I wonder why I feel trepidation writing this note. I suppose that it is because I have become so sick of attacks from people who are like-minded that I NEED this note to qualify the statement which is the Note's title. Had this been a different forum and medium, the three words themselves would suffice. But now I have something to write about!
At one point, I encountered a quote by Stephen Hawking, an old hero of mine, in the internet. I wondered if it was a joke. He said that philosophy was dead and that science would come to take its place. That it all ready had taken its place.
The sentiment seems to be about a hundred years old. For a man who tried to keep up with the times, this seemed like a joke.
When I was volunteering at my old High School with the Speech and Debate team, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Library. This was a privilege of such magnitude it should have been a right. You could not fathom my joy. The book that I picked out from the shelves that day was a rather thick but very clearly and sonorously written text called "The Passion of the Western Mind". It was recommended by Joseph Campbell, as I would find.
There was an entire chapter, I think following (but maybe preceding a chapter on the collapse of Romanticism) entitled "The Crisis in Modern Science". I read it and looked up from it and around at all of my fellow patrons at the library. I wondered how in the years I had slipped; the post-modern sentiments therein had been entirely the point where I had last saved my game; beyond this point the past several years have felt like intellectual regression (although emotional growth, one might say.). And as I beheld the students, I thought: Most probably every one of them KNOWS what this book had said, intuitively. It seems unlikely that I had drawn my conclusions from this very text and passage and simply forgotten (although the possibility looms, perchance never to be resolved). The conclusion seems INTUITIVE. I had READ Hawking, and Heinlein, and Asimov, et cetera, long before High School. The progress of the mind led me to abandon them. This author had simply leant a mature voice to all ready brilliant sentiments; as Andrew had pointed out to me, Brilliance and Maturity were two different things. Salinger's books evidence that.
Science could not ever, in its definitionally orthodox and methodical nature, meet the standard, if one could be set, of an Absolute Truth. Any kind of Truth that Science produced was as much constructed as perceived. Psychology made readily apparent the phenomenon that one subjectivises the world; Heisenberg did the same thing. Science could only be valued for its practical applications, and those had been ethically suspect for ages. To speak with such grimness has become so debased a sentiment in our happy-go-lucky Positivist society that it's no wonder that suicide is such a problem; as a friend of mine who I suspect to have been a suicide victim said: When she attempted suicide, it seemed entirely LOGICAL. Of course, if one villifies the darker of the human being's emotions, it had all ways been my suspicion, this is a natural conclusion: Man is a useless passion.
All of these sentiments had been readily apparent and troubling to me in High School, yet somehow it felt as though I were alone in them. Only age could inform me that Camus and others had all ready struggled with purportedly the same difficulties. With the loss of innocence in High School came a loss of faith in the Positivistic pretensions of the Scientific Community. This was no mere rebellion against my parents, who had all ways been researchers. It was a rejection of my own faith in what I read, which of course had never or seldom been more enthusiastic in favour of Hawking or Asimov than it was in favour of Steinbeck and Rowling. By the time that I had matured to the point that I could comprehend Shakespeare, which seemed much more complex than Hawking, it seemed definite that I could lend no more authority to science than to literature. Besides, people like Thoreau, Poe, and Hugo tended to describe experiences with such detail and brilliance as I had never observed in science, which however seemed to pride itself in not only "theory" but "observation". Scholarly speaking, I did not see what the big deal was. This group of people here took a set of philosophical postulates and presuppositions -- the Scientific Method -- and had run with it for several centuries. These others more or less developed their own modes of inquiry, and they were preferable to read and offered a bit more hope in the midst of my deep depression. Camus explains this depression as the Absurd: In having the structure of an atom described to him, his appetite for Clarity and Unity, a so moving passion in the human heart, is whetted. But by the time that the scientist gets down to the sub-atomic particles, Camus is all ready disappointed; the scientist has been "reduced to poetry". Remembering the Illustrated Brief History of Time, with its models of the atom over the course of human intellectual history, I am reminded of an assignment I had in the sixth grade. We were given a chart with seven boxes. There were two rows and four columns, but the boxes were separated by long, thin, intersecting spaces. There were four boxes therefore in the top row and three in the bottom row. Each of the columns was labeled with a style of government from the history of Hellenistic Greece: "Monarchy", "Oligarchy", "Tyranny", and "Democracy". The two rows were as follows: "Pros" and "Cons". We were expected to list the benefits and detriments of Monarchy, Oligarchy, and Tyranny. There was no second box for Democracy; we were only expected to list its Pros. I might have written some Cons in the space underneath though. Had I read Nietzsche and Marx by that time, as well as known more about Benjamin Franklin, I would have had something qualified to name-drop.
