Science, Nihilism, and the Artistry of Nature (by Ben Cain)
by rsbakker
Technologically-advanced societies may well destroy themselves, but there are two other reasons to worry that science rather than God will usher in the apocalypse, directly destroying us by destroying our will to live. The threat in question is nihilism, the loss of faith in our values and thus the wholesale humiliation of all of us, due to science’s tendency to falsify every belief that’s traditionally comforted the masses. The two reasons to suspect that science entails nihilism are that scientists find the world to be natural (fundamentally material, mechanical, and impersonal), whereas traditional values tend to have supernatural implications, and that scientific methods famously bypass intuitions and feelings to arrive at the objective truth.
These two features of science, being the content of scientific theories and the scientific methods of inquiry might seem redundant, since the point about methods is that science is methodologically naturalistic. Thus, the point about the theoretical content might seem to come as no surprise. By definition, a theory that posits something supernatural wouldn’t be scientific. While scientists may be open to learning that the world isn’t a natural place, making that discovery would amount to ending or at least transforming the scientific mode of inquiry. Nevertheless, naturalism, the worldview that explains everything in materialistic and mechanistic terms, isn’t just an artifact of scientific methods. What were once thought to be ghosts and gods and spirits really did turn out to be natural phenomena.
Moreover, scientific objectivity seems a separate cause of nihilism in that, by showing us how to be objective, paradigmatic scientists like Galileo, Newton, and Darwin showed us also how to at least temporarily give up on our commonsense values. After all, in the moment when we’re following scientific procedures, we’re ignoring our preferences and foiling our biases. Of course, scientists still have feelings and personal agendas while they’re doing science; for example, they may be highly motivated to prove their pet theory. But they also know that by participating in the scientific process they’re holding their feelings to the ultimate test. Scientific methods objectify not just the phenomenon but the scientist; as a functionary in the institution, she must follow strict procedures, recording the data accurately, thinking logically, and publishing the results, making her scientific work as impersonal as the rest of the natural world. In so far as nonscientists understand this source of science’s monumental success, we might come to question the worth of our subjectivity, of our private intuitions, wishes, and dreams which scientific methods brush aside as so many distortions.
Despite the imperative to take scientists as our model thinkers in the Age of Reason, we might choose to ignore these two threats to our naïve self-image. Nevertheless, the fear is that distraction, repression, and delusion might work only for so long before the truth outs. You might think, on the contrary, that science doesn’t entail nihilism, since science is a social enterprise and thus it has a normative basis. Scientists are pragmatic and so they evaluate their explanations in terms of rational values of simplicity, fruitfulness, elegance, utility, and so on. Still, the science-centered nihilist can reply, those values might turn out to be mechanisms, as scientists themselves would discover, in which case science would humiliate not just the superstitious masses but the pragmatic theorists and experimenters as well. That is, science would refute not only the supernaturalist’s presumptions but the elite instrumentalist’s view of scientific methods. Science would become just another mechanism in nature and scientific theories would have no special relationship with the facts since from this ultra-mechanistic “perspective,” not even scientific statements would consist of symbols that bear meaning. The scientific process would be seen as consisting entirely of meaningless, pointless, and amoral causal relations—just like any other natural system.
I think, then, this sort of nihilist can resist that pragmatic objection to the suspicion that science entails nihilism and thus poses a grave, still largely unappreciated threat to society. There’s another objection, though, which is harder to discount. The very cognitive approach which is indispensible to scientific discovery, the objectification of phenomena, which is to say the analysis of any pattern in impersonal terms of causal relations, is itself a source of certain values. When we objectify something we’re thereby well-positioned to treat that thing as having a special value, namely an aesthetic one. Objectification overlaps with the aesthetic attitude, which is the attitude we take up when we decide to evaluate something as a work of art, and thus objects, as such, are implicitly artworks.
