Science/Scientia Vs. Literary-Philosophic Experientialism ...

Dear WSN,

I thought you all might like to take a look at the following pieces. Tell me; what do you think of them?

“Does Science Refute Religion?”

Of course not, says Gene Callahan.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/callahan/callahan92.html

“Conservative Fruitcake”

By Norman Ravitch, Ph.D.

http://www.toogoodreports.com/column/reader/ravitch/20020908-fss.htm

Reg. the first one, do you think Callahan is presenting an accurate picture of Science (+ soc. sci.) and human exp. in history?  Where do you think he goes wrong? …

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My own guess is that his argument here is based on a misrepresentation of science.  Science, in such a view, is just Mechanics (pure and simple).  So whenever Science attempts to look at bigger questions in the physical world or in human events (via social science), this is immediately interpreted as being beyond the domain of what Science can actually do within its studies, and it’s viewed as being more properly the domain of philosophy.  In other words, Callahan & company are saying that when these questions are asked, the scientists asking them are no longer scientists at that point but philosophers instead (& bad – or more mildly stated, mistaken – philosophers at that).

But look carefully at the way GC is defining philosophy here.  He seems to be limiting it soley to the realm of human experientialism.  He’s using a literary-philosophic lens to interpret the whole of the human philosophic enterprise.  Yet, without some sort of macro-history and ontology (the big picture study of  “Is” & its manifestations in our cosmos), Callahan’s own universalist historical model becomes mostly [if not only] a matter of classical Greco-Roman ethics and nothing more.  He’s trying to posit a worldview that goes beyond the pale of Science (which he has reduced in his thought system to being just Newtonian mechanics), but the only way such a reality can be explored and understood is through the experientialism of the self.  The only means to study this experientialism is through Literature and Poetry (& Philosophy as a way of interpreting such L/P).  His model appears to be denying the reality of Ontology and Scientia.  But in lieu of these things, what else is there to present the “bigger picture” of real entities in the universe and the realities of human social experience?  Without Science or [some means of][scholastic] Scientia, the only “picture” available [bigger or otherwise] is the experientialism of the individual and the experiential lens of the “soul.”  … There has to be more to REALITY and the STUDY OF THINGS WE CALL “REAL” than just this (even by the very Classically-based premises that Callahan and others are using to make their arguments for the primacy of G/R moral theory in the study of history).  Without this “bigger picture” – without an ontology and metaphysics, without a scientia and episteme – one cannot even posit there being a framework of any sort of reality beyond [Mechanistic] Science (beyond even the intellective/operative level where Science exists) in which resides more properly the true domain of the “soul.”  There would be nothing outside the frame of experientialism; the “ghost” would be so big it would blot out any notion of there being any “machine” to reality [let alone any other objectively real thing in the world – matter, energy, forces, spirits, “God”, existence, or whatever] besides the affective self and its lens of personal experience.  The “machine” wouldn’t even be “an aspect of the ghost”; there be no room for it. There’d be no “machine.”  All that there would be is the “ghost” of the Self & its narrow range of “experience.” 

I may be reading too much into this piece; but Callahan and company seem to be wanting it both ways.  They want a world beyond Science; but they want a world beyond Science that fits into a narrow little corner of the real world, the “experience” of “self.”  They want a Neo-platonized world of “spirit” – a world of Moral Philosophy, affections, and acts of Will – in which the realm of the individual human self is projected onto the rest of reality.  As the saying has it “God created Man and Man repaid the compliment.”  They’re trying to remake the world in the image of their Classical G/R, ethically-based experientialism.  But the problem is they are trying to fit the metaphorical block into the round peg’s space on the toy workbench.  Or better yet, they’re trying to bottle up an entire ocean into a little jar.  It [almost] can’t be done – esp. in light of the intellectual tools they’re attempting to do it with.  The very goal they’re attempting to reach violates the very Logical tools [Classical Logic/Greco-Roman thought, esp. Aristotelian and Platonist Philosophy] that they are using to arrive at their objective.  An understanding of human experience is as reachable by the social sciences [if not moreso] than it is via a study of humanistic experientialism (by means of reading great poetry and literature).

I know Literature and Poetry can do a lot in helping us to reflect on the great themes of human experience.  But isn’t it a bit much to make such literary works the basis for an entire social philosophic inquiry into human experience? … This, it seems to me is the Achilles’ heel of contemp. Classics/Great Books scholarship.  In lieu of a more concrete, systematized understanding of “Is” (which they resent as being mechanistic, materialistic, and ultimately cold and unfeeling, to use such metaphorical terms), the principles of “ought” become their Universals.  Spiritual “ought” and the ethos of individual experiences (feelings, senses, passions, & experientialisms)(plus the power of the Will to choose its ends morally between good and evils, among ‘goods’ and ‘evils’) become the instrumentalities through which the facts of history are sifted.

I’m not sure this ideal of Callahan’s, et al,  is a sound model; whether we wish to look at “is” or “ought” in human experience makes no difference.  The problem remains.  There’s something in world history that seems to pull the rug out from under such models (in a macro-socioecon./cultural sense) when it comes to matters of ontology and “Is” in human events.  Indeed, there is also, something about praxis (& ethos/pathos/ought) in individual human affairs that pretty much does the same thing) … Somewhere along the way, it seems, Classical Moral Philosophy, fr/ Ancient Greece and Rome, gets the dynamics of history wrong.  But whereso? …

What are some better models of praxis/ethos to consider in the philosophy of history, besides this particular framework I’ve just described?  What are the pitfalls of using models of Greco-Roman ethics as qualitative measures of human experience in world history in the first place; and where are they outperformed by other (more modern) - post-Hellenistic - ethical-philosophic models of historical theory?  & are there better models of “is”-based scientia/episteme to consider here as well in historical theory [be such models more traditional or modern]?  In a nutshell, is there a way around this problematic character to G-R moral theory in the Philosophy of History?  [I’d be especially interested in what this alternative model’s own “traditional” roots would be in the longer term of human events; or does such a better alternative to the Classical model have to be more “Modern?”]

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Sorry for the longwinded, and probably very garbled discussion.  I can only hope you get one or two good things out of it via its ideas/questions.  If you can I’ll be satisfied with that.  If not, then just take this as the ranting of someone who’s seen this “Science … outside the Lab or that goes beyond questions of Mechanics … is illegitimate”/”primacy of moral philosophy ” argument far too often, and leave it at that. I can only hope that someone somewhere will give this argument and arguments like it a decent burial, by coming up with a really good refutation to it.   Such ideas as Callahan’s one here should be put to rest once and for all or at least one-upped (ala the genius of a Kant or Hegel)  … Well, enough from me on this.

I look forward to your replies & insights on this matter.

All the best!

Luke R.

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