Science and Common Sense

Science and Common Sense

The exchanges in the posts on 'sexual selection and race' have been fruitful for at least one thing. They have made me realize how badly the methods of scientific thinking are taught in schools in the United States. The anonymous poster in that exchange simply insisted that her 'common sense' was self-evident and therefore there was no need to consider evidence, or apparently even logic.

Richard Lewontin, a biologist who did not shy from controversy once wrote something apropos of our notions of common sense.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

From Richard Lewontin,, Billions and Billions of Demons, a review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

In my work-life in various factory jobs, I have met many skilled machinists who have never gone to college; all of them, without exception, knew how to think logically and scientifically. They also knew that their 'common sense' notions had to be measured against evidence. This I believe was just an aspect of their profession. I have also met many lawyers who knew how to recognize evidence but, strangely, did not know the difference between evidence that was merely speculative or definitional, and evidence that was in some way testable or repeatable. This I believe is an aspect of the lawyer's profession. The main concern of lawyers is manipulating arguments and definitions, not testing evidence. The 'epistemological standing' of the evidence is a lesser order of importance than how it can be presented in an argument or how it can be used to stretch or contract definitions.

On the other hand most of the people I meet who have graduated from colleges, and have majored in subjects outside of the sciences, do not understand the methods of science or how science and logic can be counter-intuitive and simply destroy our common sense notions of what we think of the world. Further more they don't understand that such a statement as "I don't need evidence because I have my common sense and my common sense tells me X" is simply a non-sense statement. What we call common sense is itself a kind of evidence. But it is a very weak kind of evidence usually based on cultural prejudice or untested and non-verifiable subjectivity.

There are certain statements we simply accept because there are no ways to verify the statement either way or in order to verify or provide evidence for the statement we would have to do too much research. "The chair I see near my writing desk is a 'physically real' chair" is one such statement. I accept the physical reality of the chair without much proof and hope when I sit down that I am not hallucinating. In this sense I accept that a certain class of objects, such as chairs, are solid enough for me to sit upon without investigating the nature of that 'solidity'. I will check on occasion to see if the chair is 'rickety' but not to the extent that an engineer is supposed to check the stability of a bridge. I don't need to be an engineer or a carpenter to decide that the chair is stable enough or solid enough for me to sit upon. The problem is that once we try to go beyond our common sense and investigate the nature of 'stability' and 'solidity' we run into many problems that contradict our common sense. For example I could perform an investigation using my very amaturous study of physics. Quantum mechanics has shown me that this solid chair that is beneath me as I write these words is in fact not very solid. Against common sense, physics has shown me that the chair is made up of atoms that are mostly 'empty space' between the nucleous and the 'planetary' electrons. In other words there is more space than there is continuity. The old saying was natura non facit saltum ('nature makes no jumps.'). Against all common sense this has been disproven, and quantum mechanics has shown us that the physical does not abhor a vacume, but it does abhor our common sense notions of what is 'real.' None of this prevents me from sitting on the chair. It does prevent me from relying on my common sense alone.

Bertrand Russell once wrote:

"It is not to be supposed, in any case that 'perceiving' an object involves knowing what it is like. That is quite another matter. We shall see later that certain inferences, of a highly abstract character, can be drawn for our perceptions to the objects perceived; but these inferences are at once difficult and not quite certain. The idea that perception, in itself, reveals the character of objects, is a fond delusion, and one, moreover, which it is very necessary to overcome if our philosophy is to be anything more than a pleasant fairy-tale." Bertrand Russell An Outline of Philosophy.

This can be said of the opinions that we call 'common sense' in spades.

The idea that our personal observations of our very limited social mileau can reveal very much beyond our own prejudices, cultural biases, and self-justifications is a fairy-tale that only rational thinking can overcome. What most of us believe is 'inevitable' or 'natural' about our social reality is usually only contingent and only a very small part of the many possibilities of human nature. People who don't see this will forever be caught in their own distorting biases with no possibility of learning that many portions of their world view are simply the pleasant fariry-tale that they tell themselves. This is as true of myself as it is of others (such as the anonymous correspondent in the debate on 'race and sexual selectiion'). But I suppose we all think that we try to get beyond our pleasant fairy-tales. Unfortunately this is not easy to do and most of us try to hold on to our narrow biases and do not engage in conversations that might expand our world views. Yes, I too live in 'my own world', as we all live 'in our own worlds.' The first step in trying to obtain a non-subjective view of what ever we call reality is to admit this fact and, then, to try to transcend it by mutual agreement on what we can accpet as evidence and what we can call common ground. Again, unfortunately, many people will not question the little worlds they live in and like a narcissitic child will insist that their little world is the whole world.

