Small is Beautiful

Reflections on Science

The Grand Design: Philosophy is Dead.

In his book, The Grand Design, Hawking says that "philosophy has not kept up with modern discoveries in science, particularly physics." The amusing bit here is that all scientific inquiry is philosophical. Science makes certain assumptions in its approach to understanding the world. These assumptions flow from a philosophical viewpoint. Hawking’s focus on scientific reasoning is an ideology, a worldview that flows from positivism. No scientist is an objective machine.

Positivism

Positivism is a simple idea: “Seeing is believing.”  Or better yet, like the philosophy of the Missourian: “Show me.”  It’s the idea that anything worth study can be proven. Without empirical proof, an idea is unworthy of study and useless.  The flight of a cannon ball is useful. We can learn much by studying the trajectory of a falling object. Above all it is useful in battle and, as Von Clausewitz put it,  “War is the extension of politics by other means.” If we are to get what we want on the field of battle, ultimately it is useful to study the flight of a cannonball.

The flight of a hummingbird or of the human imagination is another thing entirely. We lack the proper scientific framework to study the human imagination. In the end, science is not positive that psychology can be justified. Positivism means being “positive” about something in the sense that we can be positive that the train will arrive on time. In the end, however, positivism  is an epistemological assumption, an idea about how we know.

Why should we use science to justify psychology? Why not first see if psychology justifies science? Perhaps the need to classify and quantify everything with a view towards its utility is a skewed worldview.

The “labor theory of value,” an idea that has evolved from John Locke, Adam Smith, and Karl Marx is one that saturates our modern consciousness. It holds that a thing is valuable according to the labor invested in it. A tree has value when it is chopped up into firewood. The man and his ax has added value to the tree, which lone in the forest has no value. But the same tree, when cut carefully may be used as lumber. It has a higher value as lumber which may be used to build a house. A finely constructed house has far more labor invested in it than firewood and is worth more.

In the same way, firewood is valuable. But when the same wood is finely crafted into a musical instrument, the labor that is invested in it creates a higher value. This is the idea behind the “labor theory of value.” The value of a thing increases in proportion to the time and quality of labor that created it.

In Sanskrit, the word karma may cover the meaning of labor. So, according to Adam Smith and his economist disciples, the more karma  is invested in something in terms of quality and quantity, the more valuable that thing becomes. The “labor theory of value” was forwarded by conservative favorite Adam Smith. 

Schumacher was an internationally influential economic thinker, statistician and economist in Britain, but is best remembered for his book “Small is Beautiful, where he takes issue with the labor theory of value. While forwarded by Smith, the "labor theory of value was also favored by Karl Marx.

In criticizing the “labor theory of value, Schumacher points out, “we are estranged from reality and inclined to treat as valueless everything that we have not made ourselves. Even the great Dr Marx fell into this devastating error when he formulated the so-called 'labour theory of value'. Now, we have indeed laboured to make some of the capital which today helps us to produce -- a large fund of scientific, technological, and other knowledge; an elaborate physical infrastructure; innumerable types of sophisticated capital equipment, etc. -- but all this is but a small part of the total capital we are using. Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man -- and we do not even recognise it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is an absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved.”

It is an illusion, argues Schumacher, to think that by applying karmic energy to the destruction of all natural capital we are creating wealth. In point of fact, we are destroying wealth. By cutting down the forests to create housing, we apparently create wealth. By extracting petroleum from the earth and turning it into fuel for heating those homes we are creating more wealth. By making giant car factories we create jobs and more wealth. When we burn gasoline in our cars to speed people to work, we create more wealth. Unlimited expansion and unbridled economic growth translates into greater wealth for everyone.  But Schumacher points out that infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility.

To believe in impossibility is Quixotic. It was the Quixote after all who believed in the “impossible dream.” We have been taught and propagandized to believe in the impossible dream of absolute scientific progress. Again this is an epistemological assumption. Science would have us believe that philosophy is dead, that science has superceded philosophy. But scientism or the belief in science is merely a different kind of philosophy or epistemological assumption.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge. How do we know what we know?  Before we can investigate reality we need a framework for organizing our knowledge. We need to know what questions to ask. If our question is “how to be more productive?” or “what is the trajectory of a cannonball?” our very questions imply a particular assumption.

The Persistance of Time by Salvador Dali. Espistemology involves assumptions

The question “How to be more productive?” assumes that production is valuable. Such a question may overlook the cautions implicit in over-exploitation of natural resources. If I ask “what is the trajectory of a cannonball?” my question shows that I assume war is a useful tool to advance the interests of civilization.

