This essay is a response to Mario Bunge’s paper ‘In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia’ (1996). This paper is certainly intolerant, and very rhetorical too. There’s also a dearth of argument. This is odd because Bunge (1919–2020) accuses his philosophical enemies of “dispens[ing] with statistics, mathematical modelling, tedious argument, and empirical test”. He also accuses phenomenologists of producing “opaque” prose. Bunge’s own prose isn’t opaque, but it is shouty. Still, it’s also entertaining and not entirely devoid of argument.
“Mario Augusto Bunge [ ] 1919 — 2020) was an Argentine-Canadian philosopher and physicist. His philosophical writings combined scientific realism, systemism, materialism, emergentism, and other principles. He was an advocate of ‘exact philosophy’ and a critic of existentialist, hermeneutical, phenomenological philosophy, and postmodernism. He was popularly known for his opinions against pseudoscience. [ ] Bunge defined himself as a left-wing liberal and democratic socialist [ ].
“[ ] Popularly, he is known for his remarks considering psychoanalysis as an example of pseudoscience. He was critical of the ideas of well known scientists and philosophers such as Karl Popper, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and Daniel Dennett. [ ]”
— See source here.
The following is a long list of Mario Bunge’s targets, as supplied by Bunge himself: “irrationalists”, “relativist-constructivists”, “radical feminist and environmental ‘theories’”, “existentialism”, “poststructuralism”, “semiotics”, “philosophical hermeneutics”, “deconstructionism”… and “similar obscurantist fads”.
Readers may conclude that Bunge had it in for what many people call “Continental philosophy”… but not so quick. Bunge shouted about literally everything he disagreed with in his paper ‘In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia’ (as found in the anthology The Flight From Science and Reason). For example, he had a go at Arthur Jenson, Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, Jungian psychology, probability theory, faculties of arts, and various “radical feminists” who aren’t from the Continent.
Mario Bunge on Phenomenology
Mario Bunge’s central theme is the attack on science by Heidegger, the existentialists, feminists, etc. So it’s not a surprise that he saw phenomenologists in the same light.
Bunge stated that phenomenological literature is “characterized by opaqueness”.
How did Bunge know that phenomenologists attacked science if all their prose is opaque? More specifically, how did he know that Edmund Husserl offered us a “celebrated attack upon the exact and natural sciences”?
That said, the examples Bunge cites do seem a little opaque, but only if that word is used rhetorically. For example:
“‘I as primaeval I [Ur-Ich] construct [konstituire] my horizon of transcendental others as cosubjects of the transcendental intersubjectivity that constructs the world.’”
Now, that is a mouthful.
However, one doesn’t need to break one’s brain in order to work it out. (Perhaps it’s more pretentious than opaque… or badly translated.)
So what did Bunge understand about this opaque prose?
He took it to be a “modern paragon of subjectivism”.
Surely Bunge is right in this respect.
Bunge explained himself in the following manner:
“[A]ccording to its founder, the gist of phenomenology is that it is a ‘pure egology,’ a ‘science of the concrete transcendental subjectivity’.”
At least Husserl called his philosophy a “science”, and used scientific-sounding words like “egology”.
Can phenomenology be a science and also be an example of “subjectivism”?
Bunge didn’t think so. Indeed, he quoted Husserl himself to get his point across:
“[Phenomenology] is ‘in utmost opposition to the sciences as they have been conceived up until now, i.e., as *objective* sciences’.”
“The very first move of the phenomenologist is the ‘phenomenological reduction’ or ‘bracketing out’ (epoché) of the external world. ‘One must lose the world through epoché in order to regain it through universal self-examination.’ He must do this because his ‘universal task’ is the discovery of himself as transcendental (i.e., nonempirical) ego.”
Apart from the rhetoric, isn’t Bunge right here?
What about the mental-events-based empiricism of the logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap? How did Bunge cope with “Copenhagen subjectivism”? In addition, when physicists took the time to philosophise, many took a “subjectivist” position on “the world”. [See here.]
So what did Bunge think of them?
Elsewhere in Bunge’s paper, he highlighted another problem with the phenomenologist. He sarcastically told us that “he is graced with the ‘vision of essences,’ which gives him instant insight”. One consequence of this philosophical grace is that the phenomenologist “can dispense with statistics, mathematical modelling, tedious argument, and empirical test”.
