Rationalism and Empiricism

Three short stories

I’m Bryan Kam. I endeavour daily to make philosophy accessible and relevant. To that end I write this newsletter and host a podcast called Clerestory. I’m also writing a book called Neither/Nor and I’m a founding member of Liminal Learning. In London, I host a book club, a writing group, and other events. My work looks at how abstract concepts relate to embodied life, and how to use this understanding to transform experience.

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The Second Peloponnesian War was a long conflict between Athens and its empire, lasting from 431 to 404 BCE, when the Spartans decisively defeated the Athenians. In 404 BCE, Lysander led the Spartan and Peloponnesian League to destroy the city of Athens. The Athenians had no navy to defend them, and the Spartans cut off food supplies. Many Athenians starved. The Spartans decided not to destroy Athens, instead installing Thirty Tyrants, whose brutality was widely reviled. They tried and executed many Athenians.

Plato (428–348 BCE) was a young man during this period, and he writes about it in his Seventh Letter.¹ He was initially hopeful about this period, but his hope quickly turned to disgust at the brutality of the Thirty Tyrants. He suffered further trauma when the restored democracy — the very regime which overthrew the tyrants — charged Socrates (470–399 BCE) with impiety in 399 BCE, leading to his execution. Plato regards this with bitter irony: Socrates, who had courageously refused to participate in the Tyrants’ illegal arrest of Leon of Salamis, was now being killed by the democracy he had protected through his moral stand. Some scholars argue that this period of political upheaval and personal loss drove Plato away from Heraclitean flux and toward Socratism. I consider Socratism to be a form of rationalism. Rationalism intellectualizes, which can appear, through manipulation of concepts, to provide a refuge from experiential turmoil and chaos.

During the same period, the Spartans led a major campaign into Thrace. The city of Abdera, in Thrace, fought on the side of Athens. During that period, one philosopher in Abdera, Democritus (~460–370 BCE), began promoting an early version of scientific materialism: “Reality is made of atoms and the void.” This later became a popular view within Athens itself, brought in by an outsider to Athens by the name of Epicurus (341–270 BCE). It gave a reductionist and non-teleological account of how change occurs, which (through Lucretius) may have affected Darwin’s views millennia later. I consider Epicureanism to be a form of materialist empiricism, and even though it is not empirical in the modern sense, we shall see how Democritus influenced the “father of empiricism,” Francis Bacon.

So one period of brutal instability produced two opposite responses. On the one hand, there’s the retreat to maximally abstract rational inquiry, what I call rationalism, in works like Plato’s Phaedrus and Phaedo. On the other, there’s a retreat into maximally concrete reductionism, what you might call proto-empiricism, in the thought of people like Epicurus.

One war led to an intensification, I argue, of both rationalism and empiricism.

A Collapse of Catholicism

This same dynamic would repeat itself nearly two millennia later, in Western Europe.

In 1517, Martin Luther (1483–1546) published his Ninety-five Theses, decrying the abuses and corruption of the Catholic Church. Luther believed that if people were able to read Biblical texts themselves, they would come to a new consensus around what the scriptures meant. He hoped that this would flush out Catholic corruption and lead to a deeper connection with the spirit of the Gospel. Instead, it undermined church authority, leading to a free-for-all of interpretation. This gave rise to the incredibly brutal Wars of Religion. One century later, in 1618, the Thirty Years War began. This was one of the deadliest conflicts in European History, which may have killed as many as 8 million people, wiping out up to 50% of the population of parts of Germany.

Sebastiaen Vrancx, The Plundering of the Village of Wommelgem (1610)

René Descartes (1596–1650) fought in this war as a gentleman volunteer in the army of Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria. He witnessed brutal sacks of cities and religious massacres first-hand. His famous “method of doubt” allegedly came to him in a “stove-heated room” during winter quarters in Germany in November 1619. When all authorities were suspect, and people were killing each other over competing truth claims, Descartes explicitly sought something which could survive “the most extreme doubt.” His geometric method offered escape from the chaos of religious conflict into the mathematical certainty of “clear and distinct ideas.” Descartes has been called the “father of rationalism.”

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) also had an extreme response, but in the opposite direction. Having witnessed the same collapse of scholastic authority and the bloody consequences of competing interpretations, he sought refuge not in abstract and indubitable reason, but in what he called “the true and lawful marriage between the empirical and the rational faculty.” His Novum Organum (1620) proposed systematic observation and experimentation. Where Descartes fled from the senses into mathematical certainty, Bacon embraced sensory experience as the only trustworthy foundation, arguing that we must “dissect nature” through careful observation and experiment:

The human understanding is, by its own nature, prone to abstraction, and supposes that which is fluctuating to be fixed. But it is better to dissect than abstract nature: such was the method employed by the school of Democritus, which made greater progress in penetrating nature than the rest.

