Empiricisms: Experience and Experiment from Antiquity to the Anthropocene

Abstract

The main thesis of this long book is encapsulated in its short title: empiricism comes in the plural. If that were the only message delivered by the book, it would still be worth reading. For far too long, histories of philosophy have opposed one monolith against another, rationalism versus empiricism (or the more recent but still more nonsensical opposition of analytical versus Continental philosophy), lumping together ideas and practices that share nothing more than an appeal to experience and a vague suspicion of speculation. Worse, these dichotomies convert subtle dialogues among philosophies past and present into wars between irreconcilable positions. Worst of all, they rob philosophers and thinkers of every stripe of valuable resources for understanding inquiry. The coarse-grained accounts of “empiricism” or “rationalism” systematically filter out insights that do not fit into current schemas of either, both imagined as timeless essences variously embellished by successive thinkers but never fundamentally altered. The curiously ahistorical character of much contemporary history of philosophy derives from and is sustained by such crude simplifications. If a position of a thinker from another epoch or culture is not easily intelligible from the standpoint of the here and now, it is not even wrong; it is invisible. Allen seeks to restore some of these lost riches by surveying the long, variegated history of what it means to think about and with experience.The subtitle suggests the breadth of the book's ambitions. Although coverage is of necessity uneven, Allen makes a valiant attempt to do justice to thousands of years of history and in the final chapter at least gestures toward the equally fertile intellectual traditions of classical China. The breadth is conceptual as well as cultural and chronological. The “experience” and “experiment” of the subtitle signal the complexity of the former and the centrality of the latter. In contrast to the elemental sentences of “the-cat-is-on-the-mat” sort favored by logical positivists in search of a neutral observation language, Allen treats “experience” as a stratigraphy of sensation, perception, imagination, and memory. To a degree unusual in the history of philosophy, Allen pays attention to the actual practices of empirical inquiry: the sagacity of clinical observation, the audacity of experiment.The book is divided into three unequal but largely self-contained parts: “History's Empiricisms”; “Radical Empiricisms”; and the much shorter “Empiricisms Compared” (the latter consisting of only one chapter, “Empiricism with Chinese Characteristics”). Just as the relationship between the Western (meaning Assyrian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and some modern European vernaculars) and Chinese traditions is asymmetric, so is the relationship between part 1, dealing with over two millennia from antiquity through the Enlightenment and a cast of scores, and part 2, dedicated to a handful of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers.In defiance of chronology, the reader would be well advised to start with part 2. In the preface, Allen notes that the book started out as a study of radical empiricisms, and it shows. Part 1 is admirably learned and comprehensive, but it is also disjointed and sometimes oddly distorted. Both problems are the result of working largely from secondary sources and translations. This is no crime, and no doubt inevitable in a grand survey of this scope. Allen is formidably well-read and discerning in his choice of scholarly guides to traditions he does not know firsthand. But as a glance at the footnotes to part 1 reveals, even his quotations from primary texts are often extracted from secondary sources. This magpie practice results in shiny, quotable snippets pried out of the context of an overarching intellectual vision. Subjected to this treatment, a panoramic thinker like Aristotle is barely recognizable, castigated for overweening theoretical pride despite the pages and pages of careful observations in his animal books, easily as painstaking and numerous as those of the Hippocratic doctors Allen applauds. Galileo is congratulated for always returning to experiment, a surprise for anyone who has ever studied the theorems of the Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche, intorno due nuove scienze (1638). Grosseteste (and both Roger and Francis Bacon) are upbraided for relying on material they had read in books, as if all collective empiricism, now as then, were not dependent on testimony. Thinkers of the past are awarded grades on a mysterious scale of whether they are modest empiricists or dogmatic rationalists, theorematically or problematically oriented (Plato and Aristotle flunk; Democritus gets an A). Rationalism remains as singular and monolithic as empiricism is revealed to be plural and varied. Although Allen is a lucid and often eloquent writer, capable of striking formulations (“no experience without learning”), the overall impression of part 1 is that of an erudite jumble.All of this changes the moment Allen sets foot in home territory in part 2. These are texts he knows and loves, and his writing about them glows. Always sympathetically but never uncritically, he reconstructs the core intuitions that illuminate the radical empiricisms of William James, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze. He understands these thinkers holistically, in terms of the entirety of their intellectual projects, both what unites and divides them. There are brilliant passages on pure experience as “the becoming of perception” in James, duration in Bergson, and Deleuze's preference for creative concepts over truth. In his analysis of radical empiricisms, Allen pinpoints what makes them truly radical. As in political revolutions, there is an internal dynamic of renewing the revolution by becoming ever more revolutionary. Analogously, radical empiricisms try to outdo one another, each accusing its forerunners of being “not empirical enough.” Paradoxically, the result is to make empiricism ever more subjective, or at least ever more individual and private, ever more about verstehen and ever less about erklären (Allen convincingly recruits Dilthey to the radical empiricist lineage). “Experiment” may be a word to conjure with among radical empiricists from Nietzsche to Deleuze, but it is no longer an experiment in the scientific sense. As Allen hints in the final chapter on the Chinese intellectual tradition, the most radical empiricism may cease to be about knowledge at all.