How do we know? It’s the quintessential modern question.
It’s
the question we closely associate with Montaigne and Kant, each of whom asked
it for different reasons, each inaugurating with it an epoch in modernity. When
Montaigne published the first edition of his Essays (1580) bringing a new genre of writing into existence, he
was (in part) responding to the European discovery of ancient Greek skepticism
with the publication of Sextus Empiricus and encounter with Pyrrho of Elis.
Montaigne’s response was fully embodied, that’s to say, by intellectually
acknowledging that in a skeptical framework the only certainty was hyper-local.
This led him to focus on himself as a possible basis of certainty, and then to
discover that even at that level—the sub-atomic, as it were, compared to the
grand narrative of History—there was constant change and variation. And yet the
body was all that there was that was even the slightest bit certain. It was
this realization that also led him to a form of writing that captured the
recoil from the unitary and the grand: the essay, or probe, that took just one
small part of reality for its subject matter. This same skepticism fed both the
new sciences of nature and of humans, creating new ways of defining facts and
determining truths. But too much skepticism and too many facts could also
become unsustainable. Kant’s Critiques
of Pure Reason, Practical Reason, and Judgment
(1781/87, 1788, 1790) were about balancing a priori and a posteriori claims in
ways that allowed for enlightenment without lapsing back into dogmatism. This
meant accommodating the practice of skepticism that had proved so fruitful
intellectually without, at the same time, abandoning the possibility of some
overarching universals. The modern sciences of knowing are, therefore, a post-skeptical
venture. Even the late 19th century return of Kant in the age of
physics (“Neo-Kantinism”) was a response to science that gave birth to many of
the large-looming figures in the human sciences of the first half of the
twentieth century, people with interests as different as Max Weber and Martin Heidegger.
But
“how do we know?” also points, literally, to the means by which we know. To the
various tests by which we prove the truth, or reality, of some thing or
statement. To Socratic elenchus,
Euclidean proof, Chinese imperial examinations, early modern European Hilfswissenschaften, technical analysis
as performed by objects conservators. All of these matter as ways in which
humans have tried to assure themselves that they really did know some thing.
Proof emerged in dialogue with doubt; indeed, it is only because of a refined
doubt that a refined system of proof could emerge. The need for proof generated
logics of proofing but also a material culture of proof: the devices that
humans create to put their theories about the past, and nature, and peoples to the
test, and also the new kinds of evidence that these new questions in turn unlocked.
“How
Do We Know?” focuses on another of the basic questions (following “What is
distance?”, “When is After?” and “Whose Story?”) that defines the intellectual
horizon of the Bard Graduate Center.
