Science should be spoken of with the same partiality and candour that believers in science once spoke of the Church. All its claims to eternity and immutability, to omniscience and to the possession of final truth should be quietly dismissed, for they are not supported by the historical experience available to us. Every ‘final truth’ exists only in the human mind, not in the universe, and only then to be replaced by another, no less ‘final’ one. All ‘omniscience’ lives only then to become particular, temporary, limited knowledge.

In a word, to the claims of modern science we must boldly apply the whole apparatus of critical thought, which it developed in its struggle against the medieval worldview and then consigned to the archives.

It should be understood that, just as faith will exist on the other side of the Christian Church, so thought will also live on the other side of science; when ‘science’ in the modern sense no longer exists. Science is a historical phenomenon; it appears, lives and is destroyed in time, obeying the laws common to all creatures of human hands. There is nothing ‘eternal’ or ‘beyond the clouds’ about it; nothing that allows us to count on immortality. It did not, as I have said, arise ‘before the hills’, and it will be gone or changed much sooner than the hills will crumble.

The root of science is the study of what is quantifiable; observations of what can be repeated. Beyond regular and calculable repeatability, there is no scientific enquiry, but only judgements of probability, greater or lesser. Estimating judgements are extra-scientific in essence, because they cannot be based on precise measurements. As mentioned above, no morality or aesthetics follows from the multiplication table or the periodic system. Either to measure or to evaluate: these two abilities of the human spirit are limited and cannot (or rather, should not) encroach on a foreign, competing field.

Utilitarianism, therefore, is the last word of an honest and consistent science of things that are ‘superior to geometry’. But utilitarianism does not, and is unable to, set any other aims for man than ‘to strive for the useful, to avoid the harmful’. It is a doctrine of a completely passive life, with which it is difficult and not all possible to reconcile.

Man needs ideals, i. e. summits, looking up to which, from any remote valley, he will not feel left behind. He needs to know himself included in the great circle in which everything is necessary to one another, everything is meaningful… The search on this path leads man towards God; but God is beyond all ‘regular repetition’. The honest scientist may pray to God, but he cannot investigate Him, much less incorporate Him into his formulas. The unscrupulous (or, what is almost the same thing — presumptuous) can say that ‘there is no need for the God hypothesis’…

But even the most presumptuous mind sometimes wishes that the universe (or at least human society) had a purpose, and our life did not dissolve into a fog of ghostly incidents devoid of meaning…

Crouching, in the evening, the scientist goes out in search of something whose existence he theoretically rejects, but which he needs and whose existence he is ready to admit, at least conditionally and limitedly: to search for some meaning. He sets out on this search, having previously secured himself and possibly limited the concept of the sought meaning, so that it becomes as particular as possible and dependent on human perceptions and fabrications, that is, it becomes as unlike as possible the doctrine of the meaning of the world and life offered by religion, especially Christian religion.

Although we have seen the man of science embark on this path — in view of the sunset sunlit peaks — we shall not wish him success.

Why? Because it is a path on which reason encounters something worse than mere ignorance and delusion: great and terrible utopias; dreams of universal happiness on earth, this side of heaven. To less, as experience has shown, the mind will not agree. Rejecting the two greatest ideas: of God and of the immortality of the soul freely limiting itself, it agrees to exchange them only for the ideas of freedom, power, and universal happiness. Abandoning the knowledge of the human soul accumulated over the previous centuries, he falls into the simplest, uncomplicated trap. Whoever set it, be it an evil spirit or the nature of things, the essence of it is unchanged from time immemorial: either freedom, happiness or power are available to man and society at the same time.

I do not claim that science inevitably creates utopias like a spider spins a web. It requires a combination of certain conditions: moral or at least general cultural inquisitiveness in addition to purely scientific interests, and at the same time the absence of a broad religious or philosophical ground that could nourish the personality of a scientist… And, of course, only those will try to build a common worldview on (albeit imaginary) scientific grounds, who are unable to think calmly about a meaningless world, meaninglessly tormenting our senseless souls…

When I say ‘utopias’, I do not necessarily mean doctrines in which some social ideal is expressed. Rather, I mean a whole worldview that excludes the existence of God, the immortal soul, and free will (i. e., a mechanistic worldview), but at the same time gives man and society the ability to live and die without experiencing all-destroying despair, or at least softens its sting.

In other words, it is an attempt to build, if not on a scientific basis, then at least next to it, some integral and broad worldview that could take the place of the Christian religion. We have before us a rivalry, and not a mere free intellectual creation; and without mentioning this rivalry, we shall be silent about the most important one.

