Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being, by Paul

Feyerabend. Ed. Bert Terpstra. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 285 pp. $17.00
(trade paperback).

Bryan Lindenberger
New Mexico State University
English 510

“How is it that views that reduce abundance and devalue human existence can become so

powerful?” (16). Paul Feyerabend, professor of philosophy at Berkeley and best known for his

books Against Method (1975) and Farewell to Reason (1987), introduces this question as the

central issue of Conquest of Abundance. Published posthumously and uncompleted in 1999,

Conquest in fact answers that question in great detail, following an historical tract that leads from

the worldviews of ancient Greece (Homer) to Classical Greece (Plato, Xenophanes) and onward

to the philosophy and “scientific” approach of quantum physics (Heisenberg, Bohr).

To say that Feyerabend answers his own question— a simple rewording could ask, “How

has the template of ‘scientific method’come to limit our perception of the world?— does not

mean to suggest that he offers a set of solutions to the implied problem. His view of history

reminds the reader of the “Butterfly Effect”— chaos theorist Edward Lorenz’s notion that the

flutter of a butterfly’s wings on one continent can lead to a hurricane on another. In Conquest,

Feyerabend lays out a record of the West where a seemingly unlikely event builds into a great

force, with implications in communication, science, and our views of reality. The drawback is

that the flutter of a butterfly’s wings becomes insignificant within the tempest of its own

creation; Feyerabend presents a world consumed, where subtleties and complexities are lost to a

storm gathering force over the centuries.

Before moving from generalization to specifics, from abstraction to richness of being, I

will note the Feyerabend’s work finds utility and purpose in a diversity of fields. I found in
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researching his book citations in academic and popular works that ranged from the metaphysical

to the pedagogical, from Dadaistic diatribes to the philosophy of science. For those who study

language and its limiting effects on the way we think and reason, Feyerabend adds that

“language is not the only ‘conspiracy’… .Humans paint, produce films and videos; they dance,

dream and make music; they engage in political action, exchange goods, perform rituals, build

houses, start wars, act in plays, try to please patrons— and so on. All these activities occur in a

fairly regular way; they contain patterns, ‘press’the practitioners ‘to conform’and in this way

mold their thought, their perception, their actions, and their discriminative abilities” (28).

According to Feyerabend, emphasis on the aggregate rather than the exception imposes limits on

understanding and progress.

Part One

We can occasionally explain why crude ideas get the upper hand: special groups want to create a
new tribal identity or preserve an existing identity amidst a rich and varied cultural landscape; to
do so, they ‘block off’large parts of the landscape and either cease to talk about them, or deny
their ‘reality,’or declare them to be wholly evil (13).

The published form of the “complete” manuscript exists today in a single section, with

the unwritten second portion substituted by series of contemporaneous essays. Section 1 of Part

One, “Achilles’Passionate Conjecture,” argues that modern philosophy, scientific method, and

the arts have set limits on our view of the world, and that these limits have become so deeply

imbedded in our reasoning, that we don’t realize they are there. Feyerabend uses a speech by

Achilles as a launching point. Culled from The Iliad, the content of Achilles’speech matters less

than the fact that the god attempts to articulate a message that does not fit the template of current

(ancient) Greek thought. He has stepped outside the box, relaying a point of view that falls so far

outside the fashion and mores of the time that it seems nonsensical to his listeners. Feyerabend
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rejoins, “One theory that that has become rather popular assumes that languages, cultures, stages

in the development of a profession, a tribe, or a nation are closed in the sense that certain events

transcend their capacities. Languages, for example, are restrained by rules” (20). Had not the

Greeks granted Achilles’a status as god, his speech might have found dismissal as so much

gibberish. In fact, Achilles was a god, and his speech served as a “butterfly moment” for western

culture as his audience groped to find the meaning of his words. History changed. As told by

Feyerabend:

“It [“cultural compartmentalization” as per a radical interpretation of “subjectivity”] is of

relatively recent origin and the conceptual barriers it postulates did not and still do not affect the
commerce between cultures. Misunderstanding can happen. Even the most ordinary events baffle
some people, enrage others, and render still others speechless. But we also find that ordinary
people, i.e., people not yet confused by higher learning, readily accept statements which sound
strange to their neighbors and nonsensical to scholars… .Physicians, teachers, laborers,
missionaries in so far unknown cultures, astronomers interested in unity, they all face new
situations, products, challenges, and they deal with them, often successfully… .potentially every
culture is all cultures” (32-33, author’s emphasis).

