File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9812, message 120


Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 16:50:32 EST
Subject: Re: Paralogy


I thought some might be interested in a long quote from a paper I wrote ten
years ago for a graduate course. For those who would rather not suffer through
the text, just check out the last paragraph. I think it describes paralogy
=93It seems to me that philosophy formulates or at least attempts to articulate
the epistemologies around which the  sciences and humanities develop their
projects and methods. That being so, one might look to philosophy for an
understanding of the past and present presuppositions and methods of those
disciplines. But philosophy for all its variations and complexities, as I see
it, splits into two camps and this split is relevant for the points I wish to
make in this paper. First there are the foundational philosophies which are
both prescriptive and restrictive. Then their are the anti-foundationalist
philosophies that are nonprescriptive and open. Where the former make claims
such as, =91this is so=92, the latter make claims like, =91that is other=92. What is
implicit throughout this paper is that the former have largely determined and
continue to influence methods of historiography and that the latter,
especially of late, challenge those methods as unsubstantiated and often
unconscious claims to certainty. The schism is by no means new however; there
has developed over the last two centuries what Paul Ricoeur has described as a
=91hermeneutic of suspicion=92 within the philosophical disciplines. One might say
that there is a crisis of representation, or in other words a challenge to the
ways in which reality is socially constructed in the Western world. In this
century, existential, phenomenological, hermenueutical and Marxist informed
philosophies have each in their own way mounted this challenge. Enlightenment
philosophy, in which a knowing subject, through reason, comes to grips with an
objective world, has in the eyes of many contemporary philosophers, lost its
efficacy. Nevertheless it is still the traditions of Descartes, Locke and Kant
that inform the logical positivist position that determines modern
rationality. From them and others like them we receive our traditional notion
of knowledge which presupposes: 1) the privileged standpoint of the guarantee
of certainty, 2) perception as the paradigm case, 3) the universal truth of
claims to knowledge and 4) the impotence of reflection to disrupt self evident
tenants (1). The dominant form of structuring reality couples with a
rationalism which employs a positivist logic in the service of a :methodical
attainment of ends.. by way of an increasingly precise calculation of means=94;
in other words, an instrumental rationality. (2) The debilitating effects of a
positivist rationality are summed up by David Helde as follows:

With positivism, science is no longer understood as one possible form of
knowledge but is identified as knowledge as such. There is no mode of thought
left which may criticize the conceptual forms and the structural patterns of
science. the consequence is Horkheimer maintained, a ghostlike and distorted
picture of the world. Positivism restricted to a program of investigating
observable particulars, cannot grasp the self formative process of man as
process. It hypostecises the abstract concept of fact or datum. By declaring
meaning to be revealed in sensory observation and in identifying, in the
social sciences, legitimate scientific experience with the sensory observation
of manifest and overt action, positivism closes off central aspects of social
reality. (3). 

I do not take lightly Max Weber=92s warning =93that a loss of the ability to see
the world as intrinsically meaningful is a part of the price to be paid for
the progress of rationality =93. If we are not to give up the place of
rationality as meaning formation, then it seems we must free the term from its
narrow instrumental usage and develop a more substantive approach for
determining what is rational. 

In this regard, there are some who would replace instrumental reason with what
might be called a more substantive rationality, one that would allow for
indeterminacy and not insist on some ultimate =93word, presence, essence, truth
or reality to act as the foundation of all thought, language and experience=94.
This new rationality  although acknowledging the interconnectedness of things,
would not insist that all things exist within a field of cause-effect
relationships. Meanings would be continuously negotiated, not with the
restricted boundaries of positivist logic but within a radical paradigm;
radical in the sense that it would insist on a reflexivity that recognizes the
contingent nature of knowledge.=94 

1. Wachtrhauser, 1986, 398
2. Girth & Mills, 1961, 293
3. Helde, 1980, 172 

Don Smith


   

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