I
spoke for a long time with my brother tonight, and as usual, our conversation was wide-ranging and intensely compelling. There aren't too many people I can so thoroughly engage with intellectually as Will, and it's so satisfying to be able to go back and forth about art, philosophy, and life for as long as we do without getting tired. We got on the subject of science, and specifically the way that science is sometimes used to "de-mystify" the human condition, perhaps inappropriately, and I wanted to just jot down a point that I don't think always receives appropriate consideration.
Will expressed some dissatisfaction with the way that it sometimes feels that human beings are striving to create some "impartial system", or "eye from above" in the form of scientific theories, that we then attempt to use to look back at human beings in order to understand them more "objectively". This put me in mind of the Aristotelian point that knowledge always proceeds from the more-well-known to the less-well-known. What this means is that we take things that we know deeply and well essentially "for granted", and then use these things to explore that which we know less well. The converse is that knowledge cannot proceed from the less-well-known to the more-well-known. You cannot overturn a known thing with a theory, if that known thing was used to develop the theory in the first place. I don't want to say that "science" does this, since science is a human methodology, not an agent -- but certain people will sometimes use scientific findings to attempt to cast doubt on basic objects of knowledge, such as sense perception, or rationality itself, without taking proper heed of the fact that we rely inescapably on these well-known things to come to any scientific findings at all. Indeed, if science, which is basically by definition exploration of that which is non-obvious, ever contradicts obvious experience, this is extremely good evidence that the science is wrong, not the other way around.