71: Saving Science from Scientism - Wisdom. Poetic Knowledge and Goethe

Join James as he finishes the mini-series discussing why and how we should seek to save science from the self-desctructive clutches of scientism and reconstitute science within wisdom and recover poetic knowledge as an avenue to science. This episode draws from many key thinkers including Pope John Paul II and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Welcome back to another episode of Educating Humans. I'm your host James, and today we are continuing our travel through this little series called Saving Science from Scientism. Last time we were in this series, we looked at the question of whether science even needs saving. We discussed what scientism was and the threat that it posed to science. Today we're going to look at the second part of this argument, which is the idea of a need to reconstitute scientific knowledge within a metaphysical framework. For science to be saved from the technocratic and naturalistic scientism which currently threatens it, it must return to the metaphysical vision provided by the natural philosophy of the past. This means that science must look further back than the Enlightenment and the modern scientific revolution to reconstitute itself within a metaphysical framework. The effects of such reconstitution are twofold. First, the scientific knowledge will be reassumed as a constituent of wisdom, and second, the observational and contemplative modes of knowing will be made available as constituents of scientific knowledge. So science will be rejoined with wisdom, and both observational and contemplative modes of knowing will be made parts of scientific knowledge. Before the Enlightenment, scientific knowledge was understood as an avenue to higher truths in the pursuit of wisdom. Within this metaphysical framework, wisdom was seen as the unity of knowledge, and hence scientific knowledge was ordered towards such wisdom. The subordination of science to wisdom is essential as the alternative to a scientism which, as has been discussed, disregards truth and hence destroys science. John Paul II, working within this framework, argues for the interplay between both faith and reason when he claims that faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth. Without the aid of faith, John Paul II argues that reason has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge, and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Faith and reason as two constituents of wisdom provide a profound unity that produces knowledge capable of reaching the highest forms of speculation. With this unity in mind, John Paul II commends and exhorts the modern scientific researchers to continue their efforts without ever abandoning the sapiential horizon, the wisdom, within which scientific and technological achievements are wedded to the philosophical and ethical values which are distinctive and indelible mark of the human person. And hence, the subordination of science to wisdom enables an interplay between faith and reason in which science is both restricted in its scope and yet elevated toward higher knowledge. And finally, a return to scientific knowledge as a constituent of wisdom is a call for return to a naturalistic natural philosophy to mediate and synthesize the branches of natural history and natural science. Such a return to natural philosophy would engage with Aristotle's four causes, the essential, the teleological, the material, and the efficient as legitimate and necessary elements of understanding reality. These causes, particularly the essential and the teleological, would force men to move away from a purely Baconian manipulation of nature back towards cultivation. This is true because, as Ravi Jain explains, mere power over nature does not amount to real knowledge of nature, nor does it lead to wisdom. Such an interaction with nature, one grounded in wisdom and reverence for the essence and telos of nature, is described by Wendell Berry as a science which is both subordinate and limited because it is dedicated to the service of things greater than itself. Ultimately, a science that is made subordinate to a superior wisdom is one which is limited by a healthy reverence for nature as its own thing, with its own ends, rather than merely a tool for the utilization of humanity's desires. This version of science moves away from the mind of Medelin Wheels that we discussed in Saruman. The subordination of science to wisdom under a metaphysical and ontological vision of reality broadens the epistemological elements of science as both the analytic and poetic modes of knowing provide insight for scientific knowledge. In Leisure the Basis of Culture, Joseph Pieper argues that leisure is essential to human life and, writing in the wake of World War II, not to be deserted for pragmatism. His claim is that the purely practical must not dominate the contemplative leisure that is necessary for meaning, identity, and human flourishing. During his argument, he describes two different kinds of knowledge as understood in medieval epistemology ratio and intellectus. Ratio is the power of discursive logical thought, of searching and of examination, of abstraction and drawing conclusions, whereas intellectus is the name for understanding insofar as it is the capacity of simplex intuitus, of that simple vision to which truth offers herself like