On the Death of Science.

On the Death of Science.

When I was younger, (Well, I all ways was younger, ostensibly.) I took a college-level class in Biology while I was in high school. I did not do very well in the class, but that ought not to count against me except as an emotional appeal to Authority. Many of my peers who had once known and prized my company for being “smart” had now lost touch with me in their pursuits of impressive Grade-Point Averages, with varying degrees of ethicality in the process. Me: The leaves and even the branches of the educational tree were beginning to fall off for me.

I had been an avid reader as a student (Well, I had all most all ways been a student.), and yet I was all ways cautious to segregate the frame of reference that was fantasy in literature from the immediate Reality of my experience. Camus’ Nostalgia for Unity had all ready become apparent to me, however anonymously: How much I longed to escape into the world of Harry Potter, with its aesthetic perfection, even though this life abounded in many joys and Harry Potter too was not without its sorrows.

There was a simple and direct reason that, every Wednesday that Brick’s Biology Class had a mandatory laboratory “experiment”, I would lag behind my partner, whose passionless fervour for grades would render her impenetrable to me. I could never find it in my heart to relate the words I had pored passionlessly over in the overwrought text-book to the immediacy of my experience; it would have been the same mad, Romantic fallacy as had I projected the qualities of the Ideal Woman, coupled with and filtered through my memories of my current mate, upon that very mate and claimed to “know” her. Yet my partner had no trouble in doing this, and she made it into one of the good schools.

What I would come to learn much later was that there was a good reason why I had grown to distrust and ultimately jettison science. Derrida would have probably called it a “logocentric epistemology”. I learned the hard way, from the afore-mentioned Romanticism, that this sort of spirited attitude, a manifestation of the kind of Sisyphian Hope that Camus spoke of, that science in fact does not work in Real Life.

Dm.A.A.