Sokal on philosophers of science

Comments (13)

1. The most important point in that interview comes at the end:

   Underlying his work outside of physics is a strong conviction that it is a disaster for the left to abandon a commitment to reason. In his book, he cites one such example of someone who wanted to claim that science is not universal, but varies according to how the individual is situated in the world: “A German can look at and understand Nature only according to his racial character.”

   “This of course is a quotation from Ernst Krieck, a notorious Nazi ideologue, who was rector of the University of Heidelberg in 1937-38. I was flabbergasted – well maybe not flabbergasted – when I came across it. This doesn’t show that postmodernists are Nazis or anything. What it shows is a kind of uncanny overlap of ideas between, on the one hand, left-wing postmodernists, and the other hand, extreme right wing nationalists, whether they’re German or Hindu nationalists.”

   Whether he’s right or wrong, this is why the debate that Sokal started matters, and is why, intellectual impostor or not, philosophers too should pay attention to him.

   Notions of strong cultural determinism and power determining truth seem to fit most snugly into postmodernism and reactionary fundamentalism. Honestly, I think the political spectrum is more like a circle, where if you go too far to any one extreme you end up on the other side.

   It seems to me that anyone seeking to make tentative claims about objective truth based on available evidence will inevitably have a more moderate political stance. (Note that I mean moderate in a more global sense, not in the particularly American sense, where “moderate” means “slightly less insane conservative”.)

   1. Wes,

      It takes a pretty radical re-imagining of Nazism to put forth that German racial identity is culturally determined. There’s a reason Hitler (like all racists) wanted to eradicate Jews and Gypsies and other racial inferiors rather than sending them to re-education camps for cultural assimilation.

      Kriek means by his remark that Germans should approach nature with the knowledge that they are a privileged race in a privileged species. This is about as far as anything suggested by deconstructionists or post-structuralists as one can imagine. If you subtract the racism, and replace it with something like “an ostrich (or wasp, or wolf, or planarium) can only look at nature through its genetic character” then we merely have a statement about one of our host’s favorite concepts, the Umwelt, which offers a far different kind of “relativism” than Foucault or Baudrillard.

      Even Sokal isn’t that dumb. I suspect another hoax.

      1. Nope. Sokal would agree with me. He mentioned Hindu nationalists for a reason. He and others have done a good job of exploring just how close anti-rational and reactionary thought come to each other:

         http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/pseudoscience_rev.pdf

         http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=49

         And he’s not the only one who has noticed the fact that anti-rational leftists often end up supporting reactionaries in other cultures.

         While it’s true that the specifically Nazi brand of reactionary fascism borrowed ideas of “blood” from eugenics, that doesn’t make it conceptually distinct from the culture-worship seen in all forms of fascism. For instance, here’s something from Hitler:

         And so art today will in the same way announce and herald that common mental attitude, that common view of life, which governs the present age. It will do this not because this age entrusts commissions to artists, but because the execution of these commissions can meet with understanding only if it reveals in itself the true essence of the spirit of this age. The mysticism of Christianity, at the period of its greatest intensity, demanded for the buildings which it ordered an architectonic form which not only did not contradict the spirit of the age, but rather helped it to attain that mysterious gloom which made men the more ready to submit to renunciation of self.

         The growing protest against this crushing of the freedom of the soul and of the will, which had lasted for centuries, immediately opened the way to new forms of expression in artistic creation. The mystic narrowness and gloom of the cathedrals began to recede and, to match the free life of the spirit, buildings became spacious and flooded with light. Mystical twilight gave way before increasing brightness. The unsteady, groping transition of the nineteenth century led finally in our days to that crisis which in one way or another had to find its solution. Jewry, with its bolshevist onslaught, might smash the Aryan States and destroy those native strata of the people whose blood destined them for leadership, and in that case the culture which had hitherto sprung from these roots would be brought to the same destruction.

         http://library.flawlesslogic.com/culture.htm

         Replace “Jewry” with any of your favorite modernist or Enlightenment bugbears, and “bolshevism” with some philosophy or ideology which is associated with modernism or Enlightenment, and you’ve got two paragraphs that could easily find their way into any of the journals on the anti-rational left.

