#positivism

Even if there have been and are critics rationalism, positivism, and the subject-object division continue to influence the social sciences and thought strongly today. Building on these critiques, Abdullah Öcalan has formulated a foundational critique of these methods of social sciences in his prison writings. He believes them to be inappropriate, even dangerous. Some of the important points of his critique are: Along with rationalism, analytical thought was separated from ethical values, empathy, and social responsibility. These methods allowed for the construction of logical lines of reasoning and calculations whose ways — appropriate to respective interests and its logic — could reach dimensions of genocides, feminicide, the destruction of nature, from Fukushima to Hiroshima to Auschwitz. In order to explain society and find solutions to problems, Öcalan pleads for a synthesis of analytical and emotional reason. For, not the logic of application, but the ethics of a democratic-ecological and gender-libertarian society ought to be the point of reference for social scientific thought. In this course, it needs to be considered that knowledge has objective and subjective sides — consciousness and wisdom result from the encounter of the observed and the observer after all. In this relationship there is no subject and object — but rather an encounter. In his critique of positivism, Öcalan especially points to the danger of describing history and social development by “law of nature” and linear, mathematical formulas or in perceiving it as a mere amassment of facts: The dogmas of “objective thought” and “universality” deny society’s diversity, will and ability to act. When events — separated from the social and historical context — are isolated and observed externally aim, cause and impact remain unclear. The exaggerated split into different scientific disciplines and subjects also contributes to this. It has turned out that social sciences that merely string together and describe facts do not serve to resolve social problems. Öcalan evaluates the dualism of splitting society into subjects and objects, us and them, body and soul, god and slave, dead and live, etc. as another mean to assert domination. The existence of transitions between categories and the social diversity beyond these categories are denied this way. Öcalan further describes that this domination principle was historically first used to legitimize patriarchal domination. Later on, the same method was used for the “economic” legitimization of class domination, racism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. According to him, the Marxist dualist interpretation of social development by “antagonistic contradictions” in which one class fully defeats the other has proven to be insufficient. The dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis causes changes, but not necessarily a classless, communist society! History cannot be analysed as “closed chapters” or only from the perspective of the rulers. Because history — in which there have always been struggles from freedom as well — continues to impact the present. Referring to Adorno’s claim “Wrong life can not be lived rightly”, Öcalan emphasizes the importance of methodology. A method cannot be treated isolated from its conception and the interests connected to it. Therefore, a method is necessary which is in harmony with the aim of a free society. Appropriate methods to seek the truth need to be found, without ending in a method-inflation (in the sense that “Everyone seeks for their own truth”).

[...] [T]he projection of British imperial power and the accumulation of Enlightenment knowledge about the extra-European portions of the globe in the late eighteenth century were intertwined endeavors. On the one hand, British imperialism fabricated a sense of difference that marked colonizable geographies as not only different from but also inferior to an imagined metropolitan center. On the other hand, eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking hyper-valuated the leitmotifs of progress and reason. The result was a near-frenzied intellectual quest — what Michel Foucault pointedly labeled a taxonomic impulse — to order the world, to classify people and societies, to study the progressive advance of reason in world history, and to understand and explain why some cultures (namely those of western Europe) had reached reason's pinnacle while others had not.

Pitiful positivism