LOL. Reminds me of the drawings Newton demonstrated orbital mechanics with. It was about cannons firing cannonballs. So get this, every king and aristocrat immediately got the message that this nerdy stuff can help win wars. (Well Descartes was already an artillery officer.) Conquering nature? First and foremost, conquering each other.
I am not so sure that scientists are objective, not from what I have heard and experienced in general. Science, though, is based on an objective measurement and observation. If scientists were objective we would have far fewer problems due to human error, interference, bias, selfish motives, jealousy, spite, and so on.
Why do you think animists considered everything in their world as part of the subject and not the object? Were they aligned with a universal truth or just a bunch of hairy ignoramuses who saw themselves as a part of their difficult and confusing existence?
If there is no injection of the individual's judgments, analyses, suppositions, and appraisals, and if the mind were completely clear and without thought, would nature be an object in the psychological sense? In the physical sense, of course it appears to be an object because it is over there and we are over here. But beneath the surface and the facade, the distinction quickly falls away, especially under close scrutiny. While early humans didn’t have microscopes, animists seem to have grasped the idea that there is really no solid delineation between anything and the environment. There are actually no sharp edges that differentiate a person from a stone that he is sitting upon, for instance.
Your example of an objectified woman is apt here, because the subject is not actually seeing the totality of the woman and all else, but rather an image of his own creation. And it's my experience that most people seem to make not only an image of what they are looking at and interacting with, but also of themselves.
Science requires an object, because it requires reductionism to study and measure anything in our world, big as a solar system or small as a proton. But this has nothing to do with creating an object in a psychological sense.
By saying that scientists are objective, I’m not saying they’re perfectly rational. Certainly, capitalism can taint scientific institutions. But scientific methods objectify the subject matter. Scientists presume that most of nature isn’t mental, personal, or social, so scientists posit mainly physical properties that can, in theory, be exploited.
This account is neo-Kantian, so indeed nature’s objective physicality is partly a mental construct. It’s a way of viewing and relating to the world.
Modern science as the ogling and ravaging of Nature? It is nothing of the sort! In your introduction you assert: “...the characterization already sets up Nature as being in a passive role in relation to us, as being the object of our thoughts”
I counter this argument by noting that it is WE, the observer, circumscribed as we are by our senses, our instruments and our logic, that is the passive actor. We only observe and think about what is, as we perceive. Nature simply exists. We are mere spectators that build mental constructs and wonder. If there is a slave it is us—not the object we perceive. We probe, measure, theorize, predict.
Consider the electron. It remains mysterious—quite incomprehensible to anything our evolution prepares us. What Slave, then? We deny Nature nothing for there is nothing for us to deny save our own irrelevant preconceptions.
My point isn’t that nature is entirely passive or that nature has always been a slave. I’m saying that that’s the humanistic aspiration, to tame nature’s wildness with science and technology. Objectified nature is nature that’s been potentially tamed in so far as it’s understood with some useful model that can be technologically applied. So my point is that nature has the potential to be tamed or enslaved, thanks to nature’s explicability.
Thank you, sir, for taking the time to engage in a dialogue.
Q: Is it a humanistic aspiration to tame nature’s wildness or, rather, is it more precisely a Christian aspiration? Perhaps we might go so far as to characterize this as Christian arrogance of Man’s God-given dominion over Nature; i.e, Man’s separateness and superiority over it. Surely the Animists of old were far more comfortable with wild nature. They too would have built mental constructs to understand their world—one in which they were equally imprisoned in their allegorical caves as we. I must protest. I am a staunch believer in Science and reason; I reject magical thinking. I do not believe our ephemeral existence and need to structure our perceptions diminishes or somehow tames that which is Nature. We are one feature of Nature’s vastness—inseparable; we cannot separate it from us nor we from it.
(Full disclosure: I confess to not being well read in humanism as a philosophy, so perhaps I am playing the brash undergraduate debating the professor (actually, I am in my 70’s ;-)).
Indeed, I have not read the Humanist manifestos. I should, and will. In reading your previous essay—Secular Humanists Whitewash Our Relationship to Nature—I begin to better understand the nuance in your arguments expressed in Modern Science as the Ogling and Ravaging of Nature. All of it makes for a most satisfying intellectual excursion!
