The Self-Criticism of Science by ALEXIS KARPOUZOS - HTML preview

Beyond the metaphysics antithesis of technic & art

The neoteric human being is now being cut off from the order of nature and establishes itself as the rationally reflecting and acting subject which is now posited against the object of its cognitive and practical activity. Civilization is constituted as the product of human activity, as an artifact and technical construct. With this development, human civilization is transformed to a ‘quasi nature’, aiming to correct and replace nature, and man assumes the nature of a technical existence. By ‘technical existence’ we mean the prevalence of a one-dimensional image of the human person as the producer of rational hypotheses and interpretations and the downgrading and degradation of the non-rational element of human existence, i.e. the radical imagination as a creative capacity, which forms the a priori condition and prerequisite for social activity. This constitutive element of the modern world (man, as the producer of rational hypotheses) and its articulation with the ideology of techno-scientific progress and the evolution of the machine that transforms the methods and theories of natural sciences, arming these with new tools and constantly renovating their research and experimental capabilities, finally led to the replacement of religious and metaphysical dogmas by the blind faith to the dogma of technical and scientific progress.

The prevalence of a mechanistic, materialist and deterministic view of the world, the introduction of calculation, measurement and precision as the methodological principles of science, armed with the postulation of quantitatively defined entities, has formed an equally characteristic social ethics. The abstract schemata, the formalist methods, the universal ideas and concepts have subjected everything under the identional logic of the autonomous subjective Reason and to its now fundamental predicate, the intellectualist will for power.

The result of this process was to underestimate or to ignore the relation and the difference between the concept and the object, between Reason and Nature, sameness and otherness, subject and object, universal and the particular. With this manner however, the variety of qualities of any species is eliminated, the distinctive singularity of the otherness is rejected, the immediate and the everlasting, non-identifiable element, is thrown in disregard. In summary, anything that could not be represented and signified within intellect’s dimension of formal logic, and this latter’s characteristic repetitiveness, was deemed as non-existent, that which is the ‘strictly psycho-spiritual’, the extraordinary, the unique, unrepeatable element that differentiates human beings, civilizations and entities and gives purpose and meaning to their existence. Certainly, the metaphysical and idealist distinction between the ‘formal-logical’ and the ‘strictly psycho-spiritual’ falls in the wider Western metaphysical-idealist tradition that discerns the material from the spiritual, the rationalistic from the temperamental, technique from art, Theory from Praxis, the collective from the individual. This distinction results from the greek-western thought and its positive element, which presupposed that Being is ontologically defined, is governed by an immanent rationality; that it is full in meaning and allows for a thorough verification and determination from the human mind, itself having the analogous characteristics.

From this it is suggested that the world, as it is explained within the context of natural philosophy, is not determined as it was viewed throughout the greek-western metaphysical tradition and the technique as a totally rational activity is not able to acquire a profound knowledge of its ‘subject’. In contrary, the world ‘is’ chaos or abyss, radically undetermined and inexhaustible, creating ways to bestow meaning to life from zero.

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