“ [The radical version of positivism] is an attempt to consolidate science as a self‑sufficient activity, which exhausts all the possible ways of appropriating the world intellectually. In this radical positivist view, the realities of the world – which can, of course, be interpreted by natural science, but which are in addition an object of man’s “existential curiosity,” a source of fear or disquiet, an occasion for commitment or rejection – if they are to be encompassed by reflection and expressed in words, can be reduced to their empirical properties. Suffering, death, ideological conflict, social clashes, antithetical values of any kind – all are declared out of bounds, matters we can only be silent about, in obedience to the principle of verifiability. Positivism so understood is an act of escape from commitments, an escape masked as a definition of knowledge, invalidating all such matters as mere figments of the imagination stemming from intellectual laziness. Positivism in this sense is the escapist’s design for living, a life voluntarily cut off from participation in anything that cannot be correctly formulated. The language it imposes exempts us from the duty of speaking up in life’s most important conflicts, encases us in a kind of armor of indifference to the ineffabilia mundi, the indescribable qualitative data of experience.
Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009): The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought (translated by Norbert Guterman) (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
