by COSTICA BRADATAN
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“And what about unbiased research? What about pure knowledge?” bursts out the more idealistic of the two debaters. Before the other, the more cynical one, even has a chance to answer, the idealist ambushes him with even grander questions: “What about the truth, my dear sir, which is so intimately bound up with freedom, and its martyrs?” We can picture the caustic smile on the cynic’s face. “My good friend,” the cynic answers, “there is no such thing as pure knowledge.” His words come out calmly, fully formed, in sharp contrast to the idealist’s passionate, if sometimes logically disjointed pronouncements. The cynic’s rebuttal is merciless:
Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. Your unbiased science is a myth. Faith, a world view, an idea — in short, the will — is always present, and it is then reason’s task to examine and prove it. In the end we always come down to “quod erat demonstrandum.” The very notion of proof contains, psychologically speaking, a strong voluntaristic element.
To the idealist, brought up in the grand tradition of the European Enlightenment, this looks like a mockery of all he stands for. He can’t take the cynic’s reasoning other than as a tasteless joke. “No, let’s be serious, professore,” he implores. Whenever his emotions are running too high, he tends to mix in words from his native Italian, evidence not of cosmopolitanism but of insecurity. “Do you believe in truth, in objective, scientific truth?” The idealist thinks that, with such a frontal attack, he has finally cornered the cynic. Whereupon the latter feels obliged to divulge what he makes of truth. “Whatever profits man is true.” Truth does not exist in the abstract, he explains, but only in relation to our concrete position in the world. Truth is “situated,” as we would say today, or it’s worthless. “Theoretical knowledge with no practical application in the realm of man’s salvation is so totally uninteresting that we must deny it any value as truth and exclude it entirely.” The idealist’s grand talk about the search after truth for its own sake and the pursuit of knowledge as a completely disinterested affair was just that — talk. Moreover, such talking was socially dangerous because it bred vanity, delusion, and self-deception:
[T]he task of true science is not the pursuit of worthless information, but rather the elimination on principle of what is pernicious, even of what is merely without significance as an idea, and, in a word, to proclaim instinct, moderation, choice. […] What has led man into darkness, and will continue to lead him ever deeper is “unbiased” — that is, aphilosophical — natural science.
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