Letter to Paul on his 65th Birthday

Bern, November 25th 1988

Dear Mr Feyerabend,

a birthday letter should address the celebrant with nothing but friendly words and not start a quarrel. If my letter is not friendly and even seeks quarrels, then may this be a sign of the sincerity of the thanks I wish to convey to you on your birthday. I owe you a debt of gratitude for the many suggestions I have received from reading your writings and from meeting you in person. However, these suggestions were always irritations that provoked contradiction. This provocation to contradiction seems to me to be the real philosophical element of your life; it is an admirable art that, through anger, awakens the desire for philosophical argument. For me, you are a kind of reincarnation of one or the other (I leave the choice to you) of the virtuoso interlocutors that we encounter in Plato's dialogues.

As one of you goaded, I, therefore, take this birthday opportunity to also tease against the goad. Of course, I could have done the same in Zurich without such ado; but when the Goethe-Newton controversy really offered a good opportunity to take up a few points of contention, the anthroposophists, unfortunately, stole the show from us. Incidentally, the bone of contention that I am picking up here will probably not particularly appeal to you at all; it has been presented to you too often. Nevertheless, allow me the small feeling of happiness that is associated with the mere gesture of throwing down the gauntlet: "I told him so!"

The irritation that provokes me is certainly well known to you: my scientist soul (I have others in my breast!) still and again and again resists your radical claims about the parallelism of art and science, of art styles and different forms of Science.

Not that I deny the cognitive function of art or the aesthetic value of science; I also agree with you when you deny truth and objectivity the role of a handy distinguishing feature between art and science. I hardly find any points of contention in these philosophical fields. But nevertheless, there seems to me to be a difference between art and science that should not be relativized: In contrast to art and other, more contemplative forms of knowledge, modern science is determined by the resistance of the material world (I mean much more than just the experimental Method!). So you will reply that there is only one special test procedure among others that is peculiar to this science. Certainly, but isn't this testing procedure distinguished by the fact that it also gives us that practical certainty in everyday dealings with material things, without which we would not be able to act at all? Knowledge based on such practical certainties cannot be just one knowledge style among others. The science that arose as a result of this solid anchoring in craft practice seems to me to be a much more stable undertaking than you and T.S. Kuhn want to make us believe. Philosophers have an incorrigible tendency to concern themselves above all with theories and theoretical grounds, that is, with words and concepts; they overlook the fact that science is not only conveyed through books, but is above all a craft that requires an intimate sensory experience with the phenomena. Of course, you know this as well as I do, but you seem to me to pay too little attention to the fact that these phenomena are very stable and unchangeable in practical terms (and only in this one) and cannot be generated arbitrarily. Assuming the moon or the earth to be a flat disc is an error with far-reaching consequences in practice, which, once it has been recognized as such, cannot be undone by a change of style.

Experimental practices are completely uncontroversial, even in areas far removed from everyday experience, such as atomic physics; the interpretation of the theory, on the other hand, is still a matter of debate.

There are things we can change and things we cannot change; there are artefacts that we can change, but there are also things that we simply have to accept as given. Allow me the following Cartesian caricature: there is the malleable world of signs and the world in which things have an unmistakable unruliness; we humans stand in between and connect these worlds in a still enigmatic and unknown pineal gland. But in spite of this mysterious connection and in spite of the diverse mutual relations that these worlds unfold in art and science: there remain two distinguishable worlds between which bridges cannot be built at random. For example, I do not believe that stones can be directly influenced by our mind without the involvement of hands or instruments. I'm a great admirer of magicians and magicians whose work is sheer artistry, but I don't believe in reliably producible miracles (which doesn't rule out an actual miracle). Medicine, which you might mention here, is a bad example; People are different than stones.

Dear Mr. Feyerabend, you keep trying to make us believe that the differences between the arts and sciences, between science and magical practices, are only a matter of taste and have no deeper meaning. They want to persuade us that the line between "science" and "fiction" is just a matter of style. I also agree that there are no sharp borders; but there are, nevertheless, differences which, in practical terms, are as clear as that between dream and reality, as between day and night. Either your argument merely implies a huge inflation of the term science, or it is an intolerable nuisance for every scientist! For me it is a nuisance that provoked me to the above unbirthdayly tirade.

Nevertheless, and precisely because of this, I would like to congratulate you on your birthday and wish you good health for the coming years; I particularly hope and wish that you will continue to annoy us with your arguments: Without you as pokes and stabs, the philosophy of science would be totally insipid and boring. At least you have goaded me and my words of contradiction may be a sign of the sincerity of my compliment.

With warm regards and congratulations,

Yours, Viktor Gorgé