Scientific Objectification and the Aesthetic Attitude
There’s a lot to unpack there, so I’ll begin by explaining what I mean by the “aesthetic attitude.” This attitude is explicated differently by Kant, Schopenhauer, and others, but the main idea is that something becomes an artwork when we adopt a certain attitude towards it. The attitude is a paradoxical one, because it involves a withholding of personal interest in the object and yet also a desire to experience the object for its own sake, based on the assumption that such an experience would be rewarding. When an observer is disinterested in experiencing something, but chooses to experience it because she’s replaced her instrumental or self-interested perspective with an object-oriented one so that she wishes to be absorbed by what the object has to offer, as it were, she’s treating the object as a work of art. And arguably, that’s all it means for something to be art.
For example, if I see a painting on a wall and I study it up close with a view to stealing it, because all the while I’m thinking of how economically valuable the painting is, I’m personally interested in the painting and thus I’m not treating it as art; instead, for me the painting is a commodity. Suppose I have no ulterior motive as I look at the painting, but I’m also bored by it and so I’m not passively letting the painting pour its content into me, as it were, which is to say that I have no respect for such an experience in this case, and so I’m not giving the painting a fair chance to captivate my attention, I’m likewise not treating the painting as art. I’m giving it only a cursory glance, because I lack the selfless interest in letting the painting hold all of my attention and so I don’t anticipate the peculiar pleasure from perceiving the painting that we associate with an aesthetic experience. Whether it’s a painting, a song, a poem, a novel, or a film, the object becomes an artwork when it’s regarded as such, which requires that the observer adopt this special attitude towards it.
Now, scientific objectivity plainly isn’t identical to the aesthetic attitude. After all, regardless of whether scientists think of nature as beautiful when they’re studying the evidence or performing experiments or formulating mechanistic explanations, they do have at least one ulterior motive. Some scientists may have an economic motive, others may be after prestige, but all scientists are interested in understanding how systems work. Their motive, then, is a cognitive one—which is why they follow scientific procedures, because they believe that scientific objectification (mechanistic analysis, careful collection of the data, testing of hypotheses with repeatable experiments, and so on) is the best means of achieving that goal.
However, this cognitive interest posits a virtual aesthetic stance as the means to achieve knowledge. Again, scientists trust that their personal interests are irrelevant to scientific truth and that regardless of how they prefer the world to be, the facts will emerge as long as the scientific methods of inquiry are applied with sufficient rigor. To achieve their cognitive goal, scientists must downplay their biases and personal feelings, and indeed they expect that the phenomenon will reveal its objective, real properties when it’s scientifically scrutinized. The point of science is for us to get out of the way, as much as possible, to let the world speak with its own voice, as opposed to projecting our fantasies and delusions onto the world. Granted, as Kant explained, we never hear that voice exactly—what Pythagoras called the music of the spheres—because in the act of listening to it or of understanding it, we apply our species-specific cognitive faculties and programs. Still, the point is that the institution of science is structured in such a way that the facts emerge because the scientific form of explanation circumvents the scientists’ personalities. This is the essence of scientific objectivity: in so far as they think logically and apply the other scientific principles, scientists depersonalize themselves, meaning that they remove their character from their interaction with some phenomenon and make themselves functionaries in a larger system. This system is just the one in which the natural phenomenon reveals its causal interrelations thanks to the elimination of our subjectivity which would otherwise personalize the phenomenon, adding imaginary and typically supernatural interpretations which blind us to the truth.
And when scientists depersonalize themselves, they open themselves up to the phenomenon: they study it carefully, taking copious notes, using powerful technologies to peer deeply into it, and isolating the variables by designing sterile environments to keep out background noise. This is very like taking up the aesthetic attitude, since the art appreciator too becomes captivated by the work itself, getting lost in its objective details as she sets aside any personal priority she may have. Both the art appreciator and the scientist are personally disinterested when they inspect some object, although the scientist is often just functionally or institutionally so, and both are interested in experiencing the thing for its own sake, although the artist does so for the aesthetic reward whereas the scientist expects a cognitive one. Both objectify what they perceive in that they intend to discern only the subtlest patterns in what’s actually there in front of them, whether on the stage, in the picture frame, or on the novel’s pages, in the case of fine art, or in the laboratory or the wild in the case of science. Thus, art appreciators speak of the patterns of balance and proportion, while scientists focus on causal relations. And the former are rewarded with the normative experience of beauty or are punished with a perception of ugliness, as the case may be, while the latter speak of cognitive progress, of science as the premier way of discovering the natural facts, and indeed of the universality of their successes.
