a DIALECTIC:
Ancient
vs.
Modern
Ideologies\Knowledges.
Dear Reader,
Introduction. The historical antithesis
between ancient – especially ancient Mediterranean – philosophical
proto-science, and modern science, even from its inception, as «Philosophiae
Naturalis» [cf. Newton], is, we hold, primarily an opposition
between modern, biased, one-sidedly ‘quantitativistic’ ideology-afflicted
scientific knowledges, and ancient, biased, one-sidedly ‘qualitativistic’ ideology-afflicted
scientific knowledges.
We see opportunities, given the present
crisis in the historical development of ‘‘‘the human phenome’’’, for a
dialectical synthesis of these two biased, one-sided versions of scientific
knowledge, a combination that would weed-out much of the
ideology-affliction of both categories of ‘ideologies\sciences’.
Our work is intended to contribute to
the rigorous formation of this dialectical synthesis.
We name both of the opposing categories,
as well as their sought synthesis category, including the epithet ‘ideologies\sciences’.
This is because we do not
expect that the battle against the contamination of consensus knowledge with
ideological elements can be finally won, even via this synthesis.
We expect that the effort to weed-out
ideological adulterations from consensus knowledge will need to be a matter of
continuing vigilance, and ongoing immanent critique, even when Terran humanity
succeeds in achieving the political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRATIC Successor System to the
Capitalist System, albeit we expect that then the mass of such adulteration
will diminish.
In the Domain-symbol
for this dialectic, D
= I\K, we use the “back-slash”, ‘\’, instead of the “forward-slash”, ‘/’, between the words “ideologies” and “knowledges”,
because we hold that, as the historical self-development of
humanity has proceeded, in the broad sweep of that history, knowledge has
become increasingly dominant over ideology, and, if Terran humanity
successfully navigates its looming ‘Meta-Darwinian Planetary Fitness Test’, we
expect that this trend will continue, and will accelerate.
This dialectic, as depicted above, is pictured in ‘Marxian
format’ [pictogramic elements are placed lower to register their greater abstractness;
elements are placed higher to register their greater ‘thought-concreteness’/complexity/-determinateness].
This depiction above focuses on just one
category-symbol term in our – recently revised, 32-term – dialectical categorial progression for the extended
historical dialectic of Terran human ideologies\-knowledges.
Its dialectical equation has a new, recently revised «arché»-category –
human, initially spoken-only, Languages,
on the view that human ideologies\-knowledges begin with naming both experienced
“things” and experienced “actions”, not necessarily treated
diremptively at first, but, much later, hardening into strictly-dirempt “nouns”
versus “verbs”.
We solve for the first ‘contra-category’
of this «arché»-category as, initially “primitive”, Arts, including word of art painted
onto cave walls, carved into stone outcroppings, carved or molded into figurines,
etc.; such art units as a ‘meta-words’ form, an «aufheben» ‘meta-unit-ization’
of spoken word units, since, e.g., one artful picturing is ‘“worth a thousand
spoken words’’’.
Stating, for our purposes here, only the
‘self-hybrid’ or ‘contra-category’ names/-terms in that, 32-term progression; leaving
out the ‘merely-hybrid’, partial & full ‘uni-category’ names/terms, and naming
only those knowledge/ideology forms that are fully-manifest and extant today, we
have –
Languages --) Arts --) Mythologies --)
Religions --) Philosophies --) Scientific Knowledges
– and it is only the last knowledge-kind category in
the dialectical categorial progression just given, that we are focusing
on herein, the “scientific knowledges” category.
The progression stated above we see as a
dialectical progression of «genos» categories – of «gene».
The dialectic that we will explore as the main topic
of this blog entry is a dialectic within the “scientific knowledges” «genos»-category.
The key historical opposition inside the sciences
«genos».
Ancient, still-philosophical proto-science was more
qualitative, more intuitional and speculative, and more merely-observational,
without being experimental, vis-à-vis modern science.
Ancient science was less measurement-based, and less data-based,
than modern science – by far – even from the proto-scientific emergence of
modern knowledge in the form of the field then known as “Natural Philosophy”.
