Against Scientism

Yesterday, The Guardian ran a piece called 'Philosophy v Science: which can answer the big question of life?'. This is an interesting debate between the philosopher Julian Baggini and the physicist Lawrence Krauss on the differences of approach - and of the questions - of philosophy and of the natural sciences.  Obviously, they are both intelligent thinkers, but their attitudes - Krauss boisterous and proud of his subject, Baggini much more cautious and defensive - are revealing of the dominant reverence towards science and its extraordinary practical results and tendency to dismiss philosophy as senseless bickering. This is only natural: after all, science has produced a wealth of results with successful practical application leading to vast, radical improvements in the length and comfort of our lives, while the abstract problems of philosophy remain unsolved. The result is an uncritical idolisation of science, an act of blind faith on the power of the scientific method to produce answers - scientism, the prevailing ideology of industrial societies. However, this stance is fundamentally wrong, encapsulating a strong component of irrationality which, paradoxically, goes against the spirit of the science.

The catch-22 here is that you need a philosophical approach to grasp why scientism is both wrong and harmful to science in particular, and to knowledge in general. It is extremely naive to suppose that we have direct access to the outside world and unlimited power to change it, as scientism encourages. Even if that turns out to be true, we can only know after careful rational reflection - and that is where philosophy inevitably comes in. 

But what is this philosophical approach? 

I think it is best described as relentless rational criticism, i.e. the rigorous application of self-evident logical principles on the way we ourselves view the world. It implies a brave self-consciousness and commitment to fighting against dogmas of all sorts; it also incorporates a willingness to go to the root of our understanding of the world, in particular to the way language is employed (which is at the very core of our thinking). In particular, a large component of philosophy is the rational criticism of different methods of acquiring knowledge, which should lead to the improvement of those methods and, thus, to the possible construction of a clearer picture of the world. 

If you wish, you may picture the full body of human knowledge as an ocean, with philosophy as the waves hitting uncharted shore and leading to the expansion of the ocean in all directions. Philosophy probes at the unanswerable - once a method is fully formed and questions are circumscribed in such a way that they are answerable by its application, the problems cease to be philosophical and become part of the piecemeal practice of scientific investigation. In the meanwhile, philosophy has advanced to new formulations, and considers them until they are similarly circumscribed. In this way, philosophy contributes immensely to science. Discarding philosophical thinking - which I believe to be impossible, so deeply rooted is it in our humanity - would thus eventually lead the end of science.

But the clarification of the body of scientific truths and expansion of the scope of science is not the single task of philosophy. As an all-encompassing form of probing the world, philosophy also comprises an enquiry into our very own humanity (based on the same rational principles that have already been mentioned), into questions such as 'What is the meaning of life?' or 'How are we to live?'. These questions - the ones we must strive to answer both in theory and in practice, the ones that are concerned with the value we place in our own lives - transcend science, because, in science, the human being may be studied as an object, but not as a subject. 

For example, even if science provided us with a description (with predictions) of human behaviour in biological terms (and thus in chemical and physical ones), that still wouldn't give us the reason for a person's behaviour, - only an explanation - and it certainly wouldn't include ethical judgement. That explanation would certainly be interesting and illuminating in relation to the functioning of our organism, but, if mistaken as giving us the subject's intentionality, it would lead to a dangerous objectification of the human being.

It is, of course, an open question - a philosophical question - whether such a determinist reduction can be made. Even if it can, there is space for free will - the agent causes the action, using reason, verbal ability, and human empathy, which may be described in simpler terms (the ones of science; I speak of simper as in more fundamental). In other words, the fact that we are physical creatures, that is, based on a physical hardware, doesn't make us any less human in the sense we use in our interpersonal dealings - i.e., in the sense in which we consider each individual as an end in himself, possessing a special dignity that comes from the possibility of communication and understanding between interlocutors.

Thus science is compatible with an infinite within us, the infinite that keeps us alive and searching for more (sometimes through science, others through art, others even through religion), the infinite that makes us look into each others' eyes and seek a way of tempering our loneliness in the other's infinite potential, the infinite that underlies the freedom and dignity that make us equals in our humanity.

But science does not explore that infinite. Science has nothing to say about the human nature of love, of beauty, of goodness; but these are still necessary concepts which mean something - the meaning coming from the way we employ them and do them justice in our actions. 

Wittgenstein wrote that "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all". Science contributes to human life in many ways - from the pure joy of discovery and understanding to the great technological advances that allow us to live longer and better - but it is not enough. Attempting to reduce all the questions to hard-nosed scientific enquiry equates to jumping over the infinite within ourselves, the luscious gaping mouth of our humanity, the endless blossoming rose of our freedom.

'Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.'

I spent the last week away in the countryside with my family, which is something we do every year. I am not very sure that I like the countryside anymore. The scenery is different from what I - a lifelong suburbanite - am used to; it makes me feel, as a human being, smaller and more insignificant, because the marks of human life are few, feeble and distant from each other. Of course I am conscious of our tininess in space and time - our size is an issue of scale, and compared to the Universe we are invisible specks, while compared to atoms we are unimaginable universes in ourselves -, but being confronted with it is always a shock. 

We forget our proportion. We pretend we are immortal. We cannot face a world without our selves in it, for obvious reasons: the self is our perspective into the world. Non-existence - the empty void, unfathomable by nature - scares us, so we pretend.

In fact, we must delude our selves to create a meaning for our lives, and we do so everyday. But there is no greater meaning: our lives are self-contained. In acquiring knowledge, we can never jump out of our own heads; similarly, our personal identity is circumscribed to a specific area of space and time, and it cannot transcend it. 

The impact of our action is exterior to our selves, so the idea of achieving immortality by leaving things behind - children, books, structures, progress for humanity - is just another delusion. Furthermore, it is an unsatisfactory one: not only does it exclude perception and action and all the things which make living worthwhile (as Woody Allen famously put it, 'I don't want to achieve immortality though my work... I want to achieve it through not dying.'), but also leads to the question 'What is the point of that (our impact in the future of other people), then?' in an infinite regress.

Religious people answer with God. God is, by definition, the final answer: subject and object united, containing its own purpose and end in itself. I am not going to argue against the traditional arguments for the existence of God (if you want a very strong and clear refutation of the most important ones, you'll find it in Simon Blackburn's Think), so I will just point out two ideas. 

First, this 'rational' conception of God is equivalent to choosing an arbitrary point to pause the regress - why there, then? Why not stop before employing that obscure notion of a divine presence, which is unnecessary to explain the Universe? 

Secondly, this idea of God is very hazy, so much that it is generally interpreted by believers as a matter of emotion. Its features are blank, for it is just a dummy which each culture colours according to its body if beliefs, rules and habits (as can be seen from the multiplicity of religions that exist). And who can claim to truly understand or perceive the 'rational' conception of God? A nothing would do just as well as a something about which nothing can be said.

Quoting Thomas Nagel in What Does It All Mean?:

"But what's the point of being alive at all?"

"There's no point. It wouldn't matter if I didn't exist at all, or if I didn't care about anything. But I do. That's all there is to it." 

If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it's ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously. On the other hand, if we can't help taking ourselves so seriously, perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous. Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

 This is, by the way, one of my favourite quotations. In the end, it doesn't matter that life doesn't matter. It doesn't make any difference to what we can do. So as not to fall prey to manipulation, it is good to remember that life is both meaningless and absurd; however, the fact just does not stick to our minds because we are built to live and should, in my opinion, take the most out of it.

Freedom and Rationality

Imagine a world where there is no poverty; imagine a world where all people are free to satisfy their desires; imagine a world where society is organized in such a way that all people are satisfied at all times. Does it make you uneasy? It will if you read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, one of the prime examples of one of my favourite literary genres - dystopian fiction (other brilliant examples are George Orwell's 1984, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and Lois Lowry's The Giver, which is good for younger readers as well).

A dystopia is, to put it bluntly, an utopia gone wrong. In this type of fiction, the reader is confronted with a world which incorporates many features humans have strived to achieve throughout the ages, and shown the consequences (ranging from unpleasant to revolting) of the application of those ideals. The vision of human nature is generally quite bleak - these are not hopeful books. Their appeal - which is great, in my opinion - comes from giving us, in a distorted mirror, an image of our own society and of its failings, while stimulating our imagination, human empathy and rationality. These books clear your view of the world and lead you into philosophical reflection, for you are forced to think about what exactly is wrong with the society portrayed, about what makes us human, and about your own set of values, in a courageous way, by following a trail of thought to its last consequences (which is what the authors of these books do: they take a set of ideals and picture what a society based on them would look like).

