“Victorian and Postmodern Hybrid ‘Language Games’: Reading Tolstoy’s On the Significance of Science and Art"

Tolstoy’s essay On the Significance of Science and Art (1887) was written at a moment in which science was gaining recognition and prestige, while at the same time meeting with fierce opposition in diverse intellectual circles. It represents a useful and paradigmatic “case study” of these controversial cultural dynamics, but its relevance extends well beyond its immediate historical context. The primary targets of Tolstoy’s attack are: Comte, Spencer, Darwin and Malthus. His contention against “experimental, positive science”, which he represents as a sort of immoral fable, stems from the epistemological error he finds in the view of society as a biological organism. His philosophical opposition to “This fictitious law, […] founded on nothing whatever” is also grounded in ethical reasoning. His prevalently ethical approach to the appraisal of science leads him to suggest that his contemporaries’ blind devotion towards science is rooted in a dominant mauvaise conscience, aiming at the perpetuation of privilege. The Russian savant includes valuable epistemological considerations in support of his thesis; however, his overall perspective remains flawed. Indeed, Tolstoy’s argument bears the marks of a philosophical category mistake, which is here interpreted in terms of Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s developments of Wittgenstein’s theory of “language games”. Tolstoy’s ethical attack against neopositivist science hinges on a spurious conflation of (incompatible) “language games”. However, despite its philosophical weaknesses, Tolstoy’s essay remains valuable and thought-provoking in a postmodern context, because the anthropological transformations of the “post-human” pose compelling epistemological challenges as well as relevant ethical questions to the “virtual subject”. The pervasive equation of science with technology and the concomitant definition and promotion (by whom?), of culturally and socially “desirable” (for whom?) goals are, in fact, surreptitiously dictated by a prevailing self-validating and often uncritical ‘scientistic’ (more than scientific) mentalité.