Novum Organum, Book I, LI

John Locke (1632–1704), who had fled to Holland during political upheaval, extended this empiricist response by arguing that all knowledge must be built up gradually from sensory experience rather than from metaphysics. Later, David Hume (1711–1776) would push this retreat from abstraction to an extreme — Hume’s “problem of induction” went so far as to famously doubt whether gunpowder will explode in the present, just because it’s exploded in the past.

Once again, crisis drove philosophers to opposite extremes. Descartes pushed towards a vertiginous doubt of the senses, and disavowal of the body, leading to maximal abstraction and the mind-body dualism which is named for him — Cartesian doubt and Cartesian dualism. It also led to geometric abstraction (Cartesian coordinates as opposed to Euclid’s embodied measurements). On the other hand, it pushed Francis Bacon towards an intense observation of nature, which would lead to the scientific method.

The Death of God

The pattern recurred again at the start of the 20th century.

By the end of the 19th century, European confidence was crumbling, facing threats on all sides. Marx had argued that capitalist overproduction would lead capitalism itself to implode. Darwin had shown that men were apes. Nietzsche had declared that God was dead — and we had killed him. Colonial encounters revealed the diversity of human thought systems, challenging assumptions about universal reason. Durkheim’s sociology implied that Kant’s basic account of experience might be culturally contingent rather than a universal feature of the mind. The rise of socialism, communism, and anarchism threatened not just political but intellectual authority. Nascent nation states were destroying ancient ways of being, and homogenising populations, while new racial theories were leading to ethnic cleansing, forced relocation, and genocide.

Then came the Great War. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) served as a soldier on the Russian front, was captured, and wrote the Tractus Logico-Philosophicus partly while fighting on the Western Front. His early work sought to map the logical structure of reality itself — to show the limits of what could be meaningfully said, in maximum abstraction. “The world is all that is the case,” it simply and cryptically begins. Bertrand Russell, an outspoken pacificist, collaborated with Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) on the Principia Mathematica (1910–1913), attempting to ground all of mathematics in pure logic. David Hilbert (1862–1943) proposed his formalist program, seeking to prove the consistency of mathematics through purely mechanical procedures. All of these approaches sought certainty in rationalism.

On the other side, the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle — Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and others — developed their own foundationalist response. Rather than fleeing into pure logic, they retreated into logical empiricism, arguing that meaningful statements must be verifiable through sensory experience. They attempted to eliminate all interpretation, in favour of a neutral observation language, going so far as to claim that any statement which could not be empirically verified was “meaningless.” Like their empiricist predecessors, they sought to rebuild knowledge on the secure foundation of observation, using the tools of formal logic to eliminate metaphysical confusion.

Once more, crisis produced the same flight to the extremes: pure rational abstraction and pure empirical concreteness.

This pattern — crisis driving philosophers toward opposite extremes of rationalism and empiricism — reveals something fundamental about how we respond to uncertainty.

But to understand this pattern, we need to examine more closely what I mean by calling figures like Socrates, Descartes, and the early Wittgenstein ‘rationalists.’

Rationalism Q&A

Given this recurring pattern, some questions emerge.

Are you sure Socrates is a rationalist? Doesn’t he claim that it is the perceptual world that is intelligible?

Yes, and it is precisely this intelligibility, and the conceptual presuppositions it entails, which I regard as rationalist. Intelligibility means intelligible to reason. Add to this Socrates’ elevation of the role of the intellect (noos) and his strong disregard for the senses and the body, and I think he can fairly be called a rationalist. Above all, he persistently presupposes that all words have a core meaning — a fixed, universal essence that can be discovered through specifically rational inquiry. Whether through elenchus (cross-examination) or “collection and division,” methods whose issues I’ve written about here, Socrates believed he could get to core meanings and answer questions like “What are the virtues?” or “What is love?” through purely rational analysis.

But isn’t the point of the dialogues aporia which undermines simple categories?

I would say, “No.”

Even when Platonic aporia (“puzzlement”) reveals the inadequacy of particular attempts at definition, the method never questions its own fundamental metaphysical assumptions. For instance, it requires that concepts must be internally coherent without reference to experience. Socrates consistently dismisses his interlocutors' references to specific cases — when Meno offers examples of different virtues, or when Euthyphro cites particular pious acts, Socrates insists these miss the point entirely. He wants to know what virtue itself is, what piety itself is, as if these were mind-independent realities awaiting discovery rather than concepts emerging from social practice and metaphors to experience. Socrates regards concepts as mind-independent realities. Even when aporia results, he seems to think of this as a failure to find “the truth” in one particular instance — whereas I will argue that such failures indicate that Plato has fatally misunderstood what concepts are and where they come from.

Understanding Socrates' rationalist assumptions helps explain why this pattern keeps recurring. When faced with chaos, thinkers retreat to what seems most certain — either clean concepts or the “uninterpreted” material facts — rather than questioning whether certainty itself might be a problem.

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Bryan

1. The Seventh Letter’s authenticity is doubted, but parts of it are probably Plato.