Comprehensive grandiose rationalism
How seriously should we take William Warren Bartley’s The Retreat to Commitment? Despite its emphasis on critical inquiry, the work has a lot of elements that would place the book in a more obscure tradition.
The first thing that strikes the reader is the enormous number of pages that are devoted to the “search for identity” in Protestantism. One wonders whether this is the real topic of the book with some general philosophical thoughts on pancritical rationalism (comprehensive critical rationalism) thrown in as an afterthought, or whether the main topic of the book is pancritical rationalism with the evolution of Protestantism being used as a case study of irrational commitment. The author claims that he is doing the latter but after reading the book it is difficult to comprehend why such an extensive treatment of Protestantism is necessary. Adding insult to injury are awkward characterizations of the arguments he is criticizing and the decision to answer his critics by adding a bunch of appendices to the second edition of the book.
What makes The Retreat to Commitment even less enlightening to read is that Bartley engages in all kinds of philosophical, psychological, sociological, and political speculation that is not necessary for his argument, much of it not very analytic in nature. One unattractive aspect in Karl Popper’s writings is his inability to sustain a formal investigation of his argument without pausing to reflect on his place in the history of ideas, or to refrain from tying his technical arguments to bombastic moral and political statements. Bartley cruises down this lane at an even faster speed, including the inevitable Popperian statements about how the structure of philosophical thinking before (comprehensive) critical rationalism was inherently authoritarian in nature, while alluding to the “sweeping ramifications” when we come to recognize the implications of his argument. This grandiose style of thinking culminates in the following question:
“How can our intellectual life and institutions be arranged so as to expose our beliefs, conjectures, policies, positions, source of ideas, traditions, and the like – whether or not they are justifiable – to maximum criticism, in order to counteract and eliminate as much intellectual error as possible.”
As should be evident from this question, we have come a long way from the epistemological and technical concerns of the logical positivists when we read such calls to completely transform “our intellectual life” and society along maximizing, teleological objectives. One does not have to share the traditionalism of Russell Kirk or the skepticism of Michael Oakeshott to detect a fair amount of fanaticism here. It often seems that the degree of careful treatment of technical philosophical problems is inversely related to making sweeping statements about its conclusions and its far reaching implications.
In his 1984 introduction to the second edition of the book, Bartley is on more interesting ground when he links rationality and a competitive market economy in a Hayekian fashion:
Those whose way of life is threatened by the enterprising behavior of entrepreneurs may be driven to become more imaginative, reflective, and self-critical themselves. To compete more successfully, they may be forced to imitate and and emulate their probing, inquisitive, and self-reflective competitors, and thus to become more rational. When critical, rational behavior confers an advantage, rational methods, by the usual selective processes of evolution, will be developed and will spread by imitation.
Such a perspective would present a more level headed approach to the sociology of knowledge than the calls to engage in an egalitarian exchange of ideas to bring us closer to the truth. Unfortunately, this fruitful topic receives little attention in the book but seems to have been worked out in other publications by the author and Gerard Radnitzky.
Bartley follows the predictable pattern of a student who believes that the ideas of his teacher were not radical enough and still contained elements of the misguided thinking of the past. He seeks to purify critical rationalism from such heresies by proposing that all positions, including pancritical rationalism itself, should be open to criticism. Some critics have responded that pancritical rationalism is vacuous or creates logical paradoxes. If the fate of Bartley’s pancritical rationalism is any indication, it surely seems to generate exactly the kinds of endless (semantic) arguments that critical rationalism hoped to avoid. Popper himself seems to have expressed the opinion that Barley’s interpretation of critical rationalism erred in seeing it as a theory of rationality (instead of an attitude) that needed to be replaced by an improved theory of rationality. A practicing scientist would not have a hard time recognizing how Popper’s thinking on falsification and the demarcation problem can contribute to better scientific practice, but it is more difficult to see how Bartley’s comprehensive critical rationalism would make such a contribution.
It seems that Bartley hoped that his pancritical rationalism could end the situation in which critical rationalism could be as easily dismissed as Protestantism or astrology but the hairsplitting debates that his perspective generates should be familiar to anyone who has followed the fate of the Protestant reformation splitting up into more and more obscure sects. Substitute “comprehensive” for “ultimate justification” and Bartley’s pancritical rationalism as a “metacontext” to transform society looks remarkably similar to previous attempts to solve a philosophical problem for good, despite claims to the contrary. One wonders if Bartley’s excessive focus on Protestantism is just an arbitrary choice after all.
Despite, or perhaps because of, its vacuous nature, pancritical rationalism has been proposed as the epistemological outlook for one school of thought in transhumanism because “in seeking more effective arrangements of our intellectual life and institutions we want to balance carefully the goal of increasing lethality to incorrect memes with the goal of encouraging the proliferation of new attempts at describing the world.” In light of Bartley’s theme of his book it is ironic that transhumanism has recently been criticized as quasi-religious in nature.
