Download From Controversies to Conflicts between Worlds

FROM CONTROVERSIES TO CONFLICTS BETWEEN WORLDS.
THE TRIALS OF SOCRATES AND GALILEO AS EXAMPLES1
Oscar Nudler
1. Worlds and sub-worlds: a complex structure
In
a
series
of
papers2
on
scientific
and
philosophical
controversies, I introduced the concept of controversy space. My main
reason for doing that was heuristic. The fact that controversies are not,
to put it metaphorically, isolated stars but relate to each other forming
constellations turned in my view necessary to put the research focus
not on single controversies but on controversy spaces. With the help
of a model of the structure and evolution of controversy spaces, I then
showed how the history of a number of cases in diverse scientific and
philosophical fields can be reconstructed following a common heuristic
pattern3.
Now my purpose is to take a step further and explore the relation
of controversy spaces with their social and cultural contexts. Social life
entails the participation of individuals in a wide diversity of worlds:
their
own
subjective
world,
the
world
of
their
family,
their
neighbourhood, their profession, their social class, their religious
1
Included in A. Jiménez Perona (ed.), Normativity and Praxis, Mimesis International, MIM
Edizioni, 2015.
Oscar Nudler, “Is There Progress in Philosophy?A Russellian View”, Principia. An International
2
Journal of Epistemology, vol. 5, n. 1-2, pp.253-281 (2001)
Oscar Nudler, “Hacia un modelo de cambio conceptual: espacios controversiales y
refocalización” Revista de Filosofía,Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Vol. 29, 2 (2004)
Oscar Nudler “Controversy Spaces: The Dialectical Nature of Change in the Sciences and
3
Philosophy” in O. Nudler, ed. Controversy Spaces. A Model of Philosophical and Scientific
Change (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011)
group, and so on until reaching their “historic world”, the world
encompassing all the others. So, between the subjective or personal
world and the historic world there is a plurality of intermediate worlds,
or sub-worlds4.
But what shall we understand by “world”? This term will be used
here not to refer to an objective entity, independent of any subject.
Quite the opposite, the term will in this context refer to the world of a
given subject, either individual or collective. But nor does the term
refer either to an entity invented by the subject, as in the case of the
worlds of fiction. It is part of the process of constitution of the subject
to internalise the distinction between a “real” world and fictional,
dreamlike and other kinds of non-real worlds.
A world provides the individual with the conditions of intelligibility
of what occurs, including what occurs to her. These conditions –as has
been emphasized by twenty century philosophers as diverse in other
aspects as Heidegger, Dewey, and Wittgenstein– constitutes a prereflective background that the subject progressively internalises, not
through thinking, but through action5. In other words, the subject is
not primarily a thinker or a “spectator”, as John Dewey claimed on
criticizing what he called the spectator theory of knowledge. Instead of
regarding the scene from the outside, the subject is an actor set in it
from the very beginning. Of course, she has not been previously asked
Karl Popper, in his well-known three worlds theory uses the term “world” to refer to each one
4
of the three areas into which he divides reality: the physical world or the world of physical objects
(world I), the world of mental states or processes (world II), and the world of “the products of
human mind” (world III) When he intends to refer to the three worlds as a whole, he uses the
term “universe”. As may be seen, I do not follow Popper in his use of the term.
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (New York: Clarendon Press,
1972)
5
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. by G. E. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (London:
Harper, 1969, p. 110)
whether she agrees to play the role or not, she is just playing it. But
this does not imply, as Nikolas Kompridis6 asserts, that she is
necessarily a prisoner of a situation that she did not choose. In certain
conditions and within certain limits, and thanks to a reflective work
directed not at things, but at the way of constructing things, she can
gain an awareness –albeit partial– of the pre-reflective background
upon which she operates in the world and acquire the capacity of decentering it. The subject ceases in such case to be a passive follower
of rules to become an agent. Kompridis has dubbed this upgraded
awareness “second-order disclosure”, thereby distinguishing it from
the pre-reflective process of constitution of the subject and her world
(“first-order disclosure”).