a landscape to the eye. Furthermore, Piper compares the analytical way in which Ratio gets at something in an active manner with the intuitive way in which intellectus receives insight in a passive manner. In the former, it is by the merit of the knower's activity that they come to the truth, but in the latter it is by the merit of the thing understood, and the knowers receptivity to such truth that they come to it. In sum, Piper's argument is that leisure is receptive and contemplative, and that human nature, whilst engaging with the practical purposes of analysis, ought always to be aimed at a higher form of insight that comes not through activity, but through leisure. James Taylor argues in a similar vein in his treatise on the recovery of education from pragmatism through a return to poetic knowledge. In his book Poetic Knowledge, much like Piper's Ratio and Intellectus, Taylor distinguishes the analytic from the poetic, and notes that the poetic mode of knowing is the appropriate means of reawakening the intuitive nature of human beings who are able to know reality in a profound way, an intimate way that is prior to and, in a certain sense, superior to science. Furthermore, Taylor encompasses all fields of inquiry within the poetic knowledge as the way by which the learner is led by love. He connects this poetic knowledge to human nature when he claims that the purposes of the humanities is not knowledge but to humanize. Here Taylor aligns with Piper in arguing that there is an intuitive knowledge that informs any greater understanding of reality and human flourishing. In sum, they both outline a holistic view that unifies the analytical and the contemplative modes. But does science actually need intellectus? Scientific knowledge, insofar as it tries to understand reality, must be open to both the poetic and the analytical ratio and intellectus to provide a clearer vision of reality. The analytic alone will not suffice, for there is another side of nature which calls for our attention and perhaps even submission, not that we might impose our wills upon her and upon others through mastery of her, but that she might impress her categories upon us. In a move from the natural environment to the artificial laboratory, the modern scientistic paradigm has denigrated the emphasis on observing nature in the raw. Michael Polliani observes a similar movement in his field of biology. The deprecation of the original conception of natural history as a contemplative rather than an analytical achievement persists throughout modern biology. But this shift away from a holistic vision of the scientific knowledge towards the solely analytical is problematic for science, for poetic notions of reality often precede positivistic scientific arguments, and furthermore, hypotheses are acts of the poetic imagination. The analytic mode of getting at nature and understanding her by ratio is insufficient for no one science, or even whole set of sciences, can ever comprehend the rich totality of causal ingredients that underlie each cosmic event. Furthermore, this insufficiency of ratio necessitates the place of intellectus within scientific understanding, for the complex totality of natural causes is something which grasps the observer rather than something to be grasped. The depths of nature are something to be contemplated, not merely analyzed, and this contemplation leads to truth. As John Paul II explains, these fundamental elements of knowledge spring from the wonder awakened in them by the contemplation of creation. But to see how intellectus works within scientific knowledge and methodology, we must turn to the delicate empiricism of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. When it comes to science, Goethe stands out as characteristically different to his Newtonian contemporaries of the 18th and 19th centuries because of his emphasis on the contemplative elements of the scientific method and the qualitative dimension of scientific knowledge. The most delineating difference between Goethe and the modern scientific method that was developing around him was that Goethe advocated for what he termed a delicate empiricism, which was the effort to understand a thing's meaning through prolonged, empathetic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience. Goethe retained a natural philosophy more akin to the medieval, whilst those around him were caught up in the mechanistic conception of reality. Goethe understood that the world is no mere surface reality, but a living cosmos that can gradually learn to see if only we do not abandon a gentle empiricism for the attractions of mechanical philosophy. And this gentle empiricism stands contrary to the purely analytic mode of ratio, for as Goethe explains, number and measurement in all their baldness destroy form and banish the spirit of living contemplation. This gentle empiricism is found not just in the laboratory, but at the observed phenomena's place of natural occurrence. Goethe argued that the phenomena must be freed from their grim torture chamber of empiricism, mechanism, and dogmatism. Goethe argues for delicate empiricism as the way to approach nature and phenomena because he understands the vastness of creation and the limitations of ratio alone. The tools of scientific measurement, in his view, make the scope of science too narrow and controlled. Rather, he understands, in a