Paul Feyerabend’s Conquest of Abundance was written after his death at the request of his wife Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend and the editorial skills of his friend and former student, Bert Terpstra. For those new to the work of Feyerabend this book affords a panoramic view of one of the most penetrating and innovative thinkers of the past fifty years. Such readers will be amazed at Feyerabend’s depth of understanding in so many different areas from the arts to literature, history, politics and especially science. Of course, to describe what it means to utilize effective ideas, an author should have such an extensive foundation. Many thinkers pretend to have such a range of scholarship but there are very few such as Feyerabend, W.V.O.Quine, Morton White and Jacques Barzun who ever get to read enough, study enough or live long enough to write with the vision of a truly intellectual giant.

Feyerabend’s challenge is to explain how it is we make sense of the world when every attempt to understand the world is plagued by the fact that all understanding is an abstraction from the world. No one gets to see or experience the world as it is. As the philosopher of science and aeronautical engineer Norwood Hanson declared in his 1958, Patterns of Discovery, “Every observation is theory driven.” That is to say, there are no brute experiences of reality. Humans engage a world largely of their own making. This theme was even earlier formulated by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and probably, reached its apex of popularity in Thomas Kuhn’s work in the 1960’s and Paul Feyerabend’s work in the 1970’s (one cannot help but watch with amusement as so-called deconstructionists and post-modernists write endless drivel as though they had just discovered these insights). Feyerabend was most extreme in pressing these themes forward for it was Feyerabend who freely declared himself an epistemological anarchist. For Feyerabend any idea should be given a day in court regardless of how well it fits in with previous understanding, custom or tradition.

This position was too much for even Feyerabend’s fellow relativists to bear. So it was with much interest that the experienced student of Feyerabend might now turn to Conquest, Feyerabend’s final thoughts on such matters.

Whereas the earlier Feyerabend could be seen as putting an insurmountable wall between experience and reality his final nominalistic position seems closely aligned with that of philosopher of science, art gallery owner, professor of psychology and education and founder of Harvard’s Project Zero, Nelson Goodman. For both Goodman and Feyerabend there is an admittedly “out there”. That is to say, there are hard things and soft things, brittle and flaccid, bright and dull outside of any human experience of them. However, as soon as any of these things become experienced, their empirical characterizations become inseparable from a chosen way of talking about them. Selecting one way of talking about the world over another is not and, cannot be a matter of choosing the most realistic depiction. We can never know what the most realistic depiction might be. However, we can know what our purposes both individual and collectively might be. We can even come to know what the purposes of other communities might be: historically, culturally, religiously, geographically and professionally. With a considered knowledge of purpose in hand we can judge the appropriateness of one way of talking over another. The way of theorizing about the world that is most appropriate is one, which extends our control and sense of autonomy. Some ways of experiencing the world diminish control and others extend it.

The world is there as it is. We must accept that it is there just as we must accept that we can never know it as a thing in itself. However, we can manage to engage the world more or less effectively, given our respective purposes, if we create, shape and modify our sense of experience in light of our individual and collective ability to extend autonomous control over the world.

The world is full of abundant richness. Our capacity for experience is richer yet. We should celebrate and not bemoan the fact that while the world remains out reach for certain knowledge, we have an abundance of conceptual schemes for making it dance to our tunes.

Paul A. Wagner Ph.D., is director of both the Project in Professional Ethics and the Institute for Logic and Cognitive Studies at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. He is the author of two books and over eighty articles, reviews and editorials. He teaches several graduate level courses that are crosslisted in both philosophy and psychology such as: Philosophy of Sex and Love, Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Neurophilosophy. He is an advisor to Leadership Houston on the psychological and ethical foundations of leadership.

Categories: Philosophical