2. Wes,

   Is that really the level of rhetorical excitement you want to dial to? That the “anti-rational left” is to the Enlightenment as Hitler was to the Jews?

   It’s an especially ironic stance given that Sokal and Nanda are the ones talking about existential threats. Lumping neo-pagans and 19th c. Romantic poets in with totalitarian regimes is especially good. I remain convinced that the last 10 years of Sokal’s career is all part of the hoax, kind of an Andy Kaufman all-in stunt.

   In any case your argument that Hitler was a cultural determinist is not supported by your citation, which refers to a natural order residing in the blood, that corruptions in culture can only make doomed attempts to unseat. It’s not evident from this passage, but Hitler believed that the reason Bolshevism was a corrupting force was because it was the ideology of an inferior race. Culture is secondary to biology in Nazism. No amount of doctrinal purity can redeem a person if he is not a member of the master race. That’s not to say that culture is inconsequential to Hitler, just that humans are not blank canvasses, which is the view that Sokal is trying to attribute to the postmodernists.

   1. Is that really the level of rhetorical excitement you want to dial to? That the “anti-rational left” is to the Enlightenment as Hitler was to the Jews?

      That’s not even remotely what I’m saying. I’m defending Sokal’s claim that there are philosophical similarities between what he calls “postmodernism” (and what I’d call the strain of anti-rationalism on the left wing) and reactionary movements. The Nazis are just one example. As Sokal and Nanda have documented, other reactionary and nationalist movements have also found anti-rationalism useful as well.

      <blockquote?It’s an especially ironic stance given that Sokal and Nanda are the ones talking about existential threats. Lumping neo-pagans and 19th c. Romantic poets in with totalitarian regimes is especially good. I remain convinced that the last 10 years of Sokal’s career is all part of the hoax, kind of an Andy Kaufman all-in stunt.

      That’s cute.

      In any case your argument that Hitler was a cultural determinist is not supported by your citation, which refers to a natural order residing in the blood, that corruptions in culture can only make doomed attempts to unseat. It’s not evident from this passage, but Hitler believed that the reason Bolshevism was a corrupting force was because it was the ideology of an inferior race. Culture is secondary to biology in Nazism. No amount of doctrinal purity can redeem a person if he is not a member of the master race. That’s not to say that culture is inconsequential to Hitler, just that humans are not blank canvasses, which is the view that Sokal is trying to attribute to the postmodernists.

      No. The view that Sokal is attributing the the postmodernists is the view that objectivity is not something we should strive for, that underdetermination justifies mixing your politics and values in with claims of fact, that truth is determined by cultural or political forces, etc.

      The fact that Hitler adopted this concept of “blood” does not change the fact that he was a painter with no biological background whatsoever, and always discussed his ideas in terms of culture, not science. Hitler knew dick about science, but he knew quite a bit about culture. And in the quote I provided above, he very clearly states that art expresses truth, and that art can only be understood if it fits the “spirit of the age”, which is right in line with the cultural determinism a lot of postmodernists have appealed to in order to undermine science. I get really tired of people trying to blame biology for Hitler. Hitler knew very little about biology.

      Look, if Hitler is too touchy a subject for you, we can just talk about some other reactionary movement. It’s no coincidence, for instance, that the Discovery Institute, Access Research Network and other pro-ID outlets have stocked themselves with people from the Science Studies. Steve Fuller, Steven Meyer, Paul Nelson, Bradly Monton, John Angus Campbell, William Lane Craig, William Dembski, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Weikart, Michael Flannery, and tons of other big-name promoters of creationism all got their degrees in history of science, philosophy of science, rhetoric of science, sociology of science, and other fields which fall within the Science Studies. And all of them ape the “postmodernist” nonsense that unfortunately infected the science studies in the 90’s.

      I seriously doubt that it’s a coincidence that the Salem hypothesis appears to be shifting from dentists and engineers over to philosophers and historians. A lot of the goofball, bogus ideas promoted by the lesser lights of the science studies (the people Sokal, Nanda and others go after), fit very comfortably into the religious right agenda of pro-creationism groups. Like it or not, there’s a disturbing overlap between the anti-rationalism of a minority of (mostly left wing) people in STS and the ideologies of reactionary movements.