LOL. Reminds me of the drawings Newton demonstrated orbital mechanics with. It was about cannons firing cannonballs. So get this, every king and aristocrat immediately got the message that this nerdy stuff can help win wars. (Well Descartes was already an artillery officer.) Conquering nature? First and foremost, conquering each other.
Another great, great article!! Well thought-out.
I am not so sure that scientists are objective, not from what I have heard and experienced in general. Science, though, is based on an objective measurement and observation. If scientists were objective we would have far fewer problems due to human error, interference, bias, selfish motives, jealousy, spite, and so on.
Why do you think animists considered everything in their world as part of the subject and not the object? Were they aligned with a universal truth or just a bunch of hairy ignoramuses who saw themselves as a part of their difficult and confusing existence?
If there is no injection of the individual's judgments, analyses, suppositions, and appraisals, and if the mind were completely clear and without thought, would nature be an object in the psychological sense? In the physical sense, of course it appears to be an object because it is over there and we are over here. But beneath the surface and the facade, the distinction quickly falls away, especially under close scrutiny. While early humans didn’t have microscopes, animists seem to have grasped the idea that there is really no solid delineation between anything and the environment. There are actually no sharp edges that differentiate a person from a stone that he is sitting upon, for instance.
Your example of an objectified woman is apt here, because the subject is not actually seeing the totality of the woman and all else, but rather an image of his own creation. And it's my experience that most people seem to make not only an image of what they are looking at and interacting with, but also of themselves.
Science requires an object, because it requires reductionism to study and measure anything in our world, big as a solar system or small as a proton. But this has nothing to do with creating an object in a psychological sense.
By saying that scientists are objective, I’m not saying they’re perfectly rational. Certainly, capitalism can taint scientific institutions. But scientific methods objectify the subject matter. Scientists presume that most of nature isn’t mental, personal, or social, so scientists posit mainly physical properties that can, in theory, be exploited.
This account is neo-Kantian, so indeed nature’s objective physicality is partly a mental construct. It’s a way of viewing and relating to the world.
Modern science as the ogling and ravaging of Nature? It is nothing of the sort! In your introduction you assert: “...the characterization already sets up Nature as being in a passive role in relation to us, as being the object of our thoughts”
I counter this argument by noting that it is WE, the observer, circumscribed as we are by our senses, our instruments and our logic, that is the passive actor. We only observe and think about what is, as we perceive. Nature simply exists. We are mere spectators that build mental constructs and wonder. If there is a slave it is us—not the object we perceive. We probe, measure, theorize, predict.
Consider the electron. It remains mysterious—quite incomprehensible to anything our evolution prepares us. What Slave, then? We deny Nature nothing for there is nothing for us to deny save our own irrelevant preconceptions.
My point isn’t that nature is entirely passive or that nature has always been a slave. I’m saying that that’s the humanistic aspiration, to tame nature’s wildness with science and technology. Objectified nature is nature that’s been potentially tamed in so far as it’s understood with some useful model that can be technologically applied. So my point is that nature has the potential to be tamed or enslaved, thanks to nature’s explicability.
Thank you, sir, for taking the time to engage in a dialogue.
Q: Is it a humanistic aspiration to tame nature’s wildness or, rather, is it more precisely a Christian aspiration? Perhaps we might go so far as to characterize this as Christian arrogance of Man’s God-given dominion over Nature; i.e, Man’s separateness and superiority over it. Surely the Animists of old were far more comfortable with wild nature. They too would have built mental constructs to understand their world—one in which they were equally imprisoned in their allegorical caves as we. I must protest. I am a staunch believer in Science and reason; I reject magical thinking. I do not believe our ephemeral existence and need to structure our perceptions diminishes or somehow tames that which is Nature. We are one feature of Nature’s vastness—inseparable; we cannot separate it from us nor we from it.
(Full disclosure: I confess to not being well read in humanism as a philosophy, so perhaps I am playing the brash undergraduate debating the professor (actually, I am in my 70’s ;-)).
Indeed, I have not read the Humanist manifestos. I should, and will. In reading your previous essay—Secular Humanists Whitewash Our Relationship to Nature—I begin to better understand the nuance in your arguments expressed in Modern Science as the Ogling and Ravaging of Nature. All of it makes for a most satisfying intellectual excursion!
Best regards,
David Gancarz