Let us distinguish between conflicts in which the parties share the same
world –intra-world conflicts- and conflicts in which they don`t –interworld conflicts-. These two opposite types of conflicts are pure or ideal
in Weber´s sense, that is to say, if we draw an imaginary line uniting
the two extremes, real conflicts will locate on some point of such line
but never on any of the extremes. In other words, real conflicts are
not of a pure intra-world or a pure inter-world nature. However, their
distance from the extreme points may tell us a lot about their nature.
So, there are conflicts in which the difference between the worlds of
the parties is so minimal that in practice they may be considered as
pure intra-world conflicts. On the other hand, there are conflicts in
which world differences between the parties are so great that they
naturally are seen as pure inter-worlds conflicts. I divide further this
latter type of conflicts into two kinds: those in which world differences
do not preclude the possibility of understanding of the other party´s
world and those in which they do. If this second alternative is the case,
6
Nicholas Kompridis, Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theorybetween Past and Future
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006)
we will say that the worlds in which the conflicting parties live in are
mutually incommensurable. To illustrate the former type of conflicts
we will turn, as an historical example, to the trial of Galileo and, in
order to illustrate the latter, we will focus on the trial of Socrates. The
reason for selecting these examples7 is that they reveal on a micro
scale the nature of different types of inter-world, macro conflicts.
From a practical perspective, I am persuaded that taking into
account inter-world differences may be crucial to facilitate conflict
resolution or transformation8. Unfortunately, more often than not
workers in the field ignore world differences and, as a consequence,
follow the same methodology in cases in which they are relevant and
in which they aren´t. No wonder that the price they pay in cases of the
first kind is sheer failure. The point is that in those conflicts in which
world differences prevent the parties of getting an understanding of
the other party´s stance, a preliminary task of common ground
building is required. Only in case this usually difficult phase ends
successfully, we will say that a “primitive” form of conflict has been
transformed into a more sophisticated, dialogical one, i.e., into a
controversy. In other words, for a conflict to be considered a
controversy it is necessary that, together with the disagreement
between the parties around which the controversy revolves, there is
an agreement –often implicit– on a certain set of presuppositions9. To
7
The term “example” as applied to an event is used here to imply that such an event has universal
significance without losing its irreducible uniqueness. For an illuminating treatment of
exemplarity see the text of Alessandro Ferrara, The Force of the Example: Explorations in the
Paradigm of Judgment (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
Oscar Nudler, “On Conflicts and Metaphors: Towards an Extended Rationality” in Conflict:
8
Human Needs Theory, ed. by J. Burton, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990)
Oscar Nudler “Controversy Spaces: The Dialectical Nature of Change in the Sciences and
9
Philosophy” in O. Nudler, ed., Controversy Spaces. A Model of Philosophical and Scientific
Change (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011)
put it shortly, disagreement requires agreement. For instance, two
scientists may disagree on which law helps explain a given natural fact,
and at the same time agree on the lawfulness of nature.
In addition to ontological or metaphysical presuppositions such
as the just mentioned one, controversies also presuppose shared
assumptions of an ethical or aesthetic nature. Besides, on top of these
substantive assumptions, there must also be shared procedural ones
such as, for instance, on what is acceptable as evidence, on what would
imply that the controversy has reached an end, and so on.
2. Crisis of worlds and crisis of meaning
Worlds have a structure in which we may distinguish, following
Habermas10, three interrelated dimensions:
society, culture and
personality or subjectivity. By society we mean the network of intersubjective relationships patterned according to a common set of rules.
Culture, in turn, stands here for the shared meanings that subjects
attach to social rules, the behaviour following them, and the products
of such behaviour. Finally, subjectivity refers to the psychological ways
in which subjects experience and react to their social and cultural
context.
Subjects attribute meaning to actions and events on the basis of
common cultural meanings and shared social rules. This process of
meaning attribution usually works in an unconscious, automatic
manner. Only when what actually happens fails to meet the subject`s
expectations, the process of meaning attribution becomes conscious.
