In July 1936, Sotheby’s sold the so-called Portsmouth Papers – an unordered corpus of manuscripts in Isaac Newton’s own hand, including his extensive alchemical writings, which until then had attracted little scholarly attention. John Maynard Keynes, an avid collector of art and manuscripts, bought them. He revered Newton, regarding him as the embodiment of the rationalisation of scholarly inquiry. It is likely that Keynes saw himself as standing in Newton’s tradition when, having studied mathematics and written his doctoral dissertation in that discipline, he attempted to place economics on a new foundation.

One can imagine the economist’s astonishment when he was able, for the first time, to witness the depth and seriousness of Newton’s alchemical studies. Keynes surmised that these studies possessed “beyond doubt, no substantial value whatever except as a fascinating sidelight on the mind of our greatest genius,” since they documented, in “extensive records”, Newton’s comprehensive alchemical pursuits. “It is utterly impossible to deny that it is wholly magical and wholly devoid of scientific value; and also impossible not to admit that Newton devoted years of work to it.” Keynes was equally struck by the care – indeed, the methodological rigour – with which Newton had pursued his magical speculations: “There was extreme method in his madness. All his unpublished works on esoteric and theological matters are marked by careful learning, accurate method and extreme sobriety of statement. They are just as sane as the Principia, if their whole matter and purpose were not magical.”

At least since the emergence of modern conceptions of rigorous scholarly inquiry, Newton had been regarded as “the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason”. Yet anyone who had read the Portsmouth Papers, Keynes argued, could no longer sustain this classification: “I do not think any one who has pored over the contents of that box […] can see him like that.” Newton was, in Keynes’s words, “clearly an unbridled addict” to magic and alchemy. The Newton who emerges from these writings is not the first of the rational scientists but “the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians – […] Copernicus and Faustus in one.”

Like Newton, Keynes undoubtedly belonged, within his own discipline, to those thinkers whom Foucault once termed fondateurs de discursivité. Such figures are not merely authors of works: “Ils ont produit quelque chose de plus: la possibilité et la règle de formation d’autres textes. […] [I]ls ont établi une possibilité indéfinie de discours.” Keynes’s thought dominated political economy for a time. In 1965, even the anti-Keynesian economist Milton Friedman quipped: “We are all Keynesians now.” Yet this assessment later gave way to criticism. The Stanford economist Robert Barro has gone so far as to claim that “[t]here is no meaningful theoretical or empirical support for the Keynesian position”. Future generations may well take yet another view of the ideas of Keynes, Newton, and all earlier great thinkers. One can imagine a world in which Newton’s alchemy is valued more highly than his physical and mathematical work; and one need hardly strain one’s imagination to trace the rise and fall of Keynesianism’s reputation.

What, then, does all this imply for the epistemological and methodological status of Newton’s thinking, Keynes’s thinking, or our own today? Was Newton simply mistaken in his alchemical writings – was he merely dabbling? Are economists correct about Keynes half of the time and mistaken the other half?

Proceeding from these introductory reflections, I will critique the project of a general theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry (what Germans call Wissenschaftstheorie) using the figure of reflexivity. I understand critique here as a procedure that seeks to ceaselessly subdivide its object and thereby complicate it. This specific conception of critique is restless and – crucially – self-reflexive. It must carry on endlessly and thereby be brought to bear against every distinction it has itself drawn.

Against a generalised theory of knowledge and scholarly inquiry, I will contrast an historically unsettled concept of epistemology. It will prove less determinate and less clear. Ultimately, however, it points toward an optimistic understanding of inquiry – one that has not merely come to terms with the historical contingency, restlessness, and endlessness of the epistemic process but can even experience them as liberating.

Unsettling history

In their global anthropological study of human societies in the distant past, David Graeber and David Wengrow demonstrate that a teleology according to which humanity progressively refines its social, epistemic, and cultural concepts and practices is historically untenable. Anglo-American discourse has a term for this view against which Graeber and Wengrow write: Whig history. It denotes, essentially, a Eurocentric perspective on history that takes the present, with all its achievements, as its telos. From this vantage point, historical development appears almost inevitably to culminate in the (undoubtedly valuable) norms of contemporary Western modernity. Seen this way, the history of knowledge becomes a narrative of linear progress, gradual enlightenment, and the disenchantment of the world. Past knowledge is judged in the light of its modern counterpart. Where past thinkers fell short of the insights of the enlightened present, Whig history explains this primarily by their lack of intellectual capacity or by the insufficient state of knowledge of their time. As Paul Feyerabend once put it: “Thus in retrospect everything becomes more simplistic, and we do not learn anything about the manifold and often very surprising coincidences, without which philosophy and the sciences would not have been possible in the first place.”

By contrast, Graeber and Wengrow show that although human beings throughout the history of the species were subject to very different conditions, which produced different modes of perceiving the world, the epistemic, cultural, and political ideas and practices of early human history – so far as we can reconstruct them today – were at times comparable in complexity to those of the present. In this way, a “completely new account of how human societies developed over roughly the last 30,000 years” emerges. The authors invite the reader to adopt a transformed, anti-teleological and anti-evolutionist view of history, “one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity.”

