HUMANS
IN THE WORLD: INTRODUCTION
TO RADICAL PERSPECTIVISM
HUMANS
IN THE WORLD: INTRODUCTION
TO RADICAL PERSPECTIVISM
Other Chapters:
Alexander Makedon
Chicago State University
Copyright © 1992
SCIENCE Posted 2/6/01
Scientific Intolerance |
There is little doubt that science today is the dominant ideology in many societies, or is at least very important to people in many places around the world. Scientists are no less "human" than non-scientists, and therefore just as likely as other humans to like (prefer, love) something which they believe in, over something which they do not. It is for this reason that scientists may become as intolerant of non-scientific interpretations of the world, as any-one can be against people with different beliefs. A whole society may come to consider certain scientific beliefs so sacrosanct or "unquestionably" true that people in that society ridicule, control, or "punish" those who hold non-scientific beliefs. Herein lies the danger of science becoming so petrified inside an unchanging set of attitudes, if not widely institutionalized or well entrenched politically, that it becomes almost taboo within scientific circles even to discuss non-scientific understandings. It is ironic that although science was seen in the eighteenth century as helping humans to liberate themselves from superstition, especially so-called religious superstition, it may also be used today as a tool to obfuscate our understanding of the world, such as, deny us a systematic examination of the world's unscientific possibilities.
Scientists are bound to re-discover non-scientific possibilities even in spite of their seemingly unwavering commitment to science. This is so because there lurk in the midst of their scientific methods of "discovery" several seemingly "unexplainable" phenomena, such as, certain human abilities that are scientifically unexplainable (e.g., healing powers); events that seem to have completely unscientific meanings (e.g., crying icons); or unscientific realities in whose context people prefer to live (e.g., inside the world of imagination). It is in this sense that people who don't discount "miracles" as pure fantasy, such as, crying icons or healing of the incurably ill, may have a better clue to understanding the world, than scientists who always try to find a scientific explanation.
The more unscientific certain events are, the more ludicrous they may seem to be, although it is precisely this elusive play element that makes them the world's. Such realities remain impossible to those who don't recognize them as "real." In fact, some people may decide to live on the basis of any of the world's non-scientific possibilities, as do or did acupuncturists, healers, medicine men, astrologers, artists, philosophers, poets, dreamers, or even "scientists" whose work is not considered "scientific." Their lifestyles or beliefs represent an ever-present invitation to others to join them in their non-scientific games of interpretation.
At this point it may be objected against our view of science as "reinterpretable" that there always was a "true" science, except it was misunderstood, misapplied, or still in the process of being developed at the time. For example, how do we know that we haven't finally reached at a point today where we have "true" science? How do we know that all so-called "scientists" who worked before the discovery of "true" science in modern times were really doing science?
As a response, we ask our objector what criteria of truth is he using to come to the conclusion that true science exists? And if such criteria may be identified, then on the basis of which first assumptions is he basing his criteria on, or the criteria of his criteria, and so on ad infinitum? Again, we come back full circle to using at least some first assumptions for evaluating the truth of "true" science, such as, assumptions regarding "truth," "evaluation," or "science." The question then becomes not whether there ever was "true" science, but whether we decide to choose this rather than that set of first assumptions, or whether our first assumptions regarding, say, truth, shall be culture-bound, human-bound, or universal. It is in this sense that our first assumptions even in science must be the world's, or "universal," else we can't hope to understand anything more about the world than what our first assumptions allow.
Scientists have been criticized by such writers as Thomas Kuhn for thinking on the basis of first assumptions that are both time and culture-bound. For example, if we assume, as did Newton, a mechanistic-materialistic view of the universe, then until the time is ripe for a different view, as it was when Einstein proposed his theory of relativity, non mechanistic views may be seen as "unscientific." As a result, under a Newtonian perspective we may have seen not more of the world, in the sense of understanding it better as world, but simply more of a world pre-defined by such perspective.
Under radical perspectivism, we use both scientific and non-scientific assumptions to interpret the world. If we interpret the world under both such types of assumptions, we may finally begin to "see" it. This is so because using both, scientific and non-scientific first assumptions, allows us to have, literally, a more global view of the world. For example, if we borrow from the vast world of our imagination, which is often untestable, may help us develop a sensitivity to presently unobservable world-realities which we can't measure or quantify.
