ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R Young

Postmodern Phenomenology

SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES

by

T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute

Philosophy of science doesn't get a lot of attention in social science grad schools around the country...the presumption is that most such questions have been settled long ago and that all which is now necessary is to teach the grad student about the assumptions of a modern philosophy of science and go on to validate hypotheses and build theory. Not so in postmodern philosophy of science. In this mini-lecture, I'll try to lay out the problematics of the knowledge process as they bend around the questions in phenomenology. Then I will follow up this lecture with another on 'Foundations of Postmodern Philosophy of Science' based upon findings from the new sciences of Chaos and Complexity.

A. The Structure of Philosophy. When I took a course in modern philosophy at UMich, philosophy was divided into five parts:

1. Metaphysics comes out of a book by Aristotle and deals with the nature of reality. Aristotle took metaphysics as the body of knowledge about matters more general than any one given body of substantive knowledge. The nature of causality, actuality, teleology and other questions which transcend physics, biology chemistry, psychology and sociology would now be included.
   
2. Epistemology deals with how is it we know what we know; what can we know with any assurance; how do we obtain reliable and valid knowledge. There are two approaches: empiricism which says that knowledge must mirror 'that which really exists' and rationalism which says that knowledge statements must be coherently connected to one another such that aristotlean logic helps one discover truth. As we shall see, much mischief lurks in the conflation between the two.
   
3. Ethics deals with that which is good and that which is the right thing to do. The word, 'ethics' means custom or usage. The word, 'moralis' was the Latin translation by Cicero of the word 'ethikos' used by Aristotle. Modern science severed ethics from the knowledge process under the assumption, rightly, that one could not derive a statement about what is good to do by from a statement about what is true. In postmodern phil/sci ethics comes back into the knowledge process since, as we shall see, reality is so complex and so inter-connected that the choice of what to study becomes a political act in which ideas of what is good to know are informed by what is good to do.
   
4. Aesthetics deals with that which is beautiful and universally appealing to the senses. [You can see the word buried in the term, 'anaesthesia].' Much of modern science builds a theory aesthetics from the perfection of the circle, square, pyramid, and other euclidean forms...as we shall see, Nature don't work that way...not in non-linear dynamics. This means that one cannot build a theory of elegant architecture, painting, poetry or music on symmetry, regularity, precision, uniformity or other neat and tidy terms so much beloved of modernists. Those who have seen 'The Dead Poets Society' will remember that the first thing Robin Williams did in his poetry class was to have the students tear out the first page which said that one could judge great poetry by charting it in terms of both the significance of the topic and the universality of its message. As it turns out, postmodern models of truth ain't all that neat nor are they universal; not in social science.
   
5. Logic is the fifth part of modern philosophy. It offers a treatment of valid reasoning. Aristotle thought that logic was a basic knowledge tool. There are two forms of logic: deductive and inductive. The first starts with absolutely true premises and yeilds absolutely true inferences. The second starts with empirical observations [which may be less than certain] and yeilds less than certain truth claims. As it turns out, both forms of logic exclude statements which may be both empirically observable and, at the same time, contradictory. The new sciences of chaos and complexity demote the use of logic and linear math as epistemological tools. Small changes in a given set of variables can, and often do, produce contrary findings since a small change in one key variable can reverse a causal field or produce an entirely new 'basin' of outcomes.

B. Noumena and Phenomena.

1. For most of the history of the knowledge process, there was a division between that which existed and that which 'appeared' to exist. In the time of Plato; what we now take to be reality was viewed as a pale reflection of ultimate reality...i.e., that which existed in the mind of God: perfect, eternal, and coherent. Kant reversed the concept to use the term noumena to refer to that which really existed in this world and used the term, 'phenomena' to refer to that which we thought existed.

   You will note that, in modern science, there is no other, prior world of the supernatural which gives pattern and takes precedence over the truth claims of this world.

2. In the most extreme versions of postmodern critique, all is phen=nomena. All is text. All is simularcra for which an original does not exist. There are no structures of class, race, gender or good and evil. These are, variously, texts written by people with a political agenda. People are supposed to take these structures as valid 'representations' of that which actually exists.
   
3. In the Enlightenment version of governance, rationality is embedded in the knowledge process; enlightened governments are supposed to turn to scientists who will advise them of both natural and social laws which, in enlightened statesmen, will inform social policy. Fascism and much in the way of liberal and conservative politics assume either social, natural or Natural Law to which all enlightened persons must conform or, if not, be inscribed with enough pain [Foucault] such that they begin to listen to reason. Those of you who have seen 'The Madness of King George' will have seen the authority of the Doctor supersede that of the King. The doctor used enough force and pain to condition George to behave himself in ways congenial to the kingly estate. In all this, one can see Comte, Keynes, Marx and anyone else who thinks that universal laws exist which must be used to pattern and shape human behavior. To Marx' credit, he argued that social laws were historically grounded and could be changed by changing the political economy.

C. Phenomenology.

P. is the bridge between metaphysics [that which really exists] and epistemology [the techniques by which we gain knowledge of that which really exists. I will lay out for you the major points which, in my opinion, leads to a postmodern phenomenology. In so doing we will collect Hume, Hegel, Husserl and go on to Mandelbrot and the very messy, fuzzy, enfolded world of non-euclidean structures and non-linear dynamics.

