Science
19th installment to my philosophical system.
The true shape in which truth exists can only be the scientific system of such truth. To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing—that is what I have set myself to do. The inner necessity that knowing should be Science lies in its nature, and only the systematic exposition of philosophy itself provides it. —Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §5 (A. V. Miller Translation).
In the various thoughts which strike one throughout the day, the most vivifying are those which are meaningful. When my idle mind stumbles over the many concepts which I may be contemplating at one time or another, I am most taken aback by those which I cannot completely comprehend or correlate with some past experience. Science, as a tool for advancing man’s knowledge of the world, is one such subject which, no matter how many times I ruminate upon it, I never seem to truly apprehend in its totality.
Reality, as it stands before us, is really the whole subjectivity of the mind turned into the objectivity of the individual by their embodied action in the world. Science is nothing but man’s attempt to bring the whole subjective representation of reality into concrete comprehension.
It is no surprise to anyone familiar with intellectual history that science as we know it today was originally referred to as natural philosophy. For millennia, this label captured the whole essence of what the natural world was for those bold enough to study it. Ancient men and women saw the world exactly as we do; the difference, however, was how they interpreted it.
In the distant past, it was common to view all things as related to one another. Everything in nature seemed to have sprung from a single source or idea, from which everything that we perceive now originated. There had yet to be a standardized method for investigating nature, no single technique to probe the recesses of the natural world; the only thing ancient man could rely on was his mind and his ideas about what seemed to compose reality.
There were numerous theories about what was fundamental to existence, but everyone differed in their conclusions, stemming from their different starting presuppositions. In the West, the first person to offer up a natural explanation of reality—i.e., an explanation that does not rely on gods, folktales, or the supernatural—was Thales, who claimed that all was water. In the East, there was Uddālaka Āruṇi, who said that all of reality was sat (सत्), meaning, among other things, being. While both are ontological frameworks that have metaphysical implications, the important thing here is what was actually assumed: Thales took a materialist beginning, while Āruṇi took a purely ontological one.
From this split came the distinction between Western thought and Eastern thought, and from which came every sect, school, and dogma about the world. Of course, with time, things were bound to change, but the overall method of thinking still remains an ingrained cultural meme between both sides. It is hard to break past past vestiges of what we were; it seems, rather, that what we are, we are condemned to remain.
Once science got up on its feet, however, and entered into the modern age, the world—both West and East—was temporarily blinded by its illumination; so bright was this new revelation. It cannot be repeated enough just how transformative science as a method of investigation was. Again, prior to it, the best man could do was argue for reality on first principles—that which seems intuitive and logically follows.
The greatest of these thinkers was Aristotle, from whom we get practically all our important metaphysical terminology; but now, in this enlightened age, man no longer looked to himself but to reality as itself, and decided to consider the natural world on its own grounds, rather than from his logical homeland. At once, science lost the philosophical connotation to its original name (natural philosophy) and thus became the subject we recognize today.
What exactly happened, though? Why did man go from arguing from first principles to finally deciding to test nature itself by experimenting? It is difficult to know who was the first to bring about this change, or why man stopped considering reality in that way, but I would suspect that it happened because man was able to separate teleology (purpose) from ontology (being); that is, man stopped assuming that the causes behind things were really the grounds for their tangible purpose, which appear as effects in the world.
In essence, all of natural philosophy (prior to science proper) was derived from an implicit assumption about what nature actually was; the first philosophers all assumed that there was intentionality behind natural phenomena, and so, logically following from this, they subjected all of their conclusions to an effect which lay within the purpose of a natural occurrence, rather than in questioning the “why” behind the occurrence. In this way, all their conclusions about natural phenomena did not extend beyond what the final cause of the object was.
There is a very strong argument to be made that the first person to treat reality in a strictly ontological sense, that is, only as it appears to us in our experience of it—from which the scientific method was ultimately developed—was neither Francis Bacon, nor Da Vinci, nor Roger Bacon, but Ibn al-Haytham, who famously said:
The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them—the one who submits to argument and demonstration and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and margins of its content, attack it from every side. He should also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency.
He was the first to test his logic and intuitions about nature with actual experiments, because prior to him, it was assumed that if a thing worked out logically, that somehow made it a sure thing in reality.
It never occurred to ancient scientists that their conclusions about reality could be off if their assumptions about that reality were off. Of course, there were skeptics and sophists in the pre-Socratic age, but they only questioned their perceptions in an epistemological sense; to them, if a thing cannot be known with certainty, investigating it is pointless, for it ends in uncertainty.
Scientists, however, do not worry themselves about absolute certainty or the ground/validity of their methods, so long as it provides them with practical results that are corroborated with supporting evidence. That is why most scientifically minded people are ignorant of philosophy, and by extension, the intellectual traditions that gave birth to their frameworks to begin with; they view all ideas not directly related to the natural phenomena in question as irrelevant, and rightfully so. They couldn’t care less about the grounds or ends of their methods; all that matters is discovering the “why” through experimenting and hypothesizing. Such is why most scientists today are naturalists and naïve empirical materialists. They view all questions through a false dichotomy of verifiability: either the thing in question can be investigated to the point of proving it false, or it has no meaning whatsoever. It is very pragmatic, but I believe overly so, and too simplistic a view to have on the world.
Scientists treat the world in the same way they treat their experiments—better yet, in the same way mathematicians treat their axioms—with a view to simplicity and simplification; the point is never having a total comprehension of things, but rather a framework to view things through in order to develop methods that refine the initial results.
