March 5, 2009
NO SCHROEDINGER, NO CAT:
Putting Man Before Descartes: Human knowledge is personal and participant–placing us at the center of the universe (John Lukacs, Winter 2009, American Scholar)
Un mauvais quart d’heure, the French say, of those painful 15 minutes when a son must tell his father that he failed in school or that he stole, or when a man thinks he now must tell his woman that he will leave her. They have to tell the truth: a truth.Now, near the end of my career as a historian, I have a truth to tell. So, for 15 minutes, please bear with me.
I was still very young when I saw that historians, or indeed scholars and scientists and human beings of all kinds, are not objective. Many who wished to impress the world thought that they were objective. And there are still many historians and even more scientists of that kind, men with gray ice on their faces.
But isn’t objectivity an ideal? No: because the purpose of human knowledge—indeed, of human life itself—is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding. [...]
Knowledge, which is neither objective nor subjective, is always personal. Not individual: personal. The concept of the individual has been one of the essential misconceptions of political liberalism. Every human being is unique, but he does not exist alone. He is dependent on others (a human baby for much longer than the offspring of other animals); his existence is inseparable from his relations with other human beings.
But there is more to that. Our knowledge is not only personal; it is also participant. There is—yet there cannot be—a separation of the knower from the known. We must see further than this. It is not enough to recognize the impossibility (perhaps even the absurdity) of the ideal of their antiseptic, objective separation. What concerns—or should concern—us is something more than the inseparability; it is the involvement of the knower with the known. That this is so when it comes to the reading, researching, writing, and thinking of history should be rather obvious. Detachment from one’s passions and memories is often commendable. But detachment, too, is something different from separation; it involves the ability (issuing from one’s willingness) to achieve a stance of a longer or higher perspective. The choice for such a stance does not necessarily mean a reduction of one’s personal interest, of participation—perhaps even the contrary.
This inevitable involvement of the knower with the known exists not only in the relations of human beings with other human beings, but also in what we call “science,” man’s knowledge of physical things, of nature, of matter. I shall come to this later. Before that, a few words about the relationship of mind and matter. Did—does—matter exist independent of the human mind? It did and it does; but, without the human mind, matter’s existence is meaningless—indeed, without the human mind, we cannot think of its existence at all. In this sense it may even be argued that mind preceded and may precede matter (or what we see and then call “matter”).
In any case, the relations of mind and matter are not simple; they are not mechanical.
What matters is the necessary and historic recognition that the human mind intrudes into causality, into the relation of causes and effects.
Even science no longer pretends that the Universe isn't homocentric
MORE:
-REVIEW: of The Breakdown of Cartesian Metaphysics by Richard Watson (BrothersJudd)
-REVIEW: of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness by Fred Kuttner (BrothersJudd)