      1. Wes,

         You now appear to be making the rather bizarre argument that one needs to have a suitable grasp of biology before one can be a racist.

         On the contrary, the notion of “blood” is a primordial one, so much so that most tribal humans considered those outside their tribe to be something other than human (though they of course lacked the technical concept of a species.) Without racialism, Nazism is incoherent, and racialism is based on the belief that biology is destiny. The Nazis did not believe that race is a “construct,” they believed it was an unalterable fact, in a very objective sense.

         Yes, Hitler personally had a background in art and culture, and used this language to express the major points of his philosophy, but he was decidedly not not a cultural determinist (in contrast to his fellow totalitarian Stalin, for example). Art expressing the “spirit of the age” is not an example of cultural determinism except in the most dilute sense, in recognizing that cultures change over time, which is something that you, me, and Steve Pinker can all agree on. I’m sure.

         The rest of your comment seems to be an exercise guilt by association (which Meera Nanda also excels at). Whatever the faults of creationism, and they are many, there’s nothing inherently fascistic about it. Conversely, there’s a lot more to being a Nazi than being “anti-rational” (a charge which itself seems specious to me, given that Nazi Germany [along with Japan] was the preeminent industrialized nation of the mid 20th century. The fact that Rudolph Hess enjoyed some mystical poetry had little bearing on the fact that the Nazi’s dedication to the best science and technology available almost won them the war. They were hardly rejectionists).

         Sokal wants to divide the world into two camps: liberal rationalists on one hand, and reactionary anti-rationalists on the other. The problem is that this is simply philosophically, politically, and historically ignorant. There are numerable strands to these concerns, and we can’t untangle them by simply purging the ones we don’t like (or understand). “Slum clearance” is always tempting but we have to keep a close eye on our metaphors in a case like this. Slums exist for a reason, and if we don’t attend to it, they’ll just come back.

      2. You now appear to be making the rather bizarre argument that one needs to have a suitable grasp of biology before one can be a racist.

         You were the one who brought up race in a specifically biological context, not me. This is what you said:

         Culture is secondary to biology in Nazism.

         No, of course you don’t need to know biology to be a racist. But you certainly need to know some biology if your racism is going to be based on biology.

         On the contrary, the notion of “blood” is a primordial one, so much so that most tribal humans considered those outside their tribe to be something other than human (though they of course lacked the technical concept of a species.)

         These “tribal humans” as you derisively call them also have no knowledge of science. Notions of “blood” in traditional communities bear little meaningful resemblance to biological concepts. They have much more in common with philosophical concepts of essence or spirit than with material biology.

         It should also be noted that the claim that the names for traditional societies meaning “human” and everyone in other tribes being non-human is exaggerated. Also, while traditional cultures lack a technical concept of species, they arrange the living world heirarchically like modern biologists, and biologists visiting regions where traditional peoples live can actually gain useful information about local flora and fauna from the people living there. While their concept of “race” is not much like modern biology, their concept of “species” is actually much closer (though still not biological).

         Without racialism, Nazism is incoherent, and racialism is based on the belief that biology is destiny.

         Racism only entails that biology is destiny in cases where the racist is relying on biological concepts. The Greek notion that all other races and ethnic groups were “barbaros” was certainly racist, but it had nothing to do with biology.

         The Nazis did not believe that race is a “construct,” they believed it was an unalterable fact, in a very objective sense.

         They believed it was an essence. If you look at how they conceived it (say, by reading what Hitler said), they conceived it in cultural terms. Yes, Hitler talked about “blood”, but the actual substantial claims he made were couched in terms of spirit, soul, etc. These terms, of course, have nothing to do with biology.

         Yes, Hitler personally had a background in art and culture, and used this language to express the major points of his philosophy, but he was decidedly not not a cultural determinist (in contrast to his fellow totalitarian Stalin, for example). Art expressing the “spirit of the age” is not an example of cultural determinism except in the most dilute sense, in recognizing that cultures change over time, which is something that you, me, and Steve Pinker can all agree on. I’m sure.