All questions imply values. Epistemology examines how we know and what can be known? It would be a waste of time to ask questions about what cannot be known. So, philosophy helps us to narrow our search by helping us to frame our questions. In narrowing the purview of our questions, we determine what can be thought and what cannot be thought. Those who value the positivist world which asks only “useful” questions would limit our power to ask. One such philosopher was Kant.

Kant attempted to limit metaphysical questions, adopting the attitude that whle philosophy was really a theory of knowledge it should apply itself to useful questions. Instead of taking interest in the great cosmic problems, he tried to stop centuries of philosophical thought by reframing the problem of what can be known to fit his critique of reason.

Kant reframes reason

Of course, in another sense, as Nietzsche would point out later, all philosophy is really a game of dialectics. In mathematics we use numbers to frame questions and create formulas. In philosophy, we use words. Philosophy according to Nietzsche and later Wittgenstein is really nothing more than sophisticated word games meant to justify a world view already held. Kant’s agnostic world view fueled his destruction of metaphysical arguments. His “big” question was “How are synthetic judgments possible a priori?” He concluded that philosophy is unable to answer metaphysical questions. The business of philosophy should be to support  the hard sciences, especially physics. Philosophy after Kant’s tends to avoid the difficult questions. Having abdicated this area of thinking, philosophy appears to have died, at least academically.  Philosophy ceded its inquisitiveness to science. And science, as we have seen, rests its point of view on positivism. The positivist paradigm promoted today focuses on useful truths that can be proven experimentally and used by technology to improve production by intensifying the karmic exploitation of material nature. 

José Ortega y Gasset: Not so fast

José Ortega y Gasset´s Perspectivism was a reaction to Kant. Perspectivism is the position that one's access to the world through perception, experience, and reason is possible only through one's own perspective and interpretation. It rejects both the idea of a perspective-free or an interpretation-free objective reality. Ortega y Gasset´s Perspectivism is useful in developing a reaction to Kant. Ortega y Gasset tries to keep metaphysics alive by point out that all empiric evidence is finally subject to interpretation through the senses and mind. Since sensual and mental experience is subjective, there is no absolute objective reality. A subjective metaphysics may still be contemplated in order to balance our so-called objective world. Philosophy is still necessary and not quite dead.

In his work, What is Philosophy?  Ortega y Gasset tries to make sense of the impact of Kant and later Nietzche on subsequent worldviews. He observes that the post-Darwinian 19th century radically changed epistemology.  By the turn of the century society had witnessed a sea-change in how science pretends to know. Physics, which now dominated philosophy, having done away with metaphysics was no longer the only “hard science.”

With Neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology, life-sciences were no longer “soft sciences.” Biology and was no longer based merely classification and taxonomy, it was science with mathematical rigor. A way of knowing in medicine based on a wholistic understanding of the patient, or generalizations based on clinical practice and a lifetime of experience would no longer be permitted.  They were to give way to mathematical models as cold as the science governing the path of machine gun bullets.

New Ways of Knowing: Positivism

As the Victorian Age became the Lost Generation of World War I, science changed the lives of our grandparents. Electricity revolutionized life. Superstition was finished. Patent medicines appeared with radioactive beverages that promised newfound health. Coca-cola contained enough cocaine to give people a real boost. Dogmas were left behind. New worlds were discovered. The epistemological models changed. There was no need to question the motives of scientism.

The new way of knowing would be “objective” and “pragmatic,” based on mathematical models. The sort of science that involved precise deductions, sensory observation, and experimental knowledge was the rage. The idea was that there was a scientific method that would combine pure reasoning by which we arrive at logical conclusions and pure experimental perception, confirming the conclusions of pure theory. This method of knowing that moved by instinct and hunches, imagination and creativity, the old 19th century method of science of railroads and horseshoes would be left behind. The new science ushered in advances in physics that would be the intellectual marvel of the 20th Century and lead to the domination of the atom.

Practical and useful truths

Ortega y Gasset, being a philosopher, wasn’t so convinced. He pointed out that the positivist method itself wasn’t the only impetus to move the science of physics to its incredible triumphs. Pure logic and simple objective perception alone did not alone create the scientific paradigm that would carry human society forward to such advances. The first two sides of the triangle, logic and perception were powerful. But there is a third which gives its power to the paradigm: Practical utility. And as epistemology, practical utility is suspect. It serves not knowledge, but exploitation.

