in 급진적 생물학자 (2008-2011), 아카이브 (2002-2013)

인문좌파를 위한 논증 가이드

Gary A. Olson, “Philosophy, Rhetoric,
Literary Criticism: (Inter)views (Interviews).”
Southern Illinois University
Press
(1994).


제목이 말해주듯이, 책은 철학과 수사학 그리고 문학비평을 다루고 있다. 명의 학자들의 인터뷰를 모은 것인데, 마지막 챕터는 스티븐 툴민(Stephen Toulmin)과의 인터뷰다. 초파리 연구자는 초파리 연구나 하라는 어떤 인문학 교수의 말이 문득 떠올라 툴민의 이력을 잠시 소개해보자. 툴민이 스스로 회고하듯이 그의 삶은 물리학으로 시작해서, 과학철학, 과학사, 그리고 사회학과 과학의 정치학, 그리고 마지막으로 지성사의 진행과정 속에서 정밀과학의 위치를 탐구해간 여정이다. 툴민의 입으로 들어보자귀찮아서 번역은 하지 않겠다. 영국에서 공부한 영문과 교수에게(본인은
문화이론 전공자라고 우기지만 뭐. 영문법 책도 냈던데 뭐) 툴민의 영어가 그다지 어려울 같지는 않다.

I started in the exact sciences, then moved
to the philosophy of science, then to the history of science, then to the
broader sociology and politics of science, and finally to the whole place of
the exact sciences in the overall march of intellectual history.


외에도 인터뷰에서 툴민에게 영향을 학자들의 명단이 펼쳐지니 참고하면 듯하다. 비트겐슈타인과 콜링우드 아니라, 비트겐슈타인이 볼츠만의 제자가 되고 싶었으나 볼츠만이 자살했다는 이야기도 들을 있다(아는 사람은 아는 이야기다). 툴민이 2년에 한번씩 톨스토이의 책을 읽는다는 이야기도 나온다. 초파리 연구자가 어떻게 문화비평을 논하느냐는데, 툴민을 보면 답이 나올 법도 하다. 예를 들어 툴민은 분자생물학의 텍스트를 분석한 아니라, 록펠러 대학에서 분자생물학 연구자들의 세미나에 종종 참가하곤 했는데, 인터뷰의 후반부에 나오는 다음 구절은 인문학의 테두리 속에 인문학을 가두려는 몇몇 인문좌파들의 시도가 얼마나 유치한지를 보여주는 같다.

Q. You argue in
Human Understanding that if we are ever going to be able to increase our
understanding of human understanding we must halt the increasing tendency to
compartmentalize academic areas and disciplines, “For the very boundaries
between academic disciplines are themselves a consequence of the current
divisions of intellectual authority, and the justice of those divisions is
itself one of the chief questions to be faced afresh.” And in Cosmopolis
you say, “The intellectual tasks for a science in which all the branches
are accepted as equally serious call for more subdisciplinary,
transdisciplinary, and multidisciplinary reasoning.” How can we stop the trend
toward increasing compartmentalization and instead encourage the kind of
intellectual border crossing that you espouse?
                               

A. On a certain
level, I’m less pessimistic than perhaps I was earlier. If you take a
historical view, what you find is that transdisciplinary inquiries are always
being started up, and it’s sort of a natural sequence that after awhile what
had previously appeared to be transdisciplinary comes to appear to be centrally
disciplinary. I can’t tell you how transdisciplinary and eccentric molecular
biology was when it was first thought up; it was the ultimate transdisciplinary
activity. Now it’s almost stuffy; it’s really one of the central pillars. I
honestly think the situation is better now than it was thirty years ago; I
think people are more aware of the danger of compartmentalization, and I think
that federal funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the
MacArthur Foundation are more on the lookout for new interbreedings between
established academic disciplines. I see these groups as facilitators; there’s a
better recognition that it’s no good feeding all the financial support into the
long-established disciplines because you’ll end up getting stereotyped stuff
again and you’ll miss the winners.

보통
인문학자들이 과학자들은 연구실에만 갇혀 인문학이나 세상에 관심을 갖지 않는다고 불평하던데, 어째 인문좌파들은 과학자들더러 과학이나 하라고 명령을 하거나, 우리 나와바리를 내버려두라고 하니, 인터뷰에 있는 툴민의 말들은 그때마다 써먹으면 좋을 듯하다. , 과학철학자나 논리학자로 유명한 툴민이 문학비평 인터뷰집에 실린다는 사실 자체가 국내 인문좌파들에게는 놀라운 일인지도 모르겠다만.