But to say that we all can “potentially” communicate does not necessarily imply that we all do.

Feyerabend notes that we communicate when the need arises. Such need might arise from

something as mundane as commerce, or from the cognitive dissonance sustained by hearing a

seemingly nonsensical speech from the lips of a deity. Change, further understanding of the

world around us, takes place not in the cultural or currently popular templates we use to mold

reality, but in the exceptions to the rule, the things that just don’t quite fit into our current

“worldview.” Feyerabend notes that we can ignore, dismiss, or even legislate away these

apparently incongruent phenomena in comfort. Or we can grope, often in intellectual discomfort,

to understand them.

The remainder of Part One expands upon Achilles’ speech, tackling issues of science,

religion, and philosophy— in fact, our evolving (or devolving) view of reality. “Abundance”
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gives way to clumsy, monolithic ways of thinking with false dichotomies and an almost fervent

ability to dismiss the richness of the world standing at the forefront. For instance, Feyerabend

looks at the historical trend toward monotheism as one example. He turns to Classical Greece,

when many gods existed with distinct personalities and frailties. The amalgamation of Greek

city-states into larger states inevitably led to the consolidation of their respective gods, where the

people “emphasized their similarities over the differences” (53). A single “God” resulted, and it

lacked the human characteristics and foibles of Hera, Prometheus, or even Zeus. According to

Xenophanes, this new “God” existed as all-knowing, all-being, “[a]lways without any movement

he remains in a single location… .he moves all that is” (53). Feyerabend refers to this apparition

repeatedly as a “monster” and just one example of how diversity and “abundance” fell under the

weight of abstraction. (Feyerabend further details how this new “monster” entity of pure “being”

led to the concept of “non-being” and ultimately the false dichotomies of ancient Greece which

govern much of our political, social, and moral thought today.)

Despite this avalanche, this seemingly inevitable “snowballing” of events over time,

Feyerabend does strongly suggest that we don’t live in a mechanical, pre-determined world. He

writes:

Still, a look at history shows that this world is not a static world populated by thinking (and
publishing) ants who, crawling all over its crevices, gradually discover its features without
affecting them in any way. It is a dynamical and multifaceted Being which influences and reflects
the activity of its explorers. It was once full of Gods; it then became a drab and material world’
and it can be changed again, if its inhabitants have the determination, the intelligence, and the
heart to take the necessary steps (146).

Feyerabend thus offers hope, but no specific solutions or methods to the dilemma of a “drab and material

world.” So ends Part One.

Part Two
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There is no part two.

As mentioned, Paul Feyerabend died before completing the manuscript. But before

viewing the work as hopelessly unfinished— or worse, before we construct from the groundwork

Paul Feyerabend laid and try to follow, cult-like, to a conclusion that answers the questions of

“Life, the Universe, and Everything”1— let’s remember Feyerabend’s own sense of humor in the

whole endeavor. He sets us up to fall several times in his argument. For instance, he draws the

incautious reader into cultural analyses of an event only to later reveal that the historical and

social milieu used in the argument occurred, in fact, centuries before the event itself— a means

by which Feyerabend cautions us to question comfortable conclusions sculpted from data2. (That

is, he warns that researchers of any ilk may construct very complex theories to achieve pre-

determined conclusions, which may have more to do with popular or culturally defined

templates, acceptable outcomes, or concretely faulty information.)