There is a sense of security in maintaining our world-views and a sense of secuirty is necessary to continue to live a life that is not too unhappy. In this sense I think our 'world views' connect up with our biological needs in some undetermined way. As long as our world views are not grossly 'dysfunctional' within our given societal and 'natural' environement we usually maintain them. As long as our 'world views' don't kill us and don't put us at a selective disadvantage in relation to other human beings, then they are neutral from an evolutionary point of view. Further, it is possible that some world views that are positively destructive or even 'irrational' might provide temporary advantage over other people, who maintain less destructive world views. But it is also possible that some world views may provide short run selective advantages and, yet, in the long run may destroy us all. (Examples of such world views might be thae secular 'faiths' we call 'nationalism' and 'jingoism' or, when we profess the 'faith', we call these views 'patriotism' and 'national interest.')

How is it possible to convince another person to see that, in order to have a conversation in the first place, our notions of evidence and rationality must be grounded in something beyond our amorphous worldviews and our subjective cultural assumptions? Statements like 'biology is in the face,' and supposed conclusions that the face shows human racial sexual preferences, and that the fact of human diversity ipso facto means that there are human racial sexual preferences, need to be shown through reason and evidence in order to be accepted. If the person holding these views can't show them by reason and evidence, then we must assume that her assumptions are a kind of prejudice. In the case of the exchange that I am referring to here, the actual evidence to a large extent contradicts the cultural assumptions held by the anonymous poster. Also, since the notions put forward are a 'racial theory', I can't help, but conclude that this cultural assumption is derived from the racist and sexist assumptions that are rife in our culture. I would make a similar interpretation in regards to any notion or belief, that a person held without evidence.

My reflections on the difference between the skilled machinist, the lawyer, and the average graduate in humanities is only anecdotal, but my preliminary conclusion is that thinking rigorously, understanding the nature of evidence, and knowing when to use one's own 'intuition' and 'common sense' as an hypothesis to search for evidence is a practical matter of 'doing.' The truism is that people learn by practice. I would push the truism a bit further. People who actually perform this kind of thinking become smarter, self-skeptical, and questioning. People who don't remain within their little worlds without realizing that their 'world' is not the world.

Jerry Monaco
New York
March 2005
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco





This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Moral Intentions and Artistic Tensions in Anna Karenina

A Symptomatic Reading of the Title "Anna Karenina": Moral Intention and Artistic Tension in Tolstoy's Novel
By Jerry Monaco

A Question from a reader
"i just recently read anna karenina. do you know why tolstoy titles the novel after anna when she is not at the center of the novel and it seems that Levin is really the main character. Perhaps it is b/c everyone in the novel is connected to her in some way..i don't know..but she does not come off as strong as levin."
[Note this question was a comment to The Democracy of Minor Characters #1:
"The Character of Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (Link) which can be found posted at 7 Dec. 2005]

Why is Anna Karenina Anna's novel and not Levin's novel?

The Accidental, the Simple, and the Interesting:
If there is an interesting answer to this question it is simple, but if the answer is simple then we are led to another level where the innocence of the question might reveal deep insight into the creative process. Trying not to be blunt I wrote a pretentious sentence, so let me rephrase. The question is either innocent, answerable in a simple sentence, or deeply profound. I choose to believe it is all three. This is because the simplest questions are the most radical. They go to the root of how we think.

The "Accidental" Novel
Let me say that just possibly there is no interesting answer to this question. In other words the answer is that the title of the novel is a contingent accident of composition and publication history. Anna Karenina was written as a whole but was published in serialized form in one of the conservative Russian magazines of the day. The process of publishing the novel meant that the novel was given its name before Tolstoy actually finished the work. Tolstoy wrote and rewrote the novel between 1873 and 1877. The novel was published in the monthly magazine Russky Vestnik between 1875 and 1877. It is possible that with hindsight Tolstoy might have re-titled the novel to reflect the fact that much of Anna Karenina involves the search for something like a happy family life for Levin. Perhaps the novel could have been called "Love and Death," borrowing from Woody Allen's cinematic pastiche of Russian novels, but also reflecting Tolstoy's previous great novel War and Peace. In other words the title Anna Karenina may simply be an accident of history and we can leave it at that with no more reflection. Tolstoy had a conception of a novel where "Anna" was the main character and that changed in the course of writing but the title didn't change because of its publishing history.

