of their empiricist attitude
and because of the verification criterion, logical empiricists rejected realism
with respect to theories, that is, the belief that a theory may describe the
world or reality ‘as it is’. They believed that the statement that a correct theory
not only corresponds to observations but describes the world itself correctly
goes beyond our experience or observations and cannot be independently
verified, for example, by making more observations. Hence, it does not add
anything meaningful to the statements that are empirically verified or
confirmed. Strict empiricists can therefore say no more than that a theory
agrees with or corresponds to our observations. In their view, realism is
not so much correct or incorrect as meaningless. In practice, however,
Carnap made few objections against taking a realist stance in the sciences.
Something similar applies to his views on the concept of causality. Hume had
already argued that it is meaningless to say that two constantly co-occurring
phenomena – for example, heating a block of ice and its melting – are causally
related to each other. After all, we cannot independently observe a relation of
cause between the heating and the melting (cf. § 2.2). The concept of cause or
causality is therefore meaningless or empty from an empiricist perspective,
but perhaps it can be of practical use in our everyday language or in the
practice of scientific research. Here and elsewhere, Carnap anticipated
some later forms of American *pragmatism (see chapter 4).
Initially, empiricism offered high hopes for the logical empiricist project
of a *unified science (Einheitswissenschaft), the term given to the attempt to
develop one single and uniform language in which all specific subdisciplines
could be expressed. It was especially Neurath who guided and shaped this
project, part of which involved publishing an International Encyclopedia
of Unified Science, of which several volumes were published from 1938
on. This encyclopedia, however, should not be seen as a megalomaniac
84  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

attempt to reduce all scientific statements to the language of physics. Its

aim was practical and didactic, namely, to give a uniform and simplified
characterization of the common logical structure and the specific empirical
content of the statements of the different bona fide sciences, and thus to
facilitate the exchange between the different disciplines in order to make
possible scientific collaboration and meaningful discussion about common
open questions. Moreover, especially for Neurath, this unified science had
not only a philosophical or scientific but also a societal, not to say political,
aim: the formulation of a general language of science, or as he called it a
‘universal jargon’, also served to spread knowledge and enlightenment among
the population at large and thus to strengthen the population’s resilience
against religious and nationalist mystifications.
Hence, Neurath emphatically spoke about unified science as an ency-
clopedia rather than as a finished system. For him, an encyclopedia was
a summary of the state of the art in science, which does not try to hide or
disguise the gaps and uncertainties in our knowledge. To represent unified
science as a finished and logically perfect system, he wrote, would give the
misleading suggestion that our knowledge is already completed and can be
ordered in strict, logically deductive terms. Such a view he called ‘pseudo-
rationalist’. According to him, the sciences are collective undertakings, and
scientific knowledge can only be improved as we go along. Scientists, he
stated in an oft-quoted metaphor, are like sailors who must rebuild their
ship on the open sea.

3.2 The Vienna Circle and the Humanities

The project of unified science may seem in retrospect to have been a naive
dream. The increasingly rapid growth and degree of specialization of the
sciences today make it almost impossible for most working scientists to
meaningfully contribute to any area other than their own specialization.
The prevalent belief at present seems to be that scientific progress inevitably
involves specialization and a concomitant loss of the ability to communicate
between specialists. At the start of the twentieth century, however, such a
degree of specialization and such a strict demarcation between the different
disciplines did not yet exist. Philosophers such as Schlick, Carnap, and the
neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer (see § 7.4b) had a thorough knowledge of the
contemporary natural sciences, mathematics, and logic. Likewise, scientists
such as Mach and Einstein participated as equals in more philosophical
debates.
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 85

Given their aim of unifying the sciences, logical empiricists rejected

the idea of a distinct domain or status for the humanities or Geisteswis-
senschaften with its own distinct objects and methods, as many of their
contemporaries believed (see chapters 6, 7, and 8). For them, the very notion
of Geisteswissenschaften implied an outdated if not reactionary metaphysics.
Their anti-metaphysical attitude shaped, in particular, the logical empiricist
rejection of theology as a science. Theological arguments, such as proofs
of the existence of God, may seem like bona fide argumentations, they
argued, but on closer inspection, they were logically invalid or constructed
from meaningless pseudo-statements. Since real science, according to the
verification criterion, can only contain *testable statements, and since
theology concerns itself with supra-empirical matters, logical empiricists
believed that theological speculation by definition could not produce any
scientific knowledge.
Logical empiricists were rather more optimistic concerning the social
sciences. To the extent that these disciplines can be defined in empiri-
cally testable concepts and statements, they argued, the social sciences
also fit into the programme of unified science. Thus, Neurath, himself a
trained economist, occupied himself at length with the question of how
economics and other social sciences could be formulated or reformulated
in strictly empirical terms, that is, without any metaphysical additions.
He acknowledged the difficulties of such an undertaking but maintained
his belief in the possibility of formulating laws of society that were just as
rigorously empiricist as the laws of nature. Another sympathizer of the
Vienna Circle, Edgar Zilsel, even stated: ‘historical phenomena are hardly
more difficult to predict than the weather, and certainly no more difficult
to predict than earthquakes or the exploding of volcanoes’.17 According to
him, it was certainly possible and definitely worth attempting to formulate
general historical laws.
This emphasis on laws reflects the logical empiricist belief that only
general laws can yield genuine *explanations. They see the aim of scientific
knowledge as involving the explanation of why something happens. Explana-
tion, too, is formulated in terms of statements. The statement to be explained
is usually called the *explanandum, whereas the explaining statement is
called the *explanans. According to logical empiricists, explanation consists
of ‘embedding’ the explanandum in an explanans, which should be in the
form of a general law. The statement about the phenomenon to be explained
is then deduced logically, from the universal law (in Greek: nomos). This view

17 E. Zilsel, The Sociological Origins of Modern Science (Dordrecht, 2003), p. 19.

86  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

of explanation is therefore also called the *deductive-nomological model of

explanation. In historiography, it is also known as the *covering law model.
In the historical and social sciences, where mathematical derivations or
deductions rarely play any major role, the embedding of the explanandum
in the explanans may remain implicit. For example, when a historian writes:
‘Because in 1848 the German population’s expectations concerning speedy
economic recovery did not come true, the population rose in revolt’, he
implicitly employs an explanatory schema that may be explicated as follows:

Whenever expectations concerning economic recovery do not come true,

people rise in revolt.

The expectations in 1848 of the German population concerning economic

recovery did not come true.

In 1848, the German population rose in revolt.

It may appear pedantic to spell out the abovementioned statement in this

manner. It does, however, clarify the aspects on which this statement may be
tested or criticized. Is the general law correct? Was the German population
indeed frustrated in its expectations in 1848? And did the bulk of the German
population indeed rise in revolt in 1848?
Logical empiricists deny that other legitimate forms of explanation than
this form of embedding the explanandum in universal laws exist in either
the natural, the social, or the human sciences. Thus, Carl Hempel argued
that the so-called *verstehende (that is, interpretative or hermeneutic)
method in historiography and sociology, which attempts to explain why
people acted in a particular manner through empathy or by identifying with
their mental state (see § 7.5), does not yield genuine explanations. In these
disciplines, too, he sees the main aim as the formulation of general laws.
An interpretative or verstehende method may serve as a means towards
this end, but it cannot replace it.
For the study of languages and cultural products or phenomena, the strict
programme of the logical empiricists has not proved particularly fruitful.
In linguistics (and to a lesser extent in psychology), behaviourism, which
showed a clear Wahlverwandtschaft with logical empiricism, has been out
of fashion since 1959. In that year, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) published a
detailed and highly critical review article of the book Verbal Behavior by the
behaviourist psychologist B.F. Skinner (1904-1990). Chomsky argued that the
methodological constraints that behaviourist and empiricist approaches
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 87

impose on linguistic theories are far too strict, thereby rendering those
theories essentially incapable of characterizing the human linguistic capabil-
ity. According to him, we should make stronger assumptions about the not
directly observable structure of the human brain than behaviourists would
allow for. Rather exceptionally, Chomsky’s review has become incomparably
more widely known and influential than the book it discusses (cf. § 9.4).
During the 1960s and 1970s, logical empiricist ideals were extremely
popular in the social sciences. Sociologists, psychologists, and others tried
to set up their research according to the demands of logical empiricism and
spoke of the verification of hypotheses, of reduction, and so on. The standard
courses in ‘methods and techniques’ in the social sciences, which even today
are given in many a social-scientific faculty, have been strongly shaped by
what is usually called the ‘standard view of science’. Here, however, one
may observe the logical reconstructions of logical empiricists being used
as a kind of recipe for setting up good research, in blithe ignorance of the
fact that the latter had concerned themselves not with the acquisition but
with the justification of knowledge. Erroneously, features of the context of
justification came to be presented as requirements for the context of discovery.
In principle, the attempt to meet logical empiricist demands and to maintain
the verification criterion does not rule out that a rigorous empirical science of
art and culture can be developed. Such sciences, however, will have to limit
themselves to the empirically observable aspects of artworks, and will have
to aim at formulating general laws concerning the arts or cultural production
more generally. This implies that empirically meaningful statements about the
aesthetic or moral value of artwork cannot be made. This logical empiricist
parti pris should not be seen as a rejection of the arts themselves, however.
Indeed, several members of the Vienna Circle maintained close contacts with
modernist artists, especially architects such as Adolf Loos and the members of
the Bauhaus movement. In modernist circles in central Europe, especially in
cities such as Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, there existed a fruitful connection or
collaboration during this age between the arts, philosophy, and the sciences.
Moreover, this collaboration was often linked to a clear political stance.
Carnap clearly expressed this affinity with modernist art when he wrote:

The strict attitude informed by the sense of responsibility of the scientific

researcher is also sought after as a basic attitude for the philosophical
activist, while the attitude of the old-style philosopher looks more like
that of the poet … We can see a close affinity of the attitude that lays at
the basis of our philosophical work with the spiritual attitude which at
present may be seen in entirely different areas of life: we find the same
88  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

attitude in the arts, especially in architecture and in the movements that

make an effort towards the meaningful establishment of individual and
collective life and education. We find the same attitude everywhere, the
same style of thinking. This is the attitude which everywhere strives for
clarity, yet acknowledges the never entirely transparent interweaving
of life … it is directed towards the interconnection between humans,
and at the same time towards the free development of the individual.18

Soon after, however, the political developments of the 1930s destroyed the
optimism of the Vienna Circle. In 1933, Engelbert Dolfuss carried out a coup
d’état in Austria and established a conservative clerical dictatorship, which
marked a clear defeat for all the more progressive and enlightened forces in
the country. In the following year, Dolfuss outlawed all trade unions and other
social-democratic organizations, including the Ernst Mach Society, despite
fierce protests by Schlick and others. In 1936, Schlick, the Vienna Circle’s leading
figure, was killed by a former student. Two years later, in the 1938 Anschluss,
Austria was annexed to Nazi Germany. Many of the Circle’s members did
not wait for the situation to worsen and fled abroad, primarily to America.
With Schlick’s death and the emigration of almost all its most important
members, the role of the Vienna Circle in the public debate in the German
language-area came to an abrupt end. In America, by contrast, its philo-
sophical influence was to become all the bigger. This influence, however,
was restricted to academic philosophy, since the societal and political
conditions that had originally motivated the Circle in Austria were absent
in its new setting. Instead, logical empiricism in the United States moved
closer towards *pragmatism, the influential American philosophical current
that only accepts philosophical concepts and distinctions to the extent that
they help in solving concrete problems (see also chapter 4). More generally,
American post-war *analytical philosophy would be unthinkable without
logical empiricism, especially as formulated by Carnap.

3.3 Karl Popper: The Logic of Refutation

In 1934, Karl Popper‘s (1902-1994) Logik der Forschung was published in

Vienna. Initially, the logical empiricists saw this book as an original, if
somewhat polemical, contribution to the discussions of the Vienna Circle.
They overlooked the fact, however, that in central aspects, Popper took a

18 R. Carnap, Der logische Aufbau der Welt (Berlin, 1928), p. XIX.

Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 89

Karl Popper

completely different position. Outside the German language area, Popper’s

work remained virtually unknown for a long time. It was only after the
Second World War that Popper, who had meanwhile emigrated to New
Zealand, started to make a name in the English-speaking world. Initially,
this fame was primarily due to his social and political philosophical work
in which he passionately defended the so-called ‘open society’ against
all forms of totalitarianism. It was only during the 1950s, when Popper
had established himself in England and when The Logic of Scientific
Discovery, the English translation of Logik der Forschung, appeared, that
he was also recognized as a major philosopher of science. From the 1960s
on, his circle of followers was to expand steadily. Today, Popper ranks
among the most important and influential philosophers of science of
the twentieth century.
90  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Popper rejected the linguistic turn – that is, the logical empiricist prob-
lematic of verification and the meaningfulness of statements – as a waste
of time. For him, questions of meaning and meaningfulness were part of a
futile and uninteresting debate about words. His own interests, by contrast,
concerned theories of the world. Likewise, the logical empiricist verification
criterion did not meet his approval. He saw it as failing to distinguish even
universal natural laws – which, after all, cannot strictly be verified – from
metaphysical statements and thus as overshooting its mark. Nonetheless,
Popper shared the Vienna Circle’s belief that philosophy could benefit
from a clarification of the logical structure of scientific knowledge and the
way in which it develops. Thus, he too spoke of the ‘logic’ of the growth of
scientific knowledge. This logic aims to analyse and justify the methods
of the empirical sciences and hence constitutes a true *methodology of the
sciences.

3.3a Induction, Deduction, Demarcation

For Popper, the central problem in epistemology is that of the *growth of

knowledge, that is, the question of how it is possible that our knowledge
of the world can improve in the light of experience. He believed that
this question could best be raised with regard to the growth of scientific
knowledge, since the latter is, as he put it, ‘everyday knowledge writ large’
and all kinds of questions that remain unclear or invisible in everyday
settings become apparent in the development of scientific knowledge.
Popper presented the problem of the growth of knowledge as the eternal
question of all philosophers since Plato. In reality, however, it is clearly set
against the specifically modern background of the radical changes in the
natural sciences of his own time and of the philosophical reactions to these
changes such as logical empiricism and neo-Kantianism.
According to Popper, the problem of the growth of knowledge is divided
into two main questions: the question of the justification of induction (or
what he calls *Hume’s problem), and the question of how scientific knowledge
can be distinguished from non-scientific or pseudoscientific knowledge
claims (that is, *Kant’s problem). Popper’s solution to Hume’s problem is as
simple as it is radical: he argues that induction can be justified neither logi-
cally nor psychologically. Carnap had already acknowledged that universal
statements such as ‘all ravens are black’ do not follow deductively from the
observation of individual black ravens and that, at best, it can be made more
probable but it cannot be derived or proven from them (cf. § 3.1a). As we
have seen above, David Hume had already noted as much and had concluded
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 91

that induction, although not logically justifiable, is psychologically real, for

human beings simply have the psychological habit of formulating general
expectations concerning the future based on limited experience.
Popper, however, rejected even this way of putting things. He argued that
induction can no more be defended psychologically than logically. For him,
all knowledge has a preliminary or hypothetical character, as it can at any
moment in time turn out to be incorrect. Suppose that, throughout my life,
I have seen nothing but white swans and therefore believe the statement ‘all
swans are white’. No matter how strongly my belief that all swans are white
may seem to be confirmed by earlier observations, according to Popper it
always remains possible that it will be refuted by future observations. The very
next swan I observe in the future may, after all, turn out to be black rather
than white. For Popper, every theory is therefore a hypothesis or conjecture
that may be refuted on the grounds of subsequent experience. Hence, in his
view, the true logic of the growth of scientific knowledge is not inductive but
deductive in character. This leads to a simple if radical solution to Hume’s
problem (that is, the justification of induction). According to Popper, induction
cannot be justified at all. In fact, it need not even be justified for the simple
reason that it plays no role in the acquisition and growth of knowledge.
Popper’s radical solution to Hume’s problem also stands at the basis of his
answer to Kant’s problem. Given his rejection of the verification criterion for
meaningfulness, he had to pose anew the question concerning *demarcation,
that is, the distinction between scientific and non-scientific knowledge claims.
Since induction cannot be justified, it cannot constitute the ‘method’ that
distinguishes successful empirical sciences from metaphysical and other non-
scientific statements or systems either. How, then, can these be distinguished?
Unlike the logical empiricists, Popper refuses to reject metaphysical state-
ments as unverifiable and therefore meaningless. He argues that speculative
myths or metaphysical ideas, such as the cosmological myth that the universe
arose from an ‘original substance’ like fire or water, or like Democritus’s
conjecture that the entire visible world is composed of invisible particles or
atoms, can certainly play a positive role in the sciences, for they can serve as the
theories or hypotheses that we can subsequently put to tests. Similar to ‘real’
scientific universal statements, they are not strictly verifiable, but they are in
principle *falsifiable. And this, Popper claims, is what characterizes science:
scientific knowledge distinguishes itself not by empirical verifiability but on
the contrary by falsifiability. A truly scientific theory is formulated in such a
way that it can be rejected, or refuted, on the basis of experience and can be
improved in the light of experience. And hence, because of this falsifiability,
true scientific knowledge can also grow – one can learn from one’s errors.
92  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The *demarcation criterion, according to Popper, involves the question

whether or not a theory can be put to a test, that is, whether it is falsifiable or
not. Genuine science systematically seeks circumstances and observations
on the basis of which theories can be refuted, whereas pseudosciences
such as astrology (and, according to Popper, psychoanalysis and Marxist
social science as well) are formulated in such a way that they cannot be
refuted on the basis of any observation. There will thus never be a reason for
rejecting the theory, and hence, there will never be a reason to improve it. It
is in this respect that pseudo-sciences differ from real or genuine sciences,
Popper argues. In the latter, we can speak of the growth of knowledge.
Genuine scientific knowledge is thus characterized by its *fallibility and
by the fact that it systematically exposes itself to attempts at refutation.
Put differently, science is characterized by its openness to criticism, that
is, not by an inductive method of confirmation or verification, as the logical
empiricists thought, but by a deductive method of *falsification. We do not
test theories inductively by searching for individual confirmations but
deductively by systematically examining whether, on the basis of observation
or experiment, we should perhaps give up the theory.
A test that in this way challenges a theory is what Popper called a *crucial
test. A theory that has successfully survived such crucial tests, or explicit
attempts at refutation, is in a certain sense strengthened. Popper, however,
refused to characterize this strengthening as confirmation, as Carnap did,
since confirmation, too, is an inductivist notion. Instead, Popper introduced
the concept of the degree of *corroboration, or the degree to which a theory
has thus far survived tests. The stronger these tests, the stronger its degree
of corroboration. But even a theory that had been strongly corroborated
in earlier crucial experiments may well be refuted in the very next test.
Inductivists may object that this notion of corroboration is too strict. One
would think that a theory that has survived several attempts at refutation
could be maintained with more confidence even if it is not certain, or is at
least more solid than other theories that have not yet been put to the test.
Others will protest that the difference between deductive corroboration
and inductive confirmation is not as great as Popper suggested. After all,
both appear to boil down to the strengthening of a theory in the light of
observations and experiments. Popper was not impressed by such protests,
however. By presenting a theory as confirmed, he argued, we formulate
an inductive expectation about its future success. Describing a theory as
corroborated, by contrast, emphasizes that it has proven successful thus
far but acknowledges that it remains a conjecture that we may have to give
up in the light of coming tests.
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 93

3.3b Testing Theories

Popper’s ideas about the relation between theory and experience are equally
at odds with those of the logical empiricists. He believed that theories
precede experience rather than the other way around. Hence, he thought
that pure observation was impossible. Each observation, he argued, is
inevitably guided and coloured by our beliefs, expectations, and interests.
When somebody commands us ‘observe!’, we will be at a loss as to what
we are to observe, how we are supposed to do so, and why. Observations
are therefore always observations in the light of a theory, a question, an
expectation, or a problem.
In rejecting the possibility of pure, unprejudiced experience, Popper
showed himself to be a *rationalist rather than an empiricist. In his view, we
proceed not from observations but from theories, that is, from conjectures
or expectations that guide our observations. Hence, for Popper, knowledge
is not founded on experience, let alone on ‘pure experience’, but it can be
corrected in the light of experience. In other words, scientific knowledge is
distinguished from dogmas or superstition not because it is based on better
or purer observations, as empiricists hold, but because it invites criticism
and the possibility for improvement as a matter of principle. Thus, science is
marked by a critical – as distinct from a dogmatic – attitude. The origin of a
theory may equally well be a mythological or metaphysical statement. What
matters is that subsequently, regardless of their origins, such statements
are critically put to the test.
How exactly does this testing work? Popper emphasized that theories are
not tested by ‘observations’ or ‘observation sentences’ but by *basic sentences.
A basic sentence is a singular statement that can serve as a premisse in
the empirical testing of a theory, which is a universal statement. The basic
sentence may contradict a theory. In that case, it is a *potential falsifier of it.
For example, the theory that all swans are white (A) excludes the existence
of non-white swans. Thus, the basic sentence (B) serves as a potential falsifier
of theory (A):
(A) All swans are white.
(B) There is at least one black swan.

If we accept basic sentence (B), for example on the basis of our observing a
black swan, then theory (A) is thereby falsified. If the potential falsifier (B)
is accepted as true, after all, then universal statement (A), which contradicts
it, cannot possibly be true as well. Thus, the theory is strictly deductively
falsified by our accepting the singular basic sentence.
94  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Unlike the observation sentences of the logical empiricists, basic sentences

are not epistemologically primitive or more directly connected with observa-
tion or with the facts than any other theoretical statement – they are as
much theory-laden as other statements. They can only be distinguished from
theoretical or universal statements by their logical form: they are singular
statements. Moreover, Popper held that accepting a basic sentence is a matter
of decision or convention. The decision to accept the basic sentence ‘there is
at least one black swan’ may be caused by our observing a black swan, but
it cannot be logically be justified by it because logical relations – including
the normative relation of justification – only hold between sentences, state-
ments, or propositions and not between a statement and an observation.
That relation, Popper argued, is psychological and therefore can play no role
in a normative methodology of the sciences.
In this respect, Popper’s position may be called *conventionalist. For
him, basic sentences are not ‘statements that connect a theory with
observation’ or ‘statements of pure observation’ but logically singular
statements that may test a theory and that we may agree to accept for
the time being. Hence, according to Popper, it is not observations but
decisions that decide the fate of a theory. The decision, or convention, to
accept the basic sentence ‘there is at least one black swan’ in the light of
experience logically leads to the refutation of the theory that all swans
are white.
But surely, one may object, if falsification is no more than the convention
to accept a basic sentence, nothing logically forces us to give up a theory?
After all, one might equally well choose other conventions. In particular,
one may add conventions that protect the theory against falsification. For
example, one may add an auxiliary hypothesis that the black birds we just
saw were not swans but constitute a distinct species, or one may yet reject
the basic sentence ‘there is at least one black swan’, for example by declaring
that the person who introduced it has mistaken a black goose for a swan.
Thus, a conventionalist position like Popper’s risks making every theory
immune to falsification in advance.
Popper acknowledged that this is logically possible but argued that it
should be avoided on the basis of a methodological rule that precludes this
kind of *conventionalist stratagem. According to this rule, the scientist
should not backtrack by introducing *ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses or by
retrospectively disputing the basic sentences, thus trying to reconcile a
theory with a potential falsifier that had already been accepted. In other
words, one should state in advance under which circumstances one will
regard one’s theory to be falsified, and one should identify the crucial test
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 95

for the theory in advance. If one is to introduce auxiliary hypotheses, these

should not reduce the falsifiability of the theory.
Popper’s philosophical views may be illustrated by the work of his hero,
Albert Einstein. Popper himself once remarked that his view of science is in
fact little more than a philosophical elaboration of Einstein’s attitude towards
his theory of relativity. Other famous scientists such as Copernicus or Newton
do not play any significant role in his work. This raises the question whether
Popper’s approach, which primarily strives for philosophical adequacy,
is actually sufficiently historically adequate. In the next chapter, it will
indeed become apparent that, historically, matters are more complicated
than Popper presents them, and that this fact also has methodological
consequences.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity implies a view of gravity radically
different from the hitherto dominant theory that had been proposed by
Newton. What was admirable in Popper’s eyes was that Einstein was able
to make precise and unexpected predictions on the basis of this theory.
For example, he predicted that light does not proceed in a direct line when
near a massive object like the sun but is curved by the latter’s gravitational
mass. In 1919, Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) undertook an expedition to
the island of Principe near the African coast, where a full solar eclipse
was to occur. Here, Einstein’s predictions could be put to the test. During
the solar eclipse, the light of stars otherwise paled by the sunlight would
be visible. If Einstein’s theory was correct, the light emitted by these stars
would be deflected by the mass of the sun, with the effect that their position
would be slightly different from the one observed at night. Einstein knew of
Eddington’s expedition and declared that this would be a serious test of his
theory. He also proclaimed that he would give up his theory if Eddington’s
findings turned out not to agree with his predictions. Thus, Eddington’s
mission constituted a crucial test of Einstein’s theory. The results of the
expedition are well known: the apparent position of the stars observed
by Eddington closely corresponded to what Einstein had predicted, and
thus his theory passed the crucial test with flying colours and hence was
corroborated by it.
According to Popper, Einstein’s theory is a showcase example of good
science. It strictly observes the methodological rule to ‘try to improve the
empirical content of theories, critically test theories, and prefer the theory
with the highest degree of corroboration’. This rule is more precise than
a general principle to strive for simple or elegant theories with precise
predictions because it clarifies what such simplicity, elegance, and precision
amount to in methodological terms. In Popper’s view, precise theories are
96  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

worth pursuing because they are more testable than their rivals and because
they have greater empirical content than less simple theories containing
all kinds of ifs and buts. The recommendation to critically test a theory is
intended as a precaution against conventionalist stratagems that try to
reconcile an already accepted falsifier with a theory. That is, the *empiri-
cal content of the theory (or its *informational content) increases with the
number of potential basic sentences it excludes, or – as Popper put it – as
the class of its potential falsifiers becomes bigger. A theory with a greater
predictive range than its rivals or a theory that allows for the deduction
of more precise predictions has a larger set of potential falsifiers. For this
reason, as long as it has not been falsified, we will prefer such a theory
over competitors that have a more restricted reach or make less precise
predictions.
Basing himself on the notions of empirical content and the degree of cor-
roboration of theories, Popper also tried to defend the thesis that, over time,
theories increasingly approximate the truth. That is to say, we gradually come
closer to a uniquely correct description of the world. He suggested that there
are good reasons for believing that improving theories by systematically
searching for refutations will in the long run have the effect that the truth
is in fact approached. We will never be certain, however, that it has actually
been reached. Popper captured this idea of the ever-closer approaching of
the truth in his notion of *verisimilitude, that is, ‘similarity to the truth’.
Its technical details need not detain us here, but it shows that Popper was
ultimately a realist who believed that in our scientific theories, we strive
for truth. Popper emphasized, however, that we can never be certain that
a theory is definitely or finally true. After all, we have no way of verify-
ing a theory, as we can only try to falsify it. When a theory has survived
numerous crucial tests without being falsified, it will have a high degree
of corroboration. But that by no means gives us the certainty that it will
not be falsified in the future. Hence, Popper was a *fallibilist: he proceeded
from the idea of the fundamental fallibility of all knowledge – including
the fallibility of knowledge that has been accepted as true since time im-
memorial. For example, at the start of the twentieth century, Newtonian
mechanics, which had been regarded as uncontroversial for centuries and
which had been corroborated by countless observations, was refuted and
replaced by Einstein’s theories. According to Popper, these developments
should teach us a philosophical lesson: that we can never assume that we
possess the truth. That is no reason, however, to end our search for it. Popper
based his realism on Tarski’s theory of truth, which – unlike the logical
empiricists – he saw as a justification of the metaphysical idea of truth as
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 97

corresponding to the facts. For him, the concept of truth was essentially more
than merely a semantic notion. More generally, he had little if any affinity
with the linguistic turn of the logical empiricists. As mentioned above,
he saw philosophical questions concerning the meanings of sentences as
pseudo-problems. In his view, genuine philosophical debate should concern
itself with the world and with genuine problems rather than with words.

3.3c Explanation, Prediction, and the Laws of History

Popper shared the logical empiricists’ doubts concerning the notion of

causality. As explained above, empiricists believed it was meaningless to say
that when two observable events constantly co-occur, such as the warming
up and melting of a block of ice, one event causes the other. Popper had other
reasons for his doubts, however. He thought that a general philosophical
concept of causality is not so much meaningless as superfluous. He held
that the principle of causality could be replaced by the methodological
rule that we will not give up the search for general theories, and that we
should not give up attempts to explain events ‘causally’. With the latter
expression, Popper indicated a particular line of argumentation. Instead
of understanding causal explanations in metaphysical terms, he conceived
a ‘causal explanation’ as the logical deduction of a singular statement E
from a general, or universal, statement T (that is, the theory or hypothesis)
plus a singular statement IC that specifies the *initial conditions, that is
to say, the circumstances that according to the theory lead to the event.
Thus, we say that E is explained by T and IC, and that IC is the cause of the
effect E. This model or scheme of explanation is therefore usually called
the *hypothetico-deductive model, or scheme, of explanation. It is equal in
structure to the deductive-nomological model of explanation as formulated by
the logical empiricists in the tradition of the Vienna Circle and as discussed
above (§ 3.2).

Theory (hypothesis): Ice melts when the temperature rises above

0 degrees Celsius.

Initial condition: The temperature is 10 degrees Celsius.

Explanandum: The ice melts.

A causal explanation of the event has the same logical form as a *prediction
of an event from a hypothesis and the specification of its initial conditions.
98  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Thus we explain event E from T and IC when we could have predicted the
occurrence of E on the grounds of T and IC.
The hypothetico-deductive scheme of explaining and predicting is also
used in the social sciences. For example, in his famous 1899 study, the
French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) explained the suicide rate
in a given society and period by a theory with two variables: the degree of
integration of individuals and the degree of regulation of social life, and
the specific societal circumstances of that society and period (see also § 9.1
below). In this manner, Durkheim could explain, for example, the fact that
major economic changes coincide with a rise in suicide rates. Whenever
the economy changes, the regulation of social life decreases, as people are
less certain about what is expected of them. The theory predicts that under
those circumstances the suicide rates will rise, and conversely, that fact is
explained by this theory. Economic change, in other words, is a cause for
rising suicide rates.
Popper emphatically denied that predictions about long-term social devel-
opments can be deduced from historical or sociological laws of development.
Whereas astronomers can make reliable long-term predictions based on a
physical theory – for example concerning the position of the planets through
the decades – the course of human history, he argued, is co-determined by
the growth of knowledge. That growth cannot be predicted. The reason for
this is that our scientific knowledge is characterized by fallibility: we do
not know whether the theories we adhere to today will have to be given
up tomorrow. Hence, we cannot predict in advance in which direction our
knowledge will grow. And since societal relations are partly determined
by our knowledge, one is forced to conclude that the long-term prediction
of societal developments is impossible.
The belief that the historical sciences should strive to make long-term
predictions was labelled *historicism by Popper. This belief, he argued, is
defended especially by Marxists, who, basing themselves on Marx’s analysis
of the dynamics of class relations, make long-term predictions concern-
ing the development of capitalist society and the inevitable arrival of the
socialist revolution (see also chapter 7). According to Popper, however,
historicism rests on a fundamental misunderstanding. In The Poverty of
Historicism (1957), he elaborated on his objections, which were of both an
epistemological and social-philosophical/political-philosophical character.
The epistemological objection is that a theory can never lead to predictions
in isolation. Initial conditions always play a crucial role, and the available
knowledge should be included in the initial conditions. This latter element,
however, cannot be predicted for the reasons mentioned above: whenever
Logical Empiricism and Critical R ationalism 99

predictions are made without taking these initial conditions into account,
we are not dealing with predictions but with *prophecies.
For Popper, historicism was more than merely an academic misunder-
standing, however. His political and social-philosophical objection was that
it actually endangers human liberty. Those who believe in infallible laws of
history, he argued, and who claim to be able to make long-term predictions
based on such laws will, once in power, soon start developing totalitarian
traits. For anyone who claims to know the future course of history on the
basis of a historicist theory will probably not be inclined to take criticism
into account and will likely silence people who have another future in mind
for being ‘historically mistaken’ about society’s destiny. Hence, it comes as
no surprise that The Poverty of Historicism was dedicated ‘in memory of the
countless men and women of all creeds or nations or races who fell victim to
the fascist and communist belief in Inexorable Laws of Historical Destiny’.19
If historians are neither able nor allowed to make use of the hypothetico-
deductive scheme of explanation, then how should they explain the events
and the actions of the people they write about? Popper suggest they should
explicate what he calls the *logic of the situation, that is, make a model of
what amounts to ‘rational action’ in a given culture, given the available
knowledge and the current standards of rationality. Next, possible deviations
from this rational course of action can be studied in more detail, as well as
their unintended or unforeseen consequences. Popper’s proposal was used
fruitfully by the art historian Ernst Gombrich (1909-2001), who was strongly
influenced by Popper’s philosophy, in order to explain various developments
in the visual arts. Elsewhere in the humanities, too, traces of Popper’s ideas
of scientific method can still be found.

Summary

– The logical empiricists tried to unravel the logic of scientific research,

and they believed that induction plays a central role in this logic. They
offered a critique of metaphysics by introducing the verification criterion
of meaning, which locates the meaning of a statement in the method
of its empirical verification. This criterion was later toned down and
replaced by the concept of confirmation.
– The logical empiricists distinguished the context of justification (the
normative and logical justification of scientific knowledge claims) from

19 K.R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1957), p. vii.

100  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

the context of discovery (the factual description of scientific research

and discovery). They also made a rigid distinction between analytic
(logical and mathematical) statements and synthetic or empirical state-
ments. A central but controversial doctrine of the logical empiricists
is reductionism, which tries to reduce all meaningful statements to a
combination of analytic and purely observational statements.
– The Vienna Circle rejected the notion that the humanities have a distinct
object or method. In their view, all theories should be strictly empirically
testable.
– Popper rejected the logical-empiricist interpretation of science. He
formulated a criterion of demarcation for distinguishing science from
pseudoscience. Genuine scientific knowledge, he argued, does not look
for confirmation by our observations but precisely for the refutation or
falsification of hypotheses or conjectures, in so-called crucial tests.
– According to Popper, there is no such thing as pure observation. In
his view, scientific knowledge does not differentiate itself through its
origin but by the fact that it grows and because its growth is based on
falsification rather than confirmation. Scientific theories are put to
the test by so-called basic statements conventionally and provisionally
held to be true.
– For Popper, a critical look at one’s own convictions is a necessity not
only in science but also in politics. He rejected historicism or the belief
that the course of history could be captured in laws and hence could
also be predicted.
4 Historicizing the Philosophy of
Science

4.1 From Empiricism to Pragmatism

Popper’s views on the growth and demarcation of scientific knowledge are

attractive if not inspiring. His idea of science as a practice in which people
consciously expose their work to criticism and in which they strive for truth
without ever pretending to actually possess it has become a cherished ideal
if not the self-image for many scholars in the natural and social sciences as
well as in the humanities. Even more than the classical view or the logical
empiricist model, Popper’s view has become a ‘standard view of science’.
Various objections can be raised against Popper’s position, however,
regarding both the philosophical and historical adequacy of his philosophy
of science. The philosophical objections are based on what at first sight
appears to be a rather esoteric doctrine that has come to be known as the
*Duhem-Quine thesis. The most important criticism concerning the historical
adequacy of Popper’s views was formulated by the American historian and
philosopher of science Thomas S. Kuhn (1922-1996). As Kuhn’s insights can
be seen to some extent as an elaboration of the Duhem-Quine thesis, both
lines of criticism in fact point to the same shortcomings.
The Duhem-Quine thesis has proved to be of monumental importance
in intellectual history. If correct, it not only upsets Popper’s philosophy of
science but also has much broader philosophical implications. It undermines
not only the distinction between metaphysical and empirical scientific
statements but also the distinctions between theory and observation and
between logic and experience. The thesis ultimately comes out in favour
of a more *pragmatist position, which only accepts such distinctions to the
extent that they make a practical difference in our activities (scientific or
otherwise). Clearly, a substantial number of fundamental presuppositions
of mainstream Western philosophy are at stake here.
For everyday scientific practice, these principled objections do not im-
mediately have major repercussions. Theories with a wide empirical reach,
a high degree of precision, and a simple structure remain preferable over
theories lacking such qualities, and scientists who do not take criticism
of their work seriously still risk placing themselves outside the scientific
community. What is questioned in this critique of Popper’s philosophy of
science is the interpretation of the results of scientific work. As we shall
102  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

see below, it also brings out aspects of the development of science that had
been overlooked or ignored by Popper.
If we are to believe Popper’s critics, science is an activity of a different kind
than we had hitherto thought. Some of our basic intuitions, summarized
in the so-called subject-object scheme which merges the epistemological
and metaphysical aspects of classical natural science (cf. § 2.2), appear to
be indefensible. Anyone seeking to understand what actually happens in
the sciences will encounter major problems with the assumption that the
world lies waiting to be discovered by researchers who follow scientific
methods developed in the seventeenth century, as significant events in the
development of science will remain unaccounted for. Science, Popper’s critics
hold, is an amalgam of activities that only gradually acquires more structure
as we go along and in which the object of research is partly constituted by
those activities.
As will become clear, all of this has far-reaching consequences. Not only
does it have major implications for our views concerning the position of sci-
ence in Western culture, it also implies a rather different perspective on the
culture of modern societies, where the idea prevails that we can differentiate
ourselves from other and earlier societies by our scientific rationality. Some
of these implications are manifested in the work of philosophers such as
Richard Rorty (see § 11.3b) and Bruno Latour (see § 11.4).
Moreover, the Duhem-Quine thesis, and especially the further elaboration
of this thesis by Kuhn, has led to a shift in the way science is viewed. It
has contributed to the development of new historicizing and sociologi-
cal perspectives on science. The epistemological view on science, which
primarily focuses on questions about the justification of scientific results,
has given way to anthropological and historical studies that investigate
what scientists do when engaged in scientific research. In these studies, the
work that is required to make the world knowable is emphasized – work that
involves the use of instruments and techniques to prepare materials and
manipulate conditions in laboratories, for example. Attention has shifted
from ‘ready-made science’ to ‘science in action’ (cf. § 4.4).
Here we will first discuss the philosophical dimensions and implications
of the Duhem-Quine thesis. It implies, among other things, that individual
statements do not unequivocally correspond to specific facts in the outside
world. This idea leads to further questions concerning the relation between
theory and experiment, including the question of how and when scientists
can actually know whether an experiment is successful. Next, we will
discuss Wilfrid Sellars’ attack on the ‘myth of the given’, which entails a
further criticism of empiricist assumptions in our standard views of science.
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 103

Together, the ideas of Duhem, Quine, and Sellars imply a shift away from
empiricism towards pragmatism. This shift is also visible in the rather
more famous historicizing work of Kuhn, with whom we close this chapter.

4.1a The Duhem-Quine Thesis

The most important philosophical problem with Popper’s theory was already
known before he had even formulated it. Already in 1906, Pierre Duhem
(1861-1916), a French physicist, philosopher and historian of science, had
pointed out a fundamental problem concerning the testing of scientific
hypotheses. In the 1950s, the American logician and philosopher Willard
Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) restated Duhem’s claim as a semantic and
epistemological thesis. According to this *Duhem-Quine thesis, empirical
hypotheses cannot be verified or falsified in isolation. If this thesis is cor-
rect, testing cannot play the crucial role that Popper assigns to it in his
philosophy of science.
In La théorie physique, son object et sa structure (1906), Duhem showed that
there is no such thing as the simple observing and reporting of experimental
findings. Just like Popper, he realized that observed phenomena should
be seen and described in terms of a theory. Laws should be formulated in
general or abstract terms and hence can be no more than approximations
of our observations, according to Duhem.
Duhem diverged from Popper, however, in arguing that the fundamental
hypotheses of theories cannot as a matter of principle be tested in isolation.
He opened his argument with an empiricist objection against the initially
plausible belief that physical theories are concerned with the reality behind
or beneath the observable phenomena. We cannot directly observe this
underlying reality itself, however; we can only infer its existence and what
we know about it from the concrete and specific observations we make. For
example, in music, we only hear concrete sounds, which we then order in
general and abstract notions such as pitch, timbre, octave, chord, etc. Such
concepts or notions, however, describe sound as it is with respect to us,
not as it is in itself. The reality underlying our observations is therefore not
itself observed but rather represented in or by acoustic theory. Whereas our
senses only register sounds, acoustic theory describes these in theoretical
terms as the periodical vibrations of the air with a certain amplitude and
frequency. This frequency and amplitude, however, we do not perceive as
such when listening to music.
What, then, legitimates a theory? All that a genuine empiricist can say,
Duhem argued, is that a theory efficiently and economically represents and
104  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

orders empirical regularities. The only criterion by which one can appraise
a theory is its agreement with observations and experimental results. One
cannot observe whether a theory also corresponds to an underlying reality.
Duhem did not so much deny that an objective outside world exists as stated
that we can never be certain whether we correctly describe it. No matter
how strongly a scientist may be convinced that his theory describes reality
as it is, as a genuine empiricist he can never justify his theory in this way
because reality transcends experience. For a strict empiricist like Duhem,
realism is therefore a metaphysical doctrine if not an outright act of faith.
Indeed, the claim that a theory describes reality cannot be justified
by observation. This much we already knew from earlier empiricists, and
rationalists like Popper would agree. Hence, according to Popper, we should
improve theories by putting them to tests, and by suggesting new hypotheses
if they fail these tests. Even though the resulting theory remains falsifiable,
he argued, we have reasons to believe that along the way we will eventually
approach the truth. Duhem, however, leaves us no such possibility, for he
contended that there is another, more principled problem with experiments.
For what exactly is a scientist doing when – for example – he is measuring
the pressure of a gas while he increases its volume at a constant temperature?
According to Popper, he is testing Boyle’s law which states that the pressure
of a given quantity of a gas is inversely proportional to its volume. According
to Duhem, however, an experiment puts not only a hypothesis to the test but
also the various assumptions that the researcher has made, part of which are
implicit if not unconscious. For example, he assumes that his instruments
are functioning properly and that his techniques of measurement and even
his mathematical methods are correct. When the experiment yields results
that are at odds with his hypothesis, it may be that the hypothesis that is
incorrect, but it may equally be that one of the other assumptions is false.
Perhaps the measuring instruments do not quite do what the researcher
expected them to do, or perhaps the calculus employed is not adequate. In
other words, a test may show that something is wrong, but it does not yield a
decisive answer as to where the error resides. At most, we can agree – that is,
determine by *convention – where we can localize the error. Hence, the logic
of testing a hypothesis appears not to be deductive or logically compelling
after all. A ‘crucial experiment’ in natural science is impossible in principle.
There is always room to adjust an auxiliary assumption or hypothesis to
make the theory as a whole agree with or correspond to observation.
As noted above, Popper acknowledged this conventionalist objection, but
he argued it could be rectified by methodological measures. He points out
that our auxiliary assumptions and hypotheses concerning our instruments
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 105

are just as testable as our theories, albeit not in the same experiment in
which the theory itself is put to the test. A scientist wanting to test a theory
should proceed from the assumption that one’s instruments function in the
accepted manner. When, after a negative test result, one suspects that the
theory itself is correct and that the negative result should be blamed on
the instruments, one has only one option: to think of a new test in which
the assumptions about the functioning of one’s instruments are tested
independently.
For actual scientific practice, this approach may seem reasonable. Philo-
sophically, however, Duhem was after bigger game. Popper’s methodological
answer hides these more radical epistemological implications of Duhem’s
thesis from view. For what is the philosophical consequence of the insight
that researchers can never acquire certainty but at most agree as to what
went wrong in a test? Such agreements are mere conventions that have no
empirical content themselves. If the importance of conventions increases
in the use of theories, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend the claim
that scientific knowledge is more than a complex whole of conventions and
that the knowledge produced in science corresponds to the facts. Popper
had no adequate philosophical answer to this problem.
Should we then conclude that the theoretical knowledge produced in
science is merely conventional and that one may therefore replace such a
system by other conventions at will? Conventionalism thus risks leading
to *relativism, that is, it risks leaving no objective standards for measuring
and comparing achievements in science. But doesn’t that imply that theory
choice becomes merely a matter of taste? Duhem answered in the affirmative
but pointed out that, in this case at least, ‘taste’ is not an individual or
subjective matter. Alongside his theory and observational data, he argued,
the researcher will have to defend his decisions by referring to the history
of his discipline and by using his sense of scientific proportions.

4.1b Willard Quine’s Meaning Holism

Quine gave an even more radical twist to Duhem’s thesis, reinterpreting it as

a thesis in the philosophy of language. Whereas Duhem limited himself to
experiments in the natural sciences, Quine converted Duhem’s thesis into
a claim concerning the meaning – or as he called it, the *empirical content
– of statements in general. Not only is it impossible to test a hypothesis in
isolation, he argued, it is not even possible to say what that hypothesis by
itself means or ‘is about’. In his view, empirical content cannot be localized
statement by statement but only in a theory as a whole. Our statements about
106  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

the outside world, he famously stated, ‘face the tribunal of sense experience
not individually but as a corporate body’.20 This thesis has far-reaching
philosophical consequences.
Since the scientific revolution, scientific knowledge has been seen as
arising from the connection of mathematical methods and experimental
results. Increasingly, it was also acknowledged that mathematical methods
play a constructive role in this process. Hence, empiricists saw themselves
faced with the question of how this interconnected whole of mathematical
and empirical elements can be dissected; that is, how can we decide which
part of a theory rests on the conventions embodied in the mathematical
language in which it is formulated and which part refers to experience? In
other words, which part of the theory is analytic and which part is synthetic?
Which part is true on the basis of linguistic conventions, and which part is
true on the basis of states of affairs in the world?
As we have seen in § 3.1, the members of the Vienna Circle formulated this
problem as the question of how meaningful statements can be reduced to a
combination of purely analytic statements (that is, conventions we choose
based on practical considerations) and purely synthetic statements (which
may be interpreted either physicalistically or phenomenalistically). In this
perspective, it must be possible to decompose every empirical statement
into a purely analytic and a purely synthetic component. The merits of
theories could then be judged in purely empirical terms by scrutinizing
its synthetic component. A well-confirmed theory would be one with a
substantial synthetic component.
Quine, however, dealt a mortal blow to this ambition. He argued that
the two assumptions underlying it – the belief in the *analytic-synthetic
distinction and *reductionism – are untenable. Clearly, this thesis is at odds
with our intuition, as it seems obvious that the truth of a statement depends
on both the language used and on what is in fact the case in the world. Take
the statement ‘Caesar was killed by Brutus’. If the factual circumstances had
been different (for example, if Brutus had died in infancy), this statement
would have been false. But it could also have been false if the word killed had
had a different meaning, for example, ‘brought up’ instead of ‘put to death’.
At first sight, it thus appears easy to distinguish the conventional and the
synthetic components of any arbitrary statement. In scientific statements,
however, it is much more difficult and according to Quine even impossible

20 W.V.O. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’ in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA,
1961), p. 41.
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 107

W.V.O. Quine

in principle to draw this distinction in a systematic and philosophically

tenable manner.
Quine launched his attack on the distinction between ‘true on the basis
of meaning’ and ‘true on the basis of fact’ in his famous 1951 article, ‘Two
Dogmas of Empiricism’, in which he argued that no philosophically defensible
notion of word meaning or sentence meaning exists that can support this
distinction. We may be tempted to say that analytic statements such as ‘a
bachelor is an unmarried man’ are true on the basis of conventions and are
true by definition, or contain expressions that are synonymous. According
to Quine, however, the notions of convention, definition, and synonymy
are no less problematic than that of analyticity – worse, they are defined
in terms of analyticity themselves and thus depend on precisely the notion
they were meant to clarify. From these considerations, Quine drew the
conclusion that the intuitively plausible distinction between analytic and
synthetic cannot support the empiricist conceptualization of meaningful
language use.
Quine acknowledged that it is perfectly reasonable to want to distinguish
the linguistic and the factual components of our statements, since the
108  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

truth of an individual statement clearly depends both on the facts and on

language. But unfortunately, that does not mean that we can make a strict
and principled distinction between the analytic and the synthetic parts
of a statement. ‘[The idea] that such a distinction exists is an unempirical
dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith’, he concluded.21
The second dogma Quine rejected is reductionism, that is, the belief that
every meaningful statement can be reduced or translated into a statement
about pure sense experience. In this form, reductionism does not play a
major role in Carnap’s analyses (see § 3.2b). Quine’s criticisms, however, were
primarily directed at the related reductionist thesis that each statement can
be individually tested for its truth or falsity. Such a reduction to statements
in isolation, he claimed, is impossible as a matter of principle. It is in this
version that his argument has exerted wide influence. According to Quine,
an empirical hypothesis is not merely an isolated statement but is derived
from a theory, that is to say, it forms part of a coherent body of logically
interdependent statements. When these statements are put to the test in an
experiment, one cannot say with certainty whether a falsification refutes
the hypothesis itself or rather another statement in the theory from which
that hypothesis has been derived. It could even be the case that the other
auxiliary assumptions or hypotheses – for example, the manner in which
our measuring instruments function – are faulty.
Quine derived this argument from Duhem, but he radicalized or general-
ized it to the philosophical thesis that empirical or factual content (or what
we would call ‘meaning’) cannot be assigned on a sentence-by-sentence basis
but is spread out, so to speak, over the theory as a whole. Thus, reductionism
appears to be untenable: it is impossible to characterize individual state-
ments as concerning or representing specific ‘facts’ or ‘pure observations’.
Quine concluded that:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or belief, from the most casual
matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic phys-
ics and even pure mathematics or logic, is a man-made fabric which
impinges on experience only along the edges […] [T]he total field is so
under-determined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is
much latitude of choice as to what statements to reevaluate in the light of
any singular contrary experience. […] If this view is right, it is misleading to
speak of the empirical content of an individual statement. […] Furthermore
it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which

21 Ibid,. p. 37.
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 109

hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold

come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we
make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. […] Conversely,
by the same token, no statement is immune to revision.22

Quine accepted the empiricist verification criterion, which claims that the
meaning of a statement resides in the empirical testing of whether or not it
is true. In the dogmatic empiricist perspective, analytic statements would
then be those statements that are confirmed by all empirical circumstances
and are thus not subject to any revision in the light of experience. According
to Quine, however, no statement is immune to possible revision. In the light
of experience, it may in some circumstances even be necessary to change
mathematical or logical statements that we had held to be analytic and
unchangeable.
Moreover, Quine argued, theories essentially transcend our experience
and are thus *underdetermined by the empirical evidence on which they
rest; one can formulate different theories that are in agreement with the
same observations. Conversely, statements supposed to express observations
derive their meaning or content not from the facts or things themselves but
from the interconnected network of statements that constitute a theory.
Thus, Quine is a *meaning holist who holds that the empirical content or
meaning of an individual statement does not consist of standing for a fact
but derives from the whole of the connected statements of the theory it is
a part of.
One consequence of this thesis – which was not drawn by Quine himself
but which does figure in the work of among others Kuhn – is that when a
theory undergoes a radical change, the meanings of the terms it employs
may change along with it, including the meanings of terms that seem to
refer to observable things or events. Hence, we cannot be sure that our
statements before and after a theory change still concern the same things
or facts. In other words, radical theory change often comes with a change
in *ontology, that is, in what according to the theory and its followers exists.
This consequence is plainly counterintuitive. In everyday language, it
seems obvious that words such as chair and table directly refer to the things
they denote and that these words in a different language, such as Stuhl and
Tisch in German, refer to the same things. Scientific theories, however,
function in a different manner. They discuss observable matters in terms
of an underlying interconnected network of theoretical terms such as force,

22 Ibid., pp. 42-43.
110  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

mass, and electron, which do not themselves refer to directly observable

objects but derive their meaning or content from the theory within which
they are defined.
This also holds for theories in the social sciences and the humanities. For
example, the concept of class has a different meaning in Marx’s theory of
society than in Weber’s. In Chomsky’s generative grammar, language has a
different meaning than in a sociolinguistic theory. Theories thus define their
own terms and hence, in an important sense, create the kind of objects that
they are about. Obviously, that does not mean that scientists can arbitrarily
conjure up entities as if they were magicians who can change the world at
will. What it does mean is that their *ontology – that is, the kinds of things
they speak about – is determined by their theory and conceptual framework.
Quine may be called a *naturalist: he saw epistemological questions
concerning the justif ication of knowledge as part of (developmental)
psychological research into the origin of knowledge. The classical logi-
cal empiricist attempts to reduce natural scientific knowledge to logical
truths and pure observation statements may have failed, he argued, but
that is no reason to give up epistemology as the inquiry into the founda-
tions of our knowledge altogether. Such an inquiry, however, will have
to take the form of an empirical psychological exploration of the human
capacity for knowledge as a natural phenomenon. Thus, Quine distanced
himself from Kant’s transcendental project, which takes knowledge to be
something irreducibly normative. In Quine’s perspective, epistemological
statements, and philosophical statements more generally, no longer occupy
a privileged position as the ultimate conceptual analysis and normative
justification of empirical scientific statements but become part of those
sciences themselves.
The holism of the Duhem-Quine thesis blurs the distinction between
theoretical and empirical statements. Quine’s naturalism blurs the dis-
tinction between normative epistemology and descriptive psychology. A
Popperian may have no major difficulties with this, since he sees observation
as informed by our perspectives, theories, and expectations anyway. It would
be more difficult, however, for a Popperian to accept the conclusion that it
is futile to crucially test individual statements for the principled semantic
and epistemological reason that empirical content cannot be unambiguously
assigned to individual statements. An observation that is at odds with a
theory may lead to the rejection of an empirical hypothesis, but possibly,
one or more theoretical statements from which that hypothesis is derived
may also have to be rejected. Perhaps, in the light of experience, even logical
or mathematical principles believed to be not at all susceptible to change
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 111

may have to be revised. According to Quine, no statements are immune to

revision in the light of experience.
In giving up the analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism, there-
fore, the strict distinction between theoretical and observational statements
and between logical principles and factual claims disappears, as does the
difference between scientific language use and unverifiable metaphysical
statements. Even statements that seem to have no empirical content may
be refuted by experience, and conversely, even if a hypothesis seems to
have a clear and concrete empirical content, it is in principle possible to
maintain it in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary. Below, we will
repeatedly encounter the consequences of this thesis.

4.1c Wilfrid Sellars and the Myth of the Given

Quine’s position is still recognizably empiricist: despite his holism, he still

believed that ultimately, our knowledge is not only caused by but also
conceptually founded on experience. As he put it, it faces ‘the tribunal of
sense experience’. Another assault on classical empiricist notions that was
at least as radical in its implications as Quine’s rejection of the analytic-
synthetic distinction and reductionism came from Wilfrid Sellars. In his
1956 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars attacked what he calls
the ‘myth of the given’. In general, this myth concerns the belief in a strict
distinction between what is immediately given to the human mind and
what is added by the mind and mediated by our concepts, judgments, or
words. Epistemologically, this concerns the distinction between what in our
experience is given to our senses directly and without any intermediary
and what our cognitive apparatus adds to our experience. In other words,
what is given is neither derived from other statements nor learned from
other persons.
Sellars specifically targeted the empiricist notion of *sense data, that
is, bits of unconceptualized observational knowledge that are logically
primitive and independent of each other and of other statements. They
are, so to speak, the smallest building blocks out of which our general,
conceptual knowledge is constructed. Thus, an empiricist would argue that
my abstract or general concept of red is built up out of my observations, or
sense data, of red things. In this view, sense data themselves are not yet
conceptualized knowledge, but they mediate between such knowledge and
the world, acting as the ultimate foundation or justification of the former.
Sellars denied that sense data constitute the ultimate foundations or
building blocks of our knowledge and therefore that statements about sense
112  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

data such as ‘this is red’ express the most basic form of knowledge. Obviously,
he did not deny that observation plays an important role in the acquisition
of knowledge; he merely denied that these observation statements take up
a privileged position as its ultimate justification. This seems clearly at odds
with the widespread idea that our visual faculty, by which we may observe
objects and colours, is biologically determined and innate and hence not
acquired. Sellars’ point, however, is not a biological one but a logical one.
As knowledge claims, sense data statements are logically not primitive
or primary, and hence our observational knowledge is mediated (that is,
acquired and linguistic in character) after all. Thus, he gave an elaboration
of Kant’s slogan ‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without
concepts are blind’ in the terms of twentieth-century analytical philosophy
of language (cf. § 2.2).
The epistemological question posed by Sellars is how our sensory ob-
servations – which according to logical empiricists are not conceptualized
themselves – can maintain any logical relation of justification with our
knowledge, which is conceptual by definition. After all, it is in judgments that
the observation of particular events is connected with general concepts. Ac-
cording to Sellars, the sensory stimulation of one’s retina by something red,
for example, does not yet constitute observational or perceptual knowledge.
Our sensings are, after all, purely causal stimuli, not judgments that may
be correct or incorrect and from which other judgments can be logically
derived. In other words, sensory stimuli can only stand in a factual or causal
relation to our knowledge, not in a normative logical one of justification.
As a state of knowing, the observation of something red is not immediate,
primitive, or atomic but mediated by the language in which we make our
statements. In this sense, it is acquired. Observational statements such
as ‘this is red’ or ‘I see something red’ are logically speaking not primitive
or atomic because they presuppose the concept of red. Sellars motivated
this apparently counterintuitive position by giving a linguistic twist to
Kant’s slogan that intuitions without concepts are blind. Having a concept
‘red’, he argued, is equal to being able to use the word ‘red’ correctly. In
doing so, Sellars drew a more radical conclusion from the linguistic turn
of the earlier logical empiricists: he explained internal mental states of
knowledge or consciousness in terms of the public use of language rather
than the other way around. As a result, statements about inner states such
as ‘I see something red’ lose the privileged epistemological status they
had enjoyed since Descartes and Locke. Sellars did not view knowledge
in terms of individual (i.e., wholly subjective, immediate, non-mediated,
or non-acquired experience) that is, as inner mental states that only I can
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 113

have and that only I can evaluate, but in terms of the acquired and publicly
judged use of language.
Sellars gave another important argument for why states of knowing
cannot be logically reduced to sensory observation. Unlike sensory stimuli,
which may be described in purely causal and empirical or descriptive terms,
states of knowing have an irreducibly normative aspect: one has or does not
have stimuli, but states of knowing are correct or incorrect, or true or false:

in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not

giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it
in a logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what
one says.23

In other words, states of knowing are in an irreducibly normative *space of

reasons, whereas sensory stimuli are in an irreducibly factual or descriptive
*space of causes. Hence, according to Sellars, it is logically impossible to
reduce normative notions such as ‘correct’, ‘invalid’, or ‘true’ to the purely
causal level of sensory stimuli. Thus, his position may be characterized as
*anti-naturalistic, in opposition to Quine’s naturalism. Like several of his
predecessors, Sellars saw an unbridgeable gap between facts and norms.
For him, however, this gap is of a logical rather than an ontological or
epistemological character.
Sellars’ rejection of the ‘myth of the given’ should not be confused or
identified with Quine’s rejection of the dogmas of reductionism and the
analytic-synthetic distinction. After all, Quine still held sensory experience
to be the ultimate judge or foundation of our knowledge, albeit not for
individual sentences but for the coherent whole of our knowledge. For
Quine, the latter remained subject to the ‘tribunal of sense experience’ as
the ultimate epistemic authority. Sellars rejected this privileged position
of experience and in fact the very distinction between unconceptualized
experience and conceptual knowledge. Thus, he arrived at a more consistent
pragmatism concerning our statements.
In Sellars’ view, (scientific) knowledge is not an inner mental episode
but a public practice that is linguistic by definition and crucially involves
the giving of and asking for reasons or justifications. Scientific knowledge
is rational not because it has foundations but because it is a self-correcting
undertaking that may put every statement up for discussion. In other words,

23 W. Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ § 36, in Science, Perception and Reality
(London, 1963), p. 169.
114  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

he rejected the image of scientific knowledge as an edifice resting on a solid

foundation of controlled observation, because it represents knowledge as
static and does not take into account the dynamic and public processes – or,
more precisely, social practices – of justifying and improving. Thus, Sellars
also rejected the idea that knowledge originates in the confrontation of the
individual mind with the outside world, an assumption that we may qualify
as reflecting a philosophy of consciousness. Instead, he saw knowledge as a
normative social practice of giving and asking for reasons. Later, the German
philosopher Jürgen Habermas was to turn this idea into the cornerstone of
his theory of communicative action (see § 8.5).
Thus, Quine and Sellars were even more radical in their rejection of the
Kantian heritage than their logical empiricist predecessors. The early logical
empiricists rejected Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori as a foundation of
objectively valid empirical knowledge; Quine rejected the very distinction
between analytic and synthetic; and Sellars rejected the Kantian distinction
between concept and intuition. The most important underlying reason for
their rejection is undoubtedly the linguistic turn they presuppose, as well
as Quine and Sellars’ *pragmatism.
As a result of the linguistic turn, distinctions that are essential to Kant’s
undertaking – between analytic and synthetic and between concept and
intuition – disappeared; hence the very architecture of Kant’s impressive
theoretical edifice is undermined. As pragmatists, Quine and Sellars saw
nothing metaphysically or epistemologically important corresponding to the
distinctions between the analytic and the synthetic or between the given
and the conceptualized. Moreover, the new emphasis on the validity and
meaning of statements, as contrasted with the justification of knowledge,
suggests that the very distinction between the natural sciences as observing
facts and the humanities as unveiling meanings is less self-evident than had
been assumed in the nineteenth century. We will discuss these and other
implications below, especially in connection with the work of Thomas Kuhn
(§ 4.3) and Richard Rorty (§ 11.3b).

4.2 The Development of Scientific Knowledge According to

Thomas Kuhn

In the 1960s, two studies in the history and philosophy of science appeared
that both pointed to important discontinuities in the development of the
natural sciences and the ‘human sciences’ (in particular biology, philology,
and political economy). The authors of these studies were the American
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 115

Thomas S. Kuhn (1942-1996) and the Frenchman Michel Foucault (1926-1984).

They argued that the existence of these discontinuities problematizes the
simple idea of scientific progress.
Historiographically, Kuhn and Foucault followed Alexandre Koyré’s lead,
generalizing – and radicalizing – the latter’s idea of ‘the scientific revolution’
as a discontinuous development. Partly because of their indebtedness to
Koyré, the historiographies of Kuhn and Foucault may be characterized
as *neo-Kantian: both carried out empirical historical investigations into
the conditions for the possibility of knowledge but emphasized that these
conditions are historically variable rather than timeless aspects of a formal
and universal pure reason.
Philosophically, however, both Kuhn and Foucault carried out a linguistic
turn of sorts. Especially in Kuhn’s opinion, the Duhem-Quine thesis supports
a perspective on the historical development of scientific knowledge that
contradicts Popper’s narrative of falsification and verisimilitude. Proceeding
from a continental European rather than a logical empiricist or analytical-
philosophical background, Foucault carried out a similar linguistic turn and
arrived at broadly comparable philosophical conclusions. In this chapter, we
will discuss Kuhn’s views on the natural sciences, and in the next chapter
we will discuss Foucault’s description of the birth of the modern human
sciences.
In his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn argued on the
basis of his earlier historical work that many of our ideas about the character
and development of the sciences are mistaken and that philosophers had
given a misleading image of what constitutes good science. According to
Kuhn, the development of scientific knowledge not only consists of piece-
meal, cumulative, linear growth towards the truth but also displays what
he calls ‘revolutions’, that is, radical changes or discontinuities. He asserted
that some of the greatest scientists in history have not acted according to the
methodological prescriptions given by philosophers of science. Moreover,
he argued that the choice between rival theories cannot be made on the
basis of fixed methodological rules at all.
At the time, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was widely seen as a
frontal attack against the philosophy of science and against the very idea that
the development of science is controlled by anything like rational argument.
An often-heard objection is that, with Kuhn, science becomes a pursuit
guided and dominated by irrational historical and social processes rather
than an eminently rational activity. It is alleged that Kuhn is a *relativist
who gives up both the image of science as a search for objective truth and the
ideal of scientific rationality and progress. Kuhn himself always dismissed
116  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

these criticisms, arguing that he did not aim to cast doubt on the value or
validity of scientific knowledge but to gain better insight into its nature. In
the opening paragraph of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he stated:

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology,

could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which
we are now possessed. That image has previously been drawn, even by
scientists themselves […] in the textbooks from which each new scientific
generation learns to practice its trade. […] This essay attempts to show that
we have been misled by them in fundamental ways. Its aim is a sketch of
the quite different concept of science that can emerge from the historical
record of the research activity itself.24

Because Kuhn generally formulated his arguments in historical or psychologi-

cal terms, it is not always easy to understand their philosophical backgrounds
and implications. Explicating these philosophical dimensions, however,
makes clear that Kuhn’s work marks nowhere near as radical a rupture with
logical empiricism as might seem at first sight, for roughly speaking, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions is an extensive historiographic illustration
of the Duhem-Quine thesis. This makes it more understandable that this
book initially appeared as a volume of the International Encyclopedia of
the Unified Science and that even as strict a logical empiricist as Carnap
praised it. In the following paragraphs, we will proceed on the basis of
one of Kuhn’s favourite examples: the Copernican revolution, in which
the geocentric worldview of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic tradition was
replaced by a heliocentric one.
Kuhn described the experience that led him to his later insights as an
‘enlightenment’ that occurred in 1947, when he was still a PhD student.
He had started studying Aristotle’s Physics proceeding from a thorough
knowledge of Newton’s physics and mechanics and from the question of how
much of this mechanics could be found in Aristotle. Soon, he stumbled on
so many statements that were so evidently incorrect that he had difficulty
understanding how anybody could have ever taken Aristotle seriously as
a physicist. How was it possible, he wondered, that Aristotle, who had a
reputation of millennia and who had expressed such profound insights in
other disciplines, had made such elementary mistakes in his mechanics?
Had no one before Newton noticed all these patent absurdities?

24 T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1970), p. 1.

Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 117

These questions and dilemmas, however, disappeared instantly once

Kuhn realized that he had to read Aristotle in a different manner: not as
a flawed precursor of classical mechanics but as an author who literally
talked about other things. He realized that by ‘motion’, Aristotle had meant
‘change of quality’ in general rather than a quantitative change of position
of a thing that otherwise remained the same, as Galileo and Newton meant.
Moreover, Aristotle’s concept of motion involved goal-directed change and
also included growth processes like the development of a child into an adult
(cf. § 2.1). For Aristotle, the subject that was to become mechanics in the
seventeenth century was still at best a special case that was not quite isolable.

I did not become an Aristotelian physicist as a result, but I had to some

extent learned to think like one … I still recognized difficulties in his
physics, but they were not blatant and few of them could properly be
characterized as mere mistakes.25

Kuhn characterized his sudden insight that Aristotle was talking about
essentially different things than Newton as a *Gestalt switch. He now saw
that Aristotle had written about motion as a more general qualitative change
and not about quantitative movement in space. Just like somebody who had
hitherto seen in the famous duck-rabbit picture a drawing of a rabbit, he
suddenly realized he was looking at a drawing of a duck.
This insight caused Kuhn to try to avoid *presentism or *Whig history in
the history and philosophy of science. In nineteenth-century England, the
‘Whigs’ or liberals had seen their political opinions (which were in opposition
to those of the conservative ‘Tories’) as the fruit of progress, which led them
to describe the past as the slow but steady development towards their own
beliefs. Whig history thus consists of the tendency to see the developments
of the past as merely an imperfect preparation for the present. In the history
of science, this attitude leads one to regard the theories of the past – such
as alchemy, the doctrine of humours, or phlogiston theory – as irrational
errors or as unscientific or premodern, rather than considering the status
and merits that such doctrines had in their own age.
This tendency to believe in linear progress is strengthened by the way in
which science is usually taught. As authoritative descriptions of the state
of the art in the various disciplines, textbooks in physics, chemistry, and
other sciences do not describe the debates, controversies, and uncertain-
ties surrounding research but only the results of research. For obvious

25 T.S. Kuhn, The Essential Tension (Chicago, 1977), p. xii.

118  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

didactic purposes, Kuhn argued, they present a grossly oversimplified

image of how this state was reached. In referring to past beliefs only to the
extent that they anticipated or contributed to present-day knowledge, they
present contemporary theories as the best approximation yet of a reality
that lays waiting to be discovered by brilliant individuals. In other words:
they describe only the results of research and debate, that is, the finished
theories, and neither the alternative views that were proposed nor the
doubts, discussions, and debates of the past.
Kuhn did not dispute the didactic usefulness of such textbooks but em-
phasized that they paint a rather misleading picture of the development of
science. According to him, the growth of scientific knowledge involves not
only steady accumulation, but also displays radical ruptures in which central
elements of received scientific knowledge are rejected. He called these
consecutive phases *normal science and *scientific revolutions, respectively.
Initially, he limited himself to the ‘great’ revolutions as brought about by
Copernicus, Einstein, and the development of modern quantum mechanics.
In his later work, however, he was to acknowledge that smaller revolutions
may also occur, leading to less radical or global changes.
Normal science, Kuhn wrote, is characterized by a far-reaching consensus
among the practitioners of a discipline. This consensus comprises not only
the view of what constitutes correct theories but also what the legitimate
or relevant questions are and what the proper concepts and methods for
approaching them are. Obviously, there may be differences of opinion
concerning particular theoretical proposals or experimental results, but
even this disagreement presupposes a broader consensus as to how one
should tackle such problems in the first place.
Thus, normal science is governed by what Kuhn famously called a *para-
digm. In the first instance, he meant by this term a ‘textbook example’ – that
is, a model of good scientific practice that is offered to students of a discipline
for exercise and imitation. We encounter these models in textbooks as
illustrations of best scientific practices and as assignments at the end of
chapters, where students are trained to develop the practical skills of working
with these models. The students of a discipline acquire not only theoretical
knowledge but also practical skills for dealing with research problems and
techniques. In this sense, a paradigm is an exemplar or guiding case study:
those who want to qualify as a bona fide scientist must have a practical
command of such exemplars.
By emphasizing the role of paradigms in this sense, Kuhn showed that
studying science consists not only of learning explicit definitions and rules
about what, for example, gravity is or how the second law of mechanics
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 119

functions. It also involves an essential non-verbal practical component,

which Kuhn called a *tacit dimension, involving the acquisition of the practi-
cal skills to apply definitions, laws, and rules and to carry out experiments
in the generally accepted manner.
The concept of a paradigm also has a second, broader meaning, however,
and it is in this broader sense that it has become one of the most widely
used – and abused – terms in the philosophy of science. A paradigm in the
broad sense comprises the whole of theoretical and methodological concepts,
convictions, and expectations – including metaphysical presuppositions and
scientific values – maintained by a community of scientists in a particular
discipline. Such shared assumptions are usually acquired implicitly by
exercising and working with textbook examples. In this broader sense,
the concept of paradigm approaches the notions of conceptual scheme
or frame and worldview, but more specifically, it indicates a consensus of
what constitutes science and especially good science. In this sense, it also
approaches the coherent whole of implicit and explicit auxiliary assumptions
or logically interrelated statements, which according to the Duhem-Quine
thesis rules out the testing of individual hypotheses. In his later work, Kuhn
distinguished these two senses of the term paradigm as an *exemplar and
a *disciplinary matrix, respectively.
In addition to being dominated by a paradigm, normal science has an-
other main feature, according to Kuhn. Contrary to Popper, he argued that
scientists working in normal science do not try to refute their theories; on
the contrary, they try to elaborate and to refine them. The reason is simple:
every theory is at odds with some observations and may fail to make precise
predictions about others. As Kuhn put it, every theory knows *anomalies,
that is, cases in which nature appears not to meet the expectations and rules
that guide normal science. Since there is nothing better around, however, it
is useless to give up one’s theory at the very first encounter of a problematic
case or counterexample. Hence, normal science is not characterized by
attempts at falsification, Kuhn argued, but by attempts to solve *puzzles.
These are relatively small, concrete, and manageable problems that may be
solved by the rules dictated by the governing paradigm. As a result of this
puzzle-solving, normal science displays a steady accumulation of knowledge.
When a scientist presents an experiment or observation that he sees as
falsifying the theory, he himself is therefore more likely to be blamed than
the theory or paradigm he uses. Because puzzles are by definition solvable,
the scientist who is unable to solve such problems and who argues that some
established theory is faulty is taken as seriously as a carpenter who blames
his tools for his failures.
120  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Anomalies may lead to new discoveries, Kuhn contended, which scientists

will try to fit into the existing paradigm. It may happen, however, that such
anomalies consistently resist all attempts at incorporation into existing
theories or that new anomalies keep appearing. In such circumstances,
a sense of *crisis may develop, that is, a widespread and uncomfortable
feeling that something is seriously wrong with the existing paradigm. Kuhn
argued that such a sense of crisis arose in Ptolemaic astronomy right before
Copernicus. Since the Hellenistic age, people had steadily improved and
elaborated that theory, and countless puzzles had been solved. New puzzles
and anomalies, however, kept emerging, none of which could be solved
with complete precision, let alone elegance. By the sixteenth century, the
Ptolemaic paradigm had thus come to resemble an old house that had
been continuously renovated and extended: in order to make room for ever
new inhabitants, new rooms had been created and the building had been
enlarged with whatever materials were available. Everything and everyone
could still be accommodated but only with difficulty, and nobody really
felt at home anymore.
During such a crisis, Kuhn argued, the existing consensus about the
method of puzzle-solving starts to break down, and the possibility of a
*scientific revolution emerges. Such a scientif ic revolution, similar to a
political one, involves a radical change in beliefs and institutions: the old
paradigm is replaced by another one that is irreconcilable with it. Scientific
revolutions, therefore, represent not linear growth or the accumulation of
knowledge but destruction. Much of what had been seen as solid scientific
knowledge is now rejected or brushed aside as false, nonsensical, or even
incomprehensible. It is not only individual statements such as ‘the Sun
revolves around the Earth’ or individual theories that must be replaced after
a revolution, but also the very concepts in which theories are formulated
and the standards, norms, and values by which serious scientific work is
judged. Scientific revolutions involve changes in both senses of the term
paradigm. And indeed, the Copernican revolution did have precisely this
radical result.
Kuhn repeatedly compared the effect of a scientific revolution to that
of a Gestalt switch, a sudden reversal, causing us to see something else that
we did not see before (compare § 2.1c). In reality, however, revolutions do
not occur that quickly, as Kuhn’s own historical studies of the Copernican
revolution and of the development of quantum mechanics make abundantly
clear. Thus, Copernicus himself was not conscious of the far-reaching con-
sequences of his simple change of model. Indeed, his De Revolutionibus
Orbium Caelestium (1543) still has one foot in the Ptolemaic paradigm. The
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 121

only changes Copernicus introduced here is swapping the locations of the

Sun and the Earth and elaborating the mathematical consequences of this
change. His arguments for his insistence that the motions of the celestial
bodies are strictly circular are still strongly Aristotelian and scholastic in
character. Soon, however, others started teasing out the radical cosmologi-
cal and philosophical implications of his work. Because the Earth was no
longer seen as the centre of the universe, the necessity of making a strict
distinction between the sublunar sphere of generation and corruption
and an immutable heavenly sphere disappeared. Aristotle’s finite cosmos,
which was divided into distinct spheres, was replaced by an infinite and
homogeneous universe; and where Aristotle had seen motion as something
that arises from the inner nature of a moving object, the new physics came
to see it as the consequence of a force that was applied to it from the outside.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Aristotelian universe –
and by extension the Aristotelian conception of the sciences at large – had
been replaced by the mechanistic universe of the new physics. However, we
are still faced with the question of why this scientific revolution or paradigm
shift occurred. It cannot simply be explained by appealing to the falsification
or refutation of the older theory, or to the new theory corresponding better to
observations. Copernicus’s system was conceptually not essentially simpler
than its rival, nor did it match observation more closely. In fact, it marked
a clear step back in predictive power compared to Ptolemy’s model, which,
after all, had been elaborated and improved upon for centuries. Why, then,
did the Copernican model eventually carry the day? Kuhn suggested that
it did so primarily because it accounted for precisely those cases that had
formed problems for the Ptolemaic system. In other words, a new paradigm
will only gain the upper hand when it presents an elegant and promising
solution to the anomalies of its rival.