It must be said here that Bunge’s own essay dispenses with statistics, mathematical modelling, tedious arguments, and empirical test too! And isn’t Bunge also showing us, in his own essay, that these things taken separately, and certainly together, needn’t be compulsory in one’s writings?
Having asked if Bunge is right, he seems wrong when he says that phenomenology is
“characterised by spiritualism and subjectivism, as well as by individualism (both ontological and methodological) and conservatism — ethical and political”.
Why did Bunge use the word “spiritualism”? And why was phenomenology “conservative”? According to Bunge, it was so because, from a political angle, it
“skirt[ed] [] macrosocial issues as gender and race discrimination, mass unemployment, social conflict, and war”
to focus on the Lebenswelt.
Then again, Bunge was discussing phenomenological sociology here, and perhaps that makes all the difference.
Bunge on Existentialism and Heidegger
Mario Bunge tells us that existentialism is a “jumble of nonsense, falsity, and platitude”.
I’m not an existentialist. However, I still don’t believe that existentialism is a jumble of nonsense, falsity, and platitude. The existentialism which I have read didn’t really seem like a jumble of nonsense — even when I disagreed with it. And the idea of “falsity” seems a little out of place when discussing existentialism too. As for “platitude”, there are examples of this within existentialist literature, but there are platitudes in all philosophies.
Another thing that needs to be said here is that Bunge classified Martin Heidegger as an “existentialist”, and doesn’t name any more names. (He does, however, tell us that phenomenology is “the parent of existentialism”.) As for Heidegger himself, some commentators do class him as Bunge classed him, and others don’t. Or, alternatively, it’s generally said that Heidegger was, at least at one point, an existentialist.
Bearing all that in mind, it’s probably wise to simply see what Bunge had to say on Heidegger… But that’s not so easy to do because Bunge doesn’t mention Heidegger’s existentialist ideas at all — or, in a sense, any of his ideas.
So what does he say about Heidegger? This:
“Not content with writing nonsense and torturing the German language, Heidegger heaped scorn on ‘mere science’ for being allegedly incapable of ‘awakening the spirit’. He also denigrated logic, ‘an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers.’”
Last but not least, Bunge concluded:
“Last but not least, Heidegger was a Nazi ideologist and militant, and remained unrepentant until the end.”
It was said earlier that Bunge didn’t say much about existentialism. However, he did say (i.e., after tackling Heidegger’s Nazism) that “existentialism is no ordinary garbage”. Thus, Bunge not only connects Heidegger to Nazism (which isn’t hard to do), he also connects existentialism to Nazism (which is hard to do). Prima facie, it’s hard to connect existentialism to Nazism. However, if one is talking about a single existentialist (i.e., Heidegger), then perhaps it’s easy to do.
What about Jean-Paul Sartre?
He became a Marxist, so perhaps his earlier existentialism can be connected to Nazism. The problem is that Bunge didn’t do this. And most other existentialists were also on the Left, broadly construed.
One thing that Bunge does say about Heidegger’s work (if not existentialism) is that it “discourages clear critical thinking”. Indeed, that’s the central theme of his essay. On this, Bunge was largely correct when it came to Heidegger.
For example, many writers have used Bunge’s quote (i.e., from Heidegger) that logic was “an invention of schoolteachers, not of philosophers”. So Bunge isn’t just making stuff up. Heidegger was also very critical of science, and the quote that it can’t “awaken the spirit” has also been quoted a fair few times.
Bunge on Radical Feminist Theorists
As stated earlier, not all Bunge’s targets live on the Continent. Take the “feminist theorists” Mary Belensky, Blythe Clinchy, Nancy Goldberger and Jill Tarule. (Bunge consulted the book Women’s Ways of Knowing.) That said, these people were certainly strongly influenced by philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, etc.
Bunge stated that Belensky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule believe that “truth is context dependent”, and that “the knower is an intimate part of the known”. He also argued that these feminists believe the latter simply because “some of the women they interviewed felt so”.
Bunge then cited Sandra Harding, who once wrote that it “would be ‘illuminating and honest’ to call Newton’s laws of motion ‘Newton’s rape manual’”. Bunge explained things thus: “The rape victim would be Mother Nature, which of course is feminine.”
The problem (if it is a problem) here is the use of metaphor.
For example, “the knower is an intimate part of the known” is a poetic way of putting a position which all sorts of male non-feminist philosophers, from idealists to theologians, have held for hundreds of years. As for “Newton’s rape manual” (with nature being the rape victim), this is also a position that’s been held by all sorts of men for many years. Indeed, when it comes to metaphors about nature, Francis Bacon and many others used them too. One can even quote Bacon doing exactly that. [See here.]
