The Myth of the Empirical

                The empirical is a myth and, if I were an empiricist, I suppose I would say that is a bad thing (the myth being concerned, as Aristotle says, with the most abstract and general). It isn’t, however, a bad thing at all. It is just a thing. This myth is a powerful representation of what is means to know. It is an image of knowing and images of knowing can be good or bad depending on their application. Certainly, the myth of the empirical can lead us down some very unproductive paths. It has emancipatory potential too even on a direct social level. The myth of the empirical is, like other powerful myths, complex and multifaceted. The myth of the empirical is, for one thing, a democratic myth. All persons qua persons possess the basic capacity for observation. At the same time ‘the empirical’ is a possession of the cadre of specialists we call scientists. The empirical is directly to hand for all to see and at the same time the product of the most refined, specialized even esoteric application of method. Due to this complexity, the empirical can be vexed, contested category. This fact came home to me as I was reading a journalist complain that the empirical is under threat and indeed in decline. People, he informs us, no longer understand the rules of empiricism. This is odd for empiricism has, historically at least, had great trouble with the concept of rules. How does any finite observation justify a universal law? How can a rule or canon of reason, universal in scope, found itself on the particularity of observation? Indeed, it seems to interpret things we need to bring our minds and their content to the things we observe. On this reading the empirical is just what is unruly. The empirical is just what disrupts and overturns the rules. The empirical is the excess, the surplus, the different, even the free. This appears negatively as Hume’s problem of induction but, we can think of it positively as well. The empirical is what presents as beyond the necessary circle of reason.

                The empirical is something we now associate with the hard sciences but that is not exactly its history. If we take the empirical as in some sense the purely given then the first empirical event I can think of is the calling of Abraham in the Hebrew Tenach. Abraham is called from Ur of the Chaldees which represents the given totality of nature, culture, and the gods. This call is an event, a pure event not given in nature or reason. It is radically empirical. The empirical is also the realm of the magician who learns from experience what the occult properties of things are precisely because they are occult. The alchemist, too, does not find the philosopher’s stone by a transcendental deduction but by an ecstatic immersion in material process and change. Bacon, of course, applies evangelical principle here. Things are known by their fruits. By experimental labor the scientist brings forth novelty. The hidden springs of nature are revealed by their results. There is another component to this myth which is the blank slate. If the empirical is what is known, then the mind that knows it is in a position of pure receptivity. The empirical writes on the blank slate of possibility. Taken radically, this would mean that nothing pre-structures our knowledge in advance. The mind is a pure mirror which simply reflects back what occurs. It is an emptiness waiting for anything and everything to be written on it. This mind is everything and no thing, like pure matter.

                Thus, we might say that the empirical is unruly because beings are always giving in excess of the categorical, or at least of those categories that are finitely, discursively structured. The empirical can, Hume admits, disrupt our habits of expectation and formed association though he only states this point negatively and sceptically. What is the empirical in itself? One might speak of novelty, of chance, of spontaneity, even of freedom. If you are certain kind of Neo-Platonist what gives outside the categorical is the Good and here the empirical is present in the more sophisticated guise of the experiential. If you are Levinas it is the whole sphere of the ethical manifest in the face of the other. Of course, you may wonder why I speak of the empirical as a myth. Why is the empirical, after all, an image or model of knowing and not the thing in itself? Well, there are other ways one can speak of apprehension and these involve the categorical as actively shaping the world we figure ourselves as passively observing. This categorical realm may range from the a-priori to the social or linguistic. Too much happens implicitly BEFORE we receive the object passively for the empirical to be anything but a useful picture for one moment in how we grasp things. To be Thomistic for a moment, at very least we need the concept of an ens to apprehend anything as an object. Receptivity is pre-structured in advance by the mind’s active light. This goes on without our noticing and for that reason the myth of the empirical is intuitive and easy. Alas, this means that the myth of the empirical, if pressed to closely, if understood too literally, betrays the complexity of experience. It also, by sleight of hand, turns the ideational into the observational. The result of THAT is pure polarization for the other must be a fool or a lying knave not to see what is simply given in direct experience. At this point we see the temptation embodied in the myth of the empirical: the temptation of anti-intellectualism. There can only be ONE purely empirical account of things: mine, or, if egotism is collective, ours. Worse, if the world is what is simply there to be seen, and if hard nosed, practical people are those who see what is there to be seen, then the world of art of thought and culture, even of theoretical as opposed to applied science, becomes a realm of spurious delusion and false sophistication. It must for it is a world of complexity and difference rather that pure positivity and hard 'objective truth'. Here, it seems, is where we run up against the limit of this myth and see that, after all, it is only an image, an abstraction from the total field of knowing. A myth is as dangerous as it is liberating if it is not balanced by another myth.