From studies such as these, we learn that alternative worldviews – such as the natural philosophies and myths of earlier epochs – do not necessarily fall short of our own worldviews in terms of developmental level or complexity. They should not be read in a primitivist manner, nor dismissed as erroneous, dysfunctional, or merely fantastical. Such scientific self-righteousness from a modern vantage point overlooks the fact that our own perceptions and interpretations will one day presumably appear just as outdated to our descendants as those of our predecessors do to us. Once we understand that human cognitive capacities were not necessarily weaker in different local historical constellations but simply different, we should also assess more cautiously the epistemic prospects of an abstract, rigid philosophy of knowledge. There is no super-theory that, from an Archimedean point, can deliver correct knowledge on the basis of invariant, objective, and time-independent criteria. The value of a theory cannot lie in its correspondence with a rigid external standard (for example, “truth”), but only in its always provisional, culture- and time-specific fit with human needs. Different approaches – whether within a single discipline or across disciplines – are better treated as different tools, “as little in need of synthesis as are paintbrushes and crowbars.” Even scientific thinking operates according to criteria of situational, often provisional fruitfulness.

Those who set out to reconstruct a contemporary scholarly practice should beware of taking its self-description at face value. Every discipline has the capacity to conceal its own illusions behind a fog that it itself generates – and that also envelops its own practitioners. A general theory of knowledge and inquiry that seeks to approach this will have to relinquish, to some extent, its illusion of pure contemplation. More than that, it must accept that it will absorb its object, perhaps even consume it entirely. But this is also an epiphanic self-consumption of theory itself: once an object has been brought fully and accurately into theoretical view, theory and phenomenon collapse into one, and the object of theory is aufgehoben in its contemplation. Theory is therefore not merely speaking about or thinking of something; it intervenes in the event of being itself. A theoretical relation to the world is always a transformed – and transforming – relation to the world.

For concrete scholarly work, this means that we – reflexively – should sharpen our senses for ruptures, resistances, and fragmentations that ultimately unsettle our very own position. The price to be paid for such epistemological pluralisation is polyphony and discontinuity. Where one previously felt secure in one’s place within a designated coordinate system, an entirely new, deterritorialised topology opens up – marked by contradictions, overlaps, and proliferations. This multiplication should not be understood as a threat to knowledge and understanding. Rather, it calls for exploration, for opening dead ends. It clears the space so that we may go on and free thought itself from the contemplation, reflection, or communication of eternal values, transcendentals, or universals.

Jurisprudence occupies an ambivalent position here. On the one hand, law is the instrument through which freedom and equality can be realised. On the other hand, it justifies and stabilises an often manifestly unjust status quo. If we calibrate our expectations of law’s capacity on the basis of a theory of scholarly inquiry grounded in sharp clarity across all domains, we will frame the concerns we bring to law in a rigid and uncompromising manner, rather than leaving them open. Instead, the “decidedly artificial” character of legal enclosures should not be concealed but, on the contrary, displayed, continually demonstrating that in the world of law everything could remain as it is – or be entirely different.

Unsettling scholars

Seen from this vantage point, the question of who pursues a scholarly question becomes equally as relevant as its objects, purported methods, and so on. The scholars of the Western canon sometimes erred not only in matters of scholarship itself but also in morals – at times closely connected to their intellectual work. John Locke owned shares in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company and helped draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which granted every American slaveholder in the province of Carolina “absolute power and authority over his negro slaves”. Hannah Arendt disparaged non-Ashkenazi Jews as oriental and inferior, repeatedly referred to Black Africans as “savages”, and criticised the civil rights movement as excessive and prone to violence. A number of French intellectuals, including Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida (all personal heroes of mine), de Beauvoir, and Sartre, signed a 1977 petition to Parliament calling for the abolition of laws on sexual majority, particularly age-of-consent protections. Louis Althusser strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, in 1980 and claimed in his autobiography that he had thereby done her a service.

One can presumably condemn slavery, racism, antisemitism, the demand to extend sexual maturity to children, and femicide – yet still read all of the authors mentioned. Intellectual history may then ask how biographical facts and patterns of thought relate to one another within a particular, as precisely delimited historical context as possible, or at least explore possible connections. It examines how objects of knowledge and domains of cognition depend on historically contingent arrangements. Apparently, epistemic systems encode blindnesses that prevent even brilliant thinkers from seeing certain forms of harm.

This leads to a different kind of epistemology – one that asks not about the correctness of grand theoretical edifices in the narrow sense, nor one that sets standards for their construction or demolition. Rather, it explores the conditions of thought as comprehensively as possible and works out how particular people, at particular times, thought about particular questions. Even the “why” must be handled with care.

An optimistic outlook

An epistemology thus conceived is less a path to self-assurance than to self-unsettlement. But this should make us optimistic. We no longer need to argue about whether this or that attempt to think about something counts as “scholarly” in the strict sense. We might “substitute Freedom for Truth as the goal of thinking,” to put it with Richard Rorty. Thus, in a Nietzschean manner, we can ask other questions of those who call themselves scholars: Where does this lead us? Where does your thinking come from? What does it bring with it, and what does it exclude? Do we like that? Why? Does it allow us to see something anew, or more sharply?

It may be that all that remains for us is to circle again and again around ultimately the same questions – questions we may never resolve. But is that so bad? If we succeed in continually reformulating our striving for knowledge in ways that mean something to people at particular times and in particular places, would that not be enough? Exploring what Joel Modiri, among the first cohort of fellows at our newly founded Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex, during his stay with us in Berlin once aptly referred to as “the éros of research”, the sheer joy of scholarly curiosity, is a worthwhile undertaking in and of itself.