We would like to be able to escape from politics. We would like there to be, somewhere, a way of knowing and convincing which differs from compromise and tinkering: a way of knowing that does not depend upon a gathering of chance, impulse, and habit. We would like to be able to get away from the trials of strength and the chains of weakness. We would like to be able to read the original texts rather than translations, to see more clearly, and to listen to words less ambiguous than those of the Sibyl.
In the old days we imagined a world of gods where the harsh rules of compromise were not obeyed. But now this very world is seen as obscurantist and confused, contrasted with the exact and efficient world of the experts. “We are,” we say, “immersed in the habits of the past by our parents, our priests, and our politicians. Yet there is a way of knowing and acting which escapes from this confusion, absolutely by its principles and progressively by its results: this is a method, a single method, that of ‘science.’ ”
This is the way we have talked since Descartes, and there are few educated people on earth today who have not become Cartesian through having learned geometry, economics, accountancy, or thermodynamics. Everywhere we direct our best brains toward the extension of “science.” It is with them that we lodge our greatest, indeed often our only, hopes. Nowhere more than in the evocation of this kingdom of knowledge do we create the impression that there is another transcendental world. It is only here that there is sanctuary. Politics has no rights here, and the laws that rule the other worlds are suspended. This extraterritorial status, available only to the “sciences,” makes it possible for believers to dream, like the monks of Cluny, about reconquering the barbarians. “Why not rebuild this chaotic, badly organized world of compromise in accordance with the laws of our world?”
So what is this difference which, like Romulus and his plough, makes it possible to draw the limes that divide the scientific from other ways of knowing and convincing? A furrow, to be sure, an act of appropriation, an enclosure in the middle of nowhere, which follows up no “natural” frontier, an act of violence. Yes, it is another trial of strength which divides the forces putting might on one side and right on the other.
But surely this difference must represent something real since it is so radical, so total, and so absolute? Admittedly the credo of this religion is poor. All that it offers is a tautology. “To know” scientifically is to know “scientifically.” Epistemology is nothing but the untiring affirmation of this tautology. Abandon everything; believe in nothing except this: there is a scientific way of knowing, and other ways, such as the “natural,” the “social,” or the “magical.” All the failings of epistemology — its scorn of history, its rejection of empirical analysis, its pharisaic fear of impurity — are its only qualities, the qualities that are sought for in a frontier guard. Yes, in epistemology belief is reduced to its simplest expression, but this very simplicity brings success because it can spread easily, aided by neither priest nor seminary.
Of course, I am exaggerating. The faith has some kind of content. Technically, it is the negation of the paragraph with which I started this precis . Since the gods were destroyed, this faith has become the main obstacle that stands in the way of understanding the principle of irreduction. Its only function is passionately to deny that there are only trials of strength. “Be instant in season, out of season,” to say that “there is something in addition, there is also reason.” This cry of the faithful conceals the violence that it perpetrates, the violence of forcing this division.
All of which is to say that this precis, which prepares the way for the analysis of science and technology, is not epistemology, not at all.