When science expands to embrace the world, then it becomes "world-science." By world-science we mean the type of investigation that acknowledges the existence of presumably unscientific realities. Science is then more inclusive of a world whose existence is not reality-bound. Scientific "observables" are not pre-defined by the level of world-understanding by humans at the time. Hence the need for a more open-ended science that reflects back on the world-as-world, instead of a world-as-predefined-by-humans. Science is thus re-defined along its original, broader path of world-inclusive understanding, no matter how "unscientific" such world may presently seem to us, or to humans in any other reality-bound culture.
Although science has helped us wear "glasses" with which to "see" the world, the world has always been around us in great abundance: it is the world that we touch, see, breathe, smell, feel, think about, or discuss. It is a world into which we have not "fallen," as some writers may have us believe, but have always been a part of: we don't first exist, and then try to become, but instead co-exist with the world, and can become the world's future. We didn't need scientific tools to become "scientific," in the sense of trying to understand the world: we simply decided to take seriously the world's scientific possibilities. Ironically, it is only as we realize the vanity of our seriousness that we begin to achieve our scientific goal, which is to understand the world.
Aware of our world, we are nevertheless unable to really see it even in spite of our newly acquired scientific techniques. We live in the midst of a tremendous bundle of universal possibilities, all of which collectively represent the world. If re-interpreted playfully, these possibilities may reveal the truth about the world. Although capable of imagining the other, humans have yet to imagine it in all of its universal possibilities, or to allow ourselves to be seen as the other might see us. Perhaps we have been too tied to our struggle for physical survival to allow our minds to be played by a presumably "hostile" world. Yet the more we see the world as a means for our survival, or even science as a means merely for developing technology that will presumably benefit humans, the further away we get from understanding the world, and with it our own possibilities as a species in the future. This is so because we have become so myopically concerned with saving ourselves, that we overlook the survival of those human-supporting world-parts whose continued existence can help our own. We are still at the stage of knowing too little and worrying too much to allow our egos to become the world's, or the world to enter our ego.
We may come to learn as much about the world through make-believe, as through the scientific method. This is so because while the former allows us to come closer to the world as humans-role-playing-the-world, the latter sees it "objectively" as something separate from humans. Humans can't hope to understand the world if they persist in seeing it only scientifically, or at least as scientifically as their present-day definition of "science" allows them to see it. Humans see less the more they see, or think they see with their scientific tools, in the sense that they become increasingly less aware of how much more there is they could see even without them.
Let us take the example of a scientific tool, the microscope. It is presumably used to allow us to see what we cannot see with the naked eye. Has the microscope told us much more about the world that we didn't already know? Again, the answer depends on what we mean by "knowledge," and what criterion are we using to evaluate its quality. Inevitably, we fall back to deciding whose first assumptions are we going to use in our interpretations, for example, our interpretation of what "knowledge" is. If we use culture-bound first assumptions, then our scientific work runs the risk of representing more how science is defined in our culture at the time, than either science as such (if there is such a thing as science apart from first assumptions); or the world which scientists are presumably studying.
For a long time humans have been able to see enough of the world with the naked eye without the need of a microscope, and yet didn't feel they knew it any less, than scientists using microscopes today do. In fact, there was a time during the middle ages when almost everyone interpreted everything they saw in terms of religious or theocratic assumptions that today under the traditional scientific paradigm may be seen as anything but scientific. This shows us the "exegetic" role which first assumptions play in our interpretations of the world. Perhaps it will take many changes in lifestyle, belief systems, or ideology before we finally wake up to our ability to role-play any number of non-human first assumptions. Presently the world has its own way of borrowing our ability as humans to think, to think-through-us about itself. This is so because even when we think we are using a method invented by humans to interpret the world, such as, the scientific method, we are inadvertently using one of the world's possibilities for self-interpretation that evolved, no matter how incompletely, through humans. When humans become more self-aware of their worldliness as human-world, meaning, a world part whose thinking abilities are on a continuum with the rest of the world, then they are more likely to open wide the floodgates of universal perspectives to pass through their human-based (but not necessarily human-biased) interpretations.
Our scientific tools are the ultimate catalysts of our self-fulfilling scientific prophecies. This is so because we assume that if they are built any differently they will not enable us to see, and therefore can serve no purpose in helping us to understand the world. The humanities are sometimes seen as less the window to understanding the world, and more as a means for social mobility or "personal growth." In fact they may be seen as another kind of tool for finding out more about the world itself (but one which is presently considered "unscientific"). Expecting to see something smaller if only we had the right tools, we built ever more sophisticated microscopes that enable us to see "smaller." As a result, we don't really see anything different, in the sense of revealing another dimension of understanding or "first assumption" about the world, but only what we expected to "see."
