by Bipasha Bhattacharyya, @Bipasha05235299
Read more: The Methodology of Feyerabend’s ‘Against Method’“Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise”[i] begins Feyerabend’s controversial book; And with it, the author becomes “science’s worst enemy.”[ii] This epithet is not all that surprising for the ‘serious academic’. After all, anarchy means Guy Fawkes’s masks, and burning effigies, cheers of Inquilab Zindabad on the streets of West Bengal without the consecutive electoral victory. Of course, these instances can be critically engaged with. One need not look further than the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective in order to assert that there is a method to write about the non-existence of method. If you’re with me till here, you’ll probably agree that the substantial criticism Feyerebend’s book inspired is, if not an answer, then a question. If others were saying similar things and not getting penalised, what (apart from using the a-word) was Feyerabend doing differently? What, if anything at all, does Against Method bring to the table?
Much of Feyerabend’s text can be read subversively and inter-textually in order to arrive at something substantial. Consider the opening Brecht quotation, for instance: “Order is today most there where nothing is. It is a deficiency syndrome”.[iii] In one vein, he speaks of there being something inherently distortive in the need to classify. Alternatively, he seems to say that when one cannot fathom the variegated trajectories of the subject matter in question, classification becomes a way to fill the void. With the second perspective, Feyerabend speaks of a theme many social scientists have engaged with —the notion of the sociological construction of scientific knowledge, “that science knows no ‘facts’ at all, but that the ‘facts’ that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain way and are therefore essentially ideational”.[iv] Building on this subversive quality, Feyerabend’s assertion of any “appeal to reason” ultimately becoming “a political manoeuvre”,[v] appeals to me as a encompassing metaphor for the role of hierarchal vested interests in the growth of knowledge systems.
Feyerebend’s game changer contribution comes with his introduction of the temporal variable. “Theories,” he states, “become clear and reusable only after incoherent parts of them have been used for a long time”.[i] By including the justification that temporal longevity often bestows, Feyerabend problematizes the mandate held by certain magical catchwords like empiricism, or taxonomy. What makes this side of Feyerabend’s argument believable is the fact that he accepts the specific debates mitigated in his own study as products of their temporal and subsequently accepted social contexts. This assertion, although seemingly self-evident, reminds the reader that the obvious cannot exist in a vacuum. If reason is taken out of social context, what is it called? Is such an enterprise at all possible?
Feyerabend makes no distinction between matter and method. His interrogation of the utility of hierarchies that prioritise what we study over how we study it make him not against method, but against the infallibility of any particular method. It is this emphasis on “the passion that gives rise to specific behaviour which in turn creates the circumstances and the ideas necessary for analysing and expressing the process, for making it rational”[ii], that assures Feyerabend’s astutely written work a readership beyond histories of sciences. Nowhere is this clearer than in his invocation of an assertion made by John Stuart Mill for the purpose of critiquing what he calls ‘The Consistency Condition’. According to Mill, when a great theory is described initially, it is celebrated. This celebration leads to a conscious transformation of a process into representative maxims, which prevents further investigation. It is this pathbreaking usability of “a wonderful idea” therefore, that renders it “a fossil”.[iii]
Historians of South Asia may find it exceedingly ironic to invoke Mill within non-categorical spheres. After all, this is the man whose exceedingly problematic usage of an early 19th century model of periodising Indian history on the basis of religion first laid out by his father James Mill,[iv] gave historians working material to critique well into the twenty-first century. And yet Mill was among a handpicked set of individuals who did not accept offered seats on the Council of India, a body created after the Revolt of 1857 and the establishment of direct Crown rule in British India. When handed an opportunity to play a direct role in the progress of Empire, Mill refused, citing disagreements with the way in which this progress was conceived. The invocation of complex figures like Mill are precisely what makes Feyerabend relevant. His ‘anything goes’ is a strong reminder of the need to exempt morality from method. In an age of affect-laden scholarship, the need to reiterate the non-organic superiority of any methodology has never been felt more keenly.
Feyerebend speaks of interdisciplinarity as a given, of the need to use method as rhizomatically as the rhizome being studied. Whether ‘Against Method’ would have fared better if the opening ‘anarchic’ was replaced by ‘eclectic’ is a speculative exercise, although not an entirely unwarranted one. What is not at all speculative, however, is the blatant resonance of ‘Against Method’, often in the most unlikely of places. It finds parallels in Louise Gluck’s assertion of a “gap between truth and actuality”, thereby warranting a need “not to distinguish, but to link”.[v] E.H. Carr’s qualification of facts not being “like fish on the fishmonger’s slab [but] like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance… [partly] determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch”[vi] becomes nearly indistinguishable from Feyerabend’s assertion of “some thinkers either decid[ing] not to be bound by certain ‘obvious’ methodological rules or …unwittingly break[ing] them”. [vii]
Things get a little murky when Feyerabend begins to speak about counter-inductivity with gusto. For someone who consistently speaks of “a whole set of partly overlapping, factually adequate, but mutually inconsistent theories”, his preference for counter-inductive thinking sets a precedent for an understanding of inductive thinking. If we truly are to widen the laboratories of our quests, the term counter-induction is to narrow a prism that could have been wider. It has the same regimented quality of certain anointed axioms from the ‘periphery’, and undoubtedly that of certain self-avowedly centrist theorising.
Feyerabend’s theory of science as an anarchic enterprise, therefore, largely becomes a product of his own assertion —“My intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set; my intention is rather to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits”.[viii] Despite its limitations, it is the fluidity that Feyerebend’s intervention consciously retains that becomes its strength. Its self-contradictory character perhaps reaffirms that all things are usably self-contradictory. Drawbacks withstanding, Feyerabend’s book undoubtedly is a breath of fresh air among theories bent on being theories, and in my personal opinion, mustn’t be dismissed with the disdain that is often reserved for anarchic enterprises.
Notes
[i] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, New York: Verso, Third Edition, 1993: p.9.
[ii] J. Horgan, “Profile: Paul Karl Feyerabend – The Worst Enemy of Science”, Scientific American 1993 268(5): pp.36–37 .
[iii] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, New York: Verso, Third Edition, 1993: p.9.
[iv] Ibid p.11.
[v] Ibid p.16.
[vi] Ibid p.17.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid p.30.
[ix] Louise Glück, Proofs and Theories, New York: Harper Collins, 1995: p.33.
[x] E.H Carr, What is History?, Camberwell Vic: Penguin, 2008: pp. 9,23.
[xi] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, New York: Verso, Third Edition, 1993: p.14.
[xii] Ibid p.23.
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