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Preface
Philosophical Extremes; A Defense of Pure
Reason
The other day I found myself defending the existence of the Large Hadron Collider and fundamental research in general. The effort was discouraging and, more importantly, dispiriting. There is a feeling of persecution in the scientific community, unspoken but unmistakable. There's a creeping fear that the world is going mad and we can't stop it. We work, discover, present, and solve more and more problems. Yet the more we solve, the less credibility we seem to have.
I turned inward to try to understand why this is happening. I can't abide my fellow scientists and their insecure need to justify truth. The value of truth is self-evident to me. Indulging the opinions of the uninformed in some sort of attempt to seem open-minded (as though one can be open-minded about the truth) seems more damaging than helpful. Such actions undermine science, giving authority to opinion at the expense of truth.
After some thought, I came to the conclusion that the current sentiment against pure research is the logical progression of our current philosophical age. We are, I believe, approaching a sort of philosophical extreme, where the tenets of that age's philosophy are taken too far.
This series of posts will trace briefly the progression of philosophy that has led to our current philosophical age. They will attempt to demonstrate the cyclic tendency of Philosophy-Extremism-Rejection-New Philosophy which, I believe, can explain the current sentiment about science in the world.
The purpose of this series of posts is not to solve, but rather to understand what is happening. I dedicate it to my fellow scientists under siege.
The Antiscience
"Every generation laughs at
the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."
Epistemology
has dominated philosophy for the past several centuries in the same way that Theology had
during the previous millennium. Our modern age, defined by the advancement of
technology, today exists because of our better understanding of how to acquire
natural truths and exploit them. This understanding comes after many centuries
of struggling to comprehend the world around us. Of course, it wasn't always as
it is now, this modern way of looking at the world, and less intuitively, it
won't always be this way.
Tens of thousands of years ago, humans started filling the voids created by
consciousness with Art, Religion, and Philosophy, and in that time the process
has been marked by only the certainty of change. To try to trace the
philosophical movements of the past thousand years would be disjointed and
ultimately distracting. I'll instead begin with the first movement of the
modern philosophical epoch which consists of the Renaissance, the
Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and finally our current Technology Age.
The Renaissance: A New Epoch in Philosophy Begins
"One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it
has not already been said by one philosopher or another." - Rene
Descartes
The current philosophical epoch, spanning the Renaissance to the present
day, began as a rediscovery of an earlier Greco-Roman epoch of philosophy. For 1200 years the Greeks and then the Romans
had sought with furious industry to determine the physical nature of the world,
of humans, and of human institutions. Then, with the ascension of the first
Christian Emperor, and later the fall of the Western Roman
Empire to Germanic tribes, that epoch of Aristotle, Euclid and
Ptolemy had ended and the new epoch of Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, and
Desiderius Erasmus began.
After the fall of Rome,
theology reigned. Philosophers would
spend a millennium debating the doctrines of Christianity, and the nature of
the human spirit. During these years, schools of thought would come and go and
eventually a set of principles evolved which, for the most part, manifest
themselves as our understanding of the human spirit today (being present, but
not part of the human body, death being the separation of the spirit and the
body, afterlife being the place where the spirit goes, etc.). By the 13th century, the Church as an
institution looked unshakeable and Italy began to prosper. It was the height of the Theological Epoch.
Rebirth
The Rebirth (the literal meaning of Renaissance) started slowly and
innocently enough. By the 14th century, the people of the Italian peninsula,
particularly Venice where trade was flourishing,
began to feel nostalgic for the greatness of old Rome. Petrarch, a
poet from Venice, wrote the Epic Poem Africa,
which detailed the old Roman Republican hero Scipio Africanus, the general who
defeated the Carthaginian menace, Hannibal.
Petrarch's work was well-received, and he used his influence to push for the
recovery and Latin translations of early Greek and Roman writers. Soon everyone
in Italy
was searching everywhere for extant Greek and Roman works and amassing a vast
corpus of ancient literature. Caesar, Cicero,
Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sappho, Herodotus, Tacitus, Thucydides,
Plato, Aristophanes, and many other ancient writers were dusted off, studied
and debated. The early renaissance was a
vibrant time of rediscovery that soon spread throughout Europe,
supported and even patronized by the Church.
Art and Sculpture and Literature of increasing quality could be found
throughout the Italian City States of Florence, Milan, Venice, and the Papal States. The Renaissance began as a happy marriage of Theology and History, each glorifying
the other.
The Church's support and enthusiasm for the early Renaissance was mostly because
it was in accord with established theology, but over time, an interest in the
"classical era" of the Greeks and Romans and their works inevitably
led to a resurgence in the philosophical topics of that epoch. What had started
as an exercise in nostalgia slowly transformed, by the 16th and 17th centuries,
into a renewed interest in the cultural and intellectual peaks of the philosophies
of ancient Greece and Rome. What had been up until then a relatively smooth transition between theological and the new
Revived Greco-Roman philosophical epochs began to get a bit turbulent as
rediscovered ancient ideas contradicted Church doctrine. Soon philosophers such
as Galileo Galilei were pushing the boundaries of knowledge beyond that which
the church felt comfortable. The unexpected success of the Protestant Reformation
had made the Church cautious, and it started to stand in opposition to the expanding Philosophical Renaissance. It was soon apparent that for this Rebirth of
Philosophy to continue to grow, the movement would have to separate itself from
the tethers of theology.
The Enlightenment: Reason over
Doctrine
"As long as
people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities."