We may end up seeing even less through our tools, than without them: we may condition ourselves to "seeing" only what we can see through such tools, thus allowing those world-parts which we can see without such tools to pass us by unobserved. Witness the large number of so called "scientific discoveries," from Archimedes to Einstein, that were conceived even without such tools, proving that, at best, such tools may be used to supplement our understanding of the world, rather than as the world's gateway to our understanding.
We submit that scientific progress is seen as "progress" only in the context of our scientific first assumptions, or, more correctly, in the context of how our culture at the time understands the meaning of the term "progress." It is only as we come to understand the limits of our first assumptions, be they culture-bound, human-bound, or time-bound, that we can also know, to paraphrase Socrates, how much we don't know about the world. The more we are left with the impression that we actually know, the more closed-minded we may become to different types of first assumptions. It is in this sense that in certain contexts, the more we think we know, the less we actually do.
Our trying to understand the world or ourselves, or what earlier we referred to as the human-world, may be compared to the work of Sisyphus in Greek mythology: like Sisyphus, who was condemned by the gods to push a rock up the slope of the mountain, only to have it drop back down, and then repeat the process, we are condemned to start from the beginning every time we climb the slope of this or that type of non-universal assumption. The moment we arrive at the apex of our scientific discovery about, say, the mechanical (Newtonian) universe, the world slips right under our belief system, and presents us with a relativistic (Einsteinian) or unpredictable (Heisenbergian)universe. Or when we thought we conquered a communicable disease, a new strand with greater resistance to antibiotics is born to break through our bodily defenses.
On the other hand, if we include under "science" the unpredictable, possible, and unobservable universe, we include more of the world. Since science aims at understanding the world, such inclusive approach may be seen as more scientific than the present insipidly "sterilized" paradigm of traditional science. A radically perspectivistic approach to understanding the world may thus be seen as intimately "scientific." If by "science" we mean a process through which we aim ultimately to understand as much of the world as our human abilities allow, then does it not make sense that we shouldn't wear a "blind eye" to seemingly "unscientific" perspectives which are, nevertheless, the world's? What is even more frustrating, the closer we come to the top of our mountain, the more confident we feel that we "must" be right. As a result, we may become more arrogant toward those with different beliefs, be they other people or other cultures, or other parts of the universe. Or in the process of climbing we may feel so insecure that we may fall down, or that we are not on the right track, that we become intolerant toward others (other animate or inanimate parts of the world) that seem to hold different first assumptions.
You can give a person who can't read the best glasses for his eyes, and he will still be unable to read. Likewise with our scientific tools, we may be able to see more inside or outside our bodies, but unless we also learn how to see "differently" we will not really "see," or at least be able to understand what we see. It is in this sense that some of the most acclaimed scientists at the peak of their careers express puzzlement about the universe that touches on religious mysticism: they have no more clues as to its being or coming-to-be (birth, true nature, purpose), than those non-scientists who interpret the world imaginatively, intuitively, or poetically. Unable to explain what they see any better than what they know already, they can't help but wonder at its mysterious balance, vastness or genesis. This is probably the same feeling that someone who can't read must have toward a library: where before he couldn't find it without his glasses, now that he did find it, he is amazed at how much more there is that he can't read.
Ironically, it is precisely when scientists begin to re-interpret the world on the basis of non-scientific first assumptions that they begin to "see" it. This is so because non-scientific first assumptions allow them to re-interpret their own from a distance, and thus to have, literally, a more global view of their assumptions. Yet doing so may be very difficult, psychologically, as it may require that they do what they learned in graduate school or during their long careers they should not do.
There are many "tools" other than those that are properly "scientific" with which to see the world, but which presently we don't see them as such. For example, the humanities may be seen as "scientific" a tool to understanding the world, as are those tools which are commonly recognized as scientific. This is so because they help us see the world's "unscientific" dimensions, and therefore to fulfill one of the most important goals of modern science, which is to understand the world. For example, they may reveal the world's unscientific representabilities by studying literature, philosophy, or art. Literature may help us realize our ability to represent the world through our writing; art, may force us to adapt our perspectives to the world's to become, literally, part of the bigger picture; and religious studies, which may reveal a world too "mystical" to fit conveniently inside scientific hypotheses. Likewise with that most important human tool, the mind: it helps us rediscover the world, and therefore may be seen as another type of "scientific tool."
