Is Free Thought Possible?

Some recent reading has got me curious about the idea of human inquiry (or the pursuit of knowledge) and whether or not it is possible to do this ‘freely’. This question was addressed by contrasting the way people have thought about ‘inquiry’ during three distinct periods of human history. Essentially the questions being asked are: ‘What is the point of knowledge?’ and ‘What authorities will we use to validate that knowledge?’

The pre-modern period (essentially pre-Enlightenment) saw inquiry as having the basic goal of uniting a person with the source of truth itself, believed to be God. I should quickly add that this was the case within European history and I do not presume to speak on how others have addressed the question. So during this period university education culminated with the study of theology, the ‘queen of the sciences’. Knowledge was validated by appealing to accepted authorities and those authorities ruled out some ideas, often in ways that most of us would find restrictive and, at times, oppressive. But knowledge was seen to be part of a larger goal and the path toward that goal ran through submission to those who had previously travelled that path.

The modern period (Enlightenment to the mid 1900s roughly) reacted strongly against the idea of any kind of external authority controlling the search for knowledge. The rational individual was enthroned as the ultimate authority and ideas were evaluated according to this universally accepted (at least in theory) standard of reason. The answer to the question of the ‘point’ of knowledge was that knowledge was to be valued and sought ‘for its own sake’. Knowledge was something intrinsically worthwhile and did not serve some purpose beyond itself.

The postmodern period has reacted (inconsistently, in my opinion) against the modern ideal of reason as the only tool available to investigate and explain the world. Knowledge is not ‘out there,’ it is always someone’s interpretation of the ‘facts’. Facts are not self-evident but they require someone to make sense of them. People are not neutral, rational observers of the world; rather, they are personally invested and bring their own assumptions to the process of inquiry. The motive behind inquiry is neither the pursuit of God nor the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Rather, the pursuit of knowledge is, in postmodern eyes, the pursuit of power. Inquiry becomes a process of deconstructing the biases and agendas behind certain claims to knowledge (mostly metaphysical claims) and resisting the efforts of the ‘knowledgeable’ to use their views to oppress others.

Of these three options it seems that both the pre-modern and post-modern views of inquiry recognize the fact that ‘free thought’ is essentially impossible. Pre-moderns leaned heavily on received authorities (church and Scripture to cite two inflammatory examples), post-moderns see human ideas as the products of social forces that (at least partially) determine what is thought and valued. Only the modern view holds out some hope for ‘free thought’ but that seems to many to be hopelessly naive in that it ignores the fact that ‘our ideas are often as much a product of ‘who we are’ as ‘what we think’.

So is the ‘free-thinker’ a mythical creature after all?