Political Science

The reasons for the empiricism of political science multiply the more one investigates the topic, but the secularization of the Western world certainly played a prominent role. The changes that occurred during the sixteenth century called into doubt the traditional understanding of the place of humans in the world by undermining the existential authority of the church. Now humans were faced once again with the same metaphysical problem of antiquity ("why are we here?"), and the French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) gave voice to the age-old skeptical response. Interestingly, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) followed Montaigne in the seventeenth century by providing a very similar answer, though he couched it in philosophical terms. Montaigne had said that because human knowledge is in doubt and human existence correspondingly has no necessarily universal meaning, it is up to the individual to endow his or her own life with meaning based on his or her own beliefs. Descartes also believed that human knowledge was in doubt, and he too contended that the grounding point for knowledge and human existence was the individual human. Actually, the grounding point for him was reason but only insofar as individual human beings exercise reason. Descartes believed that the world was composed only of matter and mind. The mind accesses matter via the senses and reason, but the senses are faulty and therefore they give humans an imperfect understanding of matter. Reason, however, is much more trustworthy. It is more trustworthy because it focuses the mind on the eternal or universal characteristics of the things it encounters, whereas the senses focus on the mortal or particular characteristics of the things it encounters. The senses trick people into focusing on the things that change, whereas reason focuses the mind on what is universal, on the properties of the thing rather than on the thing itself.

So, one can see that even in the modern epoch philosophy focused (as did the ancients) on the relationship between the particular and the universal. Interestingly, though, in the modern epoch God dropped out of the picture. Descartes did not rely on God to provide the universalistic foundation for particularistic actions, beliefs, knowledges, and so on. Instead, for him, reason played this role. This "individualist" turn in philosophy led to some interesting problems with existence of God arguments, and some interesting solutions as well (for example, that of the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley [1685–1753]). Descartes, in other words, humanized philosophy, which opened up space for the individual. The individual's exercise of reason allowed access to an understanding of the universal properties of the material world. All of modern philosophy extends from this basic principle. The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) dealt with it in his problem of induction. Berkeley approached it with his emphasis on perception. And the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) addressed it with the synthetic a priori and the categorical imperative. Modern philosophers showed themselves to be preoccupied with epistemology, with finding a universal grounding point for knowledge in the absence of God as a unifying force. Science, accompanied by the belief that knowledge could transcend the subjective viewpoints of individual humans, ultimately emerged as an organizing principle for knowledge and, then, for society.