Some books are well worth reading and Stephen Toulmin’s books, ‘Cosmopolis’ and ‘Return to Reason’ are certainly two of these. They are both well written analyses of the historical path of the history of ideas in Western philosophy especially from the late medieval period to modernity. Toulmin is searching for a new way in which we can unite theory and practice of the human sciences and natural sciences. He wants us to turn away from, in his words, the present trend of “turning the human sciences into highly theoretical disciplines, comparable in structure to physics.” Most areas of human life, he contends, are simply not reducible to such frameworks. In the area of ethics, for example, trying to arrive at timeless universal ethical principles in the way one derives theorems in mathematics is fundamentally flawed. But Toulmin claims that this was not always the case, especially in the world before the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Toulmin traces the quest for certainty through faith in science and rationality from thinkers such as Galileo, Descartes,Newton, and Hobbes to modern thinkers. It is a quest that began in the tatters of the Thirty Years War which left a deep imprint on Descartes and Leibniz. But it was, he openly acknowledges, this tradition that eventually produced all our modern technological advancements. However, his contention is this Newton-Cartesian tradition must be balanced by the ideas of our humanist tradition. Such writers as Erasmus, Thomas More, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Montaigne are all part of this historical humanist tradition.
In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fuelling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavour, this vision contained a hidden yet persistent agenda: the delusion that human nature and society could be fitted into precise and manageable rational categories. Stephen Toulmin confronts this agenda—its illusions and its consequences for our present and future world.
Toulmin’s books are about this challenge, and he points out how today the two traditions of rationalism and reasonableness are, in fact, beginning to converge. An example of this convergence, according to Toulmin, is that prior to the Second World War in most Western countries, medicine was considered a technical issue and any moral issue arising here was usually dealt with by those qualified. When issues of morality arose, medical authorities were expected to take care of them. But today they are in the public domain and are no longer confined to professional bodies; it is everybody’s business. A specific example which he gives concerns the USarmy corps of engineers who “used to build canals and locks and cut up the countryside quite lightheartedly on the basis of technical specifications … . Now the whole question of environmental impact and ecological consequences is a central part of the public face of engineering and debate”.[1] Today everyone is concerned about the environment. There is a merging of the technical, on one side, and the reasonableness of the project for the environment, on the other, which perhaps illustrates Toulmin’s appeal to merge both the rational-technical approach with a human one based on reasonableness.
Part of the enjoyment of reading these last two books is Toulmin’s Montaignesque style; however I felt the term ‘reasonableness’ needs to be examined further. Perhaps there are cases in medical science, for example, where it may be reasonable to be absolute? In a society where the expert is dominant, Stephen Toulmin raises the interesting question of how issues can be dealt with in the public domain for all our benefits in a world where issues have become more and more complex.
[1] http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1997-03/toulmin.html