It has become almost cliche to remind people who are first learning about computers that it is "only" a tool, by which we mean that computers cannot replace the mind as the most perceptive of all human tools. Thus even the computer depends on the "mind-tool" for its design, purpose, or function. Without a mind, humans can't imagine the other, role-play the world, or reinterpret their actions from a variety of human or non-human perspectives. The interpretations of a mind-less human are nothing like we can imagine: without a mind, we can't even begin to imagine what his interpretations may be like.
We may come closer to appreciating how advanced our in-born tools are, say, our hands, the more advanced we become technically in simulating human behavior. Once we go through the experience of having our own capabilities simulated, we may begin to re-evaluate the complexity of our biological tools more carefully, including their potential contributions to understanding world phenomena.
Perhaps our love with science may explain our earlier attempts, from the 1950s to the 1970s, to make the computer "think" like humans, only to realize, through research on artificial intelligence, how powerful a tool the mind is for so relatively primitive a machine to simulate it. If there is a lesson to be learned from that experience, it is probably how much more the mind can do than we had given it credit for. Ironically, we may have underestimated the instrumentality of our mind-tool even while we have been using it to build technical tools.
There are many "tools" with which we are either born with, such as our senses and limbs, or "in," such as our social institutions. Such tools are no less instrumental in what he can or cannot do, or how much he can find out about the world, than our most technically advanced tools. We may refer collectively to such in-born or socially-developed "tools" as our social, intellectual, emotional, and biological capabilities.
Societies may be seen as tools-with-which-to-shape-tools. This is so because they provide the context within which other tools take shape. Seen from that perspective, it may be said that societies are a human-made laboratory for the development of world-interpretive tools (from those associated strictly with science, such as, the microscope, to larger "angles of interpretation," such as, science itself, or any number of the arts, studies or belief systems developed by humans).
Since we are born with biological "tools" (mind, hands, eyes, and the like), or at least with the potential to develop them, we may fail to fully recognize their paramount instrumental value. Having lived all our lives inside or through such in-born tools, we may lack the perspective necessary to see them "disinterestedly" from a distance as "tools."
Scientists are sometimes depicted in fiction or film as doctrinaire, almost monstrous people who will do anything to achieve their scientific goals, even if from the reader's perspective, their means may be described as "inhumane." The authors of these fictional stories, or the public that flocks to bookstores to buy them, or to cinemas to see them, may have sensed the danger inherent in allowing any one type of interpretation to dominate our thinking. For example, if science is taken "seriously," in the sense of drawing its method of experimental investigation to its logical conclusion, then not only is it justified to kill, "torture," or maim animals in the service of science, but also do the same with humans. Hence the Frankenstein phenomenon in popular culture, where human beings are seen as a means in the service of scientific "discovery." Such films, or similar stories in books, newspapers, or on television may be the public's way of snubbing science: flagrantly anti-scientific, they are, nevertheless, no less "science," in the sense of helping us to understand the world, than the world can be understood through strictly science-centered assumptions.
To paraphrase Johan Huizinga, humans remain human only as they allow themselves to play. They play, in turn, when they reinterpret the world on the basis of its universal first assumptions. As a result, they do not allow themselves to become too serious with any one interpretation, however "true" or "sacrosanct" it may sound in their own culture at the time. By playing with the world's possibilities, humans allow themselves to become its interpreter, and therefore human (while the world is "world" when human-interpreted).
If history is any indication, there is little doubt that the public's fear of the domination of any one interpretation has some basis in fact, as is shown from the different types of conquest or destruction that humans engaged against each other, or against nature, as a result of holding on to only one set of first assumptions. For example, witness the religious crusades, wholesale attempts to convert other cultures to our western "democratic" beliefs, or the widespread support that scientists holding doctoral degrees offered the Nazi regime.
Perhaps this sense by the public of the world as something re-interpretable may explain the popularity of the so-called "tabloids" (sensational newspapers): their popularity may lie not so much in the public's inability to distinguish between "true" and "untrue" facts, but in its thirst for non-traditional interpretations, or, more correctly, for setting their minds free to think differently (in this case, differently from the accepted scientific paradigm). Thus however "ridiculous" their stories may be, or commercially exploitative of the public's thirst for playful re-interpretations of the facts, they reveal an underlying truth regarding the public's need for radically unconventional perspectives; or its sense of the world as something playfully reinterpretable, imaginable, and unpredictable.
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