지그문트
슈미트는 인문학이
자신만의 게토(ghetto) 갇혀서 허우적 거리지 않으려면 논증적 학문으로 거듭나야 한다고 주장했다고 한. 그리고 논증의 학문적 방법론의 기반으로 툴민의 <논변의 사용> 거론했단. 슈미트의 드립에 대한 인터뷰어의 질문에 툴민이 답을 하는 과정에서 유명한비센샤프트 Wissenschaft’ 이야기가 나오는데 (어떤 이는 Wissenschaften이라는 복수로 써야 한다고 우기던데, 툴민은 이렇게 쓰더라) 것도 재미있다. 물론 툴민이 슈미트를 야만인이라고 부른  맥락도 읽어보면 좋을 하고. 여하튼 나는 모르는 여러 문학비평가들에 대한 이야기들이 여기저기 나오는데, 아마도 인문좌파들이 관심 있어 이야기들인 하다(새로운
수사학이라던가). 물론 툴민은 자신이 <논변의 사용>에서 이야기들이 지나치게 일반화되어 사용된다고 한숨을 쉬지만.

Q. Siegfried
Schmidt has argued in New Literary History that “if literary science is to
. . . liberate itself from the (self-adopted) ghetto of the ‘humanities,’ it
must evolve into a consciously and critically argumentative science.” He
then proceeds to outline such a “science” based almost entirely on
your method of argumentation. What is your opinion, first, of this kind of use
of your work and, second, of attempts in general to create a science of
literary criticism?
          

A. I would regard
it as a catastrophe. Where does Mr. Siegfried Schmidt come from?
       

Q. I assume he’s
from Germany, since he was at the University of Bielefeld when his article was
translated from the German by Peter Heath.

A. In that case,
we’re deceived by the translator because I’ll bet he used the word Wissenschaft.
The word Wissenschaft does not mean the same as the word science; it means
“discipline.” Obviously, if the question reads, “If literary
criticism is to become a serious discipline, it has to do this, that, and the
other,” that’s different from saying in English that it has to be a
“science.” Also, I don’t like this “self-adopted ghetto of the
humanities.” I don’t know who or what he is referring to. I’m not going to
say anything of the shallow relativistic kind, but it’s the general
”situation” problem again. The point is that when you find yourself
getting involved with arguments that come out of a situation in another
country, you have to do a bit of checking to determine what was at stake in the
debate from which this thing was taken. For example, Habermas comes here to
Northwestern most years, and we have a jolly two or three days when he’s here.
He gives a couple of lectures, usually on Kant’s ethics as being the ultimate
font of universalization and impartiality and the rest. He and I have a kind of
joking relationship: he gets up and denounces the neo-Aristotelians, by whom he
means some people in Germany who call themselves neo-Aristotelians; then I get
up like St. Sebastian, take the arrows full in my chest, and say, “I’m
happy to be a neo-Aristotelian.” So we chew that one a bit. Sometimes I
ask my colleague Tom McCarthy, “What’s really biting Jürgen; why does he
have so much investment in his pragmatics being universal?” Tom explains
how different it was growing up in Germany after the Second World War from
growing up in England just before and during the Second World War. We really do
come out of situations in which what reasonably mattered to us was very
different. For me it’s of crucial importance that Descartes died two years
after the end of the Thirty Years War, while Leibniz was born two years before
the end of the Thirty Years War. They lived in totally different situations,
and what an intelligent young man would have regarded as of supreme
intellectual importance in the 1630s was quite different from what an
intelligent young man would have regarded as of supreme intellectual importance
in Germany in the 1680s. This is the “situation” factor.

Of course, being a
classical skeptic helps one in this respect; it enables one to make this point.
If I thought there were definitely right answers to overly general
philosophical questions, then I wouldn’t be allowed to say this; this would be
what they call the “genetic fallacy” and things of this kind. But
since, like Wittgenstein, I think that to try to answer philosophical questions
definitively on that level of generality is a piece of self-deception, then the
question is, “What was at stake for people that they felt it indispensable
to find some self-validating proposition like cogito ergo sum or some principle
of judgment that would compel the attention of scholars of all kinds, like the
‘principle of sufficient reason’?” I used to find Leibniz totally opaque
until I realized that he was the first ecumenist. He spent thirty years trying
to organize a congress to which theologians of every orientation would come and
arrive at agreement about which of the basic doctrines of Christianity stood to
reasonconformed to the principle of sufficient reasonand which were
sufficiently idiosyncratic that everybody could see that different people would
have different opinions about them but that it wouldn’t matter.
      