4.3 Kuhn’s Philosophy of Science: Empiricism, Neo-

Kantianism, or Pragmatism?

Kuhn’s image of the development of science as a sequence of periods of

normal science and scientif ic revolutions is at odds with earlier beliefs
about how the sciences function in practice. It is also at odds with Popper’s
methodological ideas about how scientif ic knowledge should develop.
According to Kuhn, falsif ication does not play the central role in the
growth of scientific knowledge that Popper accords it. In periods of normal
science, he argued, there is in principle a consensus as to what exactly
122  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

would qualify as a falsifying statement, but during such periods, the main
preoccupation is precisely not with the critical testing of theories but rather
with the solving of puzzles and the further elaborating and extending of
theories. However, in times of scientific revolutions, a logically binding
choice between rival paradigms is not possible either, for the simple reason
that there is no consensus about which experiments are decisive. What
in the old paradigm is merely conceived as an anomaly waiting to be
solved – that is, as one of the many cases where the established theories
still fail to fit observations seamlessly – will be perceived by the scholars
who adhere to the new paradigm as a decisive reason for rejecting the
old paradigm.
Thus, the choice between paradigms can never be deductive or logically
compelling. One can only decide to reject a paradigm on the basis of an
observation or an experiment when one has already accepted another
paradigm qualifying that particular observation or experiment as decisive.
For that reason, Kuhn wrote:

When paradigms enter, as they must, into a debate about paradigm choice,
their role is necessarily circular. Each group uses its own paradigm in
that paradigm’s defense.26

At most, one can say that the new paradigm is better able to account for
the anomalies of its rival. But such an argument can never prove that an
anomaly could not be solved within the old paradigm if only more effort
had been put into it.
One could object to this way of putting things by arguing that the facts
or observations can give us decisive reasons for deciding which of two
competing theories is the correct one or at least the more correct one. Don’t
we just know by now that the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than
the other way around, and can’t we simply see that with the aid of proper
instruments? Unfortunately, things are not that simple. The belief in the
possibility of choosing between theories based on ‘the facts’, ‘observation,’
or ‘experience’ presupposes the existence of a neutral language of pure
facts or pure observations or unconceptualized experience. However, that
possibility is precluded as a matter of principle by the Duhem-Quine thesis
and in a different sense by Sellars’ rejection of the ‘myth of the given’. The
meaning or empirical content of statements depends on the network of
statements or concepts within which they function. When there is a change

26 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: p. 94.

Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 123

of paradigm – and hence of the conceptual frame – the meaning of terms

and statements also change. People working in different paradigms are
hence literally speaking about different things, because our perceptions
are inevitably and irreducibly led by our theories.
Competing paradigms appear to be logically irreconcilable. One cannot
believe simultaneously with Copernicus that the Earth revolves around the
Sun and with Ptolemy that the Sun revolves around the Earth. According
to Kuhn, however, something more radical is happening here. Because the
meaning of these statements is different, we cannot even compare them
in neutral terms, for example as to the degrees to which their statements
correspond to the facts. Their ontologies fail to correspond; that is, different
paradigms imply different ideas about how and what the world is constructed
of and hence also what qualifies as fact.
An example may clarify this abstract thesis. Copernicans differ from
Aristotelians not only because they think the Earth revolves around the Sun
instead of the other way around. They also speak in a different language
about celestial phenomena. In the Copernican paradigm, the term planet
acquired a new meaning, namely ‘celestial body revolving around the sun’,
which refers to other entities than the Aristotelian term because it now
includes the Earth, but not the Moon. Ontologically and cosmologically, the
Earth has gained a position similar to that of the other planets like Mars,
Venus, and Jupiter. In Aristotelian cosmology, by contrast, that thought is
literally nonsensical. For Aristotle, the Earth is a fundamentally different
entity than all other celestial bodies. Whereas on Earth, growth and decay
and change occur, the celestial bodies are eternal and unchanging. Hence,
to Aristotelians, Copernicus’s thesis that ‘planets revolve around the Sun’
is not just factually false but nonsensical: it assembles together entities or
objects under the name of ‘planet’, which for them belong to completely
different categories. Hence, for them, this statement does not even state
a possible fact. Copernicus’s thesis is simply absurd to the Aristotelian; it
cannot be accorded any serious meaning.
Hence, when we try to compare the merits of the Aristotelian and
Copernican paradigm, we hit a fundamental barrier: there is no neutral
framework into which we can translate and subsequently judge the state-
ments that are made within the rivalling paradigms. This claim, which
forms the consequence of the fundamental problems discussed above in the
context of the Duhem-Quine thesis, has become famous as Kuhn’s thesis of
*incommensurability. Following Quine, Kuhn argued that neutral statements
about pure sense experience are an illusion. And, following Sellars to some
extent, he also argues that the results of the operations and measurements
124  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

that a scientist undertakes are not ‘the given’ of experience but rather ‘the
collected with difficulty’.27
The term ‘incommensurability’ has led to numerous misunderstandings.
Many have concluded that Kuhn believed communication between defenders
of rivalling theories to be completely impossible. Obviously, that is not
the case. At most, Kuhn argued that there is a partial miscommunication
or confusion of tongues, to the extent that conversation partners do not
mutually recognize the fact that they use the same terms in different senses.
If one does not realize that Aristotle meant something fundamentally
different by terms such as light or motion than modern physicists, one will
indeed quickly and wrongly conclude that he had it completely wrong with
regard to physics.
Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis does not imply, either, that two
paradigms cannot be compared at all. They can be compared in various
respects, only not in neutral terms of ‘verisimilitude’, ‘the facts’, or ‘pure
or theory-free observation’. Every comparison is necessarily partial: from
a Copernican perspective, Aristotelians are mistaken about the position
of the Sun and the Earth; from the Aristotelian perspective, Copernicus
and his followers falsely treat the Earth and the other planets as similar
entities. Which error should count more heavily? The adherents of different
paradigms will give different answers, for each paradigm maintains its own
standards, norms, and values. There is no neutral position.
Kuhn’s thesis has another far-reaching consequence. If consecutive
paradigms are indeed incommensurable, we can no longer say that
knowledge grows in a linear manner or increases cumulatively, or that
our theories describe and explain reality in an ever-better manner or pos-
sess an ever-greater degree of, or similarity to, the truth. After all, it is a
paradigm-dependent question what the standards that scientific theories
should answer to are, what constitutes legitimate knowledge, and even
what our theoretical terms mean in the first place. Initially, for example,
Copernicus’s heliocentric model was no match in observational adequacy
to Ptolemy’s model, but its defenders concluded from this that observational
adequacy was not a very important criterion for choosing between the two
models. Only within a paradigm can one unproblematically speak about
the growth of knowledge, Kuhn concluded.
Thus, the question of what terms such as planet, gravity, or language
‘really’ mean – that is, in isolation from any theory or paradigm – is meaning-
less. Because statements containing such terms may have different senses

27 Ibid., p. 126.
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 125

in different paradigms, there cannot be any logical relations of consequence

or any contradiction between them. Consequently, it becomes impossible
to give a logically compelling reason for deciding which theory should be
chosen, as Popper demanded.
Kuhn attached crucial importance to the development of science, and it
is for this reason that revolutions and the concomitant changes in meaning
have a far greater cognitive and epistemological importance here than in the
works of earlier authors. Whereas the later Carnap saw the choice between
different languages, vocabularies, or paradigms as merely pragmatic and
guided by the practical use of a language, Kuhn saw the change of language
as an inevitable aspect of the growth of scientific knowledge and as an
effect that should be accounted for in the justification of that knowledge
too. Thus, new revolutionary developments in science may imply a change
in the standards for good scientific research. As a result, Kuhn rendered
the strict distinction that logical empiricists upheld between the context of
justification and the context of discovery more problematic and historically
variable, for in the course of the process of discovery, the norms for justifying
theories can change as well.
There is one other radical and counterintuitive consequence of this thesis.
As we saw, for terms such as motion and planet, Aristotle and Copernicans
referred to different entities – that is, they had different ontologies. This led
Kuhn to the remarkable conclusion that, in a paradigm shift, it is not only
theories about the world that change but in a sense also the very world itself
in which we live. ‘The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that
when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them’, he wrote.28 This
thesis – that the world changes along with a change in paradigm – sounds
rather odd. Surely Kuhn does not seriously mean to say that if astronomers
change their views, the Sun and the stars suddenly change place or that
planets start following different orbits? There are deep reasons for this
amazement. Kuhn’s comment undermines the very subject-object scheme
that lies at the basis of the entire epistemology that has long shaped the
philosophy of science and most of the sciences themselves.
Kuhn’s arguments for taking this step were of a philosophical and a
social-scientific character. Philosophically, he argued that for centuries
the view had prevailed that theories were merely human interpretations of
sensory observations that are given in Sellars’ sense – that is, they are fixed,
neutral, immediate, identical for everybody, and not acquired. In Kuhn’s
cautious and indeed hesitant rejection of this view, an echo may be heard of

28 Ibid., p. 111.
126  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Sellars’ attack on ‘the myth of the given’ – that is, the belief in sense data as
the neutral, non-linguistic, and non-conceptual foundation of our knowledge.
Across paradigm shifts, however, even sense data themselves change, and
hence scientists working in different paradigms literally see different things
and ‘[i]n so far as their only recourse to [the] world is through what they see
and do, we may want to say that after a revolution scientists are responding
to a different world’.29 There is no neutral world, or neutral experience, that
is ‘given’ to these different ways of viewing the world.

4.4 The ‘Anthropological Turn’

Kuhn’s historical and sociological arguments for why worlds change during
scientific revolutions have become rather better known and more influential
than their philosophical backgrounds. For a long time, philosophers of
science have presented physics as the prototypical science. In doing so, they
reproduced the epistemology that had been introduced by Galileo and Boyle.
As we have seen above, this epistemology proceeded from the basic belief
that there is a fundamental divide between on the one hand the knowing
subject and on the other hand the object of knowledge, nature, or the world
of facts, which is given to our senses. Parallel to this divide, a distinction
was made between knowledge (which is formulated in a language and
which is a human possession) and the world of facts that this knowledge
is supposed to be about.
In this view, science is supposed to bridge the gap between these two
domains. Although formulated in a particular language (and hence localized
on the ‘subject side’), scientific knowledge was claimed to have the unique
character of correctly *representing the world of facts (the ‘object side’).
Philosophers of science then faced the task of explaining the reasons for
the claim that through science this gap can be bridged, that is, to describe
how the outside world can be represented in scientific language. The tra-
ditional answer, as seen above, consists either in explaining the methods
of representation or – in Popper’s formulation – in a theory that formulates
the methods that can be used for rationally choosing between rival attempts
at representing the facts.
Kuhn emphasized that philosophers of science had for too long been
misled by textbook versions of science, which present scientific develop-
ments as the discovery of objects and facts that are given independently

29 Ibid.
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 127

and that, so to speak, only lay waiting to be discovered. This depiction

of science, however, obscures the crucial roles of scientific work and of
language in constituting the objects and facts observed by scientists. Here,
Kuhn presented a second line of argumentation for his thesis that the world
changes when paradigms change. In addition to the philosophical argument
against a neutral observation language and against sense data that goes back
to Quine and Sellars, Kuhn also based his argument on the empirical study
of factual developments in science. He not only treated the development of
scientific knowledge in purely epistemological terms, he also engaged in a
historical *anthropology of science. He primarily studied what scientists in
fact do and how their scientific life, which comprises both their language
and the way they interact with and respond to the world, may change as a
result of their actions.
Elaborating this empirical argument in the epilogue to the second (1970)
edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn observed that the
special features of scientific knowledge should be explained from the special
character of the communities of scientists. After all, he argued, it is only
within a scientific community that consensus concerning concepts, state-
ments, and standards – that is, a paradigm – can be established and can
be linked to a scientific practice (for example, the conducting of particular
experiments). Here, however, a new question arises. Should we characterize
such a community of scientists as a group held together by a paradigm, or
should we conversely define a paradigm in terms of a community? Kuhn
failed to give an unambiguous answer to this question.
Many have concluded from such remarks that Kuhn tried to describe the
development of science as a purely social process in which the birth and
growth of paradigms and the occurrences of revolutions result exclusively
from the interactions in and between groups of scientists. This implies that,
alongside social processes within these scientific communities, external
social factors could also play a role in determining the development of
scientific knowledge. This would seem to open the way for an *externalist
description of scientific development.
Kuhn himself, however, never elaborated on these comments. Instead,
in his later work, he tried to expound on the notion of incommensurability
in neo-Kantian rather than pragmatist terms. In his later years, he called
himself a ‘Kantian with moving categories’, claiming that there is only
one world ‘in itself’ but a plurality of phenomenal worlds. In doing so, he
appeared to be reverting towards an epistemology that his earlier work
had explicitly questioned. Alongside his earlier pragmatist suggestions, his
later work toned down the emphasis on social processes as Kuhn looked for
128  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

support for his views in cognitive psychology and analytical philosophy of

language than in social science.
But whatever Kuhn’s own intentions and development, the interpretation
of his work that views scientific knowledge as the result of social processes
has led to much fruitful research in the sociology and anthropology of science
from the 1970s onwards. Such research focus less on what scientists say than
on what they actually do; in the words of Bruno Latour (b. 1947), it studies
‘science in action’ rather than ‘ready-made science’. One path-breaking
example of this approach – Shapin and Schaffer’s study of the debate between
Hobbes and Boyle – has already been discussed in § 2.1. In the discipline
known as ‘Science Studies’, not only classical episodes from the history of
science are studied but increasingly also contemporary sciences such as
biomedical research that have significant, often controversial repercussions
for society.
In the same way that anthropologists had earlier studied cultures on
remote islands, scholars of Science Studies investigated the culture of
modern science, which is no less alien. They described and analyzed the
work performed in laboratories and the controversies that arise in, about,
and around scientific developments. What they encountered was a much
more unruly and more uncertain world than one would expect on the basis
of more traditional ideas about science – a world, moreover, in which much
of the effort is directed at developing the conditions and the instruments
needed to create and observe phenomena that cannot be detected by our
normal senses. Until now, however, studies investigating the social sciences
or the humanities using similar anthropological techniques have been
rather scarce.
Kuhn’s description of scientific developments seems to be at odds with
many of our intuitions, shaped by a centuries-long tradition that science
is a uniquely rational undertaking. As a result, he has often been accused
of being an irrationalist who reduces theory choice to irrational factors
such as persuasive power or group coercion. Often, he is also alleged to be
a relativist because he purportedly did not regard scientific values or even
the notion of truth as ‘objective’ but made them paradigm-dependent.
Finally, he is alleged to have rejected any idea of scientific progress, since
he was not able to indicate what makes one theory or paradigm better than
its competitors – even though we know that the Earth revolves around the
Sun rather than vice versa and that modern medicine is more successful
than the ancient theory of humours.
Such objections are widespread and understandable, but they are not
convincing. First, Kuhn only claimed that there are no logically compelling
Historicizing the Philosophy of Science 129

reasons for the choice between paradigms, not that no good reasons can be
given at all. Second, Kuhn always considered himself a realist. He did believe
that an ‘objective reality’ exists independently of our beliefs and concepts
but conceded that, given the Duhem-Quine thesis, no neutral or uniquely
correct description of that world is possible. Third, Kuhn declared that he
himself firmly believed in scientific progress, but he did not describe such
progress in terms of an ever-closer approximation towards a paradigm- (and
hence language-) neutral Truth. Such a formulation is precluded by the fact
that the meaning of theoretical terms, and thus the meaning of statements
we hold true, changes over revolutions. Instead, according to Kuhn, scientific
progress consists of the increasing ability to solve puzzles in normal science,
that is, to find answers to open questions. The better a theory is, the greater
the number of puzzles it can solve, also for questions that had not yet been
formulated and concerning matters for which the theory had not been
intended originally. In this sense, Kuhn did indeed believe that the natural
sciences had progressed in the course of history.

Summary

– According to Duhem, decisive or crucial tests are impossible because

one cannot unambiguously say which part of a theory or its auxil-
iary assumptions and hypotheses is rejected or refuted in a falsifying
experiment.
– Quine radicalized Duhem’s thesis into a claim about the empirical
content of sentences. He rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction
and reductionism in favour of meaning holism. In his view, theoretical
statements derive their empirical content not from correspondence to
individual facts but from the theory as a whole. Quine thus rejected
‘pure observation’ and the possibility of a language of pure, theory-inde-
pendent, observational facts with which a theory could be confronted.
– Sellars rejected the ‘myth of the given’, that is, the distinction between
what is given to our senses and what is added by the mind. He argued
that having a concept is identical to being able to use a word correctly,
and thus rendered observational knowledge an essentially linguistically
mediated affair. In his perspective, knowledge involves not a confronta-
tion of the individual mind with the outside world, mediated by the
senses, but a public and irreducibly normative practice.
– Kuhn rejected Popper’s idea of the growth of scientific knowledge,
partly because it does not match findings in the history of science. Kuhn
130  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

distinguished periods of normal science and scientific revolutions. The

latter occur after anomalies have accumulated and create a sense of
crisis.
– Normal science is characterized by a dominant paradigm, while in
scientific revolutions, a paradigm is replaced. Paradigms determine
the norms, standards, and even objects of research.
– Paradigms are incommensurable: their merits cannot be compared
in neutral terms. The notion of incommensurability was inspired to
an important extent by the Duhem-Quine thesis. It renders the strict
distinction between the context of justification and the context of
discovery problematic.
– Kuhn himself always rejected the accusation that he was a relativist
who had renounced scientific rationality and objectivity altogether.
 Part 2
The Rise of the Humanities
5 The Birth of the Modern Humanities

5.1 Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Kuhn limited himself to the development of the natural sciences; he hesitated

to use the concept of paradigm for the social sciences and the humanities.
However, if one studies the different views concerning the various aspects
of human life that have been formulated over the centuries, one may hit
upon a phenomenon we have also encountered in Kuhn. Here, too, one can
find the kind of discontinuous developments that Kuhn called ‘scientific
revolutions’ whereby concepts, theories, and norms undergo deep and radical
changes. Nor can one speak of a steady, linear accumulation of knowledge in
the direction of, or a gradual approach towards, the ‘truth’. In other words,
in the development of knowledge concerning man – that is, the broad field
of the social and human sciences, and more specifically the humanities or
Geisteswissenschaften – one could argue that discontinuities have occurred
as well. Even more intriguingly, the very distinction between the natural
sciences and the humanities, which we take for granted nowadays, appears
to be of surprisingly recent origin.
It was the French philosopher Michel Foucault who, independently
from Kuhn, called attention to the discontinuous development of the
sciences of man. In Les mots et les choses (1966, translated as The Order of
Things (1971)), Foucault discussed the historical development of knowledge
concerning questions that since the nineteenth century have been the
concern of economics, biology, and linguistics. The ‘things’ these modern
disciplines concern themselves with can be bundled together as labour, life,
and language, respectively. These notions, however, could not be expressed
in the theories that had been formulated between roughly 1600 and 1800,
when the focus was on the analysis of wealth, natural history, and general
grammar, respectively. The ideas from this ‘classical’ period, in turn, could
not be formulated in the terms that were available during the Renaissance.
One may thus observe two radical ruptures. According to Foucault, these
ruptures were not primarily the consequence of the discovery of novel
objects or phenomena about which new hypotheses might be formulated.
Rather, they occurred as mutations in what he calls the ‘deep structure’
of knowledge. Before 1800, he claimed, it was impossible to formulate hy-
potheses concerning labour, life, or language as distinct entities or objects
of knowledge for the simple reason that there was no room for them in the
available conceptual frames.
134  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Michel Foucault

In order to describe this deep structure, Foucault coined the term *épis-
témè, which refers to the foundations and ordering of knowledge as a whole
during a particular period. He called his inquiry an *archaeology of scientific
knowledge which, unlike intellectual history or the history of science, does
not investigate individual authors, disciplines, or discoveries, but rather
the changing conditions for the possibility of different forms of knowledge.
Foucault’s thesis states that, no matter how different in subject matter and
methods the disciplines of biology, economics, and linguistics may be, these
different disciplines were all practiced within one and the same épistémè
and therefore possess the same deep structure of knowledge. Foucault
distinguished the epistémès of the Renaissance, the classical age, and the
*modern age. Around 1600, and again around 1800, a radical and sweeping
*epistemic rupture or mutation occurred, making possible entirely novel
forms of knowledge such as modern historical-comparative linguistics and
evolutionary biology, which in a way had been ‘unthinkable’ in earlier times.
Just as an epistémè bears some remarkable similarities to what Kuhn
calls a paradigm, Foucault’s notion of a mutation is roughly analogous to
Kuhn’s idea of a scientific revolution. Although they developed their theses
independently, both authors, it seems, derived their belief in scientific
discontinuities primarily from Alexandre Koyré (see § 2.1d above). With
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 135

the aid of Kuhn, we could reformulate Foucault as arguing that when a

new épistémè appears, scholars in the human sciences begin to work in
a new world – a world in which new conceptual frames dominate, new
elements or objects of knowledge appear, and a new order of things comes
into existence. Apart from these affinities, however, there are also two
important differences. For Kuhn, a paradigm shift occurs within a single
discipline or subfield. According to Foucault, however, a change of épistémè
occurs on a far broader plane and comes into view primarily through the
comparative study of seemingly disparate fields of knowledge; it may even
be found in literary and popular writings. Furthermore, Foucault’s time
scale is far greater than Kuhn’s. Whereas Foucault distinguished only a
very small number of sweeping epistemic mutations, Kuhn’s conception
leaves room for smaller paradigmatic changes after shorter periods. Finally,
while Foucault detected a rupture in biology that occurred at the start of
the nineteenth century and that came to determine the beliefs concerning
biological knowledge until the present, a study of this period from a Kuhnian
perspective would probably conclude that towards the end of that century
a Darwinist revolution occurred and that in the 1940s a new paradigm of
molecular biology emerged due to the introduction of ideas derived from
physics and chemistry. Scientific revolutions, that is, may also occur within
one and the same épistémè.
What, then, is the difference between the épistémès of the Renaissance,
the period between 1600 and 1800 that Foucault labels the classical age,
and the modern age after 1800? Each épistémè involves a particular idea of
what knowledge amounts to, based on a number of principles accepted as
self-evident concerning the way in which the world is seen as a coherent
whole of entities. Such principles are, so to speak, analytic rather than syn-
thetic: they function, Foucault argued, as a *historical a priori. Against Kant,
Foucault argued that the a priori beliefs that serve as the foundations of our
knowledge are not universal or timeless but historically variable. Coming from
a completely different philosophical tradition, Foucault therefore arrived at
a position that shows remarkable similarities to Quine’s idea that seemingly
irrefutable logical and other principles may be subject to revision, and to
Kuhn’s belief that in paradigm shifts even our most basic beliefs may change.
We can investigate the character of the knowledge produced in a particu-
lar era especially well, Foucault suggested, by studying the way in which
*signs and language are conceptualized during that period. In order to trace
the differences between different épistémès, we should therefore focus on
the different consecutive conceptions of order, signs, and language that are
presupposed in the various sciences of these periods.
136  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

In the Renaissance, scholars ordered the world on the basis of similarities

between things, Foucault argued. They did so proceeding from the assump-
tion that the signs on the basis of which these similarities are known are
located in the similarities themselves. That is, in the Renaissance épistémè,
the system of the world has the same structure as the system of knowledge.
For example, the knowledge that the plant aconite yielded a medicine
that could be used for treating eye affections was seen as resting on the
similarities between the features of the eye and the features of the seeds
of this plant: the seeds of aconite are tiny dark globes set in white, skin-like
coverings, the appearance of which is much like the eyelid covering the eye.
Those seeking truth during the Renaissance, therefore, moved from sign to
sign, not making any principled distinction between signs forming part of
the world and signs formulated in a language.
According to Foucault, this explains the – from our perspective – remark-
able frivolity with which Renaissance scholars conflated what they witnessed
themselves and what they learned from a possibly unreliable tradition. For
example, when Renaissance authors wrote about different species of animals,
they discussed not only the external, visible features of animals but also the
role they play in mythology, without making any fundamental distinction
between such spheres. Likewise, historical treatises from this period were
characterized by the equal treatment of documented events and hearsay.
Science, magic, and commentary were therefore treated equally during
this period. In his writings, even Newton still tended to conflate elements
we would today consider radically different – to the bewilderment of some
of his later readers. Generally, ancient writings and the Bible were seen as
no less reliable sources of knowledge than sense experience. For the study
of language, these beliefs about signs had important consequences. In the
Renaissance épistémè, language was a natural phenomenon. Moreover,
because language presents itself primarily in the form of inscriptions in
physical objects, written rather than spoken language was the main object
of investigation.
Early in the seventeenth century, a new, ‘classical’ épistémè emerged
that differed in three respects from that of the Renaissance. First, signs
were moved from the world to the human mind, which meant that signs
no longer formed part of the world but belonged exclusively to the sphere
of knowledge. Hence, no signs could exist that had not yet been discovered.
During this period, one could only speak of signs where knowledge exists.
Second, the function of signs changed: instead of marking similarities or
affinities between things, they now served to assign places to things by
distinguishing them. Signs, that is, became instruments of analysis in
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 137

marking the identities of and differences between things. Third, signs that
had been conventionally created took primacy over natural signs. Ideally,
however, the ordering of signs in a language corresponded to the taxonomy
of things in the world.
Thus, during the classical age, Foucault argued, a sign *represented a
thing. The skeptical question of how we know that a sign stands for what
it represents did not arise, since representation was believed to be itself
represented in the sign. A map was a map of a particular region, and a
painting was a portrait of a particular person, as anyone knew who knew
the sign. Those who knew that this drawing was a map immediately also
knew which area was represented, as this was written on the map. Hence, he
added, no need was felt for a general theory of representation that answered
skeptical questions concerning signs. In the classical conceptual system,
there was simply no room for such skepticism.
Within the classical épistémè, the acquisition of knowledge was geared
to a general science of the order of things, in which signs – that is, linguistic
representations – assign things a place in a system in which their identities
and their differences with other entities are expressed. Thus, a table is the
appropriate way of expressing this kind of knowledge. In other words, the
knowledge of the classical era is formulated in terms of *taxonomies. During
this period, what we would nowadays call ‘biology’ was exclusively natural
history: it consisted of the careful determination, description, and ordering of
plants and animals in a taxonomy of distinct species. In a possibly artificial
ideal language, the taxonomy of words was believed to reflect exactly the
hierarchical order of things. Likewise, unlike during the Renaissance, the
classical study of language was not primarily directed at written language
but at spoken words. Given the belief that language represents, the central
problem now became how this representation occurred in spoken utterances
that presented themselves as sequences of words. What system for word
order could be established in different languages? For example, what was
the proper place of verbs? Thus, what is called general grammar dealt with
questions of how thought is represented in different languages and which
language best reflects the logical order of our thoughts in its word order.
Around 1800, another major shift occurred in beliefs about the order
of things and about signs, once again radically changing the intellectual
landscape. This ‘modern’ épistémè is less easily captured under one label than
the preceding periods. One important change concerns the new role that
time or history began to play. Whereas in the classical age, the identity of a
thing and its differences with other things were determined by its place in
the conceptual space represented in a table, a taxonomy, or in a taxonomic
138  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

system, in the modern period, the way in which things cohere or correlate
with other things in time started to play this role.
In other words, attention was now paid to the historical development of
languages, for example, or animal species. The order of things was deter-
mined by the historical forces to which things are subjected. Hence, if we
wanted to know what the essence of a thing is, we would ask about its past
or its origin. Evolutionary biology, linguistics, and the new historical science
of the nineteenth century thus study the different species of animals, the
languages of the world, and the different nations from a developmental
perspective. The new science of historical-comparative linguistics did this
in part by exploring the relations of present-day vernaculars to languages of
the past. Paired with this emphasis on development, a new preference for
thinking about the order of things in terms of *organic structure appeared.
Together with this novel conception of order, novel conceptions of signs
emerged, replacing the classical idea of representation. That is not to say
that representation stopped playing a role altogether, but merely that this
role became limited and subordinate to pure, non-representational gram-
matical aspects such as inflection. It was no longer self-evident that a sign
stood for what it represented: representation became linked to particular
*transcendental conditions of possibility. Whereas in the classical era, the
human mind was seen as transparent with respect to the whole of knowledge
and to the signs that represent, the question of how knowledge is possible
took centre stage in the modern period. Henceforth, knowledge was to be
seen as part and product of the human mind.
This belief, most starkly expressed in Kant’s philosophy, raised various
new questions. In this period, the human mind acquired a character of its
own, apart from knowledge, and thus acquired an ambiguous position: it
became both the subject and a possible object of knowledge. Thus, room for a
novel kind of ‘critical’ epistemology appeared that explored the limits of what
can be known. Moreover, the question arose as to what else, in addition to
knowledge, formed part of the human mind. The answers to these questions
would open up entirely new fields of investigation. Nineteenth-century
philosophy, with its attention to life, the (individual or collective) will, and
history, is one expression of this (see § 7.1. below).
The modern épistémè is expressed both in sciences such as biology,
economics, and linguistics and in the philosophy of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Foucault distinguished three currents in philosophy. The first kind
of philosophy concerns the conditions that the subject has to meet to make
knowledge possible. Kant’s philosophy is the f irst development of this
current (cf. § 2.2 and 5.2a).
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 139

The second kind of philosophy focuses on the conditions that the object
has to meet in order for it to become an object of representational knowledge.
Life, labour, and language are thus not simply new objects of knowledge;
instead, they constitute the conditions for the new form in which biology,
economics, and linguistics respectively appear, according to Foucault.
Biology explores living nature, which, more than in the past, was now seen
as essentially different from the non-living world. Hence, one important part
of nineteenth-century biology and medicine concerned the question of what
exactly ‘life’ is. Economics began focussing on the homo economicus, the
finite human who has to realize his existence in a world that is not made for
him, doing so through labour. Likewise, linguistics shifted its attention away
from representation to the formal aspects of grammar. Seen as an organic
whole that develops historically, language moved from being a medium of
representation to an object of investigation. As a result, the representation of
things and thoughts, which in the classical age defined the central problems
of research in general grammar, receded into the background.
The third form of philosophy that appeared in the nineteenth century,
according to Foucault, is *positivism, a current that avoids speculation
and hence sees facts as the sole legitimate source of knowledge. In several
respects, positivism seems to amount to a regression to the classical épistémè,
but Foucault pointed out that the situation had changed. Unlike during
the classical age, positivism is not a self-evident way of seeing things but a
polemical and controversial position. The positivist does not deny that there
is more in the world than facts but denies the possibility of saying anything
scientifically or philosophically meaningful about these other things.
The new sciences and the philosophy of the nineteenth century, finally,
contain an image of man that had not been available during the classical
age, which saw humans only as bearers of representations. This new object
– ‘man’ – first appeared when Kant formulated a new question in his annual
series of lectures: ‘What is man?’. As strange as it may seem, man has not
been the timeless and unchanging object of the human sciences but a very
recent invention. In 1966, Foucault believed that the épistémè that emerged
around 1800 was about to end and that a new deep structure was emerging
that no longer focused on the question concerning man but instead on the
order of *discourse. ‘Man’ is therefore not only an entity with a historically
precise beginning but also with an end. According to Foucault, man is not
the timeless object of the human sciences but a specifically modern object
of knowledge that was about to disappear with the impending demise of
the modern épistémè. To quote the famous closing lines of The Order of
Things, man was about to disappear ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge
140  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

of the sea’.30 In many respects, *structuralism and so-called *postmodern

philosophy were to constitute a further and controversial elaboration of
these thoughts. We will return to both in chapters 9 and 11.
At this point we may be tempted to ask why mutations or epistemic
ruptures occurred at all. Foucault was not impressed with the obvious lines
of explanation. According to him, neither the new insights of individual
researchers nor the grand societal changes such as the rise of the nation-
state, the French Revolution, or industrial capitalism could explain why
the deep structure of knowledge changed in such a short time in so many
disciplines. In this situation, he preferred not to search for an explanation
but instead to focus on the mere observation that several epistemic ruptures
occurred. One of these ruptures, the one that emerged around 1800, yielded
‘man’, an object of knowledge that is conceptually different both from
nature and from the supernatural, for which life, labour, and language
are central ordering principles, and which distinguishes itself from the
order of empirical natural objects as a transcendental subject. Foucault
believed it was this mutation that made possible the birth of the modern
human sciences or the humanities. In the following paragraphs, we will
describe this development in more detail. For the sake of convenience, we
will maintain Foucault’s periodization. Even though Foucault’s views have
been criticized on both philosophical and historiographical grounds, the
notion of a radical epistemic rupture or mutation around 1800 is a useful
tool for tracing the changes of this period, which were far-reaching indeed.

5.2 Philosophical Backgrounds: Immanuel Kant and Georg

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Foucault offered an original perspective on the scientific revolution of the

seventeenth century. In his view, this revolution was merely one aspect of a
far broader epistemic mutation that occurred around 1600. Furthermore, his
analysis suggests that another specifically human-scientific revolution took
place around 1800. The idea of a ‘human-scientific’ or ‘humanities’ revolution
is less current and even more problematic than of that a revolution in the
natural sciences. Can one really speak of a sudden change, or are these
changes perhaps more gradual than Foucault represented them? There are
indications that, just as with the natural-scientific revolution (cf. § 2.1D),
developments were indeed slower and more ambivalent than might seem

30 M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1994), p. 387

The Birth of the Modern Humanities 141

at first glance. This ambivalence appears especially in the rivalries that

developed in the course of the nineteenth century between the nascent
branch of studies known as the humanities and the even younger category
called the social sciences (see § 6.4). Below, we will describe a number of
the internal (that is, conceptual) and external (cultural, economic, and
social) factors that made possible the birth of the humanities and, to a lesser
extent, the social sciences.
As noted above, Foucault rejected the possibility of any such explanations
of the mutation that has given us ‘man’. Neither internal factors, such as
new scientific discoveries, nor external factors, such as economic change
or social developments, could in his opinion give a satisfactory answer
to the question of why this mutation occurred. Yet we can still call his
own archaeological approach internalist in so far as it limits itself to the
conceptual ‘substructure’ of scientific and other forms of knowledge. In this
chapter, we will also devote attention to external factors. Soon, however,
it will emerge that internal and external factors are not only inextricably
intertwined but have also mutually shaped each other. In important respects,
the modern world is the product of modern humanities knowledge as much
as the other way around.

5.2a Kant: Subject and Object

In order to trace the conceptual conditions for the birth of the humanities
in the nineteenth century in more detail, we must now return to the work
of Kant and his heirs, the philosophers of nineteenth-century German
idealism. The following chapters will repeatedly return to this Kantian and
idealist heritage, as it was Kant who first formulated the separation between
man and the world (or nature) in terms that would become dominant for
several later generations of scholars. Whereas Descartes still distinguished
matter and soul in ontological terms – that is, as distinct substances – and
characterised the mind in terms of representations, Kant made the corner-
stone of modern philosophy the epistemological distinction between the
transcendental knowing subject and the empirically known or knowable
object. The transcendental subject with its categories and forms of intuition
makes possible our very knowledge of the outside world, as the subject both
constitutes and structures experience.
This epistemology has far-reaching implications for the humanities, even
if Kant himself did not systematically discuss human society or culture in
detail. The duplicity or ambivalence between man as an empirical object
and as a transcendental subject of empirical knowledge seems inevitable
142  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

as long as we maintain a Kantian conceptual scheme. As a result, man can

no longer be unproblematically described as only subject or only object of
knowledge. On the one hand, taking man as exclusively a subject makes
empirical, objective knowledge about man principally problematic if not
impossible. Conversely, one may try to describe man as purely an empirical
object, but in doing so, one ignores all questions opened up by man as a
transcendental subject.
The most important of these questions is whether man can escape his
own limitations, and if so, how. As we all know, man is far from perfect:
he is characterized by contradictions, prejudice, superstition, and other
bad habits that he seems unable to rid himself of. How, then, can such a
flawed creature serve as the source of certainty and objective knowledge?
Moreover, in the course of the nineteenth century, doubts concerning the
Kantian picture multiplied. The terminology in which these doubts were
expressed, however, remained largely shaped by the Kantian conceptual
scheme. Seen from the perspective of Foucault’s work, this is not surprising.
After all, the whole of nineteenth-century philosophy still moved within
the épistémè that had been initially codified by Kant’s philosophy.
In chapter 7, we will see that many authors in the German language
area struggled with the question to what extent the human mind and its
products may be grasped in natural-scientific terms and to what extent
they require a distinct *hermeneutic or interpretative method that does
more justice to ‘man the subject’. Kant treated man as a rationally thinking,
judging, and acting subject. According to him, this transcendental subject
as a source of knowledge and certainty was universal and timeless, that is,
not bound to any particular historical era or culture. Clearly, Kant’s beliefs
here reflect the *universalism and trust in reason that were characteristic
of the Enlightenment.
Early in the nineteenth century, the thinkers of Romanticism and the
so-called *Counter-Enlightenment were to counter this rationalist universal-
ism by attaching new importance to feelings, traditions, the local, and the
particular. Also in the sciences, however, new discoveries suggested that
the Kantian a priori truths were not universal or inevitable and hence could
not play the foundational role that Kant had given them. As noted, Kant saw
Euclidean geometry as a system of indubitable propositions about actual
physical space that precede observation. Early in the nineteenth century,
however, scholars developed so-called non-Euclidean geometry, which is
just as consistent as Euclidean geometry, but cannot be reconciled with it.
Such scientific developments threatened to degrade Kant’s seemingly rock-
solid and universal foundations of empirical knowledge to mere arbitrary
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 143

conventions. In § 3.1 above, we discussed the logical empiricists’ radical

rejection of Kant’s foundation of knowledge. Below, we will also discuss a
less radical revision, so-called *neo-Kantianism.

5.2b Hegel: Geist and Historicity

It was primarily as a kind of complement or revision of Kant’s thought,

one could argue, that the notion of *Geist or *spirit was introduced. This
notion is the second philosophical cornerstone of the modern humanities,
alongside the strict separation of subject and object and the notion of man
contained therein. Virtually all nineteenth-century German thinkers of
importance discussed this ambiguous and emotionally charged notion,
but possibly the most influential formulation – and certainly the most
important one for the humanities – was given by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770-1831).
Hegel was an *idealist. In the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),
he argued that Geist (i.e. the soul, mind, or spirit) is the sole reality, more
real even than the world of physical objects. The notion of spirit, however,
fulfills various functions for Hegel. Roughly speaking, spirit can be seen as
an elaboration or extension of Kant’s notion of reason (Vernunft). Unlike
Kantian reason, however, Hegel’s notion of Geist is not limited to knowledge,
the will, and our faculty of judgment: it develops in a far broader form of
cognitive, moral, and other self-realization, which emerges primarily in the
cultural and social relations between people. The spirit that Hegel writes
about, therefore, is not only individual consciousness but also includes its
reified or objectified products such as philosophy, art, and religion. Although
such things as Cartesian thought, Beethoven’s late string quartets, and
Calvinism arose from the consciousness of particular individuals, they
have an objective existence of their own.
Hegel distinguished between subjective, objective, and absolute spirit.
Roughly speaking, these correspond to individual human consciousness,
which aims to make itself free and self-conscious through its own activity;
social institutions of the law, morals, and collective morality (Sittlichkeit),
i.e., family, civil society, and the state, in which the free will realizes itself;
and the embodiment of the highest stages of spiritual self-realization in
art, religion, and philosophy. It is tempting to associate these three stages
with the individual human consciousness, the collective (e.g. national)
consciousness, and cultural consciousness, respectively; but in Hegel, things
are substantially more complicated than this. Usually, his notion of spirit
is both an individual and a supra-individual entity. Unlike the divinity of
144  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

religious doctrine, however, it can be understood rationally. Moreover, Hegel

repeatedly wrote about people’s spirit and national spirit or *Volksgeist: he
believed this principle, which forms peoples or nations, was the result both
of the activity of a world spirit in history and of human action that realizes
the world spirit’s intentions.
Notably absent in Hegel’s discussion of Volksgeist and world spirit, how-
ever, is any discussion of exactly how man and people, or individual and
nation, were related to each other; nor did he pay any attention to the role
that language plays in the shaping and defining of communication between
humans and national identity. In this respect, Hegel’s work reflects, but does
not analyse, the nationalism that emerged during the same period. Although
Hegel paid more attention to language than Kant, he largely stayed within a
framework dictated by a philosophy of consciousness. Thus, he did not grant
language a systematic location as an aspect or moment of objective spirit.
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 145

Hegel’s beliefs about the self-development of spirit originated in the

Platonic idea that spiritual self-realization is the highest human achievement.
Contemporaries such as Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) and various
later authors eagerly ridiculed Hegel’s ambitious abstractions, but Hegel’s
tremendous cultural-historical importance and his enormous influence
on entire generations of philosophers, writers, historians, conservative
and progressive cultural critics, and revolutionary social scientists are
undeniable. Much of twentieth-century German and French philosophy
would literally be unthinkable without Hegel. Likewise, many generations
of historians have consciously or unconsciously taken Hegel’s ideas on the
philosophy of history as their starting point. Finally, Hegelian *dialectics had
a constitutive influence on Karl Marx and thus, indirectly, on all scientists
and politicians that elaborate on Marx’s ideas. Below, we will return to the
philosophical-historical and dialectical aspects of Hegel’s work (see § 6.1
and 8.1). Here, however, we are primarily concerned with his idea of spirit.
Despite its often vertiginous level of abstraction, Hegel’s philosophy is
unmistakably an attempt to come to grips with the complex new realities
of German society. Hegel considered the state as a realization of the general
will, and more generally he saw systems of right and politics as forms of
objective spirit. Unlike Kant, for whom reason was universal and timeless,
Hegel emphatically presented spirit in a developmental perspective. In his
view, spirit develops or realizes itself in the course of history in the direction
of freedom. One central question that emerged from this doctrine is exactly
how and when this freedom may be realized, and in what kind of state it
is realized institutionally. According to Hegel himself, the modern consti-
tutional state as it existed in England, for example, marked this endpoint.
One of his most important followers, however, Karl Marx, together with
the so-called Left Hegelians, maintained another view. According to Marx,
major improvements – indeed revolutionary developments – were still lying
in waiting for human societies.
Here, we encounter a third conceptual cornerstone of the humanities: the
dominant idea of radical *historicity, that is, the historical determination
and variability of all that is human. In the modern épistémè, time became
a central principle for the order of things. Languages, cultures, systems of
law, and so on are not given once and for all but develop in the course of
time. From around 1800, these ideas pervaded the thinking about man.
The concept of historicity, however, can lead to confusion: it is not meant
to suggest that no notion of history existed before the nineteenth century
or that earlier authors had no historical awareness at all. Rather, all of a
sudden, historical development acquired a new, central role in our thinking.
146  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Until the Enlightenment, the course of history had been interpreted as the
manifestation of an unchanging human nature. From the late eighteenth
century onward, however, the belief that human nature or spirit is itself
in essence historical and mutable began to take hold. Even though Hegel
is not the only person or even the first to emphasize it, the idea of history
as actually shaping man, and by extension all products of human culture
such as language, art, and religion, emerges in the most explicit manner in
Hegel. As he argued in Philosophy of History:

World history represents the development of the spirit’s consciousness of

its own freedom and the subsequent realisation of this freedom. […] Each
step in the process, since it is different from all the others, has its own
peculiar determinate principle. In history, such principles constitute the
determinate characteristics of the spirit of a nation (Volksgeist), [which]
expresses every aspect of the nation’s consciousness and will, and indeed
of its entire reality; it is the common denominator of its religion, its politi-
cal constitution, its ethical life, its system of justice, its customs, learning,
art, and technical skill.31

Thus, for Hegel, the development of spirit is also reflected in artistic and
scientific progress. Each phase or period in history has its own spirit of the
age or *Zeitgeist – that is, a historically and geographically distinct form
of consciousness. For example, Hegel believed that the ancient Egyptians
lived in close relation to nature and therefore produced mixed human
and animal forms, like the Sphinx, in their art. Likewise, he saw them as
attaching great importance to vision and as being less inclined to employ
abstract concepts, and hence as using a hieroglyphic script – the latter, he
thought, could more directly express concrete experience. Leaving aside
the question of the factual correctness of Hegel’s historical speculations,
it becomes clear that his is a teleological vision of an inevitable course of
history towards freedom. Nonetheless, he tries to explain each phase of
world history in its own terms. For him, each people or era has a particular
spirit, form of consciousness, or sensibility, and hence its own meaning and
value. He combined this seemingly relativist view with a belief in a linear
evolution of spirit towards ever-greater distinction and abstraction, and
towards an ever-greater consciousness of freedom.

31 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: An Introduction. H.B. Nisbet (tr.)
(Cambridge, 1975), p. 138.
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 147

This idea of progress in history was a novel one and soon became the
dominant way of thinking of this period. Later, Arthur Lovejoy (1873-1962)
described how, more generally, the idea of progress and change from the
late eighteenth century onward slowly started to penetrate a hitherto static
image of creation. In his famous book The Great Chain of Being (1936), Lovejoy
defined the figure of the great chain of being as one that runs vertically
from the lowest lifeless matter via plants and animals towards man. Above
man, one encounters the celestial bodies and angels, with God as the highest
link. The figure of the great chain of being, which for centuries dominated
Western thought, only knows a vertical dimension of cosmic hierarchy and
no horizontal one of development or change in time. Around 1800, however,
it was tilted by ninety degrees and became horizontal and dynamic, turning
growth, evolution, and change into essential elements. History, in other
words, took over the role of the hierarchical order.

5.3 Cultural-Historical Backgrounds

These three conceptual ingredients – the Kantian distinction between man

as a transcendental subject and as an empirical or immanent object; the
German idealist notion of spirit; and the belief that all cultural phenomena
are essentially historical – are part of the explanation of the birth of the
modern humanities in purely internalist, intellectual historical terms. To
some extent, they may clarify why disciplines in the modern humanities
such as historical-comparative linguistics, art history, and critical Bible
exegesis only emerged early in the nineteenth century and were in a sense
unthinkable before then. This ‘unthinkability’, however, should not be
exaggerated. It was certainly possible for observations or statements to be
made that were, so to speak, ahead of their time, but these were brushed
aside as unimportant or did not fall on fertile soil. Speaking in Kuhnian
terms: some observations simply did not fit into the paradigms of their
times and thus were ignored as irrelevant and unimportant anomalies.
An intellectual-historical explanation, however, may at best describe that
and in what respects certain intellectual changes occurred, but it cannot
explain why some ideas became popular at a particular moment in time. Why
did notions such as spirit and history and the emphasis on the specific and
changeable become such central concepts towards the end of the eighteenth
century? Why did the need arise for the new kind of knowledge and for the
new organization of knowledge involved in modern humanities disciplines
such as history and philology? These changes were not made possible by
148  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

new scientific discoveries, new or improved observations, or more refined

methods. Without pretending to give a complete explanation, we will now
describe a number of external factors that encouraged and to some extent
even necessitated the birth of the modern humanities.
In cultural-historical terms, the birth of the modern humanities forms
part of a broader intellectual and political reaction to the Enlightenment that
has been called the *Counter-Enlightenment. This term, although contested,
may serve as a useful collective label for all kinds of disparate intellectual,
literary, and social movements that in one way or another rejected Enlight-
enment ideals. It is broader than notions such as ‘Romanticism’, which is
generally restricted to the arts, or ‘nationalism’, which indicates an initially
cultural social movement that soon acquired an openly political character.
The Enlightenment thinkers, or philosophes, who were active primarily
in France, believed that reason was the best weapon against intolerance
and superstition. They also saw reason as the best counselor for realizing a
happy life or for the improvement of society. This attitude implied a rejec-
tion of the traditional forces of the Church and the land-owning nobility,
whose legitimacy was based not on reason but on power, tradition, and the
insistence on blind obedience.
In Prussia, Emperor Frederick the Great encouraged enlightened thinking
in his domains, primarily in order to undermine the influence of the Church.
He did not, however, tolerate criticism of his own absolute rule. Kant was a
great admirer of the Prussian ruler, and the French writer and philosophe
Voltaire, alongside many other Enlightenment thinkers, even travelled to
Frederick’s Potsdam court near Berlin. Soon, however, Voltaire became
disappointed with the emperor’s enlightened image, behind which stood
an unadulterated absolutist ruler. Already in 1769, the German dramatist,
philosopher, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing criticized this ‘Berlin
freedom’ of absolutism and strict censorship:

It is restricted to the freedom to bring as many stupidities against religion

onto the market as one likes; and a right-minded man should precisely
be ashamed of openly eagerly using that freedom. But let someone in
Berlin please try to write as freely about other matters … let someone
in Berlin stand up to raise his voice for the rights of the subjects and
against exploitation and despotism, as happens now even in France and
Denmark; and you will soon experience which country is until today the
most enslaved of Europe.32

32 Lessing, Letter to Friedrich Nicolai, 30 October 1769; emph. in original.

The Birth of the Modern Humanities 149

The 1789 French Revolution marked the culmination – and in a way also
the end – of the Enlightenment. Many Enlightenment thinkers, including
Kant, welcomed the revolution because it promised to bring an end to an
outdated society based on the traditional powers of kings, Church, and
nobility. Soon, however, the revolutionary élan escalated into a period of
bloody terror, which allowed conservative critics to argue that the ideals of
reason, freedom, and equality could only lead to social chaos and bloodshed,
and ultimately self-destruction.
At a very different level, and mainly in England and France, other doubts
arose concerning modernity, with its ideals of rationality and progress, as
introduced by the Enlightenment. In early nineteenth-century England, the
Industrial Revolution had led to social changes that were at least as radical as
the political revolution in France but which had not led to an improvement
in the lives of the general population. The increase in employment offered
by the factories encouraged a process of mass urbanisation. The new factory
workers, however, led lives of unbearable poverty and misery in the slums
of the big cities. Industrialization, in other words, did not spell betterment
for the population at large as optimists had believed it would, but instead
led to the formation of a new urban proletariat.
The ambiguous consequences of progress, industrialization, and moder-
nity were not discussed exclusively by conservative authors. Several thinkers
who retained the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment – in particular
the belief in the possibility of realizing freedom, equality, and progress by
the public use of reason – also participated in the general debate on these
problems. Among them were August Comte (1798-1857), the founder of
*positivist social science, and Karl Marx (1818-1883). Both retained a belief in
the power of reason to comprehend the novel circumstances and to change
these where necessary. Both also saw a return to the traditional social order
led by the nobility and the Church as undesirable if not impossible. In this
respect, both were heirs of the Enlightenment. It is in part due to their efforts
that the modern social sciences came into being. These sciences are in some
respects pitted against the modern humanities, which are generally based on
the more conservative ideas of the Counter-Enlightenment (compare § 6.4).
Against the universalist Enlightenment idea of reason, adherents of the
Counter-Enlightenment opposed the concept of *culture as bound to a
particular time and place. This concept of culture had a political meaning,
as it was linked to the rise of *nationalism, that is, the belief that a people
as a cultural unity should also realize itself in a political entity, that is, a
state. Traditions rejected by Enlightenment thinkers as backwards and
superstitious were now revalued as the expressions of a people’s pure and
150  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

noble soul or spirit, or national culture. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers

thus replaced Enlightenment universalism and the celebration of reason
with a new importance attached to feelings and the imagination, which
counted as the expression of a particular form of consciousness and spirit
shaped by a specific environment and period.
With the new belief that each nation had its own culture and language
and should realize itself within its own nation-state, German Romantic
intellectuals rejected both the traditional power of absolute rulers (which
ruled over a plurality of peoples or – as in the German-language area – over
only a fragment of a nation) and the revolutionary thought that all people are
equal. As such, nationalism was a project of the urban and higher-educated
middle classes of Europe, which rapidly emerged during this period as a
new societal force. Its most ardent defenders could be found in the new
universities that had opened in the early nineteenth century. The modern
humanities represented peoples or nations as natural and self-evident
collective entities rather than modern creations. The link between the
modern humanities and nationalism was thus not accidental or contingent
but internal or essential.
Thenceforth, peoples or nations were considered a kind of natural category
into which humanity was divided. A nation was defined as a people with
a common language and culture. These views are factually incorrect, but
they served less as scientific claims than as myths that appealed to the
emotions of their audience. As the French historian Ernest Renan was to
remark: ‘forgetting, and I would even say being mistaken about, history is
an essential factor in the formation of a nation, and therefore the progress
of historical research is often a threat to nationalism’.33 Until late in the
nineteenth century, nationalist ideas had few followers among the bulk
of the rural population, which hardly participated in ‘national culture’, if
at all. These groups continued to see religion rather than language as the
main means of identification – to the extent that they attached any major
importance to collective identities at all.
Nationalist movements contributed to the transformation of the concept
of culture. From the nineteenth century onward, culture was no longer
regarded as a developmental or educational ideal for a small elite but rather
as something preserved in and transmitted by the timeless traditions of the
illiterate rural population. Gradually, that is, ‘culture’ was transformed from
a normative into a more descriptive concept, and from an elite ideal into a
glorification of the common people. The Romantic interest in the uncultivated

33 E. Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un nation?’ [1882]. Oeuvres Complètes (Paris, 1947-61), vol. I, pp. 887-907.
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 151

and traditional rural culture as the purest expression of a people’s spirit is

clearly related to nineteenth-century efforts to form specifically national
traditions and cultures. This idealization of the lower strata of the population
was also reflected in the modern humanities, for example in the study of
dialectology, but also in the activities of the Brothers Grimm, who started
collecting the fairy tales and fables of the rural population. The Grimms
explicitly presented these oral traditions as specifically German; moreover,
they saw them as preserved in their purest form by illiterate women peasants.
Their activities also found enthusiastic followers among other nations.
The growth of the modern humanities, however, coincided not only
with the emergence of various national projects but also with the colonial
expansion of states such as England, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. It
is not difficult to see how ideas about people’s spirit and progress came into
play here: after all, if each people had its own level of civilization, and if there
was a linear process of progress, then it could easily be argued that the more
advanced peoples (by which the Europeans primarily meant themselves) had
the right if not the duty to rule over ‘primitive’ or less-developed peoples,
and thus to lead them on the path of progress. And, indeed, philosophers
such as Hegel explicitly recognized this right. The humanities disciplines
that study the languages and customs of these exotic and backward peoples
could thus easily find a political application, in so far as they supported and
scientifically legitimized colonial projects as civilizing missions or as what
has been called the white man’s burden; that is, as the heavy responsibility
that the white man took on to bring civilization, Christian morality, and
modernity to other parts of the world.
Even though a theory of races claiming to be a genuine science would
not be developed until the second half of the nineteenth century, various
disciplines in the humanities and social sciences such as anthropology,
Indo-European linguistics, and Oriental studies undeniably played a role in
the exercise and legitimation of colonial rule by European powers over ever-
greater parts of the world. As will become clear in chapter 13, postcolonial
critics such as Edward Said (1935-2003) and Martin Bernal (1937-2013) have
argued that parts of the humanities are inextricably linked to imperialism
and to the colonial domination of the non-Western world. Said argued that
the acquisition of academic knowledge, in particular concerning other
peoples and cultures, is a way of exercising power, and that nineteenth-
century disciplines such as Oriental studies stood largely in the service of
colonial domination in so far as they presented and represented dominated
peoples as exotic, irrational, uncivilized, still living in traditions, passive,
and ultimately predestined, so to speak, to be ruled by Western powers.
152  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

5.4 Institutional Transformations: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s

University Reforms, Bildung, and Nationalism

Thus far, we have explored the conceptual foundations and the cultural
historical backgrounds of the birth of the modern humanities. A third and
no less important dimension is the institutional changes of higher education
during this period, once again primarily in the German-language area. This
institutional dimension shows even more clearly just how much internal
and external factors mutually shape each other.
At the start of the nineteenth century, Germany was not yet a political
unity but only a ‘cultural nation’ (Kulturnation), that is, a nation united by
its language and culture rather than by a state or ruler. Thanks to authors
such as Goethe, Lessing, and Schiller; thinkers such as Kant and Hegel;
and composers such as Beethoven and Schubert; Germany had from the
late eighteenth century onward increasingly taken over France’s culturally
dominant role. In socio-economic respects, however, the German-speaking
states and statelets, most importantly Prussia, were lagging behind. The
economy was still dominated by a more or less feudally organized agricul-
tural sector, and Prussia and other German-speaking states had undergone
neither a political revolution (as France had) nor an industrial revolution
(as England had).
The dramatic developments elsewhere in Europe, however, and Napoleon’s
conquests made reforms inevitable in early nineteenth-century Prussia.
In education and the sciences, these reforms were primarily the work of a
single man, the multi-talented diplomat and scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt
(1767-1835). Between 1808 and 1810, during his brief tenure as minister of
science and education, Humboldt realized a number of radical changes
in the structure of Prussian higher education. Other universities were to
reproduce these changes, turning the idea of a ‘Humboldtian’ university into
a model for much of nineteenth-century Europe and beyond. Because of
his enormous power and influence, Humboldt was nicknamed the ‘Bildung
dictator’. He also became famous as a scholar: he carried out ethnographic
and linguistic research, for example, and explored to what extent human
thinking is shaped and guided by the structure of the language we speak.
Humboldt based the university of Berlin, which opened in 1809, on two
principles: academic freedom and the unity of teaching and research.
Nowadays, these principles may seem obvious, or perhaps by now out-
dated, but at the time, they were little short of revolutionary. With regard
to academic freedom, Humboldt emphasized that universities should no
longer be directly responsible to a ruler or a state and that universities
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 153

Wilhelm von Humboldt

should have their own governance rather than be subordinate to the state.
He also believed that professors should be free to teach about topics they
considered important. In addition, Humboldt proposed a new division of
labour between universities and academies. Hitherto, universities had been
considered institutions for teaching only, whereas research had been the
prerogative of academies such as the Royal Society, the French Académie
des sciences, and the Berlin Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles Lettres
(Frederick the Great had quite consciously given the latter a French name,
since French was the language of the royal court and the Enlightenment).
Humboldt asserted that university professors could only be full-fledged
scientists or scholars if they themselves conducted original research and
also based their teaching on it.
Furthermore, and famously, Humboldt argued that higher education
should strive for *Bildung. This notion expresses both a humanist ideal
and a political programme. The Bildung that Humboldt sought involved
a broad realization of all human potential: not only knowledge but also
154  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

an ability to make moral and aesthetic judgments and to act justly. The
‘objective’ science taught at universities, therefore, should be complemented
by a ‘subjective’ Bildung. Moreover, academic education had to be general
rather than specialist:

The understanding of the higher scientific institutions as the culmina-

tion at which everything comes together that happens directly for the
moral formation of the nation, rests on the fact that the institutions are
predetermined to elaborate science in the deepest and broadest sense
of the word, and to offer mental and moral development (Bildung) as a
non-intentional but automatically goal-directed prepared matter for its
use. Hence, their essence inwardly consists in the connection of objective
science and subjective Bildung, and outwardly in the connection of a
completed school education with the beginning of independent study,
or rather, in the realization of the transition from the one to the other.34

Hence, Humboldt continued, it was in the state’s own interest to guarantee

the academic freedom within which individuals could optimally develop
themselves in both specialist scientific research and general Bildung. Else-
where he added: ‘only the science that stems from the inside and can be
planted in the inner may also change one’s character; and state and humanity
are not concerned with knowledge and speaking, but with character and
action’. Bildung, that is, amounts to an organic unity of knowledge and
character, of subjective and objective, of facts and norms, and of theory
and action.
The notion of Bildung was less Humboldt’s original creation than a syn-
thesis of ideas and ideals of contemporary German authors and thinkers.
Significantly, it was during the same period that the new literary genre of the
Bildung novel emerged, of which Goethe’s 1796 Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
is the most famous example. Humboldt’s ideal of Bildung is *liberal in that
it demands full independence from the state. Soon after, however, it was
to be appropriated by the more conservative and nationalist forces of the
Counter-Enlightenment. Nonetheless, the notion itself had unmistakably
nationalist overtones, as Bildung targeted development in the service of
the nation and rejected the revolutionary universalism of some Enlighten-
ment thinkers. Thus, it had a much more clearly nationalist character than
Renaissance humanism. Humboldt viewed ancient Greek civilization in

34 Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘Zur Gründung der Universität Berlin,’ Gesammelte Schriften, Band
X (Berlin, 1934), p. 279.
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 155

which the arts and natural philosophy had flourished as his great example,
and he considered the Germans the ‘new Greeks’, that is, the great cultural
nation of his time. And just as the ancient Greeks had defeated the Persian
invading army, Humboldt believed that the modern Germans should also
resist the French invasion led by Napoleon. For him, education in the classical
languages was an integral part of national Bildung, for by learning ancient
Greek and Latin, one could become a better, and educated, German. It was
also during this time that historiography became an academic discipline.
Against the background of the rise of nationalism, and within the new
university structure that presented Bildung as a matter of national interest,
it should come as no surprise that this new discipline focused on national
history (see chapter 6).
The Bildung advanced by Humboldt was to be cultivated in the curriculum
of the so-called faculty of philosophy, the fourth faculty of the traditional
university, which also included the faculties of theology, law, and medicine.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the natural sciences were still
part of this faculty. After 1850, however, the rapid growth of the natural
scientific knowledge, the increasing need to conduct research in well-
equipped laboratories and the concomitant rapid increase in personnel, led
to the formation of a distinct faculty of natural sciences in various German
universities. The remaining disciplines of the old faculty of philosophy were
relocated to a new faculty of Geisteswissenschaften, or humanities. The work
of Wilhelm Dilthey, which will be discussed in chapter 7, may be seen as
an attempt to legitimize the disciplines that had been moved to this new
faculty by developing their own hermeneutic methods.

5.5 Conclusion

Even more clearly than in the natural sciences, the development of the
human and social sciences involved an interaction between internal (or
conceptual) and external (or societal and cultural) factors. The ‘modern
humanities revolution’ cannot be entirely explained by the emergence of
new discoveries, concepts, ideas, or methods; it was also made possible, if
not desirable, by societal and political factors such as the rise of modern
bourgeois society, nationalism, and colonial expansion. Conversely, how-
ever, new academic ideas about spirit, culture, and Bildung contributed in
some measure to the formation and development of present-day European
and Western society and of the colonial world, partly as a result of their
institutionalization in the university and the modern nation-state.
156  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Until 1933, German universities were generally structured on the basis

of Humboldt’s Bildung ideals. In that year, however, the National Socialists
started imposing their own worldview and ideals on the German educational
system. The Nazis radicalized nineteenth-century thinking about peoples or
nations, race, and Geist, seeing Germany as a cultural nation with a unique
spiritual mission that was being threatened from the outside by the crude
materialism of both capitalist America and the communist Soviet Union,
and from the inside by non-Aryan and other elements seen as polluting the
moral values and racial purity of the German Aryan Master Race.
The German sciences never fully recovered from this blow. Large numbers
of scientists, many of them Jews, left Germany during the 1930s, and many
others were murdered during the Second World War. According to some, the
nineteenth-century humanities were even discredited for good because of
the legacy of the National Socialist Party and because of the close links these
disciplines had with nationalism and colonial domination. More generally,
concepts such as spirit, people, culture, man, and nation have come to be so
strongly linked to the Counter-Enlightenment, cultural nationalism, and other
movements culminating in, or caricatured by, national socialism that doubts
have been expressed about their continuing relevance, if not legitimacy.
It was primarily postmodern and postcolonial authors who emphasized
that these terms were not neutral analytical concepts but were themselves
an integral and problematic part of the dramatic European history of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The consequences these authors attached
to these political links will be discussed in chapter 12. The persistence of a
divide between the humanities and the natural sciences was only partly
undone by the emergence of new methods and frameworks after the Second
World War. With the increasing use of social-scientific (and, subsequently,
natural-scientific) methods, the strict methodological distinction between the
natural and the human sciences gradually weakened. But institutionally, the
division into the three faculties of the humanities, the social sciences, and the
natural sciences remained solidly entrenched in almost all Western universities.

Summary

− Foucault’s archaeology of the human sciences shows remarkable

similarities with Kuhn’s view of the history of the natural sciences as
discontinuous. It studies the historically variable conditions for the
possibility of knowledge. Each age is characterized by a single épistémè.
The Birth of the Modern Humanities 157

Two far-reaching and radical epistemic mutations or ruptures occurred

around 1600 and 1800 that reorganized the entire order of knowledge.
− Around 1800, a ‘humanities revolution’ occurred that made it possible
for ‘man’, or ‘spirit’, to become an object of research. This revolution
had philosophical, cultural, historical, and institutional dimensions.
− Kant’s epistemology implies that man is simultaneously the transcen-
dental subject and the empirical object of the human sciences. Hegel
extended Kant’s notion of reason to that of Geist as a supra-individual
entity that develops in the course of history.
− In cultural-historical terms, the humanities are linked to the Counter-
Enlightenment and to the emergence of nationalist thought. Nationalism
and colonial domination accompanied the birth of various disciplines
in the modern humanities such as philology, comparative linguistics,
and orientalism.
− Institutionally, the emergence of new, autonomous academic disciplines
in the humanities was made possible by university reforms. Wilhelm
von Humboldt organized the new university of Berlin on the principles
of academic freedom and the unity of teaching and research. His ideal
of Bildung is broader than merely that of factual knowledge. Humboldt’s
ideas about Bildung also left their traces in modern university systems
elsewhere in the world.
6 Developing New Disciplines

6.1 Hegel’s Philosophical History

As part of the ‘humanities revolution’, in the nineteenth century a profession-

alized academic historiography developed, , primarily in German-speaking
areas. In this period a self-image of historical research emerged that has
prevailed to this very day: it sees historiography as a discipline in which
practitioners try to recover ‘hard historical facts’ on the basis of archival
research while steering clear of interpretations, value judgments, figments
of one’s own imagination, and vague or elusive and hence unscientific
statements. Usually labelled *positivist, this view of historiography has a
complex history of its own, however, and its claim to scientific status is less
self-evidently valid than the appeal to hard facts suggests. In this chapter,
we will discuss Hegel’s influential philosophical view of history; the rise of
philology, or historicizing textual criticism, as a method or technique of the
humanities at large; and the development of Leopold von Ranke’s famous
views as well as Nietzsche’s radical critique concerning the factuality and
scientific status of the historical sciences. Finally, we shall examine the
emergence of sociology as a rival to both literature and the humanities.
Nineteenth-century academic historiography maintains an ambivalent
relation to Hegel. On the one hand, Hegel formulated a philosophy of history
based on purely speculative arguments, which were rejected by those profes-
sional academic historians who based their scholarly claims on archival
research and empirical facts. On the other hand, it was primarily Hegel
who, more than any other, developed some of the essential notions adopted
by the modern humanities such as the notion of Volksgeist, thinking in
developmental terms, the distinction between history and prehistory, and
the distinction between Europe and those parts and periods of the world
seen as lacking a proper history.
As discussed in chapter 5, Hegel’s first major work, the Phenomenology
of Spirit (1807), proceeds from a critique of some central Kantian notions.
Most importantly, Hegel historicized the transcendental subject, which
for Kant was abstract and formal – without reducing the transcendental
subject to a merely contingent or accidental notion however.
Hegel rejected Kant’s dualism of the contingent and the necessary and
between the receptivity of perception and the spontaneity of understand-
ing (Verstand) − that is, between intuitions and concepts (cf. § 2.2, 4.1c).
According to Hegel, Kant’s dualism leads to a philosophical dilemma when
160  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

man starts exploring his own actions and his past. One option is that the
human mind hits upon the contingency of all that exists and everything
he observes; but as a result, man as a knowing subject almost inevitably
risks becoming tainted with contingency himself as well, together with all
his judgments and conclusions. However, by chosing the other option and
proceeding from the necessity of reason, the latter *sublates (aufheben) this
contingency but thereby also destroys the plurality that marks the world. It
then becomes reasonable to view human actions and the human past from
this perspective as well, with the result that all contingency disappears.
This precludes the very possibility that circumstances might force people
to perform actions they would not choose of their own free will or that
they in fact often act unreasonably. Thus, neither option is very attractive.
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit showed us a way out of this dilemma by
demonstrating that the world as a whole is intelligible without its plurality
and multiplicity having to be sacrificed to this understanding. What ap-
peared to be an insolvable dilemma was now resolved in a developmental
perspective.
Hegel argued that the objective world was a product of spirit and that, for
this reason, it is understandable. But spirit does not recognize its products
at every moment and at each stage of its self-development and therefore it
experiences its products as ‘alien’. As a result of the development of spirit,
however, this is a temporary stage, since eventually spirit will recognize
itself in what initially appeared as ‘alien’ and hence as a negation of its
being spirit. Thus, the ‘alien’ is sublated by this second negation emerging
and is thereby deprived of its alienness. As a result, the objective world
does not lose its plurality – after all, it remains objective – but is revealed
as a product of spirit itself. Thus, the intelligibility of the objective world is
guaranteed in spite of its plurality.
The Phenomenology of Spirit outlines the stages that in Hegel’s view are
necessary in this *dialectical process of negation and sublation. Conscious-
ness and its forms of knowledge develop from natural, ordinary, naïve (that is,
unmediated) consciousness via self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion
into absolute knowing. In the final stage, which Hegel identified with his own
thought, there is no longer any difference between knowledge of the world
and the world itself: the world has been understood in its reasonableness.
The thinking that understands this reasonableness, that is, speculative
science, no longer depends on anything outside itself that is merely given
to the senses and thereby is no longer finite and unfree. In this final stage
of thinking, man is therefore free and relieved of his finitude. Therefore,
spirit is the ‘circle returning onto itself, which presupposes its beginning,
Developing New Disciplines 161

but only reaches it at the very end.’ Thus, Hegel is a *dialectical idealist: for
him, the course of history exists in the dialectical development of spirit.
The impact of these abstract considerations on many currents in the
humanities and social sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can
hardly be overestimated. Hegel’s readers learned from him how culture and
society can be seen in terms of a development sustained by the continuous
emergence of contradictions and their subsequent sublation at each level
and during each period. Moreover, they also learned that eventually an
endpoint will be reached in which all contradictions will have been resolved.
At that point, the end of history will have been reached and freedom will
have been realized. Finally, they learned that spirit has to do work in order
to absorb into the concept what seemed to exist outside of itself.
The relation between subject and object, in other words, is not constant
but developing, and thereby becomes an object of thought itself. Hence,
thinking, in its cognitive appropriation of a thing, should also understand
its own relation to that thing. By thinking about society and culture, in other
words, one becomes confronted with the problem of the *relation of theory
and practice. All effort, however, is not in vain. Hegel’s work is guided by the
consoling thought that struggle is not meaningless but will eventually lead
to a noble purpose: the end of history, that is, the realization of freedom.
Thus, according to Hegel, human history develops according to a fixed
pattern in which clear stages can be distinguished. One famous phase in this
dialectical vision of history is that of the ‘unhappy consciousness’, during
which self-consciousness has recognized the objective world outside of
itself but experiences it as not identical to itself and hence as ‘alien’. Hegel
argued that this phase of development coincided with the historical period
of late Roman antiquity and early Christianity.
One other well-known example is the dialectic of master and slave. In
this dialectic, the slave is initially not free, but the master is equally bound
or constrained by the relation of repression, since his self-consciousness
is dependent on the slave. The latter, however, has the advantage that he
is working and can thus arrive at self-consciousness when he gains the
insight that the world is his work and thus is not alienated from him. By
contrast, the master, who does not work himself, remains dependent on
his slave’s work. This situation can only be resolved or sublated when both
mutually recognize each other as self-consciousness and when the difference
between master and slave disappears, when both start considering each
other as equals. For Hegel, this corresponds historically with relations in
feudal Medieval society. Later, however, Marx redescribed this stage as the
prototype of *class conflict, which he elevated to the motor of historical
162  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

change in general, up until the moment that all contradictions will have
been resolved and a classless society is realized (see § 8.1).
Hegel’s lecture courses on the philosophy of world history, taught in the
last years of his life when he was a professor at the University of Berlin,
clearly show how this view differed from that of the historians of his age. We
cannot ‘learn from the past’ as we are often told to do, Hegel argued, for the
circumstances of each era and each people are so specific and unrepeatable
that decisions about the right course of political action can only be made
by taking as one’s standard that particular population and that particular
era. This does not, however, decrease the importance of what he called
‘philosophical history’, which regards the past from the general but concrete
perspective of spirit and which leads peoples through world history. Hegel
distinguished this philosophical history from more descriptive forms of
historiography such as chronicles, which in his view merely provided a
dull and lifeless enumeration of facts and thus missed the bigger picture.
He also criticized the narrative historiography of by then newly emerging
authors such as Leopold von Ranke who enlivened the picture of the past
with striking details, but who in Hegel’s view – precisely because of the
wealth of detail – failed to show the larger patterns sufficiently clearly.
Hegel thus viewed world history as the necessary process of self-real-
ization of universal spirit, that is, as the way in which spirit, proceeding
exclusively from the thought – or concept – of its own freedom, realizes
itself in thought along the developmental stages of (self-)consciousness and
reason. Simultaneously, this self-realization is also a return from an earlier
alienation, in which the world is experienced as knowable and rational but
as standing outside spirit.
Remarkably, and despite dealing with the concepts of world history and
universal spirit, Hegel presumed peoples or nations to be self-evident units
of analysis, thereby assuming the notion of a people’s spirit or Volksgeist as
an unproblematic given. To the extent that he does not do so himself, he
has been read in this way by many later authors. Thus, in Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, he writes that:

Each of the states, peoples and individuals engaged in this process of world
spirit emerges with its own specific and determinate principle, which in
their constitution finds its interpretation and realization.35

35 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 344.

