The empirical bent, or intensified sensitivity to the fact-filled world outside the individual, has been one of modern history's outstanding features. Connected with this has been the assumption that the external world is autonomous and separate from the self, a world in which a thing still exists when attention is withdrawn from it. Equally significant is yet another assumption: that the individual passively absorbs stimuli, an idea very prominent in John Locke's empirical theory of knowledge. This idea encourages a modesty before experience, an inclination to prolonged observation prior to action, almost a delayed reaction. It is a compromise whereby we permit ourselves to take a good objective look at things before we transform things to suit ourselves. It is not only a prime stimulant to material prosperity, but also to the liberty of the individual and the secular orientation as well.

The idea of passivity in the face of the storm of experience tends to discourage belief in free will. Yet, paradoxically, deprecating free will does not debar superior achievement. Abraham Lincoln did not believe in freedom of the will, but can his accomplishments be ignored? It appears that skepticism about free will helps cure the vice of self-glorification or soul conceit. Exaggerated emphasis on the will, as exemplified by a Hitler, a Mussolini or a Stalin, has been one of the curses of the twentieth century.

Challenges to the empirical inclination are ubiquitous. Why? The answer may be sought in what this writer terms "fact fatigue." Multitudes are repelled by what they regard as an excess of stimuli from outside themselves and by the threat to self-esteem such alleged excess implies. Their exposure to external reality is, therefore, partial and usually confined to a minimum of practical matters. They retreat to spirituality, meaning that they exalt themselves into a feeling of superiority over the world beyond their skins. They avoid the accusation of spiritual arrogance by claiming humility before God. Yet what is God but the human being's alter ego, the stratagem whereby we raise ourselves to an unnecessarily high level?

It is noteworthy that such puerility is not only confined to religious people but also extends to many claiming a fondness for scientific realism. The Marxists come to mind. The following confession of Leon Trotsky, one of the forgers of the communist revolution in Russia, serves as evidence:

"The dull empiricism, the unabashed, cringing worship of the fact were odious to me. Beyond the facts, I looked for laws ... in every sphere I felt that I could move and act only when I held in my hand the thread of the general. The social revolutionary radicalism which has become the permanent pivot for my whole inner life grew out of the intellectual enmity toward the striving for petty ends, toward out-and-out pragmatism, toward all that i' ideologically without form and theoretically ungeneralized."'

One sees that Trotsky was averse to loosely floating facts not ye' cemented by general ideas or theories. His impatient yearning for the general was akin to the yearning of religious minds for spirituality Like them, he indulged in the primitive gesture of superciliousness vis-a-vis the sea of stimuli with which humans are confronted. He perpetuated spirituality in the guise of science and secularity.

There is no intention in this article to denounce all theory. What is reprehensible is enslaving facts into a mould for which there is no justification. There is a time to generalize and a time not to generalize. There should never be an occasion to generalize for the sake of soul titillation.

Childish attempts at the humbling of reality are rarely more evident than in the manipulation of history. Many religionists are preeminent in this enterprise. They believe that events move in a definite, desirable direction toward their actual destruction, toward a spiritual eternity ending the reign of matter. Thus events live on borrowed time, on condition of ultimate removal from consciousness.

St. Augustine, 354-430 A.D., probably the second most important Christian after St. Paul, thought in this fashion. History to him was double-stranded. One strand was the spiritually inclined Christian community within the Roman Empire, which community he called "The City of God." The other strand was the secular, non-spiritual populace in the Empire. He envisioned the triumph of the former, who would be admitted to heaven and eternally enjoy communion with God. The latter, the non-spirituals, would be consigned to hell. The Roman Empire, meaning the material, civilized world as known to St. Augustine, would become extinct. Thus the temporal world of fact and phenomena becomes nothing and is followed by timeless spirituality. It is obvious that St. Augustine tolerated fact-filled history only because he anticipated its oblivion. He was surely subject to fact fatigue.

Karl Marx, 1818-1883, although he disparaged religion, continued the Judeo-Christian approach to history in a secular way. He saw in the past an evolution from feudalism to bourgeois, capitalistic society and predicted as inevitable an evolution from the latter to communism. Though he did not discount problems in communist society, communism was to him the endpoint of the historical flow and, therefore, the static heaven on earth. It was to be a society denuded of the fact-ridden, pragmatic bourgeois mentality. Marx, despite possible protests from the grave, really sought a spiritual society. Here again is the tentacular approach to historical development, one in which history becomes nugatory, in which the individual stands immodestly tall in relation to externality.