In such cases the subject normally tries to fill in the gap in her horizon
of expectations by searching for additional information. A world in
which those gaps can always, or most of the times, be closed up
without altering the shared horizon of expectations, or altering it just
10
Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984)
to a minimal, superficial extent, is a world which is stable or in
equilibrium. On the contrary, a world in which meaning gaps, instead
of being closed not only remain but also proliferate, is a world in crisis,
a world approaching the point of disequilibrium or disintegration.
Now, when I speak of failure in attributing meaning to actions
and events, I am not necessarily referring to their meaning in terms of
their immediate context. The actions performed by an individual, if
taken in isolation, can make perfect sense to her and to other
participants in the action setting. However, if larger segments of an
individual`s actions are taken into account, and especially if her entire
life is pondered, then the answer to the question about their meaning
may be rather different. A paradoxical contrast between the meaning
of limited chunks of action and the meaning of the totality of them
would thus be the result of confronting two perspectives, an atomistic
and a holistic one.
According to nihilism -a philosophical view advocated not only by
philosophers but also by poets and artists- such contrast should not be
at all surprising since human life is meaningless. There is perhaps no
more concise and at the same time precise expression of nihilism than
the statement that Shakespeare puts in the mouth of his character
Macbeth: “Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing”. Without entering into the philosophical debate around
nihilism, let us only note that nihilism is a view that becomes more
appealing in times of crisis. At the individual level, the preceding
example provides a good illustration of the association between
nihilism and personal crisis: Macbeth expresses a nihilist view of life
only after the death of his wife, who goaded him into committing
regicide, and the concrete, ominous prospect of being defeated by his
enemies. At the social level, a clear example of the same association
is provided by Hugh Trevor- Roper`s description of the seventeenth
century “general crisis” in Europe:
Ever since 1618 at least there had been talk of the dissolution
of society, or of the world; and the undefined sense of gloom
of which we are constantly aware in those years was justified
sometimes by new interpretations of Scripture, sometimes by
new phenomena in the skies. With the discovery of new stars,
and particularly with the new comet of 1618, science seemed
to support the prophets of disaster11.
Trevor-Roper correlates such widespread “sense of gloom” with
a series of highly disruptive events, particularly long, destructive wars
(the Thirty Years War, the Civil War in England, and many others).
Although these wars did not cause the crisis, they had the effect of
deepening it. According to Trevor-Roper, the crisis was already under
way before the wars and was caused by a weak or too rigid social
structure:
A firm, elastic, working structure—like that of England in the
nineteenth century—is proof against revolution however
epidemic abroad. On the other hand a weak or over-rigid
social structure, though it may last long in isolation, will
collapse quickly if infected. The universality of revolution in
the
seventeenth
century
suggests
that
the
European
monarchies, which had been strong enough to absorb so
many strains in the previous century, had by now developed
serious
structural
weaknesses:
weaknesses
which
the
renewal of general war did not cause, but merely exposed
and accentuated12.
11
Hugh Trevor-Roper, The crisis of the seventeenth century.Religion, the Reformation & social
change, (London: Liberty Fund, 1967), p. 44.
12
Ibid. p. 43.
Trevor-Roper
concludes
that
the
decisive
feature
of
the
seventeenth century crisis was the divorce between civil society and
the State. I should add that such divorce seems to characterize not
only that particular crisis but all historical crises of worlds as well.
3. Clashes between old and new worlds: the trial of Galileo.
History teaches that all worlds end up disintegrating. Some of them,
particularly the ancient hydraulic civilizations of Egypt or China,
seemed over millennia to be eternal but even they finally disappeared.
Historic worlds can find themselves in different phases of their
life
cycles:
constitution,
expansion,
decadence,
crisis,
and
disintegration. A world does not necessarily go through all of these
phases, with the exception of the first and the last. Let us focus on the
crisis phase. As suggested above, as a historic world crisis evolves, it
may move closer and closer to the point of disequilibrium or
catastrophe, in René Thom`s meaning of the term13. Or, alternatively,
the structure of the world may resist and reabsorb the tensions
provoked by its crisis. Well-known twenty century cases of collapse of
historic worlds are the disintegration of the Soviet Union and, some
decades earlier, the vanishing in the air, so to speak, of the AustroHungarian Empire.