         Not I. I see no reason why someone couldn’t understand a piece of art even if it did not in any way express the “spirit of the age”. In fact, I’m skeptical of the concept of a “spirit of the age” to begin with.

         You agree with me that Hitler saw “blood” as deterministic. Yet, you want to claim that since he talked about “blood”, it’s purely biological. Despite the fact that when Hitler went into detail about this “blood”, he always described it in terms of spirit, soul, culture, etc. Hitler’s blood-concept was political and cultural.

         The rest of your comment seems to be an exercise guilt by association (which Meera Nanda also excels at).

         No. It is not guilt by association. It is a material fact: Many anti-rationalists from the science studies support creationism. And, many left wing anti-rationalists support the culturally obsessed movements associated with Hindutva (reactionary Hindu nationalism) as well, as Nanda observed. This isn’t about association. This is about what kinds of policies and ideas the anti-rationalists in STS are overtly supporting.

         Whatever the faults of creationism, and they are many, there’s nothing inherently fascistic about it. Conversely, there’s a lot more to being a Nazi than being “anti-rational” (a charge which itself seems specious to me, given that Nazi Germany [along with Japan] was the preeminent industrialized nation of the mid 20th century. The fact that Rudolph Hess enjoyed some mystical poetry had little bearing on the fact that the Nazi’s dedication to the best science and technology available almost won them the war. They were hardly rejectionists).

         The Nazis developed lots of technologies and industry, therefore they are not anti-rational?

         Bullshit. By that definition, the Republican party in the USA is pro-rationality. They certainly support the development of industry and new technology. This is the same shitty argument that Thony made on this site a while back, but in regards to the Jesuits. I mocked his argument by giving an analogous argument for the Nazis, thinking that no one would be crazy enough to accept that argument for the Nazis. And yet, here you are, making precisely the argument that I offered as a parody argument a few weeks ago.

         I’m not claiming that the Nazi’s were Luddites. Everyone knows they developed a lot of new technologies. Even anti-science movements can develop new technologies from time to time.

         I’m claiming that their political philosophy emphasized feelings and “intuitions” over careful, objective rationality. They viewed facts and truth as things which are determined by who’s in power. They made cultural identity more important than rational thinking and critical reasoning. In a word: They were anti-rationality.

         Sokal wants to divide the world into two camps: liberal rationalists on one hand, and reactionary anti-rationalists on the other.

         Have you not been paying attention? The anti-rationalists Sokal is critiquing are on the left. They are liberals who have unfortunately adopted a position which opposes the importance of reason and objectivity. In doing so, they have ended up supporting the kinds of policies that reactionaries support. But they are still on the left. As Sokal said, he is trying to save the left from a trendy segment of itself.

         The problem is that this is simply philosophically, politically, and historically ignorant. There are numerable strands to these concerns, and we can’t untangle them by simply purging the ones we don’t like (or understand). “Slum clearance” is always tempting but we have to keep a close eye on our metaphors in a case like this. Slums exist for a reason, and if we don’t attend to it, they’ll just come back.

         I like keeping an eye on metaphors, seeing as I’ve spent the past several years studying metaphors and analogies in science.

         Your attempt to extend the metaphor doesn’t work. Kitcher didn’t use the term “slum” in anything like a literal sense, and the existence of actual slums need not imply anything about the existence of Kitcher’s metaphorical “slums” (by which he meant shitty, lazy work in STS). What Kitcher meant by “slum clearance” was merely that STS has unfortunately produced some intellectually worthless nonsense over the years. STS needs to critique itself in addition to critiquing science. The arrogance and lack of self-awareness on the part of certain people in STS has lead to them supporting positions which have no basis in reality at all, and this has hurt the discipline.