1. David Hume: 1711-1776 [easy to remember his life span]. Hume is very important to a postmodern philosophy of science. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, he made three points of interest:
   
   1. Simple impressions yeild simple ideas
   2. Impressions are said to arise from the external world ...but we cannot prove this to be true.
   3. We experience a succession of impressions, ideas, and emotions but we do not experience the unifying framework which gives them a name or a meaning.

   In all this is found the grounds for a radical phenomenology. We shall see that both Hegel and Husserl posit natural categories which pre-exist human consciousness and human socialization to 'that which really exists.'

2. G.W.F. Hegel: 1770-1831. In his Phenomenology of the Mind, Hegel posited some 272 natural categories of being and knowing. They cascaded from the abstract to the concrete and covered all that existed and all the disciplines of knowledge. There is a dialectic of becoming which begins with Being. Being creates/implies Nothing. Nothing and Being combine to produce new Being. Kind of a silly idea but a lot of people believe it. The short version is that 'A' implies 'Not-A'; 'Not-A' forces one to rethink/re-invent 'A.' Out of this dialectic, new 'A's emerge all the time. There is a necessity and a direction to this which bothers postmodernists greatly.

   God exists; God is rational; Becoming moves from imperfect embodiments and imperfect knowledge to perfect. Nice ending.

   Teilhard de Chardin will take this model and, later on, say that God is realized in the world as the knowledge process improves toward perfection. Great comfort to those who produce knowledge but small comfort to those who have to conform to ideas of that which is said to be perfect in the way of social organizations: law, religion, family, gender, class or other 'perfected' social forms.

   As I have said, women, minorities, third world people, other- gendered folks, and the french post-modernists join with critical theorists, cultural marxists, as well as those who work out of a social constructionist view of society and social problems to question the idea that such natural categories exist.

3. Edmund Husserl: 1859-1938 is given great credit as the founder of modern phenomenology. He gave it a name and an agenda. The agenda was to distill every concept until only the 'essence' was left...he called those essences, 'eidos' from the Greek, meaning form or shape.

   In Husserl's method, one 'brackets' all the un-essential parts of a thing until one has reached it's essence. This is called 'eidetic reduction.'

   Look at the cup on your desk. Discard all that is not really a part of 'cupness.' My cup is ceramic but ceramic is not a significant portion of cupness. My cup had a handle but cups can be cups without a handle...japanese tea-cups don't have handles. My cup is beige and brown but cups can be any color or have none at all. My cup is about 8 oz. but cups can be bigger or much smaller...is there ever a point at which a cup becomes too big or too small to be a cup....No! Size is not the essence of cupness...keep on going until you get to the real, irreducible eidos of cupness then tell me what you have.

D. Postmodern Phenomenology. I will return to give a bit more detail to the idea...in the meantime, there are a couple papers you can have on the topic. Give me a snailmail address and I'll mail you a disk full of pomo phil/sci if that is where you live.

1. I want to help build an affirmative postmodern philosophy of knowledge which retains the possibility of fairly good data and fairly adequate statements about how society works and how it can be made to be more congenial to the human condition.
   
2. I accept most of the postmodern critique of the modernist knowledge process but I claim that the structures and dynamics of social activity do not fit nor follow the linear logic of modern science so much of the postmodern critique of structure is moot.
   
3. Findings from Chaos theory and from Complexity Theory inform us that the world is very complex and may...or may not be interconnected. In its complexity, the data base from which to extract knowledge statements is so vast that personal choice and cultural concerns have great leeway in looking at it and in extracting from that data base just the kind of 'truth' statements which are needful to social purpose.

   Given very complex data bases, any number of findings are possible; some of which are contradictory. Indeed, replicability and falsifiability, the twin guns of modernist phil/sci are lost to the knowledge process in complex social dynamics. Thus, poverty may be correlated with crime in at some levels of inequality but not at other levels of inequality. Joblessness may predict on to crime in societies with some low level programs of re-distribution but a small increase in unemployment benefits may produce a large drop in property crime. Reverses come with small changes in one of the same set of variables; not with the introduction of a new variable as is required in modern science. Lots to learn; lots to mull over and lots to do to up-date the knowledge process to take advantage of these new bodies of knowledge.

4. If our purpose is sure and certain knowledge about genetics, about metals, about chemical reactions, about the electro-magnetic spectrum, there is sufficient order in some dynamical regimes to yeild that most helpful information...and from it, we can do better jobs in food production, make more efficient and safer air transport [or rail if we want lower energy transport], do a better job healing and maybe repair some of the harm done to the good earth. The missions and methods of modern, positivistic science do not get thrown on the epistemological trash-heap...not in my pomo phil/sci.
   
5. If our concern is with change and renewal, there are other dynamical regimes in nonlinear social processes which give us option and variety. Even in deep chaotic regimes, one find enough order to yeild wonder, amazement and joy.
   
6. There is some mix of order and disorder which is most congenial to the human project. Too much order and we lose flexibility, innovation, variety and adaptability...not to mention interest and curiosity. Too much dis-order and we lose the possibility of planning and knowing. 'Twould be my guess that four to sixteen ways of doing family, gender, child care, word use, clothing rules or health care are adequate to the human condition. 'Twould be my guess that 32, 64 or more choices require too much time and discussion to serve the practical need for human interaction and symbolic communication. I suspect that one can deal with one or two great uncertainties in one's life but two, three or four interact to produce so much stress that few of us can cope.

E. A mini-tutorial on Chaos and Complexity next time. Keep the faith; we don't have to concede too much to the artsy-fartsy french post-structuralists and nasty-minded nihilists.

TR Young