In truth, science is really about generating reasons for events in the world; it wishes to offer the best explanation for every natural occurrence, and in doing so, turns every aspect of reality into a natural occurrence whose cause must have an attribution. It is the subject naming the predicate. All things experienced by man are natural; therefore, they must have some natural explanation—and they are off, searching for what mechanism lies behind such an event.
By reducing reality to only a single particular, you come to discover many things about that particular, but you never see what lies beyond it—you only retort that what lies beyond it is irrelevant because it does not refer back to the particular. This is what science is today: a telescope made only for a particular star, rather than the entire cosmos.
Science, like capitalism, is an ideal dialectic—and it is ideal because its approach to reality is never final, but rather always evolving and transforming as new discoveries are made. Unlike capitalism, however, science has brought untold riches and benefits to mankind through its method of investigation (its process), and is, in my view, the single greatest paradigm shift in intellectual history.
Science is the process by which nature is apprehended and made known; it takes the concrete aspects of reality, breaks them into their simplest parts—in doing so brushing over all their complexities—and then rearranges them in order to construct a seemingly valid explanation for the thing in question. It is a good method that is also pragmatic, but I feel too many people today cling too tightly to it. Most intelligent people like to think the results of science speak for themselves, and that alone justifies subordinating all aspects of life to it. I, for one, never felt satisfied with the results of science because it did not answer—nay, it did not even consider or look at—the questions which literature, philosophy, and theology at least strive to answer.
Science is not existential, and that is my biggest problem with it; it removes every complexity of nature for the sake of making the phenomenon as narrow as possible—in doing so making it easier to approach, with the hope that once this simplified phenomenon is figured out, it will give a clue as to how to approach the thing as a whole—and then stands proud atop the anthill it just conquered while the whole mountain still stands before it. It considers the questions of life, meaning, and existence to be unanswerable, and as a result, provides us no insights on that front, and sadly never will.
But for some reason, still unbeknownst to me, many people today only consider life through a scientific lens; again, mistaking the forest for the trees. What value has science ever added to, say, the question of love—aside from reducing it to a mere chemical reaction, a release of dopamine? I feel anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that science explains love sufficiently at all. It is as if every important aspect of life—those aspects which make living meaningful and which are never to go unnoticed as we live—are not to be approached by the scientific method, all because they cannot be put in such a definite way as to be proven false.
In short, every abstraction which can be given meaning is totally ostracized by science insofar as the meaning is subjectively made. For science, the only meaning there is is that which is objective, i.e., not subordinate to anything else, mind-independent, anti-subjective; this is foolish, however, because objectivity does not exist in the manner they define it. They deduce from the impossibility of the contrary—a dubious assumption without any real ground—that objectivity has a metaphysical status, as if a law of nature, or the logical absolutes, or a mathematical proof, were eternal and prior to all conscious creatures. They fail to recognize that these “facts” exist for us, for individuals, and are made by us from our methods of investigation; they also neglect the fact that facts themselves are values, hence being inherently subjective. The word “objective” has been maligned and equivocated against long enough. There is no “objective” anything in science. I hereby suggest that we go back to the original meaning of objective: that which is external to the subject; or in other words, that which lies outside of the individual, but which lives for them in experience. (This is how Kant and Schopenhauer used it, and it should be returned to.)
People speak of science having truth, or that this experiment showed the truth of something, but I am still waiting for them to show me the answers to life. Evidently, it would be helpful if all science enthusiasts remembered that famous quote from Lex Luthor: “I don’t believe in truth. You can’t measure it or hold it in your hands.” Existential science is the only truth there is, because it is the only one that strives to grasp reality in its totality, rather than attempting to construct it from an infinite sea of “truths.” Even if there were a finite number of truths in the universe, it would not be possible for man to comprehend them all, for our lives are too short, and life has other pressing concerns than merely pondering the whole contiguous universe.
Science can provide us with suggestions and useful results pragmatically arrived at, but it can never touch philosophical (existential) questions, and is ultimately without “objective” truth—the one thing people find meaningful about science; a crude misunderstanding which has to be attacked and driven out from everyone’s mind.
I feel we should not forget where the word “science” originates from: the Latin scientia (”knowledge”), from scīre (”to know”). Ipsa scientia potestas est (knowledge itself is power), says Francis Bacon. That is what modern science ultimately has to be: a subject whose sole focus is power—power to advance the human condition and provide information for the service of man and the planet he inhabits. Science should cut the act, trying to pretend that it has truth, when all it has is a vague conception of what reality truly appears like.
Man’s idea of truth is like a broken mirror, reflecting only pieces of the total image that stands before it. The future of man’s knowledge has to be encyclopedic and universal, incorporating everything rather than only a few simplified imitations of what the whole of conscious life is. By “science,” we should only have in our minds a totalizing kind of knowing—a knowledge that is extensive, ethical, personal, religious, artistic—in short, polymathic. That is the type of man the future must lead to if humanity as a whole is to move forward. The progression of one man must, and I think will, become the progression of all men—born in man’s own self-realization and embodiment in the world, a direct consequence of everything that has come before, unified and synthesized as one being of immense perfection. So long as man lives, power must predominate. It is up to us, therefore, to use such power to overthrow all old gods and conceptions and bring about an aeternus annus mirabilis (eternal miraculous year).
Pure self-recognition in absolute otherness, this Aether as such, is the ground and soil of Science or knowledge in general. The beginning of philosophy presupposes or requires that consciousness should dwell in this element. But this element itself achieves its own perfection and transparency only through the movement of its becoming. It is pure spirituality as the universal that has the form of simple immediacy. This simple being in its existential form is the soil [of Science], it is thinking which has its being in Spirit alone. —Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, §26 (A. V. Miller Translation).