Marx, as Bertrand Russell significantly pointed out, denied that humans are passive intakers of sensation. Russell stated the following:

"In Marx's view, all sensation or perception is an interaction between subject and object; the bare object, apart from the activity of the recipient, is a raw material, which is transformed in the process of being known. Knowledge in the old sense of passive contemplation is an unreal abstraction; the process that takes place is one of handling things. Any theory which leaves out action is a misleading abstraction. "2

There is always a link between sensation and our reaction to it. Marx, however, makes the link so close that action appears to overpower and rape sensation and perception. Action assumes priority over incoming experience, the latter being the very basis of intelligent action. Marx was yet another sufferer from anti empirical fact fatigue.

Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804, was probably the most hostile opponent of the empirical way. He ranks as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of modern philosophers. His conceit was proportionate to his reputation, for he credited himself with having fathomed all metaphysical obscurities. He was hard on John Locke, relegating him to the status of the non-philosopher, merely concerned with a "certain physiology of the human understanding." 3

Kant was one of a group of thinkers who believed, as William B. Lindley puts it: "that our awareness creates reality."4 Kant insisted that the outer world is not independent of our concepts of it. The mind, on the contrary, imposes an order on the raw sensations confronting it. The a priori concepts of space and time are especially efficacious in accomplishing this end.

Thus the external world as it appears to us is largely a product of our own mental doing, as if we forge the facts and phenomena we experience, as if the world is composed of man-manufactured matter. Such a view of perception and experience, it seems to this writer, implies that we are not only superior to the world of external objects, but own them as well.

The possible ethical consequence of Kantianism leaves something to be desired. If one mentally assumes possession of the world and all that is contained in it, one is liable to nurture an aggressiveness beyond normal bounds. The illusion of ownership may crush moral restraint. After all, should we not do what we please with our own property? Kant, paradoxically, favored international peace, but is it not difficult to derive an idea of peace from his theory of knowledge?

Kant, an East Prussian, exercised a strong influence on the German educated public. This public, in contrast with educated Americans and Britons, was not indifferent to its philosophers. Did Kantianism consequently encourage German expansionist aspirations in the 19th and 20th centuries? A certain answer is difficult to come by. We can only limit ourselves to the assertion that

Kant's theory of knowledge was more akin to the psychology of war than to that of peace.

So many celebrated religious and philosophical thinkers have been in the thrall of fact fatigue that some may regard the phenomenon as beneficial. They may conclude that a retreat to soul glorification is not objectionable, that it is uncharitable to censure individuals for wanting to feel good about themselves in the vale of tears called the world. This would be a good argument if not for historical evidence against it. Those same individuals who have sought comfort in the retracted self have been very responsible for the bloodbath that epitomizes history. The twentieth century is no exception, a century in which the relatively rational have been bullied and crushed by a host of savage isms. The twenty-first century will probably be laden with more of the same.

Some claim that religionists and abstractionists suffer from socially sanctified lunacy. Should we be so downrightly extreme? Let us simply call the condition fact fatigue.

Footnotes
1. Quoted in Alan Bullock, "Hitler and Stalin," p. 31. Alfred A. Knopf New York, 1992.

2. Bertrand Russell, "History of Western Philosophy," pp. 783-784. Simon and Schuster, New York, 1945.

3. Immanuel Kant, "Critique of Pure Reason," Preface xxiii. Anchor Books Edition New York, 1966.

4. See William B. Lindley, "Reality and Quantum Mysticism," p.20. Truth Seeker, Vol. 122, No. 3, 1995.

Recommended reading
Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy Simon and Schuster, 1945. Very clear and panoramic.

St. Augustine, City of God, Penguin Books, New York N.Y.1984.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Anchor Books, New York, 1966.

Arthur P. Mendel, Essential Works of Marxism, Bantam Matrix Edition, New York, 1965.

Alvin Bernstein is a scholar and former teacher of European history. He is retired and lives in Paradise, California.