Scientific Detachment from Nature: Part 4 of Your System of Belief is Poor in Words"

Scientific Detachment from Nature

To this day, scientists pretend that they are rather like disembodied minds. Unlike other human activities, science is supposed to be uniquely objective. Scientific papers are conventionally written in an impersonal style, seemingly devoid of emotion. Conclusions are meant to follow from facts by a logical process of reasoning like that which might be followed by a computer. Nobody is ever seen doing anything; methods are followed, phenomenas are observed and measurements are made, preferably with instruments. Everything is reported in the passive voice. Even schoolchildren learn this style of detachment in their laboratory notebook : « A test tube was taken... »

All research scientists know that this process is artificial; they are not disembodied minds uninfluenced by emotion.

The reality is very different.

In the mythology of science, great men are seen as archetypal heroes, endowed with superhuman powers, often remembered as a glory to their nation and all so-called humanity.

Behind the myth of the hero is the animist shaman- in Sanskrit Shramana «the one who has a knowledge » in Tungu, whose disembodied spirit could travel into the underworld or into the heavens in animal forms. Like the spirit of the shaman, the mind of the scientist travels far up into the sky; he can look back and observe the earth, the solar system and the entire universe as if from outside. He can travel in the other direction down into the most minuscule recesses of matter. In his heroic quest of truth, journeying beyond the frontiers of knowledge into the unknown, he overcomes all obstacles and returns bringing knowledge and power to mankind. This archaic image of the disembodied journey is the mythic basis of scientific detachment; it is what makes it exciting and it has a long animist tradition behind it, denied, of course. The European philosophy grew up against this background but but it restricted its realm to the intellect and viewed the osul as nothing but the conscious mind detached from the body and from the nature herself.

But the ideal of scientific detachment is not confined to the ranks of professional scientists and technocrats; the first principle of his philosophy « I am thinking therefore I exist » has an all-pervasive influence on modern society, deepening the divisions between man and nature, mond and body, head and heart, objedctivity and subjectivity, quantity and quality.



The new evolutionary cosmology has moved from the world machine of classical physics. But it shares its mathematical quality; it gives us a model universe that is soundless, coloreless, tasteless, odoreless and, of ocurse, lifeless. This universe differs from the one we know through our senses; indeed it is inaccessible to the senses and knowable only through mathematical reason. But what kind of reality do such mathematical models represent ? Do they correspond to an objective mathematical order that is more real than the world we know through our senses? Sounds, smelles, colors, and feelings are nowhere to be ofund in physics because they are excluded form the start. Physics abstracts from the world only those features that can be treated mathematically, such as shape, size, position, motion, mass and electric charge; it deliberately ignores everything that cannot be quantified. This procedure is fundamental to physics, and it was made plain by Galileo in the early 17th. Century. Physics need take into account only hte mathematical aspects of things, their « primary qualities »; these alone are regarded as objective. Other qualities known through the senses « secondary qualities » are told subjective; they do not exist in the objective mathematical world knowable to a disembodied mind. In Galileo's words :

I think that these tastes, odors, colours, etc., on the side of the object in which they seem to exist, are nothing else than mere names, but hold their residence solely in the sensitive body; so that if the animal were removed, every such quality would be abolished and annihilated.

The practical success of mechanistic science bear testimony to the effectiveness of this method; the quantitative aspect of the world can indeed be abstracted and modeled. But such models leave out most of our living experience; they are a partial way of knowing. Nevertheless, the prestige that this method has acquired through physics has established it as the model of scientific detachment, the envy of biologists, sociologists, economists, and all those who aspire to scientific objectivity.


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