Part of the modern worldview is the belief that certain truth is attainable and that there is a single universal method (science) for obtaining that truth. People have not always thought that way. It is debatable whether quest for certain truth in all areas of life is possible or even desirable. Previously, I explored how the amazing success of Newtonian mechanics fueled hubris and confidence in certainty and method, along with several other worldviews.
Not being a historian I did not realise that the modern turn to certainty and method came before Newton's success and was fueled by Rene Descartes who in 1637 published, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Newton was born six years later.
This turn is emphasised by the philosopher Stephen Toulmin in his 1990 book, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. He argued Descartes' work was influenced by his own political context.
I first became aware of this important work through Miroslav Volf. His book, Exclusion and Embrace, contains the following text.
In Cosmopolis Stephen Toulmin has argued for a need to revise the traditional account of the rational method's emergence. Rather than having been born out of tranquil decontextualized reflection, it was formulated in response to a given historical situation—to the ravages of the Thirty Years War fought in the name of differing religious persuasions. Toulmin writes:
If uncertainty, ambiguity, and the acceptance of pluralism led, in practice, only to an intensification of the religious war, the time had come to discover some rational method for demonstrating the essential correctness or incorrectness of philosophical, scientific, or theological doctrines. (Toulmin 1990, page 53)Enter Descartes. In Discourse on Method he proposed the one correct method to acquire absolutely certain knowledge. The Thirty Years' War had more to do with this proposal than did the day he spent "shut up in a room heated by an enclosed stove" where he had, as he writes, "complete leisure to meditate on my own thoughts".
Ever since Descartes, modernity has been dominated by "the charms of certainty and uniqueness" (Toulmin 1990, page 75) and has continued to dream of a purely rational method and a unified science which would provide a single right answer to any given question. Without a rational method we will end up disagreeing, and without agreement, we will end up fighting. The desire for peace gave birth to the belief that we can tell the one single truth about our societies and their history, and indeed about the makeup of the whole world. If there were no such truth, war seemed inescapable.
