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, presented as if a ‘‘‘convolute’’’, and not an ‘‘‘evolute’’’ progression, with only “ditto marks”, '', suggesting at least self-hybrids’ ‘evoluteness’; 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 ancients’ capability to construct something such as the Antikythera Mechanism, an astronomical-astrological analogue computer. Claudius Ptolemy’s geocentric solar system model, in his treatise Almagest – epicycles, equants 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.
In that book, Crosby sees Plato and Aristotle as
mainly qualitative sages – in contrast to the views he sees as developing in
Western society from 1250 C.E. [pp. 12-13]:
“We, who, in W. H. Auden’ words, live in societies “to
which the study of that which can be weighed and measured is a consuming love,”
have difficulty imagining an alternative to our approach to reality. We need for purposes of comparison examples
of another way of thinking. The writings
of Plato and Aristotle celebrate an un-, an almost antimetrological
approach and have te further advantage of being representative of our ancestral
mode of thought at its best. These two
men thought more highly of human reason than we do, but they did not believe
our five senses capable of accurate measurement of nature. Thus Plato wrote that when the soul depends
on the senses for information, “it is drawn away by the body into the realm of
the variable, and loses its way…” [p. 12].
The implied critique, above, of the modern «mentalité»
has the major drawback that it presents itself as an external critique, a
mere ‘alternativity’ to the modern «mentalité», rather than as an immanent
critique, proceeding from the internal difficulties – the ‘self-difficulties’
– of that modern «mentalité».
Crosby continues: “…the ancients defined
quantificational measurement much more narrowly than we do, and often rejected
it for some more broadly applicable technique. Aristotle, for instance, stated that the
mathematician measures dimensions only after he “strips off all the sensible
qualities, e.g. weight and lightness, hardness and its contrary, and also heat
and cold and other sensible contrarieties.” Aristotle, “the Philosopher,” as medieval Europe called him, found
description and analysis more useful in qualitative terms than in quantitative
ones.” [p. 13].
Robert P. Crease also coneys a vivid sense of the
historical roots of modern science, in the work of Galileo and Newton.
Regarding Galileo: “…he proceeded to investigate by
staging experiments with things like swinging pendulums and balls rolling down
inclined planes. This involved treating
space and time quite differently from the way Aristotle had. While Aristotle had treated space as a
boundary, Galileo saw it as a container with geometrical properties. To understand motion, you look at how many
units of (Galileo measured it in cubits) an object covered in how many units of
time (pulse-beats or water drops). In
the process, Galileo discovered the famous law of motion of a falling body –
stated by him as a ratio, though nowadays we always state it as the equation d
= at2/2, rewriting Galileo in our terms… . This was the first true mathematical law of
nature, the first piece of science to be written in the same way F = ma
would be.” [pp. 57-58].
Regarding Newton: “Newton had learned much from Galileo and other precursors, but
developed a generalized and truly quantitative conception of force both
continuous and instantaneous, relating it to quantitative changes in the motion
of bodies. In the Principia [M.D.: Newton’s monumental treatise entitled, in Latin,
«Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica», in English, Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy],
changes in motion are not explained by what is inside them, but only by the
forces that befall them from without.” [p. 59].
The significance of Newton’s new view was momentous: “It
changed the ontology of nature – the way we conceive the most basic units of
explanation of the reality we see. Most
of Newton’s contemporaries conceived of these units as the bodies themselves,
which affected other bodies through various mechanisms that brought about
different kinds of changes. Newton
transformed that, asserting that explanations of motion had to be in terms of
the forces that changed the motion of a mass.
The three basic terms in the ontology of motion were now force, mass
(what resisted force), and acceleration (change in motion). And each of these was quantitative,
measurable.” [p. 59].
Newton’s new worldview far surpassed that of Galileo in systematicity and internal coherence:
“In
the Principia, Newton has in effect expanded Galileo’s thought
experiment of an infinite plane without resistances, and produced a complete
and abstract world-stage. … . Galileo only glimpsed this stage from afar. Newton’s stage is spare, but therein lies its
beauty and effectiveness. Nature is not
to be looked at, as Aristotle had, as a cosmic ecosystem, in which
qualitatively different kinds of things act in qualitatively different kinds of
ways in qualitatively different domains.
It is more like a cosmic billiard table, in which all space is alike,
all directions are comparable, all events are motions, and in all changes of
motion the same basic kinds of things exert the same basic kinds of
forces. In this world, movement involves
change in space, not attainment, actualization, or intensification of being.”
[p. 62].
But Newton’s new worldview also created a strange new, hyper-abstract world picture – one estranged from the sensuous reality of immediate human experience:
“This is how F = ma can be both a definition and an
empirically discoverable fact. It is a
definition in so far as, when connected with our world via the right concepts,
assumptions, and measurement techniques, it states a quantitative relationship
between values found in a laboratory situation.
Theories become the vehicles by which to go back and forth between the
world-stage and our own, between its ideal[-ized
– M.D.] values and the real values of our
world. To non-scientists, the abstract
world might seem strange, something arbitrary and imposed upon nature, a world
of fiction[s – M.D.] – an effective fiction, perhaps, but an invention
nonetheless. To scientists, who have
been trained to connect this abstract world with our own through concepts,
procedures, and measurement practices, the temptation is just the opposite. They can move so confidently back and forth
that they can forget how abstract this world-stage is – as if it were not an
invented part of the world they live in.” [p. 63].
The Newtonian paradigm, which reduces the bodies of,
e.g., planets, to infinitesimal, 0-dimensional, volume-less mathematical points, that
somehow nevertheless have mass – “mass-points” –falsely, infinitely-erroneously,
predicts infinite forces when a pair of such “planet points” collide, so that 0
distance separates their two “mass-points”.
The Newton gravity equations have never yet been solved in closed,
analytical form, for even three such gravitationally-interacting point “bodies”. These are immanent failures of the Newtonian
paradigm, and grounds for its immanent critique.
Unfortunately, even Einstein’s General Theory of
Relativity, and the “Standard Model of Particle Physics”, still treat
gravitating bodies and “particle”-bodies, as ‘world-points’ and “world-lines”, or
as “point particles”, respectively, with many false infinities arising
resultantly, even when those fallacious infinities can be “renormalized”.
In summary:
“[Newton] is our Columbus, Voltaire wrote in 1732, “he led us to a new world.” But it is a strange world. It is not found in our own like a concealed continent. Nor is it revealed by instruments, the way tiny worlds are seen in microscopes, or distant and gigantic ones in telescopes. Newton’s strange world was found in our world – but it is not our world, either, nor one that we could live in. We humans, even the scientists among us, inhabit what philosophers call the “lived world”, amid designs, desires, and purposes: we live in an Aristotelian world. The world Newton discovered is an abstract one that appears by changing what we look at and how we look at it. It’s a fishbowl-like world, seen from the outside, closed off from our own, [M.D.: and yet] whose events disclose to us much about our world.” [p. 64].
For more
information regarding these
Seldonian insights, and to read and/or download, free
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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 –
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¡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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