"The Puzzle of the Epigraph" and the Simple Answer
Now that I have argued for the "accidental" nature of the title of Anna Karenina let me say why I think that this is not the whole answer to the question. I will do this by referring to what is known among critics as "the puzzle of the epigraph." Notice that Tolstoy begins his novel with a quote from Paul's Epistle to the Romans 12.19, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay." (The actual quote is "Vengeance is mine, I shall repay, saith the Lord." Why Tolstoy changed the quote and dropped off reference to the agent of vengeance is actually an interesting footnote to Tolstoy's novel's moral view of the universe. It can bear some reflection if the reader is up to it.) After the novel was written and ready for publication in its original edition (four-volume book form), Tolstoy considered leaving out this epigraph. There was a sense on his part that with the growth of Levin's sections of the novel the epigraph no longer fit. Levin's section was meant to work as parallel and as counterpoint to Anna's "fall." But in what sense was the idea of vengeance meant to be the epigraph for the novel as a whole. Much later, during the period of Tolstoy's renunciation of the novel form, he briefly reflected on the reason he let the epigraph remain: "I chose that epigraph simply, as I already said, in order to explain the idea that the bad things man does have as their consequence all the bitter things, which come not from people, but from God, and that is what Anna Karenina herself experienced." One can see from this comment that from Tolstoy's point of view the novel was still Anna's story, both the aesthetic architecture of the story and the moral force of its conclusion could only make sense if the novel is given to Anna's fall. (As a side note I agree with you that Levin is the "stronger" character, if by stronger you mean that he is represented as morally stronger. But I would argue that Anna is the stronger artistic realization. This is a matter of taste of course and as the Latin saying goes, there is no arguing with taste.)

It is also significant from this point of view that Levin's final chapters, the chapters that deal with Levin's revelations were written long after the rest of the novel was finished. In fact Levin's epilogue was not published in Russky Vestnik for political reasons. Tolstoy wrote the final section because he felt he needed the counterpoint as an approach to a solution - it is a dangling and inconclusive solution - to Anna's moral plight and what Tolstoy considered the problem of the reader's sympathy for Anna as a character. So this is the simple answer. For Tolstoy, the novel was still Anna's novel. No matter how much the novel had changed in the course of its writing, from Tolstoy's point of view, the only way the novel could have "moral depth," instead of being a form of "aesthetic fluff," is if we interpret the novel as the vengeance of the "universe" upon Anna. The title of the novel, as well as the novel's epigraph, reflects Tolstoy's original "moral project" to create a work of art that would show how Anna reaped "the bitter things" from the bad she had sown.

The Failed "Moral Project" of Anna Karenina
Now, demonstrably, our reaction as readers to the novel, and the reaction of readers at the time, shows that Tolstoy failed in his "moral project." As a result of his "failure" Tolstoy produced a great work of art. It was partially this realization that eventually led to his renunciation of the novel form, until the last few years of his life. The moral universe which Tolstoy intended to construct in Anna Karenina was one in which the "feeling" of Schopenhauer's metaphysics and the retributive "balance" of Kant's metaphysics would be combined with the moral revelation of the New Testament. All of this was simply to be shown to the reader. The reader would feel it and know it. With out such an ambition, Tolstoy must have thought at the time, what was the use of engaging in this child's play of telling a story?

So these reflections lead to the deeper question of the author's "intentions." We live in an age where "theorists" of literature have questioned the very concept of the "author." Many of the professorate would consider the notion of writing about an author's intentions as a way of exploring some aspect of a novel as a childish way of going about a discussion. But since I neither believe in "literary theory" or in the "professionalization" of reading, I will venture into the territory of "authorial intentions." I believe by thinking about authorial intentions we are able to gain access into the background of a novel and are able to express the contingent aspects of a work, the aspects that derive from a writer's choices in the struggle to create.

The Anti-Madame Bovary"
Anna Karenina was partially written as Tolstoy's moral response to Flaubert's aesthetically intricate Madame Bovary. It seemed to Tolstoy that the very artistic success of Flaubert's novel was a problem, simply because of what he considered its moral vacuity. The novel for Tolstoy was not necessarily an art form to be respected. Tolstoy looked at the novel with some of the suspicion one might look at say a television series such as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." It might be enjoyable but how could anyone ever call it "art"? And in the end doesn't it simply degrade our morals? In other words "Anna" was written from within Tolstoy's own ambivalent response to the very idea of "art" and the "novel." Again I must urge you to keep in mind that this was an author who would end up by renouncing the novel as an art form and declaring that it could only promote immorality. And yet Tolstoy's response to Flaubert was on many levels. He recognized a number of great aspects to the novel: it's high level of "realism," its intricate structure, its "god-like" observation of the little figures in a small provincial town, the ability to reveal the pettiness of Emma Bovary's thoughts while still remaining above the consciousness of the character. It is safe to say that Tolstoy was both enthralled and repelled by Madame Bovary. He saw that Flaubert's ability to reveal the consciousness of Madame Bovary -- to delicately analyze her delusions, to show how those delusions were derived from common ideas and cheap "romance" literature, to trace the development in a rather dull convent girl of the idolatry of "heightened experience" in "love" and adventure - all of this was an accomplishment that could only be achieved by the control of a great artist. But what was the point of this story? Was it simply art for art's sake? Was it an artists little joke on the petty bourgeois mind that accepted literature as mere entertainment? For Tolstoy, if a story was just a story, then it wasn't worth writing.

