The subject is yet another one that nobody loses sleep over. Except for me, because it’s Sunday morning and here I am, thinking out loud about the methodology of method, or meta-methodology.
Which makes me suspect the blog isn’t only superfluous to the interests of mankind, but supra-superfluous. Which usually indicates a fellow is either “onto something,” or that something is onto him, AKA madness. One can only be so eccentric before one is no longer centric at all. Rather, floating out in some incurably peripheral crock with no paddle.
Unless one happens to be correct, and then all is forgiven. Not necessarily in this lifetime, but eventually. For example, not one of the Velvet Underground’s albums cracked the top 100 -- making them the Van Gogh of rock -- and even the Ramones never got higher than #44.
Well, so what. I like it out here on the vertical frontier, alone among the stars, where the air is fresh and the horizon unlimited. No light pollution from all the propaganda, ideology, journalism, and tenure below, just me and my spirit animal Buck Mulligan, even though he’s indisposed at the moment.
We’ve posted before about how the horizontal frontier may have closed in 1890, but this has no bearing on the vertical frontier, which is always open for isness. If it weren’t, then this truly would be a prison. Everything would literally be as stupid as the most intelligent progressive. Can you even imagine? Like some reboot of The View pimping a subhuman farce -- forever.
Anyway, Method. The most popular way to dodge the subject is to pick one science and elevate it above the others, so it becomes normative (or paradigmatic) and defines the rest. Ever since the scientific revolution, more or less, this has been King Physics -- despite the revolution in physics that undermines its very assumptions. But I don’t want to veer down that well trod path, rather, up the vertical path less trivialed. Less light and dark pollution.
Regarding new age Quantumland, it brings to mind a Yogi Berra-ism: nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded. Frankly, I don’t want to be anywhere Deepak Chopra has slimed with his oleaginous presence.
You’ve probably heard the term “physics envy” to describe various disciplines that aspire to the cutandry objectivity of physics. Before it became totally unhinged from reality, this dream certainly pervaded my own racket, psychology, which caused Freud to cast his not even pseudo-scientific but romantic mythology as SCIENCE!, very much like Marx and his metaphysical hellscape.
Marx came up with a scientific theory to explain economics, history, and human psychology. It works perfectly, so long as one knows nothing about economics, less about history, and is positively delusional about human nature. Which is as easy as A-O-C.
Back before I was a recovering forensic psychologist, I would have to opine on the “causes” of a person’s mental disorder. In exact percentages. This was a purely fanciful exercise, and yet, mandated by California law. I won’t even, because that’s behind me now. Let the dead bury the tenured.
Let’s not look down and back, rather, toward the trackless mindscape that stretches a head. Ouch! Don’t stretch so quickly.
Lonergan doesn’t call it physics envy, but the meaning is the same:
Other subjects are scientific in the measure they conform to its procedures and, in the measure they do not, they are something less than scientific.
Here again, this reminds me of “psychological testing,” which is an attempt to translate the human person into clear and unambiguous, quantitative terms. Which makes perfect sense if the test-giver is autistic. But in reality, I could test a ham sandwich and arrive at any diagnosis I want.
Nowadays people ridicule Aristotle because his controlling paradigm was biology instead of physics. This naturally led to some serious errors about the nature of reality, but also some serious insights that have long since been paved over by physics. Whitehead’s organismic philosophy made a partial recovery of these insights, while introducing new errors. I suppose it wan’t until I stumbled upon the works of theoretical biologist Robert Rosen that I saw a way through this vertical impasse:
Any question becomes unanswerable if we do not permit ourselves a universe large enough to deal with the question.
Depending on the size of our (?), we’re gonna need a bigger O. And here at One Cosmos we are dealing with the largest conceivable (?)s., such as Origins, Necessary Being, Creativity, Intelligence, Intelligibility, Consciousness, etc. Smaller (?)s are more manageable, but the result is that we look “only downward toward subsystems, and never upward and outward”:
The game is thus to reduce, to express their novel [read: creative] properties in terms of inorganic subsystems...
Upward and outward, which is to say, out here on the frontier of the subjective horizon. And even Rosen wasn't a proper metaphysician, so his biological telovator didn't go all the way to the top. He transcended physics but had noplace higher to go.
Lonergan, of course, goes there, i.e., to the place from which (Whom?!) science itself flows like fresh water from a mountain spring, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. As things stand,
Today, the English word, science, means natural science. One descends a rung or more in a ladder when one speaks of behavioral or human sciences. Theologians finally have to be content if their subject is included in a list not of sciences but of academic disciplines.
Which is to turn the cosmos upside down and inside out, precisely. Don’t get me wrong: I love science as much as any atheistic MENSA member, it’s just that I love Truth even more.
That was a long prelude without getting very far. How long can a man clear his throat? Oh well. It’s my vertical travelogue. I just leave it open so any old Adam is free to eavesdrop on in and make yourself conformable to it. To be continued.
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