Developing New Disciplines 163

Hegel thus took peoples as specif ically national entities but also as
the result of specif ically modern processes of political organization,
in particular state formation. He believed that the nation was in itself
an ethical substance, which may or may not acquire the form of a state.
When that does not happen or when a specific state form lags behind in
its development, such peoples or nations may and should be ruled by more
advanced nations, which have already been organized as states. Hegel,
in other words, explicitly condoned colonial rule. It would be too facile,
however, to reject out of hand his thoughts as nationalist and ethnocentric,
if not racist. A more interesting question is exactly how and why this
view of peoples and nations as units of the historical process – and the
belief in progress or modernization as an unambiguous and dialectical
development primarily occurring in, or driven by, Europe – became
dominant if not self-evident for so many, and why it still to some extent
remains so today.
Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was convinced that not only
primitive peoples lacking writing or state organization but also Oriental
civilizations such as India and China did not know philosophy in the strict
sense of the word. He admitted that we may find general thoughts about
morals or the cosmos in ancient Chinese and Indian texts but, he added,
those thoughts do not have the systematic form of pure thinking which
in his view marked ‘real’ or ‘proper’ philosophy. Even more explicitly than
Kant, Hegel thus characterized philosophy as Western by definition and
also as academic rather than popular in character. This view reflected
the newly professionalized status of academic philosophy in Germany.
Kant’s critical philosophy and Hegel’s speculative thought were not only
uniquely Western and uniquely modern, they also resisted popularization
or simplification for a larger public and could only be taught in schools
and universities.
As a result of the nineteenth-century German university reforms dis-
cussed above, this elitist and ethnocentric view of philosophy also became
institutionally entrenched. From this period onwards, practitioners of
‘popular philosophy’ such as Cicero and Herder gradually disappeared
from the philosophical canon, and people started reading their works as
literature rather than philosophy. Likewise, Oriental intellectual traditions
came to be seen as the object of a philologically oriented study of language
and religion and to be treated as traditions of ‘wisdom’ rather than as ‘real’
philosophy. To this day, academic programmes in language, religion, and
philosophy show traces of this intellectual division of labour.
164  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

6.2 The Rise of Modern Philology

The nineteenth-century rise of academic historiography maintains a

complex relation with Hegel’s doctrines on the philosophy of history. It is
also closely connected to the development of Romantic nationalism and the
development of *philology, or historicizing textual criticism, as the method
or technique specific to a large part of the modern humanities. Even more
than hermeneutics, which will be discussed in the next chapter, philology
is seen as typical for the autonomous and professionalized humanities that
arose in the nineteenth century. Philology has also been better able than
hermeneutics to resist the emergence of new methods and conceptions.
For a long time, philologists have argued – with some justification and
success – that, in comparison to rival frameworks, they base themselves
on the hard work of learning languages, on the detailed study of texts, and
on facts rather than theories.
In itself, philological textual criticism is not a radically novel method
or technique. As described in chapter 2, the first attempts at discovering
‘true’ or ‘correct’ textual forms based on the critical study and comparison
of manuscripts took place during the Renaissance. Modern philologists,
however, see themselves as academicians rather than men of letters much
more unambiguously than Renaissance humanists. In their writings, literary
skill and rhetorical elegance are made subordinate to the recovery of hard
textual facts. Moreover, modern philology has a far stronger historicist
character, since it views not only words and texts but also the spirit expressed
in them as historically changing. More than before, the recovery of the
authentic words of an era has now become a prerequisite for the reconstruc-
tion of the spiritual life of bygone ages that may differ strongly from our
own. Nineteenth-century philologists thus see language, literature, religion,
laws, etc. as different aspects of one and the same Gemeingeist, or collective
spirit. As the famous classical scholar Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff
stated as late as 1927:

Classical philology is defined by its subject-matter: Graeco-Roman civilisa-

tion in its essence and in every facet of its existence. This civilisation is a
unity, though we are unable to say precisely when it began or ended; and
the task of scholarship is to bring that dead world to life by the power of
science … Because the life we try to fathom is a single whole, our science
too is a single whole. Its division into the separate disciplines of language
and literature, archaeology, ancient history, epigraphy, numismatics and,
latterly, papyrology, can be justified only as a concession to the limitations
Developing New Disciplines 165

of human capacity, and must not be allowed to stifle awareness of the

whole, even in the specialist.36

Despite a distinctive dislike of theoretical and philosophical abstractions,

modern philology thus presupposes a vision of a historically developing spirit
and aims to develop a comprehensive overview in terms that unmistakably
refer back to Hegel.
Claims concerning the scientific character of modern philology rest
primarily on the employment of a specific form of textual criticism called
*stemmatology or the *stemmatic method. This method was developed in
particular by Karl Lachmann (1793-1851), who tried to order the different
manuscripts of the same ancient text in a family tree (stemma). It is based
on the presupposition that writing errors in manuscripts are ‘hereditary’: if
a manuscript contains a specific error, all copies of it will contain the same
error, and if a later copy does not show this error, it is derived from another
predecessor. In this way, it becomes possible to rank surviving manuscripts
and to reconstruct an original text or *archetype. In the study of Classical
and Medieval literature, the textual critical methods of modern philology
thus amount to a search for an original text (Urtext), which is seen as the
authentic formulation of the author himself, free from later errors and
additions.
Similar assumptions may be found in historical-comparative linguistics,
which compares contemporary spoken vernaculars with the written
variants of the past and explores how these have derived from a common
ancestor (for example, Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian,
and Romanian from Latin, or Slavic languages such as Polish, Russian,
and Czech from Old Church Slavonic) and how these predecessors in
turn derive from a common reconstructed original language, the *Proto-
Indo-European language. Here, philologists search for the ‘purest’ dialect
variants that are not contaminated by contact with other languages and
are hence seen as providing the best basis for the reconstruction of a
hypothetical origin. Likewise, in modern historiography, scholars search
for the oldest and most authentic documents that are presumed not to
be distorted by literary style or rhetorical embellishment and hence are
seen to most closely approximate and most reliably describe the historical
event itself.

36 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship, transl. Alan Harris

(London, 1982 [1927]), p. 1.
166  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Philology thus involves the modern scientific study not only of texts but
also of languages. The great pioneer of historical-comparative linguistics
was Franz Bopp (1791-1867), who captured all his ideas concerning linguistic
change in a comprehensive system and tried to reconstruct the sound
changes from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) and Proto-Germanic and Gothic
to modern German. One such pattern-like sound change is the fact that
voiceless consonants in PIE become so-called fricatives in German (e.g., PIE
*pods, German Fuss); and voiced-aspirated consonants become unaspirated
in German (PIE *bhréthêr, German Bruder).37 This sound change has become
known as Grimm’s Law, even though Jacob Grimm was not the f irst to
formulate this pattern, and even though he himself did not believe this
sound change was lawlike or without exceptions.
A later generation of comparative linguists, the so-called *Neogrammar-
ians or Junggrammatiker, were rather stricter in this respect. They insisted
that linguistic changes occurred according to genuine laws that knew no
real exceptions and hence that apparent exceptions required a separate
explanation. The Neogrammarians marked an important development in
historical-comparative linguistics but not a scientific revolution or paradigm
shift. For the most part, their theories, concepts, and norms of scientific
quality mirrored those of their ancestors.
In this case, there were clear external factors that encouraged the in-
tensive study not only of ‘national’ languages and their pedigree but also
of exotic Oriental languages such as Sanskrit, in particular the formation
of nation-states and the colonial expansion that occurred beginning in
the late eighteenth century. Internal conceptual factors, however, also
deserve our attention. According to one widespread belief, William Jones,
a British colonial official in India, ‘discovered’ the close affinity of Sanskrit
with European languages towards the end of the eighteenth century. This
discovery, we are told, made him the founder of both *Orientalist philology
and of Indo-European or Indo-Germanic comparative linguistics. In 1786,
Jones famously wrote:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful

structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin
and more exquisitely refined than either; yet bearing to both of them a
stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar
than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed,

37 In this example, the asterisks mark reconstructed word forms that have not been attested
in any actual historical source.
Developing New Disciplines 167

that no philologer could examine all three without believing them to have
sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.38

This makes it tempting to see Jones as a kind of Copernicus or Galileo, that

is, as a prototypical scientific genius who changed science forever because
of his innovative and exceptional observations of the linguistic equivalent
of a new heavenly body, a continent, or a chemical element. This image
is not quite correct, however, as the same observation of the similarities
between Indian and European languages had already been made a full two
centuries earlier. In 1583, the British Jesuit Thomas Stephens had noted how
the languages of India and Iran resembled those of Europe: ‘many are the
languages of these lands; their pronunciation is not unpleasant and their
structure is similar to that of Greek and Latin.’39 Why, then, did it take
more than 200 years for comparative Indo-European linguistics to emerge?
Earlier explanations of the affinities between languages had been inci-
dental and unsystematic. Generally, they had been restricted to similarities
between individual words. Such explanations reflected the idea, typical
for classical linguistic thought, that a language is a collection of words for
language-independent concepts and thoughts. It was not until the end of
the eighteenth century that the idea of a language as a complex inflectional
system started gaining ground against the Enlightenment idea of language
as a representation of the world, albeit a possibly imperfect one. Likewise,
historical change had hitherto been seen more as an accident than as an
essential feature of languages. Although various accounts of the ‘origin of
language’ appeared in the eighteenth century, most of these were not written
by grammarians or philologists, nor were they based on the empirical inves-
tigation of languages. Rather, they were based on purely speculative fictions
about how and why mankind had ever come to achieve communication at
all, in connection with the question of how human societies could come
about. It was primarily philosophers, among them Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Johann Gottfried Herder, who wrote about these themes. Moreover, their
philosophical speculations concerned the origin rather than the historical
development of language.
Thus we could conclude that, between Stephens in 1583 and Jones in
1786, a Gestalt switch has occurred, as both saw completely different things
in Sanskrit: – a system of naming and an organically grown historical

38 William Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse, On the Hindus, 2 February 1786.

39 Letter to Richard Stephens, October 24, 1583, quoted in J. Muller, ‘Early Stages of Language
Comparison from Sassetti to William Jones (1786).’ Kratylos 31 (1986), pp. 14-15.
168  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

inflectional structure, respectively. They almost literally lived, worked,

and spoke in different worlds consisting of different objects. This conclu-
sion becomes more plausible against the background of the Duhem-Quine
thesis and of Kuhn and Foucault’s ideas described above. Concepts such
as language, art, and religion therefore do not correspond to immutable
natural kinds or categories of things because what a scientist means by
such terms is inevitably and irreducibly shaped by his conceptual frame or
by the paradigm or épistémè in which his work takes shape.
In other words, nineteenth-century disciplines share a philological ap-
proach that is partly based on the image of the family tree and on the search
for an origin or original text or language presumed to be pure, authentic,
and not distorted by language contact or literary embellishment. Obviously,
this presupposes that there is one single source or origin of all later variants.
Later philologists have cast doubt on this presupposition. After all, it is also
possible for a textual variant to be part of an ‘open tradition’ that cannot be
reduced to any one text or to a single author, for example an oral tradition.
In modern philology, we also find two other problematic presuppositions
concerning authorship and nationality. First, the philological reconstruction
of the original form or archetype of a literary text is linked to the modern
notion of the author as an individual creative genius and as the juridical
owner of the work who should therefore be protected against later changes
and forgeries. However, in European antiquity and in the Middle Ages,
and certainly in the case of oral traditions, such a Romantic and juridical
notion of the author did not exist. Second, the nineteenth-century philolo-
gists presupposed the existence of peoples and nations, as constituted by
language, as a given. The spirit they saw as expressed in a language, text, or
tradition was seen as primarily a national spirit or Volksgeist. Significantly,
Lachmann presented his reconstructed text of the middle-high German epic
The Nibelungenlied as the German national epic, which he claimed had a
status for the German nation similar to that of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for
the ancient Greeks. This nationalist vision is not an unfortunate interference
with or abuse of a scientific method that is in itself objective and politically
neutral. Modern and more specifically Romantic nationalist notions and
presuppositions of individual genius and collective spirit are an integral
and inextricable part of modern textual critical philology.
The philological interest in written language and literature presents
itself as purely scientific and as purely factually oriented and thus as free
from all philosophical speculation and theoretical reflection. Conversely,
philosophers like Kant and Hegel showed remarkably little interest in the
phenomenon of language. For Kant, language (and, more generally, culture)
Developing New Disciplines 169

was important neither for man as a thing in itself (Ding an sich) nor for man
as a natural phenomenon. Likewise, Hegel’s interest in language was at best
marginal: he believed that language is neither a form of objective spirit
such as the law, art, or religion, nor a constitutive dimension of individual
consciousness or national spirit, for example. Hence, both authors may
be characterized as adhering to a philosophy of consciousness: both took
thought or consciousness to be given – that is, as not shaped by language
or other mediating factors. In the nineteenth century, similar assumptions
dominated the various disciplines and methods in the humanities, including
philology. It was only in the twentieth century that a number of philosophers
completed a linguistic turn comparable to that of the logical empiricists
and began to argue that consciousness is formed within and by language
or linguistic practice rather than the other way around, as we will see in
chapters 8, 9, and 10.
For a long time, philological approaches dominated the organization
and practice of different disciplines in the humanities such as the study of
language and history. And for much of that time, they more or less success-
fully resisted new theoretical frameworks, appealing to the sober factuality
of their textual readings and reconstructions. As we saw, this claim to a
scientific status rested on a number of substantial – and debatable – as-
sumptions about origins, authorship, and authenticity. Especially after the
Second World War, however, these presuppositions came under increasing
scrutiny as a result of theoretical criticisms and political developments as
well as technological innovations, for example the recent development of
the digital humanities.

6.3 Historiography and Genealogy

6.3a Leopold von Ranke

Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886) is generally considered to be the father of

academic or scientific historiography, which based itself on the critical use of
primary sources rather than literary texts or a priori historical speculations
and which abstained from making moral judgments about the past or giving
advice concerning the future. Instead, it presented the historian as merely
trying to recover Wie es eigentlich gewesen (how things really were), to use
Ranke’s often-quoted and much misused phrase.
Ranke was a pioneer of academic historiography not only in terms of
method but also from an institutional point of view. In Berlin, he taught
170  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

an entire generation of historians, some of whom would come to rank

among the most important of the nineteenth century, including Jacob
Burckhardt and Heinrich von Sybel. Moreover, he was one of the first to
spread his ideas and methods via *seminars, that is, in gatherings with a
small number of advanced students, usually at home, where the participants
critically discussed their own and others’ work. The seminar was a far more
intensive and personal form of instruction than the university lecture. It
also allowed Ranke to establish enduring contacts with the participants,
which would strongly contribute to the formation of a ‘Ranke school’ in
historiography.
Unlike his predecessors, Ranke did not base his work on the stylistically
elaborated narrative literary writings of earlier historians (that is, on what we
would today call *secondary sources) but rather on non-literary sources such
as archival documents, letters, memoirs, and eyewitness reports. Moreover,
his method was critical concerning its sources in that he felt the historian
should look for the original and correct, non-embellished description of
historical facts in his sources that stands closest to the event itself, such as
documents from state archives or eyewitness reports. It is only on the basis
of such *primary texts, he argued, that we can gain direct and immediate
access to the past. His tacit assumption was that such a direct and immediate
link with the event itself also assured the factual accuracy of the report. That
is, he proceeded from the same idea as philologists reconstructing literary
texts: the closer we come to the origin, the more authentic and closer to
the truth our sources are.
Another feature of Ranke’s method is a clear preference for written sources
over oral reports: ‘we can clearly know again only that part of life which has
been preserved in writing,’ he stated. For contemporary history, however, he
occasionally used oral sources. Thus, his 1829 history of the Serbian uprising
against Ottoman rule was based primarily on testimony he had received
from Serbian linguistic and literary pioneer Vuk Karadžić (1787-1864), a
personal acquaintance of his.
Because of this preference for written and especially political sources,
Ranke’s historiography not only emphasized the conscious actions of politi-
cal leaders at the expense of the lower strata of society and of social and
structural economic factors, his trust in written sources also led to a bias
in favour of the relatively small part of the population that could read and
write. In the twentieth century, a historiographical approach known as *oral
history would emerge that developed methods specifically designed to gain
historical information from oral sources. This made it possible to recover
the history of lower classes – who were more often than not illiterate – and
Developing New Disciplines 171

other repressed or marginalized population groups, and to mitigate the

literate bias of nineteenth-century historiography.
Ranke’s historiography is at times called positivist because of this quest
for historical facts, yet he was not merely a hard-nosed searcher of empirical
facts who abstained from theoretical speculation. His rejection of Hegel’s
teleological vision was not simply based on skepticism concerning abstrac-
tions. ‘Each era stands immediately before God,’ he wrote; ‘its value resides
not in what emerges from it later, but is enclosed in its own existence’.40 And
whereas Hegel’s philosophy of history represents the self-realization of spirit
as a necessary process of development that sacrifices the individual, Ranke
saw what he called ‘the truth of individual consciousness,’ adding: ‘I believe
in Him who was and will be, in the essentially immortal nature of man, in the
Living God and in living man’. His objections against Hegel’s periodization of
world history were thus theological as much as historiographical in character.
Ranke closely resembled Hegel in one other respect. He, too, saw the state
as a particular kind of individual and as the appearance of an originally
divine idea in history rather than as a compromise of opposing forces or
interests, or as founded on a social contract between individuals. In his
view, each individual human being has the duty to be loyal to the state in
which he lives and thus to realize the Idea of the state. Moreover, according
to Ranke, the state can only exist and continue to exist to the extent that
it expresses a spiritual principle, and on closer inspection, this principle
turns out to be that of nationality. Accordingly, for Ranke all historiography
is primarily and necessarily national history. In his view, individual states
are concrete and living individuals that express or realize a nationality
of their own rather than formal abstractions or historical contingencies.
Moreover, like Hegel, he largely restricted himself to the history of Europe.
‘The nations that are characterized by an eternal standstill are a hopeless
starting point for trying to recover the inner movement of universal history,’
he wrote, clearly echoing Hegel, in the preface to his posthumous World
History (1881-1888). Thus, his view of world history was as nationalistic
and as Eurocentric as Hegel’s. It does not simply rest on the positivist aim
of recovering objective facts and omitting interpretations but was equally
shaped by an ultimately religious view of life, formulated in the idealistic
philosophical terms of nations, Ideas and ideals, and popular spirit, which
– despite Ranke’s criticisms – owe much to Hegel’s idealism.

40 Leopold von Ranke, ‘On Progress in History,’ in Iggers & Von Moltke (eds.), The Theory and
Practice of History, p. 53.
172  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

6.3b Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps the most radical nineteenth-century critic of the scientific pre-

tensions of both philology and academic historiography was formulated
by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Initially, Nietzsche was poised for a
glorious career as a classical philologist. In 1870, he became professor in
Basel, and in 1872, he published The Birth of Tragedy, a brilliant study that
contradicted the image – dominant since Winckelmann and Goethe – of
ancient Greece as all light, joy, reason, and optimism. According to Nietzsche,
the early Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles are characterized
by irrationalism and by an essential pessimism which sees life as a pool
of misery, but nevertheless fully and unhesitatingly accepts or affirms it.
This tragic view of life, he continued, disappeared in the more rationalist
plays by Euripides and Socrates’ philosophical thinking, both of which he
saw as essentially more optimistic.
Immediately after its appearance, however, Nietzsche’s book became
the target of a savage polemical attack written by the still young philologist
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who castigated Nietzsche not only for
all kinds of smaller and larger factual errors but especially for his replacing
the rigorous critical study of sources, footnotes, and references by purple
prose. In one stroke, this critique ended Nietzsche’s academic career as a
philologist, and accordingly, his later writings were more philosophical in
character, even if they remained inspired in part by philological questions
and methods.
In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1874), Nietzsche turned against
the contemporary prejudice that historical awareness – or, as he calls it,
historical Bildung – was a virtue. For him, an overdose of historical con-
sciousness could be downright damaging to the life of an individual, a people,
or a culture. His was thus an act of resistance by a philosophy of life against
both speculative philosophy of history and philological historiographical
knowledge. Whereas Ranke had rejected Hegel’s philosophical abstractions
in the name of the concrete, living individual, Nietzsche argued that his-
torical knowledge, which he saw as barren academic learning (Gelehrtheit),
could equally harm life, which he believed should be instinctive and free
from history.
Nietzsche also rejected Hegel’s philosophy of history, which he viewed
as ‘the most dangerous development in contemporary German education’.
Hegel, he argued, gave the Germans the idea that they are the necessary
end result of a ‘world process’ of the self-realizing Concept, thus providing
them with a deep respect for the force of history, which was now seen as
Developing New Disciplines 173

sovereign over other spiritual forces like art and religion. Nietzsche fiercely
contested this idol worship of the factual, which in his view merely led to
the affirmation of, and submission to, ‘every existing power, whether it is
government, public opinion, or numerical majority’.
Nietzsche’s contestation of both positivist philological historiography
and speculative philosophy of history was informed by a philosophy that
promotes interpretations over facts. Moreover, it does not grant entities an
original or authentic identity but sees them as acquiring an identity only
as a result of the relations they engage in with others – just as, in a play or
novel, the protagonists acquire an identity through their relations with the
other characters and the events in which they engage. Nietzsche consistently
generalized this belief: for him, the philosophical Subject or individual was
not a given but rather a product of a whole of relations shaped by contingent
events and relations. He even rejected Kant’s ‘thing in itself’ as nonsensical:
‘if I remove all the relationships, all the “properties”, all the “activities” of a
thing, then the thing does not remain over.’41
Against the philological and philosophical forms of historiography he
rejected, Nietzsche placed his own historicizing vision, which he called
*genealogy. He dismissed both ‘monumental’ history, which reveres past
examples of human greatness, and ‘antiquarian’ history, which tries to
recover the factual details of life in the past. He called his own genealogical
historiography ‘critical history’ which, unlike its rivals, stood in the service
of life and also judged – and where necessary condemned – the past. He
presented his own genealogy as an unmasking of past claims to greatness.
High moral values, he argued, originated in a lowly instinctive drive, which
he called the *will to power. In various works, he argued that humans (and,
possibly, other living creatures) are driven by such a will to power rather
than, for example, an instinct to survive. One example of this will is the
resentment – that is, the imaginary or fantasized revenge of those without
power against their rulers – which he claimed stands at the origin of Christi-
anity. Controversially, he argued that Christianity – the religion proclaiming
that virtue would be rewarded and evil punished in the hereafter – arose
from a ‘slave morality’, which he saw as characterized by resentment.
Nietzsche was too capricious a thinker to want to develop a systematic
historical or philosophical methodology. To the extent that his genealogy
amounted to a coherent view, however, it was non-dialectical and non-teleolog-
ical (in a reaction against Hegel). Moreover, Nietzsche proclaimed a philosophy
of life that dismissed historical knowledge as barren factual learning and as

41 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power. W. Kaufmann (tr.) (New York 1967), p. 302.
174  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

a threat to life (in a reaction against Ranke). He refused to see the course of
history as either divinely guided or rationally progressing towards freedom or
self-realization. His view thus went against organicist models of development,
which presume that later manifestations of phenomena are already enclosed
or implied in origins. Nietzsche’s influence has been tremendous and perhaps
even stronger in the arts and literature than in the humanities. Postwar French
thinkers such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault were subsequently to develop
Nietzsche’s genealogy into a more emphatically anti-dialectical method of
philosophical and historical analysis (see chapters 10 and 11).

6.4 The Emergence of Sociology and Its Rivalry with the

Humanities

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the foundations for a new sci-
ence of society were laid in Europe and in the United States. Alongside its
precursor Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who coined the term *sociology for
the scientific study of society, its most important champions in Europe
were the Frenchman Émile Durkheim and the German Max Weber (see
paragraphs 7.4 and 9.2). In the United States, the first steps towards the
institutionalization of sociology were taken with the establishment of the
first department of sociology at the University of Chicago in 1892 and the
first professional journal in 1895. This new science, however, entered an arena
that had already been claimed in part by the humanities, which extended a
skeptical welcome to the sociologists. Many humanities scholars were not
impressed by the discoveries and insights the sociologists claimed to offer.
Skeptics emerged not only in the already established humanities but also in
the literary world. Witness, for example, Graham Greene’s way of introduc-
ing a character in Getting to Know the General: ‘She seemed at that first
meeting a little pretentious and a would-be intellectual – she was studying
sociology in the States, a subject which thrives on banalities and abstract
jargon.’ Thus, the present-day mistrust regarding the use of social-scientific
theory in the humanities and historians’ opposition to the influence of the
social sciences stand in a long tradition. In France, commentators observed
that, with sociology, the language of the factory entered the universities.
In Germany, Thomas Mann wrote about what sociologists considered to
be their territory: ‘the social is morally a very dubious field; one observes
an odor of stables there’. 42 Conversely, sociologists often behaved in the

42 Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin, 1918), p. 252.

Developing New Disciplines 175

same manner as colonists did towards the natives they encountered upon
arriving on a continent that was new and alien to them. At times they saw
people working in literature and the humanities as a kind of savage: overly
sensitive, alien, and unable to keep pace with modernity.
To an important extent, the conflict between literary authors and hu-
manities scholars on the one hand and sociologists on the other primarily
concerned the question of who was to formulate the principles of education
and morality in modern industrial societies. The German humanities had
already claimed to be both the guardian of national culture and the road to
Bildung. Modern industrial society and urbanization, however, introduced
new problems which at the time were interpreted by German sociologists
such as Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies as the loss of traditional Gemeinschaft
and its replacement by a more anonymous and threatening Gesellschaft,
and as a loss of moral standards, or anomie, by the Frenchman Durkheim.
Sociologists claimed to have the answers to these new problems by providing
a novel perspective on societal and political issues.
The opposition to sociology increased as the discipline became more
solidly entrenched institutionally. For example, Durkheim was opposed
by Charles Péguy, who was not only a book trader, historian, and author
but also the publisher of the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, in which he wrote:
‘sociologists believe that one has only to become a sociologist in order to
understand society – as if it were sufficient to don a uniform in order to
be brave’. In France, this conflict only abated when anti-sociologists and
their opponents ended up in the same camp during the so-called Dreyfus
Affair. Meanwhile, sociology began to establish itself at the Sorbonne, but
even there, its position remained precarious. It is telling that today we can
find statues of the literary author Victor Hugo and the natural scientist
Louis Pasteur in the court of honour inside the university, while the statue
of Auguste Comte stands in front of it, at the Place de la Sorbonne.
In Germany, the lines were less clearly drawn. Max Weber (see § 8.4)
found himself confronted by the circle of intellectuals around the poet Stefan
George. As we will see, however, German sociology was firmly rooted in the
tradition of the humanities that it shared with some of its critics. Hence, the
battlelines were rather more erratic here than on the other side of the Rhine.
In England, where the institutionalization of sociology within the university
stagnated for a long time, the conflict with the humanities disciplines
remained largely below the surface. In the Fabian Society, sociologists
including the couple Sidney and Beatrice Webb encountered authors such
as Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, whose utopian novels they welcomed
as forms of sociological speculation. Here, too, however, we find explicit
176  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

skepticism concerning the achievements of sociologists. In Wells’ novels,

for example, it is chemists and engineers rather than officials educated in
the social sciences who call the shots.
The rivalry between sociology and the world of literature and the hu-
manities that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century cannot be
reduced to an opposition between rationalists and romantics, for ‘rationality’
was a problem both for sociologists and for its opponents. In Thomas Mann’s
works including Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice, we encounter in a literary
form the same phenomenon that Max Weber characterized as rationalization
and the ‘Protestant ethic’ (see paragraph 7.5 below). The similarities were
so close that Mann was even forced to state explicitly that he had written
Buddenbrooks before he had come to know the sociological works of Weber,
Werner Sombart, and Ernst Troeltsch. In England, the arguments given
by Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis for introducing English and literary
criticism as university disciplines could just as easily have been used by
sociologists in order to advance their own discipline. Thus, sociologists and
men of letters were separated not so much by a different appreciation of
rationality but rather by something both on a more abstract epistemological
plane and on a more concrete political level.
Especially in France, sociologists claimed they had the means to chart
societies and thus were able to give well-founded judgments concerning the
political problems of their age. When they used the term ‘society’, they had
in mind a functionally ordered whole of social facts, or a social system with a
structure of its own that cannot be identified with a particular state or nation
and that can be only accessed by scientific means. This epistemological claim
immediately led to a political conclusion, for only a sociologically trained
elite, it implied, could properly interpret societal problems. Obviously,
scholars in the humanities and literary authors perceived this conclusion
as a threat and accordingly contested it. In doing so, they also contested
sociology’s epistemological status. In the absence of evident successes,
they argued, the sociologists’ claims that their scientific methods enabled
them to note social facts hitherto ignored by others were not convincing.
Moreover, sociology was politically suspect: anyone failing to state his loyalty
to a particular nation and who spoke about ‘society’ outside of a particular
national context was readily suspected of treason, especially in the runup to
the First World War. Thus, Durkheim was forced to defend himself against
the reproach that his methods betrayed a German background, patiently
explaining that sociology was French in origin.
German sociology, which took the separation of state and society as
axiomatic, ran into similarly political objections. Against the ethos of a
Developing New Disciplines 177

science that strives for a form of knowledge shared by an international

community of researchers, Stefan George opposed the aristocracy of the
solitary man who knows better: ‘a knowledge that is equal for everybody
is deceit,’ he wrote. The ideal of value-free science (cf. § 7.5) only betrays
liberal politics, he objected. The ‘free-floating intellectual’ praised as a
political and cultural mediator by sociologist Karl Mannheim was labelled
a nihilist by the latter’s opponents. Instead of presenting a solution to the
problems of European society, sociology was seen by its opponents as part
of the problem.
The changes occurring in the German intellectual landscape from the end
of the eighteenth century, which provided fertile ground for the development
of both the humanities and the social sciences, can be depicted by tracing
the new meanings given to the term *culture. This term stems from the Latin
cultura, which originally referred to the improvement or enrichment of
agricultural crops. This original meaning can still be found in concepts such
as ‘cultivation’ and ‘bacterial cultures’. In the second half of the eighteenth
century, however, the term acquired a different meaning – that of spiritual
improvement. Thus, the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786)
wrote in 1784:

The terms Enlightenment, culture and Bildung are novel arrivals in our
language. They only form part of written language. The great mass hardly
understands them. 43

At that moment in time, these three terms could hardly be distinguished

from each other. Soon, however, Kultur and Bildung in German become the
opposites of Enlightenment (Aufklärung) and Civilization (the latter is not
mentioned by Mendelssohn). Gradually, Kultur and Bildung became more
highly valued than the other two and increasingly became a weapon in the
ideological battle of the German bourgeois intelligentsia trying to distinguish
themselves from the Francophone Prussian court. Against French civilisation,
which was associated with outward pomp, ceremony, and superficiality,
the German term Kultur appeared to express deeper or higher values and
to refer to the world of study, books, and personal development. Until deep
into the twentieth century, the opposition between culture and civilization
was to retain a political dimension. Thus, Thomas Mann wrote in his 1918

43 Moses Mendelssohn, ‘Ueber die Frage: Was heisst aufklären?’ Berlinische Monatsschrift 4
(September 1784).
178  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Reflections of an Unpolitical Man: ‘Germanness is culture, soul, freedom and

art; and not civilization, society, literature or the right to vote’. 44
In short, just like the humanities, the modern social sciences emerged
from a combination of conceptual innovation, societal needs, and the dynam-
ics created by institutional change at the universities. The humanities are
more closely linked to the nationalist Counter-Enlightenment and have a
reputation for being politically more conservative, while the social sciences
generally embrace Enlightenment universalism and are generally secularist
and politically progressive. To some extent, these characteristics solidified
when the humanities and social sciences became more firmly established
and institutionalized. As we shall see, this is most dramatically apparent
from the history of the German branches of these sciences.

Summary

− Hegel developed an influential view of history as a dialectical and

necessary or lawlike process of the development of spirit in the direction
of freedom. Hegel’s view is an example of a philosophy of consciousness.
Moreover, it is emphatically teleological and Eurocentric.
− Modern philology, or historicizing textual criticism, constitutes the
basis for historical comparative linguistics and academic historiography,
among other disciplines. It is based on the critical historicizing study
of textual sources. It aims to reconstruct original texts or languages,
which are seen as the purest and most authentic forms of the objects
under investigation.
− Ranke tried to create a scientific historiography and rejected Hegel’s
teleological views. His own views, however, were still based in part on
philosophical and theological considerations.
− Nietzsche rejected the idea that historical awareness was a virtue.
His own genealogical view unmasked Christian morality in terms of
resentment and a will to power.
− From an early stage, a rivalry developed between sociology and the
modern humanities. Both deal with similar and overlapping social,
cultural, moral, and political problems of the modern world.

44 Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin, 1918), p. XXXIII.

7 Between Hermeneutics and the Natural
Sciences: In Search of a Method

7.1 Introduction

In the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the
humanities were continuously concerned with justifying their newly autono-
mous position with respect both to the natural sciences and to the social
sciences. Institutionally, they tried to prove that they did indeed belong in
a separate faculty, and philosophically, they struggled primarily with their
Kantian heritage. As seen above, the latter’s subject-object scheme made
it difficult if not impossible to know man as a subject in the same way as
the objects of the physical and living natural world. Although humanities
scholars greatly respected the natural sciences, many of them increasingly
felt that these disciplines were not able to grasp what is essential to man.
It is against this background that the *hermeneutic, or interpretative,
humanities arose. Whereas the natural sciences try to observe and explain
external phenomena, the modern humanities look at phenomena as the
expression of inner meanings and values. The hermeneutic tradition,
however, has a completely different view of meaning and interpretation
than the logical empiricists discussed in chapter 2. Moreover, there was
little if any consensus even within this tradition as to exactly how the
natural sciences and human sciences differ and what they have in common.
Another influential philosophical current of this period is neo-Kantianism,
which phrases the distinction between the human sciences and the natural
sciences as either involving different forms of concept formation or in terms
of different symbol functions. The famous and controversial new science
of psychoanalysis elaborates an uneasy compromise between interpreta-
tion and natural scientific observation. All of these approaches share a
background in Kantian thought, which dominated nineteenth and early
twentieth-century German philosophy and as such also informed various
other disciplines.
Interpretation is one of the most common everyday human activities,
but at the same time also one of the most enigmatic. We regularly ask
ourselves ‘what something means’, ‘what somebody means by that’, and
the like, not only of linguistic utterances but also of various other kinds
of action. Moreover, we not only refer to the meaning of actions but also
the meaning of cultural products, such as artworks and artefacts, or the
180  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

meaning of particular elements in them, such as a figure of speech, a term, an

ornament, or a phrase. But exactly what does it mean to ‘mean something’?
How do we actually ascertain meanings? What should one do in order to
interpret linguistic utterances, works of art, cultural customs, or artefacts?
And in what ways can we distinguish good and inadequate interpretations?
Let us first discuss some examples of interpretation in order to get a
better idea of what it might consist of. In our everyday lives, the enormous
variety of the uses of the term ‘meaning’ is immediately apparent. We say
that the accumulation of dark grey clouds ‘means’ that it will probably
start raining; we say that a red traffic sign with a horizontal white stripe
means ‘forbidden to enter’; we say that hora est means ‘it is time’ but also,
when uttered by a beadle, that the defense of a PhD dissertation in the
Netherlands has come to an end.
Whoever understands all of this immediately understands the signs of
the weather, knows the traffic rules, has a command of elementary Latin,
and is aware of an academic custom. In other cases, however, we will have
to make an effort to ascertain a meaning, as happens when we want to know
the meaning of an ancient work of art, for example, or the customs in an
alien culture. We can ask ourselves what the meaning is of an allegorical
image we encounter in a Renaissance painting or what the meaning of the
titular character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot is. Likewise, we
can ask ourselves what the meaning of the kula is, a complex system of
commerce in Trobriand Island culture.
At first sight, ‘interpretation’ would appear to be the exclusive property
of the humanities and the social sciences. Yet this impression is misleading.
As was made clear by Duhem, Popper, Quine, and Kuhn, we encounter
interpretation in the natural sciences as well, since empirical data are
meaningful only in the light of a theory. And, as seen in Kuhn, a dispute
about the meanings of central terms is even characteristic of periods of
so-called revolutionary science.
When we restrict our attention to the interpretation of linguistic and
literary utterances, we might be tempted to think that it consists of recover-
ing the thoughts or intentions that the speaker had in mind in uttering
those words. For example, if we want to know what the meaning is of T.S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land – on first reading a rather obscure poem – then we
should try to recover the author’s intention. To put it in more everyday terms
in the form of a question: ‘What did the author mean to say?’ However, if
we could still ask the author, he would probably answer: ‘Read my poem
once again; I cannot express what I wanted to say more precisely than I
did there.’
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 181

For works composed or written in our own time and language, the
idea that interpretation primarily concerns the discovery of the author’s
intentions may still seem plausible, but in the case of a Greek tragedy or a
Japanese Nô play, we need to do much more. Texts from remote places or
periods presuppose various things as self-evident which to us may appear
obscure, false, or nonsensical. In order to understand such texts, it is essential
to retrieve their cultural background. In such cases, ‘interpreting’ also
implies getting to know these backgrounds, without which the art form
involved cannot be adequately understood. In explicating and making
understandable such a background, the author’s intentions (in so far as
there is any one person at the origin of this text) play at best a moderate
role and, in many cases, none at all.
The theory of the process of interpretation – including recovering and
explicating the background of contexts that may make a text or work of art
easier to understand – is called *hermeneutics. It discusses what humans do
in the process of understanding or interpreting and what enables them to
do so. Thus, it studies man as a knowing, interpreting, and meaning-giving
subject rather than as an object of empirical investigation. This is the main
difference between hermeneutics on the one hand and *semantics and
*pragmatics, which are linguistic subdisciplines, on the other. The latter
two also deal with ‘interpretation’ and ‘understanding’ but assume that
the associated epistemological questions are answered in empiricist terms
and therefore make an empirical and deductive study of the process of
interpretation. Hermeneutics, by contrast, because of its German idealist
framework, is strictly distinguished both from linguistics and from empirical
cognitive psychology.
The hermeneutic tradition originated in the early nineteenth century,
when the first explicit views on the interpretative process were formulated.
Foucault’s archaeological perspective makes it understandable why it took
so long for philosophers to start to look at this problem. In the classical
épistémè, representation and meaning did not form philosophical problems,
as representation was seen as the represented in the sign itself. This began
to change around 1800 (see § 5.1). Thereafter, signs were no longer seen as
transparent representations of the order of things but as primarily expressing
a local and historically variable spirit. Because of this historicity, signs lost
their representative transparency, as a result of which the search for their
correct interpretation became a demanding task, which, moreover, required
historical consciousness.
Initially, nineteenth-century hermeneutics was generally concerned with
the interpretation – usually indicated with the German term *Verstehen – of
182  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

independent products of spirit such as literature and art, which are usually
seen as possessing uniquely artistic features or qualities. If one can speak
of laws in this domain, these are not psychological regularities describing
the workings of the mind but aesthetic principles representing the artwork
as unique and the artist as a creative genius.

7.2 From Biblical Exegesis to General Method: Friedrich

Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey

In the course of the nineteenth century, hermeneutics gradually developed

from a doctrine of verstehen into a method specific to the humanities.
Two of the protagonists in this process were Friedrich Schleiermacher
and Wilhelm Dilthey, both of whom clearly stand in the German idealist
tradition sketched above in § 5.2.

7.2a Schleiermacher and Hermeneutics

The term hermeneutics, in the sense of a general doctrine of exegesis – or

explication – and interpretation, was coined by Friedrich Schleiermacher
(1768-1834), a professor of theology at the newly opened University of Berlin
and thus a close colleague of Hegel’s. Obviously, questions of understanding
and interpreting had long been held to be important in areas such as biblical
exegesis and classical philology, but Schleiermacher was the first to develop
a general theory of interpretation. He aimed to transform theology into a
serious and rigorous science. In his view, this required a strictly historicizing
approach to the texts under scrutiny. In order to gain an adequate and
scientific understanding of texts, he believed that we must locate them
within the context of their times.
Prior to Schleiermacher, texts had generally been seen as expressions of
an unchanging human nature, for example in the long tradition of historical
Biblical criticism represented by such scholars as Hugo Grotius and Baruch
Spinoza. Just like Renaissance humanism, this tradition was historicizing in
so far as it strove to free the original texts from later additions and interpreta-
tions. But, in line with the classical épistémè, it left no room for the belief
that human thought might change so radically in the course of history as to
render the interpreting of texts from the past a non-trivial task. Hence, it did
not see any major obstacles to interpreting the Bible, for example, or classical
Roman juridical texts. At the start of the nineteenth century, however, this
began to change when a belief in the historicity of human consciousness
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 183

gained currency. As a result, ‘interpreting’ became an undertaking whose

success was not guaranteed beforehand, and hermeneutics emerged as a
scientific thematic. Together with the notion of a historically determined
and mutable spirit, the idea arose that a gap could exist between the spirit
of the past and that of the present, and that this gap had to be bridged with
the aid of hermeneutics.
The aim of this general hermeneutics, according to Schleiermacher, is
first and foremost to reconstruct or reproduce the author’s original thinking.
Schleiermacher acknowledged that the meaning of a text does not only
depend on its author’s intentions, and therefore he designed a systematic
method of interpretation that also paid attention to the structure of a text
and its relation to other texts. Alongside Biblical texts, he used primarily
the writings of ancient pagan philosophers to illustrate his views.
Schleiermacher distinguished the psychological understanding of a text
from its grammatical interpretation. While a psychological understanding
attempts to retrieve the text’s inner form or the author’s intentions, Schleier-
macher’s grammatical understanding tries to determine the exterior form,
that is, the exact linguistic structure and correct reading of the original text,
by studying the variants of and writing errors in surviving manuscripts.
He argued that the structure of a text and its relations to other texts are,
to an important extent, independent of the author’s individual intentions
and follow their own principles and laws. In other words, the text has an
order of its own, which should not be sought inside the author’s head. The
exegete or hermeneutician retrieves this order by determining the structure
and context of a text. Hence, understanding not only involves reliving the
thoughts and aims of the author but should also employ a rigorous (and,
if one likes, ‘objective’) historical method that aims to recover structural
features of both texts and contexts.
A key element of this method is what Schleiermacher called the *herme-
neutic circle. A work as a whole can only be understood on the basis of the
interpretation of its individual elements, but conversely, the interpreting of
an individual line of verse or paragraph also requires a holistic understanding
of the work as a whole and of the cultural and societal circumstances in
which the work was written. This process is circular in that, according to
Schleiermacher, there is no way of breaking out of this circle: one cannot
start with the elements without any idea of the sense and aim of the whole,
and vice versa. Nonetheless, we can steadily improve our knowledge of both
the whole and the parts in a process of continuous mutual refinement and
elaboration. Thus, the circularity involved is not vicious but instead forms a
kind of upward spiral. Moreover, this process of interpretation is in principle
184  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

infinite, since one can never say that the interpretation of a text has been
definitively concluded.
Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics is inextricably linked with Romanticism
in the arts and in particular with the Romantic notion of the *genius that
unconsciously and without any rational control creates Great Works. Thus,
the hermeneutic method enables the philologist to acquire a knowledge of
the work that its maker did not himself possess. The interpreter consciously
repeats the creative process that the creative genius has completed uncon-
sciously. The aim of interpretation is therefore to ‘understand a text better
than the author himself’, as Schleiermacher put it.

7.2b Dilthey and the Humanities

Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics was systematically elaborated upon by

Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), the first great methodologist of the humanities.
According to Dilthey, the hermeneutic or interpretative method is what
principally distinguishes the humanities from the natural sciences, as the
latter follow an empirical or observational method. In doing so, Dilthey
was reacting in part to the institutional changes that had occurred in the
course of the nineteenth century at German universities. In the second
half of that century, the natural sciences had left the philosophy faculty
and had established itself in a new faculty. With this split, the need arose
to distinguish whatever remained in the old faculty of philosophy (or was
unified in a new faculty of the humanities) from the natural sciences. That
is, Dilthey developed his ideas about the methodological difference between
the natural sciences and the humanities only after this distinction had
already been institutionally established.
Philosophically, Dilthey was in effect responding to the empiricist belief,
linked to the natural sciences, that scientific knowledge can only be based
on sense perception. The problem with this, he wrote, is that we approach
humans in a different way than lifeless things. We do not merely observe
humans’ behaviour but also try to identify, or empathize, with their thoughts
and motives. In other words, we not only observe external actions but always
experience these also in terms of their inner drives. This process is made
explicit in the method of verstehen and is what distinguishes the humanities
from the natural sciences. Hence, according to Dilthey, the humanities do
not strictly have a different object of study than natural sciences but rather
distinguish themselves by their interpretative method.
Thus, according to Dilthey, verstehen involves the unearthing of inner
drives and motives by means of their exterior, observable expression in
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 185

language, art, or action. For him, interpretation is thus a kind of experiencing

in the sense of reliving (erleben), that is, of reconstructing a text and the
situation in which it was written. As such, Dilthey’s method is closely linked
to a more general ‘philosophy of life’ that sees man as a vital and organic
whole driven by a vital force that cannot be explained in natural-scientific
terms. Around 1900, this philosophy of life was quite popular, in part inspired
by Nietzsche’s writings.
Dilthey saw philosophy of life as a kind of synthesis of positivism and
German idealism. While he strove for a strictly scientific formulation of
the humanities, he also saw man as much more than a knowing being.
A science of spirit, he argued, should not turn man into an abstract and
disembodied Kantian knowing subject but should instead explore him in
the concreteness and historical determinacy of his will, experience, and
imagination. In short, the humanities should take as their object of study
human life as a whole and arrange their methods accordingly. According to
Dilthey, life is historical by definition and hence the process of verstehen itself
is constrained by the historicity of the interpreting subject. Man, however,
may try to escape these historical constraints precisely by studying other
persons and eras, thereby acquiring a measure of ‘objective’ knowledge. By
developing historical consciousness, man can thus escape his own historicity.
For Dilthey, the notion of experiencing as reliving takes over the fun-
damental role of knowledge and reason. Thus, he presented his work as a
‘critique of historical reason’, which proceeds from Kant’s ahistorical critique
of pure reason. Contrary to Kant, it sees human reason not as timeless
and universal but as historically determined and changing. Moreover, he
criticized Kant’s epistemological view of human reason as one-sided:

Apart from a few beginnings (which were not scientifically developed)

like those of Herder and Wilhelm von Humboldt, epistemology (that
of the empiricists and of Kant) has, up till now, explained experience
(Erfahrung) and cognition merely from the facts of apprehension [i.e.,
in purely epistemological terms]. No real blood flows in the veins of
the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant; it is only
the diluted juice of reason, a mere process of thought … However, my
historical and psychological studies of man as a whole led me to explain
cognition and its concepts in terms of man in the plurality of his powers,
as a willing, feeling, and imagining being. 45

45 Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Gesammelte Schriften, Band I (Stuttgart/

Göttingen, 1973 [1910]), p. XVIII.
186  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Although he saw meaning as a purely individual mental notion, the later

Dilthey advocated an unambiguously *anti-psychologistic approach, reacting
against Schleiermacher’s view of interpretation as unveiling and explicating
the genius’s unconscious inner states. Accordingly, Dilthey placed more
emphasis on the exterior side of an artwork than his predecessor.
Historical-comparative linguistics, the dominant linguistic theory of
the nineteenth century, is based on philological rather than hermeneutic
methods and hence takes an ambivalent position within Dilthey’s division of
the branches of science. In its attempt to reconstruct *Proto-Indo-European
from later languages, it sees language as the expression of a historically
variable popular spirit. This aspect turns linguistics into a prototypically
historicizing humanities discipline. Toward the end of the nineteenth
century, however, the so-called Neogrammarians or *Jung­grammatiker, a
group of German linguists, spread the belief that historical language change
is a strictly lawlike and exceptionless process among linguists (cf. § 6.2).
Henceforth, the historical development of language was formulated in
terms of ‘sound laws’, and linguistics could present itself with considerable
justification as a kind of natural science. It could boast of a number of real
and solid results, and it allowed for a meaningful discussion concerning
the question of whether a given sound law or historical reconstruction was
correct. This model, however, left little if any room for an interpretative
method, since sound laws are completely isolated from, or inaccessible to, the
consciousness of the speakers of a language. To put it briefly and somewhat
paradoxically: with its historicizing view of language as an expression of
spirit, Neogrammarian historical-comparative linguistics is a prototypical
humanities discipline, but simultaneously, given its emphasis on universal
laws, it is closer to the natural sciences.

7.3 Psychoanalysis between Hermeneutics and Natural

Science

The most famous and controversial attempt to uncover the secrets of the
human soul or spirit with the aid of methods different from those of the
natural sciences, however, was not a discipline of linguistics, or history,
but psychoanalysis, as originally developed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).
Freud was even more ambivalent than the Neogrammarians concerning
the scientific status of his theories. On the one hand, he saw psychoanalysis
as a natural-scientific ‘biology of the mind’, in part as a result of his own
medical and physiological training. On the other hand, he also clearly
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 187

Sigmund Freud

saw it as a hermeneutic undertaking in as far as it crucially involves the

interpretation of the patient’s words and associations. The friction between
these two aspects in part explains why psychoanalysis’s status as a science
remains controversial.
Initially, Freud’s work concerned clinical psychiatry. Having grown up in
fin-de-siècle Vienna, a culturally flourishing but sexually repressive society,
Freud developed the idea that bodily afflictions such as hysteria and neurosis
may have a psychological cause rather than a physiological one and thus
could not be cured with the aid of physical or physiological means such
as surgery or medication. Instead, he proposed a so-called ‘talking cure’
(Redekur) in which patients, prototypically lying on a sofa in a semi-dark
environment without being able to see their therapist, are encouraged to
associate freely and without any obstructions with words that preoccupy
them. Freud argued that such associations constitute signs of the patient’s
hidden memories and repressed earlier experiences.
188  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Thanks to his clinical experience treating psychiatric patients, Freud

arrived at the revolutionary notion of the *unconscious, that is, the hidden
drive of much of our actions. The unconscious cannot itself be observed, he
claimed, but its workings and effects appear in all kinds of human behav-
iour, from jokes and slips of the tongue to obsessively repeated actions and
neurotic habits. Freud’s first and possibly most famous idea was that our
dreams are among the most important indications for the functioning of the
unconscious, as they show us our unfulfilled desires. The most important of
these unconscious desires are sexual in character. He notoriously claimed
that even children have such sexual desires and that a proper insight into
the development of the child’s drives and the ways this development can
go wrong may help us in understanding and curing the neuroses of adults.
The notion of infantile sexuality was revolutionary and highly contro-
versial among Freud’s contemporaries. Psychic afflictions such as neuroses
do not have a physiological cause, Freud wrote, but result from errors in
the learning process that children pass through in the development of their
libidinal life. Freud distinguished different stages in this development,
proceeding from the assumption that sexual drives have no natural or
‘normal’ object but result from a complex developmental process involving
various stages (the oral, anal, phallic, oedipal, and latency phase) during
which all kinds of things can go wrong. From this perspective, neuroses were
pathological forms of developmental stages which in themselves are normal
phases of psychic growth, and they amount to a fixation on, or regression/
return to, one particular stage. They then lead to oral or anal fixations, for
example, which repeat unconscious and repressed experiences from that
phase. Psychotherapy may help the patient to ‘retrieve’ such experiences
through chains of associations and thus to transform them into conscious
memories.
Freud presents many of his ideas on the basis of so-called case studies,
that is, detailed narratives of the treatment of individual patients. One of the
most famous of these describes little Hans, a five-year-old boy with a phobia
for horses. Freud manages to reduce this phobia to an unconscious hatred
for and fear of his father, who is seen by Hans as a rival in the quest for the
love of his mother. This is the famous – or infamous – *Oedipus complex. In
later writings, Freud developed a more dynamic view of the different parts
and aspects of the human soul, in particular by distinguishing between
the *id, the *ego, and the *superego. The id comprises the unconscious,
biologically determined and ultimately irrational drives; the ego functions
in a generally realistic, rational, and conscious manner but can nonetheless
also be involved in the subconscious repression of the id’s drives. The relation
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 189

between these two aspects or parts is dynamic: a newborn infant is primarily

id but develops an ego when and because it becomes conscious of a world
outside of itself. The superego, meanwhile, is an internalization of parental
authority that suppresses or punishes the child’s oedipal drives, for example,
and thus functions as a kind of conscience for the ego.
This view that morality and conscience were based on the internaliza-
tion of the repression of oedipal and other drives also dominated Freud’s
views on culture and religion. All human culture and civilization, he wrote
in The Future of an Illusion (1927) – that is, everything that distinguishes
human existence from animal life – rests on the *repression of biologically
determined drives or on the postponed gratification of desires and thus
serves to protect humans against the forces of nature. According to him,
religious representations – such as the belief in a singular and omnipotent
God characteristic of Christian culture – also have such functions. The
Jewish and Christian God is clearly a stern father figure. Freud saw these
religions as illusions, that is, as unprovable convictions that project the idea
of a protecting and punishing father onto a supreme being. Although Freud
emphasized his respect for believers and for all the good that religions have
brought historically, he also claimed that religions display similarities to
neuroses in that they maintain childlike views and behavioural patterns
concerning punishment, reward, and responsibility in adult humans. In
his view, religions were therefore not merely illusions but positively harm-
ful illusions to the extent that they block a mature and healthy feeling of
responsibility and rational knowledge of the world.
Just like his contemporaries Weber and Durkheim, Freud was convinced
that scientific knowledge was in the process of pushing aside religion,
and that this development was mostly positive. He, too, was a convinced
*secularist. With his preference for empirical science over religious convic-
tion, Freud thus stemmed from the Enlightenment tradition, which sees
(scientific) reason as the best source of societal and moral authority, given
that it submits to rational criticism. More specifically, he adhered to the
Kantian belief that man is liberated by reason. This is ironic, given his own
unmasking of man as largely shaped by unconscious and irrational drives,
taking reason not as a transcendental given but as an achievement acquired
through arduous struggle. Yet reason marked a victory over these biologically
determined drives. Moreover, for Freud, achieving a conscious memory of
and rational insight into repressed past experiences were fundamental to a
cure, and thus reason also had a liberating capacity. Finally, Freud appears
to have shared the Kantian belief that reason, as embodied in scientific
knowledge, is universal and unchanging.
190  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

There have been more debates about the scientific status of psychoanalysis
than about any other framework discussed in this book, with the possible
exception of Marxism. Practical or clinical questions soon arose as to
whether Freudian psychotherapy was effective as a psychiatric treatment of
mental illness. In later decades, methodological doubts were added to these
criticisms. These doubts were strengthened by psychoanalysis’ ambivalent
position between hard clinical science and the interpretative humanities.
As mentioned above (see § 3.3a), Popper and his followers considered the
psychoanalytical way of dealing with observation statements a textbook
example of how not to do science. According to Popper, explaining away
seemingly falsifying observations on the basis of earlier clinical experi-
ence, as he claimed to have seen the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler do, is a
prototypical ‘conventionalist stratagem’ that immunizes theories against
refutation. If this criticism holds, psychoanalysis is unfalsifiable and hence,
in Popper’s terms, a pseudo-science.
Furthermore, objections have been raised against the central psychoana-
lytic notions of repression and the unconscious. In part, these may simply
be seen as theoretical terms that help us to order, explain, or summarize
observations. But the question remains whether theories that so clearly
appeal to concepts interpreting irrational and contradictory impulses or
drives still exclude any possible observation, as Popper required of testable
theories. Moreover, diametrically opposed forms of behaviour may be
explained or predicted from one and the same theory. Undoubtedly, Freud
himself would have strongly objected to such criticisms, arguing that he
had spent his entire career refining and reviewing his theories and concepts
in the light of clinical observations or as the result of criticism by other
psychiatrists. Despite these and other objections, Freudian psychoanalysis
has remained popular among practicing psychiatrists but also among people
working in the humanities and the public at large. In the words of Rorty
(see § 11.3b), Freud told us a new and appealing story about ourselves that
has left clear traces in science, art, and in everyday life.
In the humanities, Freudian concepts can be, and have been, used in
different ways. We may attempt to explain the motives of artists in psycho-
analytic terms, as Freud himself did with Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky, and
others, but we may also try to interpret the actions and statements of the
characters in a movie or novel or the figures in a painting with the aid of
Freudian concepts. Moreover, psychoanalytical ideas have penetrated not
only the work of many people working in the humanities – ranging from
the classical philologist E.R. Dodds and the historian Peter Gay to literary
theorists including Shoshana Felman and cultural critics such as Slavoj
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 191

Žižek – but also many cultural products that are studied in the humanities,
from the novels of Italo Svevo and D.H. Lawrence to the movies of Woody
Allen and TV shows like The Sopranos.

7.4 Neo-Kantianism: Heinrich Rickert and Ernst Cassirer

Even more than Dilthey, Nietzsche, and other philosophers of life, it is the
so-called *neo-Kantians who dominated late nineteenth-century German
academic philosophy. They extended Kant’s epistemology to the analysis
of what we call ‘culture’ or ‘tradition’: the complex whole of beliefs, norms,
values, and unconscious ways of behaving that appear so self-evident – to
those who hold them – that they need no explanation or justification. Taking
Kant’s idea that the subject is the transcendental foundation of knowledge,
neo-Kantians argue along the lines of Dilthey that human consciousness
is historically determined rather than timeless and universal, and thus
that it may change character across periods and cultures. However, in
contrast to Dilthey, they focus less on life and more on culture, and less on
interpretation and more on concept formation. Although neo-Kantianism
has largely disappeared as a philosophical current since the 1930s, its ideas
live on in various other disciplines.

7.4a Rickert

Heinrich Rickert (1863-1936) may be seen as Dilthey’s great rival in attempting

to provide a general theoretical foundation for the humanities. He considered
the latter’s notions of spirit, life, and experience too metaphysical and
unscientific and his notion of understanding too subjective and psychologist
to serve as methodological foundations for any scientific discipline. Hence,
whereas Dilthey still considered life as a natural if inner notion, Rickert
emphasized that culture is man’s essential feature. Distinguishing his views
from those of Dilthey, Rickert talked about the *cultural sciences (Kulturwis-
senschaften) rather than the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften). According
to him, these culturalsciences are characterized not by a distinct object (the
inner, mental, or spiritual) or by a distinct method (that of understanding)
but by a particular kind of *concept formation that is essentially different
from that of the natural sciences. Unlike the concept of culture (taken as
a complex whole of historically determined norms, values, and customs),
Dilthey’s notion of life as a natural or biological concept does not imply a
methodologically distinct field of scientific knowledge.
192  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

We might also say that, unlike life, culture by definition involves meanings
and values. All culture, Rickert argued, arises from human actions, and as
such, it is oriented towards meanings and values rather than towards the
physical aspects or consequences of those actions. Values are not objects that
exist and hence cannot be observed; rather, they have validity. According to
Rickert, there is only one empirical reality, but this reality may be understood
from several different perspectives. Our finite human intelligence can
only grasp the infinite variety of what can be observed by strictly selecting
from among our observations, that is, by forming concepts from particular
perspectives. Rickert argued that there are two fundamentally distinct
ways of concept formation: ‘the world becomes nature when we study it
with an eye for the general; it becomes history when we observe it with our
eye on the particular and individual’. That is, when we observe an object
as natural, we do not associate it with any meaning or value; but when we
observe it as a product of culture, we see it as value-laden by definition. If
we try to imagine an artefact or cultural product such as a painting or a
musical composition without such values, it loses everything that makes
it into something cultural, it becomes a purely physical – and literally
worthless – natural object:

The distinctive central material of historical science, that is, meaningful

cultural life, is historically represented in such a way that the values that
endow it with meaning simultaneously yield the governing principles of
concept formation with the help of which historiography appropriates
its material. 46

In this perspective, the sciences of culture are no less scientific than the
natural sciences but only distinct because of their aims and because of
the kinds of concepts they employ. That is, they observe reality from the
perspective of the individual, or particular, or even unique, case. Hence,
they are what neo-Kantians call *idiographic sciences. By contrast, the
natural sciences are *nomothetic in that they formulate universal laws that
apply identically to all cases. Both kinds of sciences make generally valid
claims, but these claims are of a different character. In other words, these
two kinds of science focus on individual if not unique events and on general
patterns, respectively.

46 Rickert, The Limits of Concept Formation in Historical Science, abridged edition, tran. Guy
Oakes. (Cambridge, 1986), p. 145
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 193

The *value orientation (Wertbeziehung) of cultural science is simultane-

ously a kind of hermeneutic orientation towards meaning. Understanding,
however, is no longer the methodological starting point here – rather, it
follows from a prior distinction between nature and culture as two strictly
separate spheres, each of which is linked to a perspective that presup-
poses its own knowledge ideal and its own concept formation. For Rickert,
the specific kinds of concept formation and the constituting of objects of
research were thus two sides of one and the same process. It is values and
interests, he believed, that give cultural materials their meaning. Thus,
he wrote, the meaning of a unique event such as the French Revolution
can only be understood by appealing to the ideal – or value – of freedom.
Ordering an event or utterance under a value is therefore not the same as
subsuming it under a general concept, as it also involves an engagement
and a taking of sides.
Rickert argued that each historical period must be understood in terms of
its own values. In doing so, however, he risked falling into a *value relativism,
that is, the belief that there are no universally valid moral or aesthetic values
that transcend different periods and cultures. In order to accommodate this
problem, Rickert formulated a philosophy of absolute values that was meant
to allow for a timeless determination of the historical meaning of events,
thus enabling him to write a universally and objectively valid history after
all. According to Rickert, the values that are fundamental to the humanities
are simultaneously objective and unreal. They do not exist in the way that
physical objects exist and thus cannot be established empirically, but they
are valid a priori and are not subjective. Initially, Rickert merely asserted that
such values must exist, but later he also tried to identify and describe them.
These attempts, however, met with little success or enthusiasm. Generally,
it was the problematic status of values in Rickert’s thought that was regarded
as one of the main philosophical causes of the demise of neo-Kantianism.
By the time Rickert died in 1936, this philosophical school had already lost
its dominant position in German academic philosophy, albeit for political
reasons as much as for academic ones. Nonetheless, many of Rickert’s beliefs
about the philosophy of science live on in Max Weber’s writings, which are
of seminal importance to the social sciences even today (see § 7.5).

7.4b Cassirer

A second prominent neo-Kantian is Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945). Whereas

Rickert defined the concept of culture in terms of norms and values, Cassirer
emphasized its symbolic aspects. And whereas Kant posed the question
194  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

of how indubitable knowledge is possible, Cassirer asked how meaning

is possible. He formulated his answers to this question on the basis of a
detailed general theory of *symbols. By symbols, Cassirer meant all empiri-
cally observable phenomena that function as signs of something else. The
linguistic sign or word, of course, is the clearest example of a symbol in
this sense, but according to Cassirer, every cultural expression – whether
a language, myth, or religious ritual – may be seen as a coherent whole of
symbols. In his view, symbols are omnipresent in human knowledge and
action.
This perspective implies a rejection of the empiricist idea that all
knowledge is built on pure observation. For Cassirer, pure or theory-free
observation is an illusion, since all observation and knowledge is inevitably
filled with meaning. ‘Whatever is perceptual is meaningful’ (‘alles Sinnli-
che ist sinnhaft’), he repeatedly emphasized – that is, observation, which
empiricists see as elementary, has an irreducibly symbolic dimension.
This brought him closer to the doctrine that all perception is theory or
interpretation-dependent, which in different versions was also presented
by, among others, Popper, Quine, Kuhn, and Sellars.
In another respect, too, Cassirer’s thinking showed similarities with
Popper. Both attempted to adapt Kantian epistemology to the findings of
contemporary scientific research that completely undermined Newtonian
mechanics, such as non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, and quantum
mechanics. These discoveries suggested that seemingly unchanging features
of human reason were not the universal foundation of objective knowledge,
as Kant had claimed. As seen above, Popper attempted to accommodate
these objections with his critical rationalist position that all scientific
knowledge may be criticized. Cassirer, by contrast, looked for a solution
to the question of scientific progress in the historical development of the
functions of human symbols.
According to Kant, the possibility of experience was founded in reason.
Cassirer, seeing man as primarily a symbolizing rather than a rational being,
shifted this foundational role from reason to man’s symbolizing capacities.
Building on Kant, he developed the idea of *symbolic forms that make it
possible for humans to observe and know empirical objects. Language is the
most obvious symbolic form, but other forms include myth, art, religion, and
scientific knowledge. For Cassirer, each of these was a distinct and possibly
irreducible way of understanding the world. The structure of a symbolic
form, in other words, determines how we look at the world and what kinds
of objects we perceive. This doctrine builds on Humboldt’s idea that the
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 195

structure of language guides our thinking, but it is more general and not
restricted to language.
Furthermore, Cassirer took culturally variable symbolic forms rather than
universal and unchanging forms of intuition as transcendental conditions
of possibility for empirical knowledge of the outside world. Continuing
in a Kantian vein, he argued that man constructs his different systems of
symbols not in order to represent an already independently given reality with
pre-existing facts and objects but rather to make the shaping or designing
of reality possible in the first place:

Language, myth, art, religion, science are the elements and the constitutive
conditions of this higher form of society. They are the means by which
the forms of social life… develop into [the] state of social consciousness.47

Unlike reason, this symbolizing capacity need not be organized systemati-

cally or rationally. Cassirer described this capacity by means of different
symbolic forms such as language, religion, and scientific knowledge. He
distinguished three functions of symbols: the expressive function, the
representational or visualizing function, and the purely signifying function.
Symbols with an expressive function express what lives inside man: the
will, the emotions, etc. In their representational function, symbols depict
the visible, empirically observable world of concrete objects. The purely
signifying function, finally, is the most abstract one, as it constitutes an
independent system of relations rather than a system of objects and their
empirically observable properties.
In primitive cultures, Cassirer claimed, the different symbol functions
have not yet been differentiated. In this view, primitive man represents
nature as living and as endowed with a will and thus conflates the expres-
sive and representative functions of the symbols. By contrast, modern
scientific knowledge, even though it rests on symbols just as much as myths
or religions, is distinguished by the function of its symbols. According to
Cassirer, science aims to remove the anthropomorphic or magical elements
from systems of symbols and distinguishes aspects that in primitive mythical
thinking are still seen as one single whole. In modern science, the signifying
function of symbols has been isolated. Hence, modern science does not
speak of empirically given objects but rather of objects as defined by their
place in abstract systems of relations.

47 Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven, 1944), p. 223.

196  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The philosophy of symbolic forms thus yields a theory of the development

of human culture. Functions that are initially not differentiated gradually
become distinguished. The purely signifying function is a new step in the
development of human culture, Cassirer argued. Furthermore, similar to
Hegel and Comte, Cassirer believed that human culture follows a linear
development running from ‘primitive’ to ‘modern’ cultures, with scientific
knowledge as its highest stage yet, if not its final stage. For Cassirer, however,
science was not the sole valid form of acquiring and reproducing knowledge,
which, moreover, had to be strictly separated from pseudo-science. In the
natural sciences, he contended, we find only one of the possible shapes of
man’s symbolic capacities. Natural-scientific knowledge is thus only one
part of a more general theory of symbolic forms, albeit its highest one.
The philosophy of symbolic forms thus presents a comprehensive vision
of progress in science and in the arts, which is not formulated in terms
of the ‘growth of knowledge’ or ‘approximation of the truth’ but in terms
of changing symbol functions. Viewed in this way, the strict distinction
between the natural sciences and the humanities loses importance. Cassirer
saw himself as an heir of Kant – more specifically, as one who tried to do
more justice to language and culture.

7.5 Understanding in the Social Sciences: Max Weber

As argued above, the social sciences have a closer affinity to the Enlighten-
ment tradition than the humanities, which in turn are more aligned with
the Counter-Enlightenment. Nonetheless, the hermeneutic method has been
employed in the social sciences as well, in particular in the influential work
of the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), who became famous with
a number of influential studies in historical sociology and the sociology
of religion. Weber is the founder of so-called interpretative or verstehende
sociology, which formulates the task of that discipline as the ‘interpretative
understanding and explaining of human action in its unfolding’. Weber’s
methodological views were formulated in several lengthy essays compiled
in his collected papers on methodology (Wissenschaftslehre) and are closely
linked to Rickert’s beliefs on the distinction between different kinds of
concept formation in the cultural sciences.
According to Weber, the object of sociology is *social action, that is, ‘ac-
tion in so far as it is directed towards others and is connected by the actor
with a subjective meaning’. It is the sociologist’s task to understand this
action and to explain its unfolding, and thus Weber reconstructed societal
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 197

phenomena and constellations as enabling a particular kind of social action.

He attempted to unearth the *subjective meaning (subjektiver Sinn) that the
*actors themselves attached to their actions, without posing the question of
whether this meaning was also ‘objectively’ valid, that is, valid for others.
Yet Weber cannot be seen as simply an *idealist who only looked for
explanations in terms of ideas or beliefs. In his opinion, actors need not
have foreseen, wanted, or planned the course of societal development. Mate-
rial – e.g., economic and technical – circumstances may play an important
role. Hence, he was not surprised to find that an agrarian society produces
different kinds of action than an industrial one. A ‘materialist’ view of
history – obviously, Weber is alluding to Marx here – is granted its ‘trivial
correctness’. For an explanation of societal developments in the West and
of the specific form of social life in modern Europe, however, he argued that
pointing out exclusively economic factors does not suffice:

Frequently, ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like
switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed
by the dynamic of interest. 48

A characteristic feature of modern Western culture, Weber argued, is the

phenomenon of *rationalism, by which he meant a worldview and forms
of action in which calculability is the guiding principle. According to him,
this rationalism is expressed not only in the modern natural sciences, the
rational view of law and ethics, modern bureaucratic government, and
the personality type of the ‘expert’ but also in classical Western music,
which elaborates polyphony and counterpoint in a reasoned and systematic
manner (Weber had Bach in mind here). Weber located the origin of this
rationalism in the Protestantism that emerged in the sixteenth century,
which in his opinion turned asceticism – hitherto exclusive to monastic
life – into a general attitude towards life among the population at large.
These novel Protestant theological attitudes gave a new subjective meaning
to forms of action that in the economic sphere were to lead to frugality,
long-term planning, a new credit system, and eventually to the (capitalist)
accumulation of wealth.
Weber did not see the task of retrieving the subjective meaning of
social action in a naturalist sense. What the sociologist may write about
action and the connected subjective meanings is not necessarily a faithful

48 H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (tr.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (London, 1948),
p. 280.
198  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

representation of what occurred in the actor but a construction, he asserted.

In other words, the sociologist forms so-called *ideal types – he emphasizes
those aspects of human society that, ‘as a cultured man’, he considers valu-
able or important. An ideal type is thus a kind of *model of sociological
or historical phenomena that abstracts away from accidental individual
variations. Thus, ideal types cannot simply be refuted by observations that
contradict them. They also clearly display the value-orientation of cultural
science that was already emphasized by Rickert. Hence, sociologists will
construe ideal types of a Medieval state or city but not of a Medieval dog.
Weber saw no reason to counter the threat of relativism by formulat-
ing a general theory of values as Rickert had done. He realized that the
researcher’s values could change over time, but unlike Rickert, he saw no
need for transcendental and unchanging foundations. What interests the
scientist of culture may subsequently appear in a different light:

The light of great cultural problems moves on. Then science, too, prepares
to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus and to view the
stream of events from the heights of thought. 49

This *value orientation, however, does not mean that the sociologist is free
to mix his personal values with his scientific judgments. Weber insisted
that the two should be kept strictly separated. Once he has taken up a
position (determined by his values) that enables him to order the chaos of
events constituted by history, the sociologist should draw conclusions that
are valid for anybody with that particular point of view, ‘also for a Chinese’.
Thus, the value-orientation of sociology does not, and should not, preclude
its being *value-free. Weber was firmly convinced that science and politics
should remain separate.
Thus, Weber reproduced Rickert’s idea that the historicizing sciences
should be oriented towards values, but he avoided Rickert’s dilemma between
value relativism and value absolutism by demanding that science itself be
value-free. To the extent that he treated them as part of a general theory
of action, he regarded questions concerning values and meanings not as
philosophical problems but as empirical questions. Values are not timeless
or transcendental philosophical concepts but empirical and historically
changing givens.
Weber’s ideas concerning the role of understanding in the social sciences
have been influential but controversial. To begin with, the central role that

49 E.A. Shils & H.A. Finch (tr.), The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, 1949), p. 112.
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 199

Max Weber

Weber granted subjective meanings in social-scientific explanations implies

an important methodological constraint, for when the social actors’ actions
are determined by their subjective meanings, the interpretative social scien-
tific explanations are essentially no different from the meanings and values
the actors themselves attach to their actions but are at best explications
and systematisations of the latter. In other words, scientific explanations
should, in essential respects, agree with actors’ *folk explanations.
A second controversial point is that, according to sociologists and
philosophers maintaining an empiricist view of science, Weber’s notion of
understanding is tenable only as a *heuristic device, that is, as a preparation
for a genuine explanation, which should eventually be formulated in terms
of general laws and which should be tested in the same way as laws in the
natural sciences (compare § 3.2). In this view, forming an image of the
subjective meaning that actors attach to their actions is about as useful as
drinking a cup of strong coffee: it may prepare our mind for a good idea or
accelerate the formation of hypotheses, but it should not be confused with
either of them. Hence, this view is also disparagingly referred to as the ‘cup
of coffee theory of understanding’.
200  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

As a convinced neo-Kantian in the tradition of Rickert, Weber himself

would undoubtedly have rejected this reconstruction in which under-
standing plays a merely heuristic role. Historical sociology, he would have
argued, strives for an understanding of unique events and thus involves a
fundamentally different kind of concept formation than the natural sciences
and their striving for universal laws. Social sciences study a world full of
meanings, that is, an already interpreted world. In addition to the interpreta-
tive problems with which the natural sciences are also confronted – witness
the work of Popper, Kuhn, and Quine – the social sciences also appear to
face a*double hermeneutic: they yield interpretations of interpretations.

