The last two years have dramatically shown how important the question of the connection between science and politics is. Never before have we heard rallying cries like “follow the science” and never before has a specialist field—virology—had such a dramatic impact on the lives of pretty much every single person on the planet.
In this regard, the most important recent book that came to my attention is the 2020 publication “Science and Human Freedom” by the German Philosopher Michael Esfeld (University of Lausanne). The book is a treatise that cuts in a somewhat unexpected way to the heart of the science-politics nexus. It asks the epistemological question of how much can be known through science, and if science can give normative instructions for our actions? This matters a great deal because, as Esfeld reminds us “the question what one should believe arises in the same way as the question how one should act. Consequently, both what one believes and what one does is subject to a justification in the sense of giving and asking for reasons.” (p 168).
Esfeld takes the question apart in its logical and metaphysical components, boiling it down to where he sees the root of the problem. In a nutshell, there is something that Esfeld calls “the scientific worldview” which understands science as the figuring out of the laws of the universe that guide the interaction between the particles that form reality. All specialized sciences are but macroscopic add-ons to the underlying atomist belief in an observer-independent reality of interacting particles. Accepting the minimally sufficient metaphysics of the world being only particles and movement, it might seem that one is forced into the conclusion that the universe itself in its course of action is already fixed and we are only witnessing its unfolding. Just as the music of the street organ player is already fixed, only awaiting it’s playing out along the axis of time. This belief underlies a particular understanding of science as the discipline that unveils the mechanical workings of the determined universe. Science, in this worldview, is the discipline that can generate unquestionable foresight about “what happens tomorrow if we do x today?” As long as we get the mechanics right, we can know the future with certainty, or at least with a very high degree of certainty. This is the intellectual fundament of the idea “follow the science” to which one should add “because real science is infallible.”
But this understanding of science does away with a crucial component that one might want to preserve; free will. In a determined universe, no freedom to take decisions is possible since the outcome of one’s actions is set from a time long before birth. Esfeld offers nothing less than a solution to the problem of scientific determinism by holding that causality does not necessarily go only forward in time: “one can with good reason maintain the following: first comes the motion of the matter, then come the laws and the dynamical parameters that are needed over and above the primitive ones to determine initial conditions that enter into the laws. Thus, the motion that actually occurs, including the behaviour of persons that is the expression of their free will, fixes the laws and the dynamical parameters that figure in the initial conditions.” (p. 167). Although Esfeld’s notion might sound counterintuitive at first or even create a form of a dualism between the determined universe and an undetermined free will, his arguments for this conclusion are highly relevant and worth reading.
At the end of the day, the question we are facing is whether we want to believe in a determined universe in which all past and future is fixed already or if we want to hold that free will “is a thing” and that it can alter the course of history. If the second is the case, we cannot and must not believe that science somehow has a magic wand that can tell us with absolute certainty how the future will be, based on certain parameters and “infallible” models. The future is contingent even when it comes to something as mechanistic as the spread of disease, especially when human free will becomes part of the equation.
This is where Esfeld’s work is valuable to the current debate about science and politics. Following his logic, one must agree that science cannot give normative answers. It cannot answer the question “how should we act?” It can only give options for “how can we act?” The should-question is simply not part of the realm of science but belongs to the sphere of the speculative mind which must take into consideration non-scientific—but equally important—disciplines like ethics, law, philosophy, history, aesthetics, religion, and others. In short, “follow the science” is a misguided belief in something that can only be called “scientism” because it misunderstands the realm of the applicability of science. “The science” as a unitary actor in the political process, is itself a politicization of science and an abuse of popular trust in the discipline of reason. Even worse, “follow the science” demands the subjugation of free will (and the critical mind) to a higher truth, only accessible to the few. This is a recipe for social disaster. We must thank thinkers like Michael Esfeld for pointing out these flaws in our perceptions of science through his fundamental philosophical reflections.
I highly recommend reading “Science and Human Freedom” as well as watching an interview with Dr. Esfeld about the implications of his thinking on the current crisis of science.
Dr. Pascal Lottaz was born in 1985, in Fribourg, Switzerland. At the age of eighteen, he spent one year at a Japanese High School, in Wakayama prefecture. He studied Philosophy and History at The University of Fribourg and came to Tokyo for the first time in 2010 for an internship at the Minato City Office. He has obtained a master’s degree in Public Policy (2012) and a PhD in International Relations (2018), both at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Roppongi. Since 2019, Pascal is Assistant Professor for Neutrality Studies at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study.