The most frequent historical case, however, is the gradual
disintegration of an old world and its replacement by a new one. Even
when the new world has been fully deployed, remains of the old world
do not necessarily disappear. In some cases they may retain a
substantial dose of power, as the case of the Roman Catholic Church
and its essentially pre-modern structure shows.
13
René Thom, 1976 distinguished between a “catastrophe”, an event that destroys the structure
of an entity, and a “crisis”, a process that alters its functioning but does not necessarily destroys
it.
A characteristic sign of the crisis of a world is an increased
intolerance towards diversity. Defenders of beliefs and behaviours that
deviate from established rules and values who were before the crisis
tolerated, though always within certain limits, become the target of
persecution. The power elite, who felt secure in the pre-crisis time, is
now on the defensive. It sets out to find –orto invent– scapegoats, i.e.,
individuals or groups “guilty” of trying to subvert the established order.
This is precisely what happened to Galileo during the world crisis of the
seventeenth century. Let us take a closer look at this case which, as
anticipated, I have selected as an example of conflicts between worlds
which are not mutually incommensurable.
There are several alternative interpretations of the true reason why
Galileo was tried and condemned. The most obvious is his campaign in
favour of Copernican heliocentrism and against Aristotelian geocentrism.
However, as Cardinal Inquisitor Bellarmine made clear in a letter to
father Foscarini, author of a Copernican booklet, the Catholic Church was
not opposed to using the Copernican theory as a tool for “saving
appearances”, that is to say, for calculating and predicting the
trajectories of celestial bodies on the basis of astronomical observation
data. What the Church rejected was the belief that Copernican theory
represents the real movement of those bodies. Thus, for Pierre Duhem
and other Catholic scholars, the conflict between Galileo and the Church
was of an epistemological nature, namely, a conflict between Galilean
realism and Bellarmine’s instrumentalism. But this epistemological
reading of the conflict has been played down by a doctrinal interpretation
that claims that the main problem stem from the clash between Galileo´s
mechanical view of nature and the teleological Aristotelian official view.
In my view, none of the available interpretations of the Galileo
trial, in spite of the fact that many of them are partially true, provides,
if taken in isolation, a truly satisfactory account of the case. Perhaps a
combination between the clash of views of nature interpretation and the
political one may do better. However, a deeper understanding of the
Galileo affair should take into account the nature of the struggle between
worlds going on in the background. It was a struggle between a still
dominant world represented by the Catholic Church and the emerging
modern world represented by Galileo and his disciples and followers.
However, though Galileo challenged the established view of nature, he
did not challenge the old world and its power structure in other areas,
particularly in the area of religion and morality. He fully accepted –as a
good Christian he was– the Church’s authority on these matters. He
differed in this respect from another famous Copernican, Giordano
Bruno. Their difference explains the different fates of both men, one
burnt at the stake and the other held under supervised house arrest for
the rest of his life.
To conclude this section, the conflict between Galileo and the
Catholic Church was a conflict between two worlds that clashed in
certain areas but not in others. Hence the two worlds were not
incommensurable in any of the usual meanings of the term. In
particular the Jesuits, who were the intellectual and ideological
vanguard of the Counterreformation, included among their ranks
mathematicians and astronomers as competent as Clavius who were
perfectly familiar with Copernican theory and its mathematical
apparatus and, as was rumoured, secretly supported it. However,
members of this order, among them Father Scheiner, the founder of
heliophysics, contributed decisively to bringing Galileo to trial. On the
other hand, the pope Urban VIII, who as Cardinal Barberini wrote in
1620 a poem expressing his great admiration for the author of the
Starry Messenger, a report of Galileo´s observations of the heavens
through the telescope, became in 1633 his inflexible persecutor.