Brave New World is based on full, perfect State control of individuals based on the use of scientific knowledge and industrial power (the writing style is very evocative of this reality, with a strong use of scientific language and decidedly unspiritual words in the modernist descriptions). Actually, I would say that there aren't individuals in this society, only member of a social class, conditioned and trained to perform a specific role. Everyone is happy - their each and every desire is satisfied in their social condition, for they were conditioned to desire only what they would get. If we take a naive definition of freedom as "lack of obstacles to do what you want", this society provides perfect freedom. But, intuitively, one feels that what is portrayed is the opposite of freedom, and that this world is not one of human beings. So, two connected questions ask themselves:

1. If freedom is not "lack of obstacles to do what you want", then what is it?
2. What makes us human?

These two themes are beautifully explored in Martin Hollis's Invitation to Philosophy (one of the books in my Philosophy reading list). 

About Brave New World, he says:

...the system engineers people with just the wants which it suits the system to satisfy. But, if freedom really is just the power to satisfy wants in a stable and lasting manner, (...) Brave New World may well be more efficient at preventing unsatisfied desires and, hence, be more free. For, by the test proposed [freedom=lack of obstacles to get what yo want], a happy slave is freer than a frustrated citizen.

To avoid this result, one must insist that there is something amiss with the wants of the happy slave. They are coherent, well-ordered, realistic and satisfiable. So why is the slave not free? The answer has to be that there is a test of freedom independent of their present wants and their achievement. Curiously, happy slaves are unfree because they could not satisfy wants which they do not have.

It appears, then, that freedom may be seen as the power to do what you would ideally want to do - freedom has a moral content, which suggests that there are wants which are essential to freedom, i.e., that freedom is not an isolated ethical value and is thus part of a wider model of humanity (Hollis calls this a positive idea of freedom). This leaves us in a difficult position: freedom and humanity imply each other, but what are they exactly, and how can they be reached? To answer, we need to determine what are the wants required for freedom, or, in other words, the values on which humanity is based. This means we are now searching for universal ethical foundations or principles. 


This is no easy task - in fact, it may prove to be impossible. First of all, there may be no such thing as universal ethical principles: we know our ethical judgements to be deeply influenced by our social, cultural and historical context, and it is possible that it actually determines all our ethical system. Though I don't deny the influence of the context we live in, I personally believe there are universal (human) values: these are based on the essential human ability to feel empathy, that is, to imagine we are in a different person's place and how we would feel in their situation. This is still rather vague, but it is a starting point, a kind of "ethical axiom" on which we can hope to build a system which leads to a solid understanding of the concepts of freedom and humanity.


We can restate this 'principle of empathy' in a different way: the desire to get close/connect to other human beings in a basic human want. It is obvious that the characters that populate Brave New World are lacking in this aspect: their desire for immediate (and easily available) pleasure makes it impossible for them to build deeper relationships, which take dedication, and always include pain (at the very least, when they end). We can say that their inability to look ahead and to endure unpleasantness - their lack of self-discipline - is their downfall, keeping them from emphasizing with others. And where does this feature come from? It is precisely from their conditioning, in other words, from their context (which is, in Brave New World, even more aggressively permeating than in our own society). For the good of society at large - a consumer society - people are stimulated to consume feverishly, and thus to have nothing lasting, including their relationships.


A new question appears: we now start to wonder if we aren't as conditioned as these characters in our own society. Are our thoughts, and therefore our lives, truly ours? Or are they the unavoidable result of outside factors? This is a re-statement of the ever-lasting problem of free will. This is not a closed question: actually, I doubt it is answerable. I won't go into it at depth now, so I will just connect it to a point I have already made: one of the most chilling features of those who populate Brave New World is their inability to stand back from present desires, precisely because that means their minds aren't active in choosing the path to follow, so they are not free to decide. The mind is active to the extent it builds a web of belief, that is, it constructs a view of the world taking input from the inner and outer senses. I we are to have free will, therefore, the mind needs to take an active role in dealing with this input.


These observations all lead in the same direction: by acknowledging that the mind plays an active role, we find that the ability to 'step out' of ourselves by using our imagination is essential to humanity. In this context, freedom can be reached by rationality, that is, by the ability to analyze a situation and decide what to do using the insight gained by 'stepping out' of the present moment. By learning and thinking, we free ourselves; if we want to keep free in a society which constantly appeals to immediate pleasure, we must keep questioning and searching and probing deeper into reality. 

My Philosophy Reading List

Now that I have done the Portuguese exam and there's only the Maths one to go (on Thursday), it is time to start thinking of other, more interesting things.

A few months ago, I was sent a reading list for Philosophy, which I found tremendously exciting. I had never been sent a Reading List before, and it made me feel I was stepping into a bright future of discussion and learning. Besides, I was very glad to have an excuse to buy (and read) more philosophy books.