7.6 Hermeneutics as an Ontological Process: Hans-Georg

Gadamer

Today, hermeneutic approaches in the humanities generally no longer appeal

to Dilthey or Rickert. Instead, if they do refer to the German tradition, they
usually focus on Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). The latter’s main work,
Truth and Method, appeared in 1960, but as the author himself remarked, its
thematic and conceptual frame belong unmistakably to German interwar
philosophy. It is wholly alien to post-war currents and fashions such as
analytical philosophy of science and the 1960s social sciences, in which
Marx and Freud dominated, and it emphatically, if not defiantly, positions
itself among the nineteenth-century ‘humanist tradition of the Romantic
humanities’.
Despite its title, Truth and Method is not a treatise on the methodology
of the humanities prescribing how one may arrive at correct, systematic,
and well-founded interpretations but a philosophical discussion of the
ontological status of the interpreting subject, the interpreted object, and
the event or process of interpretation itself:

The purpose of my investigation is not to offer a general theory of interpre-

tation and a differential account of its methods […] but to discover what is
common to all modes of understanding and to show that understanding
is never a subjective relation to a given “object” but to the history of its
effect [Wirkungsgeschichte]. In other words, understanding belongs to
the being of what is understood.50

50 H.G. Gadamer, Truth and Method. J.C. Weinsheimer & D.G. Marshall (tr.) (London/New York,
2004 [1960]), p. xxviii; emph. added.
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 201

For Gadamer, the prototypically hermeneutic or interpretative process is not

the understanding of a sentence but the experience of a work of art. Hence,
the ‘model science’ for his hermeneutics is aesthetics rather than linguistics.
Understanding a text or a painting is in Gadamer’s perspective not a more
or less conscious action by an interpreting subject but rather an experience
or a reliving that may shape and reshape both the interpreter and what is
interpreted. Thus, his hermeneutics gives a philosophical explication of the
intuition that the experience of great art may profoundly affect who or what
we are: watching Vermeer’s View of Delft, listening to Mozart’s Requiem, or
reading Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov may so deeply move us that
it turns us into different persons, either temporarily or not. We perceive
the world in a different way than before, we feel moods or emotions we
had not experienced before, or we may view and treat the people around
us differently. Yet, at the same time, what we understand or experience is
always situated in the historical moment in which we find ourselves, and
the tradition that produces such artworks plays an irreducible role in it.
Gadamer proceeded from the view that language is not simply a cultural
phenomenon but makes man into what he is. From this, he drew the radical
conclusion that language is not merely an instrument for the expression
of thought but has a primarily ‘creative’ or ‘world-disclosing’ function. In
language, that is, the world of things and facts that man can experience
and understand is constituted; and since language also makes possible
the thoughts that man has about the world as an object, the process of
interpretation is essentially linguistic. Moreover, this process influences
both interpreting subject and interpreted object.
This mutual influencing happens most clearly when the object to be
understood is also a human being. Thus, for Gadamer, dialogue – that is,
communicating with the aim of mutual understanding – is the clearest
model of the process of interpretation (Verstehen). In dialogue, the conversa-
tion partners try to understand each other’s utterances, and in achieving
mutual understanding, both are constituted and changed. The knowledge
ideal of Gadamer’s hermeneutic is emphatically not individual knowledge
of the outside world but mutual understanding.
For Gadamer, however, understanding a linguistic utterance is not only
a conscious act, since it takes place against an implicit and unconscious
background of presuppositions and actions seen as self-evident and natural.
Every conscious understanding (Verständnis), that is, requires a background
of unconscious *pre-understandings (*Vorverständnisse). Thus formulated,
this may sound rather counterintuitive, since one might expect that the
process of understanding precisely consists in trying to rid oneself of one’s
202  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Hans-Georg Gadamer with his daughter Jutta

prejudices as much as possible. For Gadamer, however, unconscious as-

sumptions play a positive, and indeed necessary, role.
Gadamer thus presented a holistic theory of interpretation. For him, it
is a process that does not occur word by word or sentence by sentence but
requires an indefinite and partly hidden background of contexts, assump-
tions, and principles. For this background, he introduced the term *horizon,
indicated elsewhere by terms such as ‘context’, ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, ‘lifeworld’,
or ‘life form’. What is attractive in Gadamer’s concept is its clarification of
one’s inevitable dependence on a background and its implication that, with
any change in perspective or point of view, one’s horizon shifts rather than
disappears. Thus, the horizon indicates that every perspective is essentially
constrained and historically situated. Simultaneously, it makes clear that
what constrains our perspective is not directly at hand. Rather, the horizon
provides a framework within which things appear as near or close, or as
large or small. In their activities, hermeneuticians will incessantly ask
themselves whether the horizon of their questions is identical to the one
supplied by tradition.
Eventually, interpretation leads to a *melting of horizons, that is, the
mutual merging and reconciliation of the different presuppositions involved.
Gadamer emphasized, however, that the horizon provides a background
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 203

not only for utterances but also for actions. This *practical holism should
therefore be distinguished from Quine and Duhem’s *theoretical holism.
On this point, and more generally, Gadamer was decisively influenced by
the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).
Gadamer’s notion of a hermeneutic circle involves both continuously
improving one’s interpretations and testing them by experience. The process
of understanding runs between a historically determined object and an
equally historically situated subject and implies an incessant modification
of our prejudices and presuppositions. According to Gadamer, however,
it is impossible to escape our own historicity completely, since each act
of interpretation is by definition a form of embedding in the horizon of
the interpreting subject. Hence, there is simply no way to achieve under-
standing without historically determined and changeable presuppositions.
Accordingly, Gadamer criticized Dilthey for believing that one could escape
historical relativism by cultivating historical awareness.
Gadamer argued that we could adjust our pre-understandings and thus
make our interpretations more selfconscious and less naive by critically
reflecting on our own presuppositions, but we cannot wholly escape these
pre-understandings. Thus, our interpretations are irreducibly historical,
for inevitably, we project our own values and meanings onto whatever we
interpret. Genuine historical understanding is thus simultaneously directed
towards historically situating a text or artwork and towards the situation of
one’s own historical understanding of it. This implies that one cannot even
talk of an artwork in isolation from the different ways in which it has been
understood before. In particular for classical works, these ever-changing
interpretations constitute a tradition that new interpretations cannot ignore.
Artwork, in other words, cannot be seen in isolation from what Gadamer
calls the history of their effects or *Wirkungsgeschichte.
Against this background, it may be clear that Gadamer did not – and
indeed could not – formulate any timeless criteria for what constitutes a
good interpretation, nor did he make any suggestions for the particular
problems that different kinds of interpretation may encounter. For example,
juridical and religious texts have very different applications, and these
differences could also influence the way we interpret them. Thus, Gadamer’s
work does not discuss the question of when an artwork may be called
good or bad, nor when an interpretation is correct or incorrect. Instead,
for him, hermeneutics is concerned with the question of how our world
is disclosed or constituted in the interpretation of a work of art. Thus,
Gadamer’s hermeneutics focuses on the experience of artwork rather than
on their analysis.
204  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

7.7 Conclusion

The hermeneutic approaches discussed above were characteristic of the

humanities of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were to be
rejected by some later frameworks, and no consensus has yet been reached
concerning the role that a hermeneutic approach can or should play in the
social and human sciences. In the eyes of contemporary readers, authors such
as Dilthey and Rickert may seem rather outdated, and fierce objections have
been raised against their work. Dilthey may be said to retain an outdated
philosophy of life and to have become enmeshed in the contradictions of
*historicism, Rickert may be accused of holding an untenable philosophy
of values, and Cassirer may be criticized for his belief in linear progress
and for his outdated distinction between primitive and modern cultures.
Nowadays, Dilthey, Rickert, and Cassirer have largely been replaced by
Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Foucault as canonical authors in philosophy
and in the humanities at large. One may ask, however, whether this is entirely
justified. Even if the former three are in any respect more clearly outdated
than the latter, this does not diminish their historical importance or their
influence on the humanities today. Thus, Weber’s verstehende sociology,
which is still dominant today, is unthinkable without Rickert’s ideas on
concept formation. Similarly, the influential art historian Erwin Panofsky
based his work on Cassirer’s notion of symbolic forms.
Even though all authors discussed in this chapter are part of the Kantian
or neo-Kantian tradition, their methodological positions differ significantly.
This becomes clear in particular with respect to their attitudes regarding
the natural sciences. Dilthey regarded the natural and the human sciences
as complementary with respect to each other. He shared the positivist
objections against metaphysics but acknowledged the limitations of the
empiricist view of knowledge. In his opinion, the humanities should be based
on experience but in the sense of reliving rather than empirical observation.
Rickert generalized this distinction by distinguishing two radically different
processes of concept formation. Cassirer considered scientific knowledge
(in the natural sciences specifically) to be a culmination of the human
capability for forming and using symbols rather than a radical rupture with
tradition or dogma. And Gadamer argued that understanding precedes all
knowledge, including knowledge of nature.
The hermeneutic tradition was shaped in part by the need for the humani-
ties to distinguish themselves from the dominant view of science, which
had been oriented towards the natural sciences. In Gadamer, this distanc-
ing even takes such proportions that he has repeatedly been accused of a
Be t ween Hermeneutics and the Natur al Sciences: In Search of a Method 205

fundamentally unscientific or anti-scientific attitude. Although he always

rejected this reproach himself, Gadamer and his followers often expressed
doubts about what they called *scientism, that is, the naive faith in the
natural sciences as the sole source of legitimate knowledge. According to
Gadamer, technological progress has not solved the problems of humanity
but, on the contrary, has created all kinds of new problems. This claim can
also be formulated differently: the progress of science and technology has
not only led to material changes but has also, and inevitably, influenced the
sphere of ideas, knowledge, and culture. We will return to this line of think-
ing in particular in our discussion about postmodernism (see chapter 11).

Summary

− Schleiermacher was the first to outline a general hermeneutics, or

theory of the understanding, interpretation, or explication of texts.
He claimed that interpretation proceeds via a so-called hermeneutic
circle and does not simply consist of unearthing the author’s intentions.
According to Dilthey, this interpretative method is what distinguishes
the humanities from the natural sciences.
− Freudian psychoanalysis wavers between a natural-scientific and a
hermeneutic approach to the human soul. Freud explained neuroses
as errors in the development of childhood drives, which may be cured
with the aid of the ‘talking cure’ of psychoanalysis.
− Neo-Kantianism takes the Kantian a priori to be empirical and/or
historically and culturally variable. Rickert argued that the cultural
sciences were different from other sciences due to their distinct concept
formation – he described them as idiographic rather than nomothetic
like the natural sciences. Cassirer captured the development of the
natural sciences in a broader theory of symbolic forms.
− Weber introduced the notion of an ideal type as an auxiliary for inter-
pretative social science. He believed that the social sciences themselves
are – and should be – value-free.
− Gadamer presented an ontological approach to interpretation. He did
not present a methodology for ‘good interpretations’ or any concrete
techniques of interpretation but instead treated the question of what
interpretation does with both the interpreting subject and the inter-
preted object.
 Part 3
Styles and Currents in the Humanities
8 Critical Theory

8.1 Karl Marx and Dialectics

The current in the humanities and the social sciences that has come to
be known as ‘critical theory’ is based primarily on Karl Marx’s dialectical
materialist critique of society. Behind his materialism, however, Hegel’s spirit
looms large. Just as the nineteenth-century hermeneutic and neo-Kantian
humanities struggled with the Kantian heritage, twentieth-century critical
theory may be said to have struggled with Hegel. Not only did it proceed
from the latter’s historicizing philosophy of consciousness, also and more
specifically it elaborated its dialectics.
None of Hegel’s students has been as influential as the philosopher, jour-
nalist, and revolutionary politician Karl Marx (1818-1883). His work played a
decisive role in the development of the labour movement and communism.
But Marx also has had considerable influence outside of politics: alongside
Comte, Weber, and Durkheim, he was one of the pioneers of the social
sciences, and his views resonate in many a twentieth-century philosopher.
Marx’s view of human history follows Hegel’s dialectical pattern, but he
interpreted its development in more down-to-earth terms than Hegel did.
As he put it himself, he turned Hegel upside down. Marx believed that the
true motor of history is not spirit in its development but human labour, and
he couched the relevant dialectical contradictions in concrete historical
rather than abstract philosophical terms. According to him, human history is
driven by the contradictions between the working and the propertied classes.
Unlike Hegel, Marx saw the stages of development not as abstract stages
in the development of spirit but as socio-economic phases – or, as he calls
them, *modes of production, that is, specific stages of economic relations
such as feudalism and capitalism. What nineteenth-century philosophers
associated with spirit – notions such as thought and culture – was referred to
by Marx as the ideological *superstructure, which follows, or is determined
by, the development of the base of material economic relations in society.
Thus, Marx was a *dialectical materialist. He saw freedom, which Hegel
linked to absolute spirit, as the result of the revolution achieved by a working
class that has achieved consciousness. After this revolution, the realm of
freedom will have finally overcome the realm of necessity and scarcity
From Hegel’s dialectic, Marx learned to see that ‘Men make their own
history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under
self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,
210  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

given and transmitted from the past.’51 In Marx, the dialectic has a dual
function. First, it plays an epistemological and methodological role as the
instrument that links the particular with the general and the concrete with
the abstract. This enabled Marx to interpret specific historical events as part
of a universal historical process and conversely to write about human history
and its laws as realized in concrete struggles only. Second, the dialectic
also has an ontological dimension. For Marx, it is not only an instrument to
view history but is also characteristic of the historical process itself. Thus,
it yields not only a methodology but also a teleology. Behind all struggle,
conflict, and setbacks, one may discern an immanent and ever-closer goal,
if only one looks carefully enough. Marx’s thought is also informed by an
*organicist metaphor: in the historical process, a nucleus comes to fruition
as the new society is born from the old one.
Against Hegel, his close colleague Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) emphasized
– even more strongly than Marx himself – that the dialectic is also a material
and natural process that is not imposed as an idealist law of thinking on
nature but on the contrary is precisely derived from nature. Once we see this,
he wrote, ‘the dialectical laws that look so extremely mysterious in idealist
philosophy at once become simple and clear as noonday’.52 A key feature of
dialectics as formulated by Engels is that purely quantitative changes may
change into qualitative ones. Thus, he argued, an increase or decrease in
temperature will only quantitatively affect the state of water until one
reaches the boiling or the freezing point, respectively, at which point the
water also undergoes a qualitative change: it changes into steam or ice.
A second dialectical regularity is that of the negation of the negation.
Engels maintained that not only the human process of production but
everything that exists in nature carries the seed of its own destruction or
denial, which in its turn will be negated or sublated. For example, when a
grain of corn germinates, it disappears as a grain (the negation), but the plant
that grows from this germ produces new grains of corn in turn, thus negating
the negation. Hence, Engels claimed, dialectics sees nature as dynamic and
changing just as Darwin’s theory of evolution does, but more strongly than
Darwin, it emphasizes the role of negation, contradiction, and struggle in
this dynamic. At the same time, it suggests that specifically human and
social processes of production are essentially natural and lawlike. Just like
Marx, Engels was a teleological thinker to the extent that he, too, saw the

51 K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. S. Padover (tr.), (Marx/Engels Internet
Archive), ch. 1.
52 C. Dutt (tr.), Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London, 1940), ch. 2.
Critical Theory 211

dialectic as a lawlike and inevitable development towards a particular

form of society.
Marx thus gave social history a research programme with a strong
heuristic. As such, the Marxist programme has yielded much of value,
also for those who do not share Marx’s political views. One need not be a
Marxist to be able to recognize the importance of societal contradictions
and the difficult social and economic circumstances in which large parts
of the population live and have lived. Marx’s dialectical method is more
controversial, in particular because of the teleology it implies. As already
mentioned, Popper argued that the Marxist belief that historians should
formulate the laws of history and thus predict its course rests on a dangerous
historicist misunderstanding (cf. § 3.2c). All too easily, it yields the dogmatic
view that the course of history is already known and that practice should
therefore be adapted to theory rather than the other way around. Anyone
who fails to side in advance with the class that will eventually win – and
more specifically, with those who present themselves as the vanguard or
representatives of this class – risks being branded a stumbling block for
human development who should be done away with. Thus, as anti-Marxist
critics including Popper argue, all too many totalitarian dictatorships have
been legitimized by an appeal to an allegedly scientific knowledge of the
course of history.

8.2 Marxism, Language, and Literature: György Lukács,

Valentin Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin

Given the materialism emphatically stated by Marx and Engels, is there any
meaningful role left for art and culture? Or are these merely the ideological
reflections of more basic or more real economic processes, as some later
orthodox Marxist thinkers believed? The latter would imply that the humani-
ties, too, would lose their distinct and autonomous task and domain and
be dissolved into the (political-economical) science of society. A number of
influential Marxists or Marxism-inspired thinkers, however, rejected this
way of putting things as reductionist and one-sided. They developed theories
of culture that proceed – but increasingly distance themselves – from
dialectics in both its materialist and its Hegelian idealist variety. The role
of language, in particular, gradually emerged as a challenge for orthodox
Marxism. As we will see, several thinkers in the critical tradition have
brought about linguistic turns that are broadly comparable to those of
logical empiricists, structuralists, and poststructuralists.
212  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The first important author to develop a dialectical-materialist theory of

culture was the Hungarian György Lukács (1885-1971), whose book The Theory
of the Novel (1916) is one of the first serious studies of the novel, which had
hitherto been seen as an inferior literary genre. Lukács argued that genres
such as the epic and the novel are not only historically determined but
also subject to a historical-philosophical dialectic. Homer’s ancient Greek
epics, for example, emerged in a world that was still enclosed within itself
and was simple and orderly. The modern novel, by contrast, expresses the
‘transcendental homelessness’ that is characteristic of modernity. It is the
‘epic of a godless world’, which has emerged in an era in which the hitherto
enclosed and orderly totality of the world starts bursting at its seams. Classical
epics do not describe an individual hero but the fate of an entire people, but
in the modern novel, the contingent modern world interacts with a modern
individual alienated from others and searching for meaning. Thus, Lukács
contended, the difference between the epic and the novel is determined by
historical conditions and their effects on consciousness, but these conditions
are also reflected in the formal features of both genres. Thus, epics maintain
a strict verse form, whereas the novel may employ various registers of prose.
At age 33, Lukács converted to Marxism and reformulated these Hegelian
historicizing ideas about the rise of the novel in more explicitly historical
materialist terms. He became the fiercest critic of his own earlier, pre-Marxist
work. Just like Dilthey’s writings, he argued, it was based on intuition rather
than on method and had introduced arbitrary typologies and premature
generalizations. He maintained, however, that The Theory of the Novel was
among the first works to shift the humanities from a neo-Kantian to a Hegelian
methodology. It did so by more consistently historicizing aesthetic categories
than Dilthey had done and by analysing literary genres such as the drama, the
epic, and the novel in correlation to particular historical eras. In later works
such as The Historical Novel (1937), he linked the rise of the historical novel to
concrete societal realities (read: class relations) such as the rise of bourgeois
capitalist society in Western and Middle Europe. The French Revolution and
the Napoleonic Wars had given the population a new historical awareness, he
argued, and it was in this climate that the historical novel could emerge – a
genre that, despite appearances, was a progressive social force until the failed
1848 revolutions. Lukács posited that while the historical novels of authors
such as Walter Scott and Honoré de Balzac may seem nostalgic and conserva-
tive because of their glorification of the aristocratic past, in reality they are
revolutionary innovations because they imply a critique of bourgeois society.
This is not to say that Lukács favoured literary innovation in itself. He
rejected the formal experiments of literary modernists such as Franz Kafka
Critical Theory 213

and James Joyce as overly preoccupied with subjective individual conscious-

ness rather than history. In his opinion, the realism of authors including
Thomas Mann and Maxim Gorky gave a better insight into modernity and
the hidden social and societal forces that shape individual consciousness.
Lukács’s analyses curiously overlook the fact that the historical novel often
glorifies a specifically national past. In other words, the historical novel also
appears inextricably linked with Romantic nationalism. More generally,
Marxists tend to reject nationalism as a surface phenomenon and as no
more than a reprehensible element of bourgeois ideology.
Lukács adhered to an orthodox dialectical materialism that sees human
consciousness as determined by social existence rather than the other way
around. Several early Soviet authors modified this view, particularly in the
light of their studies of literary language. In the early years of the Soviet
Union, Marxist dialectical orthodoxy did not yet dominate the humanities.
Hence linguistics, literary theory, and folklore studies flourished, not to
mention the arts themselves. Innovators, including Sergei Eisenstein in
film, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Anna Achmatova in poetry, and Kasimir
Malevitch in painting, still had substantial room for manoeuvre. In this
relatively open intellectual climate, a radical discussion was conducted
concerning the place of language within Marxist theory, primarily in the
circle surrounding literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975). The linguist
V.N. Voloshinov (1895-1936) played a major role in this circle as well. Their
works exercised significant influence not only on literary theory but also
on the linguistic theories of the Russian Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and
the so-called Prague circle, and on later disciplines such as sociolinguistics
and linguistic anthropology.
In his treatise entitled Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1929),
Voloshinov emphasized that language and other signs are not simply part
of an ideological superstructure. In the first place, he argued, linguistic
signs are material objects with a specific function, just like tools such as
hammers and sickles which may be transformed into ideological signs.
This implies, however, that ideology and consciousness are not possible
without signs: ‘consciousness can arise and become a viable factor only
in the material embodiment of signs’.53 Put differently, consciousness is
constituted verbally, and in its *materiality, the sign is the ideological
phenomenon par excellence.
Moreover, Voloshinov added, verbal communication is a form of material
and physical interaction between individuals, which cannot be reduced to the

53 V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA, 1968), p. 11
214  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

mental terms of social psychology such as ‘collective soul’ or ‘people’s spirit’.

Thus, Voloshinov not only replaced a Hegelian philosophy of consciousness
with a philosophy of language, his linguistic turn also de-emphasized the
strict distinction between material base and ideological superstructure and
denied in so many words that the latter is mechanically caused by material
factors. This led him to reject, for example, Marxist explanations of the rise in
nineteenth-century Russian novels of the ‘superfluous man’ character – the
idling landowner without a clear purpose in life, like Alexander Pushkin’s
Yevgeni Onegin and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov – as resulting from the
economic decay of the Russian landed aristocracy. Voloshinov dismissed
as absurd the idea that the rise of such literary figures was directly caused
by economic decay. Moreover, he argued, any such correlation does not say
anything specific concerning the artistic function that the superfluous man
may have in a particular novel.
According to Voloshinov, linguistic signs have an irreducibly material and
social character. Hence, ideology cannot possibly be reduced to the inner
or the subjective by either individual or collective psychology but should
instead be described in *semiotic terms of public or intersubjective signs.
He described the social functioning of these signs in dialectical terms. A
linguistic community, he wrote, consists of people from different social classes
who may use the same signs for different ideological aims, so that words and
their meanings themselves become arenas of class struggle. Expressions
that are used by one group or class as terms of abuse may be given another,
more positive meaning by other classes. In other words, signs are not only
irreducibly material and intersubjective but also inherently dialectical.
Voloshinov thus took a first step towards replacing the Hegelian and
Marxist philosophy of consciousness with a perspective shaped by semiotics
and the philosophy of language. This linguistic turn, however, retained an
explicitly dialectical character. His close colleague Mikhail Bakhtin shared
this linguistic reorientation but more emphatically distanced himself from
Hegelian dialectics. Bakhtin focused on the aesthetics of the modern novel,
which, he argued, is characterized by a plurality of styles and a diversity of
voices. It may contain both the voice of an authoritative narrator and the
voices of various persons introduced in direct speech. Bakhtin called this
diversity of social styles of speaking (for example, vulgar and aristocratic
uses of language, jargon, local rural dialects, slang, etc.) *heteroglossia, which
according to him is an essential feature of the modern genre of the novel.
In classical epic and lyric poetry, he continued, this plurality is reduced to
a single dominant voice and style. A poetic style as opposed to a novelistic
one is characterized by the unity of the linguistic system and by the unity
Critical Theory 215

of the poet’s individuality as reflected in his use of language. Hence, the

categories of classical poetics cannot deal with the heteroglossic novel, and
therefore a new stylistic or aesthetic theory should be developed, one that
is specifically tailored to the novel. The aesthetics of the novel cannot be
captured in either purely formal terms of syntax or style, for example, or
in purely ideological terms that reduce formal properties to social factors
such as class and class struggle.
In a 1929 study on Dostoevsky, Bakhtin also used the term *polyphony
alongside heteroglossia to indicate this plurality of voices, and in his later
work, he also spoke of *dialogism. Polyphony, he argued, is a specific feature
of Dostoevsky’s novels such as The Brothers Karamazov. The plurality of
contradictory and clashing voices in that novel cannot be reduced to one
single, dialectically developing and resolved conflict or narrative, or to
one single coherent or *monological dominant voice of either the narrator
inside the story or the author outside of it. Polyphony is not a function of
the author’s intentions and therefore cannot be reduced to the latter’s class
position, as Lukács would have argued. Dostoevsky’s characters speak less as
characters invented and manipulated by the author than as autonomous and
full-blooded subjects. And indeed, Dostoevsky himself maintained rather
conservative religious and Russian-nationalist convictions but, according to
Bakhtin, his novels are rather more progressive and subversive due to this
polyphony. Implicitly, Bakhtin also appeared to reject Hegel’s dialectic here
as monological. The dialectical development of spirit, he implied, reduces a
polyphony of voices to a single coherent and dominant narrative.
Bakhtin’s works, however, shows an ambivalence or development in the
ideas of polyphony and heteroglossia. Initially, he saw them primarily as a
specific feature of Dostoevsky’s novels that is absent from Tolstoy’s novels
War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In the latter, he suggested, one voice of
an omniscient and authoritative narrator dominates, turning Tolstoy into
a *monological author. In his later works, however, Bakhtin argued that
heteroglossia was a defining feature of the genre of the novel in general, which
was first apparent in Dostoevsky’s work but in retrospect also appeared to
be a crucial feature of other and earlier novels. In this view, the dialogical or
polyphonic novel is a ‘new’ or ‘modern’ genre by definition. Yet elsewhere,
Bakhtin suggested that even the works of pre-modern authors including
Cervantes and Homer contain ‘novelistic’ elements, implying that the novel
should no longer be seen as a modern and bourgeois genre but rather as a
stylistic feature that is potentially present in literature at all times and places.
Bakhtin also equivocated in his distinction between terms such as
polyphony, heteroglossia, and dialogism. Seen as a linguistic phenomenon,
216  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

heteroglossia indicates the radical context-dependence of all language.

Each linguistic utterance, Bakhtin suggested, is irreducibly linked to the
social context in which it is uttered and/or interpreted. That means that
linguistic utterances from the past (for example, classical literary texts) can
receive ever-novel interpretations that cannot possibly have been foreseen
or intended by the author (a suggestion that will also be elaborated in Der-
rida’s notion of *iterability, see chapter 11). It also means that the attempt
by linguists to reduce this plurality to one single monolithic system or
structure of language, shared by all speakers of that language, is illusory
and indeed misguided. On this point, Bakhtin, like Voloshinov, emphatically
rejected Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics (see § 9.3), which
was starting to gain acceptance in the Soviet Union during this period.
Unlike Lukács, Bakhtin did not see the novel as a specifically bourgeois
genre. On the contrary, he saw traces of popular culture in it, that is, of
the cultural expressions of the lower population strata, generally held in
contempt as ‘vulgar’ by the elites and distinct from the latter’s ‘high culture’.
Bakhtin shared an interest in popular culture or *folklore with a number
of prominent Russian linguists and literary scholars of this period such as
Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and Vladimir Propp. He argued that
literary works such as François Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel and
Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls cannot be properly understood if we ignore
their folkloric elements or aspects of folk culture. One central feature of
this popular culture, he claimed, was grotesque popular humour in which
the official high culture is parodied or ridiculed. In premodern and early
modern Europe, folk humour could be found during special recurring events
such as the ancient Roman Saturnalia, Medieval carnivals, and annual fairs.
Bakhtin, however, also exposed *carnivalesque elements in high literature,
in particular the modern novel.
Thus, Bakhtin’s notions of dialogism and heteroglossia received a more
emphatically political meaning. Usually, carnivals are seen as a way of
releasing social tensions, as existing social relations are temporarily
inverted and the people are briefly allowed to do all kinds of things that
are normally disapproved of or forbidden so that they will submit again to
existing laws, morals, and religion for the rest of the year. Thus, during the
Roman Saturnalia, slaves were allowed to play the masters for one fixed
day of the year, during which they were served by their masters.
According to Bakhtin, however, carnivals have a more strongly subversive
element because they challenge and undermine the normally undisputed
authority of the elites and, with it, the fixed meanings and values of the
*authoritative discourse of the official institutions. Authoritative discourse,
Critical Theory 217

like that of the Church or the worldly ruler, is a form of monological language
use that demands a monopoly on valid norms, values, and meanings. In a
carnival, however, this monological character is destroyed, in particular by
the ridiculing of dominant discourse. For example, Rabelais ridiculed the
Latin-language learning associated with Church power.
Unlike the Romantic nationalists, Bakhtin thus saw popular culture as
defying authoritative discourse and not as the expression of a people’s soul
or natural character supposedly shared by a nation as a whole. However,
in a clear allusion to Hegelian dialectics, Bakhtin contended that popular
culture should not be seen as merely a negation of high culture: it not only
negates but also simultaneously innovates and revives. Moreover, popular
humour is not individual but collective: it is not merely negative in its satire
but universal in its claims and ambivalent in its effects. Thus, popular culture
challenges the monological pretensions of elite culture and authoritative
discourse, as a result of which the carnivalesque acquires a subversive if
not revolutionary character. The people’s laughter, Bakhtin concluded, is
liberating.
Bakhtin wrote his study of Rabelais during the 1930s, which not only
was a time of dialectical materialism’s promotion to official Soviet ideol-
ogy but also marked the high point of Stalin’s terror. It is tempting to see
Bakhtin’s emphasis on the subversive laughter of the people and his cautious
criticisms of Hegelian dialectic as a disguised critique of Stalinism, but
neither Bakhtin’s political opinions nor his precise relation to the much
more explicitly dialectical writings of his colleague Voloshinov have ever
been clarified. Some authors even argue that Bakhtin had personally written
a number of the texts published under Voloshinov’s name. Such claims,
however, can be neither proved nor refuted. In any case, the preoccupa-
tion with literary language and folklore among these early Soviet authors
reflects an awareness that language and signs deserve a more important
place in the Hegelian and Marxist tradition and may even undermine its
consciousness-philosophical architecture.

8.3 Antonio Gramsci

Few Marxist authors have been, and still are, as influential in the humanities
as the Italian Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). That his influence has persisted
even after the 1989 collapse of the communism is in part due to the fact
that Gramsci resolutely breaks with the economical reductionism and
determinism of earlier Marxists, who considered the sphere of language,
218  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

culture, and ideas to be merely an ideological superstructure, completely

determined by – and reducible to – the economic base. Gramsci’s main
contributions to Marxist analyses of culture and language were his complex
understanding of *hegemony, or cultural and ideological domination; of
the experience of the subordinate or *subaltern classes; and of the role of
intellectuals in public life.
Gramsci was one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and
of party publications such as l’Ordine nuovo and the daily L’Unità. After the
fascists came to power, he was arrested in 1926 and condemned to twenty
years of imprisonment. ‘We have to prevent this brain from functioning for
the coming two decades,’ the prosecutor declared during the public trial,
but the Italian authorities ultimately failed to do so. In prison, Gramsci
started work on what would come to be known as the Prison Notebooks
(Quaderni del Carcere). These contain notes and analyses ranging from
theoretical discussions within Marxism and themes from Italian history
to contemporary culture and politics. Gramsci spent many years in solitary
confinement, and his health gradually deteriorated. In 1935, he was released
on medical grounds and died shortly thereafter.
The Prison Notebooks were never intended for publication. Fragmentary
and searching, they do not form a continuous or systematic argument. But
they do show Gramsci gradually developing, refining, and modifying his
central concepts and ideas. The circumspect and at times allusive style
of these writings were meant in part to evade censorship. Thus, Gramsci
nowhere mentions Marx or Lenin by name and consistently refers to Marx-
ism as ‘the philosophy of praxis’. More importantly, he nowhere presents
strict or final definitions of key notions such as hegemony.
One of the central questions he poses in these writings is why the socialist
revolution, which orthodox Marxists had seen as inevitable, had failed to
materialize in Italy, and how instead Mussolini’s National Fascist Party had
been able to gain power. Intriguingly, Popper had raised almost exactly the
same question concerning so-called ‘scientific socialism’ (cf. § 3.2c). But
for Gramsci, this question reflected a bitter societal and personal reality,
leading to an entirely different answer. Gramsci was skeptical about the
Marxist belief in objective and inevitable historical laws because he accorded
greater importance to the human will and to the power of ideas. He rejected
historical determinism not only as a fatalist doctrine but also as factually
incorrect. The 1917 Russian revolution, he argued, occurred before a full-
fledged capitalist society had developed in Russia. He dismissed Engels’s
materialism, which regards human history and the dialectics of nature as
one continuous whole too.
Critical Theory 219

According to Gramsci, the main reason for the failure of the revolu-
tion in Italy was the fact that the Italian workers had not developed any
revolutionary consciousness. Their thinking was still shaped by the values
and beliefs – that is, the culture and ideology – of the bourgeoisie. Thus,
Gramsci arrived at his famous notion of *hegemony, that is, cultural and
ideological domination. This domination, he argued, is a crucial precondition
for seizing and exercising political power. Unlike political domination,
however, hegemony does not work through coercion but rather through
consensus. Italian workers voluntarily accepted the bourgeois worldview
and values, which gave a central place to the Italian nation and Catholic
faith, instead of the emancipation of the working class and atheist doctrines
of progress such as evolutionary theory or historical materialism. A suc-
cessful working-class revolution, he argued, requires the working class
to have succeeded in convincing other classes to adopt the working-class
worldview and values. In other words, the revolution in Italy failed because
the revolutionary ideology of the Italian workers had not become hegemonic
among the population at large.
Cultural hegemony is not only a condition for political domination; since it
precedes the conquest of state power, it has to be established in society, rather
than produced by the state. However, that does not preclude a state that is
accepted by the population as legitimate from being culturally hegemonic.
Unlike in France, Gramsci thought, the bourgeoisie had not managed to
form a nation in Italy. Instead, Italian unification had in part been imposed
from above by Cavour’s unitary state in what Gramsci called a *passive
revolution and in part realized from below by Garibaldi’s mass movement.
Gramsci used the term *subaltern to signify those societal classes or
groups and cultural phenomena that are not hegemonic. Subaltern groups
are not identical to farmers and workers or the proletariat in the economic
sense. They are culturally subordinate and are negatively valued as backward,
uncivilized, underdeveloped, or inferior. A simple example of the distinction
between hegemonic and subaltern – and, in fact, the origin of Gramsci’s
own distinction – is the difference between standard language and regional
dialect, seen not only in modern Italy but in most modern nation-states.
At the time of Italian unification in 1861, only a minute part of the Italian
population spoke standard Italian (according to some estimates as little as
2.5%). The remainder of the population spoke a local dialect as its native
tongue. These local dialects had a low status and generally did not have a
written literature. In other words, they had a subaltern status with respect
to the standard language. Standard Italian, by contrast, was diffused among
the population at large via education, via written and printed journalistic and
220  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

literary texts – most famously Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (I

Promessi Sposi) (1827/1842) – and later via media such as radio and television.
To the extent that it was voluntarily accepted as the national language, it
thus acquired hegemonic status. Unlike the French, however, the Italians had
never had a genuinely national literature. The Betrothed, Gramsci claimed,
was not read and appreciated by the people as the French classics were.
Unlike bourgeois or liberal thinkers, Gramsci did not see the standard
language as a medium of modernity nor the rural dialects as backward. And
unlike Romantics like the brothers Grimm, he did not simply see dialects as
the expression of a pure or authentic people’s spirit. The language and culture
of standardized modern Italian, which are hegemonic with respect to the
dialect of his native Sardinia, for example, were in his view closely linked
to the modern industrialized society of Northern Italy, which exploited
Sardinian miners, peasants, and others.
Despite this attention to language, Gramsci’s Marxism does not complete
a genuine linguistic turn comparable to those of the Vienna circle, French
structuralism, or Bakhtin and Voloshinov. Even though he considered
questions of language, signs, and meanings as primary with respect to
questions of knowledge, experience, and consciousness, and even though he
acknowledged the importance of the people’s language in the development
of revolutionary consciousness among the working class, he did not arrive
at the more radical thesis that language and signs are constitutive of, or
primary with respect to, consciousness.
Gramsci did mark an innovation with respect to classical Marxism, however,
in so far as he rejected the strict dichotomies of economic base and cultural or
ideological superstructure, and of theory and practice. Societal developments,
he argued, do not arise in a blind, lawlike process but are achieved by and due
to changing class consciousness, that is, due to changing knowledge. For this
changing consciousness, moreover, organization is essential, and this is the
work of intellectuals. Thus, *organic intellectuals, as Gramsci called them,
are linked to the culture and aspirations of the proletariat and contribute to
organizing and realizing their culture and thereby their aspirations.
Politically, this implies a rejection of the privileged status of the Communist
Party bureaucracy, which is neither elected nor legitimized by the working
class. Epistemologically, it implies a different societal role and status for
human-scientific or social-scientific knowledge. For Gramsci, Marxism
involves not the scientific description of objective social realities but the
expression of the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat. In this
perspective, scientific and philosophical knowledge amounts to the theoreti-
cal consciousness of historical development and thus form an integral part
Critical Theory 221

of these events rather than a reflection on them. This vision brings Gramsci’s
position close to that of the *sociology of knowledge, which analyses scientific
and other knowledge claims not in terms of validity or truth, but rather as
being produced in, or related to, underlying societal processes.
Since the 1960s, Gramsci’s ideas have become especially influential in and
through British *cultural studies, led by among others Raymond Williams
(1921-1988) and Stuart Hall (1932-2014). These scholars systematically studied
what was called ‘popular culture’ – not so much the culture of the illiterate
rural population as glorified by the Romantics but rather the working-class
culture of subaltern population groups in industrialized cities. Various
others, including postcolonial critics such as Edward Said and the so-called
Subaltern Studies Group in India (see § 13.4) have been similarly shaped or
inspired by Gramsci’s works.

8.4 The Frankfurt School

The so-called *Frankfurt School is among the most enduringly influential

currents of the critical and dialectical tradition of the twentieth century.
The name refers to a group of philosophers and social scientists who were
united in the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research),
originally established in Frankfurt and led by Max Horkheimer (1895-1973).
Its members had diverse disciplinary backgrounds, as the institute’s research
programme encouraged the integration of philosophy and empirical research
in the social sciences and the humanities. Alongside philosophers, it also
housed historians, economists, psychologists, sociologists, literary theo-
rists, and art historians, including Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, Herbert
Marcuse, Karl Wittfogel, and, more loosely, Walter Benjamin. Between 1932
and 1940, the institute’s Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (Journal for Social
Research) published numerous articles that had a major influence on the
philosophy of culture and on social theory. The members of the institute
were predominantly Jewish and were forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933.
After a period of wandering about, the institute was re-established in the
United States. After the war, it returned to Frankfurt. Due to the discovery
of this group of intellectuals by the 1960s student movement, they regained
influence. Subsequently, the Frankfurt School’s legacy was upheld by among
others Jürgen Habermas. Thus, the Frankfurt School developed into one of
the most influential critical voices in post-war West-German society.
The programme of the Frankfurt School is usually referred to by the term
*critical theory, coined in 1937 by Horkheimer for theories at the intersection
222  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

of social science and philosophy that maintain self-consciously a close

relation to social practice. The term also echoes ideas derived from Hegel
and Marx. Because of this dialectical background, critical theories have
a complex methodological structure, since they have to fulfil three tasks
simultaneously. First, a critical theory supplies interpretations of societal
phenomena in a historical perspective. Researchers present their findings
concerning contemporary phenomena in the light of the developments and
societal contradictions that have shaped it. Second, a critical theory antici-
pates future societal change. Hence, it points out discrepancies between
the factual functioning of social institutions and the values and ideals
these institutions claim to embody. The gap between a society’s claims
and its achievements justifies criticism, it is argued. Thus, critical theories
have not only a cognitive but also a normative task. Third, a critical theory
maintains an explicit relation to practice, knowing that it is not developed
from an Archimedean or neutral point but from practical concerns. Hence,
the theory tries to give a reflective explanation for its own emergence.
Moreover, it may yield insights that can help particular social groups to
engage in self-reflection. Herein lies the practical importance of a critical
theory. It could also help to enable people to rid themselves of their tutelage
which they themselves had helped to perpetuate. The third task of critical
theories is thus to advance emancipation.
Each of the abovementioned tasks is also taken up outside the tradition
of critical theory. Thus, the history of societal phenomena is addressed in
historical sociology; in political philosophy and ethics, we find normative
treatises that justify social change; and the sociology of science likewise
informs us about the origin of theories in societal developments and about
the bearers of social change. It is not these separate elements, however, that
make a critical theory into a particular edifice but rather their integration
into a single coherent framework. To illustrate how such a framework
works in practice, we now turn to two of critical theory’s best-known rep-
resentatives in the humanities: Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. After
surveying both, we will briefly discuss Habermas’s language-philosophical
reformulation of critical theory.

8.4a Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) started his intellectual existence – in his

case, one can hardly speak of a ‘career’ – as a literary critic with a heavily
mystically and religiously inspired view of language. Later in life, however,
he became interested in the dialectical materialism of Marxists such as
Critical Theory 223

Bertolt Brecht. He was ambivalent with regard to the nineteenth-century

belief in progress, proclaiming that ‘in the development of technology,
[positivism] saw only the progress of natural science, not the concomitant
retrogression of society’.54 The massacres of the First World War, he believed,
had rendered all liberal optimism about scientific and technological progress
illusory. Instead, war on a hitherto unknown scale had been made possible
by technological innovation. During the early 1930s, fascism was already
taking its toll, and it was clear to Benjamin and the other members of the
Frankfurt School that the immediate future had little good to offer. How
could one retain any faith in societal progress in these circumstances? On
the run from the Nazis and disillusioned by years of setbacks and failures,
Benjamin committed suicide in 1940.
Benjamin gave an important impulse to dialectical materialist criticism
of art and culture. He did not reduce artworks to mere *ideology (that is, to
a mere reflection or legitimation of an economic base) or to expressions of
the class position of their makers. Instead, he analysed how human percep-
tion and consciousness, as part of the superstructure, have been shaped
by material – and especially technological – developments. Innovations
such as cars, newspapers, radio, or movies had led to qualitative changes
in our perception of time and space, he argued. Thus, he unambiguously
positioned himself in the Hegelian tradition which sees consciousness as
historically determined, and he rejected the naive empiricist belief in the
existence of an unchanging ‘pure perception’. This belief also explains
his interest in surrealist experiments with perception in the visual arts
and in Marcel Proust’s literary exploration of involuntary memory – not
to mention his own exercises in avant-garde prose and experiments with
hallucinatory drugs.
The most famous statement of Benjamin’s aesthetic beliefs is undoubtedly
the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, written under
difficult circumstances in 1936 while Benjamin was living in Paris. He was
fleeing the Nazis and did not even have the hundred francs he needed to renew
his identity papers. In a letter to Horkheimer, he noted the irony of his financial
difficulties, given that his work was politically relevant as never before. In the
preface to his essay, he described this political relevance as follows: ‘the fol-
lowing concepts, here introduced into art theory for the first time, differ from
more familiar ones in that they are quite useless for the purposes of fascism.
They can, on the other hand, be used to formulate revolutionary demands in

54 W. Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 266.

224  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Walter Benjamin

the politics of art.’55 When Horkheimer published a French translation of the

essay in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, however, he deleted this preface.
It was only to be printed in the German version, which did not appear until
after the Second World War, long after Benjamin’s death in 1940.
Benjamin consciously placed his essay against the background of rising
Nazism. Despite the impression its title may give, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction is not a conservative cultural criticism of
the increasing influence of technological processes on the creation and
perception of art. On the contrary, Benjamin considered the Romantic
notions on which conservative critiques are based – such as ‘creative genius’
and ‘value for eternity’ – to be outdated, realizing all too well how these

55 W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. J.A. Underwood (tr.)
(London, 2008), pp. 2-3.
Critical Theory 225

notions could be abused for fascist purposes. In the Romantic view, a work
of art is something unique and unrepeatable, as it is obviously impossible
to paint an exact copy of the Mona Lisa or to play Bach’s Art of the Fugue
twice in exactly the same manner. It is this unrepeatable character – or what
Benjamin called the artwork’s *aura or its ‘here and now’ – that on romantic
accounts gives the work of art its value. The emergence of technological
means of reproduction such as photography, film, and the gramophone,
however, allowed for artworks to be reproduced an arbitrary number of times
in perfectly identical form. This reproducibility, Benjamin argued, destroys
the work’s aura, but one should not feel sorry about this destruction, since
it makes possible a radically different experience of art.
Many nineteenth-century authors treat art as a secularized ritual that is
aesthetic rather than religious in character and which involves the creation of
new myths. The aura is an essential aspect of this quasi-religious view of art.
In the bourgeois concept of *art for art’s sake, which gained ground during the
nineteenth century, art therefore has no other or higher purpose than itself.
According to Benjamin, it is exactly this bourgeois conception of art as a
ritual that was challenged by new technologies. Technological reproduction,
he argued, destroys the artwork’s aura and thereby its foundation in ritual,
making a new foundation in politics possible. This new connection of art
and technology changes the artist as well as the place of art, the audience,
and also the character of the artwork itself. Hence, the art theoretician’s
attention should shift away from the artwork itself to the space between
the work and the audience, and it is in this intermediate space that the
political potential sought by Benjamin can be found.
According to Benjamin, it was precisely because of their technological
reproducibility, and thanks to new techniques of editing and visualization,
that new media such as film and gramophone records could lead to new ways
of perceiving. Film is a popular art, he wrote, but thanks to technologically
created effects, it could make the masses critical and progressive. Thus, even
if the masses may have rejected Picasso’s avant-gardist paintings during
the 1930s, at the same time they embraced the movies of Charlie Chaplin,
who was politically and artistically just as innovative and progressive. The
editing techniques of Chaplin’s movie Modern Times (1936), for example,
make visible the dehumanizing effects of mass industrial production.
In Benjamin’s view, the Nazi cult of the glorification and aestheticization
of violence was no more than an extreme form of the bourgeois ideal of art
for art’s sake, which sees the aesthetic experience as the highest achievement
in a secularized world. He argued that communism responds to the fascist
tendency to aestheticize politics by politicizing art.
226  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Benjamin’s line of argument may seem somewhat outdated, but his ap-
proach implies a series of questions and ways of seeing that are still relevant
today. It implies a critique of aesthetic approaches that restricts its attention
to the work of art itself. Despite his interest in language and aesthetics,
however, Benjamin emphatically remained within the tradition of the
philosophy of consciousness, which sees language as merely a manifestation
of our inner being. He was interested in the area between the production
and consumption of art and in the question of how economic aspects of
art production partly determine how the work of art constitutes or steers
our perceptions – both subjects that remain timely to this very day. In our
modern society, both elite culture and mass culture are more subjected
to the laws of the capitalist market than ever before and are increasingly
created via new media.
Benjamin’s ideas live on primarily in literary and cultural theory but
have also taken root elsewhere. Thus, Benedict Anderson (1936-2015), one
of the most famous and important contemporary social-scientific scholars
of nationalism, based his view of nations as *imagined communities on
Benjamin’s work, in particular his idea that technology and the means
of production may shape perception. Anderson argued that the modern
nation is an ‘imagined community’ in so far as it is part of the popula-
tion’s consciousness. But this imaginary of the nation is made possible
by the technology of printing, which allows for the production of books
and periodicals in the vernacular language, thereby helping to create this
sense of community. Printing technology, however, functions within a
market that is directed primarily toward the bourgeoisie, that is, within a
capitalist mode of production. Hence, Anderson characterized this process
in emphatically Marxist terms as *print capitalism. Put differently, print
capitalism constitutes the material (that is, technological and economic)
base, while the imagined community of the nation constitutes the ideal, or
ideological, superstructure of national consciousness that is made possible
by this base.

8.4b Theodor Adorno

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), whose work is in many respects closely related

to Benjamin’s, was born and educated in Frankfurt, where he studied phi-
losophy, psychology, musicology, and sociology. Subsequently, he studied
composition with Arnold Schönberg’s pupil Alban Berg in Vienna. During
the 1930s, he worked in Berlin and Frankurt, maintaining close contacts
with such intellectuals as Horkheimer, Benjamin, and Brecht as well as
Critical Theory 227

the composer Kurt Weill. Due to his thorough theoretical knowledge of

and practical experience with both composing and performing classical
music, Adorno has remained an authority in musicology to this day. More
generally, he made fundamental contributions to the development of a
social and aesthetic theory that is both critical and materialist. The critical
aspect of his work lies in his belief that social science is and should in the
first place be a critique of existing societal relations. Its materialist aspect
lies in his use of Marxist dialectical materialist notions of cultural and
aesthetic theory. At the same time, however, Adorno’s roots were in Ger-
man nineteenth-century bourgeois literary and musical culture. It is this
combination that leads him to try to overcome the radical rupture in German
civilization marked by the rise of Nazism. As his student Albrecht Wellmer
put it: ‘Adorno made it possible in Germany once more to be intellectually,
morally and aesthetically of the present, without hating Kant, Hegel, Bach,
Beethoven, Goethe or Hölderlin’.56
Just like Benjamin, Adorno saw society in dialectical terms, that is, as
an unstable field of irreconcilable contradictions in ideas and interests.
Unlike classical Marxists, however, Adorno refused to see the proletariat
as the proper subject of revolution. He argued that the experience of Nazi
Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union shows how easily the masses can be
mobilized for purposes that do not serve their emancipation or real interests.
Hence, the critical social and cultural theory he proposed is self-consciously
as elitist as it is progressive, and Adorno saw himself as a member – if not
the embodiment – of a counter-elite.
The most famous statement of this elitist critical social theory is Dialec-
tics of Enlightenment (1947), written together with Horkheimer. This work
amounts to a radical critique of the Kantian ‘Enlightenment project’, that
is, of the hope to improve the fate of humanity with the aid of reason and
science. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Nazi Germany was not a
temporary or contingent deviation from an otherwise admirable Enlighten-
ment project but an inevitable consequence of tendencies that were already
implicit in that project itself. It is, after all, in modern industrial societies
based on Enlightenment ideals that Kantian reason has been reduced to
a purely instrumental way of thinking in the intellectual sphere; in the
cultural sphere, increasing commercialization has undermined art; and in
the societal sphere, human interests have been subordinated to economic
considerations. Thus, despite its own intentions, the Enlightenment project

56 A. Wellmer, Endgames: The Irreconcilable Nature of Modernity. D. Midgley (tr.) (Cambridge,

MA, 1998), p. 253.
228  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

appears not to lead to freedom, progress, and emancipation but on the

contrary to new forms of domination and barbarism, which may even
escalate to totalitarianism. Hence, one should not identify scientific and
technological progress with societal and cultural improvement.
Adorno thus had a rather more negative opinion than Benjamin of the
status, function, and potential of art in a modern industrial society based
on capitalist relations of production. For Adorno, the technological products
of mass culture were no more than sops, which do not in the least enable
listeners to develop a critical consciousness. What he called the *culture
industry offers mere entertainment, which reduces music to a mere com-
modity and offers the audience an escape from the routines of everyday
life. Adorno emphatically distinguished the mass art of popular music or
‘light music’ (Unterhaltungsmusik) from the elitist art or ‘serious music’.
Popular music appeals to what is already known and stimulates the
passive, unthinking consumption of culture due to its stereotypical structure
and content. Its ubiquitous broadcasting by technological media such as
radio and gramophone records allows it to exclude any alternatives and to
present itself as inevitable. In this respect, even music, that most abstract
and least representational of all art forms, may be ideological. On the radio,
in supermarkets, while being ‘on hold’ at telephonic help-desks, on electronic
alarm clocks, or as ringtones, we can hear pop melodies or muzak versions
of classical music everywhere. As mass art, Adorno argued, this music has
an ideological function in its omnipresence, simplicity, and thoughtlessness:
it both masks and reaffirms the existing social order and relations. Popular
music sedates its audience by distracting its thoughts from its societal
existence, thereby affirming and reproducing existing societal relations
and disguising society’s wrongs rather than showing its contradictions
and disharmonies. In its fetishistic attitude to light music as a commodity,
the audience in turn undergoes a ‘regression’ in its listening, which is not a
return to an undeveloped stage of music appreciation but a ‘forcibly retarded’
rejection of everything that is complex or ‘different’.
Serious music, by contrast, demands the listener’s active involvement and
cooperation. It encourages critical thinking and exposes the hidden tensions,
conflicts, and contradictions in society, thus revealing the unpleasant
social reality in all its contradictoriness and dissonance. For Adorno, the
prototype of such deliberately unharmonious and non-ideological elite
art is the avant-gardist twelve-tone or atonal music of Arnold Schönberg
(1874-1951) and the so-called second Viennese school inspired by the latter.
Thus, critical theory is linked to an extremely negative judgment concern-
ing virtually all forms of cultural production and consumption of the present,
Critical Theory 229

Arnold Schönberg conducts one of his compositions in Vienna. (From Die Sonntagszeit, 7-4-1913)

and of many products from the past. Later generations were to find fault
with Adorno for taking things to extremes, as in his attitude towards jazz,
a genre nowadays generally seen as one of the most significant American
art forms of the twentieth century. In the 1930s, jazz, which had originated
in African-American circles, was dismissed in America as ‘brothel music’
but appreciated among the European *avant-garde in literature and visual
art, among other reasons because it was seen as the artistic embodiment
of the industrial era. Moreover, jazz had the reputation of being not only
artistically but also politically progressive. Adorno, however, saw jazz music
as a commercial imitation of primitive entertainment music posing as
art music by introducing syncopated rhythmns and quasi-spontaneous
improvisations. This rejection is all the more remarkable because it comes
perilously close to the contemporaneous Nazi rejection of jazz as Negermusik,
even if it was based on entirely different grounds.
It would be unfair, however, to brush aside Adorno as merely a German
elitist or mandarin, since he did not base his judgment on racial theories
230  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

still popular in his days but on musicological and materialist considerations.

Hence, Adorno’s modernism is an uneasy combination of nineteenth-century
bourgeois German cultural conservatism and a dialectical materialist
continuation of Enlightenment ideals. He realized that both the societal
ideals of the Enlightenment and the aesthetic ideals of German nineteenth-
century Romanticism had been seriously discredited by Nazism, a realization
that was most tersely expressed in his famous remark: ‘After Auschwitz,
no poetry is possible anymore.’ For Adorno, the Nazi destruction of Jews,
Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and others amounted to the
destruction of modernity and of everything that is human and optimistic
about Enlightenment ideals.
As we may expect from a practitioner of critical theory, Adorno’s work
offers both scientific analyses and explicit normative evaluations. Thus,
he has little use for Weber’s thesis of value-free science. For him, the social
sciences should aim to show the contradictions in existing societies and
hence, empirical inquiries should be inextricably linked to a normative
vision of a radical alternative.
These beliefs about the aim and function of the social sciences are
diametrically opposed to those of Popper. Towards the end of the 1960s,
Adorno and Popper even conducted a debate about these aims and functions,
which came to be known as the Positivismusstreit (*positivism debate). This
term, however, is somewhat confusing, since Adorno’s criticisms were not
directed against the logical positivists but against Popper, who himself also
rejected positivism and the empiricist idea that science proceeds from pure
experience (see § 3.3). Thus, the clash between Adorno’s critical theory and
Popper’s critical rationalism did not primarily concern the methods of the
social sciences but rather their aims and, by extension, the societal role of
science. Adorno and his followers criticized the restricted, apolitical attitude
of ‘positivist’ (or, perhaps more appropriately called, liberal) views of science,
which put scientific knowledge in the service of existing relations of power
and production and refrained from thinking critically about its character
or goal. This already shows that political opinions played an important
role in this debate. According to Popper, however, the contemporary world,
whatever its shortcomings, was the best that mankind had ever known.
Adorno refused to pass such a positive and optimistic judgment, as he
considered it incomprehensible that a society that had produced Auschwitz
deserved such a compliment.
Clearly, Adorno’s radical elitism was inspired by the horrors of the
twentieth century. Apart from this historical background, however, the
epistemological question remains whether this critical attitude may still be
Critical Theory 231

reconciled with a descriptively adequate approach to social realities. In other

words, does Adorno’s sociology of music do justice to the numerous listeners
who have not had the privilege of engaging in academic musicological
study and lack the time, leisure, or background knowledge to subject the
music they listen to or play to a thorough analysis? Hence, some critics see
Adorno’s work as little more than a conservative cultural criticism posing
as sociological analysis.
Adorno was as pessimistic about the effects of technology and the culture
industry on the consciousness of the masses as Benjamin was optimistic
about the potential of technology to change the societal role of art. Despite
their disagreements, both authors called attention to the role of technologi-
cal, economic, and other material factors in the creation and consumption
of culture, taking a principled position against Romantic and humanist
views of art as the realm of individual consciousness or of creative genius.
Nonetheless, Adorno revealed his roots in Romantiicsm with his belief
that contemporary mass culture imposes a false consciousness on the
listener whereas the performance of genuine works of art yields a moment
of individual and non-social authenticity in which both the performer and
the listener may be ‘themselves’. This moment embodies what Adorno called
the ‘truth in music’. Authentic music, he argued, is as related to kitsch as
truth is related to falsehood. The cultural and philosophical postmodernism
that will be discussed in chapter 11 may be seen as rejecting this final hope
of Adorno’s as illusory.

8.5 Jürgen Habermas

The rise to prominence of Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929) marked the emergence
of a new postwar generation of the Frankfurt School. Whereas dialectical ma-
terialism had provided the framework for the critical theory of Horkheimer
and the other members of the Frankfurt School who had started publishing
already before the war, Habermas gradually turned away from this founda-
tion after a sojourn in the United States, and in particular from 1981 on,
when his two-volume study Theory of Communicative Action appeared. In
this work, he provides a new framework for theories that should meet the
three tasks of a critical theory mentioned above on the basis of the analytical
philosophy of language of Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle, and Sellars rather
than on dialectical materialist thought as inspired by Hegel and Marx.
Habermas has three objections against dialectics. First, it is linked to
an absolutist notion of truth that should be considered outdated now that,
232  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

due to Popper, it has become common practice to view scientific knowledge

as fallible and provisional. Second, the normative justification given by
dialectical critical theory no longer meets contemporary standards in
this area. And third, the development of the Frankfurt School showed the
practical difficulties that those who retain a dialectical framework run
into. In the final phase of their development, Adorno and Horkheimer
considered art to be the only arena in which the necessary societal change
could be brought about, no longer leaving any role for social movements
that could push for real change. In other words, critical theory fails in all of
the three tasks it has set itself. With respect to all three tasks, Habermas’s
diagnosis is the same: the reason for their shortcomings should be sought
in the dialectical method and its philosophy of consciousness.
From these criticisms, Habermas does not draw the conclusion that the
very notion of a critical theory should be given up. On the contrary, he wants
to retain it and tries to provide a new framework to replace the philosophy
of consciousness and dialectics in which the abovementioned tasks can
be fulfilled simultaneously. He believes he can provide such a framework
with his theory of communicative action, which is a theory of action aimed
at answering Georg Simmel’s Kantian question of how societies are possible
at all. How is the community we know as ‘society’ constituted? How are the
countless actions that humans perform every day mutually coordinated?
Habermas initially distinguishes two types of mutual adjustment, or
coordination, of actions. First, this coordination may be achieved through
the mutual adjustment of the orientations of their actions (Handlungsorien-
tierungen) of those involved. In this case, Habermas speaks of *communica-
tive action. The relation of speaker and hearer yields a model for this kind of
adjustment: by uttering a sentence, the speaker assumes a position in a world
he shares with his hearer. For example, when he says ‘Ronald Reagan was
a crook’, he is assuming that the hearer is familiar with this former movie
star and U.S. president. According to Habermas, in communicative action,
speakers seeking mutual understanding and agreement accept or assume
the obligation to provide further explication of their claims when necessary
and to revise what they have said in the light of criticism by the hearers.
By contrast, actors who see themselves as free from such obligations
treat their hearers as unfree or under tutelage and appear not to be oriented
towards understanding and consensus but to have other effects in mind.
Habermas argues that they use a second way of coordinating actions, namely
by engaging in *strategic rather than communicative action: they seek to
realize their individual aims, regardless of whether these are achieved at
the expense of the aims and interests of others.
Critical Theory 233

Habermas characterizes communicative action as follows: anyone seeking

to create or reach mutual understanding and agreement counterfactually
presupposes an ‘ideal speech situation’ of power-free communication, in
which all speakers can equally dispute the claims to truth, correctness, and
veracity at stake in the speech acts that are exchanged. In the same vein as
Wilfrid Sellars (see § 4.1c), Habermas thus describes communicative action
as a practice of giving and asking for reasons. Speakers derive the persuasive
force of what they say from the possibility that their claims are disputed,
hence any consensus that emerges under such circumstances is by definition
rational. Where the conditions of the ideal speech situation are not fulfilled,
by contrast, persuasion must be achieved by other, non-rational means.
Habermas does not say that communicative action is irreducibly linguistic
but rather proposes to model relations between actors in general on those
between speakers and hearers. In doing so, one will quickly discover that
any communicative action can take place only against the background of
an acknowledged consensus. For this background, Habermas uses the term
*lifeworld, clearly alluding to Gadamer’s notion of a ‘horizon’ as that which
implicitly stands at the basis of all understanding.
The mutual coordination of actions may also be achieved in another
manner, however. In strategic action, this coordination is not achieved via
action orientations but rather through the effects of actions. The exemplary
situation for this case is the market, in which all actors involved are geared
toward realizing their own individual interests. Under the pressure of
scarcity, buyers and sellers coordinate their actions according to the laws
of supply and demand. In other words, the coordination of actions does
not arise from rational consensus but rather on grounds of anonymous
economic regularities – that is, it arises via *system mechanisms. Hence,
societal life becomes possible because actions may be coordinated either via
orientations with respect to the shared lifeworld or via system mechanisms.
Every actual society, Habermas argues, involves a particular configuration
of these two coordination principles.
The distinction between the lifeworld and system mechanisms allows
Habermas to distinguish three kinds of developments in society: either the
lifeworld may change, or the system may change, or the relation between the
lifeworld and the system may change. According to him, a proper under-
standing of the trajectory of modern Western society must consider each
of these three developments. In the first place, the complexity of its system
increases in the course of a society’s history: the coordination of actions
through system mechanisms, that is, becomes increasingly complex. Second,
the structure of the lifeworld becomes increasingly differentiated when
234  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

more and more domains of action (Handlungsbereiche) are opened up for

rational discussion: that is, a rationalization of the lifeworld occurs. Whereas
in preceding periods, consensus had been founded in largely sacral terms,
it now becomes possible for agreement to emerge in and through secular
communicative processes. Whereas in earlier times, citing the Scriptures
may have served as a warrant, in a secular, individualistic society individuals
are inclined to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to normative claims that are at stake in action
themselves. Following Durkheim, Weber, and Marx, Habermas is thus a
*secularist concerning modernity. The third development concerns the
distance between the lifeworld and the system. Chains of actions become
longer and increasingly complex, and as a consequence the orientations
of our actions and their consequences grow further and further apart. As
a result, the lifeworld and the system not only become differentiated and
more complex themselves, but they also become increasingly disconnected.
The differentiation of the lifeworld puts the mutual coordination of
actions increasing at risk. Hence, in the lifeworld, so-called *media appear
that are aimed at reducing these risks. Habermas distinguishes four kinds
of media. Two of them – influence and value orientation – remain linked
to consensus and the assent of those involved; the other two – money and
power – become institutionalized in the economy and the state, respec-
tively. Action that is coordinated through the latter two media is no longer
oriented towards reaching consensus but towards strategic aspects, that
is, towards the consequences of actions, namely the success of power and
the use of money, respectively. Through the media of power and money,
system mechanisms may thus penetrate the lifeworld. Habermas accordingly
speaks of the *colonization of the lifeworld by the system, in which system
mechanisms start constraining the coordination of communicative action.
Some claims are no longer up for discussion; in this case, we can speak of
*structural violence.
The theory of communicative action enables Habermas to formulate
a critique of Weber’s theory of rationalization. His critique is not based
on the discovery of new facts; Habermas did not conduct new historical
research himself. In part, he is inspired by Adorno’s vision of the Dialectic
of Enlightenment, which is far more pessimistic concerning the process of
rationalization than Weber had been. The theory of communicative action
looks at familiar facts from another perspective and aims to show that what
was a necessary development for Weber is in fact only one of many possible
lines of development. The importance of this novel perspective thus lies in
the fact that it enables Habermas to re-assess the process of rationalization
in Western modernity.
Critical Theory 235

On the basis of his theory, Habermas criticizes the one-sided way in

which rationalization had earlier been conceptualized and he reinterprets
a number of negative consequences of this process. The loss of freedom, for
example, which Weber saw as the inevitable consequence of rationalization,
is seen by Habermas in a rather different light. For him, this loss is not a
consequence of the rationalization of the lifeworld but rather an effect of
the colonization of the lifeworld by the system. Unlike Weber, therefore,
Habermas does not hold the emergence of one new type of action – that is,
goal-rational action – responsible for all problems of modernity. Instead, his
diagnosis lies at the level of the coordination of actions. The rationalization
of the lifeworld has also made possible its mediatization, which has in its
turn transformed into colonization of the lifeworld by the system. Through
the media of money and power, system mechanics have penetrated both the
public sphere and private life, thus interfering with the symbolic reproduc-
tion of the lifeworld.
With Habermas, critical theory has established a solid position in the
academic world. Nowadays, he is among the most widely quoted philo-
sophical and social-scientific authors. The political importance of his work
is no longer expressed by its relation with particular movements, which
had always been an uneasy one in earlier critical theory; rather, it lies in
his attempts to defend the secular project of Enlightenment, that is, an
emancipation that should comprise both societal and scientific progress.
During the 1980s, Habermas defended this project against postmodern
skepticism in particular (cf. chapter 11). In more recent decades, he has
defended the Western Enlightenment project against new forms of national-
ism and xenophobia and has pleaded for a united Europe based on – and
legitimized by – a European constitution. He has also reflected on what he
calls the *postsecular society in which religious claims persist or arise in a
secularized environment, providing new challenges and opportunities for
a dialogue between the claims of reason and of faith. Habermas conducts
much of these debates outside strictly academic circles. A large part of his
later publications consists of contributions to German newspapers and
periodicals.

Summary

− Hegel described human history in terms of the dialectical development

of spirit. Marx saw the dialectic of economic relations, or class struggle,
as the motor of history.
236  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

− Lukács saw the modern novel as an ideological reflection of the rise of

the bourgeoisie. Voloshinov argued that consciousness can arise only
through language or signs, the latter being intersubjective and inherently
dialectical in character.
− According to Bakhtin, heteroglossia, or the plurality in styles and
registers, is irreconcilable with any formalist linguistics. In his view,
the modern novel is characterized by polyphony and therefore cannot
be judged in the terminology of classical poetics. Some literary works
are carnivalesque in so far as they express a subversive popular culture.
− Gramsci distinguished cultural, linguistic, and/or ideological hegemony
from political domination. He called non-hegemonic classes and cultural
expressions subaltern.
− In the face of Nazism, Benjamin and Adorno tried to maintain mod-
ernism, the avant-garde, and a belief in progress. Both applied Marx’s
dialectical materialist notions to the study of cultural phenomena.
Benjamin analysed the effects of technological media such as film
on cultural production and on perception. According to Adorno, the
capitalist culture industry reduces works of art to mere entertainment
products.
− The positivism debate between Adorno and Popper concerned the
question of whether the social sciences should restrict themselves to
the critical testing of their own hypotheses or should also criticize the
social reality they study. According to Adorno, critical social theory
should proceed from a vision, or ideal, of the right or just society.
− Habermas reformulates critical theory in terms of a theory of com-
municative action. Such action, he argues, presupposes a common
lifeworld, but the role of this lifeworld is increasingly being colonized
by the system mechanisms of money and power.
9 Positivism and Structuralism

9.1 Introduction

Positivism and structuralism are in many respects the direct opposite of the
interpretative or hermeneutic approaches discussed in chapter 7, and they
also reject the teleological philosophy of consciousness that characterized
some of the dialectical approaches discussed in chapter 8. Instead, they
proceed from the belief that the social and human sciences should follow the
same approach as the natural sciences, and that conducting serious scientific
research should hence be oriented towards observations that can be publicly
checked or towards the formal features of the object being investigated.
In this manner, they reject the idea that ‘subjective meanings’ deserve a
special place in the humanities or social sciences. Scientists who believe
that understanding is a useful tool are free to utilize it, on the condition
that the hypotheses they have formed formed on the basis of understanding
are tested in the manner that has proved its value in the natural sciences.
For this reason, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was to call positivist and
structuralist approaches *objectivist, as distinct from the *subjectivism of
interpretative methods (cf. § 10.4).
As remarked above, hermeneutic scholars do not accept this restricted and
purely heuristic role for understanding. They point out that the humanities
and social sciences study a reality that is already interpreted. Moreover,
they see nothing enigmatic or unreliable in interpretation, as it is an activ-
ity that all humans continuously engage in, if not a central feature of the
human condition. Positivists and structuralists are not impressed by such
claims. They argue that important developments in the sciences have been
achieved by explicitly abstracting away from everyday interpretations of
phenomena, as Galileo already emphasized. Hence, the French sociologist
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917) argued that scientifically controlled experience
should be guiding for the social sciences rather than the concepts shaped
outside of science and for needs entirely unscientific. Thus, scientists should
free themselves from ‘those fallacious notions which hold sway over the
mind of the ordinary person’.57 According to positivists, researchers in the
humanities and social sciences enter an unknown world just as natural
scientists do and must leave their everyday prejudices behind at the gates
of science.

57 E. Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method. S. Lukes (tr.) (London, 1982), p. 29.
238  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

*Positivism emerged in the early nineteenth century. Its most important

representative at that time was Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He argued that
only empirical science can yield genuine knowledge and that knowledge
claims based on tradition, metaphysics, or religious revelation are inferior.
In the course of history, these different knowledge claims appeared in three
consecutive stages: religion, metaphysics, and science. Self-consciously,
Comte positioned himself and his scientific sociology as the final stage in
this development.
In a number of respects, positivism seems to relapse into what Foucault
called the classical épistémè and hence into pre-Kantian philosophy, since
it does not appear to see the representation of the world as a problem and
since the limitations of knowledge do not form an explicit theme, in contrast
to the modern épistémè. These appearances are deceptive, however. Positiv-
ists only see representation as unproblematic in so far as it is achieved by
means of the right method, which in practice amounts to being accepted by
people with the right scientific means and attitude – that is, by the scientific
community. It is precisely for this reason, incidentally, that positivism has
been important for the establishment and *professionalization of various
other disciplines. Unlike men of letters, journalists, or scholarly amateurs,
professional scientific researchers have the means available to appeal to
objective facts, and for this reason, positivists claim, they possess a unique
authority.
Whereas positivists accept scientific representation based on experience
as unproblematic, they are skeptical about non-scientific (for example, reli-
gious) representations, or even reject them as unreliable. For the structuralist
and positivist human and social sciences, they argue, such representations
are clearly not a source of knowledge, although they can form an object of
research. As we will see below, Durkheim’s descriptions and explanations of
religious and other non-scientific representations implicitly and explicitly
appeal to a Kantian thematic: he posed the Kantian question of how such
non-scientific representations are possible at all. Here, however, this question
is phrased as an empirical matter rather than an epistemological inquiry
into the justification of knowledge. The answer, as we shall see, is sought
in terms of social structures.
By *structuralism, we usually mean the current in anthropology and
literary theory inspired by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-
1913), who described language as an autonomous structure. More generally,
structuralism may be characterized as the belief that social phenomena can
be explained in terms of structures or givens that stand outside the subject
and may accordingly be called ‘objective.’ According to Saussure, language is
Positivism and Struc tur alism 239

such a structure, but also other social institutions such as religions, money,
and nation-states may be and have been seen as structures. Hence, in this
chapter, we will use the term ‘structuralism’ in a somewhat broader sense
than is usually done.
The notion of ‘structure’ acquired a prominent place in the social sciences
only towards the end of the nineteenth century, when it was introduced by
Durkheim in his 1895 treatise The Rules of Sociological Method. The concept’s
earlier biological connotations are echoed in Durkheim’s discussion of not
only social structures but also the ‘morphology’ and ‘anatomy’ of social facts.
The structures referred to in structuralist social-scientific explanations are
inaccessible to the will of individual actors and may even be inaccessible
to individual consciousness. That is, the actors involved need not be aware
of the forces exerted on them. Perhaps these influences cannot even be
formulated in everyday terms. Indeed, many structuralists appear to engage
in explanations that are completely independent from, if not radically at
odds with, our everyday beliefs and intuitions.
In this chapter, we will discuss a number of these counterintuitive ex-
planations on the basis of Durkheim and Saussure’s work and subsequently
review the most important features and implications of structuralism in
anthropology and literary theory. We will not address the broader episte-
mological and methodological leanings of positivism in detail, since these
are largely based on the practice of the nineteenth-century natural sciences
that we already discussed in the chapters above. Just like classical empiri-
cism, however, nineteenth-century positivist beliefs about how scientific
knowledge is based on experience have increasingly appeared untenable
in the light of twentieth-century philosophical developments.

9.2 Émile Durkheim’s Sociology

Émile Durkheim has contributed to the establishment of sociology as a

distinct and autonomous discipline in several different ways. In addition
to his work on sociological method already mentioned above, he also
wrote a number of influential sociological analyses of suicide, primitive
or totemic religion, and the division of labour in modern industrial socie-
ties. Furthermore, he trained numerous students in this new science and
had a substantial influence on higher educational reforms in France. By
establishing an academic journal of his own, L’Année sociologique, which
started appearing in 1897, he could present and spread the ideas of his
school. His doctrines have exercised a major influence not only on sociology
240  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

but also anthropology (Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss) and on the

Annales school, an important current in French historiography (cf. § 13.5).
For years, Durkheim’s books and L’Année sociologique were obligatory – and
favourite – reading material for Annales school historians.
Durkheim is an heir to French positivism. His years of study in Paris
were primarily devoted to social and political philosophy, since at that time
sociology did not yet exist as either an academic discipline or a university
study. He developed an interest in Kantian epistemology and in Auguste
Comte’s positivism. As noted earlier, the latter had argued that the scientific
study of society should follow the methods of the natural sciences, and he
had also claimed that a science with an object of its own can be relatively
autonomous. Comte believed that he had laid the ultimate foundations
for the scientific study of society, for which he coined the term sociology.
Knowledge of this science, the highest in the hierarchy of sciences designed
by Comte, would enable administrators to formulate successful social and
political policies. Thus, according to Comte, sociology was better able than
either religion or tradition to guide the development of modern society and
to prevent or channel social unrest.
Durkheim reproduced Comte’s theses that methods used in the natural
sciences should provide the basis for the study of society and that such
knowledge should also be applied in policymaking. Moreover, he learned
from Comte that the domain of a science is relatively autonomous and
that it is therefore incorrect to seek biological explanations, for example,
for social phenomena. On this point, Durkheim even went beyond Comte,
since he had to distinguish sociology not only from biology but also from
a powerful new rival: psychology. Durkheim reproached his predecessor
for giving *idealist – or, as he called them, ‘ideological’ – explanations of
social facts, which risked reducing sociology to psychology. He was equally
skeptical about Comte’s tripartite division of the stages in the development
of knowledge and about his claim to have formulated the basic principles
of sociology. ‘A science cannot live and develop when it is reduced to one
single problem on which… a great mind has placed his seal,’ he wrote.58
Clearly, he believed that after Comte, there was still enough work to do.
Durkheim formulated his own basic principles in The Rules of Sociological
Method. His first and most fundamental methodological rule states: ‘social
facts are things, and should be treated as things’.59 It is this rule that allowed
Durkheim to treat sociology as an autonomous and independent discipline,

58 Ibid., p. 135.
59 Ibid., p. 29
Positivism and Struc tur alism 241

distinct from both biology and psychology. Moreover, this *realism with
respect to *social facts helped him to present sociology as a rigorous science
that proceeds not from subjective ideas but from ‘hard facts’. Durkheim
emphasized, however, that he was presenting a methodological rule here,
not an ontological doctrine:

One does not need to philosophize about the nature [of social facts] or
to discuss the analogies they present with phenomena of a lower order
of existence. Suffice to say that they are the sole datum afforded the
sociologist. A thing is in effect all that is given, all that is offered, or rather
imposing itself upon our observation. To treat phenomena as things is
to treat them as data, and this constitutes the starting point for science.
Social phenomena unquestionably display this characteristic. […] Social
phenomena must therefore be considered in themselves, detached from
the conscious beings who form their own mental representations of them.
They must be studied from the outside, as external things, because it is
in this guise that they present themselves to us. […] Even if in the end
social phenomena may not have all the features intrinsic to things, they
must at first be treated as if they had.60

In other words, Durkheim’s sociology rests on the methodological choice

to treat social facts as, in a sense, given. But what exactly are social facts?
Durkheim was the first who posed, and tried to answer, this question. The
existence of money, for example, is a social fact, just like the fact that in the
Netherlands the vast majority of the population have Dutch as their mother
tongue. According to Durkheim, such facts are as ‘objective’ as physical and
biological facts, but they possess two particular features. First, social facts
are external to, or independent of, the individual; and second, they possess a
certain coercive force. The currency with which I pay and the language that I
speak exist and function independently of my knowledge of them and of the
use I make of them. If I decide to ignore them or to make my own language
or money, I may expect different kinds of sanctions: I may be ignored,
marginalized, or excluded by others who view me as incomprehensible or
insane, or I may be imprisoned for being a counterfeiter.
Moreover, social facts are distinguished from physical and biological
phenomena such as breathing, which may not be discontinued with im-
punity, in that they consist of representations and actions – they involve
conventional ways of doing, thinking, and believing. That is, they rest

60 Ibid., p. 36-37.
242  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

essentially on individual mental representations, even if they cannot be

reduced to them, because they are in an important respect independent of
individual consciousness. They are borne not by the individual but by the
whole or at least a major part of a society. By contrast, psychological facts
like emotions or thoughts exclusively exist in individual consciousness.
Next, Durkheim generally defines ‘social facts’ as ‘any way of acting,
whether fixed or not, capable of exerting over the individual an external
constraint’, or ‘any way of acting which is general over the whole of a given
society whilst having an existence of its own, independent of its individual
manifestations’.61 The word that expresses this very special mode of being
rather well, he added, is *institution; thus, sociology is also the science of
institutions or institutional facts, and of their emergence and functioning.
Although societies consist of individual persons, they can no more be
reduced to them than the biological world can be reduced to chemistry. Even
though a living cell ultimately consists of lifeless matter, Durkheim wrote, it
nonetheless constitutes a reality of its own with its own features. The same
holds for the social realm: it is a reality of its own, as social phenomena
exist outside of the individual. This claim may mean one of two things: it
can either mean that social phenomena stand outside of each individual
in isolation or that they stand outside of all individuals taken together.
Durkheim emphasized that he meant the former. Time and again, he denied
turning societies into particular kinds of entities; he even wrote that ‘there
is nothing in society that is not in the consciousness of individuals’. For the
sociologist, however, this is of little importance. For each of the individuals
he might like to consult, social reality is external. Thus, institutions cannot
be clarified by introspection, and precisely for this reason, sociologists
should treat social phenomena as things.
Hence, Durkheim argued that sociologists should base their investiga-
tions on experience rather than on pre-scientifically formed concepts.
Immediately after proclaiming this, however, he added that, since experience
is subjective, the sociologist must look for objective representations of social
phenomena. After all, in the natural sciences temperature is not measured
by vague impressions but with the aid of instruments such as thermom-
eters. Likewise, sociologists should look for objective representations of
the phenomena they want to study. Consistent with his research project,
Durkheim found the required objective representations in collective customs
such as rules of law, popular sayings, and phenomena of social structure.
These, he argued, ‘do not change by means of the different applications

61 Ibid., p. 27.
Positivism and Struc tur alism 243

made of them, form a solid object, a constant measure at the disposal of

the observer, and… leave no room for subjective impressions and personal
experiences. Even adding that, a rule of law is what it is, it cannot be observed
in two different ways.’62 They are what Durkheim was later to call *collective
representations, that is, states of collective consciousness, as distinct from
individual consciousness.
Collective representations are social: individuals find them in the country
in which they were born and in the education they receive, both involuntar-
ily. Because of the prestige they enjoy, these representations also have a
coercive force. Further, collective representations function on two different
levels, in Durkheim’s view. First, they are representations of social reality for
the sociologist; and second, social reality is constituted by them. Durkheim
was not put off by this ambivalence: as a positivist, he claimed that those
who employ proper scientific methods can represent reality as it is.
A 1897 study on suicide was to prove the fertility of Durkheim’s perspec-
tive. The topic was a hit. Basing himself on statistics, Durkheim showed that
the way in which people think about suicide in everyday terms, namely as
an extreme form of individual action, produces a distortion of actual facts.
On closer inspection, each nation turns out to have its own suicide rate,
which is relatively constant over time. Thus, Durkheim explicitly distanced
himself from the commonsensical terms in which this topic is usually
discussed. Likewise, he consciously ignored the motivations that suicidal
individuals themselves provide for their actions. Instead, he used statistics.
With great sophistication, he employed these in trying to explain differ-
ences in suicide rates, which he believed should be sought in the differing
degrees of individuals’ social integration and of the regulation of social life
in different countries. In principle, this explanation can be formulated in
the form of a deductive-nomsological or hypothetical-deductive model, as
is usual in the natural sciences (cf. § 3.3).
Many social facts thus consist of more or less stable and conventional-
ized – that is, institutionalized – beliefs and actions, but there are also more
ephemeral social facts that are not institutionally organized on a more
permanent basis. Various kinds of collective action and social movements –
including the celebration of sports or war victories, protest demonstrations,
and in particular spontaneous events such as political revolts and soccer
riots – are short-lived and more or less unorganized. They need not originate
or endure in any one individual consciousness, and their course can hardly
if at all be guided or controlled by individuals. Although individuals may

62 Ibid., p. 23-4.
244  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

have the illusion that they themselves have created an in-group feeling or
collective behaviour, they are in fact guided by it, Durkheim argued, rather
than guiding it. Hence, social facts and their coercive force on the individual
may go hand in hand with a subjective feeling of individual liberty and
autonomous action. Durkheim thus did not philosophically reject the idea of
free will, he merely took the methodological position that individual factors
and individual liberty are irrelevant for social-scientific explanations.

