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Paul Feyerabend: Conquest of Abundance - Vs - The Richness of Being
Paul Feyerabend: Conquest of Abundance - Vs - The Richness of Being
Feyerabend. Ed. Bert Terpstra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 285 pp. $17.00
(trade paperback).
Bryan Lindenberger
New Mexico State University
English 510
“How is it that views that reduce abundance and devalue human existence can become so
powerful?” (16). Paul Feyerabend, professor of philosophy at Berkeley and best known for his
books Against Method (1975) and Farewell to Reason (1987), introduces this question as the
Conquest in fact answers that question in great detail, following an historical tract that leads from
the worldviews of ancient Greece (Homer) to Classical Greece (Plato, Xenophanes) and onward
To say that Feyerabend answers his own question— a simple rewording could ask, “How
has the template of ‘scientific method’come to limit our perception of the world?— does not
mean to suggest that he offers a set of solutions to the implied problem. His view of history
reminds the reader of the “Butterfly Effect”— chaos theorist Edward Lorenz’s notion that the
flutter of a butterfly’s wings on one continent can lead to a hurricane on another. In Conquest,
Feyerabend lays out a record of the West where a seemingly unlikely event builds into a great
force, with implications in communication, science, and our views of reality. The drawback is
that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings becomes insignificant within the tempest of its own
creation; Feyerabend presents a world consumed, where subtleties and complexities are lost to a
will note the Feyerabend’s work finds utility and purpose in a diversity of fields. I found in
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researching his book citations in academic and popular works that ranged from the metaphysical
to the pedagogical, from Dadaistic diatribes to the philosophy of science. For those who study
language and its limiting effects on the way we think and reason, Feyerabend adds that
“language is not the only ‘conspiracy’… .Humans paint, produce films and videos; they dance,
dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build
houses, start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons— and so on. All these activities occur in a
fairly regular way; they contain patterns, ‘press’the practitioners ‘to conform’and in this way
mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities” (28).
According to Feyerabend, emphasis on the aggregate rather than the exception imposes limits on
Part One
We can occasionally explain why crude ideas get the upper hand: special groups want to create a
new tribal identity or preserve an existing identity amidst a rich and varied cultural landscape; to
do so, they ‘block off’large parts of the landscape and either cease to talk about them, or deny
their ‘reality,’or declare them to be wholly evil (13).
The published form of the “complete” manuscript exists today in a single section, with
the unwritten second portion substituted by series of contemporaneous essays. Section 1 of Part
One, “Achilles’Passionate Conjecture,” argues that modern philosophy, scientific method, and
the arts have set limits on our view of the world, and that these limits have become so deeply
imbedded in our reasoning, that we don’t realize they are there. Feyerabend uses a speech by
Achilles as a launching point. Culled from The Iliad, the content of Achilles’speech matters less
than the fact that the god attempts to articulate a message that does not fit the template of current
(ancient) Greek thought. He has stepped outside the box, relaying a point of view that falls so far
outside the fashion and mores of the time that it seems nonsensical to his listeners. Feyerabend
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rejoins, “One theory that that has become rather popular assumes that languages, cultures, stages
in the development of a profession, a tribe, or a nation are closed in the sense that certain events
transcend their capacities. Languages, for example, are restrained by rules” (20). Had not the
Greeks granted Achilles’a status as god, his speech might have found dismissal as so much
gibberish. In fact, Achilles was a god, and his speech served as a “butterfly moment” for western
culture as his audience groped to find the meaning of his words. History changed. As told by
Feyerabend:
But to say that we all can “potentially” communicate does not necessarily imply that we all do.
Feyerabend notes that we communicate when the need arises. Such need might arise from
seemingly nonsensical speech from the lips of a deity. Change, further understanding of the
world around us, takes place not in the cultural or currently popular templates we use to mold
reality, but in the exceptions to the rule, the things that just don’t quite fit into our current
“worldview.” Feyerabend notes that we can ignore, dismiss, or even legislate away these
to understand them.
The remainder of Part One expands upon Achilles’ speech, tackling issues of science,
religion, and philosophy— in fact, our evolving (or devolving) view of reality. “Abundance”
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gives way to clumsy, monolithic ways of thinking with false dichotomies and an almost fervent
ability to dismiss the richness of the world standing at the forefront. For instance, Feyerabend
looks at the historical trend toward monotheism as one example. He turns to Classical Greece,
when many gods existed with distinct personalities and frailties. The amalgamation of Greek
city-states into larger states inevitably led to the consolidation of their respective gods, where the
people “emphasized their similarities over the differences” (53). A single “God” resulted, and it
lacked the human characteristics and foibles of Hera, Prometheus, or even Zeus. According to
Xenophanes, this new “God” existed as all-knowing, all-being, “[a]lways without any movement
he remains in a single location… .he moves all that is” (53). Feyerabend refers to this apparition
repeatedly as a “monster” and just one example of how diversity and “abundance” fell under the
weight of abstraction. (Feyerabend further details how this new “monster” entity of pure “being”
led to the concept of “non-being” and ultimately the false dichotomies of ancient Greece which
Despite this avalanche, this seemingly inevitable “snowballing” of events over time,
Feyerabend does strongly suggest that we don’t live in a mechanical, pre-determined world. He
writes:
Still, a look at history shows that this world is not a static world populated by thinking (and
publishing) ants who, crawling all over its crevices, gradually discover its features without
affecting them in any way. It is a dynamical and multifaceted Being which influences and reflects
the activity of its explorers. It was once full of Gods; it then became a drab and material world’
and it can be changed again, if its inhabitants have the determination, the intelligence, and the
heart to take the necessary steps (146).
