Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know and what is there to know? Throughout the history of philosophy, there have been two principal forms of knowledge: moral knowledge, or knowledge of the “interior” world of the heart, and material knowledge, or knowledge of the “exterior” world of nature which is, today, more or less called scientific knowledge. Throughout history, there has often been a seesaw of conflict between philosophers and philosophies over which form of knowledge mattered more, or if one form of knowledge can even be considered knowledge. Today, we live in a world dominated by scientific knowledge at the expense of moral knowledge, moral knowledge is diminished and dismissed, often scoffed at, yet the history of philosophy reveals the extent to which this was a principal concern from the time of the Greeks and Christians through the Enlightenment and modern period.
Moral knowledge, to put it crudely, concerns itself with “right” and “wrong.” More appropriately, moral knowledge is how we are to relate with others. Moral knowledge, therefore, rests on several axiomatic points that a student of philosophy may not initially realize. First: we do not exist independent of the world, we exist in a world with others and most likely for others. The notion that we exist with others is a product of the insight of Greek philosophy: we are social animals, we live in communities, or what the Greeks called the polis, the city, and we therefore have duties and responsibilities as a result of this social nature. The notion that we exist for others is the revelation of Christian theology; because God is love, and love exists to create and unite, being made in the image of love—God—means that we exist to be united for others to help them love. As Saint Augustine famously expressed, we exist in love for love. Love is the very nature of humanity. We therefore exist for others to help them love and be loved. Combined, the existing with others and for others led to the developments of philosophies of moral knowledge, which we sometimes reduce to “ethics.” Second: we exist for virtue, and virtue is acquired by coming into contact with others. While this notion embedded in the philosophies of moral knowledge have their antecedent roots in Aristotle, this idea was prevalent during the early modern period of the Enlightenment and is expressed by philosophers like Adam Smith, the famous father of modern economics, in his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments. According to Smith, there exists in man a moral sense, which we principally feel when encountering others, which leads us to act ethically, or morally, with others, by which we become more virtuous persons as a result. As we can see, moral philosophy isn’t really about “right” and “wrong” in the positive and negative sense, it is really about how we relate with others (and ourselves). This knowledge of how to relate to others is what has been identified as moral knowledge.
Scientific Knowledge, and here I use that term in its modern usage following the “Scientific Revolution” of the early modern age, is not concerned with moral knowledge. This is not to say that natural scientists in the past were not concerned with moral knowledge, but it is to say that the focus of study is not concerned with the interior world of the human heart but rather with the outer world of matter, or nature. This has its earliest roots in pre-Socratic philosophy where philosophers like Thales and Anaximander were concerned with the physis, or nature, of existence – and they asserted that material substances had something to do with it. By the period of the Enlightenment, Scientific Knowledge became a matter of measurement. Scientific Knowledge presupposes that the material world is measurable by mathematics, and while many scientists today do not consider the implications of metaphysical mathematics, the only way that the world is knowable is through verifiable measurements—or so says Karl Popper, the most famous modern representative of the philosophy of scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge is based on empiricism, not rationalism, as that imbecile Richard Dawkins ignorantly opines despite being a scientist. In order to measure we must observe. In order to observe we must rely on our senses.
The triumph of scientific knowledge marked the triumph of empiricism over rationalism, the school of philosophy which asserted that knowledge could be known by thought alone – hence, rationalism, although for most of its history it was related to Platonic and post-Platonic ideas of intelligible forms and definitions. The famous syllogism there are no married bachelors is an example of rationalist epistemology: by definition, bachelors are not married, ipso facto there are no married bachelors. We know this by definition and do not need empirical confirmation. The triumph of scientific knowledge, however, wrought an unintentional consequence: the dismissal of moral knowledge.
This happened through the mechanistic understanding of man, a view that became prevalent in the early modern period through Francis Bacon and then the neo-materialist philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Baron d’Holbach. Since man was, by nature, an object like all other objects in the world, he too could be measured by movement. This was a corollary conclusion of Newton’s laws of physics and the rise of determinist philosophies which shunned the idea of free will as a material impossibility. As a result, moral knowledge was deemed a social construct, an idea we are very familiar with today, a relativistic creation of men and women living in social contract society to maintain a relative degree of peace and order and nothing more than that.
We, however, must be willing to ask whether this is true. Whether there is only scientific knowledge, or if there is, in fact, moral knowledge. To grant that there is moral knowledge thereby demands the questions of human nature, something that scientific knowledge and natural philosophy does not want to accede. Historically, Romanticism arose in opposition to the materialist scientism of the late Enlightenment, seeking a restoration of the moral, or sentimental, heart to existence. Even though we like to pretend otherwise, are still very much living in this long-attested dichotomy: moral knowledge vs. scientific knowledge. While there have been movements and traditions which have attempted to synthesize the two, the most famous being the natural law philosophy of Catholicism, the fact of history shows that moral knowledge and scientific knowledge have often been at odds with each other (even from within that natural law tradition developed from Catholicism). Why? Because at the root of this dichotomy is the question of metaphysics, or first principles: are humans social or moral or loving by nature or are humans merely matter in motions, object-bodies governed by the same laws of physics as all other objects are? The answer we give reveals a lot about ourselves (and probably how we do, in fact, relate with others).
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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.
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