Here, then, is an explanation of what David Hume called the curious generalization that occurs in inductive reasoning, when we infer that because some regularity holds in some cases, therefore it likely holds in all cases. We take our inductive findings to have universal scope because when we reason in that way, we’re objectifying rather than personalizing the phenomenon, and when we objectify something we’re virtually taking up the aesthetic attitude towards it. Finally, when we take up such an attitude, we anticipate a reward, which is to say that we assume that objectification is worthwhile—not just for petty instrumental reasons, but for normative ones, which is to say that objectification functions as a standard for everyone. When you encounter a wonderful work of art, you think everyone ought to have the same experience and that someone who isn’t as moved by that artwork is failing in some way. Likewise, when you discover an objective fact of how some natural system operates, you think the fact is real and not just apparent, that it’s there universally for anyone on the planet to confirm.
Of course, inductive generalization is based also on metaphysical materialism, on the assumptions that the world is made of atoms and that a chunk of matter is just the sort of thing to hold its form and to behave in regular ways regardless of who’s observing it, since material things are impersonal and thus they lack any freedom to surprise. But scientists persist in speaking of their cognitive enterprise as progressive, not just because they assume that science is socially useful, but because scientific findings transcend our instrumental motives since they allow a natural system to speak mainly for itself. Moreover, scientists persist in calling those generalizations laws, despite the unfortunate personal (theistic) connotations, given the comparison with social laws. These facts indicate that inductive reasoning isn’t wholly rational, after all, and that the generalizations are implicitly normative (which isn’t to say moral), because the process of scientific discovery is structurally similar to the experience of art.
Natural Art and Science’s True Horror
Some obvious questions remain. Are natural phenomena exactly the same as fine artworks? No, since the latter are produced by minds whereas the former are generated by natural forces and elements, and by the processes of evolution and complexification. Does this mean that calling natural systems works of art is merely analogical? No, because the similarity in question isn’t accidental; rather, it’s due to the above theory of art, which says that art is nothing more than what we find when we adopt the aesthetic attitude towards it. According to this account, art is potentially everywhere and how the art is produced is irrelevant.
Does this mean, though, that aesthetic values are entirely subjective, that whether something is art is all in our heads since it depends on that perspective? The answer to this question is more complicated. Yes, the values of beauty and ugliness, for example, are subjective in that minds are required to discover and appreciate them. But notice that scientific truth is likewise just as subjective: minds are required to discover and to understand such truth. What’s objective in the case of scientific discoveries is the reality that corresponds to the best scientific conclusions. That reality is what it is regardless of whether we explain it or even encounter it. Likewise, what’s objective in the case of aesthetics is something’s potential to make the aesthetic appreciation of it worthwhile. That potential isn’t added entirely by the art appreciator, since that person opens herself up to being pleased or disappointed by the artwork. She hopes to be pleased, but the art’s quality is what it is and the truth will surface as long as she adopts the aesthetic attitude towards it, ignoring her prejudices and giving the art a chance to speak for itself, to show what it has to offer. Even if she loathes the artist, she may grudgingly come to admit that he’s produced a fine work, as long as she’s virtually objective in her appreciation of his work, which is to say as long as she treats it aesthetically and impersonally for the sake of the experience itself. Again, scientific objectivity differs slightly from aesthetic appreciation, since scientists are interested in knowledge, not in pleasant experience. But as I’ve explained, that difference is irrelevant since the cognitive agenda compels the scientist to subdue or to work around her personality and to think objectively—just like the art beholder.
So do beauty and ugliness exist as objective parts of the world? As potentials to reward or to punish the person who takes up anything like the aesthetic attitude, including a stance of scientific objectification, given the extent of the harmony or disharmony in the observed patterns, for example, I believe the answer is that those aesthetic properties are indeed as real as atoms and planets. The objective scientist is rewarded ultimately with knowledge of how nature works, while someone in the grip of the aesthetic attitude is rewarded (or punished) with an experience of the aesthetic dimension of any natural or artificial product. That dimension is found in the mechanical aspect of natural systems, since aesthetic harmony requires that the parts be related in certain ways to each other so that the whole system can be perceived as sublime or otherwise transcendent (mind-blowing). Traditional artworks are self-contained and science likewise deals largely with parts of the universe that are analyzed or reduced to systems within systems, each studied independently in artificial environments that are designed to isolate certain components of the system.