3. Just to make it clear where I stand on this issue (reading back over my previous comment I started to fear that it’s not), I agree pretty much 100% with the following statement:

   [Science studies is] a vast colony strung out on a difficult, but strategically important, seashore. Some of the buildings—gross and gaudy in self-advertisement—stand on pathetically slender foundations; they hardly need a tsunami to wash them away, the merest ripple will do. Others are a curious mixture of craftsmanlike work and jerry-building, often with a folly or a vast, unscoured stable attached. A few buildings, more modest, sneered at or ignored by the most ambitious architects, are constructed to last. Perhaps if this image is accepted, we can begin to see that we should neither announce utopia nor call for the bulldozers. What is need is slum clearance and urban renewal, a project in which historians, philosophers, sociologists and scientists all should all be invited to join.
   —Phillip Kitcher, “A Plea for Science Studies,” in A House Built on Sand (ed. Noretta Koertge) p. 50.

   I see Sokal as part of the necessary “slum clearance” that Kitcher is talking about. As a student in STS, I see the strong social constructivist and anti-rational sentiments of certain bubbleheads in STS as an embarrassment. And as a liberal I’m embarrassed by the people who promote irrational reactionary ideas while calling themselves leftists.

   1. Jim,

      The fact that the Nazis were intellectually shallow and unsubtle is part of what allows me to make my point, which is simply that racism is not a form of cultural determinism. Wes’s response is (implicitly) that the Nazis weren’t really racists; they just despised cultural Judaism.

      I’m not trying to argue that the Nazis defended the idea of racial purity to my satisfaction, just that they promoted such an idea, with tragic success. Obviously the fact that they executed hundreds of thousands of communists and trade unionists meant that one could be an enemy of the Reich on the grounds of one’s beliefs as well as one’s biology. But Sokal is trying to paint the Nazi intelligentsia as some kind of proto social constructionists which is just absurd.

      Wes,

      1). Heidegger is not to be dismissed on the basis of his Nazi affiliations. (Plato and Heraclitus, among many others, have illiberal implications, that some have even gone so far as to call fascist, but we write them off as irrelevant at our intellectual peril).

      2). When Hitler was in Landsburg in the 1920s the modern synthesis was still being worked out. The word “gene” was less than two decades old, and still viewed with skepticism. Ideas like “essence” seem murky and mystical now, but good alternatives were only just coming to view at the time. (We forget today how legitimate the vitalist biological thought of Dreisch and Bergson seemed to many people at this time.)

      More to the point,When Hitler took power, full citizenship became restricted to “full-blooded” Germans–that is, based on biology, not culture. (By contrast we could call the kind of apartheid practiced now in Israel, where one can convert to Judaism and gain full citizenship a form much closer to cultural determinism). Jews were called–officially!–Untermencschen, or “subhuman.” The concept of the Herrenvolk was biological, not cultural. Here is a passage from a Nazi pamphlet distributed in 1942:

      The sub-human, that biologically seemingly complete similar creation of nature with hands, feet and a kind of brain, with eyes and a mouth, is nevertheless a completely different, dreadful creature. He is only a rough copy of a human being, with human-like facial traits but nonetheless morally and mentally lower than any animal. Within this creature there is a fearful chaos of wild, uninhibited passions, nameless destructiveness, the most primitive desires, the nakedest vulgarity. Sub-human, otherwise nothing. For all that bear a human face are not equal. Woe to him who forgets it.

      I understand a certain level of defensiveness owing to recent fundamentalist Christian efforts to blame Hitler on Darwin. But racism and ethnic hygiene are real ideologies that take firm hold in our history from time to time, and German Nazism remains the preeminent, though not the lone, example. It doesn’t do Darwin any justice to deny this.

      Finally, I think it’s possible that there is some confusion (in your writing, not Sokal’s) over what it means for an idea to be “biological.” You write that “you certainly need to know some biology if your racism is going to be based on biology,” and that traditional cultures have a concept of “species” but that it is “not biological.”

      If you mean here, by biological, “not in accord with the modern science of evolutionary biology” then of course you are right. But that is not the sense of the word that naturally contrasts cultural determinism. All that is needed for this is a folk version of “biology,” indicating something that can’t be changed by an act of mind. It’s the “nature” in the ancient polarity of nature and nurture. The idea that there are laws of heredity, that you can’t breed dogs and get a cat or a jasmine bush, is an old one. Without it we have the quite ridiculous proposition that everyone before Darwin was a cultural determinist, which I don’t think helps Sokal’s case.