9.2a Sociology of Religion and Sociology of Knowledge

These methodological choices and considerations allowed Durkheim to

define sociology as an autonomous discipline with its own object of study
and its own norms of what constitutes an adequate explanation. A brief
discussion of Durkheim’s work on primitive religion may help to clarify
these methods and may also help to uncover the Kantian assumptions
that inform his work.
At first blush, religion seems to be a moral, metaphysical, or individual
psychological phenomenon rather than a social one. Religious beliefs and
doctrines are concerned with the order and purpose of creation or the
cosmos, the character of the creator or highest being, and the proper conduct
of the individual striving for liberation or redemption. Yet, for Durkheim,
worshipping the higher or the supernatural is not essential for religion as
a social phenomenon – after all, some religions such as Buddhism have
no notion of a divinity or creator in the first place. What is essential, he
continued, is the fact that every religion strictly distinguishes between the
sacred and the profane. The sacred or holy is a separate domain of things
and one that should remain separate. When ordinary mortals do come into
contact with sacred things, the latter risk becoming defiled and order must
be restored, for example by performing a purification ritual. Examples of
this are the Indian caste system with its ritual of untouchability and the
treatment of cows as sacred animals by Hindus.
Religion divides things into the sacred and the profane, and as such, it is
a principle of classification. The strict subdivision of humans and objects is
simultaneously a mental process of *categorization and a social process that
subdivides humans into societal ‘classes’. Categories of thought are therefore
not only cognitive ordering principles, they also contribute to maintaining
social order because they assign all individuals a fixed position.
Durkheim illustrated this idea by means of the totemistic religion of the
Australian Aboriginals. He used this religion because he believed it was ‘the
most primitive and simple religion which is actually known’ and accordingly
Positivism and Struc tur alism 245

shows the social origins of all religions most clearly.63 This view of socially
‘primitive’ forms of religion as also methodologically ‘elementary’ rests on
a typically nineteenth-century belief in linear progress, a principle that has
since proved to be debatable if not dubious. In addition to this evolutionary
way of thinking, another relevant factor is the fact that Durkheim based
his analyses exclusively on ethnographic materials that had already been
collected and interpreted by others. He himself never set foot on Australian
soil.
Australian Aboriginal society, Durkheim writes, is divided into clans
or groups whose members consider themselves to be a family not because
they are biologically related but because they bear the same clan name. This
name, however, also refers to a so-called totem: a particular species of plant
or animal. Totemic animals are sacred and may not be killed or eaten by
clan members; instead, they are ritually worshipped. Durkheim argued that
this distinguishing and worshipping of specific totemic animals reflects the
distinction of the clans associated with them; thus, the ordering of things
reflects the ordering of people. As a result of sociological analysis, the classes
of objects in nature distinguished by Aboriginals turn out to correspond
precisely with the groups from which their own society is composed. Hence,
Durkheim concluded, the mental categories with which the Aboriginals
order the observable world do not have their origin in observation or, as
Kant thought, in the a priori structure of human thought but in the structure
of their society.
According to Durkheim, the social function of religion does not consist of
individual salvation but of maintaining social order – and with it, moral and
cognitive order. Religious rituals and ceremonies serve to worship existing
sacred objects as distinct from the everyday or the profane, and hence they
affirm and reproduce both the cognitive and the social order. Through
rituals, Durkheim concluded, society worships itself. In this view, primitive
religion rests upon an illusion, and yet it plays an important constructive
role in maintaining social order and cohesion. Modern industrial society
is characterized by the loss of such traditional social binding forces, as
religion can no longer fulfil its traditional social function. Thus, we will have
to introduce other means of securing social cohesion and of overcoming
the negative consequences of progress and modernization. According to
Durkheim, sociology can make an important contribution to this effort.

63 E. Durkheim, The Elementaray Forms of the Religious Life. J.W. Swain (tr.) (New York, 1965),
p. 1.
246  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

In his sociology of religion and knowledge, Durkheim thus gave a socio-

logical twist to Kantian epistemology. In doing so, however, he also effected
a change in Kant’s problematic. When Durkheim spoke of categories, he
was talking both about the way of thinking, understanding, or perceiving
and about the content of what is thought, understood, or perceived. Kant,
however, maintained a strict distinction between the contents of the mind
and the mind’s capacity to form such contents. Moreover, Kant’s problematic
is philosophical – that, is, conceptual and normative – in character in that
he was concerned with the question of how justified and objectively valid
knowledge is possible. Durkheim, by contrast, proceeded sociologically and
empirically. He presumed that the answer to the question of how scientific
(that is, objectively valid) knowledge is possible is supplied by positivist
doctrines. For beliefs other than those of scientific knowledge, however,
we can pose the Kantian question: how are the various forms of religious
belief possible? Durkheim found the answer to this question in a society’s
social structure and in the social function of the beliefs under investigation.
Thus, Durkheim treated scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking
*asymmetrically. Obviously, he realized that scientif ic knowledge also
requires social organization. He did not, however, account for the content of
such knowledge in terms of social structure. For him, the latter was related
only to the facts that were represented. The content of non-scientific forms
of thinking, however, can, like religious belief, be explained in terms of
social structure and function.
Until the 1960s, Durkheim’s asymmetrical treatment of scientific and
non-scientific beliefs remained largely uncontested. This changed, however,
under the impact of Kuhn’s work and the critique of positivism it implied.
Kuhn prompted sociologists of knowledge to start looking for sociological
interpretations and explanations of the ways in which distinctions are made
in the different sciences. In doing so, they drew a more radical conclusion
from Durkheim’s views and proposed a *symmetrical treatment of scientific
and non-scientific knowledge, as both should be equally investigated, they
argued, in terms of social processes. Accordingly, sociological studies of
various natural-scientific questions have appeared, such as Shapin and
Schaffer’s book on the Hobbes-Boyle debate (cf. § 2.1). Incidentally, sociologi-
cal studies of the humanities are much rarer.
Such sociological explanations of the content of scientific knowledge
are philosophically suspect, since they seem to confuse the normative
epistemological justification of knowledge with the causal and empirical
explanation of its origins. Sociologists of knowledge, in other words, are
accused of confusing the context of discovery and the context of justification.
Positivism and Struc tur alism 247

These sociologists, however, are not impressed by such criticisms. With some
justification, they point out that flourishing research programmes often
rest on assumptions that are philosophically naïve or debatable. Moreover,
Kuhn’s and others’ historicizing views of the development of science have
undermined the strict and unchanging division between both contexts.

9.3 Ferdinand de Saussure and General Linguistics

Just as Durkheim was concerned with establishing sociology as an autono-

mous discipline, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure tried to establish the
foundations for an independent science of general linguistics that cannot be
reduced to any other discipline. Initially, Saussure studied Indo-European
linguistics in Leipzig, at that time a stronghold of the Neogrammarians. At
the tender age of twenty-one, he published Mémoire sur le système primitif
des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878), according to many
one of the most important studies ever published in historical-comparative
linguistics. In this work, he presented the so-called laryngeal theory, which
explains the characteristics of a number of vowels in the Indo-European
languages by positing that the Proto-Indo-European language must have
had a number of particular phonemes – so-called laryngeals – that display
features of both vowels and consonants.
Several decades later, Saussure’s hypothesis was to receive empirical con-
firmation in a most spectacular way. In 1906, a number of vast archives with
clay tablets from the second millennium BC were discovered in Bogazkale
in present-day Turkey. Many of these cuneiform inscriptions, it appeared,
were written in Hittite, which not only is an early Indo-European language
but which also turned out to possess precisely the formal features – larynge-
als – that Saussure had postulated for Proto-Indo-European.
After this flying start, however, Saussure published very few studies. This
silence was in part due to his increasing dissatisfaction or unease with the
concepts and methods of contemporary linguistics. In 1894, he wrote to his
colleague Antoine Meillet:

For a long time I have been mainly concerned with the logical classifica-
tion of linguistic facts, and with classifying the perspective from which
we treat them; and I have become increasingly conscious of the enormous
amount of work that is needed to show linguists what they are actually
doing […] The complete inadequacy of existing terminology, and the neces-
sity of reforming it and showing what kind of an object language is, spoil
248  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

my pleasure in philology; but there is nothing I would be happier doing

than not having to think about the character of language in general.64

Because of this dissatisfaction, Saussure wrote little and published nothing

about his own ideas concerning general theoretical questions. During his
final years, however, he did give a series of lectures on what he called *general
linguistics at the University of Geneva. After his death, two colleagues
elaborated and systematized the notes his students had taken of the lectures
and compiled them in a book that appeared in 1916 with the title Course in
General Linguistics. It is this text that has brought Saussure lasting fame
that far exceeds the boundaries of linguistics. One could even argue that it
established a new paradigm in linguistics. The doctrines that Saussure de-
veloped create a distinct object of research for linguistics, present the norms
that observations must conform to in order to be scientifically relevant,
and formulate the criteria for what counts as an adequate explanation of
those observations. Moreover, it was soon to become a major influence on
many – though by no means all – linguists.
Course in General Linguistics opens by raising the question of what the
object of linguistics is. This object, Saussure argued, is not simply given. It is
not prior to any specific perspective on language but is constituted precisely
by such a perspective. What kind of an object, then, should linguistics
create in order to qualify as an autonomous discipline? The phenomena
with which linguistic research is concerned vary strongly between speakers
and over time. Moreover, they are also studied in various other disciplines
such as acoustics, psychology, ethnography, and philology. From each of
these perspectives, language seems an incoherent and chaotic collection
of heterogeneous elements.
In order to escape this chaos and to make language into a coherent and
concrete object of research, the linguist should, according to Saussure,
focus on the language system, or what he calls the *langue, and take this
as the norm of all concrete manifestations of speech or language use, that
is, utterances. In other words, the linguist should explicitly abstract away
from individual variation and from developments over time and recover
the structure that language forms at any given moment. The langue, or
language system, is thus by definition independent from speech, or what
Saussure called *parole. Nor can it be simply changed by individuals. Saus-
sure appeared to waver between a purely methodological and a realist
view of the notion of langue. It is not clear whether he considered this,

64 F. Saussure, Letter to Antoine Meillet, January 4, 1894.

Positivism and Struc tur alism 249

Ferdinand de Saussure

the ‘real and singular’ object of linguistics, an independently existing

entity of which the linguist should discover the essence, or merely as a
methodological auxiliary.
Regardless of such questions, Saussure argued that the langue is a system
of linguistic *signs. Such signs, he elaborated, have two sides or elements: the
*signifier (signifiant) and the *signified (signifié). These two are as inseparable
as the two sides of a sheet of paper. The signifier is the sound, or what Saus-
sure called the ‘acoustic image’, while the signified is the mental concept
linked to the sign. The signifier, however, is not a purely physical notion but
a sound, as part of a language system. Acoustically, no two utterances of a
word like cat are ever exactly alike: its pronunciation may show differences
in pitch, velocity, etc., or the consonant c may be pronounced aspirated or
unaspirated (i.e. with an accompanying ‘breath’) or somewhat further to
the front or back of the throat. However, for the recognition of the sound
of the English word cat – and hence, for the place of this word within the
English language system – such variations are irrelevant. For other language
systems, however, such differences do matter. Thus, in Georgian, it does
make a difference in meaning whether or not one pronounces voiceless
consonants like p, k, or t with or without aspiration, and in Arabic, the k
250  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

and the q (which is pronounced further to the back of the throat than the
k) yield different words (kalb = ‘dog’ and qalb = ‘heart’).
Saussure primarily discussed the signs of spoken language, but written
signs may be viewed in the same manner. Indeed, his description of how
signs function was intended to serve as the basis for a more general theory of
signs or, as he called it, *semiology or *semiotics, of which general linguistics
is no more than a subdiscipline. Saussure himself gave only a rough sketch
of what such a general theory of signs should look like, but after his death,
various attempts were undertaken to elaborate a full semiotics. And, as
we will see below, attempts have been made to introduce a structuralist
method in such areas as ethnography and literary theory. These attempts,
however, have not had a lasting influence. Nowadays, few if any linguists
see their work as part of a more general semiology. Saussure’s generalization,
that is, appears not to have been very fruitful, as human languages appear
to possess a much more complex and articulate structure than other sign
systems such as music, film, or painting as studied by semioticians.
It should be clear by now that langue, which according to Saussure is
the actual research object of the autonomous discipline of linguistics, is
not a ready-made empirical given but must be construed or constituted
by a number of methodological choices. These choices include abstracting
away from phonetic variation, from individual speakers, and from historical
change, but there are other choices we could also have made.
Saussure did have one important argument, however, for defining langue
the way he did, which is the *arbitrariness of the linguistic sign. Just like
Durkheim’s social facts, languages as defined by Saussure exist on the basis
of shared conventions even though they are autonomous with respect to
individuals, who hence are not able to create or change languages at will.
According to Saussure, language is radically distinct from other social
institutions because of the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign: there
is no natural, internal, or essential link between the sign and what it means.
Aside from a few cases of onomatopoeia, like woof or cock-a-doodle-doo,
words have an arbitrary and conventional link with what they signify. Thus,
it is not necessary for the concept ‘dog’ to be expressed in English by the
word dog. Instead, one might just as well have used any other word such
as cam, köpek, or sag.
This point may seem trivial, but it has far-reaching consequences. Without
language, Saussure remarked, it is impossible to have clear, distinct, and
constant ideas or concepts at all. Moreover, the idea that language is arbitrary
and conventional holds for both sides of the linguistic sign, that is, for the
concept as well as for the sound. We are tempted to think that words such
Positivism and Struc tur alism 251

as dog in English, köpek in Turkish, and sag in Persian are merely different
acoustic expressions of the same, independently given concept of ‘dog’. But
if languages really were mere systems of names for independently given
concepts, translation should be much easier than it actually is. Different
languages appear to order the world in different ways. Thus, the English
word river corresponds to two French terms, fleuve and rivière, which refer
to rivers that respectively do and do not flow into the sea; and the German
word Fleisch corresponds to both flesh and meat in English. Obviously, we
cannot say that any one of these expressions is the ‘correct’ or ‘real’ one that
corresponds to the order of ‘things in themselves’. Moreover, both sounds
and concepts change in the course of time: thus, English brave and Italian
bravo nowadays express completely different concepts, although both derive
from Ancient Greek barbaros. In the course of the centuries, therefore, not
only the sound but also the meaning of this word has changed.
In other words, there is no stable system of immutable concepts directly
linked to things in themselves or givens that underlies the changing sounds
of a language. This would imply that our concepts are just as arbitrary
and conventional – and hence as changeable – as our sounds. As with the
acoustic image, the meaning or concept also acquires its value only within
a system of oppositions constituted by a language, for both the signifier and
the signified are completely arbitrary. The existence of distinct concepts
and reference to specific objects are only possible due to the existence of the
language system as a whole. In Saussure, we thus find a meaning holism that
shows some similarities with the Duhem-Quine thesis (see § 4.2a). Later,
the poststructuralist Derrida would radicalize Saussure’s ideas (see § 11.2).
The identity of the individual linguistic sign is thus not intrinsically
given but emerges only due to its difference with other signs. Thus, the
sign cat only functions in English because it stands in opposition to other
expressions such as rat, mat, and dog. The sign does not have any substantial
properties that make it into what it is but is only relationally defined by its
formal differences with other signs. As Saussure famously put it, ‘a language
is a form and not a substance’.65
Thus, it is no coincidence that Saussure nowhere spoke about *reference,
that is, the object referred to by the sign, or the relation of referring, as a
third aspect of the linguistic sign. We do not possess any conceptual or
other means independently of language to give us direct access to things in
themselves, he argued. On the contrary, our thinking is only made possible
by the existence of the language system as a structure. Both at the level

65 F. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. W. Baskin (tr.) (New York, 1966), p. 122; cf. p. 113.
252  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

of the signified and of the signifier, the distinctions made by a language

give an essentially arbitrary ordering of the things in the outside world.
Saussure emphasized that this ordering is not dictated or forced onto us
by the world itself.
A decidedly Kantian or transcendentalist strain in Saussure’s work appears
here. The idea that language is merely a nomenclature or a system of names
for independently given concepts and objects informs both seventeenth and
eighteenth-century general grammar and the common sense of present-day
ordinary language users. According to Saussure, however, this belief blocks
every insight into the true nature of language. In this sense, he argued, the
Neogrammarians made a significant breakthrough, for in ordering the
results of comparison in strictly historical terms, they placed the facts in
their ‘natural order’. Saussure wrote: ‘thanks to them, language is no longer
looked upon as an organism that develops independently but as the product
of the collective mind of linguistic groups.’66
Saussure’s use of the term ‘collective spirit’ suggests an affinity with both
Durkheim’s collective conscience and with the German idealist concept of
spirit. In terms of the latter, Saussure recognized that language is thoroughly
historical, but he added that the Neogrammarians had not yet developed a
strict method and hence could not arrive at the right conclusions concerning
the essence of their object of research. Although historical change is essential
to language because it is inextricably linked to the arbitrariness of the sign,
it is not determined by the systematics of the language (langue) itself. All
linguistic change, Saussure argued, arises in individual language use, that
is, in parole, and hence processes of linguistic change fall outside the reach
of linguistics proper, which is or should be concerned only with langue.
Thus, Saussure strictly separated *diachrony as the domain of changing
parole from *synchrony, the domain of the general and lawlike langue. Put
differently, the language system studied in linguistics stands outside of – or
is abstracted away from – time. Moreover, as that which makes possible
the formation of clear and distinct ideas, language is a social fact existing
independently of individual language users. Speaking in Kantian terms,
it forms the condition for the possibility of thinking. Just like Durkheim,
however, Saussure distinguished himself from Kant in that he did not derive
these conditions for possibility from the structure of the human mind but
located them in society. For Saussure, too, they are not strictly transcendental
in the epistemological sense but rather phenomena that can be investigated
empirically.

66 Ibid., p. 5.
Positivism and Struc tur alism 253

Just like the Neogrammarians, Saussure accepted the notion that language
is essentially historical and always changing. Paradoxically, however, he
argued that linguists should take this historicity seriously precisely by
abstracting away from it and by analysing the language system at a strictly
synchronic level as an arbitrary system of signs in relations of opposition.
At the synchronic level, language is a coherent system that is independent
of speakers and has its own laws as a langue; at the diachronic level, all
kinds of extralinguistic factors start interfering. For Saussure, diachrony
is the domain of individual variation and influences and of social and
other extra-linguistic factors. Hence, it concerns not general laws as in
the linguistics of langue but particular developments and events in which
social, historical, and possibly even physical laws and principles may be
involved. As an autonomous science, Saussure concluded, general linguistics
is therefore strictly limited to the synchronic level.

9.4 Noam Chomsky and the Cognitive Revolution

After Saussure’s revolution, another paradigm shift occurred in linguistics

after the Second World War: the rise of generative grammar (formerly also
labelled ‘transformational-generative grammar’) as developed by the
American Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) and his followers. Generative grammar
may be labelled structuralist in so far as it explores grammatical structures
that are not directly accessible to human consciousness. Unlike Saussure’s
linguistics, however, it argues that these structures are not social facts but
unconscious features of the human brain. Generative grammar thus clearly
shows features of a new paradigm. In general linguistics, it has become an
influential current and has become institutionalized in a distinct com-
munity, with its own professional journals and conferences. Moreover, it
has paved the way for various so-called *cognitive approaches to language,
music, media, and so on.
In 1957, the then twenty-eight-year-old Chomsky published a booklet of
less than 120 pages entitled Syntactic Structures. In it, he argued on purely
formal grounds that traditional grammars cannot correctly describe the
syntactic structure of human languages. Such grammars, he argued, are
formulated as rules for rewriting, or parsing, a sentence, that is, for analysing
it into its immediate constituents. Thus, the sentence (1)

(1) The Queen reads a novel

254  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

is rewritten as a noun phrase (NP), the Queen, expressing the grammati-

cal subject, and a verbal phrase (VP), reads a novel, which in turn can be
analysed as an inflected transitive verb (‘to read’) and another noun phrase,
a novel, expressing the sentence’s grammatical object. Chomsky argues that,
in formal terms, traditional grammar presupposed that the grammatical
structure of sentences can be described with the aid of so-called rewriting
rules, in this case:

Sentence → NP + VP
NP → T + N
VP → Verb + NP
T → the, a/an
N → Queen, novel
Verb → read

Next, Chomsky argues that grammars based on such rewriting rules

cannot possibly capture the systematic connections that exist between
active and passive sentences, for example, or between assertions and
questions. He argues that one needs essentially more powerful syntactic
rules for this, something he called transformational rules, which can
move or remove parts of a sentence. In this perspective, the passive
construction (2)

(2) A novel is read by the Queen

is formed by a transformation that moves forward the grammatical object

in the underlying active structure. The question (3)

(3) What does the Queen read?

even involves a kind of reversal of the underlying structure: the grammatical

object is removed, and the question-word what replacing it is placed in front
of the verbal phrase, in which, moreover, an auxiliary verb do is inserted.
Such operations, Chomsky argues, cannot be described with the aid of
rewriting rules.
In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Chomsky elaborated his argument
into an ambitious and philosophically motivated research programme for
linguistics at large. He argued that the transformational-generative model
is superior to other theories not only descriptively but also in explanatory
terms. In doing so, he frontally attacked the behaviouristically inspired
Positivism and Struc tur alism 255

views of descriptive linguists such as Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949), which

until then had dominated American linguistics.
Chomsky’s main thesis now is that all human languages can be described
in terms of a relatively small number of rewriting rules and transformations,
but the precise form and order of these rules vary from language to language.
Generative grammar thus describes the linguistic knowledge possessed
by every adult language user. According to Chomsky, this knowledge is
no more than one possible realization of so-called Universal Grammar,
that is, the innate linguistic capacity in humans, which in his view is the
proper research object of linguistics. This Universal Grammar, he continues,
should not be investigated by studying the actual language behaviour of
language users, that is, their so-called *performance, but by uncovering their
linguistic knowledge or *competence. We can do this by asking them to judge
whether various sentences formed in their language by the researcher are
grammatically correct or not.
Chomsky gives a realist interpretation to his theoretical and explanatory
notions. For him, the hypothesis of a Universal Grammar is not merely a
convenient aid to describe the variety of human languages in terms of a small
set of abstract notions but a statement about the structure of the human
mind. Another philosophical dimension is Chomsky’s rationalism. Like Kant,
he focusses attention on the mental structures that structure experience
(in this case: hearing and learning a language) which cannot themselves
be derived from experience. Unlike in Kant, however, these structures are
not taken as transcendental and as recoverable only through philosophi-
cal reflection, nor are they social facts as in Durkheim and Saussure. For
Chomsky, they form the proper object of empirical cognitive research.
Thus, generative grammar clearly amounts to a paradigm in Kuhn’s
broader sense. To begin with, it delimits its proper object: from now on,
linguistics is to investigate syntax, or more precisely, Universal Grammar
and the innate linguistic capacities of humans. Furthermore, it has its own
method in so far as it captures the grammaticality judgments that form its
data into quasi-formal or quasi-mathematical rules. In this context, Chomsky
claims to have introduced ‘a Galilean style’ in linguistics. Finally, it has its
own norms of descriptive and explanatory adequacy in that hypotheses
should fit the postulated Universal Grammar.
Unsurprisingly, this new paradigm met with resistance. Many established
linguists were outraged by it, since it brushed aside much existing descriptive
and comparative linguistics as theoretically irrelevant. Chomsky’s ideas,
however, appealed to a new generation of linguists that arose out of the rapid
growth in American universities in the 1960s. Other linguists contested
256  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

the tenability and relevance of the distinction between competence and

performance and the importance Chomsky attaches to the former. Shouldn’t
actual language use rather than intuitive linguistic knowledge be the proper
object of linguistic research?
Likewise, isolating the language ability as an autonomous form of cogni-
tive competence met with criticism. Critics claimed that it was only by
restricting his attention to syntax that Chomsky could achieve precise
results. Related topics such as *semantics and *pragmatics, let alone other
cognitive capacities like spatial insight or visual perception, were dismissed
as irrelevant. But did this precision not come at the price of an overhasty
rejection of various important phenomena as theoretically irrelevant? How
should one choose between a theory that covers a broad domain but yields
relatively imprecise results and a theory that yields precision for a strictly
delimited field?
The ideas presented in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax formed a framework
in which much of normal scientific research in linguistics was subsequently
conducted. In time, however, anomalies started appearing. The generative
capacity of the model turned out to be far too strong to produce of all and
only human languages. For this reason, much of generative linguistics in
the 1970s tried to constrain the number of possible transformations and
the circumstances in which these could apply. Repeatedly, such anomalies
have led to radical revisions. Thus, in 1981, Chomsky presented the so-called
government and binding model, which no longer contains any rules at all
but merely a number of modules or grammatical subsystems that only yield
complete sentence structures in interaction. Barely a decade later, another
radical revision followed. In the early 1990s, Chomsky introduced what he
called the ‘minimalist programme’, which discards the very concept of a
transformation, in defiance of major objections by prominent members of
the generativist community. Thus, in a relatively short period, the theory
of generative grammar has been radically revised several times.
Despite these shifts, one can claim with considerable justification that
Chomskian linguistics constitutes a paradigm in both the epistemological
and the social sense of the word. After the publication of Syntactic Struc-
tures, linguists began doing different things: new styles of research gained
currency, new criteria appeared for theoretical relevance, and new views
emerged concerning which linguistic facts were decisive. Moreover, the
generativists formed – and continue to form – an institutionalized scientific
community.
Finally, as said, Chomsky’s work has proved to be one of the main sources
of inspiration for the development of cognitive approaches in linguistics and
Positivism and Struc tur alism 257

related disciplines. Chomsky himself argues that our syntactic linguistic

capacity is autonomous not only with respect to linguistic meaning and
language use but also with respect to our other cognitive capacities such
as visual perception, hearing, and memory. On this last point, many later
linguists have followed a different line. Partly basing themselves on insights
from Gestalt psychology, they have explored grammatical constructions such
as idioms, which cannot be interpreted in generative terms and cannot be
analysed as having been built compositionally from the meanings of their
parts. Thus, linguists such as Ronald Langacker (b. 1942) have argued that
linguistic structure is motivated by more general cognitive processes. Hence,
in his ‘cognitive grammar’ he draws far-reaching parallels between linguistic
structure and visual perception, both of which he describes in terms of Gestalts.
Even more famous is the so-called ‘cognitive semantics’ developed by
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In 1981, these scholars argued that our
everyday language use is shot through with visual and other metaphors for
expressing abstract notions in concrete terms. Thus, we express our moods
in terms of the *conceptual metaphor HAPPY IS UP and conceptualize our
discussions in terms of the underlying metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR. Lakoff
and Johnson claim that such conceptual metaphors are not simply ‘ways
of saying’, they betray the fact that we do in fact conceptualize moods and
arguments in these terms. In other words, our cognition itself is structured
metaphorically. In their view, metaphors are therefore not mere linguistic
ornaments but reflections of fundamental cognitive processes.
For a long time, cognitive approaches have focused on semantics, that is,
on linguistic meaning. More recently, however, they have also spread to other
linguistic subdisciplines such as phonology and morphology. Furthermore,
cognitive perspectives have also made headway in disciplines such as film
studies and musicology. The study of musical cognition, for example, has been
developing rapidly. Philosophically, we may see these cognitive approaches as
neo-Kantian – just like the generative grammar that pioneered them – in so
far as they take the basic structures of our knowledge capacity as their object
of empirical investigation. Thus, they roughly belong to the frameworks
that have been characterized above as consciousness-philosophical – that
is, they take inner mental processes of cognition as primary with respect
to linguistic and public practices and either ignore or reject the linguistic
and practice turns carried out by other authors. The question of who is
correct, however, or of which view of the relation between mental states and
linguistic practices is the best is meaningless, as these different approaches
rest, after all, on methodological choices that imply radically different, and
possibly incommensurable, questions and answers.
258  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

9.5 Structuralism in Literary Theory

During the 1950s and 1960s, Saussure’s theory of language – and with it the
promise of a novel, rigorously scientific analysis of literature and other
cultural domains – gained wider currency. Its structuralist approach inspired
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) in anthropology; Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
in literary theory; and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) in psychoanalysis. The early
Foucault, too, was in many respects indebted to structuralism (see § 5.1),
even though, in the preface to the 1971 English translation of The Order of
Things, he emphatically asked his readers not to use this label for his own,
rather more historicizing approach.
In these decades, a wide variety of cultural phenomena is subjected to
structural semiotic analysis. Saussure’s vision of semiotics, or semiology
– that is, a general theory of signs – seems to be about to be fully realized.
Remarkably, many of these analyses do not restrict themselves to the cultural
canon. In addition to analysing the texts of established authors such as
Balzac and Baudelaire, structuralists study film, advertisements, and other
aspects of contemporary popular culture that had not traditionally been
seen as belonging to the domain of the humanities.
Structuralist students of literature propose an approach to literary
and other texts that breaks with interpretative methods and completely
subordinates the individual author’s thoughts and intentions to social
structures that follow laws of their own. The self-confident iconoclasm
of this approach abounds in provocative slogans about the ‘death of man’
(Foucault) or the ‘death of the author’ (Roland Barthes). Both slogans are
indicative of the belief that a work of art can be understood without ap-
pealing to the consciousness or intentions of its maker, or more generally
to a subject standing at the origin of an artwork and authoritatively giving
it its meaning. Thus, Barthes wrote:

A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the

‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which
a variety of writings (écritures), none of them original, blend and clash.
The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers
of culture.67

Thus, Barthes and Foucault radically rejected the humanist tradition of

the interpretative humanities, which sees Man – and in particular the

67 Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text (London, 1977), p. 146.

Positivism and Struc tur alism 259

Author – as the ultimate source and authority of meaning. Man, Foucault

argued in The Order of Things (see § 5.1) is only a recent invention, having
emerged as recently as around 1800, together with the modern epistémè.
Moreover, the Age of Man is about to finish, Foucault predicted. Barthes
advanced a similar thesis, namely that the author is by no means an
invariable given:

The author is a modern figure, a product of our society in so far as, emerg-
ing from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism
and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the prestige of
the individual, or as it is more nobly put, the ‘human person’.68

With a semiotic approach, by contrast, a work of art such as a book or a

painting is analysed as a system of signs. This approach, which sees every
part of an artwork as a sign, goes far beyond the uncontroversial idea that
artworks may employ isolated and more or less consciously inserted symbols.
For example, seventeenth-century Dutch still life paintings often depict
a half-peeled lemon as an allusion to the transience of life. Structuralist
approaches, however, do not restrict themselves to such intentionally
introduced symbols. They also try to recover signs and symbols of which
the maker was not aware and which may not even have been known to
him. Hence, structural analyses may also have a critical or unmasking
function, as they may show how seemingly innocuous or neutral elements
in a narrative or painting may reveal all kinds of things about their maker’s
social or political position, ideology, etc.
The clearest (and in many respects the most entertaining) example of
semiotics as a form of cultural or social criticism is undoubtedly Barthes’
Mythologies (1957). In this collection of short essays, Barthes analysed the
‘myths’ of French everyday life of the 1950s, such as the Citroën DS, ‘typi-
cally French’ dishes such as the beef steak with French fries, Greta Garbo’s
face, and sports. All these phenomena are analysed as sign systems or, as
Barthes called it, as the ‘language of mass culture’. Barthes viewed a myth
as a stereotype that represents a cultural phenomenon as natural. Thus,
myths represent as natural and self-evident ways of doing and thinking
that depend on particular social conventions and hence are contingent and
arbitrary. Students of myths should analyse their functioning, and in doing
so, they simultaneously unmask them as ideology. Barthes, in other words,
turned semiotic analysis into a critique of bourgeois society. He linked a

68 Ibid., p. 142.
260  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

structuralist method (which is geared to explaining consensus and social

integration) to a Marxist view of society.
Other classical structural analyses focus on more strictly literary texts.
They try to uncover the formal features of poems or novels and to explicate
how these features function as integrated and coherent sign systems. One
famous example of such an analysis is the meticulous dissection of Baude-
laire’s poem ‘Les chats’ by Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss. They
view this poem as constructed out of a large number of *equivalences and
*oppositions at various levels of analysis. For example, rhyme, which involves
two syllables at the end of verse lines with the same or similiar sound, may
be seen as an equivalence at the phonological level. On the semantic level,
oppositions may be formulated in terms of opposing concepts such as light/
dark, man/woman, and life/death.
Such structural analyses give rise to two questions. The first is whether,
if every new analysis may yield a novel interpretation, they can yield any
such thing as ‘the’ or ‘a’ meaning in any more or less current sense of the
word. On occasion, the structuralist approach has been jokingly referred
to as a ‘lemon-squeezer technique’, as it allows us to press meanings out of
a text that no longer bear any relation whatsoever to the author’s thoughts
and intentions. This point immediately leads to a second question: can we
pose any limits to structuralist interpretations? And is there any way of
distinguishing between a ‘good’ and an ‘inadequate’ structural analysis?
These questions echo Umberto Eco’s more general question (see § 1.3) of
whether there are any limits to legitimate interpretation, and if so, where
these limits lie.
Structuralists themselves do not necessarily see it as a problem that
a structural analysis allows us to extract meanings from a text that are
independent of the author’s intentions. On the contrary, some proponents
of the structuralist approach proudly proclaim that their method marks a
radical break with the notion of meaning in the sense of what was meant
by the author. Thus, they make a virtue of necessity. Instead of appealing
to unverifiable notions such as the thoughts and intentions of an author,
structuralist analyses are allegedly based on hard observational data. That
is, they focus on aspects of texts that may be checked by others.
In response to the second question, structuralists would assert that by
abandoning the notion that the author’s intentions are the source of a text’s
meaning, any and all restrictions on possible interpretations of a text’s
meaning are lifted. According to Barthes, the *writing (écriture) – that is,
the cultural or societal significance expressed by a text as distinct from
its grammar or style – is indeed limitless. But this absence of limits has a
Positivism and Struc tur alism 261

positive side too. If a text allows for the uncovering and analysis of ever-new
cultural elements and subsystems, the literary critic need not be afraid
of ever running out of work. Thus, just like hermeneutic interpretation,
structural analysis is never ‘finished’.
Methodologically, structuralist slogans amount to the decision to study
not the author’s intentions but the formal or structuring elements of the text
itself. When reading a novel, a structuralist will therefore not see the same
object as, say, a hermeneutician. The structuralist sees it not as encoding an
‘author’s message’ but as a system of signs reflecting a particular culture or
society. In this sense, structuralism may be said to embody a paradigm in
Kuhn’s sense. Structural analyses indeed create their own distinct objects
of inquiry, their own relevant facts, and their own forms and norms of
explanation.

9.6 Structuralism and Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan

Structuralist methods have left their traces not only on Barthes’s literary
theory and Claude Levi-Strauss’s ethnography (which will not be discussed
here) but also on psychology and psychiatry. Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) in
particular gave a structuralist twist to psychoanalysis, which until that
moment could be called a hermeneutic science (see § 7.3). He no longer
aimed to expose the hidden secrets of the soul but took the unconscious
as a langue, that is, as an autonomous system of signs that wholly escapes
the control of the conscious self. His work has been important not only in
clinical psychiatry but also in philosophy, literary criticism, film theory, and
postcolonial theory. One of the reasons for this influence is undoubtedly
the fact that Lacan combined his structuralist perspective with a strongly
Hegelian narrative of alienation and dialectical development. This enabled
him not only to interpret societal and cultural developments in terms
of unconscious psychological drives but also conversely, and even more
emphatically than Freud, to expose the social and political implications
of psychological phenomena.
Lacan reached intellectual maturity in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, where
he maintained intensive contacts with surrealist artists such as André
Breton and Salvador Dalí and contributed to various surrealist publications.
His most important work, however, lies in the field of psychoanalysis. One
of his major early innovations is the notion of the mirror stage, according
to which a child only develops a notion of selfhood by mirroring itself to
another. Just as chameleons and other animals can assume the colours of
262  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

their environment, Lacan wrote, very young children identify with images
outside of themselves – for example, their own mirror-image or the image
of other children – in order to be able to form an ego or ‘I’. However, he
continued in a Hegelian vein, because the idea of the ‘self’ or ‘ego’ thus
originates outside or in others by definition, the ego rests on a fundamental
alienation. This identification takes place in the realm of what Lacan called
the *imaginary, whereby the ego is captive to an image, if not an imagination,
that remains outside itself.
Originally, the clinical notion of the imaginary was developed in con-
nection with that of the mirror stage and was intended primarily to explain
the development of what Freud called narcissism, that is, the potentially
pathological erotic attraction to the ego. Lacan’s notion of the imaginary,
however, acquired a rather broader theoretical significance, for it emphasized
the fact that the ego in general is founded on what he called an ‘alienating
identification’. Formulated in even more emphatically Hegelian terms is the
relation of the imaginary to what Lacan called the *symbolic, that is, the whole
of linguistic, cultural, and social networks, rules, and laws in which a child is
caught from the moment of its birth. Although Lacan repeatedly changed his
formulations over the years, he generally seemed to think that the imaginary
is dominated by the symbolic, just as the slave is dominated by his master.
Thus, the symbolic is not a developmental stage that chronologically
follows the stage of the imaginary; rather, it maintains a dialectical rela-
tion of negation or sublation with it in so far as the imaginary is based on
misrecognition. Moreover, unlike the imaginary, the symbolic does not
lead to individual self-identification but to a mutual recognition of people
as full-fledged and free subjects. Thus, according to Lacan, the conscious
and rational subject emerges in a dialectical process that overcomes the
imaginary misrecognition and can exist only in the linguistic order of the
symbolic. But because the symbolic order produces ever-new meanings, the
subject’s essence can never be definitely determined. Therefore, the subject
is inherently indeterminate and characterized by unhappy consciousness as
a matter of definition, not merely during a specific stage of its development.
Further, Lacan distinguished the *real, or the symbolized reality, from
the imaginary and the symbolic. He rejected, however, the idea that the real
is in any respect primary with respect to either. From the moment children
are born, he wrote, they live in a thoroughly symbolic world of language
and laws, and hence, the real consists of an abstraction from the imaginary
and the symbolic rather than forming a given.
Even more than his distinction between the imaginary, symbolic, and
the real, Lacan’s fame rests on the linguistic turn he gave to Freudian
Positivism and Struc tur alism 263

psychoanalysis starting in the 1950s. This turn is best summarized in his

famous remark that the ‘unconscious is structured as a language’. Freud
himself had already acknowledged the fact that words themselves may be
symptoms, for they are the matter, so to speak, of his patients’ afflictions.
Thus, the obsessions and feelings of guilt of one of his most famous patients,
the so-called ‘Rat Man’, circle around associations of the word Ratte (rat),
Spielratte (gambling addict), Raten (payment instalments), and heiraten
(marrying). Even more than Freud, Lacan emphasized the importance
and the linguistic character of such chains of associations, that is, of links
between signifiers based on similarities in sound. In contrast to Saussure
who regarded signifier and signified as inseparable, just like the two sides
of a sheet of paper, Lacan argued that the link between the two aspects of
the (linguistic) sign was neither direct nor unproblematic.
Lacan not only gave a linguistic and structuralist twist to Freudian
psychoanalysis with his attention to language and signs; he also formulated
this twist in recognizably Hegelian terms. He emphasized, as noted, the
element of alienation in language, for example in so far as our mother tongue
is not strictly our own language but comes from the outside. He also stressed
the negative aspects of our words, which not only express our desires but
also distort those desires by introducing them into the symbolic order of
language. Hence, language is not only bound to alienation and negativity,
our speaking also involves an irreducible and irrevocable loss. Thus, Lacan
also gave an interesting linguistic turn to Hegel’s dialectic. As we saw before,
in the latter’s consciousness-philosophical undertaking language does not
have a systematic or philosophically substantial place. In Lacan, however,
the linguistic or symbolic order is constitutive of the irrevocably alienated,
indeterminate, and unhappy subject.
Lacan also provided a psychoanalytical explanation of Hegel’s notion
of the struggle for recognition. Unlike Hegel, he interpreted desire not as
an original drive or a primary given. The human desire for recognition, he
argued, is also the desire for an imaginary identity. Thus, self-consciousness
does not originate in a real social dialectical struggle – such as that between
master and slave – but in a primarily imaginary process of identification,
with desire being merely a consequence of this process of identification.
Lacan’s vocabulary and problematic spawned many followers, especially
in the study of literature. One famous example of Lacan’s reading of literary
texts is his interpretation of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, in which Oedipus’s
daughter Antigone tries to bury her brother Polynices after he has died in
an attack on his native city of Thebes. This may seem a noble undertaking,
but it defied the express commands of Thebes’ new ruler, her uncle Creon,
264  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

who has ordered the traitor Polynices to remain unburied. Antigone says
that her wish to bury her brother is dictated by laws higher than those of
the state. She does not fear capital punishment, she says, because:

It is honourable for me to do this and die. I will lie with the one I love and
loved by him – an outrage sacred to the gods.69

On the basis of this comment, Lacan argued that Antigone is driven neither
by noble feelings nor by timeless laws but by desire, which resists reason as
embodied by Creon – a desire, moreover, which has her brother Polynices as
its object and as such is downright incestuous. Classical scholars, however,
may object that Lacan represented Antigone’s desire too emphatically and
too unambiguously as incestuous and Creon’s attitude too one-sidedly as
reasonable. After all, the remainder of Sophocles’s play shows very clearly
that the gods do not at all approve of Creon’s course of action and do not
consider his leaving the dead unburied and putting the living below the
ground as either reasonable or just.
Despite these and other objections, Lacan’s influence on the contemporary
study of film, literature, and other cultural forms has been immense. One of
the best known contemporary Lacanians is the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Žižek (b. 1949), whose many influential publications apply Lacan’s central
ideas to various developments in contemporary politics, economy, and
(popular) culture. Whereas Freud can still be described as a hermeneutician
(and partly as a Kantian), and Lacan had elaborated a structuralist and
Hegelian dialectical form of psychoanalysis, Žižek subsequently gave the
latter a Marxist twist. Combining Marxist social critique and Lacanian
psychoanalysis, Žižek has developed a way of analysing that systemati-
cally generates unexpected – not to say wayward – readings of cultural
phenomena. He effortlessly links serious and complex topics such as Hegelian
dialectics, Marxist critique of ideology, the technical details of Lacan’s
psychoanalysis, or the horrors of the war in former Yugoslavia with such
seemingly frivolous or trivial themes as Mickey Mouse, pornographic movies,
or the differences between French, German, and American toilet bowls.
Žižek’s analyses of movies have become especially popular. In his view,
film is the ultimate perverse artform, not because it shows us unreal persons
and imaginary desires but because it teaches us how to desire. Film does not
amount to a distraction or escape from the real outside world, he argues. On
the contrary, it shows us precisely how the real is formed by the symbolic

69 Sophocles, Antigone, vs. 72-73, transl. B. Knox.

Positivism and Struc tur alism 265

and the imaginary. Žižek illustrates his view with readings of well-known
films such as Hitchcock’s The Birds and the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix.
According to him, the central and banal question concerning The Birds is
why all birds all of a sudden start to attack humans. He refuses, however, to
interpret these attacks as an invasion by the (biological) real of the symbolic
world of man. Rather, reality itself disintegrates as a result of this dramatic
attack on the symbolic order. Instead, he points out the Oedipal relation
between protaganist Mitch and his dominant mother, and he interprets the
birds’ violence as a raw and incestuous energy and as an explosion of the
motherly superego against Mitch’s girlfriend Melanie. Likewise, he rejects
the seemingly obvious reading of The Matrix as unmasking our perceptual
world as a systematic distortion. What is at stake here, Žižek argues, is not
a simple opposition or struggle between reality and illusion, since the real
itself is already structured by symbolic fictions.
One remarkable feature of Žižek’s Lacanian analyses, incidentally, is the
fact that the linguistic or semiotic dimension, which takes centre stage in
Lacan, recedes into the background. Žižek pays far less attention than his
predecessor did to language, signs, or systems of signs and talks much more
about both consciousness and political economy.

9.7 Conclusion

A substantial part of Durkheim and Saussure’s work consists of construing

and isolating their objects of research in such a manner that they could
justify the existence of sociology and linguistics, respectively, as autonomous
disciplines. Thus, they form two clear examples of theories or paradigms that
consciously create their own ontology, as described above, based on examples
from the natural sciences, in more general terms (cf. § 4.2). Durkheim did
so by presenting social facts as things. Saussure followed Durkheim to the
extent that he explicitly described the langue or language system as a ‘social
fact’ but otherwise emphasized that linguistic facts could not be reduced to
sociological or socio-psychological factors. Likewise, Chomsky’s generative
grammar isolates syntactic structure as its object of research, separate from
semantic, pragmatic, or cognitive factors.
The main risk of structuralist approaches is that they reduce human action
to no more than an *epiphenomenon of underlying structures unmasked by
the scholar. For example, Durkheim has been criticized for overly depicting
social facts as primitive, uninterpreted natural givens. In reality, however,
social facts are saturated with meaning, as the British sociologist Anthony
266  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Giddens (b. 1938) argues. Hence, in a sense, we cannot avoid some kind of
hermeneutic perspective. For example, in employing suicide statistics in
support of his theoretical views in his study of suicide, Durkheim took for
granted the various judgments and interpretations underlying the gathering
of data for such statistics. When, for example, should a death be quali-
fied as ‘suicide’? Medical doctors and juridical (and, in Durkheim’s time,
religious) authorities who collected these data did so on the basis of various
criteria that go unnoticed by positivist sociologists, for the latter literally
presuppose such data as given. But do these criteria themselves not involve
various societal and cultural relations and norms? For example, why is the
action of a soldier who faces certain death when storming enemy positions
qualified as a ‘heroic deed’ rather than an ‘attempt at suicide’? His death
will certainly not appear in suicide statistics. Hence, Giddens concludes,
the social sciences are faced with a double hermeneutic, since they concern
themselves with interpreting societal data that are themselves already the
results of societal interpretations.
In literary theory, too, structuralist or semiotic approaches have been
attacked from hermeneutic positions. Here as well, objections have been
raised against the pretence of being able to analyse a work of art without
having to rely on ‘subjective’ or ‘unscientific’ interpretations. Hermeneuti-
cians argue that isolating the elements of signification in itself already
requires substantial interpretation.
Perhaps, however, it is precisely for ignoring this fundamental herme-
neutic fact and in treating linguistic structure as a meaningless and natural
given that linguistics has booked its most significant progress. Saussure and
Chomsky suggest that linguistics can only advance by focusing on structure
and by ignoring the motivations and intentions that play a role in language
use. This, however, leaves open the question of why this methodological
decision has led to substantial and relatively uncontroversial successes in
linguistics, while similar successes in other disciplines inspired by structural-
ist linguistics have not materialized. Why, in other words, have these new
paradigms not led to the puzzle-solving characteristics of normal science
in ethnography and literary theory, for example? Is it because language is
qualitatively different from other cultural phenomena that can be analysed
as systems of signs, or could it perhaps be because structuralist paradigms
are still insufficiently specific in determining the question of which puzzles
are worth solving?
In the social sciences, the general confrontation between methods that
favour structures and approaches that explain actions in terms of human
consciousness has come to be known as the *structure-agency debate. Just
Positivism and Struc tur alism 267

like the question of whether language is primarily a cognitive or a social

phenomenon, this debate primarily concerns a methodological question.
Anyone will readily admit that social action involves both structural factors
and actors’ intentions and that our language has both structural and inten-
tional dimensions. The relevant question is therefore not which of these two
poles is the ‘real’ or ‘uniquely correct one’ but rather which perspective is most
fertile in yielding explanations. There is a wide spectrum of views on these
matters, including the view that this question can never be answered at all.
Another problem is that in structuralist approaches, the question of
how structures emerge or are constructed at all is not considered, with the
concomitant risk that practitioners start mistaking their methodological
choices for ontological realities. Thus, it was a methodological choice to
abstract social facts and language systems from individual consciousness
and to represent them as being governed exclusively by sociological and
linguistic causes, respectively. It is tempting to subsequently identify these
methodological constructions with empirical realities. The question, how-
ever, remains: if individual intentions or contents of consciousness, social
and cultural factors, and historical change have been so systematically
excluded from the definition of structuralist humanities and social sciences,
how can we reintegrate them when trying to explain how structures are
formed and how they change?

Summary

− Durkheim tried to establish sociology as a rigorous and autonomous

empirical science by basing it on social facts, which cannot be reduced
to psychological or biological facts, for example. According to Durkheim,
sociological explanations may well be at odds with what members of
the society under scrutiny themselves believe.
− Saussure laid the foundations of general linguistics by strictly distin-
guishing the language system (langue) from language use (parole) and
synchrony from diachrony. Linguistics as an autonomous science is
devoted to the synchronic study of language. According to Saussure,
the linguistic sign consists of a signifier and a signified, and the relation
between these two is arbitrary and conventional.
− The structuralist theory of signs, or semiology, has inspired literary
theory, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines. It allows us to view
any realm of culture as a sign system, which follows laws that escape
individual consciousness or intentions.
268  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

− The methodological debate between hermeneutical and structuralist

approaches amounts to what is called the structure-agency debate in
the social sciences.
− Generative grammar as formulated by Chomsky and his followers
analyses language in terms of structures that are not directly accessible
to consciousness. Unlike Saussure, however, Chomsky locates these
structures in the human brain. This paradigm has inspired so-called
cognitive approaches.
− Structuralist approaches to literary theory present structural analyses
that wholly sidestep the author’s intentions.
− Lacan presented a structuralist and Hegelian reformulation of psychoa-
nalysis, arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language. He
made a distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real,
and he claimed that the relation between these three is dialectical.
10 The Practice Turn

10.1 Introduction

From the 1970s, attention in a number of disciplines in the humanities

and social sciences has gradually shifted from institutions, systems, and
structures and from languages and sign systems towards *practices, that is,
towards everyday ways of doing things that are limited in time and space.
Methodologically, this *practice turn amounted to a reaction to on the one
hand structuralism and positivism, both of which were modelled on the
natural sciences, and on the other hand hermeneutics and its foundations
in the philosophy of consciousness. Thus, it amounted to a rejection of
the idea that concrete cultural phenomena or practices such as speaking
sentences or making music are either the more-or-less correct execution of
an already given, independent system of rules or the expression of an inner
mental state, image, or intention.
Philosophically, the practice turn builds on the linguistic turn of logical
empiricism. Post-war analytical philosophers including Ludwig Wittgenstein
and J.L. Austin primarily criticized both the logical empiricist belief that only
descriptive or assertive language use was meaningful and the consciousness-
philosophical assumption that linguistic behaviour should be explained in
terms of mental states like intentions or beliefs. French representatives of
practice theory such as Foucault and Bourdieu elaborated on these analytical
philosophical ideas but paid more attention to the role of power in social
action than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
As a first approximation, we may say that most linguistic practices have
the following properties. First, they are public or intersubjective in so far as
they usually require several actors or players. Second, they are normative
in so far as they can be executed correctly or incorrectly. And third, they
often if not always involve various forms of power or authority. Moreover,
practices are produced neither by structures standing outside of the subject
nor by the conscious and explicit intentions of actors. Rather, we may think
of them conversely as creating structures and as the context in which
individual acts acquire form and meaning. Put in musical terms: social and
cultural action may be seen not as the execution of a script or score, which
is supposed to be given in advance, but rather as an improvisation or a jam
session. This shift in attention leads to a number of important changes in
research questions.
270  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

10.2 Words as Deeds: J.L. Austin and Ludwig Wittgenstein

10.2a Wittgenstein on Language Games

In his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), Austrian-

born philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) rejected the
view expounded in his early work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, that
only descriptive or assertive statements with empirical truth conditions are
meaningful – a belief that had been adopted by the Vienna Circle. Moreover,
he dismissed the view that languages consist of sets of abstract grammatical
rules in the heads of individual speakers and that the meaning of words
consists primarily of the mental images or representations that language
users associate with those words. According to the later Wittgenstein, the
meaning of words consists of the way in which we use them. Such specific
and everyday forms of use Wittgenstein called *language games, thus em-
phasizing the practical character of language and language use. Our words,
he argued, are not simply labels for naming antecedently given things in
the world but rather instruments with which we can do all sorts of things:
describe, command, make jokes, pray, act, etc.
Wittgenstein’s doctrine of meaning-as-use clashes with the commonsensi-
cal view held by philosophies of the subject or of consciousness that suggests
that the meaning of words is something in our heads, for example a mental
image, a concept, or a state of knowledge. He attacked this assumption by
means of his famous *private language argument. Wittgenstein argued that
we cannot coherently formulate the idea that speakers may privately possess
a language for referring to experiences only accessible to themselves. The
fact that another speaker uses a word in the same way as I do – for example,
labelling the colour of grass as ‘green’ – cannot be explained from both of
us having the same rules in our heads. After all, it cannot be excluded that
in his private language, one speaker would subsequently call an object
‘red’ which another would call ‘green’. Thus, their using the same language
cannot be explained from the fact of their having the same grammatical
rules in their heads.
Instead, Wittgenstein continued, the relation between inner state and
outward behaviour should be seen the other way around. Thus, we should
not say that somebody speaks a particular language because he is in a
particular mental state, but we conversely ascribe a particular mental state
to him because he uses that language correctly – that is to say that he
correctly follows the (public) grammatical rules for using colour terms, for
example. Thus, saying that the speaker speaks the language is not a factual
The Pr ac tice Turn 271

but a normative statement, by which we refer to a public norm. If a speaker

suddenly starts using the term ‘red’ for naming the colour of an object that
we call ‘green,’ he is said to be mistaken. Hence, other language users will be
able to correct him. On the basis of this argument, Wittgenstein concluded
that, as a matter of principle, language use cannot rest on private mental
states or contents. Put differently, the rules of a language are public; one
should therefore not confuse believing that one is following a rule with
actually following a rule.

And hence, ‘following a rule’ is a practice. And to believe one is following a

rule is not following a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’:
otherwise thinking one was following a rule would be the same thing
as following it.70

Of course, the fact that our public behaviour cannot be explained in terms
of mental states does not rule out that we can talk about such states, but
it does imply that mental states now lose the leading epistemological role
they had played since Descartes and Locke. Thus, the later Wittgenstein
marks an important shift in twentieth-century philosophy. Also in other
disciplines, his influence has been immense. For example, from the 1960s,
his work, together with Austin’s speech act theory, inspired the development
of *pragmatics, that is, the empirical linguistic inquiry into the use – as
distinct from the grammar and meaning – of language.
But what exactly are these practices that Wittgenstein so emphatically
called our attention to? What are the defining features of language games?
One would think that the different ways of using a language have something
in common, and that these common features constitute the essence of
language usage and by extension of language itself. Wittgenstein, however,
denied the existence of such an essence. With language games, he argued,
it is just as it is with the concept of game more generally: there is no one
feature, or set of features, that all games and only games have in common
and that thus captures the essence of games. Some games are played to be
won, others are not; some games are played in teams, others by two players,
and yet others alone; some games are fully captured in rules, whereas others,
like Monopoly or Mahjong, are partly governed by luck or chance. The
most that one can say, Wittgenstein continued, is that between all these
different games, there is a *family resemblance: a set of overlapping greater
and smaller similarities instead of a clearly delimited whole of features

70 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, § 202.

272  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

shared by all games. By analogy, one can conclude that language does not
have an essence either.
Wittgenstein’s rejection of necessary and sufficient common features is
typical for the *anti-essentialist strain in later practice approaches, which no
longer seek essential features or origins of cultural phenomena but instead
emphasize their everyday, contingent, and changing character.

10.2b Austin’s Speech Act Theory

No less radical in its implications than the later Wittgenstein’s work is the
*speech act theory developed by Oxford philosopher J.L. Austin (1911-1960).
Austin opened a 1955 lecture series that was posthumously published as How
to Do Things with Words (1962) with a subtle criticism of the logical empiricist
verification criterion of meaning. According to this criterion, utterances
without empirical verification conditions are ‘pseudo-statements’ that may
be correctly formed grammatically but do not describe possible facts and are
therefore neither true nor false but meaningless. This implies that, strictly
speaking, only descriptive language use with clear empirical conditions of
verification is meaningful. Austin, however, called our attention to a class
of statements that seem to be factual descriptions but really are not, and
yet, he argued, they are not meaningless. Examples of such statements are:

I baptize this ship the Lady Gaga.

I hereby declare you legally married.
I bet you ten dollars that the LA Lakers will win tomorrow’s game.

On closer inspection, such statements appear not to be descriptions of facts

at all and therefore cannot be called true or false – yet they are meaningful.
In uttering them, Austin argued, we are not describing a state of affairs
but performing a particular kind of action. Austin called such statements
*performatives. Usually, performative utterances like declaring, promising,
and baptizing are formulated in the first-person singular; they can also be
recognized because a phrase like ‘hereby’ can be attached to them. Usually,
they also concern ritualized actions such as baptizing or marrying which
are carried out in specific institutional settings like town halls or churches.
They seem like a kind of magic spell by which we can create facts purely
by pronouncing them. This magical potential, however, also has its limits.
For example, one cannot fry an egg by saying ‘I hereby fry an egg’. Thus, it
appears that with the aid of performative statements, one can only create
social or institutional facts, not physical or natural ones.
The Pr ac tice Turn 273

The existence of performatives makes clear that describing facts is only

one of the many things we can meaningfully do with language. With our
words, we can also express opinions or feelings, ask questions, give com-
mands, make promises or bets, conclude contracts, etc. In other words,
assertions are but one particular kind of speech act among many. Thus,
Austin’s critique does not so much aim to reject the verification criterion
as to show its limited reach.
Austin next introduced the idea that speech acts have *felicity conditions,
as a generalization of the notion of truth conditions for descriptive state-
ments. For example, one cannot felicitously promise something outside
one’s powers, something that is already the case, or something that lies
in the past. Thus, one can never felicitously utter the following sentences:

*I promise you that it is raining tomorrow.

*I promise that two and two equals four.
*I promise you I came yesterday.

Speech act theory thus implies a generalization of the empiricist view of

language and meaning in which the notion of truth conditions is to be
replaced by a more general one of felicity conditions. This theory, however,
also has more radical implications. Generally, language use is thus no longer
characterized in terms of knowledge but in terms of action, that is, in terms of
practices. In this view, descriptive statements are no longer the prototype, let
alone the sole meaningful form, of language use but just one class of speech
acts among others. In other words, the distinction between descriptive and
performative statements is not merely a complement to the verification
criterion. Instead, it constitutes the first move in a much more radical
programme, namely the development of a general theory of speech acts.
Next, Austin further refined his analysis by distinguishing three types, or
aspects, of speech act: *locutionary, *illocutionary, and *perlocutionary acts.
The locutionary act is the act of uttering particular words. The illocutionary
act is the action conventionally performed in or by pronouncing those
words. Thus, saying ‘Please hand me the salt’ conventionally expresses
the illocutionary act of a request or command. In order to indicate this
conventionally determined capacity of the imperative mode for expressing
commands, Austin also calls this the ‘illocutionary force’ of a speech act. The
perlocutionary act, finally, is the effect that uttering the words may have
on the hearer – in this case, the fact that the addressee does indeed give
the speaker the salt. The perlocutionary act is not conventionally linked to
the utterance of words; it is, so to say, the hearer’s work. Elsewhere, Austin
274  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

described this not as the perlocutionary act but rather the perlocutionary
effect a speech act may have on its audience.
Austin rejected the idea that speech acts are merely the external signs of
more fundamental mental acts or intentions. Thus, like Wittgenstein and
Sellars, he rejected a consciousness-philosophical view of language use.
It may be tempting to think that speech acts like promising or swearing
are characterized by the *intentions with which the speaker utters them
but, according to Austin, these intentions are not decisive for the action
carried out. He illustrates this with a famous quote from Euripides’ tragedy
Hippolytus: when the protagonist of that play is caught having committed
perjury, he defends himself by saying that he had not meant his oath with
the words:
It is my tongue that spoke an oath, not my heart.71
Austin rejected this line of defence as not only immoral but also contrary
to common sense. The words we speak, he emphasized, impose obligations
on us, regardless of the inner mental state we may have while uttering them.
In other words, it is irrelevant whether the speaker was sincere or not in
swearing an oath or making a promise – the fact that he has publicly done
so imposes the obligation on him to keep his word and to make good on his
promise. Our words are our bond, Austin wrote. Likewise, when a promise
has been made in bad faith, it is not thereby rendered vacuous. Thus Austin,
too, emphasized the priority of public language use with respect to inner
mental states.
There is one particular kind of non-serious language use, however, in
which words do lose their binding force, and that is on a theatre stage and
in other circumstances in which the speaker pretends to speak and to
act. An utterance such as ‘I am the king’ or ‘I condemn you to death’ is
not felicitous when spoken by an actor in a play or a movie or written in a
poem. According to Austin, these utterances are parasitic with respect to
normal – that is, serious and literally meant – language use.
Speech act theory has had an immense influence not only in philosophy
but also in other humanities disciplines. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were
extensive debates in literary theory about whether literary genres such as
poems and novels should be seen as particular kinds of speech acts, and if
so, what their felicity conditions are. Likewise, Habermas bases his theory
of communicative action (see § 8.5) not only on Sellars’ view of knowledge
in terms of giving and asking for reasons but also on Austin’s notion of
speech acts and the associated felicity conditions. Thus, his theory may

71 Euripides, Hippolytus, v. 612.

The Pr ac tice Turn 275

also be seen as associated with the practice turn, even though Habermas
generally restricts himself to one very specific practice, that of rational
argumentation. And, as we shall see, during the 1990s, American philosopher
Judith Butler popularized the view that gender identities are also constituted
performatively, a view that would become one of the pillars of so-called
*queer theory (see § 12.4).
The practice turn implies that we should view knowledge in terms of
irreducibly normative public or social practices rather than in terms of
a confrontation of an individual mind or spirit with the external world,
and that such practices are logically prior to the contents of individual
consciousness. Let us now look at several other prominent representatives
of the practice turn who in part elaborated on Wittgenstein and Austin:
the French social theorists Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. Both
zoomed in on an important aspect of social practices that is absent in their
analytical-philosophical predecessors: the factor of power.

10.3 Michel Foucault’s Genealogy

One of the most influential approaches in the humanities today was formu-
lated by Michel Foucault in his later work. As noted above, his archaeological
study The Order of Things described the conditions for the possibility of the
birth of the modern human sciences and the simultaneous birth of Man
as both subject and object of that knowledge (see § 5.1). Already in that
early study, he employed linguistic or language-philosophical insights for
dethroning the subject as the transcendental foundation and basis of all
empirical knowledge. In his later archaeological work, especially in the
Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), he completed this linguistic turn. Partly
employing notions developed by analytical philosophers, he no longer saw
the human sciences as fields of knowledge but as systems of statements,
which he called *discursive formations. He argued that by focusing attention
not on the statements themselves but on the knowledge, ideas, or beliefs
expressed in statements, one risks surreptitiously smuggling back in the
subject as prior to these statements and once more reducing any perceived
discursive discontinuities to a continuous narrative of the development of
spirit or consciousness.
To this critique of subject-philosophical or consciousness-philosophical
assumptions, Foucault added a critique of the units of analysis that are
traditionally employed in the history of knowledge and ideas. In part, this
methodological reflection on units and periodizations was inspired by the
276  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

work of the Annales school, in particular Fernand Braudel’s history of the

longue durée. We speak of authors, oeuvres, genres, and disciplines as if they
were self-evident entities, and we divide history into seemingly self-evident
periods such as prehistory, antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Modern
Age, but such entities and periods, Foucault argued, are not simply given
or objectively present in the world prior to our attempts to capture them in
theories. On the contrary, they are the result of implicit theories, all of which
presuppose a transcendental subject. Thus, according to Foucault, terms
such as author and oeuvre do not refer to self-evidently given individuals
and entities but are specific and implicitly subject-philosophical ways of
ordering or grouping discursive formations. The units of analysis in the
study of discursive formations, however, should rest not on such implicit
philosophical assumptions but on explicit methodological choices and
decisions.
In his archaeological period, Foucault completed a linguistic turn in the
historicizing study of the humanities or human sciences, shifting attention
from knowledge to discursive formations. Subsequently, in his *genealogical
phase, he completed a practice turn that built on the former. He did so
especially in Discipline and Punish (1975), which explores the dramatic
changes in the French prison system around 1800. Until that time, suspects
were routinely tortured in order to extract confessions, and convicted
criminals were generally subjected to horrendous and publicly executed
punishments, for example quartering, burning, hanging, or decapitation.
Around 1800, however, these humiliating public corporeal punishments
were abruptly replaced by ways of punishing in which individuals were
no longer hurt or mutilated but instead locked up in separate spaces and
isolated from their surroundings. The aim of such punishment methods was
to reform or re-educate criminals into law-abiding citizens and productive
elements of society.
We are tempted to see this development in terms of moral progress. In
today’s civilized world, which we usually implicitly or expressly identify with
the modern Western world, we no longer punish criminals by having them
undergo horrendous and publicly inflicted corporal punishments, and as a
result we see ourselves as having become more civilized. Foucault rejected
this view: in the modern world, he claimed, new technologies of power have
been developed for punishing people, and these technologies are much more
efficient and successful than the classical ways of punishing. They render
it simply unnecessary to publicly humiliate, torture, or execute criminals.
This new form of power emerges not only in the modern prison system but
also in modern education, in medical and psychiatric care, and in the army.
The Pr ac tice Turn 277

Foucault labelled it *discipline. Unlike classical power, disciplinary power

is not the work of a sovereign ruler or state that promulgates laws that the
subjects are supposed to obey. Unlike the sovereign power of a state or ruler,
which is expressed in terms of laws and transgressions, discipline functions
in terms of the opposition between the normal and the pathological. In
other words, it involves a distinct kind of *normativity. It is exercised in
various locations that are less directly beholden to sovereign state power
such as prisons, military barracks, schools, hospitals, and psychiatric wards.
Moreover, it is focussed not primarily on torturing the body but on improving
the soul. Further, discipline is an individualizing power in that it explores
to what extent an individual diverges from a norm of bodily or mental
health or normality, in a process of continuous observation and reporting
of its behaviour. In its ideal form, and abstracted away from all resistance,
disciplinary power is simultaneously all-seeing and invisible as power,
precisely because it is directed towards the individual’s well-being.
Thus, discipline crucially involves individualizing forms of knowledge.
This insight enabled Foucault to give a new explanation for the birth of the
modern human sciences, one that goes far beyond his earlier archaeological
enquiries. In particular, disciplines such as criminology, psychiatry, and
medicine arose simultaneously and in interconnection with modern
technologies of power, he contended, as they supplied the individualizing
knowledge of normal and pathological behaviour that was required for the
successful exercise of individualizing disciplinary power.
It was here that Foucault completed a practice turn in so far as he no longer
spoke of the human sciences in terms of knowledge or discursive formations but
in terms of *discursive practices, which – together with non-discursive practices
such as punishing or (re-)educating – are always and irreducibly linked to
different forms of power. According to Foucault, practices are not the result of a
subject that is acting intentionally, let alone one that is transcendental – rather,
he forcefully argued that the modern subject – that is, the autonomous, rational,
secular, economically productive, and sexually reproductive subject – is
precisely the product of disciplinary and other practices of power.
Thus, Foucault’s analysis of the modern human sciences is *genealogical
in that it systematically relates the historical emergence of knowledge to
new power practices. Clearly, Foucault is elaborating on Nietzsche’s work
here, but he subjects not morality but scientific knowledge to a genealogical
analysis. In order to emphasize the internal and indissoluble, albeit histori-
cally variable link between knowledge and power, he occasionally wrote
these two words conjointly as *pouvoir-savoir (power-knowledge). Neither
of these, he emphasized, is logically prior or paramount with respect to the
278  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

other. For him, scientific knowledge could no more be reduced to social

power than the other way around.
Foucault’s approach is explicitly *antihumanist to the extent that it rejects
humanist views of modernization in terms of moral progress or of a civilizing
process. Moreover, Foucault dismissed the humanist idea of an absolute and
irreducible human freedom and dignity that escapes, or should escape, every
relation of power. This is, of course, a rather provocative view. After all, we
tend to see hospitals and schools as institutions where people are helped,
improved, and/or cured, rather than as arenas where power is exercised and
contested. By analysing such institutions for human well-being in terms of
disciplinary power, Foucault’s antihumanism makes visible those relations of
power that have become almost invisible precisely because of their everyday
character. It is precisely here that he sees the task of philosophy:

The role of philosophy is not to uncover what is hidden, but to make visible
what is visible; that is, to render evident what is so close, so immediate, and
so intimately connected with us that we no longer perceive it. Whereas the
role of science is to uncover what we do not see, it is the task of philosophy
to make us see what we see.72

Foucault shared the analytical philosophers’ concern with everyday prac-

tices. He himself acknowledged this indebtedness, for example when he
spoke of ‘power games’ in a clear echo of Wittgenstein’s ‘language games’.
Otherwise, however, his practice turn primarily positions itself with respect
to French phenomenology and to the positivist and structuralist social
sciences. Thus, whereas Durkheim’s analyses were formulated in terms
of enduring institutions and depicted societies as stable, integrated, and
peaceful, Foucault’s analyses in terms of practices exposed the conflicts
and power relations that occur in all societies.
Foucault also distanced himself from Marxist views of power and con-
flict. Unlike positivists, Marxists do emphasize the conflicts and forms of
dominance in any society, but they characterize the beliefs, knowledge, and
culture of the dominant class in terms of ideology, that is, as a distortion
of objective social realities. Marxists, in other words, see ideology as by
definition false and power as by definition repressive. Foucault countered
this view by arguing that power may be positive and productive as well as
negative, distorting, and repressive. Discipline produces human-scientific

72 M. Foucault, ‘La philosophie analytique de la politique’, Dits et écrits III, p. 540-1 (emph.
added).
The Pr ac tice Turn 279

knowledge, that is, scientific truth rather than ideological falsehood. At

the same time, it also produces ‘normal’ people, that is, individuals who
are bodily and mentally healthy, philosophically rational and autonomous,
economically productive, and sexually reproductive. According to Foucault,
the free individual, or what Kant called the ‘autonomous subject’, is itself
constituted by disciplinary power relations.
With his attention for discursive practices, Foucault also emphatically
rejected Derrida’s deconstructivism, which will be discussed in more detail
in § 11.2a. The latter’s claim that there is nothing outside of text, Foucault
argued, amounts to a reduction of practices to texts. Thus, Derrida stood
in a long tradition of philosophical – and, in the final analysis, philologi-
cal – textual commentary that reduces the event character of practices to
the study of anonymous texts and in doing so skirts the question of exactly
how subjects are related to practices: are they the origin of practices or are
they instead shaped and transformed by them?
Foucault asserted that Derrida’s method relieves readers of the respon-
sibility to look beyond the words in the text (or the words suppressed or
concealed by the text). It also gives them an unlimited sovereignty over
the text, allowing them to assign it meanings that fall wholly outside the
consciousness and the authority of those who have produced those texts. This
is a typically philosophical way of proceeding, he concluded, which ignores
the study of individual historical events and of historically specific forms
of knowledge in the name of a philosophical critique posing as universal.
And indeed, Foucault’s own historicizing practice analyses stand miles
apart from Derrida’s largely ahistorical text readings. In this respect, the
practice turn not only led to new problematics but also uncovered entirely
new fields of research. In § 12.3, we will encounter one famous example of
this: the history of sexuality.

10.4 Pierre Bourdieu’s Reflexive Sociology

The work of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) can, in a

sense, be seen as the great rival to German critical theory. Just like Adorno,
Bourdieu strove to create a general sociology of culture. And just like Haber-
mas, he attempted to formulate a general theory of action. Moreover, because
of his political and social engagement, his work may also be seen as a form of
‘critical theory’, for Bourdieu practiced sociology with the aim of formulating
social critique. In Bourdieu we also find the thesis that self-reflection is
part and parcel of such a sociology. His influences, however, should not be
280  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

sought exclusively in the tradition of Hegel and Marx but also in French
structuralism, Weber’s interpretative sociology, and in the writings of Austin
and the later Wittgenstein. Like the latter two, he also completed a practice
turn. Far more than the members of the Frankfurt School, Bourdieu also
conducted empirical research, for example in the agrarian societies of the
Béarn, his native region, and with the Kabylian Berbers in Algeria, as well
as in the cultural world of Parisian high society.

