TO THE
GREAT TRADITION
Gavin Greenoak
In this, the first of a series of articles originally for the Society's Australasia Internet pages, Gavin Greenoak discusses the ethical considerations of an experimental scientist, who wishes to make philosophical sense of his practice. A view is advanced that the dominant authority of science, justified as such by its claim to literal truth, has reluctantly crossed the threshold into a dimension that challenges and transforms its own basis and authority. The assumption is that a philosophy is embedded and embodied in every possible, deliberate, human act. In other words, we must always act, consciously or unconsciously, 'in the belief that ...'
A philosophical investigation consists in the penetration, interpretation, and critique of this embodied raison d'etre, as this is also an effort to become conscious and thence responsible for action. The sense we make of the world is the world we make, with nothing less at stake. It is the assumption that consciousness demands the coherence of thought, action, and feeling within a resonant field of meaning, exceeding in breadth and depth any containment by conceptualisation.
When the effort of integration is not continually made, but rests in established meanings already overtaken, then the resultant incoherence demands unconsciousness. It is this sleep of reason that produces monsters.
- Justin Woods
I do not know much about Australian philosophy. With any kind of eye to the 'Great Tradition', I see little of it in Australia. Institutionalised, or academic, philosophy in Australia appears to accept its specialised status and is taken to be an endless mastication of other people's philosophies. If swallowing actually takes place there is little expression of the results of the process. To attempt one's own thought appears to invite the potential of too great an embarrassment.
Of course, where the dominant ethos, and authority, of the western world is a science that now claims to be the only practice which can adequately serve truth in any sphere of human experience, it is hardly surprising that any philosophy which subjects the assumptions of science to perpetual questioning is going to find a hard time of it. Philosophies, on the other hand, that tacitly support the assumptions of this dominance as questionable, also accept a specialised status, which is but a step from redundancy.
Philosophy for me, is that which we do when we try to make sense of our experience. Since the world we make is dependent upon the sense we make of it, philosophy is important. For many, science has already established and provided the only sense necessary to make a world. This science has already subsumed truth as identical with its assumptions if not also its practice. Its aim is not to make sense, but to render all things possessable in terms of applicable information. To do this, it views all systems as machines; whether people, economies, nature, language, or the psyche. The model, the paradigm, the machine metaphysic is consistent. The human being is a bad machine, almost a bug, and its ideal is to be a good and better machine - a cyberbeing, an immortal machine. For the 'mechanismos' and its 'mechaphysics', the truth is not at stake; it is a question of 'if and how it works', conceptually and in practice.
Mechaphysics can only address closed and stable systems with a view to establishing their governing laws of motion, action and interaction. In the mechaphysical body, the person is but a ghost in the machine, and strictly unnecessary to it except as they obey the functionalities of a discrete unit of consumption, production, reproduction and survival. For mechaphysics, there is no 'being'. The equation of scientific truth can do without it. This assumption of 'being' is a problem because it is 'being' which is at stake in all we think, feel, and do. Now, if the sense we make of the world is the world we make, and we hold scientific sense to be that which alone can achieve the highest status and authority of truth, then the world we must make is a world without being. Far from conquering this 'nature', we are progressively conquered by it. The personal will, the purposive nature of which endows the word 'cause' with meaning, is made dependent upon it but with no purpose permitted to it.
Through the mechaphysical 'speculum', every focus of attention must first be disconnected from being, as such; a process we call 'being objective'. Only by this process can the objects of attention become conceptually possessable and available for use; the secret thrill, as life turns into data.
I have said this science, because there are still scientists who still serve the 'truth' as though it is 'something': that is, something we are, and not about anything. For such human beings, science is a means (amongst many) for making a kind of sense that must command that quality of conviction worthy of belief. Such people, who would test even testability, are still 'natural philosophers'. The truth is a creative event, the apprehension of which is transformative. It is not a theory, or a piece of information. Theories are like clothes, which have their fit, and their fashions. The scientist who has no place for belief has only chosen to be unconscious of it. Moreover, they have in fact been absorbed by the mechanismos of their own making. Such scientists are legion, and as units of survival, consistently surrender truth to its politics.