- Voltaire
Those ancient Greco-Roman philosophies had seduced a continent plagued by
disease, war, and an increasingly impotent Church, to return to contemplating
the ancient ideals of the human form, government, art, and knowledge or
"truth". Scholars sought out and devoured the ancient works,
combining classic thought and modern theology, achieving artistic heights and
intellectual leaps. Eventually however, philosophers started to view Theology,
particularly Church doctrine, as more of a hindrance than as a compliment to
understanding the natural world. There was a shift, not epochal, but still
significant. The shift would break the final fetters of theology and glorify
not the Church, but reason as the highest authority for understanding the
natural world.
During the Enlightenment, the ideal of knowledge, called "truth",
subjugated the other ideals. Reason and empiricism, the means by which
"truth" was obtained, were applied to all the arts and sciences, from
biology to music to politics. The scientific method, the ultimate expression of
the Enlightenment, was born of the belief that through precise observation and
reasoning, one could obtain truth. During this period, it was believed that all
of the ills experienced by man could be conquered eventually by reason. In the beginning,
there were many successes and much progress was made. But soon the philosophical pendulum reached an
extreme, and what had started out as a means to free thought from theology
turned into a cult of rationality. The
enlightenment railed against anything that couldn't be proven by reason and
labeled such things "superstitions".
Soon political "enlightenment" led to the French Revolution
and countless horrors for Europe.
Ultimately this was the Enlightenment's undoing. For as well as reason and
observation serves us, and as much as progress can be made by indoctrinating
the acquisition of knowledge, it didn't explain the fact that human beings had
been painting seashells for 40,000 years. That is to say, there are aspects of
the human experience that are separate from reason - some would even say
transcend reason. People knew this intuitively, but the Enlightenment rejected it.
Romanticism
"I had therefore
to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief." - Immanuel Kant
The backlash against the pure reasoning of the Enlightenment manifested
itself as a movement of its own, Romanticism. Romanticism embraced emotional
experience as the relevant experience. The romantics believed that the
Enlightenment had gone too far, that not everything could be explained with
"cold" reasoning. Romantics pointed to intuition and imagination as
the means to attain truth. Romanticism was marked by Revivalism, Gothic Resurgence, and a general nostalgia for that extinct and now Romanticized Theological Epoch. Unfortunately, the world was moving forward, not backward, and soon the cold realities of the American Civil War, The Crimean War, and countless colonial rebellions across the globe undermined the romanticized worldview. As with all movements,
Romanticism went too far. Obviously, every truth couldn't be derived by mere
imagination. Surely, some reasoning was necessary. Thus the next major movement,
Realism, was born.
Realism
"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that
faith does not prove anything." - Frederick Nietzsche
Realism rejected what it felt were the overly emotional sentiments of the
Romantics, embracing instead "truth", be it good or bad. This was
subtlety different from the Enlightenment in that where the Enlightenment
sought ideals in every aspect of human experience, realism simply sought one
ideal - the ideal of knowledge, "truth". The realists weren't trying
to save the world through reason like the Enlightenment thinkers, or embrace it
with emotions like the Romantics, but rather understand all the
"truths" of it, whether those truths be ugly or beautiful, coldly and
critically.
".......This is the sort of modernity that made us ill, --we
sickened on lazy peace, cowardly compromise, the whole virtuous dirtiness of
the modern Yea and Nay. This tolerance and largeur of the heart that
"forgives" everything because it "understands" everything
is a sirocco
to us. Rather live amid the ice than among modern virtues and other such
south-winds! We were brave enough; we spared neither ourselves nor
others'......" - Friedrich Nietzsche "Der Antichrist" 1888.
One example of Realism, and it's fatal flaw, is the passage quoted above
from Nietzsche's Der Antichrist. The passage articulates Nietzsche's and
other Realists' belief that Christianity was undermining Natural Selection.
Nietzsche complains that the tenets of Christianity, principally compassion
for the weak, prevents Natural Selection from weeding the weaker races from the
stronger ones, thus undermining the evolution of mankind. Nietzsche, himself
frail and a bit of a loner, went to great pains to explain that weak
individuals in a "strong" race were counter-intuitively a blessing
because they could make out-sized contributions due to their "time to
think". (You've got to love Nietzsche. If you find yourself quoting
Nietzsche, however, I suggest you read him thoroughly first).
In Der Antichrist
he uses the term "Hyperbolean" to describe the stronger races and the
plague of religion as originating "in the south". What Nietzsche was
writing in Der Antichrist was that it was an unpleasant fact that
Natural Selection exists, but being a realist meant you accepted that fact.
Furthermore, since "compassion for the weak" was in direct opposition
to Natural Selection (Survival of the Fittest), it was a blight and a hindrance
of Human Kind's progress.
Therein lies the difficulty with Realism. It starts with a truth and uses
logic to reach a conclusion. Unfortunately, realism never double checks the
truth it starts with. It assumes that truth to be correct and never revisits
it.
Compassion for our fellow human beings isn't a
"blight". Our compassion for each other isn't in opposition to
natural selection; it is the result of natural selection. Scientists now have
found that it is our high altruism that separates us from even our nearest
primate relatives, who themselves are fairly compassionate for animals. Our
ability to empathize, our compassion, our altruism are the very traits that
make us so successful as a species. In fact, our species is defined by our ability to
cooperate. Nietzsche misunderstood natural selection, specifically
"fittest" in the phrase of "Survival of the Fittest", but
he wasn't alone in that misunderstanding. Many of the Realists made the same
mistake; it was called "Social Darwinism". It took two world wars and
several holocausts for the world to yearn again for a little idealism.
After World War II, the world was irreversably changed. The horrors of the last few decades demanded a change in thinking. The world needed idealism again, something to save humanity from itself, and they knew exactly what could do it.
End of Part I
Click here for Part II
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