10.4a The Notion of Habitus: Beyond Structure and Agency

Bourdieu’s most important theoretical contribution to the structure-agency

debate is undoubtedly his theory of action in which the notion of *habitus
is central. He applied this theory of action to various subsections of the
cultural realm such as language, education (primarily higher education), and
the arts. Most importantly, his work shows how such seemingly individual,
disinterested, and societally neutral phenomena as aesthetic apprecia-
tion, good taste, or literary activity may systematically contribute to the
maintenance of societal inequality.
According to Bourdieu, the structure-agency debate in the social sciences
– or, as he called it, the methodological debate between subjectivists and
objectivists – rests on a misleading opposition. Subjectivists, he argued,
will explain social action in terms of the interpretations given by the social
actors themselves, and hence their explanations can in a sense not be at odds
with the latter’s self-explications (cf. § 7.5). Objectivists (or structuralists), by
contrast, explain actions from objective underlying structures outside the
actor’s consciousness, which implies that scholars have a kind of privileged
access to the underlying social reality, an access the actors themselves do
not have (cf. § 9.2).
Bourdieu resolved this seemingly irreconcilable opposition not by
seeking a golden mean but by pointing out a common shortcoming of
both approaches. Actual action, he argued, is shaped both by subjective
considerations and objective factors such as class, age, and sex. This action,
however, is of another character than most social scientists think, for it
is not determined by ‘theoretical knowledge’ – that is, by conscious and
intentional considerations and decisions – but rather by what he calls a
*practical logic, which is not fully explicit, systematic, or goal-directed. Social
scientists, however, tend to retrospectively project back their own theoretical
explanations onto the practical action of the actors they have observed, thus
reducing the latter’s actions to a kind of theory and representing them as
something essentially other than they really are.
The Pr ac tice Turn 281

Pierre Bourdieu

Social action, Bourdieu argues, is in reality not driven by conscious mental

states or abstract theoretical structures but by an unconscious or semi-
conscious set of acquired values and dispositions to behave in particular
ways. For example, upper-class Englishmen know that one should eat with
fork and knife, holding the knife in the right hand and the fork in the left,
and holding both in a specific way. They also know that one should not mash
one’s food, and so on. All such practical knowledge is clearly acquired but
not consciously applied during meals. For the actors involved, it has become
‘second nature’ which – hardly consciously, almost automatically, and
seemingly self-evidently – shapes and steers their actions. This collection
of bodily dispositions to particular behaviour, or the system of unconscious
practical principles generating or producing particular actions, is what
Bourdieu called the *habitus.
The habitus is not an underlying structure but a system that produces
actions directed towards concrete, if at times unconscious, aims. Nor is the
282  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

habitus a system of conscious rules or values: it makes particular forms of

actions like observing table manners during meals seem self-evident, but
it does not enforce ‘correct’ action. Thus, the notion of habitus bears some
resemblance to Chomsky’s notion of universal grammar (UG), which likewise
consists of a set of generative principles (see § 9.4). Unlike UG, however,
habitus is not innate but acquired.
Bourdieu’s more radical thesis is that it is not only the actors under inves-
tigation that have a habitus but also the social scientists themselves. From
this observation, he did not draw the relativist conclusion that ‘objective
knowledge’ is impossible given that nobody can escape one’s own historicity.
On the contrary, it led him to the conclusion that a scientific description of
social reality should also explicitly and systematically analyse or, as he called
it, objectify, the scientist’s social position. Bourdieu thus emphatically took
a realist position with respect to scientific knowledge of the social world.
For him, the objectification of the scientist’s place is an essential aspect
of universally valid scientific knowledge. Adequate knowledge should be
reflexive, he argued.
With these claims, Bourdieu took a clear stance in the French intellectual
debate of his time, which had moved back and forth between Saussure and
Levi-Strauss’s structuralism, Marxism, Sartre’s individualist and humanist-
oriented existentialism, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. He paid
less attention to contemporaneous developments elsewhere and thus only
commented in passing on the Frankfurt School-style sociology of culture.
Just like Habermas, however, Bourdieu objected to positivist social science.
Both philosophers gave their theories a critical and emancipatory function
without giving up claims to universal validity.

10.4b Bourdieu’s Sociology of Culture: Fields and Capitals

Alongside habitus, the notion of *field forms the second major concept in
Bourdieu’s work. According to him, science, the economy, religion, and art
each form distinct fields, each of which follows its own logic or principles
and each of which has its own interests, goals, and values, or as Bourdieu
called it, its own form of *capital.
Common opinion holds that science and art do not aim to make a financial
profit but rather strive for truth and beauty, respectively. Anyone wanting
to be recognized as a bona fide scientist or artist is therefore supposed to
act in an economically disinterested manner, that is, out of pure love for
science and the arts. Bourdieu attacked this belief, arguing that although
scientists and artists are not generally driven by economic interests or a
The Pr ac tice Turn 283

wish to become rich, they do strive for what he calls *symbolic capital, that
is, for the scarce good specific to their field. It is such interests, rather than
economic considerations, that in his view determine how a field functions.
Scientists strive for a monopoly on pronouncing the truth, whereas artists
strive for excellence in representing or expressing beauty.
The symbolic capital of both f ields, Bourdieu continued, cannot be
reduced to economic capital. In both fields, it is even seen as a matter of
professional honour not to be driven or tempted by economic profit. There
are, however, quite a few exceptions to be found to this claim. For example,
artists such as Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) and Jeff Koons (b. 1955) openly
proclaimed their interest in money. With such blatantly economically driven
behaviour, artists may transgress the boundaries of their respective fields,
but generally, they can do so successfully only after having established
themselves as authorities in their fields. Moreover, the behaviour of both
these artists also contained a large dose of irony and camp.
Bourdieu claimed that fields emerge historically and develop as a result
of the actions of individual actors or groups. In this respect, they should
be methodologically distinguished from structures and social facts, which
are supposedly entirely autonomous with respect to individual actors (see
§ 9.2 and 9.3). Thus, during the nineteenth century, the autonomous field of
literature, and more generally art, emerged. It was during this time that art-
ists started considering it a matter of artistic integrity not to work for money
but solely for the sake of art itself. In doing so, they wanted to emphasize the
autonomy of the artistic field with respect to the economic field as well as
the artist’s autonomy with respect to the nobility and the higher bourgeoisie,
which had hitherto been the most important patrons of the arts and artists.
The striving for social autonomy found expression in the aesthetic
principle of *art for art’s sake (l’art pour l’art). Nineteenth-century artists
thus started to see art and the aesthetic experience as their highest ideal,
which even stood above ethical or political principles, thus distinguishing
themselves from bourgeois morality. It was during this time that the type of
artist known as bohémien emerged. One of the most important harbingers
of these new artistic ideals in literature was the French novelist Gustave
Flaubert (1821-1880), to whom Bourdieu devoted his voluminous 1992 The
Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field.
Bourdieu’s analysis of fields that each have their own capital and their
own competitive relations may be seen as a continuation or generalization of
Marx’s analyses in terms of capital, accumulation, and class struggle, but it
may equally be seen as a reaction against the Marxist temptation to reduce
the cultural superstructure to the economic base or substructure, that is,
284  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

to explain all fields in terms of the principles, goals, and interests of one
field: economics. Thus, for example, it excludes the naive Marxist belief that
each artistic expression may simply be explained from the class position of
its maker. Such an economic reduction, Bourdieu argued, wrongly tries to
represent the features particular to the artistic field as no more than the
expression of purely economic interests.
All this may seem like an attempt to unmask artists – who in the bourgeois
humanist view should be driven only by their strictly individual impulses
and are expected to reject any thought of f inancial gain – as a kind of
calculating homo economicus who are only out to maximize their – financial
or any other kind of – profit. Such a view, however, overlooks the fact that
the habitus that structures social action has an important unconscious
component, according to Bourdieu. Social action, including the making
and experiencing of art, is not driven by a goal-conscious calculation of the
line of action that will maximize profit in the given field but by the mutual
influencing of the actors’ habitus and the field in which they act.
Bourdieu’s work implies a somewhat surprising perspective on the aims
of the humanities. As mentioned repeatedly in the preceding chapters, the
humanities are supposed to concern themselves primarily with expressions
of higher culture and to pursue Bildung. Bourdieu, however, interpreted
this Bildung as a form of *cultural capital. The members of the upper,
higher-educated classes are not only richer in economic terms, they also
have acquired more cultural capital than people from a working-class
environment. This allows them to distinguish themselves from the lower
classes both aesthetically and socially. Thus, *distinction or ‘good taste’ – that
is, the capacity for aesthetic appreciation – is also an instrument by which
the members of the upper classes distinguish themselves socially, Bourdieu
argued in his famous 1979 book Distinction.
In this book, incidentally, Bourdieu also criticized Adorno’s belief that
mass culture can be distinguished from elite culture by passive listening
(cf. § 8.4b). The distinction and cultivation of elite culture support precisely
the reproduction of existing class relationships, according to Bourdieu. The
seemingly disinterested humanist ideal of Bildung thus contributes to the
maintenance of social inequality in the field of culture. Exposing and describ-
ing such mechanisms is in itself already an act of critical science that can
contribute to the emancipation of subordinated or marginalized population
groups. In Bourdieu’s view, the task of the humanities consisted of exposing
relations of power and bringing to light the reproduction of social inequality
in the social fields of literature, the arts, and communication – that is, in
spheres that are usually seen as free of power and economic interests.
The Pr ac tice Turn 285

Summary

− Wittgenstein emphasized the importance of linguistic practices or

language games. In his view, the meaning of a sentence primarily
consists of its use and not of any mental states associated with that use.
− Austin rejected the logical empiricist verification criterion as too heavily
oriented towards assertive or descriptive language use. According to
him, we can perform all kinds of speech acts with language. Performative
language use itself creates the facts it purports to describe.
− Foucault’s genealogy sees scientific knowledge as both shaped by and
constitutive of relations of power. Foucault emphatically advocated
analysing power and knowledge in terms of practices rather than
structures, institutions, or ideas.
− Bourdieu criticized both objectivist and subjectivist approaches in the
humanities and social sciences for neglecting the social position of the
scholar. His own notion of ‘practical logic’ postulates the habitus, i.e.,
an underlying generative principle at the basis of all social action.
− Bourdieu’s sociology of art and culture introduces the notion of fields,
that is, relatively autonomous realms of social action that have their
own laws and their own capital.
 Part 4
Modernity and Identity
11 Critique of Modernity

11.1 Introduction: Modernity, Postmodernity, and

Postmodernism

In the following three chapters, we will discuss a number of topics that

have thus far remained largely implicit. Much humanities research makes
substantial but often tacit assumptions about *modernity, about relations
between men and women, and about the relation of Europe or the West to
the rest of the world. When these assumptions are made explicit, they can
also be subjected to a more systematic critique, as is done in a number of
contemporary currents in the humanities.
The scientif ic revolution and the Enlightenment are widely seen as
specifically modern and uniquely European achievements. Max Weber
summarized these ideas in his thesis that, ‘as we like to believe’, Western
*rationalism embodies a worldview and a number of forms of social action
that, even though they have emerged in a restricted period in time and in
a relatively small number of countries, have a universal application and
significance. He sees this worldview and these forms of action as manifested
in such things as the modern natural sciences, modern jurisprudence,
bureaucracy, capitalism, and in the personality of the professional, who has
learned to separate work-related and personal matters. He also sees Western
classical music, characterized by systematic counterpoint as developed
by Johann Sebastian Bach and later composers, as a specifically modern
and uniquely Western form of rationalized music (cf. § 7.5). Furthermore,
Weber and others also consider *secularization – that is, the disappearance
of religious convictions from public and/or private life and the receding of
the societal power of the Church – to be an equally logically and inevitable
consequence of this ongoing rationalization in the Western world.
The idea of a specifically European or Western modernity is present in
virtually all authors and currents discussed above. Hence, they may be
called *modernist in so far as they implicitly or explicitly accept this idea,
whatever their doubts and reservations. Despite their acknowledgement of
the horrors of the twentieth century, they continue to cherish the thought
that scientific, cultural, and societal progress is at least possible and that
science and art play an important role in its realization. Many of them,
moreover, are staunch *secularists who not only are convinced that there
is a factual process of secularization but also normatively welcome this
process. Whatever the darker sides of a disenchanted worldview and of
290  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

modern anomie, they argue, the weakening of the public role of the Church
and religion is on balance a positive development.
From around the 1970s, however, this optimistic belief in progress began
to weaken. A new generation of literary authors including Thomas Pynchon
and Salman Rushdie, minimalist composers such as Steve Reich and Philip
Glass, and visual artists such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons rejected the
demanding, inaccessible, and consciously elitist art of their modernist
predecessors and sought their inspiration in popular culture.
Likewise, during the 1970s, the belief in economic progress was under-
mined when Western European countries experienced a protracted period of
high unemployment, stagnating growth, and persistent inflation. Renewed
attention to environmental problems also suggested that there were limits
to economic growth. The 1980s then marked the rise of new *neoliberal
economic policies championed by President Ronald Reagan in the United
States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. As a
result of these policies, various societal realms that had hitherto been seen
as public goods and at least in part as the responsibility of the state – such
as social housing, public transportation, and later also education and health
care – were privatized and became subjected to market mechanisms.
Politically, this period coincided with the heyday of the Cold War, that is,
the confrontation between the liberal and capitalist West and the communist
East Bloc led by the Soviet Union. For a number of years after the Second World
War, many progressive intellectuals in Western Europe had cherished hopes
for the development of communism, but this optimism was dealt a heavy blow
in 1973 with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago,
which described in detail the horrors of Stalinism. Likewise, the idea of class
struggle started to lose its dominant position in progressive circles. Gradually,
other societal divides began attracting more attention, giving rise to new forms
of *identity politics – that is, activism on behalf of specific groups – such as
feminism, the gay liberation movement, and ethnic movements.
Finally, toward the end of the twentieth century, religion began – against
all secularist expectations – to acquire new political relevance if not new
revolutionary fervor, as witnessed by the rise of Marxist-inspired ‘libera-
tion theology’ in South America and even more dramatically by the 1979
Islamic revolution in Iran. After the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the
rapid disappearance of communism virtually worldwide as a major political
force, religion started to play a much more important – not to say entirely
novel – political role, as evidenced by the rise of political Islam in the Middle
East, Hindu nationalism in India, neo-Confucianism in China, and the
revival of the Orthodox Church in Eastern Europe.
Critique of Modernit y 291

All these developments weakened the faith in modernity and the hitherto
unquestioned self-evidence of progress (albeit a particular view of progress).
These doubts are captured in the term *postmodernism. This is the general
term for a broad span of developments in the arts, architecture, science, and
politics that began in the 1980s and that, roughly speaking, represented a
reaction against the achievements, ideals, and pretentions of modernity and
*modernism. A common trait in all of them is the rejection of the modernist
belief in artistic, scientific, and societal progress.
In politics, postmodern actors reject both liberal and communist univer-
salism and mobilize on behalf of particular or localized interest groups or on
behalf of oppressed minorities, traditions, or peoples. In cultural-historical
terms, postmodernism may therefore be associated with the emergence of
a number of new social movements such as feminism and gay liberation.
Postmodern artists cast doubt on the belief in artistic progress and thus
on the possibility of an artistic avant-garde, but also on the very distinction
between elite art and mass culture or between genuine art and kitsch. In
architecture, too, postmodernism rapidly gained ground. Characteristic
elements of postmodernist art are irony, quotation, allusions, and the playful
use of older forms without pretending to be able to form a new unity or
synthesis out of them. Postmodern artists often explicitly appeal to existing
traditions and show rather less of an urge to reject or transform the tradition
than modernist artists such as Picasso, Mondriaan, or Schönberg. Declaring
that the ideal of progress is irrelevant is thus paired with a decreasing urge
to be original, provocative, or scandalous. When their work is provocative,
it is generally the result of the sexually explicit contents of their work.
Examples are popular musicians such as Madonna (b. 1958) and (The Artist
Formerly Known As) Prince (1958-2016), visual artists such as Jeff Koons, and
film directors such as Quentin Tarantino. Accordingly, the main aesthetic
objection to postmodern art forms is that they are vulgar, sensationalist, or
overly market-oriented instead of being elitist, difficult, or incomprehensible,
as modernist art was often said to be.
Concerning the sciences, postmodernists cast doubt on notions such
as objectivity and universal validity and disregard established ideas of
value-free science by proposing research that explicitly takes into account
the particular and possibly divergent perspectives and interests of minority
groups. In part, this position may be seen as an aspect or consequence of
their changing institutional context. Inevitably, increasing specialization
in the various disciplines – each with their own terminology or jargon, and
each having their own methodological standards and, possibly, paradigms
– has led to the fragmentation of academic knowledge. As a result, we have
292  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

witnessed the gradual undermining of the classical knowledge ideal, which

carried the expectation that scientific knowledge would eventually form
one coherent whole. For postmodernists, science has lost its privileged
position as the guardian of truth, rationality, and objectivity. In the heat
of this discussion, postmodernist ideas are all too often reduced to slogans
such as ‘there is no objective reality’, ‘there is nothing outside of text’, or
‘there is nothing beyond conflicting points of view, representations and
interpretations’.
The humanities, too, which are solidly rooted in the conceptual and
institutional achievements of the nineteenth century, experienced in
the late twentieth century an increasing undermining of the ideal of
objective and universally valid truth as a result of both heady new doc-
trines and the progressive specialization and fragmentation of academic
knowledge. Thus, postmodern historians reject the idea that objective
historiography is possible and instead encourage the proliferation of
a plurality of historical narratives. From this plurality, they argue, no
single coherent, consistent, or authoritative overarching narrative can be
constructed. But also the humanities ideal of humanist and/or national
Bildung was increasingly questioned as a result of this internal fragmenta-
tion and these external developments. Hasn’t the ideal of Bildung, if not
the entire architecture of philosophical concepts and distinctions upon
which it rests, been rendered hopelessly outdated by the dramatic if not
catastrophic social, political, intellectual, and technological developments
of the twentieth century?
Postmodernists emphasize the fragmented and heterogeneous character
of contemporary culture, science, and society. They deny that these hetero-
geneous elements can be harmonized with each other, or that there is any
single goal or endpoint toward which they are all converging, or that there
is any one point or perspective from which we can formulate a coherent
normative judgment of them all. Instead, they place increasing emphasis on
the local, the fragmentary, and the contingent. As a result, postmodernism
is a rather pluriform movement, and it is primarily its critics that see it
as a unified whole. In particular, the rejection of the belief in progress
meets with fierce criticism by those who ask how we can take seriously
a current that gives up any hope or ambition of doing things better than
its predecessors. Accordingly, in some circles, ‘postmodern’ has primarily
become a term of abuse.
In the sections below, we will first discuss Derrida and Gilles Deleuze
– two scholars that have often been labelled ‘postmodern’ – before turn-
ing to Jean-François Lyotard and Richard Rorty, two thinkers who have
Critique of Modernit y 293

reflected on what has been called the ‘postmodern condition’. In the final
two chapters, we will examine even more radical forms of critique from
feminist and postcolonial angles, where the argument is that the humanist
ideals of the humanities too easily speak of humanity at large. Seen from
the perspective of women and colonized peoples, such ideals come to be
seen in a rather different light.

11.2 Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and the Philosophy of

Difference: ‘French Theory’

The generation of French thinkers who gained fame from the late 1960s inside
and outside of France – including Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques
Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-François Lyotard – is usually labelled
with such imprecise terms as ‘postmodernism’ or ‘poststructuralism’. In
terms of content, these thinkers have little in common. At most, one could
say that they all reject both Hegelian dialectics (which had been dominant
among the previous generation of French thinkers) and the philosophy of
consciousness underlying both dialectics and phenomenology, turning
instead to Nietzsche’s genealogy and/or Saussure’s structuralism. But even
a shift to the philosophy of language and an anti-dialectical attitude are not
equally present in all of these authors, let alone in the same form. What they
do have in common is that they became especially influential in America
from the late 1960s onwards, albeit not so much among philosophers as
primarily in literature departments and in cultural studies. This common
history of reception justifies the term ‘French theory’ that is sometimes
used for these authors.
Undoubtedly, the anti-dialectical attitude of this generation of French
thinkers should also be interpreted in political terms as a critique of the
dominance in progressive circles of the French Communist Party (PCF),
which had uncritically followed the official Soviet line concerning inter-
national political developments such as the 1956 Hungarian revolt and had
maintained an almost conservative position loyal to the French government
in domestic political issues including the 1968 student revolts. This political
dimension did not survive the move across the Atlantic Ocean. In America,
‘French theory’ is usually studied in isolation from its philosophical and
political backgrounds in postwar Europe and is usually taken as a new
radical instrument for the emancipation of oppressed or marginalized
racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. Below, we will discuss Derrida and
Deleuze, two scholars often labelled – or branded – ‘postmodern’. We have
294  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

already discussed Foucault and Barthes as well as Lacan, who in a sense

also belongs in this group of theorists.

11.2a Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) gave up all belief in (philosophical) progress: he

was pessimistic about the possibility and even desirability of replacing the
problematic concepts of the Western philosophical tradition with something
better. The seemingly paradoxical conclusion of Derrida’s approach to texts,
which is commonly known as *deconstruction, is that this tradition is both
untenable and inescapable. Deconstruction proceeds from existing ways of
thinking and does not pretend to be able to transcend or improve upon them
but involves a distinct way of reading the texts in which these ideas and
concepts are expressed. According to Derrida, the concept pairs with which
we think – for example: signifier/signified, speech/writing, literal/figurative,
but also man/woman, etc. – form oppositions that are not neutral but imply
hierarchical orderings. For example, writing is generally seen as based on
and derived from an originally spoken language, figurative language is seen
as derived from literal language use, etc. Likewise, the signifier is usually
seen as no more than a means to a higher end, which is the idea expressed,
that is, the signified. Deconstruction does not simply invert such hierarchies.
Derrida did not argue that the hitherto repressed or derivative side really is,
or should be, dominant; that existing hierarchies should simply be inverted;
or that what seems derivative really is the origin. Instead, his way of reading
only shows how problematic and indeed untenable such oppositions are
(this is the element of destruction in deconstruction). But simultaneously, it
acknowledges that we cannot think without such problematic oppositional
pairs of concepts, and thus in the same gesture, so to speak, it once more
reconstructs the criticized concepts (hence deconstruction).
It is in this context that Derrida’s notorious slogan ‘il n’y a pas de hors-texte’
(‘there is nothing outside of the text’) should be seen. Taken outside of its
context, this statement sounds downright nonsensical, so one may suspect
that Derrida meant something else by it. Its precise character becomes
clearer against its philosophical and especially epistemological background:

Reading cannot legitimately transcend the text towards something other

than that text, for example towards a referent (a metaphysical, historical,
or psycho-biographical reality) or to a signified (signifié) outside the text
of which the content finds a place outside language, that is, outside writing
in general. These methodological concerns […] are closely connected to
Critique of Modernit y 295

my earlier general comments as regards the absence of the reference or

of the transcendental signified. There is nothing outside of the text.73

Derrida’s mention of a ‘transcendental signified’ suggests that he was allud-

ing to Saussure’s Kantian belief that the language system is a transcendental
condition for the possibility of thought (see § 9.3). Elsewhere in his writings,
this link becomes more explicit. As already discussed, Saussure considered
the language system a coherent whole: the identity of individual signs (for
example cat as distinguished from that, rat, mat, etc.) does not emerge as a
result of any property or attribute inherent in that sign itself but only as a
result of the difference of this sound, cat, with other sounds in that language.
Derrida draws the radical and paradoxical conclusion of this argument.
In Saussure’s view, the linguistic sign is one united and inseparable whole
of signifier and signified, that is, of acoustic image and mental concept.
If, however, the sound is arbitrary and conventional and only derives its
identity from oppositions with other sounds, then, according to Derrida,
the same should hold for the reverse side of the sign, that is, the concept as
well. We have no independent access to the referent or the thing itself on
the basis of which we can identify a concept.
Nor can consciousness play the foundational role for knowledge and
meaning since, according to Saussure, thinking and consciousness are
precisely made possible by a transcendental system of linguistic signs.
This implies, for Derrida and other poststructuralist thinkers, that the
subject, which had been postulated by Kant as the transcendental basis of
knowledge and meaning, is constituted by linguistic signs and as such is itself
fragmented and divided; hence, it is unable to warrant a stable meaning.
Derrida did not argue that there is no such thing as ‘meaning’ but rather
that the meaning of a text is not ruled or controlled – and hence cannot
be explained – by the ideas or intentions (that is, the conscious thought
contents) of the speaker or author.
Derrida’s commentary on Austin’s speech act theory is similar in its
tenets. He argued that Austin’s notion of performative speech, which may
create the very fact it seems to be describing (as in ‘I baptize this ship the
Lady Gaga’), marks a step forward with respect to earlier theories that see
communication as the linguistic expression of contents that themselves exist
outside of, and prior to, language. However, according to Derrida, in the final
analysis Austin also relapsed into the belief that the speaker’s intentions play
an essential role in communication, in particular in distinguishing between

73 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, 1976), p. 158.

296  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

felicitous and infelicitous and serious and non-serious speech acts. Thus,
Austin argued that in non-serious speech acts such as making a promise
on a theatre stage, speakers cannot be held responsible for the words they
speak: the actor who promises to marry his co-actor during a performance
is not held to his word once the curtain has fallen. In this sense, non-serious
language is parasitic on normal language use, in which speakers do have
such a responsibility for their words. According to Derrida, however, the
possibility of linguistic signs to be repeated or quoted in other contexts
in which the speaker’s intentions are no longer valid is not an exceptional
or parasitic case but, on the contrary, precisely the positive and internal
condition of the possibility of language. Every linguistic sign, he argued,
may be radically taken out of its context and thus acquire meanings that
had not been foreseen, let alone intended, by the speaker. Because of this
repeatability, or *iterability, linguistic signs are radically context-dependent
and radically independent of speaker’s intentions. Both in his discussion of
Saussure’s theory of signs and in his criticism of Austin’s speech act theory,
Derrida thus rejected the consciousness-philosophical assumption that
human consciousness is primary with respect to linguistic signs and can
dominate or control them.
In American literary-theoretical circles, Derrida’s deconstructionist
undertaking gained fame under the slogan of the ‘free play of the signifier’.
This slogan is correct in so far as deconstruction does not primarily look at
meanings or concepts, that is, signifieds – that is, it focusses on the play of
signs in a text rather than on the speaker’s or author’s intentions. That does
not necessarily imply, however, that it gives up all ideas of, and standards for,
a correct interpretation. Rather, it argues that there is an indefinite number
of possible readings and that these are not constrained or governed by the
speaker’s intentions or consciousness.
The general tenor of Derrida’s writings may in some respects be compared
to that of analytical philosophy in so far as here, too, a linguistic turn is
completed that replaces traditional metaphysical and epistemological ques-
tions or concerns with questions concerning signs and meaning. Derrida’s
style, however, is very different from that of analytic philosophers. Moreover,
he was far more radical in his rejection of the philosophy of consciousness.
He not only dismissed the belief that human intentions may control or
constrain the interpretation of signs, he also problematized the pairs of
concepts associated with this belief. Likewise, he replaced the thought
that the development of the human spirit is dialectical, in the sense of
teleological and lawlike, by a new emphasis on the radically contingent and
undecidable character of the linguistic sign. Hence, Derrida’s work amounts
Critique of Modernit y 297

to a language-philosophical critique of both French phenomenology and

Hegelian dialectics.
Derrida’s approach, which unmasks seemingly neutral oppositions as
hierarchical without aiming to radically replace or reject them, gained
currency not only in academia. It was also embraced as a new theoretical
foundation for various emancipatory but non-revolutionary movements
that represented oppressed groups such as women and ethnic minorities.
Thus, Derrida’s work shows clear similarities to – or serves as an inspiration
for – the work of feminist philosophers including Luce Irigaray, who argues
that patriarchal mechanisms have dominated the feminine in Western
philosophy since Plato. Irigaray emphasizes the role of the seemingly neutral
if not philosophically irrelevant distinction between man and woman in
the history of Western thought. According to her, Kant’s knowing subject
is, contrary to what Dilthey and others may have asserted, not an anemic
abstraction but clearly a masculine being. As we shall see below, postcolonial
studies have also made great use of Derrida’s work.
Deconstruction shows how problematic it is to think in such seemingly
self-evident pairs of opposites, but it does not pretend to be able to supply
new or better pairs. Derrida recognized that, in a sense, we cannot think
without such oppositions, even if on closer inspection they appear to yield
all kinds of tensions and contradictions. Thus, his thought was not guided
by a modernist idea of progress or emancipation. His resistance against
attempts to see deconstruction as a new ‘method’ of reading and interpreting
should also be seen in this light.
Especially in America, an influential deconstructionist approach to
literature and other texts developed in Derrida’s wake. This approach
elaborated on Derrida’s claims that there is ‘nothing outside of the text’
and that texts are the domain of the ‘free play of the signifier’. Out of context
and thus reduced to slogans, these tenets risk being misunderstood by both
proponents and opponents. Methodologically, however, they imply that
deconstructionists do not treat literary texts as referring to a reality outside
of the text or as expressing an author’s consciousness but rather as creating
their own literary world and as referring primarily to other texts. That view
also implies a revaluation of the text as a structured whole of signifiers,
with respect to the author as the ultimate authority concerning expressed
intentions and ideas, or signifieds. As such, it led to the development of a
broad new academic field that is usually referred to as *cultural analysis.
This is not a paradigm in Kuhn’s sense but rather a collection of more or
less like-minded approaches to literary and other texts and to cultural
phenomena more generally.
298  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

11.2b Gilles Deleuze: The Philosophy of Difference

Even more than Derrida, Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) qualifies as the pro-
totypical postmodern ‘philosopher of difference’ who – in particular in
his study Difference and Repetition (1968) – gave up thinking about, and in
terms of, fixed identities in favour of difference and change. Inspired by
Nietzsche, he thus shifted philosophical attention from being to becoming.
His thinking was also clearly anti-essentialist, since it did not proceed from
fixed identities of e.g. gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or religion.
Because of this emphasis on the absence of fixed identities, Deleuze’s thought
is also called *nomadic.
Deleuze has had considerable influence in the humanities, in particular
in film and media studies, but his impact also extends to practicing artists,
architects, and others. In part, this enthusiastic reception is easy to under-
stand. Deleuze thought of philosophy not as a discipline of critical reflection
on knowledge, morals, or beauty, but rather as a creative activity on an equal
footing with, although functioning differently than, art and science. For him,
philosophy is concerned with generating concepts. Unlike in the sciences,
it does not presuppose entities, and unlike the arts, it does not presuppose
experience, but it explores the constitution of both objects and experiences.
Politically speaking, Deleuze’s nomadic differential thinking, which resists
any form of institutionalized power, has anarchist tendencies. But although
he emphatically presented his work as an oppositional ‘counter-philosophy’,
it may yet gain in depth when placed against the specific philosophical
tradition from which it departs.
Deleuze’s fundamental notion is that of *difference. Usually, difference
is seen as a relation between two antecedently and independently given
entities, the identity of which is determined beforehand. Deleuze, however,
reverted this way of seeing things: he contended that difference is both
logically and metaphysically prior to identity. No two things, he argued, are
ever completely identical, and the identity of each thing is determined by
its difference with other individual specimens of the same kind or genus.
Thus, a specific cat acquires its individual identity only to the extent that it
differs from other members of the species cat. But, Deleuze continued, our
notions for grasping identity such as kinds, categories, and similarities not
only presuppose a prior difference, they are not even able to grasp difference
in itself. Our general concepts are mere tools for heading our different
experiences under a common denominator, or for reducing them to a single
genus. In other words, they help to reduce the plurality of experience to
the unity of thought.
Critique of Modernit y 299

Kant had argued that the general concepts with which we think sys-
tematically transcend experience. Deleuze suggested conversely that the
pure experience of difference exceeds our existing concepts and forces
new ways of thinking on us. Philosophy, he argued, has direct access to
things only in so far as it claims to be able to grasp the thing in itself in its
identity – that is, in its difference with everything that it is not. Difference
in itself, however, cannot be grasped by this conceptual thinking, since that
thinking precisely imposes unifying and identity-forming concepts on its
plurality of observations or perceptions, and it is directed towards identities
rather than differences. Strictly speaking, there is thus no concept of pure
difference or difference in itself. Rather, it is what Kant would call an idea
and what Deleuze himself referred to as the virtual. This virtual difference
forms the immanent and genetic condition for real experience, which should
be distinguished from the transcendental conditions of possible knowledge
of which Kant spoke.
Deleuze was less inspired in his thinking by structuralist linguistics or
analytical philosophy than Foucault and Derrida. Instead, he primarily
referred back to the philosophical tradition of Hume, Spinoza, Kant, and
especially Nietzsche. Although in his influential two-volume Cinema, he
presented an emphatically semiotic perspective on film as consisting of
images and signs, he appealed not to Saussure’s semiology but to the theory
of signs of the American pragmatist C.S. Peirce. Hence, Deleuze never called
himself ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructuralist’. Usually he characterized his own
position as ‘transcendental empiricism’, which suggests both a continuation
and critique of Kant’s critical philosophy. His empiricism leans on Hume’s in
so far as it explains abstract concepts in terms of experience or observation,
but he went beyond Hume by not presuming the knowing subject as given
but rather seeing it as formed by underlying processes. His thinking is
‘transcendental’ to the extent that it explores the conditions under which a
thing emerges, but unlike Kant, he regarded these conditions not as general,
abstract, and constitutive but as specific, real, and genetic.
Deleuze’s philosophy of difference also amounts to a rejection of Hegelian
dialectics. Differences are no dialectical oppositions, that is, relations char-
acterized by negativity; instead, they are positive and affirmative. Hence,
Deleuze also rejected the idea of the dialectical development of history as
necessary and lawlike in character and emphasized the radical contingency
of everything that exists. In this respect, Nietzsche was his great example.
Deleuze considered the latter’s genealogy to be the completion of Kant’s
critical project because it subjects not only dogmatic thinking but also true
knowledge to critique and accounts for that knowledge in genetic rather
300  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

than transcendental terms. He added that Nietzsche regarded the will to

power as a *principle of difference, that is, as that which produces individual
identities from differences.
The philosophical tradition rejected by Deleuze amounts to thinking in
terms of identities, which seeks first principles or hierarchical systems aimed
at reducing the plurality of experience to the unity of sovereign reason. Kant’s
critical philosophy, too, is a form of ‘identity’ philosophy in that it speaks of
the synthesis of intuitions and concepts (which amounts to subsuming the
plurality of experience under a unitary conceptual denominator), an operation
it sees as the work of a unitary and transcendental subject. Kant’s theory
of experience thus presupposes the subject and only considers the a priori
conditions of possible experiential knowledge. Real experiential knowledge,
by contrast, also comprises an a posteriori element, that is, that which is given
to the knowing subject (or, more specifically, to the latter’s senses).
Deleuze, by contrast, did not see either transcendental subject or empirical
object, either sense data or reason, as given. Thus, in his own Nietzschean
manner, he attacks the ‘myth of the given’. This way of thinking is called
‘nomadic,’ because it gives up the search for unity, identity, and founding
principles. According to Deleuze, philosophical quests for a fixed founda-
tion of knowledge – such as Kant’s postulating a transcendental subject or
Descartes’ argument that the ego exists because it thinks – are but so many
attempts at smuggling identity into the irreducible plurality of experiences.
This metaphysical and epistemological background clarifies much of
Deleuze’s influential studies of film and other art forms. His writings on art
do not fall into the category of art criticism that applies existing concepts
to artwork. Rather, he conversely developed new philosophical concepts on
the basis of the experience of art. As said, Deleuze argued against Kant that
reason does not transcend experience because it is the other way around:
experience, and in particular the experience of art, transcends our concepts.
Looked at from this perspective, art gives signals that take us beyond our
perceptual habits and produces perceptions we cannot subsume under the
concepts we have already formed.
Thus, in his two volumes on cinema (1983-1985), Deleuze developed
philosophical ideas about movement and time based on the medium of film.
Technically speaking, he argued, film images consist of rapid sequences
of photographic images. We experience them not as a sequence of stills,
however, but as a *movement-image (image-mouvement). In part, this notion
is inspired by the distinction that French film critic André Bazin made
between the photographic image, which tries to give us the object itself
emancipated from time, and the movie image, which captures objectivity
Critique of Modernit y 301

in time. Thus, Deleuze concluded, film does not represent merely an object
but also its duration, as movement is a translation of time to space. We also
experience movement in the everyday world surrounding us, of course, but
with the technical means of the shot and of editing, film may puncture or
transgress our perceptual habits.
Furthermore, Deleuze distinguished different kinds of shots that can lead
to different kinds of images and thus different kinds of signs: the close-up
amounts to what he called an *affection-image. In Sergei Eisenstein’s words,
the close-up is not an image among others but yields an affective reading of
the movie as a whole. Next, Deleuze distinguished between what he called
*perception-images, which derive from medium shots, and *action images,
that is, long-distance shots or long shots. The combination of these three
kinds of images is what we call editing, and the domination of one kind of
image indicates the character of the movie as a whole. Moreover, editing
may have an ideological dimension, which led Deleuze to distinguish the
‘dialectical’ editing of the cinematographically and politically revolutionary
Soviet director Eisenstein from the ‘organic’ technique of editing he saw as
dominating American films.
Among film critics and theoreticians, Deleuze’s writings have acquired
enormous influence. Because of his emphatic use of Peirce’s semiotics and
because of his attempt to take movement-images as signs, Deleuze also
performed a particular kind of linguistic or semiotic turn in film studies
that takes us far beyond the philosophy of consciousness, in particular in
its Hegelian dialectical incarnation. Some influential film theoreticians
including Robert Stam have expressed their doubts about the practical
applicability of Deleuze’s brilliant but idiosyncratic readings. Others, by
contrast, have enthusiastically used the concepts generated by Deleuze,
taking advantage of the fact that, since they are not rigorously defined or
ordered, they are even more flexible in actual use.
Together with the psychiatrist Félix Guattari (1930-1992), Deleuze also
wrote a number of path-breaking studies linking Lacanian psychoanalysis
to a Marxist critique of capitalism. Unlike traditional Marxists and Freud-
ians, they did not try to reduce either social relations to family relations
or, conversely, individual neuroses to mere superstructural or ideological
epiphenomena of the capitalist relations of production. Instead, they pos-
tulated a uniform process of *desiring-production, which is active both in
individual souls and in the societal world and which forms an equivalent
of sorts to Nietzsche’s will to power.
Desiring-production is not so much confronted with a reality given in
advance – rather, it is precisely desire that produces what Lacan called ‘the real’.
302  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The schizophrenic individual arises when this process is no longer directed

towards nature and society but only towards the individual body. In this view,
schizophrenia is not the mental illness of an individual unable to enter into
confrontation with reality but rather a quest in the unconscious – that is, a
process that is not merely individual but simultaneously also social and natural.

11.3 Thinkers on Postmodernity

11.3a Postmodernism and the Legitimation of the Humanities: Jean-

François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) was a key figure in the postmodernism

debate. In The Postmodern Condition (1979), he questioned the contemporary
social and political status, and in particular the justification, of scientific
knowledge. He originally thought of this book as an occasional piece and
as a sociological stocktaking rather than a philosophical analysis of recent
developments in science, politics, and art. More than any other single
work, however, it is this book that was responsible for the spread of the
postmodernism debate, which had hitherto been restricted to architecture
and literary theory, into a broader intellectual debate about postwar culture
and society. In The Differend (1983), Lyotard gave a more systematic and
rather more demanding philosophical reformulation of these ideas.
The Postmodern Condition is primarily a sociological analysis of the state
of knowledge in contemporary Western societies. According to Lyotard,
the ‘postmodern condition’ in which the sciences find themselves involves
the *end of grand narratives or ideologies, that is, the end to the belief in
progress and emancipation for humanity with the aid of reason. Borrowing
Adorno and Horkheimer’s line of argument, Lyotard claimed that this
modernity was destroyed by Auschwitz, as the large-scale premeditated
and organized murder of human beings that took place under the Nazis has
rendered impossible the legitimation of modernity in terms of universal
progress. Likewise, the ‘grand narrative’ of Marxism has been undermined,
if not refuted, by postwar history, in particular by the excesses of Stalinism.
Lyotard himself, however, did not advocate a nihilist rejection of grand
narratives. Instead, he investigated how scientific knowledge functions in
the postmodern societal and political constellation.
According to Lyotard, scientific knowledge may be seen as a body of state-
ments, that is, as a *discourse. This discourse, however, requires a legitimation
or justification, or, put differently, an answer to the question of why we should
Critique of Modernit y 303

spend time and money on acquiring this knowledge. Lyotard called such a
legitimation a *metanarrative, a metadiscourse, or a ‘grand narrative’, which is
a system of statements that dictates from above, so to speak, what the utility
or meaning of scientific statements is. He distinguished two such metanarra-
tives: one linked to the Enlightenment and the other to Bildung nationalism.
The Enlightenment narrative justifies scientific knowledge as serving the
liberation or emancipation of humanity at large. In the Bildung narrative, by
contrast, speculative knowledge is an aspect of the self-realization of spirit
and, as such, is its own legitimation. Since spirit is conceived as historically
and culturally specific, however, this knowledge contributes to the spiritual
and moral development of a particular people, nation, or state.
According to Lyotard, all familiar political currents, including liberalism,
Marxism, and even national socialism, legitimate scientific knowledge
in terms of one of these two grand narratives. What is characteristic of
the postmodern condition, however, is the fact that these narratives have
lost their credibility as a legitimation of science, not only as a result of the
violent political excesses of Nazism and Stalinism, but also because of the
technological development of the new media of computing and mass com-
munication. These have radically changed the structure and transmission of
scientific knowledge. The rise of information and communication technology
has led to a redefinition of knowledge in terms of ‘units of information’
that are measurable and quantifiable and hence may be traded. Hence,
‘knowledge as information’ is not only a target of science, but also of industry
and telecommunication. Thus, the dimensions of the postmodern condition
of knowledge are not only epistemological but also political and economic:

The scenario of the computerization of the most developed societies allows

us to spotlight – though with the risk of excessive magnification – certain
aspects of the transformation of knowledge and its effects on public
power and civil institutions – effects it would be difficult to perceive
from other perspectives.74

In other words, in the postmodern condition as described by Lyotard, the

complex interaction between scientific knowledge, politics, and economic
and social processes is brought up for discussion. We tend to view these do-
mains as strictly separate, but in practice it appears increasingly difficult to
tell them apart. Science has important societal and economic consequences,

74 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (tr. G. Bennington

and B. Massumi) (Manchester, 1986), p. 7
304  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

in particular through technology. And conversely, the content and organiza-

tion of the sciences (in particular the division into distinct disciplines, with
the concomitant fragmentation of knowledge and knowledge ideals) is
largely the result of societal developments and political choices. According
to Lyotard, this condition undermines the grand narrative that science
is a source of progress and emancipation because of its alleged ability to
escape societal and cultural constraints due to its rational methods. As we
saw in particular in chapters 2 and 5, however, the interconnectedness of
science, economy, and politics is by no means new and even less unique or
specific to the present-day ‘postmodern condition’. What is novel, however,
is the acceptance of and reflection on this sociological phenomenon by
philosophers such as Lyotard.

11.3b Richard Rorty’s Postmodern Bildung

Another influential critic of the modernist belief in scientific progress as

the steady approximation of the truth is the American philosopher Richard
Rorty, who derived his arguments mainly from American pragmatism rather
than from Nietzsche or from Saussure’s theory of signs. The philosophical
core of Rorty’s view is stated in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979),
in which Rorty elaborated both on Quine’s rejection of the two empiricist
dogmas, the analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism, and Sellars’
rejection of the ‘myth of the given’, that is, of the alleged distinction between
what is given to our senses and what is added by our minds (cf. § 4.1). The
combination of these two rejections led Rorty to give up the idea that there
is any particular class of statements, whether sense-data statements or
analytic or synthetic a priori statements, that has an epistemologically
fundamental, foundational, or privileged status. Following Sellars, he argued
that knowledge is not an edifice that rests on any such foundations but
rather an irreducibly normative social practice of justifying statements.
For Rorty, the combination of Sellars’ and Quine’s criticisms sets off a
far more general rejection of various conceptual distinctions that jointly
provided the basic structure of the modern philosophical tradition. He
radically questioned the status of distinctions between the ‘thing in itself’
and the phenomenon, between accident and essence, between body and soul,
and, as we will see, between the natural sciences and the humanities. In his
view, nothing metaphysically or epistemologically important corresponds
to such distinctions, nor do they have any practical usefulness. He also
generalized Kuhn’s thesis of the incommensurability of scientific paradigms.
According to Rorty, not only the natural sciences but also philosophy is
Critique of Modernit y 305

governed by paradigms. Hence, he sees the history of philosophy not as a

narrative of gradual progress and refinement but rather as a story of radical
revolutions and incommensurable theories.
Since Descartes, Rorty argued, Western philosophy has been shaped and
guided not by any particular concept or belief but rather by an underlying
image, or metaphor, of the human mind as a mirror of the world. Among
other things, this image leads to the belief that knowledge consists of
correct mental pictures, or *representations, of the outside world. As a
result, philosophy has been charged with the task of figuring out how the
validity or correctness of these mental representations may be proven.
Hence, epistemology, which had been given its classical formulation in
Kant’s writings, became the central subdiscipline of philosophy.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature presents a detailed argument for
combatting the view of thought in terms of representation and for giving up
this epistemological paradigm, not in favour of some other epistemological
paradigm that supposedly approaches the truth more closely or describes
reality more correctly, but order to to replace them by a pragmatist ac-
count. *Pragmatism is an originally American philosophical current which
originated in the works of C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, who
argued that concepts and conceptual distinctions may only be retained to the
extent that they make a noticeable difference for practical purposes. Hence,
according to Rorty, the task of philosophy is not theoretical (for example,
providing a foundation for knowledge claims) but practical. Philosophers,
he maintained, should contribute to public debates concerning practical
matters; they should also try to understand other traditions from within their
own tradition and to rejuvenate their traditions by inventing new images or
metaphors. That may sound like a humanist undertaking with universalist
aspirations, but this impression is not entirely correct, as we will see below.
Rorty was not engaged in building a philosophical system, and he was
even less concerned with recommending a specific philosophical set of tools
and concepts that will open the door to philosophical insights. He realized,
however, that he has to deal with the fact that the public debates in which
philosophers should engage have in part been framed and discussed in terms
that have already received a particular connotation in the philosophical and
scientific tradition. Hence, he argued for what he calls an ‘ironic attitude’.
Just like his conversation partners, he continued to use the philosophical
vocabulary, but he emphasized that it cannot provide the foundations for
which it was brought into being. For Rorty, philosophical concepts and
distinctions are mere instruments that should be judged exclusively in
terms of their practical role in public debates. Many long-held philosophical
306  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

notions or convictions then turn out to be of little use and hence, he argued,
it is better to give them up. In other words, Rorty continues to play the game
of traditional philosophy, but for him the stakes are different from those
of his predecessors.
For Rorty, the pragmatist main contribution to discussions consists of
redescribing what others claim to have found. Those who claim to have
formulated a theoretical foundation for correct action would be told by Rorty
that they have given an interesting summary of current political and ethical
ideas. In Rorty’s perspective, the natural sciences consist of an extension of
our language that is tailor-made to yield precisely formulated predictions,
but we should give up the pretense that it charts the underlying structure
of reality. Thus, Rorty regarded new scientific theories as metaphors, that is,
as extensions of hitherto current ways of speaking. In his view, the appear-
ance and gradual acceptance of these theories cannot be explained by the
discovery of new aspects of reality; the processes involved have a cultural
and societal rather than a metaphysical character. Thus, the rise of a new
paradigm in the natural sciences may be compared to the emergence of a
new current in the arts or the establishment of a new literary style.
This also holds for the humanities and social sciences. For Rorty, Freud
was not a scientist who uncovered hitherto unknown mechanisms of an
obscure entity, the unconscious. Instead, he reads Freud as an author who
has formulated a new and interesting narrative about humans. Hence, he
compared Freud’s position in intellectual history to that of important literary
innovators. What we call ‘science’ is thus no more than the group of statements
that in our community enjoy the highest prestige or are otherwise favoured.
Rorty’s argument leads to a particular view of the role of philosophy
and the humanities, implying that they should not aim to create or attain
more truth or a better approximation of ‘the truth’. Rather, he argues, they
should help us in becoming better humans, that is, to become more open
to the ideas, experiences, and sufferings of others. Thus, through Gadamer,
Rorty’s notion of *edification comes surprisingly close to Humboldt’s notion
of Bildung. Indeed, Rorty explicitly acknowledged as much:

Gadamer [substitutes] the notion of Bildung (education, self-formation)

for that of “knowledge” as the goal of thinking […] Since “education”
sounds a bit too flat, and Bildung a bit too foreign, I shall use “edification”
to stand for this project of finding new, better, more interesting, more
fruitful ways of speaking.75

75 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton 1980, 2nd ed.), p. 359-360.
Critique of Modernit y 307

So, is Rorty’s pragmatism simply a reproduction of the German idealistic

knowledge ideal of the humanities as formulated initially by Humboldt
and elaborated by Gadamer into a hermeneutic extreme? Not really, since
he regarded the classical notions of Bildung and Geisteswissenschaften as
inextricably intertwined with the epistemological and metaphysical tradi-
tion he rejected. In his own view, there simply is no essential or substantial
difference between the natural sciences and the humanities, for what we
call ‘science’ is no more than the body of statements that enjoy the highest
prestige in our community or are favoured in some other sense. Thus, Rorty
denied that any meaningful distinction can be made between the natural
sciences and the humanities in terms of their object (lifeless nature and
the value- or meaning-laden human spirit, respectively) or method (the
empirical-explanatory and the interpretative method, respectively). The
distinction between these paradigms, he claimed, is contingent and variable
and does not rest on any solid philosophical foundations:

Contemporary science (which already seems so hopeless for explaining

acupuncture, the migration of butterflies, and so on) may soon come to
seem as badly off as Aristotle’s hylomorphism. The [crucial dividing line]
is not the line between the human and the nonhuman but between that
portion of the field of inquiry where we feel rather uncertain that we
have the right vocabulary at hand and that portion where we feel rather
certain that we do. This does, at the moment, roughly coincide with the
distinction between the fields of the Geistes- and the Naturwissenschaften.
But this coincidence may be mere coincidence.76

Rorty reached these conclusions after a long, arduous, and fascinating path
through technical debates in analytical philosophy. Once he had reached this
point, however, his further thoughts were at times somewhat disappointing,
since it allowed him to brush aside various philosophical questions as either
uninteresting or meaningless. Nonetheless, his work has exercised a positive
intellectual and cultural function, as it has emphasized how problematic,
and ultimately futile, the seemingly self-evident appeal to such oppositions
as subjective/objective, interpretation/use, and nature/spirit can be.
Thus, Rorty stands at the end of an epistemological tradition that was
initiated by Descartes and found its culmination in Kant. In Rorty’s view, the
image of knowledge as a correct representation of the outside world and the
concomitant oppositions between mind and matter, subject and object, and

76 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 351-352.

308  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

the natural sciences and the humanities have become simply superfluous.
Academic disciplines should no longer aim at truth and objectivity but at a
postmodern form of Bildung; philosophy should not strive for ‘objectivity’
but for ‘solidarity’.
In rejecting the view of knowledge as representation, Rorty also gave
a new twist to the notion of hermeneutics, which he saw as involving the
effort to understand an incommensurable set of statements from one’s own
perspective, horizon, or paradigm. People living and working in the same
paradigm do not need hermeneutics, since they agree on what their terms
refer to and on which of their statements are true. In dealing with people
from other paradigms or traditions, however, we cannot appeal to a shared
‘objective reality’, to neutral facts, or to pure observation, the existence of
which had already been denied by Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis.
The only path still open here is to initiate discussion – which will undoubt-
edly be difficult at first – with other traditions, starting from one’s own
tradition. In doing so, one’s tradition will be gradually extended and renewed
because of this interaction, one’s horizon will be broadened. In the light
of Kuhn’s findings, we should think of philosophy as hermeneutics rather
than epistemology, Rorty concluded. That is, we should give up the search
for indubitable knowledge and correct representations of the outside world
in favour of striving for mutual understanding, in what Rorty referred to as
*edifying conversation. Thus for Rorty, philosophy should have as its goal
not the foundation of knowledge claims but a meeting of minds.
It would seem logical that such an edifying conversation between devotees
of different paradigms should be directed in particular towards conversation
partners from different cultures. This is not, however, what Rorty himself
primarily had in mind. He showed little interest in a conversation with
representatives of radically different value systems. Indeed, on closer inspec-
tion, he appeared remarkably ethnocentric: ‘philosophers’ moral concern,’
he wrote in the very last sentence of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature,
‘should be with continuing the conversation of the West’.77 Likewise, after
the September 11th assaults against the World Trade Center in New York in
2001, he argued that the Western conversation with the Islamic world should
not consist of a mutual expansion or exchanging of horizons but rather of
patiently explaining why the Western world really is better. Thus, Rorty’s
postmodernism or pragmatism appears to have definite boundaries. He
himself, however, explicitly defended this ethnocentrism by arguing that
we cannot just ignore our own historical and cultural context, since each

77 Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 394.

Critique of Modernit y 309

conversation, including conservations with others, should inevitably start

from this point. It is less self-evident, however, that it should also end there.

11.4 Conclusion: Beyond (Western) Modernity

Rorty made explicit a point that has thus far in this book remained largely
implicit: to a greater or lesser extent, virtually all the authors discussed above
are *ethnocentric or *Eurocentric in that they assume that modernity, whatever
its features and problems may be, is a specifically, if not uniquely, European
or Western phenomenon. In recent decades, such assumptions have increas-
ingly come under attack, in particular by researchers with a non-European
background. Some of these criticisms – in particular from among practitioners
of postcolonial studies and, later, global history – will be discussed in chapter 13.
We conclude this chapter with an overview of two scholars who thematize the
ethnocentrism of current notions of modernity from the inside, so to speak.
The Israeli sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt (1923-2010) argued that we are
increasingly confronted with what he calls *multiple modernities. The hitherto
widespread notion that modernization implies Westernization has been
unmasked as an illusion. Eisenstadt characterized modernity as a cultural
programme or project that was initiated during the Enlightenment and that
rejected the traditional powers of religion and absolutist rulers. This modern
project included a radically novel idea of man as free and autonomous and
an equally radically novel idea of political order as legitimized by popular
sovereignty. From the start, however, there was a tension between the societal
and political pluralism of this project and the universalist – or, as Eisenstadt
called it, ‘totalist’ – claims of modern reason. An even more paradoxical
aspect of modernity is the universalization of the – particularist – project
of the nation-state, which in the course of the twentieth century became
the dominant form of political organization across the globe.
In the 1950s, the expectation among Western scholars and postcolonial
political elites alike was that in all nation-states, modernization would lead
to more homogeneous societies (the so-called ‘melting pot’ hypothesis) as
well as to equality between men and women and to secularization. At the
end of the twentieth century, however, the experience of various countries
has disproved the expectation that modernization would simply amount to
the adoption of Western values, practices, and institutions and to the disap-
pearance of internal differences. Increasingly, various new forms of social
protest, religious fundamentalism, and ethnic or regional consciousness are
now contesting the nation-state’s legitimacy. These forces are only seemingly
310  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

traditional, Eisenstadt argued, for in reality, they embody alternative visions of

the cultural programme of modernity. Hence, modernity is no longer uniform,
universal, or hegemonic but has become plural and permanently contested.
Obviously, that leaves unanswered the question of whether this multiple
and contested modernity still implies any intellectual or normative standards
that can give us support, and if so, what these are. Eisenstadt also seemed to
maintain the assumption that modernity was in the first instance a purely
European affair and that other modernities have emerged only in reaction
to this European project. Nowadays, this assumption, too, has increasingly
come under attack (see § 13.5).
Second, French anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour rejected
the notions of both modernity and postmodernity. In his much-discussed
1993 essay, We Have Never Been Modern, he argued that, unlike what we
would like to believe, we Westerners are simply *amodern. In doing so, he
rejected the idea that modernity is marked by a unique kind of rationality.
As received opinion has it, the premodern and/or non-Western world is
characterized by magic and superstition, both of which amount to a confu-
sion or mixing of the realms of nature and society. To give a simple and
slightly ethnocentric example, among premodern or ‘primitive’ peoples,
the magical belief holds that one may provoke a natural phenomenon by
performing a rain dance or cure a disease by pronouncing a spell or ritual
formula. Latour called such mixtures of nature and culture *hybrids. We
modern Westerners, our self-image tells us, have left the primitive confusion
of such hybrids behind us. The *modern constitution would accordingly
amount to the strict separation, or *purification, of the realms of nature,
politics, or society, and language or discourse. One is ‘modern’ if one has
learned to carefully distinguish between facts and values, between means
and goals, and between man and nature.
According to Latour, however, while the modern constitution may present
these domains as strictly separated, it produces and proliferates new hybrids
itself. Thus, for example, the gap in the ozone layer, climate change, genetic
modification, and the AIDS virus are simultaneously and irreducibly natural
phenomena, societal and political problems, and discursively constituted
notions. The conviction that only premodern and non-Western peoples
confuse nature, culture, and language thus appears untenable, for we,
too, inevitably live in a world of hybrids. In fact, precisely as a result of
the development of science and technology, the number of hybrids has
increased exponentially. Thus, Latour argues, the modern constitution is
a myth that paradoxically makes possible the increasing proliferation of
hybrids even as it denies their existence and even their possibility. Whereas
Critique of Modernit y 311

modern existence is dominated by hybrids and whereas numerous political

questions concerning such hybrids present themselves, ranging from climate
change to ethical questions concerning genetic manipulation, the modern
discourse of purification itself blocks the very formulation of such questions.
From this observation, Latour drew a radical philosophical conclusion.
Whereas in modern philosophy epistemology has priority over ontology, he
himself developed a philosophy in which ontology takes the lead. Whereas the
philosophical tradition concerned itself with the question of how knowledge
about reality comes about and indeed is made possible, Latour zoomed in on
the question of how knowledge may arise in reality and how it contributes
to the shaping of reality. With his approach, science thus becomes a *mode
of existence that emerged in the modern period and that is ontologically
rather than epistemologically (that is, a specific attitude, state of mind, or
rationality) distinct from other modes such as religion, politics, or law. Within
each of these modes of existence, specific forms of existence are created.
This philosophical starting point enabled Latour to develop an ‘anthropol-
ogy of the moderns’ in which modernity itself – and in particular the modern
scientific and technological world – is described with the aid of the empirical
ethnographic techniques that Western anthropologists had developed for
the study of ‘premodern’ or ‘primitive’ non-Western cultures. Just as earlier
anthropologists had studied life among peoples in remote regions such as
the Pacific Ocean, Latour studied life in modern laboratories in order to
show how, within the mode of existence we call ‘science’, hybrid entities
are produced that are both real and constructed. Later, he also conducted
research in the Conseil d’État, the highest French juridical organ, in order
to clarify how what we call ‘law’ is produced in the judicial process.
Eisenstadt and Latour had relatively little to say about the role of the
humanities in the world of multiple modernities and/or modern hybrids. Two
other aspects of modernity, however, have attracted considerable attention
from humanities scholars – namely gender and postcolonial relations;
conversely, the role of the humanities in constituting these aspects has been
studied as well. The final two chapters of this book delve into these themes.

Summary

− Derrida described the Western metaphysical tradition as both unten-

able and inescapable. His deconstructionist thought emphasizes the
contingency of linguistic signs against the dialectical and teleological
philosophy of consciousness of many of his predecessors.
312  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

− Deleuze developed a philosophy of difference, which gives up fixed

essences and identities. He developed his idea in part on the basis of
his interest in film.
− Postmodernism is both a social-cultural phenomenon and an intellectual
current. It involves a principled doubt about the possibility of scientific,
political, societal, and artistic progress; a rejection of the distinction
between mass and elite culture; and an emphasis on the constitutive role
that signs, or ‘representations’, play in our knowledge. Epistemologically,
postmodernism may be seen as a radical critique of reason with respect
to reason’s own presuppositions.
− Lyotard regarded the ‘postmodern condition’ as a sociological phe-
nomenon in which knowledge had disintegrated into irreconcilable
sub-areas. He argued that the overarching grand narratives or metanar-
ratives – such as the liberal belief in progress and the Marxist ideal of
the classless society – can no longer serve as a general legitimation of
knowledge.
− Proceeding from Quine and Sellars, Rorty’s postmodern pragmatism
rejected the Kantian view of knowledge as representation and the entire
epistemological and metaphysical tradition that has developed from
it. His knowledge ideal is not that of approximating the truth but one
of edifying conversation.
− Eisenstadt and Latour rejected the prevailing notion of modernity as
ethnocentric. Eisenstadt introduced the notion of ‘multiple modernities’,
and Latour claimed that we have never been modern in the first place.
In Latour’s view, the ‘modern constitution’ simultaneously purifies
nature, politics, and discourse as separate domains and creates new
hybrids of these three.
12 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

12.1 Introduction

Feminist critiques of the universal validity claims of the sciences proceed

from the simple fact that, over the centuries, scientific research has mostly
been conducted by men. Even today, the majority of academic university
staff and academy members are male. This holds in particular, but not
exclusively, for the natural sciences and for the higher scientific functions.
Such facts are widely known. But are they also relevant for discussions
in the philosophy of science? Do they affect the content of scientif ic
knowledge or the ways in which the sciences are practised and taught?
Feminist philosophers of science answer both questions in the affirmative.
In doing so, they seem to be turning against not only widely held beliefs
concerning science but also against common sense. At first sight, after
all, it seems absurd to argue that, for example, the laws of gravity or the
hermeneutic process of understanding are specifically masculine. Real
scientific knowledge, one could retort, is universal, controlled, and free of
ideological distortions concerning gender, race, or class, and to the extent
that it is not, it is simply not good science. According to this line of defence,
*sexism or *androcentrism may be a deplorable or objectionable trait of the
practitioners of science but not of the content of scientific knowledge itself.
Or, to speak in terms of classical empiricist philosophy of science, matters
of sexism and the oppression of women may well form part of the context
of discovery, but they are irrelevant for the context of justification.
Feminist philosophers of science arguing against this line of defence
form part of the academic movement of women’s studies, which was made
possible in part by the second feminist wave of the 1960s and 1970s. The
first feminist wave had been confined to demanding universal suffrage and
other civil rights for women. In the 1960s, in part due to the improved access
of women to higher education, these demands were supplemented with
demands for equal rights in education and employment. Under the influence
of feminist activism, many universities then established departments of
women’s studies. Initially, these departments were strongly politicized,
but increasingly they became focused on more strictly academic research.
In other words, the institutionalization of women’s studies in universities
and the gradual detachment from more informal and activist women’s
organizations also brought steady changes to the academic field.
314  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Gradually, women’s studies have broadened their territory. In particular,

increasing attention has been paid to what in the Anglo-Saxon literature is
referred to as *gender. Gender should be strictly distinguished from biological
sex: it is not a natural-scientific fact but instead concerns the social and
cultural meanings that differences in sex have had at different times and
places and the ways in which such differences are expressed and have left
their traces in scientific and other practices. Hence, nowadays, one generally
speaks of gender studies.
For a long time, gender-theoretic research focused primarily on the
gender aspects of extra-scientific phenomena and practices and less on
the sciences themselves. Examples of such early research are studies in the
representation and imagination of gender identity in contemporary mass
culture. The American singer and actress Madonna is an obvious example.
She has been labelled post-feminist, since she generally does not express any
politically feminist ideas, but neither does she accept conventional gender
roles. Instead, and indeed like various other contemporary artists, she
assumes an ambivalent and ambiguous sexual identity. For example, her
video ‘Material Girl’ (1984) is a parody of the famous singing and dancing
scene from ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ performed by Marilyn Monroe
in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but it breaks both with the conventions of
Hollywood films and with traditional gender roles. Madonna combines
voluptuous seductiveness with an assertive and almost aggressively in-
dependent way of acting. If one subsequently turns to the original film
parodied by Madonna, incidentally, one would discover that this is more
refined than common wisdom has it. The archetypes of the ‘dumb blonde’
and ‘black witch’ (played by Monroe and Jane Russell, respectively) are
rendered in such a way that they are simultaneously ridiculed. Some further
covert feminism may also be suspected when Dorothy (played by Russell)
summarizes the economic position of men as their ‘vital statistics’ – a
characterization hitherto reserved for the bodily measures of women.
Thus, gender studies no longer exclusively – and perhaps not even primar-
ily – study the ways in which women are and have been oppressed but also
increasingly examine the ways in which both male and female gender
identities and symbolisms are created. Hence, the term ‘women’s studies’ in a
sense only covers half of what is studied in gender research. Such research is
not exclusively focused on the gender identities and gender norms of women
but also tries to explain how feminine and masculine gender identities are
formed jointly and generally in opposition to each other.
This emphasis on the culture-bound notion of gender distinguishes
present-day feminist research into the sciences from earlier forms, which
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 315

had focused on male domination in and through the sciences. Such research,
obviously, is important enough in its own right. The American philosopher
of science Sandra Harding (b. 1935) distinguishes three variants of such
research: 1) enquiries into the female scientists (whom she calls ‘women
worthies’) whose work has unjustly been forgotten; 2) enquiries into spe-
cifically female contributions to the sciences that have been ignored or
suppressed; and 3) enquiries into the ways in which scientific knowledge
is used for the domination or oppression of women.
All these forms of critique of the sciences, however, have two limitations.
First, they presuppose a more or less constant oppression, usually labelled
*patriarchate in feminist circles, instead of exploring specif ically how
domination is achieved and reproduced in different times and places. As
a result, they risk falling into a form of victim thinking and relapsing into
representations of women as the eternally weak, powerless, and passive
objects of an equally timeless male oppression. Second, such critiques
leave open the abovementioned route of escape for defenders of ‘scientific
objectivity’, who can now argue that such examples of oppression are simply
irrelevant to science itself. The fact that relatively few famous scientific
discoveries have been made by women or that even today relatively few
female scientists are active, or that scientific knowledge has been abused for
the oppression of women and others can be shrugged off as a deplorable but
historically contingent phenomenon. Eventually, such aspects are rejected as
irrelevant for scientific knowledge. It is not important, it is argued, who has
made a specific discovery but only what has been discovered and whether
the claims made can withstand criticism or attempts at refutation.
This rejection of feminist analyses, however, presumes an image of science
that has already been rendered increasingly problematic in the course of
chapters 3 and 4 above. Thus, in The Science Question in Feminism (1986),
Harding applied a number of developments in the philosophy of science
to feminist themes, emphasizing that feminist critiques of science should
not restrict themselves to the three kinds of research mentioned above. A
more important and radical task, she argued, is theorizing the concept of
gender, that is, systematically exploring the effects of gender identities and
gendered behaviour – such as the representation of emotions and reason as
typically feminine and masculine respectively – on actual scientific practice.
At first sight, such a radical critique may seem far-fetched, but it gains in
plausibility against the background of a number of the developments in the
philosophy of science described above. Two of these have been especially
important for the formulation of a feminist critique of science: first, the
genealogical critique of forms of domination that may be hidden in seemingly
316  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

neutral domains, as was made possible by such thinkers as Foucault and

Bourdieu; and second, the pragmatist line in American philosophical think-
ing running from Quine and Sellars to Kuhn and Rorty.
The main tenets of French-inspired critiques should by now be clear to
the reader. Initially, we may be tempted to explain the authoritative position
of the sciences based on its privileged access to and correct representation
of reality, but French thinkers have rendered the very idea of ‘access to an
extra-linguistic reality’ deeply problematic. Moreover, they have pointed
out the ability of linguistic means – generally referred to as discourses,
narratives, or representations – to constitute, in a certain sense, their own
realities. What is true and what is false, what are the objects we talk about,
etc. are to an important extent constituted by such linguistic means. In other
words, they are not given independently of a discourse but are internal to
it. This perspective allows us to study the whole of scientific statements
as a discourse or narrative and to explore how discursive tactics such
as *gender metaphors – that is, characterizing phenomena as ‘typically
masculine’ or ‘feminine’ – contribute to the exclusion or marginalization
of elements represented as feminine. Below, we will discuss several such
gender metaphors.
The second source of inspiration for a radical feminist critique is the
development of American empiricism since the Duhem-Quine thesis. If
we accept the thesis that crucial tests are impossible – and hence that it
is unworkable to adhere to and reject theories on the basis of strict and
unchanging methodological principles – the suspicion arises that choices
between theories are apparently made on other grounds. Kuhn claimed
that the processes in which such decisions are made have a social character.
This view opens the way to the study of scientific development as a social
activity conducted by specific, and mainly male, social groups and of the
role played in it by beliefs and ideologies concerning nature and culture,
concerning valid and invalid knowledge claims, and concerning the relation
between men and women – in short, that group’s ‘worldview’. And finally,
Rorty’s rejection of the image of science as representation gives us a reason
for seeking another explanation for the dominance of scientific knowledge
and for the dominant role of men in the acquisition and spread of such
knowledge other than the conventional appeal to a privileged access to and
uniquely correct interpretation of the world that science is supposed to yield.
Contemporary gender studies are not, or are no longer, marked by any
one generally accepted method and even less by any one societal aim. They
share this fragmentation with postmodern scientific currents in general.
This situation leads to a number of problems and risks that are even more
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 317

apparent and more urgent in the case of gender studies than elsewhere. In
the first place, the increasing emphasis on the notion of gender in terms of
representation and symbolization has led to a relative decline in focus on
the concrete social practices and institutions in which such representations
and symbolizations are formed and reproduced. In part, gender studies have
moved from the social to the humane sciences. Nowadays, they belong to
literary and cultural theory, film and television sciences, and philosophy
as much as to sociology. With this shift in emphasis from social practices
of oppression to symbolic processes of representation, the links with the
wider social women’s movement have weakened to some extent. This is, of
course, a problem encountered by any form of scientific practice that has its
roots and legitimation in a social movement or in social activism. In part,
this shift also reflects a broader opposition that is difficult to avoid entirely
between social engagement on the one hand, and on the other, academic
institutionalization, professionalization, and respectability.
A second problem is the question of why gender should be such a uniquely
important social factor. After all, for a long time, science has not only been
exclusively the work of men; for the most part, it has also been carried out by
white males from the European and Northern-American upper and middle
classes. Why, then, should we exclusively pay attention to gender relations or
at least pay more attention to those relations than to other social variables
such as class, race, or ethnicity, of which we might equally well argue that
they have shaped the development of scientific knowledge?
Several answers to this question have been given. For example, Evelyn Fox
Keller (b. 1936) acknowledges that the notion of gender in the exploration
of science is restricted to a small part of Western culture. But it is precisely
because modern science is culturally and socially bound so strongly to
the white, Eurocentric upper classes that we can focus without any great
risk on the analysis of gender phenomena in the latter and leave the social
variables of class and race out of our consideration. By contrast, other
authors, including Sandra Harding, systematically link feminist critiques
with ideas and insights from *postcolonial critiques of science that argue
that Western science has in part developed as a result of the European
voyages of discovery and as a result of the slavery and colonial domination
that followed in their wake.
A third problem, specific to the philosophy of science, is the fact that
the postmodern approach of many gender theoreticians seems difficult
to square with their belief that studies that do not take gender relations
into account are incomplete or incorrect. Many feminist critics accept the
French-inspired critique that notions such as truth and objective validity are
318  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

internal to or constituted by the whole of scientific statements. Moreover,

many of them share beliefs such as Rorty’s that knowledge – including
scientific knowledge – should not be seen as a correct representation of the
outside world. But how can we then still argue that it is only by theorizing
the concept of gender that we can come to an adequate description or
representation of factual scientific practice, for example, as some feminist
critics seem to do?
Here, too, different reactions are possible. Some, like Sandra Harding,
give up the classical ideal of knowledge as the correct representation of the
outside world in favour of a pragmatist idea of knowledge as defended by
Rorty. Thus, Harding does not argue that feminist descriptions of scientific
practice are more adequate or correct than others but merely that they
have a greater practical use in so far as they contribute to the emancipa-
tion of women and other oppressed groups. Others appeal to the work of
scholars such as Kuhn and Habermas, arguing that scientific knowledge
is in the final analysis not legitimized by a ‘correspondence to the facts’
but by its acceptance by the community of scientists. If only women and
other minorities sufficiently participate in that community, and practise
science from their own particular interests and concerns, it is argued,
feminist and other ideas will increasingly become part of legitimate – that
is, ‘true’ – scientific knowledge.

12.2 Gender and Gender Metaphors

The concept of gender is informed by the idea that in different periods and
in different places, people have thought in very different ways about the
relation between the masculine and the feminine. One of the achievements
of gender studies is thus the insight into how deep these historical differences
and changes have been and how such historically variable ideas have shaped
both quotidian and scientific practices.
Thus, Evelyn Fox Keller has argued that the development of modern
science cannot be adequately understood without paying attention to the
role of so-called *gender metaphors – i.e., the representation or imagination
of phenomena and things as ‘typically’ masculine or feminine – in shaping
the aims and values of the new mechanist natural philosophy. One example
with which she illustrates this thesis is her analysis of how such metaphors
have shaped the debate between early modern adherents of mechanistic
and hermetic philosophies concerning witchcraft. Without paying attention
to the role of gender metaphors and ideologies of gender in science, she
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 319

maintains, one can hardly understand why the supposedly ‘rational’ spirit
of the new science took the phenomenon of witchcraft so seriously.
In the mid-seventeenth century, *hermeticism, which saw the material
world as permeated by the divine spirit, was the biggest rival to mechanistic
philosophy. The most important hermetic science was alchemy, which strove
for the purification of the human soul. The alchemist desire to make gold
out of base metals was a symbolic expression of this process of spiritual
purification. The alchemists had a clearly gendered and occasionally ex-
plicitly sexual imagery regarding the links between matter and spirit: they
imagined scientific knowledge in terms of a mystical and in part sexual
unification and as the amalgamation of elements represented as masculine
and feminine. The mechanistic philosophers’ imagery, by contrast, was
one of a strict separation between male and female principles and of the
domination of the female by the male.
Remarkably, the academic institutionalization of the new mechanistic
science virtually coincided with a period of intensive persecution of witches.
Thus, in 1667, one of the most prominent members of the Royal Society,
Joseph Glanvill, published a treatise against witchcraft, Some Philosophical
Considerations Touching Witchcraft and Witches, which gained considerable
popularity. In this book, Glanvill did not argue, as a present-day reader
might expect, that witchcraft is all nonsense and superstition. On the
contrary, he accepted that the existence of a domain of spirits and demons
had been proved by the statements of ‘thousands of eye- and ear-witnesses,
and those not of the easily deceivable vulgar onely, but of wise and grave
discerners’.78 According to the alchemists, the magical spiritual forces of
witches were an expression of the miracles God can work in the material
world and of the interpenetration of the spiritual and material domains.
The mechanistic philosophers, however, shared the more conservative view
that witchcraft was the work of the Devil. Already in 1486, the influential
Malleus Maleficarum (Witches’ Hammer), a treatise on the existence of
witchcraft, included the following statement: ‘All witchcraft comes from
carnal lust, which is in women insatiable… Wherefore for the sake of their
lusts [women] consort with devils’.79
From this perspective, the seventeenth-century witch hunts may be seen
as expressing a fear of female sexuality. The mechanists, however, did not
seek the complete eradication of spiritual phenomena. After all, completely

78 Glanvill, Some Philosophical Considerations Touching the Being of Witches and Witchcraft
(London, 1667), p. 5.
79 Quoted in Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, 1985), p. 60.
320  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

denying these could lead to atheism, which they saw as societally even
more dangerous. Rather, they held that both spiritual and feminine forces
should be strictly dominated. Even in the field of knowledge, they felt,
‘feminine’ principles should be strictly separated from and subordinated to
the ‘masculine’ principles of the new science: one should seek domination
instead of unification, and experimental, rather than spiritual knowledge.
Glanvill and others, in other words, did not combat alchemy in the name of
‘truth’ or ‘scientific rationality’ as opposed to superstition and irrationality
but in terms of the question of what kinds of knowledge are risky from a
societal point of view and what kinds encourage social stability.
Seen in this light, it is by no means a coincidence that the members of
the Royal Society explicitly stated their preference for a ‘masculine science’
in which features represented as typically masculine, such as reason and
unprejudiced observation, took centre stage and from which passions,
emotions, and intuitions as found in the hermetic tradition were resolutely
banished as being ‘feminine’. Nor is it a coincidence that they saw the domi-
nation of nature, conceived as being feminine, as the main aim of science
and that the way this goal was to be reached consisted of the civilized and
self-possessed conversation between the gentlemen of the Royal Society.
Likewise, religious differences of opinion were out of bounds here.
With her analysis, Fox Keller did not intend to encourage a return to
the more mystical and perhaps ‘women-friendlier’ views of science of the
hermetic tradition. She merely aimed to show that the struggle between
hermetic and mechanistic philosophies was driven by factors very different
from what we might think today, and that nowadays seemingly self-evident
ideals of science were the result of a societal, political, and religious debate
in which ideas about feminine and masculine features played a key role.
More recent developments in both the natural sciences and the hu-
manities have also been studied from the perspective of gender metaphors.
Thus, feminist theoretician Donna Haraway (b. 1944) has described how
culturally specific prejudices concerning the relation between men and
women and associated notions of family, mother-child relations, and love
have informed research into primates. When societal views concerning
gender change, she argues, this change is reflected in the way biologists
and other primate scholars write about anthropoid apes. Other studies
have pointed out similar stereotypes in which scientists working in biology
or medicine have conceptualized processes of reproduction in which the
man’s semen is invariably represented as ‘active’, ‘powerful’, and ‘able to
move’, as a result of which it is able to penetrate the woman’s ovum, where it
‘deposes’ its genes and ‘sets development in motion’. The ovum, by contrast,
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 321

is represented as passive; it is held that the ovum does not displace itself but
is ‘transported’ by the Fallopian tubes, where it passively waits until it is
fertilized by the semen. Thus, according to Haraway and others, currently
dominant stereotypes concerning men and women are reflected in technical
scientific literature as well.