That is not to say that ancient Mediterranean
science, and especially ancient Alexandrian science, was only
qualitative. Consider the quantitative
achievements of Archimedes and Ptolemy, of Eudoxus, Heron and Ctesibius,
and, e.g., the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical-astrological analogue
computer. Claudius Ptolemy’s geocentric
solar system model, in his treatise Almagest – epicycles and all – fit
well the then-available data on planetary positions, and the Copernican model’s
predictions of those positions was initially no more accurate than the Ptolemaic
predictions.
Likewise, modern science is not
only quantitative, especially in biology and the social sciences, but even in
the “Standard Model of Particle Physics”, in that the various “particles”
identified in that model differ qualitatively, albeit in terms of quantitatively-measurable
“quantum numbers”, etc.
But modern science is biased toward quantitative ‘descriptivity’,
just as ancient science, e.g., that of Aristotle, was biased toward the
qualitative – albeit systematic – description of nature.
In his 2008 book The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg, Robert P. Crease coneys a vivid, & somewhat ‘‘‘psychohistorical’’’ sense of this historical opposition between ancient and modern science:
“The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384 – 322 BC) was the
earliest we know who drew up a systematic account of all kinds of motion or
change – he used the same word, kinesis, for both.”
“Kinesis is so important, he thought, that to
understand it is tantamount to understanding nature itself, and he created a
framework to include all varieties of kinesis: of animate and inanimate
objects, with and without human intervention, in earth and in the heavens.”
“He distinguished several kinds of kinesis: the
substantial change of a thing being born or dying (fire consuming a log); the quantitative
change of a thing growing or shrinking; the transformational change of one
property changing into another (a green leaf turning brown); and local motion [M.D.: spatial-locational, change-of-location motion], or something changing its place.”
“Aristotle viewed these changes with biologically trained eyes. He regarded the world as a kind of cosmic ecosystem that contained different levels of organization. Motion in this ecosystem is almost never random or chaotic, but a process of passing from one state to another in which something existing only in potential…is underway to being actualized.”
“Many levels of organization are built on top of each
other –human beings make up a state, organs make up a human being – so that any
event us shaped by a complex network of different kinds of causes.” [p.48].
Dr. Crease recognizes the ‘‘‘psychohistorical’’’ gulf that separates the typical modern «mentalité» from that of Aristotle –
“If today we fund this unjustified, it is a sign of
how far we have traveled since Aristotle’s time and how our sight has changed,
for his ideas were based on rational argument, logical deduction, and careful observation.”
[p. 49].
Dr. Crease touches on some of the ‘‘‘psychohistorical’’’ causes of the historical chasm separating Aristotle’s life-world experience, and worldview, from our own –
“It is difficult for us to see the world as Aristotle did. Our thoroughly quantitative understanding of motion has become second nature, thanks to familiar concepts like uniform speed and acceleration, to a technologically rich environment containing instruments like digital clocks and speedometers, and to our practical experience with equipment that depends on such concepts and instruments.”
“The experience of Aristotle and his contemporaries
was much different. They had neither the
experimental instruments nor a mathematical framework for measuring and
analyzing motion, and no urgent reason to seek them.” [p. 50].
A key ‘psychohistorical cause’ of this chasm, has, in our
view, been induced, mostly subliminally, by the historical development of a much more pervasive role in daily life for
what Marx called “the exchange-value” – for commodities, money, and industrial
and finance capital, and the quantitative «mentalité» that they
inculcate – in the modern world compared to its role in the, still more
use-value centered, ancient Mediterranean world; a causation well-described in
Alfred W. Crosby’s 1997 book entitled The Measure of Reality:
Quantification and Western Society, 1250 – 1600.
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free
of charge, PDFs and/or JPGs of Foundation books, other texts, and images, please see:
For partially pictographical, ‘poster-ized’ visualizations of many of these Seldonian insights -- specimens of ‘dialectical art’ – as well as dialectically-illustrated books
published by
the F.E.D. Press, see –
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DialecticsMATH
¡ENJOY!
Regards,
Miguel
Detonacciones,
Voting Member, Foundation Encyclopedia Dialectica [F.E.D.];
Elected Member, F.E.D. General Council;
Participant, F.E.D. Special Council for Public Liaison;
Officer, F.E.D. Office of Public Liaison.
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