The trial of Galileo might be represented as a drama with two
characters on the stage defending conflicting worlds, one old and still
hegemonic and the other young and defiant. The emerging, new world
is not always as visible as it was in the Galileo´s case. Sometimes it is
mostly invisible, though it is growing deep down, in the underground
of the old world. Even great thinkers may fail to sense its hidden
presence. For example, Plato and Aristotle, writing at a time when the
end of the polis as the locus of politics was underway, still took for
granted that it would continue to be the basic political unit. In many
cases poets and artists, instead of philosophers or scientists, develop
an awareness of the subterranean current that, when emerging, will
constitute a new world. For instance, Charles Baudelaire anticipated in
The Flowers of Evil the fragmentation between the spheres of value
described by Max Weber several decades later as a result of capitalist
modernization. Another well-known example of such an anticipatory
vision is Franz Kafka who anticipated the world of twenty century nazi
totalitarianism.
4. Conflicts between incommensurable worlds. The trial of
Socrates.
Let us turn now to the trial of Socrates, our second historic
example. As mentioned, it illustrates our second type of conflicts,
namely, conflicts between incommensurable worlds. But before
addressing this example, I should briefly refer to the notion of
incommensurability. Thomas Kuhn, in the first version of his thesis on
the incommensurability between paradigms, claimed that after the
substitution of an old paradigm by a new one scientists work in a
“different world”14. This concept of incommensurability between
theories is a metaphorical extension of the mathematical notion of
absence of a common measure between magnitudes. The lack of a
common measure is understood in the case of incommensurable
14
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1962)
theories as the lack of a third, neutral language, to which both theories
may be translated15. Although without using this term, somehow such
view was anticipated by Hegel in his discussion of the trial of Socrates.
A question that remains open after 2,500 years of the trial is
which was the real accusation against Socrates. According to his
accusers, he committed an essentially religious crime, namely: not
believing in the gods in whom the city believes, introducing new
divinities and corrupting the youth. Socrates himself, in his defence
speech as has been rendered by Plato in his Apology of Socrates,
claimed that an even more serious religious accusation –the accusation
of atheism, i.e., of not believing in the existence of gods at all- has
been spread by his enemies among the Athenians for so many years
that it was very difficult for him to convince the members of the jury
of his innocence in the short time available. However, according to an
alternative, widely held interpretation, the real accusation was not
religious but political. Those who defend this interpretation invoke
Socrates’close ties with conspicuous enemies of democracy such as
Critias and Alcibiades. Likewise, Socrates refusal to participate in the
political institutions of the city, particularly the Assembly, was
considered a serious violation of the main civic duty of any Athenian
citizen. But, if this was the accusation, why didn’t his accusers make it
explicit? The answer given by those who defend the political
interpretation is that the amnesty against political crimes that the
Assembly had sanctioned some time earlier prevented them from using
such evidence. Consequently, the accusers used the religious charge
as a smokescreen to bring Socrates to trial.
These and other interpretations that have been offered have in
common, despite differing on their answers to the question of why
Socrates was tried, the assumption that Socrates and the people of
15
As is well known, Kuhn limited afterwards the scope of the concept of incommensurability to
the linguistic level. Accordingly, he did no longer speak of different worlds in relation to it.
Athens represented by the jury shared the same world. The conflict,
whether religious or political or, as has plausibly been claimed, both
religious and political –did not imply that Socrates did not belong to
the same world as his accusers. But, as suggested above, Hegel
challenged this assumption. In his view, Socrates’ trial was a tragic
collision between two opposing forms of consciousness and two forms
of law. One –that of the people of Athens– was an objective law,
external to the individual, whereas the other –Socrates' law–was a new
law founded on the interiority of the subject, a subject who submits
her life to permanent cross-examination. In the words of Hegel:
Two opposed rights come into collision, and the one
destroys the other. Thus both suffer loss and yet both are
mutually justified; it is not as though the one alone were
right and the other wrong. The one power is the divine
right, the natural morality whose laws are identical with the
will which dwells therein as in its own essence, freely and
nobly; we may call it abstractly objective freedom. The
other principle, on the contrary, is the right, as really
divine, of consciousness or of subjective freedom; this is
the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, i.e.
of self-creative reason; and it is the universal principle of
Philosophy for all successive times. It is these two principles
which we see coming into opposition in the life and the
philosophy of Socrates16.