Tolstoy conceived of Anna Karenina in this artistic context. The novel had to show what a novelist such as Flaubert would never show, the moral arc of the universe, that would show that the "bad things man does have as their consequences, all the bitter things." Unlike War and Peace, which was not "designed" as a "work of art," but where the point of the novel was to show how individuals were "in" history, Anna Karenina would create an artistic architecture, so deftly created by Flaubert, to reveal the "true reality" of the "bad things" and the "bitter things" of the moral universe. If Tolstoy could do this then he could prove the worth of the art form of the novel. His own moral vision necessitated that he show the worth of the novel form to himself in order to justify the time he spent writing stories.

There is so much more I can write about this topic but I must close with a few specific observations and then the larger point about how a strong artist is never contained by his intentions.

Tolstoy's Paradoxical Task and the Symptom of His Failure
If the reader will remember from the story, Anna is riding on a train, coming home from her visit with her brother Oblonsky. She has met Vronsky at a ball, turned Vronsky's head away from Kitty and then fled for home in fear of her own desires. On the train she is reading a novel. She is yearning for the adventures that such novels seem to promise. The novel that Tolstoy describes Anna as reading is the kind of novel both Flaubert and Tolstoy despised but each for their own reasons - Flaubert because he believed such novels were bad artistic works and Tolstoy because he believed they were a bad moral influence. It is also the kind of novel that Emma Bovary would love to read. (Actually, Tolstoy was writing a pastiche of the novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon. The best by this author is Lady Audley's Secret and, contra Flaubert and Tolstoy, I consider the novel worth a read.) Now this is not just a reference to one of Tolstoy's sources for Anna Karenina (i.e. Madame Bovary), but is meant to show us how Tolstoy will deal with these subjects in a different way than Flaubert. Immediately after reading the novel Anna dozes and falls into a nightmare that, in the context of the novel can only be called an "omen." How in the context of this novel can we interpret the continual omens that confront Anna from almost the beginning. Unlike Flaubert, Tolstoy had a problem. Flaubert's novel was an "anti-romance" novel and so was Tolstoy's. But Tolstoy had to show that the very fact of a "novelistic imagination," of imagining one self "in" a novel was a kind of "sin" against reality. Tolstoy's paradoxical task is to produce a work of art that shows that life does not imitate art, that the novelistic structure is itself a false consciousness. Everything that the novel can give us - "heightened experience" within a profoundly shaped architecture of motifs which ends with a sense of closure - must be shown as part of what leads Anna astray. So Tolstoy has to add stories that will show the reader that Anna's imagination, that the life that is lived best is lived like a novel, is wrong. Those stories must not have closure and they must "feel" powerful for the reader. Thus the story of Levin will grow and grow along these lines and Levin's story will not end with closure but only further questions.

Anna was not meant to be a sympathetic figure. But again Tolstoy's art was stronger than his moral condemnation. He kept on trying to write Anna as a morally corrupt shrew, but the more he felt himself straining toward what he felt was the "reality" of a woman such as Anna, the more sympathetic she became. What makes a feminist reading of this novel possible is that Tolstoy saw too clearly the situation of a bright, vibrant, and strangled woman from within society, and once seeing he could not bend his insights into the box of his preconceived morality. In other words, no matter what moralistic intentions Tolstoy began with, his artistic integrity, his constant straining to get it right, led him to write a novel that is more than God's vengeance upon Anna. And yet in his mind, unless he wrote such a novel Anna Karenina could not be a success. Thus the title is a symptom of his original intention.

The Symptom of the Author's Intention: The Reader's Counter-factual
Which brings me to what we do as readers. More specifically, to why I think it is important to speak of the intentions of the author in the way I have above. I believe those intentions can be seen as symptoms through out the structure of a great work. They are symptoms of how we as readers later struggle to recreate the work of art in our own minds. Your question, dear reader, was a perception of a symptom of Tolstoy's intention. Your very simple question - "Why is the novel entitled Anna Karenina and not something else?" - was actually a hidden perception of how the aesthetic structure of this novel is in constant tension with the novel's moral expression. Other critics have felt the symptom of Tolstoy's intention in the "puzzle of the epigraph." Even when we have no direct evidence of an author's intention, it is sometimes impossible to express the contingency of artistic choice of an author without tracing the shadow of what that author might have done otherwise and why, this choice was made instead of another. The construction of the "author's intention" within the reader's mind is like a careful thought experiment or counter-factual, which allows the reader to imagine the artistic choices from within the novel, and thus to understand better how the novel works. A good reader will not brush aside these symptoms of the author's intentions but will try to see them and experience them as part of the fullness of the struggle to communicate our experience of the world in stories and art.

Jerry Monaco
26 January, 2005
New York
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco

I am going to post this now without rereading. I will edit later. Reader forgive me for the typos and the syntax.




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.