What we have instead of a neatly-wrapped narrative metaphor to help codify the first

portion of the book is instead a series of essays, chosen by editor Bert Terpstra, and written

concurrently with Conquest of Abundance. Essay subjects present the range of Feyerabend’s

current interests, ranging from “Realism and the History of Knowledge” to “Aristotle,”

“Universals as Tyrants and Mediators” and “Art as a Product of Nature as a Work of Art.” These

works serve as artifacts— glimpses of where Feyerabend had gone, and some idea of maybe

where he “was going” with the unfinished manuscript. Even the most mildly curious human

could find pet loves and erudite references to latch onto. For me, the no less than four references

1
The title of a popular book (1982) by Douglas Adams, a frequent cross-reference with Feyerabend along with
Buckminster Fuller, Robert Anton Wilson, Erwin Schroedinger, George Carlin, and a range of other recent
“philosophers.”
2
The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges posed a similar critique of literary analysis in “Pierre Menard, Author
of Don Quixote” by presenting an author who intended to re-write Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the 20th Century.
What circumstances, we ask, would lead an author to write those exact words in the postmodern world? The
implication of Borges (and of Feyerabend) is that we posit comfortable, well-suited meaning to our analysis,
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to Halton Arp (the once-renowned astronomer and professor who questioned the “pure

mathematics” of quantum physics as applied to large mechanical systems and found himself

exiled from the North American university system3) served as a foundation for my interests. Yet

to say that Conquest speaks to an abundance of fields does not mean that it serves a broad

audience. Those who find comfort in the predictability of their chosen reality, their chosen field,

will not relate; those who find predictable results occurring with increasing frequency throughout

their careers and pause at night to wonder “What Am I Missing Here?” will discover a gold mine

in Feyerabend’s reasoning, as did earlier review writers and those who extensively cite

Feyerabend’s work.

Earlier Reviews and Conclusions

“Feyerabend bemoans the uncritical acceptance of precise concepts and rules that, if

followed slavishly, my appear to be the only representations of thought”4 writes Mark

Tadajewski, a research student at the University of Leicester. A writer from Princeton asks,

“What audience does this author constitute for himself, as intended target? An educated audience

[though] Feyerabend wears his learning lightly… .The conquest in the end is a sham conquest, an

whether that analysis is of literature, cultures, or natural phenomena.

3
Halton Arp continues his research in Germany at the Max Planck Institute. Arp’s book Seeing Red questions
specifically the “leap of faith” that leads from the mundane appearance of red-shifted stellar bodies to the exotic
assumption of “singularity” and the big bang (often capitalized as “Big Bang” among the true believers). In an email
discussion with Eric J. Lerner, author of the more accessible The Big Bang Never Happened, he and I realized that
while most “common” people see numbers as adjectives (ten cows, five apples, etc.) “pure mathematicians” often
view numbers as NOUNS, things that actually exist as entities unto themselves, as did the mystics of ancient Greece,
Pythagoras among them. We’re not off point here. Communication, even communication regarding something so
absolute as whole numbers, breaks down when worldviews become so dogmatic, so rigid, that researchers will
sooner entertain exotic, un-provable, and often useless notions such as singularity and string theory than to
acknowledge more practical, applicable ideas that break fundamentally from the popular tide of thought and
correspondent grant dollars.
4
“HOT on the Limits of Organization Theory.” Ephemera Reviews: Critical Dialogues on Organization.
<ephemeraweb.org/journal/4-1/4-1tadajewski.pdf>.
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illusory victory for the forces of abstracting intellect.”5 Conquest of Abundance does not rebuke

science. In fact, Feyerabend reminds us at turns of great accomplishments that have come of

science. Nor does Feyerabend attack the reasoning of historical figures with whom he apparently

disagrees (or, more often, in whose proclamations he finds contradictions). Rather, he takes issue

with a general historical trend that leads to greater generalizations (abstractions) in our

perception (our making) of the world around us. “Early Chinese thinkers,” says Paul Feyerabend,

“had taken empirical variety at face value. They had favored diversification and had collected

anomalies instead of trying to explain them away” (165). As with the Babylonians studying lunar

eclipses— those phenomenal exceptions to the rule of a routine, predictable, and hegemonic

universe— Feyerabend finds in empirical anomalies and the apparently useless glitches that

researchers trim like statistical fat at the outer limits of Bell’s curve, a view of an abundant

world, and one that leads to leaps in scientific, cultural, and in fact human progress.

5
Bas C. van Fraassen, “The Sham Victory of Abstraction: Review of Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance.” Times
Literary Supplement 5073: June 23, 2000, 10-11.