Now, such reduction is futile in the case of chaotic systems, but the grandeur of such systems is hardly lessened when the scientist discovers how a system which is sensitive to initial conditions evolves unpredictably as defined by a mathematical formula. Indeed, chaotic systems are comparable to modern and postmodern art as opposed to the more traditional kind. Recent, highly conceptual art or the nonrepresentational kind that explores the limits of the medium is about as unpredictable as a chaotic system. So the aesthetic dimension is found not just in part-whole relations and thus in beauty in the sense of harmony, but in free creativity. Modern art and science are both institutions that idealize the freedom of thought. Freed from certain traditions, artists now create whatever they’re inspired to create; they’re free to experiment, not to learn the natural facts but to push the boundaries of human creativity. Likewise, modern scientists are free to study whatever they like (in theory). And just as such modernists renounce their personal autonomy for the sake of their work, giving themselves over to their muse, to their unconscious inclinations (somewhat like Zen Buddhists who abhor the illusion of rational self-control), or instead to the rigors of institutional science, nature reveals its mindless creativity when chaotic systems emerge in its midst.
But does the scientist actually posit aesthetic values while doing science, given that scientific objectification isn’t identical with the aesthetic attitude? Well, the scientist would generally be too busy doing science to attend to the aesthetic dimension. But it’s no accident that mathematicians are disproportionately Platonists, that early modern scientists saw the cosmic order as attesting to God’s greatness, or that postmodern scientists like Neal deGrasse Tyson, who hosts the rebooted television show Cosmos, labour to convince the average American that naturalism ought to be enough of a religion for them, because the natural facts are glorious if not technically miraculous. The question isn’t whether scientists supply the world with aesthetic properties, like beauty or ugliness, since those properties preexist science as objective probabilities of uplifting or depressing anyone who takes up the aesthetic attitude, which attitude is practically the same as objectivity. Instead, the question here might be whether scientific objectivity compels the scientist to behold a natural phenomenon as art. Assuming there are nihilistic scientists, the answer would have to be no. The reason for this would be the difference in social contexts, which accounts for the difference between the goals and rewards. Again, the artist wants a certain refined pleasure whereas the scientist wants knowledge. But the point is that the scientist is poised to behold natural systems as artworks, just in so far as she’s especially objective.
Finally, we should return to the question of how this relates to nihilism. The fear, raised above, was that because science entails nihilism, the loss of faith in our values and traditions, scientists threaten to undermine the social order even as they lay bare the natural one. I’ve questioned the premise, since objectivity entails instead the aesthetic attitude which compels us to behold nature not as arid and barren but as rife with aesthetic values. Science presents us with a self-shaping universe, with the mindless, brute facts of how natural systems work that scientists come to know with exquisite attention to detail, thanks to their cognitive methods which effectively reveal the potential of even such systems to reward or to punish someone with an aesthetic eye. For every indifferent natural system uncovered by science, we’re well-disposed to appreciating that system’s aesthetic quality—as long as we emulate the scientist and objectify the system, ignoring our personal interests and modeling its patterns, such as by reducing the system to mechanical part-whole relations. The more objective knowledge we have, the more grist for the aesthetic mill. This isn’t to say that science supports all of our values and traditions. Obviously science threatens some of them and has already made many of them untenable. But science won’t leave us without any value at all. The more objective scientists are and the more of physical reality they disclose, the more we can perceive the aesthetic dimension that permeates all things, just by asking for pleasure rather than knowledge from nature.
There is, however, another great fear that should fill in for the nihilistic one. Instead of worrying that science will show us why we shouldn’t believe there’s any such thing as value, we might wonder whether, given the above, science will ultimately present us with a horrible rather than a beautiful universe. The question, then, is whether nature will indeed tend to punish or to reward those of us with aesthetic sensibilities. What is the aesthetic quality of natural phenomena in so far as they’re appreciated as artworks, as aesthetically interpretable products of undead processes? Is the final aesthetic judgment of nature an encouraging, life-affirming one that justifies all the scientific work that’s divorced the facts from our mental projections or will that judgment terrorize us worse than any grim vision of the world’s fundamental neutrality? Optimists like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan and Tyson think the wonders of nature are uplifting, but perhaps they’re spinning matters to protect science’s mystique and the secular humanistic myth of the progress of modern, science-centered societies. Perhaps the world’s objectification curses us not just with knowledge of many unpleasant facts of life, but with an experience of the monstrousness of all natural facts.