Feyerabend thus offers hope, but no specific solutions or methods to the dilemma of a “drab and material
Part Two
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As mentioned, Paul Feyerabend died before completing the manuscript. But before
viewing the work as hopelessly unfinished— or worse, before we construct from the groundwork
Paul Feyerabend laid and try to follow, cult-like, to a conclusion that answers the questions of
“Life, the Universe, and Everything”1— let’s remember Feyerabend’s own sense of humor in the
whole endeavor. He sets us up to fall several times in his argument. For instance, he draws the
incautious reader into cultural analyses of an event only to later reveal that the historical and
social milieu used in the argument occurred, in fact, centuries before the event itself— a means
by which Feyerabend cautions us to question comfortable conclusions sculpted from data2. (That
is, he warns that researchers of any ilk may construct very complex theories to achieve pre-
determined conclusions, which may have more to do with popular or culturally defined
What we have instead of a neatly-wrapped narrative metaphor to help codify the first
portion of the book is instead a series of essays, chosen by editor Bert Terpstra, and written
concurrently with Conquest of Abundance. Essay subjects present the range of Feyerabend’s
current interests, ranging from “Realism and the History of Knowledge” to “Aristotle,”
“Universals as Tyrants and Mediators” and “Art as a Product of Nature as a Work of Art.” These
works serve as artifacts— glimpses of where Feyerabend had gone, and some idea of maybe
where he “was going” with the unfinished manuscript. Even the most mildly curious human
could find pet loves and erudite references to latch onto. For me, the no less than four references
1
The title of a popular book (1982) by Douglas Adams, a frequent cross-reference with Feyerabend along with
Buckminster Fuller, Robert Anton Wilson, Erwin Schroedinger, George Carlin, and a range of other recent
“philosophers.”
2
The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges posed a similar critique of literary analysis in “Pierre Menard, Author
of Don Quixote” by presenting an author who intended to re-write Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the 20th Century.
What circumstances, we ask, would lead an author to write those exact words in the postmodern world? The
implication of Borges (and of Feyerabend) is that we posit comfortable, well-suited meaning to our analysis,
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to Halton Arp (the once-renowned astronomer and professor who questioned the “pure
mathematics” of quantum physics as applied to large mechanical systems and found himself
exiled from the North American university system3) served as a foundation for my interests. Yet
to say that Conquest speaks to an abundance of fields does not mean that it serves a broad
audience. Those who find comfort in the predictability of their chosen reality, their chosen field,
will not relate; those who find predictable results occurring with increasing frequency throughout
their careers and pause at night to wonder “What Am I Missing Here?” will discover a gold mine
in Feyerabend’s reasoning, as did earlier review writers and those who extensively cite
Feyerabend’s work.
“Feyerabend bemoans the uncritical acceptance of precise concepts and rules that, if
Tadajewski, a research student at the University of Leicester. A writer from Princeton asks,
“What audience does this author constitute for himself, as intended target? An educated audience
[though] Feyerabend wears his learning lightly… .The conquest in the end is a sham conquest, an
illusory victory for the forces of abstracting intellect.”5 Conquest of Abundance does not rebuke
science. In fact, Feyerabend reminds us at turns of great accomplishments that have come of
science. Nor does Feyerabend attack the reasoning of historical figures with whom he apparently
disagrees (or, more often, in whose proclamations he finds contradictions). Rather, he takes issue
with a general historical trend that leads to greater generalizations (abstractions) in our
perception (our making) of the world around us. “Early Chinese thinkers,” says Paul Feyerabend,
“had taken empirical variety at face value. They had favored diversification and had collected
anomalies instead of trying to explain them away” (165). As with the Babylonians studying lunar
eclipses— those phenomenal exceptions to the rule of a routine, predictable, and hegemonic
universe— Feyerabend finds in empirical anomalies and the apparently useless glitches that
researchers trim like statistical fat at the outer limits of Bell’s curve, a view of an abundant
world, and one that leads to leaps in scientific, cultural, and in fact human progress.
5
Bas C. van Fraassen, “The Sham Victory of Abstraction: Review of Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance.” Times
Literary Supplement 5073: June 23, 2000, 10-11.