Practical Utility

Ortega y Gasset observed that apart from the ideal of pure logic and the hope of objective perception, it is practical utility for materialistic human society that has really driven the paradigm of scientism that governs scientific achievement and discovery.  The Spanish Philosopher points out that “practical utility” is an inadequate framework for scientific inquiry:

Utility is not a virtue

“The third characteristic of science [after objective perception and pure logic], its practical utility for man’s dominion over matter, is not exactly a virtue or a test of the perfection of physics as a theory and a form of knowledge.” (What is Philosophy, José Ortega y Gasset, p.41) In Greece, this utilitarian fruitfulness would not have won a decisive influence over every mind, but in Europe it coincided with the predominance of a type of man--the so-called bourgeois wanted to settle himself comfortably in the world, and for his comfort to intervene in it, to modify it for his own pleasure. Therefore, the bourgeois age is honored most of all for the triumph of industrialization, and in general, for those techniques which are useful to life--medicine, economics, administration.

Prestige of Physics

Physics acquired a peerless prestige because out of it came both medicine and the machine. The masses of the middle class became interested in it not out of intellectual curiosity, but through their material interests. It was in such an atmosphere that what we might call the “imperialism of physics” was produced.”

“Born and educated as we are in an age which shares this mode of feeling, it seems to us a very naturally thing that first place among the various kinds of knowledge should be granted to that which, whatever its standing in theory, gives us domination over matter. But a new cycle is beginning within us; for no sooner do we see that this form of supremacy makes practical utility appear to be a norm of truth than we cease to be content. We begin to realize that this skill in dominating matter and making it conform to our wishes, this enthusiasm for comfort is, if one makes of it a principle, as open to argument as any other. Alerted by this suspicions, we begin to see that comfort is merely a subjective predilection, or to put it bluntly, a capricious desire which Western peoples have exercised for two hundred years, but which does not in itself reveal any superiority of character....the urge for the comfortable and the convenient which is the ultimate reason for a preference for physics is in now ay an index of superiority.”

Search for Comfort and Convenience

Here, Ortega y Gasset, who is writing in the Jazz Age of the 1920s has defined the motif of the Twentieth Century: The search for the comfortable and the convenient defines our way of life.

This search for the comfortable and convenient  is entwined with our worldview; it is baked into our epistemology. The practical knowledge of how to exploit this world, or how to have a convenient life is not the same as wisdom. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And yet science passes for wisdom. If a child is playing with matches we react. We take away the matches and scold the child: “Fire is not a toy.”  If we see the same child with a cell-phone, we think, “She’s so advanced.”

Technology impresses us as the ultimate wisdom. The symbol of technology is fire. Prometheus was chained to a rock where vultures rip his entrails for giving the fire of the gods to man. It seems an unfair punishment. And yet now we have nuclear fire and are equipped to destroy our planet. Were the gods so wrong for punishing Prometheus? Or at the least, might we not have a philosophy that questions the limits of what is “practical and useful?” Is nuclear fire “practical and useful?” Is wisdom the absolute application of all technology for maximum exploitation? Or does wisdom move in the opposite direction. And shouldn’t philosophy be an attempt at wisdom? As Schumacher puts it, “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

A working knowledge of how to manipulate material elements may be “practical and useful” in creating convenience and comfort. But this convenience and comfort are only temporary. An advanced society must go beyond the basic concepts of the “labor theory of value,” to consider the greater good, not only of human society, but also for the planet itself.  Wholesale slaughter of animals is not convenient for the cows and bulls, the sheep and pigs who are turned into hamburgers. Wholesale destruction of cultures and languages around the world may suit the Hollywood consumption model, or the capitalist one, but it is not convenient for the native and indigenous peoples whose traditions are disappearing. The international tourist industry gobbles up rainforest and coral reef to create luxury hotels, ruining wildlife habitats and wetlands forever. This is neither convenient nor comfortable for the inhabitants of the rainforest. In the end, having indulged in rampant consumerism at the expense of future generations, the “practical and useful truths” of positivism are neither practical nor useful. As birds and mammal species become extinct we may find that the human species also becomes endangered. The economic model based on exploitation and positivistic science is not sustainable. Practical knowledge, the ability to make a fire, and wisdom, the understanding of fire are not equivalent.

The modern view of wisdom is whatever makes us comfortable. The search for comfort and convenience informs our epistemology, the idea of “knowledge” that drives science. Wisdom, we are told is being “street-smart,” wisdom is what is “practical,” is what is “useful,” what makes us comfortable. By eliminating “impractical” questions, we can arrive at the practical and useful. In this way, by restricting the questions that may be asked our way of knowledge is defined by the comfortable, informed by materialism and pragmatism. But is this really wisdom?

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