Three Pound Brain 
Beautifully written, as always, Ben!
So on my ‘pronaturalist’ account value-talk is only reliable when deployed in first-order contexts – as soon as you begin making intentional claims about the nature of value in general, you’re almost certainly applying intentional cognition to problems it simply cannot solve, and thus inviting endless interpretative regress. So my first question is, why should anyone presume that the problems you consider are at all soluble using the intentional cognitive modes you do?
You’re keen to emphasize what you see as the similarities between the objective and aesthetic attitudes, but surely the distinction between them, in cognitive terms, couldn’t be more drastic. Where the ‘objective attitude’ is a component allowing for the arbitration of disparate theoretical claims, the ‘aesthetic attitude’ is a component allowing for… what, exactly?
Nihilism need not be viewed in substantival terms as the absence of value, it can also be viewed in process terms as the inability to arbitrate various determinations of value – as anomie. The two are related.
So on my account, value, understood naturalistically, is best thought of a low-grain metacognitive gist that facilitates (in ways yet to be determined) our navigation of different environments. It’s not that we have these ‘values’ floating around in us, any more than they limn the structure of nature. Our organism converges on various activities on the basis of various histories; metacognition systematically neglects this, forcing us to adopt post facto posits – values – for the purposes of communication. The fact that, even granting you these mysterious values floating within us doesn’t allow you to solve the problem of anomie, I would take as symptomatic. The posits don’t solve this problem because this isn’t the problem ‘value-talk’ is adapted to solve. ‘Values’ are almost paradigmatic heuristics, don’t you think?
Thanks! I’m not sold on your first-order, second-order distinction. This came out in the discussion of one of your recent articles, in the comments section. You keep talk about the need to solve problems. Who do I have to be, Sherlock Holmes? Now, if everything were mechanical, then indeed we’d be left with technocracy. Everything that happens would be a matter of fine-tuning the machines. But that view of nature is surely metaphorical, not to mention verboten for atheists. It’s like saying the brain is a computer, which turns “computer” into a weasel word so that everything in the universe can be called one too (a “processor of information”).
Am I trying to solve a problem here? No, I’m pointing out the fact that objectification is like the aesthetic attitude, so that naturalism implies not nihilism but the potential for an aesthetic evaluation of nature. Period. Do with it what you will. Can that fact be put to good use? I certainly think so. For example, it might save us from despair at the coming technoscientific apocalypse and from the hackneyed artworks of the mainstream religions. What we need is a naturalistic religion, which is what Nietzsche said. Why do we need that? Because we’re animals and as Durkheim said, we’re bound to worship things, to hold them as sacred or profane to unite our tribe. Until we tinker with our hardware so that those primitive impulses disappear, I maintain that if we’re going to indulge in normativity and teleology, we should make our religion scientifically respectable, so that we at least deal with the facts instead of running from them with supernaturalism.
Your epistemic construal of nihilism is interesting. I don’t discuss it in this article. What’s the problem here, that there has to be one right answer to a normative question, as if we were doing math rather than art? Sorry, but that’s a bogus problem.
If we don’t have values floating around us, then neither are there facts as such. That undermines science itself. You don’t want to do that. But I agree that values aren’t mind-independent. I see them in a more or less Kantian way, in terms of an interaction between minds and non-minds. Scientifically-explained facts, as such, have the potential to give us aesthetic pleasure or horror. So whereas you employ the mechanistic metaphor of nature, I consider nature an artwork (a self-creation that leaves itself open to aesthetic interpretation).