So like many (though not all) uses of metaphor and poeticism, they can be cashed out into a dull and precise prose.
Of course, one can guess that Bunge also believed that “context-dependent truth” can’t be truth at all.
What else did Bunge have to say about what he called “radical feminist theory”?
Here again his emphasis was on science.
He stated that some radical feminists are “dead against all science”. Others have only “promised a ‘successor science’”. Moreover, (all?) radical feminists
“denounce precision — in particular, quantitation, rational argument, the search for empirical data, and the empirical testing of hypotheses as so many tools of male domination”.
Finally: “They are constructivist-relativists: they denounce what they call ‘the myth of objectivity’.”
So, according to Bunge, it’s not that these radical feminists don’t themselves practice “the search for empirical data” and the “empirical testing of hypotheses”: it’s that they denounce the scientists who do such things. This essentially means that there’s no room for science at all in radical feminist theory. Not even science carried out by other people.
Bunge was a self-described “democratic socialist”, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he ended by saying that the
“attack on science alienates women from scientific studies and thus reinforces their subordinate position in modern society”.
It’s easy to agree with Bunge on this. And positions similar to his can be found in the work of Noam Chomsky. [See my ‘Chomsky on the Pretentiousness and Political Impotence of Postmodern Philosophy’.]
Bunge on the Sociologists of Science
Following on from all the above, it’s not surprising that “[o]ther vocal constructivist-relativists have mounted spirited defenses of astrology and parapsychology”.
Isn’t it hard to mount criticisms of astrology and parapsychology if one also accepts all the things that Bunge claimed that feminists and “constructivist-relativists” believe? What grounds, exactly, would they have for mounting any critical attack on these ologies?
Some readers may also agree with Bunge when he stated that because such people “ignore science, they are incapable of distinguishing it from pseudoscience”. Yet one can know a lot of science and still attack it, as Paul Feyerabend did… Except that Bunge believed that Feyerabend “has been listened to because he was wrongly believed to know some physics”…
Come on Mr Bunge! You’re going too far here!
Of course Feyerabend knew “some physics”. Even some of his critics have said that he knew a lot of physics. This didn’t stop Bunge singling out a couple of technical mistakes that Feyerabend supposedly made. (I’m not qualified to know if Bunge is correct on this.) Here Bunge indulged in his only bit of (grandstanding) technical science, which is very out of place within the context of the rest of his (rhetorical) essay.
In my essay ‘ Sociologist Steve Fuller Challenges the ‘Would-Be Emperors’ of Physics and Biology’ I discussed the issue of (some) sociologists of science believing that they have a privileged position when it comes to science. I cited the words of Professor Steve Fuller. Bunge makes similar points in the following passage:
“[T]he constructivist-relativists deny that there is any conceptual difference between science and other human endeavours, they feel entitled to pass judgment on the content of science, not only on its social context. Thus, after reading one of Einstein’s popularizations of special relativity, Latour concludes that the poor man was wrong in believing that it deals with ‘the electrodynamics of moving bodies’. [ ] The theory, he reveals to us, is about long distance travellers. Not only this: it renders everything physical relative to the knower (not to the reference frame), thus confirming subjectivism — the misinterpretation popular among idealist philosophers at the beginning of this century.”
Bunge also mentioned Bruno Latour elsewhere when he claimed that he “regard[ed] all facts, or at least what they call scientific facts, as constructions, none as given”. (What on earth can a given fact be?)
It’s worth saying that what Bunge says about sociologists is very similar to what physicists and other scientists have said about philosophers. (Bunge himself mentions “idealist philosophers” at the end of the passage above.)
Take the example of the theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.
Feynman’s own overall position was that “it is not true that ‘all is relative’”. He argued that all-is-relative philosophers needn’t have stolen Einstein’s ideas in order to make their (rather obvious) points. Feynman wrote:
“That what one sees depends on his frame of reference is certainly known to anybody who walks around, because he sees an approaching pedestrian first from the front and then from the back; there is nothing deeper in most of the philosophy which is said to have come from the theory of relativity [].”
The upshot here, then, is that scientists (especially physicists) often have a problem with any non-scientists commentating in any way on science. However, Bunge might well have extricated himself from this by virtue of the fact that he wasn’t only a philosopher, he was also a physicist.
