Philosophy of Nature by Paul Feyerabend (review)

“Anything goes,” Feyerabend famously quipped in his controversial 1975 classic, Against Method, making the point that there is no universal, rational method by which science advances and that, consequently, scientific knowledge cannot be regarded as better than any of the alternative systems of knowing the world that are incommensurable with science. Feyerabend remained at the time under the influence of Karl Popper, with whom he had worked in the 1950s, believing that theoretical pluralism was the path to scientific progress. But the strongly negative criticism of Against Method ultimately led to Feyerabend’s radicalization, to his development from critical rationalist to epistemic anarchist. Many failed to understand this change: was it merely a sociocultural idiosyncrasy, due to time spent at Berkeley?

Twenty-two years after his passing, a clue to the puzzle presents itself in Philosophy of Nature, the first part of a planned but unexecuted trilogy, the type-script of which was discovered providentially in 2004 at the University of Konstanz, in a folder hidden under Feyerabend’s dissertation, and then published in 2009 in German. Here is a historical account of the ways in which prehistoric art and mythology represent fully worked-out worldviews, holistic and context-sensitive and sensual, as opposed to the abstract, context-independent metaphysics that followed. The Homeric-mythical worldview, Feyerabend contends, set out to describe the cosmos, rather than simply to convey logical relations, as Lévi-Strauss and classical structuralism would have it. Myth ultimately was defeated not by arguments but by history, logos replacing mythos by happenstance, rather than by reason on its imagined path to cultural and moral progress. Only by carefully exploring myths, archaeology, and early Greek art could Feyerabend demonstrate the idea that even the putative rules of reason are unable to make any essential distinction between science and nonscience. History had come to the philosopher’s rescue, but the rise of rationalism in Greek antiquity emerges, in this account, as a disastrous development.

His unfinished project nearly drove Feyerabend crazy: “Damn the Naturphilosophie,” he wrote in a letter to Imre Lakatos. Feyerabend’s radicalization, which led the journal Nature in 1987 to dub him “the Salvador Dali of academic philosophy and currently the worst enemy of science,” is now established as clearly less a sociocultural quirk and more the result of sustained, serious (though not faultless) historical research. Feyerabend was and is a force to contend with, and in the “posttruth” environment of the present day more than ever.