‘But what about’, it may be objected to me, ‘the Christian scientists who even in our day still exist and are not at enmity with the religious view of nature and man?’

‘Very simple’, I reply. Their views on what cannot be studied in the laboratory do not come from the laboratory. They are ‘scientists’ (that is, adherents of the scientific method of knowledge) only insofar as they are concerned with things that allow science to know itself. For everything else, they show reasonable restraint, not allowing the mind (enthusiastic by nature) to rush in pursuit of things it has no basis for judgement. They see in the world, as I have said, not the opposition of ‘matter and its reflection’, but a long chain of things, the beginning of which is in our mind, the continuation in the so-called ‘facts’, the vague remoteness in the as yet unknown, and the stardust above it all in the inscrutable Mystery.

A mind that does not recognise the Mystery is a childish mind, that is, a limited mind. Here, as in many other cases, the belief in the unlimited nature of one’s faculties is the best and surest sign of their limitations.

But let us return to the attempts to build an integral (and meaning-creating, let us say) worldview, if not on the foundation of science, then next to it. It is not in vain that I mention this ‘next to it’ for another time. The knowledge gathered by science and such, say, thing as knowledge of good and evil, have nothing in common but word roots. One can know a thousand unnecessary trifles about how the human body is organised, but one cannot, even with the greatest mental effort, deduce from them: should one humble oneself? should one love a man? and does this man need freedom? and what are the motives of this man? What in him is worthy of encouragement and what is worthy of contempt? And is there any good at all? Is there a moral rule suitable for all times and human multitudes? Or are only its particular cases available to us? Or is there no such rule at all, and only the Power can be our path and star?..

These are ‘Dostoevsky questions’. Without answering them, one cannot even dream of a meaning-forming and, if not all-encompassing, then extremely broad worldview. These questions confront the scientist who goes out in search of meaning. Does he answer them, and how does he answer them?

Utilitarianism has been and remains a reliable and proven tool of science, used when it is necessary to judge what does not fit in a test tube, that is, about man and his deeds. It is true that in its primitive form it is naïve and rather undemanding. Early utilitarianism existed not in a pure field, in which modern scientific thought operates, but on a fairly still rich cultural soil, next to the living and accessible heritage of ancient philosophy and old and new Christian thought… To be ‘all things to all’ — it never dreamt of such claims.

However, utilitarianism is convenient as a starting point. More precisely, the idea behind it is convenient: instead of dealing with the difficult, i. e. explaining the irrational, spiritual (both in the higher and demonic sense — after all, man is spiritual both when he loves and when he torments) in man, one should ease one’s labour and put all the difficult, i. e. spiritual, into a bracket and consider only simple motives and movements of forces.

Here is the firm ground of all the latest near-scientific doctrines. Their strength (and charm for uncomplicated minds) lies in the fact that as a ‘prime mover’, the main human motivation, something extremely simple is taken, preferably from among vague but infinitely greedy prehuman motivations: hunger of the body or hunger of passion, thirst for power or success… Depending on how the cards are laid out, we get either Marxism, or Freudianism, or liberal doctrine, or the theory of late Nietzsche. All this is self-evident and has been said by me many times before, but I must repeat myself in order not to leave a gap in thought.

All these doctrines fear free will like the devil, and circumvent it by means of a rigorously enforced monism (i. e., belief in a single and all-powerful source of all human affairs; in a force irresistibly drawing us to fulfil its desires, such as libido, class struggle, natural selection, or ‘selfish hereditary matter’, as in the latest theories of this kind).

Because of their limitations, these worldviews may seem both bold and universal, but one by one they have crumbled — ever since humanism let man out of the Church fence, telling him, ‘Investigate and try!’ If you are not God, you are like Him!’

…If once there was a broad wasteland between the House of Faith and the House of Science, the further away, the more, right before our eyes, this wasteland is being built up with rapidly growing and just as rapidly falling into utter dilapidation buildings based on the scientific method of ‘integral worldviews’. The House of Science still stands untouched; its chimneys smoke; its furnaces blow day and night; but its libraries are empty, and the lenses that look into the sky serve the once precious truth only in part, for Science has a master, and that master is unkind. He has pride and power on his mind; he has freedom and wealth on his tongue; he has weapons in his hand…

And more and more buildings are being destroyed, and soon there will be no more open spaces between the House of Faith and the House of Science.

Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity. Essays on Cullture.

Back to Knowledge and Creativity

Views: 38