What Went Wrong
The sense of the limits of science and the
contemporary malaise has structural and methodological no
less than historical roots. It is a complex phenomena which
requires both analytic clarity and historical specificity.
I shall venture to point out at the very out set that the
modern science, though a heir to all scientific traditions
of the past especially to the works of the great Muslim
scientists, is distinctively European. It is an embodiment
of the western secular ethos and has its foundations in the
western intellectual history. Thus, to have indepth and
firm understanding of the nature of modern science, we must
examine the philosophical tradition which is the fulcrum of
modern science.
Philosophers and scientists separated natural science from
metaphysics during the Renaissance in Europe. The
intellectual and scholarly tradition which is responsible
for the present status of science and technology has its
roots in the Enlightenment which by many is considered to be
the beginning of modern times. The Enlightenment was the
work of the Philosophes — the intellectuals who conceived
and perfected it. The philosophes looked at science and
exploration not just for new knowledge but also for new
attitudes towards knowledge. From science they acquired the
sceptical attitude of systematic doubt, and from exploration
a new relativistic attitude towards belief and used them as
ammunition against traditional norms and values.
The methodological concerns of the Enlightenment
derived from the seventeenth century. The intellectual
spokesmen of that century — Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke,
Newton — all appealed for a rational standard of truth. The
philosophy of the Enlightenment takes up this call,
particularly the methodological pattern of Newtonian
mechanics and begins to generalize it. This then becomes
the basic epistemological framework of the Enlightenment.
However much individual thinkers and scholars agree or
disagree with the end results, they are all unified in their
framework of knowledge. The new tools of “reason” and
“analysis” however, were not only for mathematical and
physical knowledge but they were also used by the
philosophes to dissect all branches of human endeavour.
Such traditional disciplines as politics, ethics,
metaphysics and religion were analyzed on the basis of
reason and logic with a view to ending their perplexities
once and for all. The principles which the philosophes
attempted to apply were the new scientific cannons of the
seventeenth century: there was to be no a priori deduction
from “natural” principles without concrete experimental
evidence. “This use of observation and experiment,” writes
Isaiah Berlin, “entitled the application of exact methods of
measurement, and resulted in the linking together of many
diverse phenomena under laws of great precision, generally
formulated in mathematical terms. Consequently only the
measurable aspects of reality were to be treated as real —
those susceptible to equations connecting the variations in
one aspect of a phenomenon with measurable variations in
other phenomena. The whole notion of nature as compounded
of irreducibly different qualities and unbridgeable
‘natural’ kinds was to be finally discarded. The
Aristotelian category of final cause — the explanation of
phenomena in terms of the ‘natural’ tendency of every object
to fulfill its own inner end or purpose — which was also to
be the answer to the question of why it existed, and what
function it was attempting to fulfill — notions for which no
experimental or observational evidence can in principle be
discovered — was abandoned as unscientific, and, indeed, in
the case of inanimate entities without wills or purposes, as
literally unintelligible. Laws formulating regular
concomitances of phenomena — the observed order and
conjunctions of things and events — were sufficient, without
introducing impalpable entities and forces, to describe all
that is describable, and predict all that is predictable in
the universe. Space, time, mass, force, momentum, rest —
the terms of mechanics — are to take the place of final
causes, substantial forms, divine purpose, and other
metaphysical notions.”
The Enlightenment separated knowledge from values
without giving an adverse judgment on the either. The
philosophes were in favour of reason; but they did not throw
intrinsic values overboard. Kant, for example clearly saw
in Newtonian mechanics knowledge of the law of the physical
universe, but he did not submit the autonomy and sovereignty
of man to deterministic mechanics. He separated the domains
of physical knowledge and intrinsic values by proclaiming
“the starry heavens above you and the moral law within” The
philosophies that followed the Enlightenment took the
divorce of knowledge and values further.
The nineteenth century heralds the true triumphs
of reasons in the unparalleled spread of materialism.
Positivism and materialism (of which Marxism is a part) and
their twentieth century counterpart logical empiricism threw
values overboard altogether. In their epistemological
framework values are not considered proper knowledge.
Utilitarianism declared that the goal, the ideal, of all
moral endeavour is the greatest happiness of the greatest
number of people. What came to be practiced, in fact, was
the greatest number of material goods for the largest
possible number of people. Industrialization, which also
became the main agent of the environmental devastation, had
produced this reality.
Indeed, the thought system of the philosophers of
the Enlightenment which became the basis of the
technological rationality of the present century, evacuates
the metaphysical ‘unknowable’ from the purview of human
thought by declaring either that everything is knowable, or
if not knowable, that it is unimportant. The basic
procedural assumption made is that all evidence can and must
be tested. For the scientific mind, truth has no absolute
meaning or ultimate epistemological foundation, no
metaphysical substructure to regard truths known to human
minds as manifestations of natural essences or divine
concept. On the contrary truth is defined as intrinsically
relative: there exist truths for a particular time or
context, for limited applications or interpretive purposes.
In this model of rationality, verifiability and predictive
value are the ultimate criteria of validity. The spiritual
aspect of human personality is ignored because it cannot be
proved by the technique that natural sciences have evolved.
The result of all this, as we notice in contemporary
civilization, is lack of direction, loss of a comprehensive
view of life that transcends temporary interests and
ambitions and a complete disarray of moral principles.
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