What you call your naturalistic account of values presupposes the evolutionary function of these mental states. Who says we have to follow that function? Who says something interesting can’t happen from an accidental “misuse” of our inner states? You say when we philosophize about meaning and value, we merely get nowhere. I say that philosophical and religious meta-reflection was long ago instrumental in turning our animalistic, prehistoric ancestors into people! You say the mechanisms did all the work. I’m saying that redescribing the mind in solely mechanistic terms is culturally counter-productive. It’s not a matter of getting at the facts vs talking nonsense (values, meaning, etc). It’s a matter of the possible effects of different interpretations of certain facts. When we think of ourselves as persons rather than machines, we act like persons and literally train ourselves to be unique as a species. That’s bootstrapped transcendence.
So you don’t think there’s a difference between theory and practice? I’m not saying we get nowhere, only that we don’t arrive at the destination printed on the ticket. In this case, ‘humanity’ – to whit, “I say that philosophical and religious meta-reflection was long ago instrumental in turning our animalistic, prehistoric ancestors into people!” This claim (which I think, for reasons similar to Adorno’s, is dubious) sounds an awful lot like some kind of problem-solving, that ‘animal’ is bad, and ‘people’ is good, and religion was one way of overcoming the bad, but that philosophy is the best way of achieving the good. The simple fact is that you have no compelling way to substantiate this claim. In fact, no one has any compelling way, short of coercion, to substantiate any good. This is why contemporary consumer society can be described as a functionally nihilistic one, why the ‘pursuit of happiness’ is left to each individual to decide in liberal democracies, and why it tends to devolve into the accumulation of fitness indicators and material goods. Our shared biological imperatives become the basis of community because those are ultimately the only imperatives that reliably collectively compel us. So we abandon the traditional frameworks and ‘rationalize’ society, set up regimes of coercion – endless webs of what amounts to tort law – balancing the ways pursuing biological imperatives infringes on the way others pursue their imperatives. So as Adorno would say, the process of modernity is the process of becoming more efficiently animal. Turning wolves into dogs, you could say, although Adorno would probably argue that our ancestors were more human insofar as they actually acknowledged ‘objective reason,’ universal moral orders that define the good for individuals.
But even if you disagree with that interpretation, the takeaway remains the same: It doesn’t matter how many tickets you or I or anyone else prints up, there is simply no way compel theoretical consensus regarding the kinds of ‘goods’ you are extolling. You are making claims that cannot make any systematic social difference, that only add to the noise of innumerable such claims. One plausible reason for this is that moral theoretical cognition is chimerical, the exaptation of a social problem-solving system that continually generates the appearance of moral knowledge, but nothing else.
All BBT does is offer an empirically tethered view of why this is the case, and what kind of dysfunctions we might expect to see in the near future. You use ‘machines’ in a pejorative sense, attempting to rhetorically paint my position in an unappealing corner, and I happen to agree. It is unappealing! But the ugliness or the horror, if anything, warrant we take a closer look, given the way science has consistently undermined so many of our past conceits. In this case, it’s the final redoubt, the pretension of ‘man the meaning maker’ that’s on the table. The case you make for the aesthetic not only begs the naturalistic question of what the aesthetic is, it solves none of the ‘transcending the animal’ problems you claim it does. For me, a ‘fact’ is a way to communicate systematically effective information. Our interpretations either feed into this systematicity, attenuate it, extend it, or they generate noise. What you need to prove is that you’re doing more than simply generating more noise, and I fail to see how this is the case. Your own trap swallows you up.
Which is perhaps what you should expect given a truly indifferent universe.
RSB, may just be a matter of taste/experience but I don’t find mechanistic/materialist viewpoints to be unappealing, they remind me of studying physiology or learning techniques in the arts.
Theory is a distinctive kind of activity/practice – otherwise I never said things weren’t messy!
If you’re not arguing to solve any problems, make any difference, then what is your rationale? If it really is a kind of aesthetic emotivism you’re advocating, then the issue is moot, I suppose, because you could argue that you’re simply trying to nudge your readers into certain agreeable states. But this definitely cuts against the rhetorical tenor of your rants!
