A Critique of an Epistemic Intellectual Culture: Cartesianism, Normativism and Modern Crises

Abstract

The so-called epistemological turn of the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition (Rorty) is a hallmark of modern philosophy. The broad family of normativism constitutes one major response to the Cartesian heritage building upon some version of the idea that human knowledge, action and sociality build fundamentally upon some form of social agreement and standards. Representationalism and the Cartesian picture more generally have been challenged by normativists but this paper argues that, even where these challenges by normativism have been taken to heart, our intellectual culture remains fundamentally epistemic in certain problematic senses. Two problems are highlighted: first, normativism remains functionally Cartesian, for human action and sociality appear as processes driven by the shared understandings by competent contributors (regardless of how these are constructed naturalistically), and second, normativism is unable to account for forms of human action and sociality other than those occurring in the relatively small worlds of normatively regulated conceptual spaces of mutual access and listening. These points are illustrated by an applied discussion of the blind spots of normativist accounts of the emerging environmental and the on-going economic crises.

Incomegetting and Environmental Degradation

“…Environmental social sciences in general appears to shy away from explicitly addressing their assumptions with regard to individuals and most often assumes more or less rational or at least intellectually driven people [38]. This appears to be also the case in socio-ecological systems literature [39] that continues to emphasize the ecological or the social system level, such as institutions or societies [40].…”

“…As far as we see, there is an intellectualist view of the human causing of our environmental predicament that seems to pass largely unquestioned by natural and even by social scientists as the default position through which the human relationship to nature is conceptualized. However, it entails a pertinent anomaly, namely, that of rational or intellectually driven beings allegedly being increasingly aware, conscious and worried about the environmental situation, but who nevertheless continue to destroy the "natural" environment on which their lives and livelihoods ultimately lean [10,31,38,45]. Such an intellectualist imagery of the essence of the human relationship to nature has been traced back to Plato.…”

“…According to William James, there is a historical sense, from Plato onward, that "the intelligible order ought to supersede the senses" ( [46] quoted in [27] p. 194). The Cartesian epistemological philosophical heritage has furthermore stabilized the focus on human cognitive relation to the world-values, knowledge, attitudes-as the principal driver of our activities [29,38,47]. With such a paradigm at hand, it is natural to think of the human relationship to nature as a function of what modern humans think of nature, our attitude to it, which for their part depend on our values, awareness and especially knowledge in terms of the "natural" environment.…”

“…While human beings live life in the context of their particular life-worlds and with the individual relevances and practical intelligibility that this involves, environmental problems are caused and tend to occur on wholly different, much larger, temporal and geographical scales that do not (thus far, at least) impose themselves as such in immediate pragmatic terms on people's life-worlds. That is to say, environmental problems are produced by the daily operations of the global industrial market society, in the context of which the activities of geographically, temporally and culturally dispersed peoples interlink in a structure [38]. The constitution, occurrence and effects of these operations transcend the life-worlds, personal relevances, and practical intelligibility-agency-of any single individual.…”

“…From an environmental perspective, our actions, linked up with countless other activities in the commodified chain of production, distribution, and consumption, cause an immense environmental impact [1,29,38]. These are activities that lie predominantly outside our control.…”