Endowment Chairman Sheldon Hackney talked recently with philosopher Stephen Toulmin about postmodern society and the shifting of power. Toulmin, Henry R. Luce Professor at the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies at the University of Southern California, is the author of many books, among them Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, The Abuse of Casuistry (with Albert R. Jonsen), The Return to Cosmology, and Wittgenstein's Vienna (with Allan Janik). Toulmin is this year's Jefferson Lecturer in the Humanities.

Sheldon Hackney: There is a great deal of talk about posteverything these days, especially postmodernity. Would it be fair to say that in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity you provide, not an explanation of postmodernity, but an alternative understanding of modernity?

Stephen Toulmin: That's what I set out to do, and I did so as much for my own edification as for other people's sake. I grew up accustomed to a particular, slightly rosy view of how much the modern era had done for us, and it was only as my career went along that I found the darker side of the picture pressing itself on my attention. I had to explain to myself how it was that there was this divergence between the optimistic view of scientific progress and philosophical clarification, and how the world seemed to have gone and what the role of these new ideas had truly been since 1600.

Hackney: These new ideas I take to be the Cartesian- Newtonian version based on rationality, faith in science, progress.

Toulmin: It includes Descartes and Newton but also embraces Thomas Hobbes and the founders of the various political traditions that one thinks of as characteristic of the modern world.

Hackney: What is the central notion of that received notion of modernity?

Toulmin: The central thing, which was the one I found most attractive to attack, is the belief that rationality has to be understood in terms of formal argumentation, in terms of rather strict ideals of argument, which, in the ideal case, should become geometrical in the kind of way that Plato explains -- whether he advocates it or not is another matter -- in antiquity, and which Descartes makes explicit in his discourse.

Hackney: You use the term "the quest for certainty" or "the search for certainty."

Toulmin: Yes. I'm consciously associating myself with John Dewey, who also, in the late 1920s, picked on the quest for certainty as a perennial disease of modern thought, although he never sat down and thought enough from a historical point of view about why this quest for certainty had the kinds of attractions it had in the first half of the seventeenth century and provided the kind of mold or template on which modern science, modern politics, modern philosophy were shaped.

Hackney: Exactly. But someone in that tradition would object to your notion that it is to be explained by events outside of the discipline itself and in society.

Toulmin: I wouldn't say it is explained. Throughout history there has been -- and I think in all of us there is -- a tension between a concern for precision and a concern for particularity, a concern for getting things stated in an absolutely rigorous way and a concern for the broader humane streams of understanding that we find flowing around these technical arguments and providing a context for them, providing a situation for them.

In fact, there's one thing about the book Cosmopolis that you're mainly alluding to.

Hackney: Right.

Toulmin: There's one thing that I slightly regret. I repeatedly use words like "conceptualized" and "decontextualized" in that book when I would have preferred (and should have preferred) to use words about situations. It's not a question of the relation between one text and another text. It's a relation between how intellectual thought has progressed and the situations to which it has been responsive. It's not outrageous to suggest that the beginnings of modern philosophy have to be seen in a context, or have to be seen against a background of a situation in which it has ceased to be possible to get any general agreement about the overall framework of human understanding, for reasons of theological deadlock.

To this extent -- and we know that Descartes and his colleagues were exposed to this terrible final religious war between rulers of different European states who professed to be defending the interests of Protestantism on the one side, Catholicism on the other -- we know that this made a deep impression on Descartes and Leibniz. It's been naive of a lot of us to think that Descartes and Leibniz and their successors could dissociate the arguments they put forward entirely from the rest of the experience they had, which must have been a searing and indigestible kind of experience.

Hackney: Yes, making the search for certainty more attractive.

Toulmin: Making it seem more urgent. Leibniz, who was born right at the end of the Thirty Years' War, long after Descartes by humane standards, spent the whole of his career afraid that the argument might go in a way that enabled the religious wars to break out again. Since his family had seen much of Germany destroyed and about a third of the population of Germany killed in the course of those thirty years, it's understandable that he felt an intellectual mission to create a basis for people to agree on foundations about which they need no longer fight.

Hackney: It's interesting that you prefer the word "situation" to "context." I haven't been infected enough by the literary theorists to misunderstand your use of context.

Toulmin: No. I only mention it because in the last resort it was quite an achievement of Wittgenstein, with whom I studied, to have taken the argument behind texts to the life within which texts have a life. Literary theory discussions which treat everything as a text, even life, put the cart before the horse, and I stay on Wittgenstein's side of the fence in this respect.

Hackney: But they have contributed another element to your sense that knowledge has to be seen as contingent and situational. I'm paraphrasing now what I take to be a literary theorist's approach: If everything we know, we know through language and we communicate through language, and language is not the thing itself but a representation of the thing, that's simply another barrier between us and the ideal thing, is it not, that we're trying to understand?