It is of both great interest and concern that from the sartorial perspective on science, where the clothes should fit the body of fact, that very few scientists wear 'quantum cloth.' Many have it hanging in the closet, and take it out from time to time, but few actually wear it, especially in the biological sciences. Indeed, it does not fit them, because their body of fact only admits of the quantum reality in the dimension of the very small and very fast. What's more, since the quantum world admits only of statistical probability, the odds fall in everyday reality to a Newtonian predictability. By the quantum world, I mean a world that admits of an implicit and simultaneous duality of being, with which crucially, consciousness is both continuous and complicit. Every 'thing' in the quantum world is both particle and wave. The 'thought' is both a wave, in so far as it resonates with meaning, and a thing, in so far as it is also a neuro-physio-chemical event, physically active, and consequential. The quantum world is literally metaphysical.
It is perhaps no wonder that most scientists keep this coat in the closet, because it radically qualifies any materialistic and mechanistic constraints upon the truth. It challenges the mechanismos rather more than by suggesting that its existence has no independence from our subscription to it. Further, it becomes a choice and its laws no more or less binding than those laws to which we generally adhere as social custom and habit. The statement by the first lawgiver of Athens, Solon, that 'laws are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men,' attracts a cosmic scope.
The refusal to accept the revolutionary, philosophical implications of the quantum world, delivered by a science claiming its authority in the name of truth, and only thereby justified, is nothing less than bad faith on a global scale.
Bad faith is not just a derogatory label: it is disconnectedness from reality with consequences clearly visible all around us. For instance, if the first prohibiting reactions of the Roman Catholic Church against Giordarno Bruno, Copernicus, and Galileo had prevailed, and the earth had remained the centre of the universe, the world we live in today would be completely different.
To maintain 'bad faith' a question must not be asked, 'Is this true?' In other words, does it command belief, whence a responsible and conscious meaning can live? Postmodernism might be defined as a 'legitimized bad faith', which has abandoned this question altogether and embraces a freedom from it which can only be capable of a stylised banality, celebrating both irresponsibility and unconsciousness. On the other side of this celebration stand the easy heights of indignation against violence and atrocity.
The problem of course, is that the truth is reality. At every moment, we are being told what the truth is. In every thought, act, and feeling, the truth is active. The truth knows us; and the truth that damns us is our salvation. Do away with truth, and we do away with reality; this is the reality of experience. We do away with that immanent reference, the presence of which is not an idea but that which informs ideas with their actual force and organising power. Wherever we look, it can never be what we are looking at, because it is always what we are looking with! That which we make up as we go along without this reference, is a weird virtuality, which will bear no scrutiny. Like the plausible lie, it looks almost right yet feels utterly wrong. At the political level, if a statement does not sound like a lie, then it no longer rings true. Yet yielded to the authority of the mechaphysical paradigm we also feel completely helpless before the momentum of its manifest logic. The mere force of this logic derives from the severance of the purposive will, from the meaning of cause, which it informs. This severance defines what I have called mechaphysics, and results in a systematic and progressive disempowerment of the individual will, which must accept subjection to causes from which it is eternally excluded. The mechaphysical person can only use himself without ever being himself.
The mechanismo does not make sense, but denies, negates, and deprives of sense. All phenomena, whatsoever, are but the resource for its knowledge producing process, and the relation this knowledge declares is a relation of use. In the mechanismos, we can only live by an act of disintegration. Bits of us, with other bits, and nothing to draw them whole. The mechaphysicist is like a self-blinded man for whom reality is only that into which he bangs with his stick. The door to that which I have called the quantum world is also the door into the immanence of a participatory universe: on the other side we may realise that mechaphysics is the disease itself!
Mechaphysics cannot address that which is now and still to be, but only that which has been, is already accomplished and established. In subscribing to the mechaphysical, we must be doomed to variations upon a final theme, to repetition. Since that which we are is already assumed by its postulates, we are compelled to seek mere additions. Greed is our logical compulsion. Being nothing, we must have everything. There is nowhere else to go on official and approved transport. This is all rather like a bunch of grubs on a leaf determining the laws, limits, and scope of their grubby little universe. The grub that feels the impulse of metamorphosis and transformation must break the law and become, by definition, abnormal.
There is nothing in the most advanced primate that predicts the advent of the human being. The human being had to be a transgression of the known and established rules of primate existence. Metaphysics is the philosophy of the status quo, writ large and more forcibly than ever before in the history of human thought and culture. Under the banner of truth, a literal religion gave way to a literal science, which with quantum physics is returned to its poetic/creative origins, only apprehensible at the centre of a wholeness which contains us but which we can never contain. In this metaphysical dimension, it is the otherness of life that constitutes the objective fact. We move within an irreducible mystery of which we can only be finally expressive. The truth in all our knowledge consists in the justice of its relationality.
Address for correspondence: Gavin Greenoak, Research
Associate, Dept. of Animal Science, University of Sydney.