Thus, according to Hegel Socrates died as a result of a tragic
clash between incommensurable worlds. Was then Socrates a tragic
hero, whose fate had been determined from the outset? Or was he the
16
George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of WorldHistory, 1821-1831
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 29).
victim of a series of circumstances that could have had a different
outcome? Students of the trial are sharply divided in this regard. Most
of them favour the latter reading, i.e., that a contingent set of events
led to Socrates condemnation. It is on the basis of this shared
presupposition that they disagree on the main cause of the jury
decision against Socrates: religious, political, both political and
religious, a supposed self-defeating defence of his case made by
Socrates, and so on. However, other interpreters, from Hegel onwards,
think as just mentioned that far beyond these causes there was
something deeper playing a decisive role.
For instance, the Plato
scholar Terence Irwin claims that it was “easy” for his accusers to
believe that Socrates was something he was not since they failed to
recognise that he was “something new, a moral philosopher”
17.In
order to be able to accuse him he was put in a place – natural
philosopher and Sophist- that did not correspond to him. That is to say,
Irwin implies that the accusers and Socrates were separated by an
incommensurability
breach.
As
anticipated,
I
side
with
this
interpretation. A clear manifestation of this incommensurability breach
is Socrates´strangeness or atopia, so vividly described in the Socratic
dialogues written by Plato. See, for example, what Phaedrus said to
Socrates in the following passage:
You are an amazing and most remarkable person. For you
really do seem exactly like a stranger who is being guided
about, and not like a native. [But] you don't go away from the
city out over the border, and it seems to me you don't go
outside the walls at all (Phaedrus, 230c-d).
.
17
Terence Irwin, Classical Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 84)
In short, Socrates doesn´t seem to be an Athenian and doesn`t seem
to be a stranger either. He was átopos.
5. Concluding remarks
Socrates trial illustrates, according to the preceding interpretation, the
conflicts that involve worlds that are mutually incommensurable. But
an important qualification should be added: the worlds of Socrates and
the Athenian citizens were only locally, not globally incommensurable
worlds. The fact is that Socrates and the people of Athens, along with
the breach that divided them, shared a considerable number of beliefs,
including the crucial belief in the existence of gods. In contrast, the
trial of Galileo does not imply any form of incommensurability. It is true
that Galileo and his adversaries had strongly opposed views of nature
and the epistemic authority –scientific or theological- who is entitled to
legitimize
the
knowledge
of
it.
But
even
so,
there
was
no
communication or understanding gap between them.
Now, as these historic examples show, conflicts between worlds
–whether incommensurable or not– are certainly not new. However, in
our present historical juncture, the nature of these conflicts has
changed to a considerable extent. I shall close this essay with a brief
outline of my view in this regard.
A novelty in connection to inter-worlds conflicts is that they have
become far more complex. The reason is that the ongoing process of
globalization is having a double, contradictory impact. Together with
its
traditional
centrifugal
effect,
i.
e.,
the
increasing
cultural
homogenization of the world associated to the expansion and
hegemony of the West, there is a more recent centripetal effect,
represented by the massive movement of migrants from other regions
and cultures to the centre, with the result of a growing heterogeneity
of the societies in which they settle in. As a consequence, it is no longer
necessary for citizens of the so called First World to travel to distant
places in order to find utterly different worlds. They can find them
around the corner, in their own neighbourhood. So, conflicts between
worlds, including conflicts between incommensurable worlds, which
some decades ago mainly involved people living in separate territories,
also involve today parties living in the same place. And since the two
kinds of inter-world conflicts are, in turn, interconnected, the
complexity of the conflicts between worlds we are witnessing today has
grown accordingly18. If we add to this complexity the fact that the world
is in a state of deep crisis promoting the concentration of power in the
hands of a small, powerful elite, the prospect is certainly gloomy.
However, the growing of emerging forms of awareness and action is at
the same time fostering the hope in the upcoming of a new, more
humane world.
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1831 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975)
18
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