      1. Reminded of Thonie’s remarks on Christianity not being one thing, or a single solid definable entity, as far as the Nazi’s go.

         Does seem to be a bit of science war point scoring creeping into this thread.

         I dont agree with the more extreme end of the post-modernist perspective on truth and objectivity but I think it is possible to loose sight of objectivity even for the most hardcore of empricists at times.

         Some of the statements made remind me strongly of Ann Coulter pondering on why all evolutionists are liberals.

         I had always put her views down to emotive political cheer-leading; but perhaps I am wrong and she is using some philosophical approach I am unaware of? But she has never struck me as objective or particularly rational.

4. Trying to define a unambiguous Nazi worldview is probably a losing proposition because the Nazis were not exactly deep thinkers. I’m always a little surprised when people speak about the Nazi philosophy as if it had been devised by some sort of David Hume in leather shorts. I’ ve spent thirty or forty years attempting to define my own outlook and come to recognize how hard it is to come up with a consistent philosophy. Maybe it’s vanity, but I expect that even I do a better job at that than a hysterical paperhanger.

   In fact, though the downfall of the Reich cut off the process, some of the medical and scientific types in the SS were gradually redefining their antisemitism towards the end of the war. Since they couldn’t make any literal, biochemical sense out of notions like Jewish or Aryan blood, they began to redefine Jewishness as a cultural rather than a biological category, not that it made ’em reluctant to gas the enemies of the Volk. The SS differed from the SA in all this: the SS people tended to have a somewhat more complex outlook than the SA rather as if the SA were like our teabaggers, the SS like our neocons.

   1. You’re partially right in your first paragraph. Although, in some cases, the more thoughtful and philosophical of the Nazis are harder to figure out than the demagogues like Hitler. I mean, what the fuck was going on in Heidegger’s head?

5. Levi-Strauss, who died the other day, used to write about things that weren’t good to eat but were good to think, that is, could serve as useful models. Nazism is not good to think. It was so pathological that understanding it doesn’t tell you a lot, even about other far-right political movements. As my Dad once put it, Nazism was so out there it gave fascism a bad name.

   I look to other historical examples myself: the Second Reich of Kaiser Wilhelm, for example, or the various fascisms of the first half of the 20th Century. If you read the apologists for these outfits, you encounter a lot of arguments that aren’t frankly bizarre. Indeed, some of the long quotations from Leev Sternhell’s books on this period sound like something you could find in the op-ed section of an American paper—David Broder’s handwringing about the horrors of partisanship faithfully echoes the expressions of disgust at the messiness of parliamentary politics you can read in French or Italian newspapers from the 20s, for example. One of my objections to a focus on Nazism is that it makes it easy to ignore the genuine and continuing appeal of fascist rhetoric.

   Speaking about Heidegger. I’m very far from wishing to make apologies for this man. As a not untypical German mandarin, he really was absurdly naive about politics as you can gather from reading some of his speeches from the 30’s. That doesn’t excuse him from what amounts to a willful blindness about what was going on, however; and it certainly doesn’t explain his betrayal of individual colleagues including his philosophical mentor, Edmund Husserl.

   The more interesting question to me is not about Heidegger’s personal failings but about the ways in which his philosophical project really did have an organic connection, if not to the actuality of Nazism, at least to a drastically illiberal politics. One can denounce or simply make fun of the late Heidegger and the heavy breathing of his cultural politics, but the redescription of human existence Heidegger carried out in Being and Time is harder to dismiss. His ideas really are powerful; and their implications, including their political implications, call for something more than a know-your-enemy treatment. A serious engagement with an alien system of thought is risky, of course, because actually listening inevitably involves the possibility of being convinced. On the other hand, the strategy of simply ignoring the deeper springs of right wing thought is also problematic since these ideas have a way of surfacing again and again under other names. As a poet once said about nature, you can chase them out of the door with a pitchfork but they crawl back in through he window.

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