인터뷰
중간에 프랑스 해체주의자들에 대한 이야기가 나온다. 촘스키가 이들의 텍스트를 이해할 없다고 투덜거렸다는 이야기는 유명한데, 툴민은 이들의 텍스트를 읽을까 말까 고민하다가, 거기에 투자할 시간을 내지 않았다고 한다.

Q. What about the use of the French
deconstructionists in literary criticism? Do you have any opinion about that?

A. Honestly, about ten years ago I had to
decide whether to make an investment: the investment of time needed in order to
penetrate their terminology. I decided I was already too old for that to be a
prudent investment. My sense is that they take us about as far as the
Tractatus, that there’s a great deal of humane wisdom even in the Philosophical
Investigations, and it’s game playing so far as I’m concerned. It’s very unfair
of me to say so without having made this investment, but it’s based on a
partial judgment that is not totally uninformed.

이론에
대한 이야기들이 많으니 한번 보시면 좋을 하다. 과학이론이나 문학비평 이론이나 툴민에겐 함께 다루어질 있는 것인데, 무슨 이론가이드를 만든 사람에겐 그러면 되는 것인가 보다. 이론에 관한 이야기들은 꽤나 중요한 포인트이니 여기서 내놓지는 않겠다. 필요하면 미리 읽으시라. 여하튼 계속해서 문학비평이 어떻게 하면 진지한 학문(비센샤프트. ?) 있냐고, 무려 물리학자로 시작한 툴민이 이야기하고 있으니, 듣던가 말던가 맘대로 하면 하다.


귀중한 텍스트를 미리 공개하는 이유는 뻔하다. 무시하려면 얼마든지 하라는 뜻이다. 권위와 수준과 학제의 차이로, 비판의 시도를 가로막는 이가 결국 택할 장소는인문학의 게토뿐인 싶다. 안전한 곳에서 혼자 실컷 자위하시면 되겠다. 아, 르상티망이 강하다고 무시해도 되던가?

보너스로
비트겐슈타인의 제자였던 툴민이 비트 해석하는 상반된 입장을 듣고는 놀라 자빠질뻔했다던 재미있는 일화 하나가 있어서 옮긴다. 무슨 비코의 농담인가 뭔가를 언급하길래. , 참고로 일화는 촘스키의 생득주의(nativism) 대한 질문에 대한 답이었다. 그 정도야 이해를 하시겠지. 라깡이 소쉬르에게서 영향을 받았으니, 촘스키 정도는 읽으셨다고 가정해야 하지 않나?

Let me add one
more point related to nativism. Some years ago I was at McMaster University at
Hamilton in Ontario, and I met a very interesting philosopher called Albert
Shalom, a Jewish Québecois who had just published a book about Collingwood. We
started talking about Wittgenstein, and he said cheerfully, “But of course,
Wittgenstein is a cultural relativist.” My eyebrows went up and I asked
him to expand on this. He explained, “But of course, agreement in concepts
is possible only where there are shared forms of life; different cultures have
different forms of life; ergo, all concepts are culturally relative.”
Three months later, I met David Hamlyn (who edited Mind) at London University,
and I reported this conversation with Shalom. He laughed airily and said,
“But of course that’s wrong; of course, Wittgenstein is a nativist.”
Again my eyebrows went up, and I asked him why he said this. He replied,
“Obviously, we understand each other perfectly well across cultural
boundaries; therefore, all the basic forms of life must in some way or another
be hard-wired in.” He didn’t use that phrase, for this was some years ago,
but he meant they must have some kind of physiological basis. Now, what I want
to say about this is that it’s clear to me that Wittgenstein deliberately
avoided taking a position on this subject for reasons that seem to me to be
partly arbitrary but generally sufficient. They’re arbitrary in that what he’s
doing is seeking to draw a line between philosophical and scientific issues,
and what he is refusing to do is to admit this question of nativism or relativism
into his philosophical discussion. On the other hand, it seems to me that there
is a perfectly good point to be made, which is that you can’t generalize about
it; there may well be some concepts, some modes of perception, some cognitive
categories that turn out to be, at any rate with certain qualifications,
cultural universals.

어째, 나라는 융복합 연구를 하자고 생난리인데 (나는 이게 별로 마음에 들지 않지만), 인문좌파들은 그들만의 게토로 점점 더 고립되어 가려는 듯 하다. 그게 가련해서 뭔가 이야기를 해주면 더더욱 게토로 빠져드시니, 이건 말을 해야할 지 말아야 할지 그걸 고민하게 된다. “나는 라깡의 정신분석은 임상적으로 쓰지 않는데”, “내가 쓰는 과학은 비센샤프트적인 의미인데”, 이런거 정말 유치하다. 게토에서 평안하시라. 세레니티!