12.3 Foucault and the History of Sexuality

In 1976, Michel Foucault published La volonté de savoir (The Will to Knowl-

edge), the first volume in a multi-volume series on the history of sexuality.
In this book, Foucault turned against the received wisdom of that time,
criticizing both the Freudian idea that bourgeois society rests on the
repression of sexual desires and the Marxist view that bourgeois Victorian
morality, in all its prudishness, homophobia, and fear of female sexuality,
had repressed talking about – let alone practicing – sexuality. According
to this ‘repressive hypothesis’, our repressed sexual desires were liberated
only by psychoanalysis and the post-war sexual revolution.
Foucault rejected this picture. In the first place, he argued, during the
nineteenth century, sexuality was not silenced. On the contrary, by means of
various new sciences such as modern medicine and psychiatry, people were
in fact forced to speak about their sexual desires and acts. Genealogically,
these modern sciences may therefore be seen as power practices, since
they force individuals to speak the truth about themselves. Hence, one
cannot simply say that during the Victorian age, speaking about sex was
forbidden or repressed across the board, for in some spaces, such speaking
was actually encouraged.
In the second place, according to Foucault, the power involved in these
new forms of knowledge is not repressive or negative but productive, as it is
supposed to produce physically and mentally healthy people. Hence, deviant
and non-reproductive forms of sexuality such as homosexual contacts,
masturbation, or frigidity are represented in these sciences as pathological
or abnormal. Here, too, a modern, non-sovereign form of power is involved,
which is articulated in terms of the normal and the pathological (cf. § 10.3).
Modern human sciences such as medicine and psychiatry have not only
labelled modern man as either sexually healthy or pathological, they have
also produced the new notion of *sexuality, which brought together hitherto
strictly separated areas of human experience. Thus, in 1870, the concept of
‘homosexuality’ was introduced. This concept involved both the outward
sexual behaviour between persons of the same sex and the inner same-sex
322  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

desire, or love, which was initially represented as pathological. Whereas

premodern sources speak of sexuality in terms of behaviour that may
transgress either human or divine laws and commands, modern scientists
speak of sexuality as a psychological and physiological condition or as
both a bodily and mental identity. Thus, according to Foucault, during the
nineteenth century, a specifically modern and uniquely Western science
of sexuality or scientia sexualis was developed.
In other societies and traditions and in earlier historical periods, theoreti-
cal works on sexuality had been written, but these did not concern a science
of sexuality but rather an ‘art of pleasure’ or ars erotica, in which knowledge
concerning sexuality was formulated not in terms of sin, perversion, or
health, but primarily in terms of pleasure. The most famous example of
such a premodern ars erotica is undoubtedly the ancient Indian Kama Sutra,
but comparable works also existed among the ancient Greeks, in ancient
China, and in the medieval Islamic world. Incidentally, later researchers
have criticized Foucault for introducing an overly schematic and partly
*Orientalist opposition between identities and behaviour, between modern
and premodern, and between East and West (cf. § 13.3).
In short, for Foucault, sexuality was not a natural given but a social
practice. As such, it is saturated with meanings and power relations, and it is
inherently historically variable. Sexuality, in other words, has a history. The
modern sciences that concern themselves with sexuality, Foucault argued,
amount to a continuation of medieval Christian rituals of confession. And
just like those rituals, they are linked to a disciplining and individualizing
form of power, which is to expose the truth concerning the individual. These
sciences of sexuality are modern, however, because they are not expressed in
terms of sin or transgression of the law (not only in the sense of a sovereign
or lawgiving power but also in the Lacanian sense of the symbolic order)
but in the modern scientific terms of healthy and pathological.
Thus, Foucault’s genealogical approach radically rejects the notion of
repression, which forms a cornerstone of psychoanalysis. Some readers
have concluded that in doing so, Foucault has undermined if not destroyed
the entire Freudian – and, by extension, Lacanian – edifice. That may be
overstating the case, but the influence and – to use a sexual image – fertility
of Foucault’s genealogical approach have proved immense. Since then, the
historicizing study of sexuality in different traditions has developed into a
separate field of study, with its own journals and conferences.
In his later writings, in particular in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of
Sexuality, Foucault shifted his attention from the genealogical study of
power to the ethical study of the self, and from practices of power-knowledge
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 323

over others to practices of knowledge and government of the self. He did so

primarily through an inquiry into the sexual practices of Greek and Roman
antiquity. Among the ancient Greeks, same-sex practices and pederasty were
generally accepted. More generally, and unlike in later Christian and (early)
modern Europe, sexuality was not a domain of absolute taboos, commands,
or laws. However, that did not mean, as some nineteenth-century minds
liked to believe, that a completely free and unconstrained sexual morality
ruled. Rather, sexuality was a domain in which individuals (mostly male)
could shape themselves in and through their actions into free, honourable,
and respectable citizens.
In other words, during this period, sexuality was not a domain of laws
and taboos but of what Foucault called *technologies of the self. For example,
citizens, or free adult males, could – and were expected to – prove their
masculinity by performing an active and penetrating role in all their sexual
encounters and by showing self-restraint in controlling their sexual behav-
iour (as they did, for example, with their eating and drinking habits). A man
who did not control his own passions or who played a passive sexual role
was not only seen as unmanly but was also considered unfit for offices of
government. A man who could not govern himself, it was argued, would
not be able to govern his city either. Hence, freedom and citizenship were
not inalienable rights during this period but rather the results of concrete
actions, and individuals could acquire but also lose these privileges or
achievements.
What is remarkable about Foucault’s later writings about practices of
the self is the fact that, unlike in his earlier works, Foucault was concerned
primarily with Greek and Latin antiquity rather than with the modern
period, that he searched for continuities (for example, between pagan ancient
Greece and early Christianity) rather than discontinuities, and that he no
longer wrote about anonymous and invisible practices of power but about
the ways in which individuals could shape themselves. In doing so, he did
not try to restore the leading role that he had taken away from the subject
in his earlier archaeological and genealogical writings. On the contrary, his
analyses show how individuals can form themselves into free, autonomous,
responsible, and respectable subjects in and through their self-practices.
Here, too, that is, the subject is not an antecedently given source of actions
but rather the result, or product, of practices through which individuals
may exercise power over themselves by learning to control their impulses
and desires.
Foucault’s historical analyses may be criticized on various points. For
example, he pays too much attention to free male citizens and not enough
324  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

to women and slaves, as a result of which he represents ancient Greek

sexuality too onesidedly as a purely voluntary and nonconflictual cultiva-
tion of pleasure. Nonetheless, his inquiries into ancient sexual practices
have given an enormous impulse to the study of antiquity, and his view
that individuals may form themselves into subjects in and through their
practices has proved to be a source of inspiration for the later development
of gay and lesbian studies as well as for queer theory as formulated by Judith
Butler and others.

12.4 Gender and Performativity: Judith Butler and Queer

Theory

One of the most influential new views on gender identity was formulated
by the American theoretician Judith Butler (b. 1956), one of the pioneers of
so-called *queer theory. Her work has gained substantial influence not only
in gender studies but also in literary and cultural theory and in political
theory. What is especially innovative about her work is the way in which
she applies insights from analytical philosophy – in particular concepts
from speech act theory – to ideas on subjectivity and identity (in particular,
gender identity) inspired by Hegel and contemporary French theoreticians.
Butler opens her book Gender Trouble (1990) with a critique of tacit
heterosexual assumptions in existing feminist theorizing. She does so with
a critique of the distinction, assumed by feminists and others, between sex
as biologically given and gender as socially constructed (see § 12.2). She also
denaturalizes the seemingly natural given of biological sex. In her view,
feminists also remain captives of the assumption that men and women
are naturally – that is, as a biological given – heterosexual. Against this
assumption, she mobilizes Foucault’s archaeological insight that concepts
such as ‘nature’ and hence what is ‘natural’ are also discursively constituted
and historically variable. Thus, biological sex, too, is a theory-dependent
and discursively constituted category rather than a pre-discursive, natural
given:

Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/

cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced
and established as ‘prediscursive’, prior to culture, a politically neutral
surface on which culture acts.80

80 J. Butler, Gender Trouble, (London 1990), p. 10; emph. in original.

Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 325

Contemporary biology therefore does not simply describe natural facts

but also contains tacit normative assumptions, in particular the belief that
people, as biological beings, are normally heterosexual. This heterosexual
normativity, Butler continues, does not function in biology alone but at
various levels. By representing other forms of sexuality, in particular homo-
sexuality, as ‘abnormal’, it encourages their marginalization and oppression.
Butler describes the functioning of this normative heterosexuality, or as
she calls it *heterosexual matrix, in great detail. Feminist activists may
undermine social norms regarding gender while simultaneously leaving
intact the heterosexual matrix, for example when they tacitly or explicitly
assume that humans are biologically, hence naturally, heterosexual. She
likewise finds fault with the psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Lacan
for proceeding from an assumed normative heterosexuality. Thus, although
Freud acknowledges the fact that children do not have an ambiguous or natu-
ral object of desire, he still presumes a ‘normal’ course of development that
is supposed to conclude in a genital and reproductive adult heterosexuality.
Next, Butler argues that gender identities are *performative, that is, they
are constituted in and by our actions. Gender, she writes, is not a natural
given, but neither is it simply a cultural meaning or interpretation of such
givens. Instead, it is an embodied practice under existing norms. Put dif-
ferently, gender is not something we have by nature but something that
is constituted performatively in and by repeated actions, for example by
behaving or not behaving as a ‘real’ man or woman is supposed to, according
to our environment. Thus, according to Butler, gender identity is not a secret
truth or hidden essence of the inner or psyche, which may be revealed by
the interpretative work of psychoanalysis. Such an interpretation would
presuppose a subject that, independently of and prior to our behaviours,
already possesses such an identity as given.
Building upon the practice theoreticians discussed above (see chapter 10),
Butler argues that the subject in possession of a gender identity, with its
sexual desires and intentions, is not the source but the result of a sequence
of sexual practices which in time are naturalized into unconscious bodily
positions and dispositions, that is, what Bourdieu would call a habitus
(compare § 10.4a). Following Foucault, Butler describes her undertaking
as ‘genealogical’. She explores categories such as sex, gender, and desire
not as the origins or causes of sexual behaviour but rather as power effects
arising from institutions, practices, and forms of language usage. Just like
Foucault, she argues that power may be productive, but the historicizing
dimension of Foucault’s analyses recedes into the background in her own
writings.
326  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Judith Butler

The clearest and most famous example of this performative dimension

of gender is drag or travesty. A man dressed up as a woman, or a woman
dressed up as a man is not merely an external manifestation derived from
a – supposedly inner and prior – ‘reality’ of gender, Butler argues, as there
is no inner experience that is given independently of and prior to such
embodied and partly linguistic behaviour. On the contrary, what drag shows
is precisely the fact that our bodily experience is constituted by normative
categories such as man and woman and that we may reproduce and affirm
but also imitate, parody, and/or subvert such norms in our behaviour. Thus,
drag also undermines the very notion of gender in that it renders the ques-
tion of what the ‘real’ identity (man or woman) is of the person dressed up
impossible to answer. Thus, Butler systematically problematizes the relation
between sex, gender, and sexuality. She shows that this relation is not a
simple causal or natural one. In principle, gender identities are independent
of sexual desires and practices. That is, the fact that some people engage in
drag says nothing about the character or direction of their sexual desires.
Obviously, Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender, for example in
drag, does not amount to the suggestion that individuals are entirely free
and without constraints in constituting gender identities or that a single
sexual act immediately establishes such an identity. On the contrary, she
emphasizes precisely the problematic relation that performative gender
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 327

behaviour has with respect to the existing norms under which it is pro-
duced and the crucial role played by repetition or iteration in the formation,
reproduction, and possible subversion of such identities and norms. Norms
of gender and sexuality, she argues, are not simply given; they only function
to the extent that they are presupposed and reproduced in our behaviour.
Thus, performative gender behaviour is not an isolated act but rather a
ritual that achieves its naturalized and embodied effects in and by repetition.
It is also in and by such repetition, or iteration, that norms may be produced,
reproduced, or – as we know since Derrida – subverted. According to Butler,
Austin’s own example of performing a marriage service by speaking words
like ‘I hereby declare you legally married as man and woman’ is not only an
example of how we may performatively constitute what we describe in our
speech acts but also a prototypical case of making societal ties heterosexual
by performatively and ritually sacralizing them.
Next, Butler poses the question of exactly where the power resides that
makes such performative acts successful or felicitous. She argues that this
power is not located in a subject or consciousness that stands outside or
above the speech act and hence can control or govern its meaning. The
effect of authoritative language use, she argues, is not achieved either by
the speaker’s intentions (in this case, the intentions of the town official
pronouncing the marriage formula) or by any authority those speakers
possess in advance. Rather, it is precisely by quoting, and thus iterating,
the law that the authority of both the speaker and of the words spoken
is performatively established and confirmed. In other words, following
Derrida, Butler argues that performative action is effective not as a result
of either speakers’ intentions, linguistic conventions, or power relations
given in advance but primarily due to the repeatability or iterability of signs
(compare § 11.2a). Norms concerning sexuality and gender, she argues, also
function in this manner, that is, through iteration.
In later work, Butler also applied her insights into the performativity
of gender identity – and the precarious power effects it involves – to the
phenomenon of hate speech. Using slurs or terms of abuse in order to refer
to racial, ethnic, sexual, or religious minorities, for example, does not simply
involve the legitimate exercise of free speech in describing facts or expressing
opinions, as the perpetrators of hate speech often argue in their defence.
Speech act theory can help us to see that our words may have rather more
far-reaching effects and may create various (social) realities in that they may
hurt or humiliate the addressee, they may incite third parties to hatred or
discrimination, etc. But such effects, Butler adds, can never unambiguously
be foreseen or controlled by speakers. Moreover, the iterability of words
328  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

problematizes the strict distinction between their illocutionary force,

which is conventionally determined or intended by the speaker, and their
perlocutionary effect on the hearer, as conceived by Austin.
Words can therefore not be identif ied unambiguously with deeds,
Butler argues, and this renders problematic any attempt to regulate hate
speech and the freedom of speech by law. Hence, Butler resists the un-
derstandable attempt to protect the rights of minorities by strengthening
existing laws concerning hate speech. Such laws, she argues, merely serve
to strengthen state power, and with it the state’s ability to constrain the
rights of other minorities. Here, she is alluding primarily to the notorious
‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in the United States army from the 1990s,
which took the statement ‘I am gay’ as in itself an act of homosexuality,
which was accordingly made punishable for American soldiers. Butler
also emphasizes the hypocrisy of the appeal to free speech in the case of
hate speech, which inverts the relation between victims and perpetrators.
Take the notorious example of placing a burning cross in the front yard of
an African-American family by Ku Klux Klan members in the southern
United States. Traditionally, that sign counts as a call for a lynching, but by
representing it as the expression of an opinion, perpetrators represent the
victims who ask for prosecution as the real perpetrators and themselves
as the victims of state censorship.
Butler’s analysis of hate speech as performative and working through
iteration implies an innovative perspective on censorship. In her view,
censorship is not a repressive form of power that forbids specific words or
statements but rather a productive power practice that tries to form specific
personalities or subjects by regulating speaking as action. Thus, with regard
to the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy in the American army, it was believed that
by outlawing that linguistic action in the army, the United States could also
keep homosexuals out of the army as persons.
These and other cases suggest that Butler’s work is relevant not only
for an audience of colleagues, as some critics who have reproached her
have argued. Although her style is often demanding, Butler exposes seem-
ingly self-evident and as such unrecognized forms of discursive and other
violence, which may touch upon the deepest aspects of someone’s public
or private life. The very fact that people have a gender identity, she argues,
is a result of continuous processes of heterosexual framing and subjection,
which are carried out in a series of ritual performative actions, literally
from the very moment a child is born and the wet nurse declares whether
it is a girl or a boy.
Gender, Sex, and Sexualit y 329

Summary

− Feminist approaches to science maintain an ambivalent relation to

postmodernism. They argue that the traditional image of science is
strongly androcentric. Initially, the main focus of attention within
women’s studies was demonstrating the oppression of women in and by
scientific knowledge. Later, the theoretization of the concept of gender
in the sciences took centre stage.
− Foucault argued that the concept of ‘sexuality’ is a specifically modern
notion that combines inner desire and outer behaviour and is coupled
with new forms of knowledge and power that classify people in terms
of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’.
− According to Judith Butler, gender identities are neither biologically
given nor socially constructed but performatively constituted. In later
years, Butler extended these ideas about the performativity of gender
to other kinds of identity and applied them to the phenomenon of hate
speech.
13 Postcolonialism

13.1 Introduction

One recently influential second line of radical criticism of the status and
legitimation of the modern humanities can be found in the writings of
so-called *postcolonial critics. Like ‘postmodernism,’ ‘postcolonialism’ is
an ambivalent term. The word was initially used to indicate the political
constellation in the world after the Second World War in which virtually all
former colonies had achieved independence but in which various colonial
and quasi-colonial relations continued to exist or to have their effects,
like the use of English or French as an official language or the continu-
ing economic, linguistic, or cultural dependence on the former colonial
motherland. But postcolonialism also refers to a theoretical framework
that systematically takes into account the fact of colonial domination and
its enduring effects when studying political, social-economic, or cultural
developments and relations in the contemporary world.
For the humanities, postcolonialism implies a very different perspec-
tive on familiar topics. First, it emphatically presents Western civilization
as merely one among many classical traditions worldwide. As a result, it
unmasks the *ethnocentrism hidden in both Renaissance humanism and the
modern humanities as well as their implicit *universalism, which presents
the particulars of classical and modern Western civilization as valid and
valuable for all mankind. Postcolonial scholars argue that this attitude
wrongly ignores, marginalizes, or dismisses other traditions as uncivilized
or unimportant.
Second, and more radically, postcolonial theoreticians argue that the
humanist ideas of Western civilization acquire a very different content and
meaning in colonial settings. Some even argue that colonial domination and
the concomitant racism are integral, if not essential, aspects of European
humanism. Hence, postcolonial approaches offer not only a novel view of
the canonical concepts, ideals, and works of European civilization but also
a radical critique of various hidden assumptions in the humanities as they
have developed in modern Europe.

13.1a Frantz Fanon

One of the pioneers of postcolonial criticism was Frantz Fanon (1925-1961).

Born on the Caribbean island of Martinique which was at the time still
332  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

a French colony, Fanon was educated in France as a medical doctor and

psychiatrist. He spent his final years in Algeria, where he actively supported
the war for independence against France. Fanon’s most famous work, The
Wretched of the Earth (1961), concerns the consequences of colonial relations,
in particular during the always difficult and often violent process of decolo-
nization in which colonies gain independence from their colonial rulers.
In this book, Fanon focused on the decolonization of Africa, in particular
the brutal Algerian war of independence, which at the time of his writing
was still ongoing and would not end until 1962.
His argument concerning colonialism and decolonization, however,
is more generally valid. Colonialism, he argued, rests on a *Manichaean
division of the world in which an absolute distinction is made between
white colonial rulers, represented as civilized and moral, and colonized
populations, represented as wild and uncivilized. Thus, colonized popula-
tion groups are often represented as uncultured ‘primitive peoples’ and as
inherently lazy, evil, and/or violent. By thus presenting colonized peoples as
not fully human, colonial rule deprives a large part of humanity of both its
pre-colonial culture and its human dignity, especially when it is exercised
in the name of modern humanist ideals of civilization and progress. In other
words, in a colonial setting, Western humanism acquires an inhuman form.
Hence, for Fanon, resistance against colonial rule also implies a rejection of
the humanist values that legitimize this rule. He added, however, that this
resistance cannot be mounted in the name of any pre-colonial, ‘authentic’
culture, precisely because this culture has been destroyed by and through
colonial domination.
Although Fanon wrote in emphatically dialectical terms, he strictly
distinguished colonial relations from Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave.
In part, his motivation to do so was undoubtedly strengthened by the fact
that Hegel, in his philosophy of right, had explicitly approved of the colonial
domination of less developed peoples (see § 6.1). Against Hegel, Fanon argued
that colonial relations do not rest on a mutual desire for recognition. The
white master does not want the recognition of the black slave but only his
labour, and conversely, the colonial slave cannot liberate himself through
this labour. Instead, he continues to orient himself towards his master
because he wants to become just like him, for example, by internalizing
his language and civilizational ideals. Thus, he becomes alienated because
of his own attempts to assimilate into European culture. As a result, even
the emancipation of black slaves is the result not of their own action and
struggle, Fanon argued, but merely of the seemingly generous but in reality
paternalistic words of the master saying ‘you are free’. Thus, not even the
Postcolonialism 333

formal emancipation or liberation of the black slave will lead to the latter’s
recognition.
Despite these criticisms, Fanon remained caught in a Hegelian and
phenomenological philosophy of consciousness in that he referred to the
dialectical process of the colonized population acquiring consciousness.
This consciousness, he added, is in the first place national, and thus Fanon’s
reflections also imply an interesting perspective on nationalism. Postcolonial
national consciousness, he claimed, was not the immediate result of an
anticolonial mass mobilization but merely an ‘empty shell’. Unlike Europe,
the Third World has no dominant bourgeoisie and hence, according to Fanon,
nationalism cannot become the dominant ideology. Nor should it become
dominant, he continued, for the national independence that is the intended
aim of the process of decolonization should not imitate European models.
In other words, by ‘national consciousness’, Fanon meant something
different from nationalism because the former is directed towards the
future and towards universal human values rather than towards cultural
or folkloric particularities from the past. After independence, he asserted,
defensive, anti-colonial nationalism must soon yield to another ideology.
The anti-colonial struggle should be directed towards developing a new
humanism and thus towards creating new humans, neither of which are
hindered or distorted by the crimes that European humanism had lapsed
into in colonial circumstances.
One of the most controversial aspects of The Wretched of the Earth is
Fanon’s discussion of violence. He argued that colonial rule is itself a form
of violence because it robs colonized peoples of their dignity and humanity,
destroys their past, and oppresses their national culture. Moreover, it can
only be maintained by violence: colonial rule is not legitimated by elections
or by education in which it turns its subjects into citizens, but only by the
repression exercised by the police and the military. Since colonists will never
voluntarily give up their power, possessions, and colonized lands, colonial
rule can only be brought to an end by means of violence:
At the level of the individual, violence is a cleansing force. It liberates the
native of his inferiority complex, and of his despair and inaction; it liberates
him of fear and rehabilitates his self-respect.81
Because of such passages, large parts of the first print run of Fanon’s book
were confiscated by the French authorities. At the same time, the French
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre praised Fanon’s book precisely because of its
open propagation of revolutionary anti-colonial violence.

81 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth, 1967), p. 74.

334  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

The Wretched of the Earth is not an academic book. One of Fanon’s main
motives was rage, according to one biographer, and one can clearly notice
this in Fanon’s writing style. For many of his opinions he gave few if any
arguments, and often the book is carried more by its compelling tone than
by a meticulous analysis. Nonetheless, it was an enormous inspiration for
several generations of academics and activists. Fanon’s work is important
because it implies a radical critique of the values of Western humanism
and because it invites us to see the classical cultural products of Western
civilization in a different light, namely that of the colonial domination of
non-Western peoples. It is along these lines that his work has been continued
by later postcolonial scholars.

13.2 Postcolonialism and the Humanities: Edward Said and

Martin Bernal

13.2a Said and Orientalism

A second pioneer of postcolonial studies who showed a much more ambiva-

lent attitude towards humanist ideals than Fanon was the Palestinian-born
literary theorist Edward Said (1935-2003). In his famous 1978 book Oriental-
ism, Said argued that the Western philological study of the Orient (and
more specifically the philological study of Arab-Islamic civilization) is
not neutral or objective descriptive scholarship but has served to support
and even justify Western colonial or imperialist rule over the non-Western
world. Basing himself on an extensive discussion of the work of a number of
pre-eminent Orientalists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Said
maintained that Orientalism reduces the complex social and cultural reali-
ties of the Arab-Islamic world to – or represents these as – a text, which can
only be correctly read and interpreted by the philologically trained Western
scholar. Moreover, he argued, Orientalism represents its object of research,
the Orient, as fundamentally and irreducibly different from the West. It
describes the Islamic Orient as sensual and thus as sexually depraved, as
drenched in religion, and as culturally and scientifically decadent, stagnant,
and unable to modernize by its own powers. Thus, in all these respects, the
homo orientalis, or Oriental man inhabiting these lands, is represented as the
absolute opposite of modern Western man, who sees himself as enlightened,
secularized, progressive, and endowed with a strict religious and sexual
morality and hence as truly masculine. For this reason, the latter believes
he has not only the right but even the duty to rule over Eastern peoples,
Postcolonialism 335

to educate them and to introduce them to Western modernity. Hence,

Orientalism is not merely in the service of Western imperialist projects, it
simultaneously helps to legitimize them as noble civilizing missions.
Said’s critique of modern philological Orientalism is radical, but it rests
on an ambivalent appreciation of the philological and humanist methods
of historicizing textual criticism. At some points, his argument appears to
amount to the wholesale rejection of the philological method that reduces
cultures to texts. Elsewhere, however, he appears to see Orientalism as
merely a bad or politically dubious kind of philology. Not only does he sing
the virtually uncritical praise of nineteenth-century philologists such as
Erich Auerbach, his own methods and ideals may also be called traditionally
philological and humanist. Thus, Said was far less dismissive of the humanist
Western civilizational ideal than Fanon, even though he was otherwise
clearly inspired by the latter, for example in his own view of Orientalism
as a colonial science or ideology, which in a Manichaean manner splits the
world into two geographically and morally opposite parts.
In part, Said elaborated on Foucault’s genealogical analyses, which
relate modern human-scientific knowledge to disciplinary power, but more
unambiguously than the latter, he treated it primarily as a function of the
colonial or imperialist power of states. And unlike Foucault, he analysed
Orientalism in Marxist terms as an ideology that distorts social realities
rather than genealogically as a form of knowledge that constitutes scientific
truths and particular kinds of subjects. Moreover, he was less interested than
Foucault in the historical variability of human scientific knowledge. Whereas
Foucault emphasized and explored the specifically modern character of
the philological methods of contemporary Orientalism, Said saw the first
expression of an essentially unchanging Orientalist division of the world into
a civilized West and a barbaric East already in ancient Greek authors such as
the tragic poet Aeschylus and the historian Herodotus. With this suggestion,
however, Said himself risked relapsing into the very representations of an
age-old or even timeless opposition between East and West that his book
Orientalism was intended to counter.
Moreover, Said has been reproached for making things too easy for
himself by restricting his analysis of connections between Orientalism
and imperialism to acknowledged imperialist overseas powers such as
France and England in the nineteenth century and the United States in the
twentieth. The narrative of the relation between Orientalist knowledge and
imperialist state power, however, is already much more complicated in the
case of Russia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russia grew into
a full-blown imperialist empire, but in crucial respects, it continued – or
336  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

one could say started – to consider itself as Oriental or Asiatic, in particular

because of its orthodox spirituality and its pagan folkloric traditions. As
such, it saw itself as strictly distinct from the modern West and from the
Enlightenment ideals of rationalism and secularism.
Even more problematic for Said’s argument is the development of Oriental-
ism in Germany (or perhaps more correctly, Prussia). In the nineteenth
century, Orientalism flourished there, and German Orientalists were among
the most prominent in the world, but for most of the nineteenth century,
German rulers had no colonial possessions whatsoever. It was not until 1884
that the newly unified Prussia started acquiring its own colonies, and in
Africa rather than in the Orient.
Said never formulated a convincing answer to such criticisms, even
though his central theses clearly should be nuanced or modified in the
light of German and Russian Orientalism. Despite such shortcomings,
however, Orientalism has been a source of inspiration for research in and
concerning the humanities, also regarding other parts of the non-Western
world such as India and China. In particular, it has led to the exploration of
the *representation of the Orient. One of the most remarkable discoveries
of this research is the insight that dominant (and gendered) images or
representations may change quickly and radically. For example, whereas
in the nineteenth century, the Islamic world was represented as sensual,
mystical, mysterious, and passive and hence as typically female, today
the media and public debate are dominated by the stereotypical image of
politicized Islam as precisely the opposite: sexually repressive, law-oriented,
aggressive, and/or prototypically masculine.

13.2b Bernal and Classical Philology

Said’s critique was largely restricted to the relatively marginal discipline

of Orientalism, but a similar postcolonial critique has also been expressed
concerning another, indeed prototypical, discipline of the modern humani-
ties: classical philology. Famously, Martin Bernal argued in Black Athena
(1987) that the modern philological image that arose in the nineteenth
century of classical Greek civilization as the origin of modern Western
culture and democracy has unmistakably racist traits. The formation of this
image, he claimed, involved the transformation of the ancient Greeks into
a racially pure, white, European, and Aryan Herrenvolk that had allegedly
developed itself all by its own powers into an advanced civilization out of its
erstwhile primitive barbarism and that had justifiably exercised a cultural
dominance over other ancient peoples. According to Bernal, this image of a
Postcolonialism 337

racially and culturally pure Greek and Indo-European civilization required

the systematic downplaying – indeed, the purging – of the Egyptian and
Phoenician (or, as Bernal called them, ‘Afro-Asiatic’) contributions to Greek
culture, even though ancient Greek authors had explicitly acknowledged
these influences.
Books by authors such as Said and Bernal are obviously both scientifically
and societally rather controversial. Both authors were castigated for having
damaged the reputation of highly respected scholars, for their rather reduc-
tive presentation of scientific knowledge as mere ideology or as the mere
legitimation of ruling powers, and for having given a one-sided, distorted,
or outdated image of the modern humanities, ancient history, and the
non-Western world. Such criticisms, however, unveil an important feature
of the modern humanities. The systematic link of part of the humanities
with the development of nationalism and with colonialism may help us
appreciate the fact that scientific theories and concepts do not develop
in a societal and political vacuum. In other words, the development and
institutionalization of academic knowledge is not isolated from societal
preoccupations and interests. This holds for the social sciences and the
humanities as much as for the natural sciences – and perhaps even more
so. Conversely, such knowledge may help to articulate and thus to shape
society itself. Thus, the modern nation-state is to an important extent the
product of work in the humanities.

13.3 The Subaltern Studies Group and Its Offshoots

A third influential current in postcolonial theorizing is the so-called

Subaltern Studies Group, which has been active in Calcutta since the early
1980s. Initially, this group focused on the social and economic history of
modern India, but soon their work was also to become a source of inspiration
for postcolonial studies concerned with other parts of the world and with
literature, the visual arts, film, and other forms of cultural expression as
well. Originally, the group owed much to Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony
and subalternity, but later, poststructuralist authors including Derrida and
Lacan were to become dominant.
The initial historiographical aim of the group was primarily to counter
the elitist bias in the historiography of British colonial rule in India and of
the resistance against it. Thus, Ranajit Guha (b. 1923), one of the group’s
initial members, argues that the conventional image of the Indian struggle
for independence as a confrontation between the British colonial rulers and
338  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

the nationalist Indian National Congress – led by figures such as Mahatma

Gandhi (1869-1948) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) – pays insufficient
attention to the specific experience and activities of subaltern groups such
as peasants and untouchables. Guha rejects the widespread image of these
groups as backward, that is, as premodern, dominated by religion (or, even
worse, superstition), lacking political consciousness, and only mobilized to
action by the leadership of modernized, secular higher classes.
According to Guha, subaltern groups did in fact possess an autonomous
domain of political action, which was not merely derived from elite politics.
On the contrary, he argues, it was precisely the failure of the Indian bourgeois
leadership to acquire hegemony over the subaltern classes that formed the
central problem of colonial and postcolonial India. The leaders of the Indian
National Congress failed to mobilize the population as a whole and to act
on the basis of the consensus of subaltern groups. Accordingly, postcolonial
India has not managed to form a nation. Instead, it is kept together through
coercion by the state rather than through consensus in society.
Another member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Partha Chatterjee (b.
1945), elaborates this critique of Indian nationalism as a non-hegemonic
ideology, generalizing it into a distinct critique of modernity. In a famous
study of nationalism in British colonial India, Chatterjee criticizes both
liberal, conservative, and Marxist views of Third-World nationalism. Accord-
ing to him, all of these presuppose the same idea of modernity as founded
on scientific rationality and as specifically European – that is, the very
notion of modernity that had also been used to justify British colonial rule
over an India represented as unenlightened, pre-modern, and irrational.
Earlier Gramscian historians of British colonial India had argued that
modernist nationalist Indian elites were a product of the English educational
system and hence did not constitute ‘organic intellectuals’ in Gramsci’s
sense, but Chatterjee describes how even the way of thinking of anti-British
Indian leaders was shaped by colonial categories. Indian nationalists such as
Gandhi, for example, rejected the colonialist idea that the Indian population
was underdeveloped and backward, arguing that it was this backwardness
that justified British colonial domination. But in their criticism of British
domination, they reproduced the very notions of ‘modernity’ and ‘rationality’
on which this domination was based.
The initial members of the Subaltern Studies Group were informed pri-
marily by Gramsci’s writings, but later authors, in particular Gayatri Spivak
(b. 1942), effected an important methodological change by introducing
poststructuralist ideas into this approach. Inspired by Lacan and Derrida,
Spivak complemented the Marxist and Gramscian theoretical vocabulary
Postcolonialism 339

with a poststructuralist critique of the subject and consciousness. Moreover,

she gave questions of gender a far more central place than the members of
the group had done hitherto.
The affinity of subaltern studies with authors such as Derrida and Lacan
was not immediately obvious, since both of these authors’ writings are
solidly anchored in the works of such known Eurocentric philosophers as
Hegel and Heidegger. The theoretical shift to poststructural methods and
concepts also implied a shift away from questions of society and political
economy – such as class or caste relations and the struggle of landless
peasants – towards themes that lie more in the linguistic and literary (and,
more generally, cultural) realm. Spivak and other scholars including Homi
Bhabha (b. 1949) have become popular primarily in comparative literature,
in cultural studies, and in film and television studies.
With the aid of poststructuralist concepts, Spivak problematized the
notions of subaltern consciousness and agency or subjectivity that are
presupposed in earlier subaltern studies. Thus, scholars such as Guha still
presume that through archival research, we have access to the consciousness
of subaltern groups (whether these are peasants or workers, women or
untouchables) and that it is possible to let these subaltern groups speak
‘for themselves’, that is, represent themselves. According to Spivak, earlier
subaltern studies therefore remained captive to the evolutionist or tele-
ological perspective presupposed in the ultimately Hegelian narrative of the
dialectical development of subaltern political consciousness. She wanted
to replace this Hegelian narrative of acquiring consciousness with a more
Derrida-inspired reading, which analyses such societal developments in
terms of non-teleological changes in sign systems.
Spivak’s criticism thus stands in the tradition of Western antihumanists
and anti-Hegelians such as Foucault, Barthes, and Deleuze, but in a famous
1988 article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, she castigated these thinkers in
turn for ignoring colonial relations. As thematized by them, the subject
is a specifically Western and masculine subject, and as a result, they fail
to pay attention to the imperialist construction of the colonial subject as
Other. For example, when Foucault and Deleuze discussed ‘the struggle’ of
‘the working class’, they neglected the international division of labour that
is characteristic of neo-imperialism, as a result of which the interests and
even the agencies of workers in the mother country and those in the colony
could not be identified unproblematically.
Spivak illustrated her argument that subaltern subjects could not un-
problematically speak or act in their own name by discussing the notorious
practice among Hindus of widow burning (sati), usually rendered in English
340  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

as suttee. For the British rulers, this practice was a prime example of the
kinds of barbarian religious practices that should be brought to an end by the
modern British civilizing mission. In this perspective, colonial rule was sup-
posed to protect Indian women against Indian men. The Indian patriarchal
tradition, by contrast, valued the ritual self-immolation of widows positively
as a noble act of loyalty and self-sacrifice, which protected the honour and
purity of both family and nation. Spivak argued that the consciousness
of Indian subaltern women is partly shaped by the sign systems of both
British colonial liberalism and Indian religious patriarchy, and hence it
becomes impossible as a matter of principle to separate their own authentic
subjectivity or consciousness from such formative influences. Thus, the
subaltern subject is not an autonomous, authentic, or self-conscious actor
but an effect of colonial and other mechanisms of power. In other words,
the subaltern are shaped by hegemonic sign systems and hence cannot
speak as subaltern.
The equally influential work of Homi Bhabha, nowadays a professor
at Harvard, shows a similar turn towards poststructuralist literary criti-
cism. Bhabha shares Spivak’s argument that the subaltern subject is not an
autonomous or homogeneous entity, but he extends this line of argument
to include the dominant or hegemonic subject. Elaborating on Fanon, he
argues that colonial relations are not only characterized by alienation, as
already noted by Hegel in the analysis of the relation between master and
slave, but also by a deeper psychological uncertainty. Here, he is clearly
inspired by Lacan’s variety of psychoanalysis (cf. § 9.6) and by Derrida’s
notion of iterability (cf. § 11.2a).
Hegemony, he argues, requires repetition (or iteration) and alterity in order
to be effective: an idea or ideology can only become hegemonic by being
repeated and reaffirmed against alternatives represented and rejected as
‘Other’. But precisely as a result of this iteration, a potential for resignification
or subversion of hegemonic meanings inevitably emerges. Unlike earlier
theoreticians, and like Derrida and Butler, Bhabha thus argues against the
belief that a subject or consciousness stands at the basis of, or can dominate,
possible meanings, for the speaking subject, he concludes in a Lacanian
vein, is itself split.
This vision also shapes Bhabha’s notion of *hybridity, that is, the blend-
ing of divergent and possibly contradictory traditions that according
to Bhabha is characteristic of postcolonial cultural relations. The most
famous – and Bhabha’s favourite – example of this hybridity may be found
in Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, in which the two Indian
protagonists undergo a Kafkaesque metamorphosis into an angel and a devil.
Postcolonialism 341

This metamorphosis is primarily intended as an allegory of how Indian

migrants in England become hybrid beings whose languages and traditions
are increasingly mixed, whose religious certainties are undermined, and
whose very humanity becomes increasingly disputed.
Although The Satanic Verses was primarily a commentary on racism and
xenophobia in 1980s England, it has hardly been read as such. Instead, it has
been seen – and both praised and condemned – as a polemical critique of
Islam. In the course of the novel, one of the protagonists, Djibreel Farishta,
gradually loses the Islamic faith of his ancestors, and the dreams he has
during this process describe the emergence of an imaginary religion in
which numerous elements of Islam are easily recognizable. It was primarily
these dream sequences, often formulated in provocative terms, that were
considered by many practicing Muslims in both England and the Islamic
world to be an insult to Islam and its prophet Muhammad. In various places,
protest demonstrations were held, and in February 1989, the Iranian leader
Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa or juridical opinion on the book
in which he condemned Rushdie to death.
Obviously, it was a cruel irony for Rushdie – and by extension for Bhabha –
that in international politics, this supposed hymn to hybridity actually
led to a strengthening of identities and of the representation of cultural
differences as irreconcilable. This divergence between literary hybridity
and identity politics leads to a more fundamental theoretical question: if
national and other identities are indeed as hybrid and as unstable as Bhabha
and Rushdie believe, why is it so easy to mobilize subaltern population
groups to defend them? Is the seemingly enduring appeal of such beliefs
in identity merely a matter of verbal or physical violence or of some other
magical identity-imposing potential of globalized capitalism? The answer
is not immediately clear.
Here and elsewhere, one notices the fact that literary-theoretical analyses
such as those of Spivak and Bhabha are not complemented by a concrete
study of the economic and political dimensions of labour migration and
globalization. As a result, more orthodox Marxist literary critics such as
Terry Eagleton (b. 1943) argue – with some justification – that in their
focus on cultural and symbolic factors, postcolonial critics largely overlook
concrete economic relations and developments. The oft-repeated emphasis
on ambiguity, hybridity, and indeterminacy, they add, pushes any concrete
programme for political action and for the improvement of concrete social
shortcomings into the background.
Eagleton has a point. It is indeed the case that the culture-critical com-
ments of later postcolonial scholars are generally not accompanied by
342  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

political-economical analyses, even if there seems to be every reason to do so.

Instead, they tend to remain stuck in generic claims about the international
or multi-national division of labour or about either the hybridizing or the
identity-shaping ‘logic’ of capitalism. Similar reproaches may also be heard
from orthodox Marxists towards later critics who have made a linguistic or
cultural turn. Behind such polemics, however, the more general theoretical
question looms of whether we can accommodate a linguistic turn and the
rise of identity politics in political-economic analyses, and if so, how.
Two other recently influential postcolonial approaches – *intersectional-
ity and *decoloniality – are equally contested. Adherents of the notion of
intersectionality, a term coined by the law professor Kimberlé Williams
Crenshaw (b. 1959), argue that race, gender, sexual orientation, and class
position are not separable or isolated aspects of one’s identity but jointly
function in systemic forms of oppression and marginalization. Methodo-
logically, this does not amount to the relatively trivial claim that social
identities have multiple dimensions or components but rather consists of a
proposal to study these dimensions as jointly arising in interaction with each
other, in order to explore systemic forms of injustice and power relations
at work within identities. In practice, intersectional thinkers, activists, and
ideas have served as a corrective to so-called ‘white feminism’, arguing
that the outlook and interests of white, Western, and often middle-class
feminists are not necessarily the same as – nor necessarily serve as a model
for – those of women with other backgrounds. But these differences do not
preclude the need for and possibility of mutual solidarity and the formation
of alliances to counter oppression. Critics have objected that th notion of
intersectionality – introduced as a metaphor to serve social activism rather
than as an academic or analytical concept – lacks a proper definition and
explanatory power. In particular, they argue that economic class is not just
one intersection or identity among others. By focusing on identity rather
than income equality, they argue, intersectionalists risk overlooking if not
ultimately serving neoliberal agendas.
The notion of decoloniality, introduced by Argentine-born Walter Mignolo
(b. 1941), originates in and focusses on the Latin-American experience rather
than India, Africa, or the Orient, but it claims to be relevant for the latter
as well. Mignolo argues that from the Renaissance until today, Western
civilization has been marked by an underlying logic of coloniality in that
the humanist ideals of ‘civilization’ or ‘civilizing’ are necessarily founded in
imperial and overseas rule. The colonial logic is not necessarily overcome
in the historical process of decolonization. Mignolo thus argues for what
he calls ‘epistemic disobedience’ or ‘epistemic de-linking,’ which consists of
Postcolonialism 343

countering the assumption that Western modes and categories of thought

are universal and trying to expose and undo the colonial matrix, or legacy, in
subordinated or subaltern ways of thinking. This can be done, for example,
by systematically studying the colonization of language, of memories, and of
space of indigenous peoples, or the ‘darker side’ – that is, the colonial logic
or dimension – of European civilization since the Renaissance.
One may ask whether Mignolo’s notion of a ‘colonial matrix of power’
created by Western imperial countries does justice to the experience of
other empires, in particular Russia and China. Likewise, the relation of
these civilizational processes to questions of political economy remains
unexplored. According to Mignolo, both liberal capitalism and Marxism
are products of Western civilization, but it remains to be seen whether his
programme can develop a detailed critique of, let alone an alternative to,
the modern and possibly colonial concept of the ‘economy’. In short, it is too
early to tell whether these approaches, however popular they are at present,
will prove to be fertile and enduring analytical frameworks in the longer run.

13.4 Beyond Postcolonialism: Globalization and Global History

In the early twenty-first century, postcolonial theory – with its shift from
liberal, Marxist, and consciousness-philosophical approaches to sign-
oriented and/or poststructuralist perspectives – is giving way to theories
about *globalization, the key term – or, according to some, the word now in
vogue. Initially, this term referred to the seemingly unstoppable worldwide
spread of free-market capitalism after the 1989 fall of the communist East
Bloc; more recently, it has also increasingly been used to interpret cultural
phenomena.
Not everyone is happy with the popularity of this term, however. The
Africanist and historian Frederick Cooper (b. 1947), for example, expresses
his doubts about the concept of globalization, which he believes is too
unclear and too diffuse in meaning to serve any analytical purpose. Cooper
does not deny that the contemporary world economy has qualitatively
novel features, but he doubts whether these features are best captured
under the heading of ‘globalization’. Both proponents and opponents of
globalization, he argues, proceed from the unquestioned assumption that
they are dealing with a single, unitary and unambiguous phenomenon in the
first place. The present-day enthusiasm for this concept is comparable to the
popularity of the notion of ‘modernization’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Cooper
argues that both notions smack of Whig History, and both risk depicting a
344  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

historically specific and contested development with very specific actors

as an anonymous, inevitable, and natural process.
Cooper goes further to dispute the idea that globalization is something
specific or unique to the present, claiming that its uncritical use betrays a
lack of historical depth. This is not simply to say, however, that ‘globalization
belongs to all ages’. Also in the premodern and early modern periods, there
were various forms of transregional and transcontinental economic ties
such as colonization and the transatlantic slave trade, but by labelling these
phenomena as early forms of globalization, one risks extending the meaning
of that term so far that it loses virtually all substance. Moreover, the idea
of a worldwide and integrated market of economic goods and information
flows – portrayed, moreover, as homogeneous and inevitable – downplays or
ignores the limits of such connections, the forms of power that sustain them,
and – perhaps most importantly – the limitations of such powers. Cooper
adds that the nation-state has at no point in history been the sole point of
reference. In premodern and early modern discussions, too, phenomena
such as empire, universal humanity, civilization, and diaspora already
played a role.
In short, precisely because contemporary developments are still in a
period of change and because they occur so quickly and capriciously, no
generally accepted vocabulary for its analysis has yet materialized. And
given the controversial character of these processes, it also does not seem
likely that such a vocabulary will be developed anytime soon. From the
perspective of the humanities, in particular historiography, we may be able
to develop a critical vocabulary that prevents us from being blinded by the
latest fads, that is, one that takes also long-term tendencies into account.
Hence, we will conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of some of the
most prominent attempts to interpret globalized modernity, all of which
distance themselves from the postcolonial and globalization perspectives
discussed above.
As already discussed above, both Durkheim and Weber exhibited a
distinct ambivalence towards modernization, which in their opinion yields
both gains and losses. Some of Weber’s later followers were rather more
straightforward and unambiguous in their evaluations, including the Ameri-
can sociologist Talcott Parsons (1902-1979), who was one of the key figures
in the development of *modernization theory, a framework that became
popular in the United States after the Second World War. Modernization
theorists distinguish ‘modern’ societies such as the United States, which
have a liberal and secular political system and a free-market economy,
and are supposed to be rationally ordered and nationally integrated, from
Postcolonialism 345

‘traditional’ societies that do not (yet) have these features. In this view,
modernization simply consists of appropriating Western, or more specifically
American, ideals. Deviations from this American model are interpreted
negatively as ‘stagnation’ or ‘underdevelopment’.
Clearly, modernization theory was formulated against the backdrop
of the Cold War. The main theoretical objection to it is that it represents
both ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ societies as self-enclosed wholes and does
not sufficiently take into account the possible contacts and exchanges
between societies. After all, such exchanges have always occurred. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most important contact was,
of course, the colonization of large parts of the world by a small number of
European states (and, later, the United States and Japan), and the political-
economic phenomenon of *imperialism, that is, the project of acquiring
overseas territories that could function both as a source of cheap raw goods
and labour and as a market for the finished industrial products from the
mother countries.
The most important theories that do take into account such transnational
relations are *world systems theory, as developed by the economist Emmanuel
Wallerstein (b. 1930), and the broadly comparable *dependency theory, which
was developed in particular by South American theoreticians. Wallerstein
argues that we should take not the nation-state as our unit of analysis but
rather the interlocking whole of the world economy. According to him, from
the sixteenth century on, a global monetary economy developed that was
also characterized by an international division of labour.
In his analysis, the economically more advanced and subsequently
industrialized Western European states constitute the *centre of the world
economy, while the non-Western areas based on agricultural economies
and the extracting of raw goods form the *periphery. In a further refine-
ment, the relatively slowly industrialized economies of Eastern Europe
are characterized as the *semiperiphery. The relation between centre and
periphery is asymmetrical: it is shaped and reproduced by specifically
capitalist economic relations. Similarly, proponents of dependency theory
argue that the underdevelopment of Third World countries is not a question
of the stagnation of traditional societies or of the deviation from a Western
model, but a result from imperialist countries’ efforts to expand and protect
their home markets and to ensure that Third World countries stay both
economically and politically dependent on the capitalist West.
Both world systems theory and dependency theory consider the mod-
ernization of Third World countries in terms of their becoming embedded
in the capitalist world economy. Compared with modernization theory,
346  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

these theories have the advantage of focussing far more systematically on

transnational relations and worldwide processes, but they have shortcomings
of their own. To begin with, they are formulated in purely macroeconomic
terms, thereby ignoring the question of how cultural processes or ideological
developments fit into these analyses. Second – and this point partly follows
from the preceding – world systems theory and dependency theory pay little
attention to specific local developments or to local agency, as investigated in
ethnographic studies. Although they do not represent non-Western societies
as ‘traditional’ or ‘stagnant’, they do tend to view these societies as merely
the passive victims of worldwide economic processes. Despite their own
intentions, these theories thus risk remaining captive to the ethnocentric
assumption that modernization originated in Europe and that worldwide
capitalism is the ultimate cause, if not the sole true actor, of this process.
One alternative in this respect is presented by the recent rise of *world
history and/or *global history. These frameworks, which have been steadily
gaining ground since the 1980s, reject the assumption of the nation-state as
the frame of reference by pointing out historical processes that are hardly if
at all constrained by national boundaries. At the same time, they dismiss the
ethnocentric idea that globalization is a specifically modern phenomenon
and that it amounts to the spread of Western ideas and institutions. This
is not to concede the banal point that long-distance connections have
always existed; rather, it redirects attention to historically specific and
contingent forms of such contacts. In this context, Indian-born historian
Sanjay Subrahmanyam (b. 1961) also speaks of *connected history, which
does not simply strive for an increase in scale, nor does it proclaim the mere
merging of existing national histories. Instead, it questions the very way in
which we break up history into the histories of nations such as England or
the Netherlands or the histories of ‘cultural areas’ such as Europe and Asia.
It aims to make visible once again the historically variable interconnections
that have been obscured or marginalized by politically or methodologically
nationalist assumptions in historiography.
The most famous precursor of this way of writing history is undoubtedly
the French historian and member of the Annales school Fernand Braudel
(1902-1985) who, in a classical study of the Mediterranean, aimed to write a
‘total history’ that acknowledged, alongside the political history of unique
events and individual rulers, the underlying continuities and larger-scale
developments, or as he called it, a history of the *longue durée.
The best-known contemporary example of global history is perhaps
The Birth of the Modern World: 1780-1914 (2004) by C.A. Bayly. According to
Bayly (1945-2015), across the globe one may observe all kinds of connections
Postcolonialism 347

and interconnected social and political processes of modernization that

cannot be reduced to either capitalist domination or imperialist hegemony
and that occurred long before the start of what is usually called the eco-
nomic and cultural globalization after the Second World War. Already by
the nineteenth century, he argued, various worldwide uniformities had
emerged, including the capitalist world economy already mentioned above;
the modern political organizational form of the nation-state; mutually
commensurable and comparable ’world religions’ such as Christianity,
Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism; national languages with codified and
mutually comparable grammars and stylistic registers; and even new
styles of clothing.
Bayly argued that these worldwide and increasingly converging patterns
are not developments that have occurred independently in different parts
of the world, nor are they simply the result of European dominance or of
an all-penetrating and all-determining capitalist world economy. Instead,
they have mutually and causally influenced each other. He characterized
Europe’s economic dominance during the nineteenth century as historically
contingent and relatively ephemeral, for in earlier periods, the centre of
the world economy was located in Asia. However, Bayly refused to see the
economy as the sole driving force behind all these processes. In his opinion,
the major political and intellectual developments of the nineteenth century
do not simply reflect the growth of industrial capital, and economic, political,
and ideological developments do not always occur synchronically.
Just like Wallerstein, Bayly clearly built on the historiography of the longue
durée as practiced by Braudel and other members of the Annales school.
But according to Bayly, we should not only take longer periods of time into
consideration but also proceed on a larger geographical scale. In doing so,
he also rejected the national, or nationalist, perspectives that have been
dominating much of historiography since the nineteenth century. All local
or national history, he wrote, should be studied as global history.
Unlike both modernization theoreticians and their Marxist-inspired
rivals, Bayly did not proceed from the assumption that the modern world
originated in Europe and spread from there toward the rest of the world.
He stressed the virtually simultaneous appearance of modern ideas and
practices in different places and also emphasized the agency of local actors.
Moreover, unlike postcolonial theoreticians, he did not proceed from a
normative and a priori assumption that the world would have been better off
if European institutions of colonial domination and scientific rationality had
not been dominant. This point is not so much moral but analytical. On closer
inspection, what we had thought of as a clearly delimited national history
348  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

turns out to have been partly shaped by transnational contacts including

missionary activity, colonial domination, and other worldwide processes.
Obviously, such forms of global history have not remained without criti-
cism. Postcolonial theorists such as Chatterjee have come down on Bayly
for whitewashing or downplaying the qualitative and often downright
destructive changes that resulted from colonial rule. A more principled
objection is that the methods and delimitations of global historiography
are not yet clear and that, for the time being, it does not provide a genuinely
explanatory framework. Thus, one may argue that Bayly does little more
than observe that similar developments occurred in different places and
fails to provide a convincing narrative of why these developments occurred
simultaneously.
Another line of criticism is that worldwide historiography is still insuffi-
ciently explicit and principled concerning questions of space and geography.
Exactly what are its units of analysis? And doesn’t the emphasis on the
macro level come at the expense of attention to individual actors? One
possible answer to the latter question is so-called *global microhistory, which
explores the lives of individual actors against a transnational background.
But this is certainly not the ultimate, let alone sole possible, way of writing
such histories.
Such criticisms show that none of the currents discussed in this chapter –
or in this book as a whole – has the final word. Time and again, new concepts
and methods are developed. At present, it seems that novel developments
in and concerning new media, digital technologies, and contacts with the
social and natural sciences may lead the humanities to yet another phase
of innovation. But here, as elsewhere, it is impossible to make predictions
with any confidence.

Summary

− Postcolonial critics argue that seemingly universal or neutral West-

ern values and ideals appear in a rather different light against the
background of colonial domination. Fanon rejected the universalist
pretensions of humanism, which have had inhuman consequences in
colonial settings.
− Edward Said argued that modern Western philological orientalism
has long served as both an instrument and a legitimation of colonial
domination. His work adopted an ambivalent position towards the
humanist philology on which modern Orientalism bases itself.
Postcolonialism 349

− Bernal argued that not only Orientalism but also classical philology,
especially as developed in nineteenth-century Germany, has inherently
racist features.
− The members of the Subaltern Studies Group apply Gramscian notions of
hegemony and subalternity to the realities of colonial and post-colonial
India. Their emphasis on subaltern agency and consciousness is radically
questioned by Spivak and Bhabha, who have a background in the work
of Derrida and Lacan rather than in Marx and Gramsci.
− Recently, global history has become an influential way of trying to
escape the confines of the nation-state and national historiography
and to give more historical depth to the currently fashionable notion
of globalization.
− Bayly introduced an interactional global history, according to which
various aspects of modernity simultaneously emerged in different parts
of the world rather than having been simply exported or diffused from
Europe. Subrahmanyam’s concept of ‘connected history’ systematically
questions the assumptions and limitations of national and nationalist
historiography.
 Further Reading

This brief bibliographical overview does not list the works consulted while
writing this book but merely provides some suggestions for those who would
like to know more about the various topics treated.

1 Introduction
We are not aware of the existence of any other English-language textbooks
on the history and philosophy of the humanities. Introductory textbooks
used in teaching the history and philosophy of science tend to focus on the
natural sciences; some of them also discuss more technical questions (such
as causality, probability, and Bayesian theories of confirmation) than we
do in the present work. For a classical introduction to the topic, see Alan
Chalmers, What is This Thing Called Science (3rd ed., Maidenhead, 1999). A
more historicizing overview is John Losee, A Historical Introduction to the
Philosophy of Science (4th ed., Oxford, 2002). A monumental and extremely
detailed overview of the intellectual history of the natural sciences is A.C.
Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition (London,
1994). An excellent study, somewhat more technical than the abovemen-
tioned works, is Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge,
1983). The Philosophy of Social Science (Cambridge, 1994) by Martin Hollis
is devoted entirely and exclusively to the social sciences.

2 The Birth of the Modern Natural Sciences

Many historical overviews of the sciences and of the humanities limit
themselves to developments in Europe, but increasing attention is be-
ing given for what happened in other parts of the world. For a historical
overview of the humanities since antiquity that is not restricted to the
European tradition, see Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities (Ox-
ford, 2013). For a recent overview of the study of languages, texts, and
literatures in the Indian subcontinent immediately prior to the British
conquest, see Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern
Asia: Explorations in the Intellectual History of India and Tibet, 1500-1800
(Durham/London, 2011). For a more comprehensive comparative overview
of philological traditions, see Sheldon Pollock, Ben Elman, and Ku-ming
Kevin Chang (eds.) World Philology (Cambridge MA, 2015). An excellent
overview of the modern Western sciences in China that also pays at-
tention to the revival of textual criticism in the early modern period is
Ben Elman’s A Cultural History of Modern Science in China (Cambridge,
352  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

2006). Since 2015, this field has had its own specialist journal, History of
Humanities. Some of the philosophical questions addressed in the present
book are also discussed in specialist journals such as The British Journal
for the Philosophy of Science and History of the Human Sciences/Histoire
des sciences humaines.
The literature on the scientific revolution is extensive. A solid if somewhat
dated introduction is Richard S. Westfall’s The Construction of Modern
Science (Cambridge, 1977). The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution
(New York, 1988) by Margaret C. Jacob discusses exactly what its title an-
nounces. A more recent revisionist overview of the literature on the scientific
revolution is The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996) by Steve Shapin. Few
authors have done as much to undermine the longstanding view that the
scientific revolution brought an end to humanism as Anthony Grafton. See,
among others, Defenders of the Text: The Tradition of Scholarship in an Age of
Science, 1450-1800 (Cambridge MA, 1991) and From Humanism to Humanities:
Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe
(London, 1986), written jointly with Lisa Jardine. A recent comparative
study of the scientific revolution is Toby Huff’s Intellectual Curiosity and
the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2010); see also
Floris Cohen’s detailed study How Modern Science Came into the World
(Amsterdam, 2010).
Paul Guyer’s entry on Immanuel Kant in the Routledge Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (London, 1999) provides a convenient first introduction. For more
detailed discussions, see Paul Guyer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Kant
(Cambridge, 1992). The currently canonical translation of Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason and other writings has appeared in The Cambridge edition of
the works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge, 1998). Sebastian Gardner’s Kant
and the Critique of Pure Reason (London, 1999) forms a useful introductory
guide to this demanding work. A shorter and relatively accessible specimen
of Kant’s sophisticated style of reasoning is his Prolegomena to Any Future
Metaphysics, translated by Gary Hatfield (Cambridge, 1997).

3 Logical Empiricism and Critical Rationalism

For a classic but by now outdated study of the Vienna Circle, see Victor Kraft,
The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-Positivism, A Chapter in the History of
Recent Philosophy (New York, 1953). Rudolf Carnap’s Introduction to the
Philosophy of Science (New York, 1966) – originally entitled Philosophical
Foundations of Physics – provides an admirably clear overview of a logical
empiricist philosophy of the natural sciences and of Carnap’s own later
views, whichis still well worth reading today. Philosophy of Natural Science
Further Reading 353

(Englewood Cliffs, 1966) by Carl Hempel likewise presents a solid intro-

duction to the logical empiricist approach. For a recent revisionist study
of the historical and philosophical significance of the Vienna Circle, see
Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge, 1999) by Michael Friedman.
Bryan Magee’s Popper (London, 1973) presents an accessible introduction
to Karl Popper’s work. For a selection of the latter’s own writings, see David
Miller (ed.), A Pocket Popper (London, 1983). Popper’s autobiography, Unended
Quest (London, 1976), presents an interesting narrative of his philosophical
backgrounds and development. In The Poverty of Historicism (London, 1961),
Popper discusses problems specific to the historical and social sciences and
presents his rejection of historicism.
On the epistemology of the historical sciences, see, e.g., The Pursuit of
History: Aims, Methods, and New Directions in the Study of History (6th ed.,
London, 2015) by John Tosh.

4 Historicizing the Philosophy of Science

Willard Quine’s classic, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism,’ has been reprinted in
From a Logical Point of View (New York, 1963) and anthologized numerous
times. It demands careful and repeated reading and only comes into its
own against the background of Carnap’s work. Wilfrid Sellars’ rich but
demanding Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind has been reprinted with
an even more unfathomable commentary by Robert Brandom (Cambridge
MA, 1997). Knowledge, Mind, and the Given (Indianapolis, 2000) by Willem
DeVries is a rather more accessible text edition with commentary.
Thomas Kuhn’s classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, appeared
with an important new afterword in 1970, and with a foreword by Ian
Hacking in its 50th anniversary edition (Chicago, 2012). See also Kuhn’s
essays collected in The Essential Tension (Chicago, 1977) and The Road
Since Structure (Chicago, 1999). For an excellent if at times somewhat dry
philosophical reconstruction of Kuhn’s writings, see Paul Hoyningen-Huene,
Reconstructing Scientifijic Revolutions – Thomas S. Kuhn’s Philosophy of
Science (Chicago, 1993).

5 The Birth of the Modern Humanities

Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (London, 2002) is brilliant but often
rather obscure in its literary eloquence. In Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of
Scientific Reason (Cambridge, 1989), Gary Gutting offers a solid discussion
of Foucault’s archaeological method and its philosophical antecedents. For
an anthology of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s writings, see Marianne Cowan
(ed.), Humanist Without Portfolio (Detroit, 1963).
354  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Historical overviews of the humanities at large are few and far between.
Rens Bod’s A New History of the Humanities, already mentioned above,
emphasizes the continuities between the premodern and the modern
humanities and depicts a cumulative growth of knowledge. On the history
of the early modern and modern humanities, see three recent volumes
of conference proceedings: R. Bod, J. Maat, and T. Weststeijn (eds.), The
Making of the Humanities Vol. 1: The Humanities in Early Modern Europe
(Amsterdam, 2010), Volume 2: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines
(Amsterdam, 2012), and Volume 3: The Modern Humanities (Amsterdam,
2014). On the connections between the modern humanities and the rise of
nationalism, see, among others, Joep Leerssen’s National Thought in Europe:
A Cultural History (Amsterdam, 2006). For a highly readable account of the
rise of modern social science and its relation with the humanities and the
natural sciences, see Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology
(Cambridge, 1988) by Wolf Lepenies.

6 Developing New Disciplines

Those wishing to learn more about Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel could
do worse than start with Walter Kaufmann. Hegel: A Reinterpretation (New
York, 1965), which is rather old but very accessible, and highly critical of
Popper’s influential reading of Hegel as paving the way for totalitarianism. A
more demanding but influential study is Charles Taylor’s Hegel (Cambridge,
1975). For an English translation of one of Hegel’s more accessible works,
see H.B. Nisbet (translation), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:
Introduction (Cambridge, 1975).
An entertaining overview of (classical) philology across the ages is L.D.
Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission
of Greek and Latin Literature (3rd ed., Oxford, 1991). A rather more critical
history may be found in Bernard Cerquiglini’s In Praise of the Variant: A
Critical History of Philology (Baltimore, 1999), which is short and thought-
provoking, even if it has in part been rendered outdated by the rise of novel
computational techniques. See also James Turner’s Philology: The Forgotten
Origins of the Humanities (Princeton, 2014). For the development of the
language sciences, see R.H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (4th ed.,
London, 1997).
An English-language anthology that includes part of Leopold von Ranke’s
more theoretical writings is Georg Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (eds.), The
Theory and Practice of History (Indianapolis, 1973). Friedrich Nietzsche’s writ-
ings are available in several good translations, including his more philological
The Birth of Tragedy and his more essayistic Untimely Meditations. For a solid
Further Reading 355

first introduction to Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher,

Psychologist, Antichrist (4th ed., Princeton, 1975), which was also crucial in
rehabilitating Nietzsche’s works in the postwar English-language arena,
can hardly be surpassed. Alexander Nehamas’ Nietzsche: Life as Literature
(Cambridge, 1985) gives an impressive systematic interpretation.

7 Between Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences: In Search of a

Method
For a brief and accessible overview of the hermeneutic tradition, see Jens
Zimmermann, Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2015).
Wilhelm Dilthey can best be approached through The Formation of the
Historical World in the Humanities (Princeton, 2002). A brief and accessible
work by Ernst Cassirer is The Logic of the Humanities (New Haven, 1960). For
a collection of Max Weber’s methodological treatises, see his Methodology
of Social Science (Glencoe IL, 1949). See also Reinhard Bendix’s classic, Max
Weber: An Intellectual Portrait (Garden City NY, 1962).
On psychoanalysis, read Sigmund Freud’s oft-reprinted classic General
Introduction to Psychoanalysis (New York, 1920) translated by Stanley Hall,
or one of his numerous, suspenseful case histories on such patients as Little
Hans, the Rat Man, the Wolf Man, and Anna O. For English translations,
see the various volumes in The Penguin Freud Library.

8 Critical Theory
Peter Singer’s Marx: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2000) presents a
brief but thorough introduction to Karl Marx’s ideas. The most accessible
inroad to Mikhail Bakhtin’s writings is the editor’s introduction to his The
Dialogic Imagination, Four Essays (Austin/London, 1981). A very influential
English-language anthology of Antonio Gramsci’s prison writings is Quentin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (eds.), Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(New York, 1971); see also David Forgacs (ed.), Selections from Cultural Writings
(Cambridge MA, 1991) or the complete English-language edition of The Prison
Notebooks (New York, 2007), translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg.
Rolf Wiggershaus’ The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political
Significance (Cambridge, 1995) provides an exhaustive overview of the
School’s development and impact. Theodor W. Adorno’s Introduction to
the Sociology of Music (New York, 1976) provides a first introduction to a
vast and occasionally impenetrable oeuvre. See also Adorno’s Philosophy
of Modern Music (London/New York, 2007). On Jürgen Habermas, see,
for example, Thomas McCarthy’s The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas
(London, 1978).
356  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

9 Positivism and Structuralism

Émile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method (London, 1982) and Fer-
dinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1966) are
still well worth reading. For intellectual biographies of both pioneers, see
Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim (London, 1973) and John Joseph, Saussure
(Oxford, 2012). François Dosse’s two-volume History of Structuralism (Min-
neapolis, 1998) provides an extensive overview of the development of French
structuralist thought. A detailed critical overview of different currents in
structuralist literary theory is presented in Jonathan Culler, Structuralist
Poetics (London, 1975); see also Culler’s Saussure (London, 1976).
For an introduction to Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar in its
different incarnations, see, for example, Vivian Cook and Mark Newson,
Chomsky’s Universal Grammar: An Introduction (2nd ed., Oxford, 1996).
On cognitive linguistics, see William Croft and D. Alan Cruse, Cognitive
Linguistics (Cambridge, 2004). For a first taste of cognitive approaches
to music, see Henkjan Honing’s Musical Cognition: A Science of Listening
(London/New York, 2013).
Jacques Lacan’s Ecrits: A Selection (New York, 1977) is a notoriously im-
penetrable work. The seminars Lacan taught in Paris between 1963 and 1981,
some of which have been published in English, are rather easier to digest.
For a comic-book introduction to Lacan, see Darian Leader and Judy Groves,
Introducing Lacan (London, 2000). A convenient primer of Slavoj Žižek is
Sarah Kay’s Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, 2003).

10 The Practice Turn

The William James Lectures on speech acts by J.L. Austin have been
posthumously published as How to Do Things with Words (2nd ed., Oxford,
1975). Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical lnvestigations/Philosophische
Untersuchungen have been published in a posthumous bilingual edition
(Oxford, 1953).
Foucault’s later works are rather more accessible than his earlier, ar-
chaeological studies. See in particular Discipline and Punish (New York 1977)
and the three-volume The History of Sexuality (New York, 1978-1986). For a
methodologically inspired study of genealogy, see Rudi Visker, Genealogy
as Critique (London, 1995).
Pierre Bourdieu’s style is deliberately complex and inaccessible. On the
one hand, it is intended to avoid overhasty and oversimplified renderings of
his ideas; on the other, it signifies that he forms part of a French-language
academic market that places demands of its own on intellectual production.
Most directly relevant for the humanities are perhaps Distinction: A Social
Further Reading 357

Critique About the Judgment of Taste (London, 1984) and The Rules of Art:
Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Cambridge, 1996). For a collection
of short and relatively accessible essays, see The Field of Cultural Production
(New York, 1993).

11 Critique of Modernity
Modern French Philosophy (Cambridge, 1979) by Vincent Descombes presents
a clear, concise, and critical overview of postwar French thought. For an
introduction to Jacques Derrida’s influential but often misunderstood
thinking, see Christopher Norris, Derrida (London, 1987) and Jonathan
Culler, On Deconstruction (London, 1983). For an accessible introduction
to some of Gilles Deleuze’s central notions, see Charles Stivale (ed.), Gilles
Deleuze: Key Concepts (2nd ed., Montreal, 2011).
On postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon, see David Harvey, The Con-
dition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989). For Jean-François Lyotard’s influential
ideas, see The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester,
1986). Richard Rorty’s lengthy Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton,
1979) often gets bogged down in the technical details of 1970s analytical
philosophy. A more user-friendly overview for non-philosophical readers
is his later Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, 1989). Bruno
Latour’s most accessible discussion of modernity is We Have Never Been
Modern (Cambridge MA, 1993). For an introduction to his work as a whole,
see Gerard de Vries, Bruno Latour (Cambridge, 2016).

12 Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

For a statement that is by now considered classical, see Sandra Harding, The
Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca NY, 1986). Evelyn Fox Keller’s views
on the scientific revolution may be found in her Reflections on Gender and
Science (New Haven, 1985). Foucault’s The Will to Knowledge (New York,
1978) remains the best and most provocative introduction to the history of
sexuality. Judith Butler’s best-known book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and
the Subversion of Identity (new edition, New York/London, 1999) remains a
demanding exercise. Her later Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
(London, 1997) focuses on hate speech.