To have lost my faith in Science, Intuitively, was not an ideological transformation limited to Science; it was an entire parting with Certainty and a coming to maturation in a post-modern world. It was as though the ground had dissolved beneath my feet, as I like to say. Yet I wonder if this is really as Universal an experience as people make it out to be. Is anything? In this modern life with its growing Mass, people are too keen to level and to generalise in order to keep moving. They have to keep moving, as though to escape something. Are they trying to escape that which had caught up with me? With Camus? With Salinger? With everyone I could think of who still impressed me after that age?
With the aforementioned recent finding of this book -- "The Passion of the Western Mind" -- it certainly seemed as though Camus had at least been wrong about one thing: There IS hope, in that we are all in this together. Surely MOST of the world -- the civilised world -- has recognised this by now. The evidence seemed overwhelming. As early as Nietzsche and Lev Shestov the Absolutist pretensions of Science were suspect as merely new idols used to replace the creed of the Christian Church. The parallels between Scientific dogmatism, Religious dogmatism, and any other kind of dogmatism are so readily emotionally apparent upon first meeting that the three kinds (and all others and sub-divisions) seem inscrutable from one another. After all: One had been raised to believe that somewhere, SOMEONE knew everything you were going through. So surely, even if this was not a God, it was the solidarity of man and the Universality of human experience? If Common Sense has any authority, it must be that the same basically negative conclusion I had come to about Science, amongst many others, was shared by most?
IMAGINE MY DISAPPOINTMENT. Upon return to the Speech and Debate class-room, I was met with a gang of these young, "bright", promising pupils in unaninimity that one cannot "challenge Science" in a round and expect to win. Even the president of the group had to waver momentarily in his confidence, with a slight stutter of nervousness, when suggesting that Science "was wrong in the past". And I had to remind his opponents, as a judge, that all though the opponent made the claim that "Science may have been wrong in the past, but it's not wrong now," that same sentiment might easily have been held in the past. The class laughed, more or less. Hubris. The last atom to be published in A Brief HIstory of TIme was Democracy. There are all ways those who forget that even the present has its Cons.
Of course, true people of Science do not hold this view. Popper pointed out that all theory is falsifiable. I don't mean to put my parents out of the job, only to adhere to my own quest. Science is beautiful. Like theatre. Like Painting. Like architecture. But when I hear someone say "Science does not give a [you can imagine]" in assertion that, say:
1. Women are worse drivers than men.
2. Human beings are intrinsically greedy.
3. Any other prejudice you can think of that someone could easily construct an experiment for, "test", and decide what to determine as conclusive and inconclusive,
I think that we could do well exercise the same kind of politeness (I avoid saying "Political Correctedness") in Science as in the Arts. Why exempt any process of human subjectivity? After all: It's obvious that there was no such thing as Gravity before Newton observed it. As Heidegger pointed out, to his credit, any Truth (of which I would exempt deeply personal, usually ineffable experiences) was the comportment of an actual Thing or Being, a Mental Conception, and the Language necessary to refer to the mental conception and the indicate the Thing. So you might have all ways fallen down the stairs before Newton came along, but there was no "law of Gravity" before we constructed it, just like there is no current "law of reverse Gravity" that explains why we grow upwards and seldom downwards. One can watch, say, a bit of mucus following one's finger in the bath, but when one begins to imagine: Tiny vacuums are forming about my finger-tip, concentrating in my pores and grooves, and attracting this little particle... Well, one has been reduced to poetry. The immediacy of the non-verbal is gone; we are now in the realm of Words, of Concepts, and of Intersubjectivity. The naked experience has been clothed in abstraction.
Plato suggested a dichotomy of the Noumenal World and the Phenomenal World. There is what we Know and what we Think. He justified this by Inspiration. Kant rejected this and yet accepted it; he said that if there WERE a Noumenal World, we would be unable to contact it. Typical Kant. HOW would one be able to SPEAK of a world that we "Know" if one had never "Known" it? Well, I subscribe to the tentative theory that the Noumenal World, and even Certainty, are possibilities. This is my hypothesis: All abstract, intersubjective, readily available knowledge -- the entire scholastic, historical, scientific, frame of reference, et al -- belongs to the Phenomenal. We THINK these things, but they do not have the luster of Knowledge. This seems to hold with Eastern thought as well as with Western thought. If any Certainty of Truth is possible, it is personal and individual. True intersubjectivity is incredibly rare; one is lucky to experience it once a year. We can all agree, for instance, that the "sky is blue" because we would be damned to call it something else on a bright, cloudless day. But for me it seems not mere sophistry but the very essence of truth to make this observation: The fact that every painting you have ever seen of the sky looks distinct proves that every painter saw a different sky. Few of us just have the nerve and patience to render it. Furthermore, the "sky" that I see when I tell you about it -- the sky "out there" -- is NOT the sky that I saw when I was five years old, whic only in passing and at those rare moments of solidarity can I avail myself of again. The forer has the colour of blue construction paper and is projected outwards upon the "out there". The True Sky is everywhere around me, nebulously sapphire blue and maddeningly beautiful.