manner akin to intellectus, that simple vision to which truth offers itself like a landscape to the eye, that science must recognise that all effects we observe in the world of experience are interrelated in the most constant manner and merge into one another. From first to last they form a series of undulations, and furthermore that nature is nevertheless always a single entity, a unity. And thus, whenever it manifests itself in parts, all the rest must serve as a foundation for that very part, and the part must be related to all the rest. This understanding of the vast interrelation and unity of nature is significant, for it means, as Goethe explains, that even as the empirical evidence may seem quite isolated, we may view our experiments as mere isolated facts, but this is not to say that they are in fact isolated. The large implication of this inability to isolate the particular from the whole is that it places the phenomena above any explanation and makes nature irreducible to mere cause and effect. However, this is hard for a science which has not the contemplative patience of a gentle empiricism. For Goethe, a science which seeks to replace the phenomena experience with a theory or mechanical explanation reduces the sum to mere parts and loses the phenomena in the process. He reasserts this idea in his claim against the mathematizing of the natural sciences as he asserts that it is a false notion that a phrase of mathematical formula can ever take place of or set aside a phenomenon. The key difference of outcome between the contemplative gentle empiricism that is informed by both Ratio and intellectus and the mechanistic empiricism of the modern scientific method, that is informed by Ratio alone, is that whilst the latter can only observe quantitative values, the former widens its gaze into the qualitative dimension also. For as Goethe explains, if we set out to apply the full measure of mind and all its powers to this universe, we will realize that quantity and quality must be viewed as two poles of material existence. Therefore, this means that for Goethe, science is not merely a mechanistic, mathematical, and analytical way of getting at nature, but from its intent to its method to the knowledge it produces, it goes beyond the realm of ratio alone and enters the mystical. In the face of nature's complex web of causes and its irreducible ontology, Goethe's scientific inquiry includes intuition, empathy, and contemplation alongside the analytical. Therefore, the reconstitution of science within a metaphysical framework that necessitates that science be a constituent of wisdom also, by reference to a qualitative dimension beyond the purely material, necessitates that ratio and intellectus both be constituents of science. Furthermore, it is in the science of Goethe that we see a model, in theory and in practice, of how such a scientific method could be constituent constituted. Science must, if it is to move beyond the materialism by which it was co-opted, return to both the quantitative and qualitative unity of nature. Science needs saving from scientism. The history of science reveals that science was co-opted by a mechanistic naturalism with technocratic ends. Science has been used as the puppet for an ontologically reductive paradigm that, in the quest for power over nature, desecrates the very nature that science sees as venerable. Furthermore, this scientism, as has been proved, is anti science, for it, in a self-refutation, removes the very foundations on which science is erected. Science, which in its truest form, cultivates nature in a way akin to the elves of Middle Earth, has been consumed by the ring and its promise of power. But like Gollum, this power is proving to diminish science into something less than itself. Science can be saved so long as it is reconstituted within metaphysical realism. Science was never meant to take the place of the logos. It was meant to seek it earnestly. It is only within a metaphysical realism, led by wisdom and informed by the analytic and poetic modes of knowing, that science remains ordinate in its pursuit of truth. Only within such a constitution is science finally liberated from scientism. Well, thank you for listening to that paper titled Saving Science from Scientism. I know it was a bit of a um analytical, academic couple episodes to listen to, but I hope you got something out of it, and particularly the idea that science is maybe more than we have been told in our modern era, and that when we try to figure out this idea of classical education within science, that we can get a vision of something true and good and beautiful. And if anyone would be looking to extend their research into this, if this wetted your appetite for more of a discussion about how to do it, and in maybe even more practical terms, then I would recommend Ravi Jain's A New Natural Philosophy by Classical Academic Press. He's got it's very good, lots of this paper was inspired by his writing uh and the book is very good and goes into many practical things. Um particularly in the discussion of how does wonder work in science, and then how do we work to cultivate wonder rather than to do that diminishing reduction of these great, true, good and beautiful things to purely material things. And so that would be my recommendation. I hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you on the next episode.