Philosophy, method and the arts

Considered in terms of their main tendencies, political science and political studies remain in a pre-Kantian epistemological slumber. Presuming that the world is responsible for what is perceived, they have slept through Kant’s (self-described) Copernican Revolution, a change in the way to raise questions about the experience of the object world. Within a pre-Kantian philosophical framing, experience is engendered by that which appears, as opposed to that which lies behind appearance (“the intelligible essence”). ¹ To simplify at the outset, “appearances” constitute the data for empirical/explanatory analysis and “the intelligible essence” references the object of some versions of hermeneutic/interpretive analysis. What Kant contributed is a shift that enfranchises post-empiricist and post-hermeneutic modes of inquiry: “phenomenon will no longer at all be appearance.” ² Kantian epistemological orientations privilege the conditions of possibility for something to appear, an innovation in the philosophy of experience that puts critical pressure on the way that political inquiries have construed issues of method. Heeding that innovation in the midst of the “behavioral revolution” in political science in the mid-twentieth century, the political theorist Sheldon Wolin addressed himself to the implications of Kant’s philosophy. Seeking to redeem the “tradition” of political theory, Wolin indicted the behaviorist trend in political science for its “methodism,” for exhausting the space of political education with a preoccupation with methodological techniques, to the neglect of a historically informed and politically engaged knowledge. ³ Invoking the Kantian revolution in philosophy, Wolin asserted that “method” [in the sense in which empiricists construct it] “is not a thing for all worlds. It presupposes a certain answer to a Kantian type question, what must the world be like for the methodist’s knowledge to be possible?” ⁴