Our Mass-mindedness obscures that sky in all the ways that Huxley predicted in Brave New World. Let me make my point clear: Each of us belongs to a tower at the top of which one can see the Sun over the hills. Yet that solitary window does not face any other windows in the castle. We can descend onto the parapet and mingle, but then we will not see the Sun. Very rarely do we see each other and the Sun at the same time.
The people who are trying to make it "big" in the intellectual world would not begin to question that presuppositions of Science. Money talks, B.S. walks. The government funds Science and Science we get. But the brilliant minds of our time that pick up where Einstein left off are not a part of this oppressive majority. Rupert Sheldrake said that he had been an Anglican for I think twenty-three years and had never heard the word "heretic" used once in the Church. Yet he has heard it used innumerable times in the Scientific Community, perhaps chiefly targeted at him for his refusal to accept the philosophical, unverified prejudices of Materialism and other dogmas.
For a very long time, Philosophers have known that Science was dying. Yet if one de-funds History and Philosophy, what do you expect to happen? Oh Brave New World that has such people in it. People with no qualms with repeating themselves or saying that they "Agree" will line up and crusade against you for any "unverified" (read: Original) thought. Who am I to drop a bomb like "Science is Dead"? If I cannot with-stand the shelling of Common Sense, maybe I will start believing it. Yet I know enough about the history of religious creed and the evolution of common sense not to be worried: Only depressingly annoyed. Shestov pointed out very clearly how Common Sense and Logic work within a tightly knit community, and with the Internet now, it jeels impossible to escape the entangling Net of like-mindedness. Add that introversion has all ways been a minority and that does not help at all. I need only to remind myself of these things, though, and I won't be impressed by hearing appeals to the virtues of the Scientific Method. The Method is a Method, not an idol. To commit to it entirely in one's life is to commit philosophical suicide and to join the Church during the Inquisition. And that is alone enough for one solitary to say "Science is Dead", as Nietzsche would have said of God (and science as well) decades ago.
To defend science according to science is stupid. What psychology has shown us, as well as physics, is that, just as philosophy can be used to get out of philosophy, science can be used to invalidate science. It's a world within a world, but only a dolt would say: "This state of consciousness that I am in now, which is entirely logically understood and agreed-upon by my friends and perhaps by the majority, is certainly the entirety of experience. There has been nothing I have forgotten or over-looked." My whole struggle has been to maintain contact with something more vulnerable and true. In that very process what had appeared totally clear was lost. The quest of the philosopher is a nebulous and paradoxal one. Enough people remember my depression from high school to note my seriousness, though, and that consistency should lend me merit.
I could not bring myself to believe in a "society" outside of my mind that has more authority than my own "anecdotal" experience. What is it? Everyone on facebook has a different set of friends. If my "society" is the sum of my relationships with people, how is it that I occupy the same society as anyone else? To appeal to its authority would be to appeal to a narcissistic projection. But I am consciously and unconsciously subtle enough to know how to please and flatter people. If you must hear me say that the sky is blue, I just might do it if there's something in it for me. If I refuse to, soon the "Objective" world dissolves. I am left only with the subjective. How do *I* know what the totality of all Societies is like? I am not God, to the best of my knowledge, and that is a Noumenal world which, if I cannot contact it, can be said not to exist.
I would be foolish to project the logic of my own mind onto the World and to say that the World follows the same laws. This was the Leap that Camus was talking about. It is entirely emotional, not logical. True, pure logic all ways transcends itself. I don't care much for the dogma of people living in a snow-globe; I only fear them when they attack or when they retaliate. All conceptual knowledge is a world within a world. We need it. We eed to get out of it. We may need it to get out of it. I would like to live in the society that I envisioned the adult world to be: One of radically Individual people who re-invent themselves with every hour to suit a changing Universe. But perhaps to project THAT hope upon the world is equally naiive.
Dmitry.