13 Postcolonialism
For an introductory overview, see Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A
Critical Introduction (Edinburgh, 1998). Edward Said’s Orientalism has gone
through many editions. For Martin Bernal’s argument, see especially his
Black Athena, volume 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 (London,
358  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

1987). For the Subaltern Studies Group, see Ranajit Guha (ed.), A Subaltern
Studies Reader (Minneapolis, 1997). An already widely influential if not
classical text on decoloniality is Walter Mignolo’s The Darker Side of Western
Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham/London, 2011). Fer-
nand Braudel’s masterpiece The Mediterranean (London, 1975) remains worth
reading, even if it is problematic or outdated in various places. Frederick
Cooper’s critique of ‘globalization’, ‘identity’, and several other key concepts
in the present-day humanities is included in his Colonialism in Question:
Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, 2005). C.A. Bayly’s most important
book is The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Oxford, 2004). For an introduction to Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s
numerous writings, see Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and
Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge MA, 2012) or the accessible
collection of essays, Is Indian Civilization a Myth? (Delhi, 2013).
 Glossary

a posteriori Knowledge based on experience.

a priori Knowledge preceding experience.
academy Union of scientific researchers.
action-image Deleuze’s term for a long-shot in cinema.
actor Socially acting person.
ad hoc change The retrospective adapting of a theory to experience, as a
result of which it becomes less informative.
affection-image In Deleuze, the close-up moving image, which yields an
affective reading of a film.
amodern Latour’s term for emphasizing that we have ‘never been modern’,
rejecting both modernity and postmodernism and, by implication, the
idea of the ‘premodern’.
analytic Statement that is true or false on the basis of the meanings of the
words it contains; e.g. ‘This rose is a flower.’; cf. synthetic.
analytic-synthetic distinction The distinction between statements that
are true on the basis of meaning and those that are true on the basis of
facts. Quine rejects this distinction.
analytical philosophy Anglo-Saxon current that reduces philosophical
questions to matters of meaning and language use.
androcentrism An ideology that represents specifically masculine phe-
nomena as universally human.
anomaly An unsolvable problem for scientists working in a paradigm.
Anschauungsform In Kant, the fundamental forms of time and space with
which our understanding (Verstand) can transform intuitions into gener-
ally valid judgments.
anthropology of science The study of what scientists actually do, as distinct
from what philosophers and scientists say they do (see also science in
action).
anti-essentialism Rejection of the view that cultural phenomena possess
essences, that is, fixed or unchanging defining features.
antihumanism In Foucault, the rejection of the humanist assumption of
man as being in the final instance free, and of the view of history as a
linear process of progress and emancipation towards freedom.
antinaturalism In Sellars, the belief that states of knowing are irreducibly
normative and cannot be reduced to purely causal or physical events.
anti-psychologism The rejection of explanations in terms of mental or
psychological terms.
360  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

arbitrariness The fact that a linguistic sign has an arbitrary and conventional

relation with what it signifies.
archaeology of scientific knowledge In Foucault, the inquiry into the deep
structures of knowledge.
archetype The original version of a text determined or reconstructed by
philological research.
art for art’s sake See l’art pour l’art.
artes liberales The seven liberal arts that civilized persons were supposed to
master in the Middle Ages, consisting of the trivium and the quadrivium.
asymmetry In Durkheim, the fact that scientific knowledge is not explained
in the same sociological way as non- or pre-scientific knowledge.
aura In Benjamin, the ‘here and now’ of an artwork, or that which makes
it irreplaceable and unrepeatable.
authoritative discourse In Bakhtin, monological language use that claims
a monopoly on valid values, norms, and meanings.
avant-garde A group of interbellum artists who systematically rejected or
transgressed existing artistic conventions.
axiom A self-evident or indubitable starting point; in mathematics, a thesis
that cannot be derived from other statements.
basic sentence A singular statement for testing a theory.
behaviourism A current in the social sciences that only accepts explanations
in terms of publicly observable behaviour and not in terms of mental
states or motives.
Bildung In Humboldt, the broad intellectual formation that covers not only
factual knowledge but also the capacity to judge and to act.
canon Standard list of what are seen as the great works in cultural history.
capital In Bourdieu, the scarce good that is the object of competition within
a field.
carnivalesque In Bakhtin, an expression of popular culture that imitates,
parodies, and/or ridicules official culture and that has a potentially
revolutionary character because of its liberating and subversive humour.
categorization The mental and social process of ordering people and things
into distinct groups.
category In Kant, a pure concept of the understanding, not derived from
experience, which enables us to form judgments.
causality A relation of cause and effect between things or events.
causes (principles) In Aristotle, the underlying aspects that yield complete
knowledge of a thing.
centre In Wallerstein, the industrialized protagonist of the capitalist world
economy
Glossary 361

civilization Modern notion of an urban, rational, and humane society.

class struggle In Marx, the irreducible political conflict between different
social classes, which is the motor of history.
classical age In Foucault, the period between 1600 and 1800 that was domi-
nated by the épistémè of representation, order, and taxonomy.
classical physics The physical theory that emerged in the seventeenth
century; usually seen as resulting from the combination of experiments
and mathematical methods.
classification of the sciences The ordering of the different disciplines by
object and/or method. Today we distinguish between the natural sciences,
the social sciences, and the humanities. Aristotle distinguished between
theoretical, practical, and poetic sciences.
cognitive, cognitivist The current that postulates mental structures and
processes as explanatory notions and that views the human mind as an
information-processing machine.
collective representation In Durkheim, a state or representation of a group
or society as a whole, which cannot be reduced to individual psychological
states.
colonization In Habermas, the penetration of system elements into the
lifeworld.
communicative action In Habermas, the type of social action that is oriented
towards mutual understanding and consensus.
competence In Chomsky, the language capacity as distinct from perfor-
mance or actual linguistic behaviour.
concept Mental representation; in Kant, the general and normative notions
by which our understanding forms judgments out of the particulars
given to experience.
concept formation Developing concepts on the basis of specific observations
or experiences.
conceptual frame/scheme The whole of interconnected concepts with
which we think.
conceptual metaphor Understanding one cognitive domain (e.g. argument)
in terms of another (e.g. war).
conclusion Statement that follows logically from other statements (premisses).
confirmation The affirmation of a theory via observation.
connected history Historiographic approach that thematizes transnational
connections.
consistency Property of statements of not contradicting each other.
context of discovery The actual process of the acquisition of scientific
knowledge.
362  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

context of justification The logical or epistemological justif ication of

scientific claims to knowledge.
contradiction Two statements that cannot be simultaneously true, e.g., ‘It
is raining’ and ‘It is not raining’.
convention Agreement; for example a decision to retain part of a theory
as non-testable.
conventionalism The belief that important choices in science are the result
of agreements or conventions.
conventionalist stratagem Reinterpreting a basic statement of observation
so that it is no longer at odds with a theory.
Copernican revolution In sixteenth-century astronomy, the radically novel
thought that Earth revolves around the Sun rather than the other way
around.
Copernican turn Kant’s shift in epistemology proclaiming that knowledge
must not conform to objects, but that, conversely, objects must conform
to our (a priori) knowledge.
corroboration The degree to which a theory has hitherto successfully
survived attempts at refutation.
Counter-Enlightenment Cultural and political movement that empha-
sizes feelings, traditions, and cultures, as opposed to the Enlightenment
championing of universalist reason.
covering-law model The view that the explanation of a phenomenon involves
its embedding in a general law.
crisis In Kuhn, the predominant feeling that something is fundamentally
wrong with an existing paradigm.
critical theory See Frankfurt School.
crucial test A test that can decide the fate of a theory or hypothesis.
cultural analysis The contemporary current in the humanities that empha-
sizes representations in cultural processes and products.
cultural capital In Bourdieu, a form of symbolic capital by which people
may distinguish themselves in the cultural realm.
cultural sciences The neo-Kantian conception of the study of culture as
idiographic and value-oriented; to be distinguished from (Gramscian-
inspired) cultural studies.
cultural studies The contemporary current in the social sciences that fo-
cusses on popular, or working-class, culture in urban and/or industrialized
societies.
culture Descriptively, the whole of customs and habits of a people in a given
time and place; normatively, the highest artistic and moral achievements
or expressions of a people or era.
Glossary 363

culture industry In Adorno, the capitalist production of art as no more

than escapist entertainment.
decolonializality In Mignolo, the attempt to counter the logic of coloniality
underlying Western civilization and to develop epistemic alternatives.
deconstruction A way of reading texts that exposes their hidden conceptual
assumptions, characterizing these as untenable but inevitable.
deduction Logically valid or logically binding derivation of one statement
from another. From ‘All swans are white’, it logically or deductively follows
that ‘This swan is white’; cf. induction.
deductive-nomological model of explanation The view that it must be
possible to derive the description of a phenomenon deductively from a
general law; cf. covering law model.
degree of confirmation The degree to which a theory or statement is
strengthened or supported by empirical observations.
demarcation In Popper, the dividing line between scientific and pseudo-
scientific theories.
demarcation criterion In Popper, the view that science distinguishes itself
from pseudo-science in that its knowledge grows through attempts at
falsification.
demarcation problem The question of how scientific knowledge is distin-
guished from other claims to knowledge.
dependency theory Macro-economic approach that explains poverty and
underdevelopment in the ‘periphery’ as resulting from a dependency on
goods from the industrialized ‘centre’ due to capitalist relations.
Desiring-production In Deleuze & Guattari, the principle or force that
appropriates what is other than or outside the self, active both in society
and in the individual psyche; cf. Nietzsche’s will to power.
diachrony The domain of historical development or change; cf. synchrony.
dialectics The view that takes developments as the unstable and changeable
result of opposite forces through a process of negation and of the sublation
of contradictions.
dialectical idealism The view that history develops according to the dialecti-
cal development of spirit, which is primary with respect to matter.
dialectical materialism The view that society evolves according to the
dialectical development of material (and in particular economic)
contradictions.
dialogism In Bakhtin, the irreducible plurality and context-dependence of
(novelistic) language or discourse.
difference In Deleuze, the virtual, non-conceptual principle that logically
and metaphysically precedes identity and the categories based on it.
364  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

difference, principle of In Deleuze, that which produces individual identities

from differences.
Ding an Sich The ‘thing in itself’, not as it is known or perceived by the
knowing subject.
disciplinary matrix The whole of partly implicit beliefs, assumptions, and
norms of a community of researchers.
discipline A field of study that is characterized by its own canon of insights,
approaches, and results; in Foucault, the normalizing and individualizing
power that does not function in terms of laws, transgression, and sover-
eignty but in terms of knowledge and of the normal and the abnormal.
discourse Interconnected and structured whole of statements.
discursive formation In Foucault, a system of statements that is not ordered
or governed by an underlying or transcendental subject.
discursive practice In Foucault, ‘knowledge’ studied in terms of statements
made, i.e. in terms of practices informed by power.
distinction A form of cultural capital; the ability to distinguish oneself
societally by one’s ‘good taste’ in cultural and aesthetic matters.
double hermeneutics For Giddens, the feature that the social sciences are
concerned with the interpretation of social data that are themselves the
result of interpretations.
doxa In ancient Greek, opinion as distinct from true knowledge; cf. épistémè.
Duhem-Quine thesis The thesis that a crucial experiment in Popper’s sense
is impossible, since one does not know exactly which part of one’s theory
or assumptions is refuted.
edification Intellectual and moral formation, or Bildung; for Rorty, edifica-
tion rather than truth should be the aim of philosophy and the sciences.
edifying conversation ‘Educational discussion’; for Rorty, the aim of work
in the humanities, in particular philosophy.
efficient cause In Aristotle, the cause that actualizes an object’s potential.
ego (Ich) In Freud, the self-conscious, rational, and realist part of the soul.
empirical content The degree of informativeness of a theory; in Quine,
roughly the empirical ‘meaning’ of a sentence or theory.
empirical regularity The observable continuous co-occurrence of phenom-
ena: ‘Everything that is a swan is also white’.
empirical science Field of knowledge that concerns itself with the descrip-
tion and explanation of sensory experience.
empiricism The philosophical current that argues that observation is the
ultimate source and justification of knowledge.
end of grand narratives For Lyotard, the decay of comprehensive ideologies.
Glossary 365

Enlightenment A cultural movement or period in the eighteenth century

in which the ideals of reason, progress, and equality gained prominence.
entailment Logical consequence.
entertainment music (Unterhaltungsmusik) In Adorno, the ideologically
laden popular music produced by the culture industry.
epicycle In Ptolemy, the additional circular motion that heavenly bodies
make along their circular motion around Earth.
epiphenomenon Side-effect without causal explanatory power of its own.
épistémè In Ancient Greek, true knowledge, as distinguished from opinion
(cf. doxa); in Foucault, the deep structure of knowledge.
epistemic rupture / mutation In Foucault, the discontinuity between
different épistémès.
epistemology A subdiscipline in the field of philosophy that explores what
knowledge is and how knowledge claims may be justified.
equant The position next to Earth around which, according to Ptolemy,
the planets circle.
equivalence The similarity or identity of e.g. logical or semantic aspects
of two signs.
ethnocentrism The belief that one’s own beliefs, practices, and/or traditions
are the only correct ones and should be universally valid.
Eurocentrism The belief that the beliefs, practices, and/or traditions of
Western Europe (or more generally the Western world) are the only
correct ones and should be universally valid.
exemplar In Kuhn, a textbook example of good scientific practice.
existential statement A statement concerning whether or not a particular
object exists or concerning its particular properties: ‘There exists at least
one black swan’.
experience For empiricists, sensory observation; for Dilthey, the renewed
experiencing, through understanding, of the creation of a work of art.
experiment An artificial intervention in nature, as a result of which we can
observe phenomena that would otherwise remain hidden.
explanandum That which should be explained.
explanans Statement or theory that yields an explanation.
explanation Answer to the question why something is what it is.
externalism The view that scientif ic knowledge is shaped by external
societal, cultural, or historical factors.
fact That which makes a statement true.
faculty An organizational unit within the university in which disciplines
with similar disciplinary backgrounds are united. In epistemology: mental
capacity.
366  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

fallibilism The belief in the fundamental fallibility of all knowledge.

fallibility The view that all scientific statements have a hypothetical and
provisory character and may thus eventually be refuted.
falsifiability The possibility of falsifying or refuting a theory in the light
of experience.
falsification Refutation. The statement ‘All swans are white’ is falsified by
accepting the observation statement that there is a black swan.
falsification criterion Popper’s view that genuine science can be distin-
guished from pseudoscience by the fact that its theories are formulated
in such a way that they can be falsified.
family resemblance In Wittgenstein, the idea that concepts like game do
not have a definition with necessary and sufficient conditions but only
display a diffuse set of overlapping features.
felicity conditions Conditions under which a speech act counts as felicitous
or successful; generalization of truth conditions.
field In Bourdieu, a specific and autonomous domain of social action, e.g.,
art or religion, which has its own principles, goals, and capital.
final cause In Aristotle, the goal towards which a thing moves by virtue
of its nature.
folk explanation Theory that social actors themselves have about their
words or actions.
folklore Tales and other cultural expressions of the common and often
illiterate people.
form of intuition See Anschauungsform.
formal cause In Aristotle, the ‘form’ or essence of a thing; that which makes
it what it is.
Frankfurt School (Frankfurter Schule) The current that assigns the social
sciences an essentially social-critical function; hence this current is also
called ‘critical theory’.
fusion of horizons The process of reconciling the backgrounds of interpreting
subject and interpreted object.
Geisteswissenschaften See humanities
gender The whole of cultural meanings given in a specific time and place
to biological sex.
gender metaphor Characterizing or imagining things and phenomena as
‘typically’ masculine or feminine.
genealogy Non-teleological and non-dialectical form of historical analysis
that analyses social phenomena in terms of power practices.
general linguistics The autonomous discipline that describes and explains
linguistic facts in their own terms.
Glossary 367

genius In the Romantic view, the artist whose unique creative activity is
not rationally explicable.
geocentrism The view that Earth stands at the centre of the cosmos.
Gestalt switch Suddenly observing the same thing ‘with different eyes’;
for example, one may see in one and the same drawing alternatively a
duck or a rabbit.
given That which is immediately given to the senses; (object of) ‘pure [i.e.,
non-conceptualized] observation’.
global history Historiographical approach that systematically transcends
national and regional boundaries.
global microhistory Historical approach that explores individual lives
against a transnational background.
globalization The post-war worldwide spread of capitalist economic produc-
tion; more generally also the cultural dimension of this process.
growth of knowledge The view that scientific knowledge is always subject
to change and improvement.
habitus The whole of acquired inclinations or dispositions to particular
forms of behaviour that generates social action.
hegemony ‘Prestige’; cultural and/or ideological dominance over the different
groups or classes in society; cf. subaltern.
heliocentrism The view that the sun stands at the centre of the cosmos.
hermeneutic circle The continuing interaction between the interpretation
of the whole on the basis of the interpretation of its parts and vice versa.
hermeneutics General and systematic theory of interpreting or understand-
ing texts and other cultural forms of expression.
hermeticism Early modern esoteric tradition that sought the purification
of the soul and conceived of knowledge as a union of male and female.
heteroglossia The irreducible diversity of socially determined styles and
registers of speaking, which according to Bakhtin is typical of the
novelistic genre.
heterosexual matrix In Butler, the tacit normative assumptions that
represent heterosexuality as normal or natural.
heuristic Aid in finding scientific truths and explanations.
historical a priori In Foucault, the historically changing self-evident truths
at the basis of all knowledge.
historical adequacy The criterion demanding that a philosophical view of
science is in agreement with our historical knowledge about the actual
practice of researchers recognized as good scientists.
historical materialism The view that the course of history is determined
by material and, in particular, economic factors.
368  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

historicism For Popper, the belief that the course of history has fixed laws
and can hence be predicted; for Dilthey, the view that human conscious-
ness is finite and historically determined.
historicity Being historically determined or changing, for example with
regard to human spirit or reason.
holism The view that a larger whole cannot be explained in full in terms
of its elements. See also meaning holism.
horizon The background or context of actions and presuppositions that are
indispensable for understanding.
humanism A movement during the European Renaissance that elevated
pagan literary antiquity with respect to the Bible and that pursued a
secular ideal of humanitas or humanity. Later also a secular confes-
sional current that defended human liberty against religious dogmas
and authoritarian governments.
humanitas Civilizational ideal in antiquity and the Renaissance; in Cicero,
the education (in particular, the study of literature) necessary for leading
a decent public and private life.
humanities The disciplines that occupy themselves with the independent
products of the human spirit, including linguistics and literary theory,
history, art history, etc. Also called the sciences humaines, humane sci-
ences, or moral sciences and Geisteswissenschaften.
Hume’s problem The question concerning the justification of induction;
cf. problem of induction.
hybridity The incessant and irreversible blending and mixture of elements
from different traditions and cultures, especially in modern, globalized
urban societies.
hybrids In Latour, that which is seen in the modern constitution as a mix-
ture of nature, culture, and discourse, and which can therefore not be
adequately analysed within that constitution, although their number
increases explosively.
hypothesis Conjecture.
hypothetico-deductive scheme of explanation The view that the explanan-
dum should follow deductively from a general law or hypothesis (and
initial conditions).
id (Es) In Freud, that part of the soul that comprises irrational, biologically
determined drives.
ideal type Non-empirical model of empirical phenomena that abstracts
away from individual variations.
Glossary 369

idealism The philosophical current that views consciousness as more

fundamental than matter; methodologically, the explanation of social
facts in terms of ‘ideas’ like mental states or religious doctrines.
idealization An abstracting away from the particulars of observed individual
objects or phenomena.
identity politics Political activism defending the interests of specific groups
such as feminists, the gay movement, and ethnic minorities.
ideology In Marx and later critical theory, the whole of ideas and beliefs that
justifies, masks, and/or distorts existing social realities; more generally,
the informal and historically variable system of current beliefs concerning
the world.
idiographic The approach and concept formation in terms of the individual
and the unique; cf. nomothetic.
illocutionary The act that is conventionally expressed by pronouncing
particular words.
imaginary, the In Lacan, the realm from which the ego emerges out of an
alienated identification with an image outside of itself.
imagined community In Anderson, the kind of national consciousness
that only became possible because of printing; see also print capitalism.
imperialism Modern attempt to acquire or dominate overseas territories as
sources of raw goods and/or markets for a capitalist industrial economy.
incommensurability Epistemologically, the impossibility of comparing two
paradigms in a neutral and paradigm-independent manner; sociologically,
the miscommunication between scientists from different paradigms
because they unknowingly employ the same terms in different senses.
induction, inductive Generalization on the basis of a limited number of
observations; not a logically binding form of argument.
induction, problem of The question of whether and how inductive arguments
may be justified.
informational content The degree of empirical content of a theory.
initial conditions Statements about the initial circumstances that function
as a premisse in a prediction or explanation.
institution In Durkheim, a relatively stable and enduring social fact.
instrumentalism The view that sees scientific theories as merely useful
instruments for making observations and predictions and does not pose
the question of whether they are true or correctly describe the world;
cf. realism.
intention The aims a speaker has in making an utterance or performing
an action.
370  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

intentionality The capacity of our mental states to be directed towards

things in the outside world or to be ‘about’ the outside world.
interdisciplinary approach Research that integrates the methods and
insights of different disciplines.
internalism The view that scientific knowledge develops according to its
own inner logic and independently of social factors.
interpretative technique A perspective or a way of interpreting literary
texts, for example, psychoanalysis and deconstruction can yield different
kinds of interpretations of the same material.
intersectionality The idea that different identities of e.g. race, gender, and
sexuality are not isolated but function jointly in overlapping systems of
oppression and marginalization.
intersubjective Enjoying the concurrence of different researchers.
iterability In Derrida, the radical dependence of a speech utterance on
the particular context of utterance, which cannot be governed by the
speaker’s intentions.
judgment In Kant, the connection of concepts and intuition that constitutes
objectively valid knowledge.
Junggrammatiker or Neogrammarians A group of nineteenth-century Ger-
man linguists who emphasized the exceptionless and lawlike character
of historical language change.
Kant’s problem In Popper, the question concerning the demarcation between
scientific and pseudoscientific knowledge claims.
language game In Wittgenstein, the belief that language is a concrete and
limited practice rather than an abstract or formal system of rules.
langue The language system as a social fact; cf. parole
l’art pour l’art (art for art’s sake) The nineteenth-century view that art – or
more generally, aesthetic experience – serves no higher purpose than
itself.
law Universal statement of the form ‘All cases that have property A also
have property B’, which also establishes a causal nexus.
liberal In Humboldt, the view that universities and individuals should be
free from state interference as much as possible.
lifeworld In Habermas, the shared and commonly accepted background
of communicative action.
linguistic turn In philosophy, the shift in attention from the justification
of judgments to the meaningfulness of statements.
locutionary The act of uttering a sentence.
logic of the situation A model of what constitutes rational action in a specific
culture and state of knowledge.
Glossary 371

logical analysis Uncovering of the logical (as opposed to the grammatical)

structure of a sentence.
logical consequence Statement the truth of which is forced by the truth of
the premisses in the argument.
logically equivalent The property of statements of being true or false under
exactly the same circumstances.
logically valid Binding or deductively valid argument; when the premisses are
true, the conclusion must be true as well. For example, from ‘All men are
mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man’, it deductively follows that ‘Socrates is mortal’.
macrocosm Creation at large, mirroring man as a microcosm.
Manichaeism A way of seeing things that divides the world into two strictly
separated domains, e.g. of good and evil.
Marxism A social-scientific and political current that analyses the course
of history as the dialectical development of economic relations.
material cause In Aristotle, the matter of which a thing consists.
materiality The material, non-ideal aspect of a cultural phenomenon.
meaning holism In Quine and Kuhn, the idea that theoretical sentences
derive their content or meaning not from the ‘facts’ or the ‘things them-
selves’ but from the theory as a whole; cf. reductionism.
mechanicism, mechanistic view The belief that all movement is strictly
mechanical and lawlike and does not pursue an aim or telos.
media In Habermas, the means of warranting the coordination of action
in a differentiated lifeworld.
melting of horizons In Gadamer, the fusion of background assumptions in
the process of understanding.
metanarrative In Lyotard, a discourse (e.g., that of the Enlightenment)
that serves to justify or legitimize another discourse, for example that
of science.
metaphysics Statement or theory that essentially goes beyond what can
be empirically observed.
method The way of acquiring and extending scientific knowledge.
methodology The whole of norms of what constitutes good science; the
‘quality control of scientific production’.
microcosm Man as mirroring the cosmos at large, or macrocosm.
mirror stage In Lacan, the developmental stage in which an identity is
formed by mirroring someone else.
mode of existence In Latour, the notion to set off science from religion, poli-
tics, and law by claiming that science does not just amount to knowledge
about a given reality, but arises in, and contributes to the shaping of, the
world, and thus introduces new beings.
372  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

mode of production Stage of economic relations between the different

people involved in the production process; e.g., feudalism, capitalism.
model The simplified representation of an empirical fact or object that tries
to capture its essential aspects.
modern age In Foucault, the period since 1800 in which man appears in
the épistémè.
modernism In the arts and sciences, the current that sees itself as a cultural
avant-garde that self-consciously aims to break with the past; in politics
and society, the belief in progress, secularization, and/or emancipation.
modernity The coherent whole of beliefs as to what characterizes a modern
society or culture.
modernization theory The social-scientific paradigm that accounts for
the development of Third-World countries in terms of a universal pat-
tern of progress, taking the Western (liberal, capitalist, and/or secular)
experience as a model.
monological In Bakhtin, language use that belongs to or aims at one over-
arching narrative or system of values and meanings.
movement-image (image-mouvement) In Deleuze, the irreducibly temporal
cinematic image that translates time into space and cannot be reduced
to a sequence of still images.
multidisciplinary Research approach that makes use of the methods and
insights of different disciplines.
multiple modernities In Eisenstadt, the view that modernization should
not be identified with Westernization.
nationalism The idea that the people or nation (as a cultural unity) must
coincide with the state (as a political unity).
naturalism In Quine, the belief that the knowing subject is a natural being
and that epistemological questions can be translated into or reduced to
empirical questions in (developmental) psychology.
Neogrammarians See Junggrammatiker.
neo-Kantianism The nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century cur-
rent that regarded the Kantian subject not as universal and unchanging
but as historically and/or culturally determined.
neoliberalism The contemporary doctrine that views the common good –
such as culture, care, or education – as economic goods that are better
governed by market mechanisms than by state intervention.
nomadic In Deleuze, a difference-oriented way of thinking that rejects fixed
essences and does not attempt to reduce phenomena to authoritative
concepts.
Glossary 373

nomothetic Approach and concept formation in terms of general laws; cf.

idiographic.
normal science In Kuhn, the periods during which scientists work within
a given paradigm without questioning its foundations.
normativity The historically variable property of e.g. sentences, knowledge
states, and/or practices of being normative (i.e., ‘correct’ or not), rather
than purely factual or causally produced.
norms The standards for what good scientific research should involve.
object ‘Thing’; that which is known.
objective Concerning the things or facts themselves; cf. subjective.
objectivism Explanation in terms of objective givens.
Oedipus complex Pathological attachment to the mother and hatred against
the father.
ontology Theory concerning what exists and how it exists; in Quine and
after, the kind of objects a theory deals with.
opposition A difference in sound or meaning between two signs.
oral history Historiography on the basis of oral rather than written sources.
organic intellectual In Gramsci, an intellectual who is linked to the culture
and aspirations of the proletariat.
organicism The representation of cultural, societal, or historical phenomena
or processes in terms of living organisms.
organon In Aristotle, the auxiliary logical sciences, which precede the
substantial sciences.
Orientalism In Said, the thesis that the Western philological study of the
Orient does not constitute neutral or objective descriptive science but
supports and justifies Western colonial or imperialist domination of the
non-Western world.
paradigm In Kuhn, in the strict sense an exemplar or textbook example
of good scientific practice in a given discipline; in a broader sense the
disciplinary matrix, i.e. the whole of beliefs, assumptions, and norms
concerning scientific research with which a community of scientists
works.
parole Individual language use or linguistic behaviour; cf. langue.
passive revolution In Gramsci, a revolution imposed from above, in par-
ticular by the state.
patriarchate Male domination.
people’s spirit See Volksgeist.
perception-image Deleuze’s term for medium shots in films.
performance In Chomsky, actual language use, as opposed to competence,
or linguistic knowledge.
374  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

performative An utterance or action that creates what it seems to describe

or represent.
periphery In Wallerstein, the non-industrialized, non-Western parts of the
world economy
perlocutionary The effect the speech act has on the hearer.
perspective The starting point or position from which an interpretation
is formed.
phenomena Things as they appear to our senses, not as they are in
themselves.
phenomenal world The world as it appears to one’s consciousness; cf. Ding
an Sich.
phenomenalism The reduction of all meaningful statements to statements
about pure observation or elementary experience.
phenomenology The philosophical current that focusses not on the ques-
tion of how something exists but on the question of how it appears to
consciousness.
philosophical adequacy The criterion that demands that a theory about
science is in agreement with philosophical (e.g. epistemological) ideas
and beliefs.
philosophy of consciousness The philosophical view that takes conscious-
ness as primary and not mediated by language or social processes.
philology The historical and critical reconstruction of languages and texts,
and the attempt to recover the cultural life of an era as a whole on the
basis of these reconstructions.
physicalism The reduction of all meaningful statement to statements about
pure observable facts.
poetic sciences In Aristotle, the sciences that concern the making (Gr.
poiein) of things, like poetics.
polyphony The irreducible plurality of voices and styles in specific novels.
positivism In the social sciences, the belief that only the empirical sciences
can yield valid knowledge or serve as the basis for a successful social order;
in historiography, the view that the historian should only recover histori-
cal facts and should abstain from interpretations and value judgments.
positivism debate Dispute concerning the character and scientific task of
the social sciences.
postcolonialism The approach that explores the influence of Western
voyages of discovery, colonial domination, and slavery on the development
of central aspects of modern Western and non-Western experience.
Glossary 375

postmodernism A cultural, scientific, and/or political current that disputes

the values and ideals of modernity or modernism such as progress,
universal validity, and originality.
postsecularism In Habermas, the continued existence of religious groups
and religiously motivated political demands in a secularized environment.
poststructuralism A current inspired by Saussure that places signs above
or outside human consciousness.
potential falsifier A basic statement that logically contradicts a theory.
pouvoir-savoir See power-knowledge.
power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir): In Foucault, the internal and indissoluble
albeit historically variable interconnection between knowledge and
power.
practical holism The view that the understanding of individual statements
or actions presupposes a whole, or horizon, of actions.
practical logic In Bourdieu, the nonsystematic, partially unconscious
reasoning that stands at the basis of action.
practical sciences In Aristotle, the sciences that are concerned with action,
like ethics and political theory.
practice Temporally and spatially delimited way of doing things.
practice turn The turn within the social sciences and the humanities to
take practices as the primary object of inquiry rather than structures
or actor’s intentions.
pragmatics A branch of linguistics: the theory of language use.
pragmatism The philosophical current that seeks explanations in terms
of actual or desired actions rather than epistemic states; rejects any
idea of specific classes of privileged statements (e.g. religious, logical,
or observational), and accepts abstract terms only in so far as they have
practical use.
predicate logic Logical theory that analyses the internal logical structure
of statements.
prediction A theory-based statement about expected future observations.
premisse The first step in an argument, out of which a conclusion follows
logically.
presentism The tendency to view the past as merely an imperfect preparation
of the present, which is seen as self-evidently superior.
primary qualities Properties that are essential for physical objects, like
place and extension.
primary texts The non-literary sources such as archival documents, letters,
and eyewitness reports that according to Ranke should constitute the
historian’s ultimate source material.
376  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

principle of difference In Deleuze, the principle that produces identities

out of differences, like Nietzsche’s will to power.
principles See causes.
print capitalism In Anderson, the technological and economic basis of
national imagination and national consciousness.
private language argument Wittgenstein’s argument that the meaning
of words should be accounted for not in terms of mental entities but in
terms of publicly controllable use.
professionalization The process in which a field of science turns into an
acknowledged and institutionally anchored activity.
prophecy A pseudoscientific prediction that does not state initial conditions.
proposition An assertion or statement expressed in a sentence.
Proto-Indo-European According to historical-comparative linguistics, the
hypothetical ‘original language’ from which all existing Indo-European
languages like English, Dutch, Latin, and Sanskrit developed.
pseudoscience For Popper, a system of knowledge that claims scientific
status but does not meet the falsification criterion (e.g. astrology or
Marxism).
pseudo-statement A statement that seems meaningful but does not have
any empirical truth conditions.
psychologism The attempt to account for facts in the humanities in terms
of inner mental or psychological properties and states.
public sphere Popular (as distinct from specialist or professional) environ-
ment in which matters of culture, science, society, and politics are debated.
purification In Latour, the way in which, in the modern constitution, hybrids
are dissected into natural, societal, and discursive components.
puzzles In Kuhn, the relatively concrete problems that can be solved ac-
cording to the rules of an existing paradigm.
quadrivium The four advanced sciences of the Middle Ages: music, geometry,
arithmetic, astronomy.
queer theory A poststructuralist approach to sexuality that rejects the belief
in essences of gender and sexuality and that emphasizes the normativity
of concepts and the performativity of practices.
rationalism The belief that the human mind does not derive its knowledge
passively from observation but itself plays an active role in forming
knowledge; in Weber, the rationalized worldview and forms of social
action specific to Western modernity.
rationalization In Weber, the developmental process in which the legitimacy
of actions increasingly is based on rational considerations; the ever-more
bureaucratic, efficient, and anonymous organization of societal life.
Glossary 377

ready-made science In Latour, the generally accepted end result of scientific

research after the resolution of controversies; cf. science in action.
real, the In Lacan, the realm of nonsymbolized reality.
realism The belief that a correct theory describes the world as it is; cf.
instrumentalism.
receptivity In Kant, the passive capacity to receive sense impressions.
reduction statement Translation of another statement that explicates the
latter’s empirical truth conditions.
reductionism The belief that a theory can be completely translated or
reduced to other kinds of statements, e.g., concerning pure, theory-
independent experience.
reference Either the indicating of an object by a sign or the object thus
indicated.
reflexivity In Bourdieu, the demand that social sciences should also analyse
or ‘objectify’ the social position of the researcher.
relativism The belief that truth, rationality, etc. are not absolute or objective
but relative to e.g. a culture, perspective or paradigm.
Renaissance humanism Intellectual movement working on the recovery
and reconstruction of classical (and in particular pagan) texts.
representation In epistemology, mental image by the knowing subject of
extra-mental reality; in Foucault, the figure of knowledge characteristic
to the classical épistémè; in postmodern and postcolonial authors, the
socially dominant way in which particular individuals, groups or phe-
nomena are seen.
repression In Freud, the preventing of a drive, desire, or memory from
reaching the ego’s consciousness.
reproducibility The demand that an observation or experiment be repeatable
for it to be recognized as a basis of knowledge.
revolution In Kuhn, a period of radical scientific change in which one
paradigm is replaced by another.
rule Principle that states the correct use of a word.
schematism In Kant, the application of the concepts of the understanding
to our intuitions in a judgment.
science in action What scientists actually do in their research, as distinct
from what is retrospectively presented as ready-made science.
scientific revolution Period of rapid and radical scientific change in the
early seventeenth century in which the classical image of science, and of
knowledge at large, emerged. In the early nineteenth century, one may
speak of a ‘humanities revolution’. In Kuhn: paradigm shift.
378  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

scientism The belief that science is the sole source of knowledge and societal
well-being.
secondary qualities Properties that do not belong to things themselves
but only appear in the mind of those who observe them, e.g., colour and
flavour.
secondary sources In Von Ranke, the later texts that themselves already
involve a literary elaboration of historical source material.
secular Worldly, non-religious.
secularism The normative belief that church and state should be separated,
or that religion should be restricted to the private realm.
secularization The factual process of the decreasing public and/or private
role of religious belief and/or clerical power.
semantic concept of truth Tarski’s characterization of truth in purely
semantic and language-dependent notions of word meaning, which
have no metaphysical implications.
semantics Branch of linguistics; theory of meaning.
seminar Small-scale didactic gathering for colleagues and advanced students.
semiology General theory of signs.
semiotics See semiology.
semi-periphery Partially modernized and industrialized parts of the world
economy.
sense data In modern empiricism, the logically primitive and non-conceptual
observations as given to our senses; epistemological atoms or building
blocks.
sense experience Direct observation by the human sensory organs as a
source of knowledge.
sex Biological distinction between man and woman.
sexism Ideology that represents women as unimportant or inferior.
sexuality Modern scientific concept, which incorporates both outward
sexual behavior and inner desire.
sign Physically observable object that indicates or expresses something else.
signified ‘Meaning;’ the conceptual aspect or side of the linguistic sign.
signifier ‘That which means.’ Sound aspect of the linguistic sign.
singular statement Statement about a particular object.
skepticism Philosophical current that argues that nothing can be known
with certainty; in its most radical variant doubting even the existence
of the world outside of us.
social action In Weber, action with a subjective meaning and directed
towards someone else.
Glossary 379

social constructivism Social-scientific current that tries to unmask seem-

ingly natural, autonomous and/or power-free cultural phenomena like
science as produced by social relations in which power plays an important
role.
social fact In Durkheim, the observable social phenomena that constitute
the sociologist’s raw materials.
social sciences Disciplines like sociology, economics, and anthropology,
originally modelled on the natural sciences rather than the humanities;
can be positivist or interpretive.
sociology The science of society.
sociology of knowledge Sociological approach that analyses scientif ic
knowledge as a social phenomenon.
space of causes Factual or descriptive realm of causation and natural laws.
space of reasons Normative domain or realm of justification.
speech act theory Approach that analyses the use of language in terms of
the actions we can perform with our utterances, like asserting, promising,
asking, etc.
spirit In Hegel, the individual or collective human consciousness or its
products; amounts to a broadening of Kant’s reason; develops in history.
spirit of the age The form of consciousness that is specific to a particular
period of history.
spontaneity In Kant, the mind’s capacity of forming representations.
stemmatology/stemmatic method Philological approach that tries to order
the manuscripts of a text in the form of a pedigree.
strategic action In Habermas, the type of social action that is directed
towards the realization of one’s own individual aims.
structural violence In Habermas, the restriction of communicative action
by system mechanisms.
structuralism Approach that attempts to explain social and other phenom-
ena from objective givens lying outside the subject.
structure Ordered whole of elements that only acquire their value or identity
within the whole.
structure-agency debate Dispute concerning the question of whether
objective structures or mental states are more fundamental in social-
scientific explanations.
style of argumentation Method or way of conducting scientific research
and of accounting for its results.
subaltern Repressed or oppressed culturally or ideologically; subordinate
and/or considered inferior; non-hegemonic.
380  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

subject The human mind as bearer of knowledge of the empirical world;

cf. object.
subject-object scheme The idea that knowledge consists of a relation of
depiction or representation between a knowing subject and a known object.
subjective Concerning the knowledge or opinions of the knowing subject;
cf. objective.
subjective meaning In Weber, the meaning or value a social actor attaches to
a fact or action, regardless of its actual or ‘objective’ validity or correctness.
subjectivism Explanation in terms of subjective mental states.
sublation (Aufhebung) ‘lifting up’ and/or ‘cancelling’; in Hegel, the resolution,
reconciliation, or overcoming of a contradictory or conflictual earlier
developmental stage.
substructure In Marx, the whole of material (and specifically economic)
relations that determine the cultural or ideological superstructure.
superego (Über-Ich) In Freud, the internalized parental authority, which
functions as the ego’s conscience; cf. id, ego.
superstructure In Marxist analyses, the whole of cultural or ideological
facts that is determined by the material economic base or substructure.
symbol, sign Object that represents or refers to another.
symbolic capital ‘Prestige’ or ‘authority;’ the scarce good that governs a
symbolic field like art or religion and determines how it functions.
symbolic form In Cassirer, a symbolic domain (e.g., language, myth, or sci-
ence) that makes possible the knowledge and meaning of specific symbols .
symbolic, the In Lacan, the whole of linguistic and social rules and laws
that the child is exposed to from the moment of birth.
symmetry The view that scientific and non-scientific knowledge should
be explained in the same social-scientific manner.
synchrony Level of analysis which abstracts away from historical or dia-
chronic change.
syntax Branch of linguistics; theory of the grammatically correct connection
of words in sentences.
synthetic Statement that is true or untrue on the basis of facts, e.g. ‘this
flower is red;’ cf. analytical.
synthetic a priori judgment Judgment that does not rest on experience, yet
expresses new knowledge.
system mechanism In Habermas, the mechanism that realizes the coordina-
tion of social actions via the effect of those actions; e.g., the capitalist
market; cf. lifeworld.
systematic observation The regular and controlled conducting of
observations.
Glossary 381

tacit dimension or tacit knowledge Non-propositional knowledge, practical

skill, required for correctly practising a science.
tautology A statement that is true in all circumstances.
taxonomy Hierarchically ordered representation in classes, which should
mirror the order of things themselves.
technologies of the self In Foucault, the ways in which individuals can
make themselves into subjects.
teleological explanation Explanation of a thing or process in terms of its
function or of the aim towards which it is directed.
testability The requirement that a scientif ic theory make precise and
refutable predictions about which observations may be expected.
theoretical holism The view that meaning or empirical content cannot be
assigned on a sentence-by-sentence basis but is spread over a theory as
a whole.
theoretical sciences In Aristotle, those sciences that are concerned with
pure knowledge or contemplation, like metaphysics and mathematics.
theory Collection of universal statements expressing empirical regularities
or laws.
theory and practice, relation of In critical theory, the problematic and vari-
able (dialectical) relation between scientific knowledge and social reality.
transcendental That which makes possible empirical knowledge; in Kant,
the knowing subject is transcendental, not empirical.
transcendental conditions of possibility In Kant, the a priori epistemologi-
cal conditions that make empirical knowledge possible.
trivium The three propaedeutic sciences of the Medieval artes liberales:
grammar, dialectic, rhetoric.
truth In the classical view, a correspondence between a statement and a
fact; modern authors tend to see truth as a purely semantic property of
statements (see semantic concept of truth).
truth conditions Empirical conditions on the basis of which it can be
established whether or not a statement is true.
unconscious In Freud, the hidden drives of our actions, which are not directly
accessible to our consciousness.
underdetermination of theories The fact that general theories always express
more than can be justified by a limited number of observations, and that
two conflicting theories can agree with the same empirical evidence.
unified science The logical empiricist project of expressing the different
disciplines in a mutually understandable language or jargon.
universal knowledge Knowledge of lawlike generalities, as opposed to
particular individuals, objects, or events.
382  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

universal statement Statement about an entire group or class of entities,

e.g., ‘All swans are white’.
universalism The view that e.g. truth or reason is not bound to any particular
time, place, or culture but is universally valid or applicable.
university Institute of higher education.
valid Logically binding.
value orientation The inevitable focus on norms and values of the social
and cultural sciences.
value relativism The belief that values are always bound to particular times,
places, and/or cultures.
value-free The idea that scientific knowledge should be restricted to purely
factual claims and does not and should not contain moral or other values;
nor should such values be deducible from it.
verification criterion of meaning The notion that a statement’s meaning
is completely captured in its empirical truth conditions.
verisimilitude The degree to which a theory approximates the truth.
verstehen Interpreting; explaining an outward phenomenon in terms of
inner meanings and values.
Volksgeist In Hegel, the collective identity of a nation as a specific principle
of the evolution of the world spirit, which follows its own course of
development.
Vorverständnisse Unconscious pre-understanding at the basis of conscious
knowledge and action.
Whig history See presentism.
will to power In Nietzsche, the instinctive drive underlying human actions
and morality.
Wirkungsgeschichte History of the effects of an artwork or other cultural
product.
world history Historiographic approach that sees the world as an intercon-
nected whole.
world religion Modern notion of commensurable religious traditions with
a dominant status and/or universal moral claims.
world systems theory Macro-economic approach that explains the emer-
gence of the modern capitalist world in terms of a rich and industrialized
centre, a poor semi-industrialized semiperiphery, and a poor agrarian
periphery.
writing (écriture) In Barthes, the relation between a text and society; a
function of language between grammar and style.
Zeitgeist In Hegel, spirit’s stage of development at a particular moment in
history.
 Index of Names
Adler, A. 190 Dalí, S. 261, 283
Adorno, T.W. § 8.4b, 221-222, 226-232, 234, Dante Alighieri 25-26
236, 279, 284, 302 Deleuze, G. § 11.2b, 174, 292-293, 298-301, 312,
Aeschylus 172, 335 339, 357
Akhmatova, A. 213 Democritus 44, 91
Allen, W. 191 Derrida, J. § 11.2a, 174, 251, 279, 292-299, 311,
Anderson, B. 226 327, 337-340, 349
Antigone 263-264 Descartes, R. 56-57, 63-64, 112, 141, 271, 300,
Aristotle § 2.1a, 20, 28-29, 35, 40, 42-44, 51-56, 305, 307
58, 71, 78-79, 116-117, 121, 123-125, 307 Descombes, V. 357
Arnold, M. 176 Dewey, J. 305
Auerbach, E. 335 Dijksterhuis, E.J. 60
Austin, J.L. § 10.2b, 231, 269-275, 280, 285, Dilthey, W. § 7.2b, 155, 182, 184-186, 191, 200,
295-296, 327-328 203-205, 212, 297
Dodds, E.R. 190
Bach, J.S. 197, 225, 227, 289 Dolfuss, E. 88
Bacon, F. 53-54, 56, 58, 61 Dostoyevsky, F. 180, 190, 201
Bakhtin, M. § 8.2, 211, 213-217, 220, 236 Duhem, P. § 4.1a, 11, 101-105, 108, 110, 115-116,
Balzac, H. de 212, 258 119, 122-123, 129-130, 168, 180, 251, 316
Barthes, R. 258-260, 293-294, 339 Durkheim, E. § 9.2, 98, 174-176, 189, 209, 234,
Baudelaire, C. 258, 260 237-247, 250, 252, 255, 265-267, 278, 344
Bayly, C.A. 346-349
Bazin, A. 300 Eagleton, T. 341
Beethoven, L. van 143, 152, 227 Eco, U. 25-26
Bellarmine, Cardinal 53, 57 Eddington, A. 95
Benjamin, W. § 8.4a, 221-228, 231, 236 Einstein, A. 72, 74, 79, 84, 95-96, 118
Berg, A. 226 Eisenstein, S. 213, 301
Berkeley, G. 64 Eliot, T.S. 180
Bernal, M. § 13.2b, 151, 334, 336-337, 349 Engels, F. 210-211, 218
Bhabha, H. 339-341, 349 Engerman, S.L. 22-24
Bloomfield, L. 255 Erasmus, D. 48-50
Boccaccio, G. 47, 49 Euripides 172, 274
Bopp, F. 166
Bourdieu, P. § 10.4, 237, 269, 275, 279-285, Fanon, F. § 13.1a 331-335, 340, 348
316, 325 Felman, S. 190
Boyle, R. 39-41, 54-58, 60, 62-63, 68-69, 104, Flaubert, G. 283
126, 128, 246 Fogel, R.W. 22-24
Bracciolini, P. 47 Foucault, M. § 5.1, § 10.3, § 12.3, 11, 30, 63, 115,
Braudel, F. 276, 346-347 133-142, 156, 168, 174, 181, 204, 238, 258-259,
Brecht, B. 223, 226 269, 275-279, 285, 293-294, 299, 316, 321-325,
Butler, J. § 12.4, 275, 324-329, 340 329, 335, 339
Fox Keller, E. 317-320
Carnap, R. § 3.1a, 74, 76-84, 87-88, 90, 92, Frederick the Great 148, 153
116, 125 Frege, G. 71, 74, 77, 80
Cassirer, E. § 7.4b, 84, 191, 193-196, 204-205 Freud, S. 186-190, 200, 205, 261-264, 306, 325
Cervantes 215 Fromm, E. 221
Chaplin, C. 225
Chatterjee, P. 338, 348 Gadamer, H.-G. § 7.6, 200-205, 306-307
Chomsky, N.A. § 9.4, 86, 253-257, 266, 268 Galen 44
Cicero 46-47, 49-50, 163 Galilei, G. 40-41, 51-54, 57-58, 61, 63, 68-69,
Comte, A. 149, 174-175, 196, 209, 238, 240 117, 126, 167, 237
Confucius 28 Gandhi, M. 338
Cooper, F. 343-344 Garbo, G. 259
Copernicus, N. 51, 53, 59, 95, 118, 120-121, Gauss, C.F. 74
123-124, 167 Gay, P. 190
384  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

George, S. 175, 177 Koyré, A. 58, 62, 115, 134

Giddens, A. 266 Kuhn, T.S. § 4.2, § 4.3, 17, 101-103, 109, 114-130,
Glanvill, J. 319-320 133-135, 156, 168, 180, 194, 200, 246-247, 255,
Glass, Ph. 290 261, 297, 304, 308, 316, 318
Goethe, J.W. von 152, 154, 172, 227
Gombrich, E. 99 Lacan, J. § 9.6, 258, 261-265, 268, 294, 301, 325,
Goncharov, I. 214 337-340, 349
Gorky, M. 213 Lachmann, K. 165, 168
Grafton, A. 57 Lakoff, G. 257
Gramsci, A. § 8.3, 217-221, 236, 337-338, 349 Langacker, R. 257
Greene, G. 174 Latour, B. 102, 128, 310-312
Grimm, J. 151, 166, 220 Leavis, F.R. 176
Grimm, W. 151, 220 Lenin, V.I. 218
Grotius, H. 182 Lessing, G.E. 148, 152
Guattari, F. 301 Lévi-Strauss, C. 240, 258, 260-261, 282
Guha, R. 337-339 Lobachevsky, N. 74
Locke, J. 57, 112, 185, 271
Habermas, J. § 8.5, 114, 221, 231-236, 274-275, Loos, A. 87
279, 282, 318 Lovejoy, A.O. 147
Hall, S. 221 Lukács, G. § 8.2, 211-213, 215-216, 236
Haraway, D. 320-321 Luther, M. 49
Harding, S. 315, 317-318 Lyotard, J.-F. § 11.3a, 292-293, 302-304, 312
Hegel, G.W.F. § 5.2b, § 6.1, 140, 143-146, 151-152,
157, 159-165, 168-169, 171-173, 178, 182, 196, Mach, E. 72-73, 84, 88
209-210, 215, 222, 227, 231, 235, 263, 280, 324, Madonna 27, 291, 314
332, 339-340 Mann, Th. 174, 176-177, 213
Heidegger, M. 76, 203, 339 Mannheim, K. 177
Hempel, C.G. 86 Manzoni, A. 220
Herder, J.G. 163, 167, 185 Marcuse, H. 221
Herodotus 335 Marx, K. § 8.1, 98, 110, 145, 149, 161, 197, 200,
Hitchcock, A. 265 209-211, 218, 222, 231, 234-236, 280, 283, 349
Hobbes, Th. 54-56, 60, 128, 246 Mauss, M. 240
Hölderlin, F. 227 Meillet, A. 247
Homer 168, 212, 215 Mendelssohn, M. 177
Horkheimer, M. 221, 223-224, 226-227, Michelangelo 27, 190
231-232, 302 Mignolo, W. 342-343
Hugo, V. 175 Mirandola, P. della 49
Humboldt, W. von § 5.4, 31-33, 152-157, 185, Mondriaan, P. 291
194, 306-307 Monroe, M. 314
Hume, D. 64, 83, 90, 185, 299 Mozart, W.A. 201

Ibn al-Shâtir 59 Needham, J. 59

Irigaray, L. 297 Nehru, J. 338
Neurath, O. 72-74, 83-85
Jakobson, F.R. 213, 216, 260 Newton, I. 40, 52, 57, 61-62, 68-69, 72, 95,
James, W. 305 116-117, 136
Johnson, M. 257 Nicolai, F. 148
Jones, W. 166-167 Nietzsche, F. § 6.3b, 159, 172-174, 178, 185, 191,
Joyce, J. 213 204, 277, 293, 298-301, 304

Kafka, F. 212 Oedipus 188, 263

Kant, I. § 2.2, § 5.2a, 11, 61, 64-74, 77, 79-80,
90-91, 110, 112, 114, 135, 138-145, 148-149, Pânini 28
152, 157, 159, 163, 168, 173, 185, 191, 193-194, Panofsky, E. 204
196, 227, 245-246, 252, 255, 279, 295, 297, Parsons, T. 344
299-300, 305, 307 Pasteur, L. 175
Karadžić , V. 170 Péguy, C. 175
Kekulé, A. 77 Peirce, C.S. 299, 301, 305
Khomeini, R. 341 Petrarca, F. 47, 49
Koons, J. 283, 290-291 Picasso, P. 225, 291
Index of Names 385

Planck, M. 71, 74 Seneca 47

Plato 40, 90, 297 Shakespeare, W. 24, 27
Poliziano, A. 47 Shapin, S. 55, 60, 128, 246
Pollock, Sh. 351 Shaw, B. 175
Popper, K.R. § 3.3, 39, 88-105, 115, 119, 121, Simmel, G. 232
125-126, 129, 180, 190, 194, 200, 211, 218, 230, Skinner, B.F. 86
232, 236 Solzhenitsyn, A. 290
Prince (The Artist Formerly Known As) 291 Sombart, W. 176
Propp, V. 216 Sophocles 172, 263-264
Proust, M. 223 Spinoza, B. de 57, 182, 299
Ptolemy 40, 44-46, 51, 53, 121, 123-124 Spivak, G. 338-341, 349
Pushkin, A. 214 Stalin, J. 217
Pynchon, Th. 290 Stam, R. 301
Pythagoras 40 Stephens, Th. 167
Subrahmanyam, S. 346, 349
Quine, W.V.O. § 4.1a, § 4.1b, 11, 101-103, 105-111, Svevo, I. 191
113-116, 119, 122-123, 127, 129-130, 135, 168, 180,
194, 200, 203, 251, 304, 312, 316 Tarski, A. 79, 96
Quintilian 49 Thatcher, M. 290
Tolstoy, L. 215
Rabelais, F. 216-217 Troeltsch, E. 176
Ranke, L. von § 6.3a, 159, 162, 169-172, 174, 178 Trubetzkoy, N. 216
Reagan, R. 232, 290 al-Tûsî, N. 59
Reich, S. 290
Renan, E. 150 Valla, L. 47
Rickert, H. § 7.4a, 191-193, 196, 198, 200, Vermeer, J. 201
204-205 Voloshinov, V. § 8.2, 211, 213-214, 216-217, 220,
Rorty, R. § 11.3b, 102, 114, 190, 292, 304-309, 236
312, 316, 318 Voltaire, F.M.A.L. 148
Rossetti, G. 25-26
Rousseau, J.-J. 167 Wachowski, L. & L. 265
Rushdie, S. 290, 340-341 Wallerstein, E. 345, 347
Russell, B. 71, 74, 77, 80 Warhol, A. 290
Russell, J. 314 Webb, B. 175
Webb, S. 175
Said, E. § 13.2a, 151, 221, 334-337, 348 Weber, M. § 7.5, 110, 174-176, 189, 193, 196-200,
Sartre, J.-P. 282, 333 204-205, 209, 230, 234-235, 280, 289, 344
Saussure, F. de § 9.3, 216, 238-239, 247-253, Weill, K. 227
255, 258, 263, 265-268, 282, 293, 295-296, Wellmer, A. 227
299, 304 Wells, H.G. 175, 176
Schaffer, S. 55, 128, 246 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von 164-165, 172
Schleiermacher, F. § 7.2a, 182-184, 205 Williams, R. 221
Schlick, M. 74, 84, 88 Williams Crenshaw, K. 342
Schönberg, A. 226, 228-229, 291 Winckelmann, J.J. 172
Schopenhauer, A. 145 Wittfogel, K. 221
Schubert, F. 152 Wittgenstein, L. § 10.2a, 22, 26, 77, 204, 231,
Scott, W. 212 269-272, 274-275, 278, 280, 285
Searle, J. 231
Sellars, W. § 4.1c, 102-103, 111-114, 122-123, Zilsel, E. 58-59, 85
125-127, 129, 194, 231, 233, 274, 304, 312, 316 Žižek, S. 191, 264, 265
 Index of Subjects
a posteriori 67, 300 Boyle-Hobbes debate 60, 128, 246
a priori 66-67, 69, 71-72, 74, 79-80, 114, 135,
142, 169, 193, 205, 245, 300, 304, 347 canon 18, 26, 28, 163, 258
historical – 135 capital (Bourdieu)
academic freedom 32, 152, 154, 157 cultural – 284
academy 31-32, 41, 59, 153; cf. Royal Society; symbolic – 283
university vs academy capitalism 58, 98, 140, 209, 226, 289, 301,
act 341-343, 346
illocutionary – 273, 328 carnival 216-217
locutionary – 273 carnivalesque (Bakhtin) 216-217, 236
perlocutionary – 273-274, 328 categories (Kant) 64, 67, 127, 141, 245-246
action causality 64, 83, 97
communicative – (Habermas) § 8.5, 114, in Aristotle 43-44
274 in Carnap 83
social – (Weber) 196-200, 289 in Hume 64
strategic – 232-234 in Kant 64
action-image (Deleuze) 301 in Popper 97
ad hoc hypothesis see hypothesis, ad hoc – centre (world-systems theory) 345
affection-image (Deleuze) 301 Classical Age (Foucault) § 5.1
amodern (Latour) 310 cognition § 9.4, 185
analytic-synthetic distinction § 3.1b, 79, 106, collective representation 243
111, 113, 129, 304 colonialism 332, 337; cf. postcolonialism
analytical philosophy 12, 32, 88, 112, 128, 200, colonization of the lifeworld 234-235
231, 269, 275, 296, 299, 307, 324 communicative action see action: com-
androcentrism 313 municative –
Annales school 240, 276, 346-347 competence vs performance 255-256
anomaly 119-122, 130, 147, 256 concept 27, 43, 51-52, 63-65, 69, 75, 78-79, 81,
anti-essentialism 272, 298 83, 85, 88, 92, 97, 99, 103, 110-112, 114, 116-120,
antihumanism 278, 339 122, 127, 129, 133, 145-147, 149-150, 155-156,
antimetaphysical attitude 73, 85 159, 161-162, 166-167, 177, 185, 190-193, 202,
antinaturalism 113 218, 223, 225, 237, 239, 242, 247, 249-252, 256,
anti-psychologism 186 260, 270-271, 282, 292, 294-296, 298-301, 305,
anthropology 28, 32, 151, 238-240, 258, 267 315, 318, 321, 324, 329, 331, 337, 339, 342-343,
linguistic – 213 348-349
of the moderns 311 concept formation 179, 191-193, 196, 200,
of science 127-128 204-205
arbitrariness of the linguistic sign 250, 252, 267 in natural and cultural sciences 191, 200
archaeology (Foucault) § 5.1, 11, 141, 156, 181, conceptual frame/scheme 19, 52-53, 69, 110,
275-277, 323-324 119, 123, 133, 135, 142, 168, 200
artes liberales 29 conceptual metaphor 257
Aufklärung see Enlightenment confirmation 40, 78, 92, 99-100, 247
aura 225 degree of – 62, 92
author, ‘death of the –’ 258 consciousness, philosophy of – 69, 114, 144,
avant-garde 223, 229, 236, 291 169, 178, 209, 214, 226, 232, 237, 269, 293, 296,
301, 311, 333
base (Marx) 209, 214, 218, 220, 226, 283; cf. context of discovery 77, 87, 100, 125, 130, 246, 313
superstructure context of justification 77, 87, 99, 125, 130,
basic sentence 93-94 246, 313
– vs observation statement 50, 78, 110, contradiction, contradictory 125, 142, 161-162,
112, 190 190, 204, 209-211, 215, 222, 227-228, 230, 297,
behaviorism 18 340
Bildung § 5.4, § 11.3b, 31-33, 172, 175, 177, 284, conventionalism 105
292, 303 conventionalist stratagem 94, 96, 190
Nietzsche’s critique of – 159, 172 corroboration 92
Boyle’s law 39-40, 104 degree of – 92, 95-96
388  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

Counter-Enlightenment 142, 148-150, 154, epistémè (Foucault) 134-139, 142, 145, 156, 168,

156-157, 178, 196 181, 238, 259
crisis (Kuhn) 120, 130 epistémè vs doxa 19-20
critical theory Ch. 8 passim, 279 epistemic rupture/mutation 134-135, 140-141,
tasks of a – 222, 231 157
crucial test § 4.1a, 92, 94-96, 100, 129, 316 epistemology § 2.2, 90, 110, 125-127, 138, 141,
cultural analysis 297 157, 185, 191, 194, 240, 246, 305, 308, 311
cultural studies 26-28, 221, 293, 339 equant 45, 51
culture industry 228, 231, 236 ethnocentrism/eurocentrism 308-309, 331
culture sciences § 7.4a evolution 57, 146-147, 210
exemplar see paradigm
decoloniality 342 experience 20-21, 35, 39, 44, 51, 54-55, 61-62,
deconstruction § 11.2a 64-65, 67, 77, 79, 81-83, 101, 104, 106, 108-113,
deduction § 3.3a, 86, 96-97 116, 122-124, 126, 136, 141, 146, 148, 160-161,
demarcation criterion 92, 100 184-185, 187-191, 194, 201, 203-204, 218, 220,
demarcation problem (Popper) 90-91 225, 227, 230, 237-239, 242-243, 255, 270, 283,
dependency theory 345-346 298-301, 306, 309, 321, 326, 338, 342, 343; cf.
diachrony 252-253, 267 sense data
dialect vs standard language 165, 219-220 Popper’s notion of – 90-91, 93-94
dialectic 145, 160-161, 211-212, 214-215, 217-218, sense – 20-21, 35, 62, 64-65, 67, 113
227, 231-232, 234-235, 263-264, 293, 297, experiment 20, 40, 44, 53-56, 58-59, 77, 92,
299, 332 102, 104-105, 108, 119, 122, 127, 129, 212, 223
Habermas’ objections against – 231 explanandum 85-86, 97
in Hegel § 6.1 explanans 85-86
in Marx and Engels § 8.1 explanation § 3.3c, 35, 40, 43-44, 51, 55, 59-60,
– of master and slave 161, 263, 332 69, 85-86, 140-141, 147-148, 166-167, 191, 197,
dialectical idealism 161, 210-211 199, 214, 222, 238-240, 243-244, 246, 248, 261,
dialectical materialism 213, 217, 222, 231 263, 267, 277, 280, 316
dialogism (Bakhtin) 215-216 covering law-model of – 86
dialogue (Gadamer) 201 deductive-nomological model of – 86, 97
difference (Deleuze) § 11.2b hypothetico-deductive model of – 97-99
Ding an sich (thing in itself) 65, 69, 169, 173, in Aristotle 42-43
299, 304 relation to prediction § 3.3c
disciplinary matrix see paradigm externalism/externalist 58, 60, 141, 147; cf.
discipline (Foucault) 276-278 internalism
discourse 139, 216, 302, 310-312, 316
authoritative – 216-217 faculty (university) 15, 32, 87, 155, 179, 184
discursive formation 275-277 fallibilism 96, 98
discursive practice 277, 279 falsifiability of scientific knowledge 91
distinction (Bourdieu) 284 falsification 92, 94, 100, 108, 115, 119, 121
print capitalism 226 falsifier, potential 93-94, 96
Duhem-Quine thesis § 4.1a, 11, 101-102, 110, family resemblance 271
115-116, 119, 122-123, 129-130, 168, 251, 316 felicity conditions 273-274
field (Bourdieu) § 10.4b
edification, edifying conversation 308, 312 film 225, 264
ego (Ich) 188-189, 262, 300 folklore 213, 216-217
empirical content see meaning: empirical form of intuition (Anschauungsform) 64-65,
content; theory: empirical content 141, 195
empiricism § 4.1, § 4.3, 62, 80, 83, 239, 259, Frankfurt School (Frankfurter Schule) § 8.4,
299, 316 231-232, 280, 282; cf. critical theory
logical – § 3.1, 11-12, 86-88, 90, 116, 269 ‘French theory’ § 11.2
transcendental – (Deleuze) 299-300
end of grand narratives 302 Geist see spirit
Enlightenment 62, 73, 84, 116, 142, 146, Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft 175
148-150, 153-154, 156-157, 167, 177-178, 189, 196, gender § 12.2
227, 235, 289, 303, 309, 336 gender metaphor § 12.2, 316, 318, 320
dialectic of – (Horkheimer, Adorno) 227, gender studies 29, 314, 316-318, 324
230, 234 genealogy
epicycle 45-46, 51 Foucault’s – § 10.3, 285
epiphenomenon 265 Nietzsche’s – § 6.3b, 293, 299
Index of Subjec ts 389

generative grammar § 9.4 induction § 3.3a, 42, 53, 99

genius, Romantic notion of – 184 inductive logic (Carnap) 78
geocentrism 50-51, 116 initial conditions 97-99
Gestalt switch 52, 117, 120, 167 institution § 5.4, 11, 31, 41, 120, 143, 216, 222,
given 69, 82, 124-125, 160, 162, 168-169, 173, 186, 239, 242, 250, 269, 278, 285, 303, 309, 317,
189, 195, 210, 241-242, 248, 250-251, 259, 262- 325, 346-347
263, 266, 269-270, 276, 299, 316, 322-327, 329 – vs practice 309, 317
myth of the – § 4.1c, 11, 102, 111, 113, 122, intellectual, organic – 220, 338
126, 129, 300, 304 intention 25, 128, 144, 180-181, 183, 205, 215,
globalization § 13.4, 341, 349 227, 258, 260-261, 266-269, 274, 295-297, 325,
growth of knowledge 16, 21, 90-92, 98, 124, 196 327, 346
internalism/internalist 58-60, 141, 147; cf.
habitus § 10.4a externalism
hegemony (Gramsci) 218-219, 236, 337-338, interpreting see verstehen
340, 347, 349 – vs overinterpreting 25
heliocentrism 51, 53, 57, 70, 116, 124 – vs truth seeking § 1.3
hermeneutic circle 183, 203, 205 intersectionality 342
hermeneutics Ch. 7 passim, 12, 86, 142, intuition (Anschauung) 16, 25, 27, 62-65, 77,
155, 164, 209, 237, 261, 264, 266, 268-269, 102, 106, 112, 114, 128, 141, 159, 195, 201, 212,
307-308, 313 239, 300, 320
double – 200, 266 ironic attitude (Rorty) 305
heteroglossia 214-216, 236 iterability 216, 296, 327, 340
historical a priori 135
historical materialism 219 Junggrammatiker see neogrammarians
historicism 98-100, 164, 204, 211
historicity § 5.2b, 181-182, 185, 203, 253, 282 l’art pour l’art 283
historiography § 6.3, 23, 29, 59, 86, 115, 155, language game § 10.2a, 278, 285
159, 162, 164-165, 178, 192, 240, 292, 337, 344, langue (language system) 247-253, 261, 265,
346-349 267, 295
positivist – § 6.1-6.3 laryngeal theory 247
history laws
global – § 13.4, 309 – of history § 3.3c, 211
philosophical – (Hegel) § 6.1 scientific – 72, 78, 85-86, 90, 186, 199-200,
world – (Hegel, Von Ranke) § 6.1, § 6.3a 253
horizon (Gadamer) 202-203, 233 life, philosophy of – 172-173, 185, 204
melting of –s 202 life world 202, 233-236
humane sciences 15-16, 317 linguistic turn 12, 69, 77, 90, 97, 112, 114-115,
humanism § 2.1b, § 2.1c, 11, 28, 42, 154, 182, 169, 211, 214, 220, 262-263, 269, 275-276,
278, 331-334, 348; cf. Renaissance humanism 296, 342
humanities, birth of the – Ch. 5 linguistics § 6.2, § 9.3, § 9.4
humanities, philosophy of the 16, 18-19, 26, 35 general – § 9.3, 267
‘humanities revolution’ Ch. 5, 31, 140, 155, historical-comparative – § 6.2, 134, 138,
157, 159 147, 186, 247
hybridity (Bhabha) 340-341 literary theory § 9.5, 15, 29, 213, 221, 238-239,
hybrids (Latour) 311 250, 261, 266-268, 274, 302
hypothesis 25, 91, 94, 97, 104-105, 108, 110-111, locutionary act see act, locutionary –
247, 255, 309, 321 logic of the situation 99
logical analysis 76-77, 83
Id (Es) 188 logical (deductive) consequence 75
ideal speech situation 233 logical empiricism see empiricism, logical –
ideal type 198, 205 logical positivism see logical empiricism,
idealism (philosophical) 141, 171, 185 Vienna Circle
identity politics 290, 341-342 logical validity 29, 42-43, 75
idiographic sciences 192 logically equivalent 76
il n’y a pas de hors-texte 294
illocutionary act see act, illocutionary – manichaeism 332, 335
illocutionary force 273, 328 meaning see Carnap, Cassirer, Derrida,
imaginary, the – (Lacan) § 9.6 Dilthey, Saussure, hermeneutics, speech act
imagined community (Anderson) 226 theory, verification criterion, understand-
incommensurability 123-124, 127, 130, 304, 308 ing (verstehen)
390  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

– as empirical content (Quine) 105, phenomenology 32, 278, 282, 293, 297

108-111, 129 philology § 6.2, § 13.2b, 29, 48, 50, 56, 114, 147,
change of – (Kuhn) 129 157, 159, 169, 172, 178, 182, 248, 335, 348-349
subjective – (Weber) 205 philosophy of the humanities 16-19, 23, 26, 35
meaning holism § 4.1b, 129, 203, 251 philosophy of science
mechanistic world view 51-52, 54-55, 61, 70, historical adequacy, criterion of – 17
121, 318-320 philosophical adequacy, criterion of – 16
metanarrative 303, 312 tasks 17
methodology § 3.3, 17, 90, 94, 173, 196, 200, physicalism 82
205, 210, 212 polyphony (Bakhtin) 215, 236
microcosm/macrocosm 45 positivism § 9-9.1, 12, 82, 139, 185, 223, 230,
mode of existence (Latour) 311 236, 240, 246, 269
Modern Age (Foucault) § 5.1 positivism debate 230, 236
modern constitution (Latour) 310, 312 postcolonialism Ch. 13, 12
modernism 230, 236, 291 postmodern condition § 11.1-11.2, § 11.3a, 312
modernity Ch. 4, Ch. 11, 12, 149, 151, 175, postmodernism § 11.1-11.3, 312, 329, 331
212-213, 220, 230, 234-235, 335, 338 poststructuralism § 11.2
modernization theory 344-345 power-knowledge (pouvoir-savoir) 277, 322
movement-image (image-mouvement) practical logic (Bourdieu) 280, 285
(Deleuze) 300-301 practice turn Ch. 10
multiple modernities 309, 311-312 pragmatics 181, 256, 271
myth of the given see given, myth of the – pragmatism § 4.1, 4.3, 83, 88, 304-305,
307-308, 312
nationalism § 5.4, 11, 71, 144, 148-150, 164, 213, prediction vs prophecy 99
226, 235, 290, 303, 333, 337-338 presentism 117
third-world – 338 private language argument § 10.2a
– vs national consciousness 143, 226, 333 professionalization 159, 163-164, 238, 317
naturalism 110, 113 prophecy see prediction vs prophecy
neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker) 166, proposition 62, 75, 94, 142
186, 247, 252-253 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) 165-166, 186, 247
neo-Kantianism § 7.4 pseudo-science 92, 190, 196
neoliberalism 290, 342 psychoanalysis § 7.3, § 9.6, 72, 92, 179, 205,
nomadic (Deleuze) 298, 300 258, 268, 301, 321-322, 325, 340
nomothetic sciences 192, 205 purification (Latour) 310-311
normal science (Kuhn) 118-119, 121, 129, 130, 270
and puzzle solving 119-120, 266 qualities, primary vs secondary – 51, 63
queer theory § 12.4, 275, 324
objectivism 237, 280, 285
Oedipus complex 188 racism 163, 331, 336, 341, 349
ontology 109-110, 123, 125, 265, 311 rationalism 11, 197, 255, 259, 289, 336
oral history 170 critical – § 3, 230
organon 29, 42 rationalization (Weber) 176, 234-235, 289
oriental studies 151, 334ff reductionism § 3.1b, § 4.1a-b, 100, 106, 108, 111,
orientalism § 13.2a, 157, 166, 322, 336, 348-349 113, 129, 217, 304
economical – 217
paradigm § 4.2-4.4, 133-135, 147, 166, 168, 248, real, the – (Lacan) § 9.6
253, 255-256, 261, 265-266, 268, 291, 297, relativism 105, 115, 128, 130, 146, 198, 203, 282
304-308 value – 193, 198
as disciplinary matrix 119 reliving/experiencing (erleben) 183, 185, 201,
as exemplar 118-119 204
parole (language use) 248, 252, 267 Renaissance § 2.1b, 28, 41-42, 50, 133-137, 164,
people’s spirit (Volksgeist) see spirit, people’s – 180, 342-343
perception image (Deleuze) 301 Renaissance humanism § 2.1b, 56, 154, 182, 331
performative 272-273, 285, 295, 325-328 revolution, scientific see scientific revolution
performativity (Butler) § 12.4 Romanticism 142, 148, 184, 230
periphery (world systems theory) 345 Royal Society 32, 41, 54-55, 57, 60, 153, 319-320
perlocutionary act see act, perlocutionary –
perlocutionary effect 274, 328 science
phenomenal world 65, 127 Aristotelian – § 2.1a, § 2.1c, 41, 46, 57, 69, 121
phenomenalism 82 classifications of the –s 29, 35
Index of Subjec ts 391

critique of speech act theory § 10.2b, 271, 295-296, 324,

feminist – § 12.1-12.2, 293 327
postcolonial – § 13.1-13.2 spirit (Geist) § 5.2b, 26, 31, 63, 146, 150-151,
– in action (Latour) § 4.4, 102, 128 155-157, 160-162, 164-165, 168-169, 171, 178,
– in China 28, 59 181-183, 185-186, 191, 209, 214-215, 220, 235,
Islamic – 40, 44, 59 252, 275, 296, 303, 307, 319
Medieval – § 2.1a – of the age (Zeitgeist) 146
poetic – (Aristotle) 29 – people’s (Volksgeist) 144, 146, 159, 162,
practical – (Aristotle) 29, 35 168
pure vs applied – 17 stemmatology (stemmatic method) 165
ready-made – (Latour) 102, 128 structural violence 234
theoretical – (Aristotle) 28, 29 structuralism Ch. 9, 12, 140, 220, 269, 280,
– vs religion 189 282, 293
science studies 128; cf. anthropology of post– see poststructuralism
science, sociology of science structure-agency debate 266, 268, 280
scientific revolution, the (16th-17 th cen- subaltern 218-219, 221, 236, 349
tury) § 2.1, 20, 31, 61, 70, 116, 121, 140 Subaltern Studies Group § 13.3, 224, 349
scientific revolutions (Kuhn) § 4.2-4.3, 127, subject, transcendental – 69-70, 140-142, 147,
133-135 157, 159, 276-277, 300
scientism 205 subjectivism 237
secularism 336 subject-object scheme 11, 63, 70, 102, 125, 179
post– 235 superego (Über-ich) 188-189, 265
secularization 289, 309 superstructure 209, 213-214, 218, 220, 223,
semantics 29, 181, 256-257 226, 283
cognitive – 257 symbol § 7.4b, 25, 179, 194-196, 204, 259
semiology/semiotics 214, 250, 258-259, 267, symbolic forms § 7.4b, 204-205
299, 301 symbolic, the – (Lacan) § 9.6, 322
semiperiphery (world systems theory) 345 synchrony 252, 267
sense data 111-112, 126-127, 304 synthetic a priori judgment 67, 71
sexuality § 12.3, 12, 188, 279, 319, 325; cf. system mechanisms (Habermas) 233-234,
critique of 236
science, feminist
in Butler 326-328 tacit dimension 119
in Foucault § 12.3, 329 teleology 210-211
in Freud 188 theology 29, 31, 50, 73, 85, 155, 182, 290
signified (signifié) 249, 251-252, 263, 267, theory
294-297 – as hypothesis 91, 97, 104-105, 108, 110-111
signifier (signifiant) 249, 251-252, 263, 267, empirical content of – 81, 95-96, 105, 129
294-297 informational content of – 96
free play of the – 296-297 instrumentalist interpretation of –s 46
singular/existential statement 75, 78, 93-94, realist interpretation of –s 255, 51, 53,
97, 108, 189, 249; cf. basic sentence 57, 255
skepticism 64, 137, 171, 176, 235 relation with practice 161
social action (Weber) 196-197, 289 testing of –s § 3.3b, § 4.1, 119, 122, 236
social fact (Bourdieu) 283 underdetermination of – by
social fact (Durkheim) 176, 239-244, 250, 252, observation 109
255, 265, 267 theory of communicative action § 8.5, 114,
social sciences, birth of – § 6.4 274
sociology § 6.4, § 9.2, § 10.4, 28, 32, 59, 86, transcendental 65-67, 69-70, 110, 138, 189, 191,
159, 196, 198, 204, 222, 226, 265, 267, 317; cf. 195, 198, 212, 252, 255, 275, 295, 299-300
Bourdieu, Comte, Durkheim, Weber – subject see subject, transcendental
– of knowledge § 9.2a, 221 truth § 1.2, 16, 18, 23-24, 29, 35, 56-57, 62, 73,
– of music § 8.4b, 238, 289 78-79, 96-97, 101, 104, 106, 108, 110, 115, 124,
– of religion § 9.2a 128-129, 133, 136, 142, 170-171, 196, 221, 231,
– of science 60, 128, 200, 218, 222, 238, 233, 270, 279, 282-283, 292, 304-306, 308, 312,
247; cf. anthropology of science, science 317, 320-322, 325, 335
studies Aristotle’s definition of – 20
reflexive – § 10.4 correspondence theory of – 78-79
verstehende – § 7.5 semantic concept of – 79
speech act § 10.2b, 235, 300, 331 truth conditions 75, 77, 80, 270, 273
392  History and Philosophy of the Humanities

unconscious (Freud, Lacan) 188-190, 261, 263, verisimilitude 96, 115, 124

268, 302, 306 verstehen (interpreting) 86, 181-182, 184-185,
unified science (Einheitswissenschaft) 83-85 196, 201, 204
universal statements/laws 42, 75, 78, 85-86, Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis) § 3.1-3.2, 39, 88,
90-91, 93-94, 97, 186, 192, 200 90, 97, 100, 106, 220, 270
universalism 142, 150, 154, 178, 291, 331 Volksgeist see people’s spirit
university 15, 31-34, 58, 155, 157, 170, 175-176, Vorverständnis (pre-understanding) 201, 203
240, 313
Humboldtian – § 5.4 Whig history see presentism
– reforms § 5.4, 31, 157, 163 Wiener Kreis see Vienna Circle
– vs academy 32, 153 will to power 173, 178, 300-301
Wirkungsgeschichte (history of effect) 200,
value orientation 193, 198, 234 203
value-free 177, 198, 205, 230, 291 women’s studies 313-314, 329
verification criterion of meaning 77-80, 83, world systems theory 345-346
85, 87, 90-91, 99, 109, 272-273, 285