Message #33829

[Bianca]

Science contributes to the modeling of the socio-economic environment through its technological production. [24]  Its conception of reality is by no means necessarily the most legitimate or fecund, but it is indeed the one with a hold on our way of living and perceiving.

And just what is that way of living? Here arises the suprising contradiction of our modern mentality: on the one hand one affirms the rightness of our mental representations and the necessity of upholding scientific criteria as the only valid ones, to the detriment of other forms of knowledge, because only those criteria are believed to guarantee the legitimacy of results and to satisfy the requirements of modern rationality; on the other hand, one admits quite freely that civilization -- despite all its technological benefits -- is an unmitigated disaster on the human level: our industrialized cities are intolerable places to live, suicide is on the rise among the young and the not so young, civility is in marked decline, ethical and emotional faculties are atrophying, interpersonal exchanges lose anything they had of warmth and agreeableness, ecosystems are destroyed slowly and inexorably -- all of which is simply the visible manifestation of a single event of contemporary history: the internal destruction of the human being.

So we end up with intellectual competence and political impotence at the same time: supposedly the world is thought up by phoenixes, but it is governed by incompetent idiots. It is of course quite apparent that our material production and our mental representations condition the texture of our lives. Modernity simply gets the world which it itself shapes.

    Science seems to be an activity, a functional type of knowledge, which creates objects such as particle accelerators, computers and food products and so forth, but that activity is sustained by institutions put into place in order to make it function in that manner. In its ideological dimension science has become what Christian religion and morality still seemed to be in Marx's day: the opiate of the people.

The critique of the positivistic sciences and modern technology, formulated from various perspectives by Ernst Mach, Edmund Husserl, Heidegger, Bohr, Habermas, Kuhn, Feyerabend and many others, is not intended to condemn those things, but rather to show their limitations and abuses: e.g. the relative objectivity of scientific rationality, its application to domains where it does not rightly apply at all, the intrinsic production of an ideology, called scientistic, which precludes the involvement of other types of knowledge. So the critique does not focus on science as a theory of nature, but rather on its abusive technological applications and its ideological monopoly of knowledge.