This is the list:

• A.J. Ayer The Central Questions of Philosophy (Penguin)
• Simon Blackburn Think (Oxford University Press)
• Martin Hollis Invitation to Philosophy (Blackwell)
• Thomas Nagel What Does It All Mean? (Oxford University Press)
• Bertrand Russell The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford University Press)
• Roger Scruton An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Philosophy (Duckworth)
• Peter Singer How Are We to Live? (Prometheus)
• Gottlob Frege Foundations of Arithmetic (Blackwell)
• Mark Sainsbury Logical Forms (Blackwell), especially Chapter 1
• Douglas Hofstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach (Penguin)
• Stuart Shapiro Thinking About Mathematics (Oxford University Press)
• AW Moore The Infinite (Routledge)

I have already read a few of them  (slowly and carefully: taking notes, re-reading harder passages, extracting the main concepts, trying to draw connections between different authors' ideas, making up my own mind, building my own arguments...) and I will read the rest throughout the summer.

To help me take some more from the texts (you can always take more from books!), I will start a sort of blog series of reflections inspired by each of the books. This may include summarizing ideas, reviewing and comparing them, exposing arguments, or whatever I feel inspired to do and think helpful in preparing me for University. My aim is also to show how beautiful and fascinating the open questions and non-dogmatic, fiercely rational approach of philosophy are, so that hopefully you will also feel motivated to read some of these (or others) and to think philosophically.

One!

This is my first blog post, so I suppose I should introduce myself. I am a 17-year-old girl from Lisbon, Portugal, though I'm moving to Oxford in a few months to start an undergraduate degree in Maths and Philosophy there (why did I have to say this straight away? I'm just too damn excited, that's why :) ). I started this blog because I felt an indefinite yearning to communicate and think more/in a more structured way. Basically, I want to write about things I find interesting and share them with whoever cares to read my ramblings. Comments are more than welcome! :)

Amongst the things I like and hope to post about here are:

Books

I have always loved books. As you can see from the picture on the left, I have plenty of them (you can also see I'm not the neatest person on the planet). Even before I knew how to read, I remember spending quite a lot of time listening to my parents reading to me, puzzling over the meaning of words (which were, of course, just strange marks on paper: isn't it amazing how we are able to assign meaning to sounds and graphical marks?) and inventing my own stories based on the pictures. Then, when I already knew how to read, I stumbled upon the Harry Potter books and fell for that whole imaginary universe (like so many other people). This obsession spread to reading in general - so much that I was once in a while forbidden to read! (How geeky is that?)

I try to read all sorts of books: classic and contemporary romances and novels, short stories, fantasy, poetry, pop science, biographies, memoirs, history, comics, children and young adult novels... You'll get to know my tastes in detail, because I'll definitely write quite a bit about books.

Music

Just like (almost) everyone, listening to music is very important for me to keep my mental stability and to feel connected to others - there's always a song for the way I feel. The name of this blog is a play on the title of Nick Drake's second album, and I chose it both because he's one of my favourite artists and because I just really like the sound of  the words - ethereal and filled with longing, just like Nick's music. This is his song Riverman - isn't it just beautiful?

Cinema

When I was 12 or so, I had a blog where I posted film reviews, though I eventually grew tired of it. I have to say I'm not nearly as much of a cinephile as I used to be back then, when I even entertained the fantasy of becoming a film director, but I still like watching films and find myself challenged to perceive the world in new ways and to connect more deeply with other people's experiences through cinema.

A screenshot from Splendor in the Grass,
just because I like it.

Philosophy/Maths/Science

After writing about my more or less socially acceptable interests, I have to mention that I really enjoy learning mathematics, thinking about philosophical problems and engaging with scientific ideas, particularly in the areas of physics and neuroscience, though I have to admit I know much less than I would like to. Nevertheless, I would say that the type of thinking involved in these areas is at the core of how I interpret the world (I hope that doesn't sound pretentious or too much like a personal statement). 

Politics and Society

Be warned: I'm a liberal on the red side of the political spectrum. I enjoy discussing politics and social issues, particularly related to education, which I believe (like so many others...) to be very important if we want to build a different society, one where there actually is equality between people, and therefore all are granted freedom to fulfill themselves personally and as members of humanity. I hope to be able to participate in the project of building that world throughout my life.

Then, I have a bourgeois side: I like nice and pretty things (scenic views, good-looking people, clothes, cooking, etcetera). 

I hope to write often and about different things, and I also hope that you enjoy reading!

Xx