Toulmin: I don't want to quibble over the word, but if you're saying that contemporary literary theory is itself as much a response to our present return to a respect for contingency, a respect for happenstance, then, as my own work or the work of Richard Rorty and others who have been moving in the same direction shows, over that I agree.

Hackney: But they go beyond that.

Toulmin: They're coming at it from a different starting point, and we all bear the impress of our starting points on the ways we think, and even more on the ways we express ourselves.

Hackney: Yes. And you do also.

Toulmin: It's inevitable. We do the best we can given where we start from, and there's nothing to despair about. There's nothing in the way of absurdity involved in acknowledging that fact.

Hackney: Is that a fundamental error of Descartes?

Toulmin: It's an interesting thing. I feel about Descartes as I feel about Plato, that he had at least two things at stake in his philosophizing. I talk about him in the book as partly a cryptanalyst, partly a foundationalist; by which I mean part of the time he thought he was, in the spirit of a scientist, deciphering the code in which the book of nature is written, and so developing an account of the world of nature in which God's fundamental language is translated into a form that humanists could follow. But, of course, that pursuit is not one that necessarily gives one absolute certainty.

The other part of the time he was infected with Dewey's quest for certainty. He was hoping that we could find some absolute foundation for our ideas, and that's the point on which his rationalist successors seized. But whether it's fair to call Descartes a Cartesian is a bit like, is it fair to call Plato a Platonist, or even more, Aristotle an Aristotelian.

Hackney: You are much more sympathetic to the other, the alternative arc of modernism from Montaigne. Why is that? Or, maybe even first, what is that?

Toulmin: Cosmopolis is intended as a balance-redressing book. There is so much in high school textbooks, in orthodox philosophy of science, in all kinds of much published, much read, much assimilated public thought, which takes it for granted that Galileo and Descartes and Hobbes were embarking on a great new positive direction and that this mathematization of thought was a splendid and admirable thing. In some ways, it's true. It bore all kinds of fruit. But, at the same time, these formal achievements have been allowed to cloud our vision of the other half of our modern inheritance, which goes back a bit further to Erasmus and Thomas More, to Cervantes and Rabelais, to Montaigne and Shakespeare, and people who lived and wrote and contributed before the beginning of modern science and modern philosophy as the academies and schools know it.

At the present time what we see is a convergence of these two traditions. The domination of an ideal of rationality rather than a reasonableness has been receding, so that now we find people in all kinds of fields recognizing that the technicalities and mathematical formulations of that tradition need always to be looked at as contributing or failing to contribute to humane ideals and to humane achievements.

Forty years ago, you would never have discovered in the daily newspapers of this country or any of the other industrialized countries discussions about the moral problems in medicine, for instance. Medicine was a technical art which the doctors were responsible for. To the extent that ethical questions arose in the practice of medicine, the doctors, as professionals, were expected to take care of them, and, indeed, took good care that it was they who took care of them. Twenty years ago, there was quite a tussle between people who argued that it was time for the public to be allowed into this discussion and people who still wanted to hang onto a professional monopoly in the resolution of these problems.

The debate about whether people should be allowed to die when they feel their time has come, to say nothing of all the debates about abortion -- all of these questions are now public property. Leaving aside the question about how they're argued in actual practice, I think it's an excellent thing.

It goes along with the environmental critique of engineering. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers used to build canals and locks and cut up the countryside quite lightheartedly on the basis of technical specifications, which their theories have yet to justify. Now the whole question of environmental impact and ecological consequences is a central part of the public face of engineering.

Technicality, technical excellence, is no longer an end in itself. It's something which has to be kept in balance with humane consequences.

Hackney: So you're urging us to keep in balance these two traditions.

Toulmin: This is one of the extraordinary things about the last thirty-five years or so. It still strikes me as amazing that Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, appeared as recently as 1962.

Hackney: That is very recent.

Toulmin: Thirty-five years. At that time, if you had said to Rachel Carson in her last years that by the mid 1990s no government in the world with any pretension to respectability would fail to have some kind of environmental protection agency, it would have appeared quite incredible to her.

This is a major change in the agenda of politics, and it's a change which moves precisely in the direction that represents a return from, shall we say, Descartes to Erasmus. I remain charmed by Erasmus's famous essay, In Praise of Folly, which is a prophylactic against the quest for certainty.

Hackney: Yes, exactly. And you recall the humanistic or the more humane . . .

Toulmin: Well, yes, yes. This is the beginning of the tradition which the academic world knows as the humanities in the way in which Galileo and Descartes are the beginning of the tradition which the academic world knows as the exact sciences. Because I myself began my professional training as a physicist and have been spending the decades opening all the doors that lead out of physics into other areas of reflection, I welcome any evidence that this broadening of the agenda of the exact sciences is being reflected in the way in which human life is being led on the public as well as on the private level.

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Amy Lifson: A Conversation with Stephen Toulmin (from Humanities 18 (1997)