You clearly set up the ‘aesthetic’ as some kind of redemptive possibility, and you continually critique traditional modes of rationalizing value as retrograde. You quite explicitly offer the aesthetic as the way out. The fact that it apparently involves indifference, or the ‘theoretical attitude,’ with scientific cognition is neither here nor there as far as I can tell, because the similarities end there. Scientific cognition arbitrates between claims. Aesthetic appreciation does not. What strikes you as ugly strikes Christians as beautiful and so on. Why shouldn’t the pessimist assume that turning to the aesthetic, far from providing escape, isn’t rather a symptom of the severity of the crisis?
The problem isn’t simply that science philosophically implies the absence of value, but that it enacts it as well. Philosophers argue and scientists engineer, and engineer, and engineer. The problem of nihilism is at once a crisis in the efficacy of intentional reasoning, our inability to rationally arbitrate value claims in an age when everything is set to be engineered.
There is no mind in my account, so there’s no ‘mind dependence.’ The dichotomy of views from nowhere versus views from here collapse on my account.
Yeah, I disagree with your interpretation. Yes, there’s a difference between theory and practice. No, the difference isn’t exhaustive or even mutually exclusive. To say that philosophers are in the business of providing theories of the facts is to use scientific criteria for knowledge. That’s liable to be scientistic. Like religion, philosophy is a practice (of being skeptical, subversive, ideologically creative, etc). Science is also part of a process I call technoscience or just modernity. Scientific knowledge feeds into the business of controlling nature for our happiness. Moreover, an eliminativist is in no position to draw that theory-practice distinction, since without the practice you have no causal relations and are left with the semantic relations between theories and facts. If the latter don’t exist, how do you define “theory” without appealing to practice (i.e. to behaviour, or to mind-environment interactions)?
And no, I don’t say the transition from animals into people was good. I say it was awesome. It was a work of mesmerizing art that demonstrated the power and originality of the undead god, the latter being the set of natural forces and elements. That’s literally what it was and in this article I show how saying so is perfectly consistent with naturalism. Nature creates and changes itself. Those changes can be viewed objectively or impersonally, which is to say aesthetically, assuming we’re bent on being pleased or disgusted by the experience instead of using the information for instrumental or technocratic purposes.
If you say this aesthetic view of nature is bunk, show me how you can have scientific objectivity without the potential for the aesthetic interpretation.
I’m not interested in “consensus” when it comes to appreciating art. Nature’s no hack artist, so the mob doesn’t rule when it comes to figuring out what’s sacred; hence, I dismiss theistic religion. Again, consensus is a scientific criterion. We needn’t be in a scientific frame of mind all the time. Where do you find the normative consensus that we ought to think only about solving problems or exchanging information based on the facts? How does an eliminativist justify that view of what we ought to be doing?
And why on earth would I care about making a “systematic social difference”? Are you saying someone has to be famous to be worth a damn? The simpler reason why my blog is part of the noise on the internet is that there are hundreds of millions of other writers and we have limited time and attention spans so only a minority can make a systematic social difference. Any other interpretation requires a leap of logic.
And no, I don’t beg the question here. The aesthetic experience is just a matter of being surprisingly pleased or disgusted due to a relatively impersonal experience of an objective fact. Where’s the supernatural in that?
By the way, your definition of “fact” makes a fact mind-dependent. Are you implying there would be no facts without minds to “communicate” them? Likewise, I doubt you can define “information” without bringing in minds, but we’ve already been over that.
In fact, no one has any compelling way, short of coercion, to substantiate any good.
So what is the worth of saying that? It almost seems a one step recursive version of Ben’s position – point out certain things and…some kind of hanging implication?
Also what were the traditional frameworks and how did they escape being informed by biological imperatives?
Firstly, I thought the whole article reads wonderfully, I find you answering my objections as I raise then my mind. Anyways, on the brain is a computer, perhaps we are modelling computers on brains. Creating an accurate metaphor. Anyways I got a kick out your arguments, in a good way.
Ben… great write up!
My problem comes in right off the bat. You seem to have either passed over, or forgotten all the battles over scientism in the past 20 years or so. What you describe is old school science as if it still existed in the form you critique. But the more that I explore many of the new sciences the more I see a move toward a post-nihilistic methodology. Even your conception that sciences are based on a material, mechanical, and impersonal view of the universe, etc. is not only incorrect for many of the new trends in NBIC and ICT technologies and sciences, but for the biological and cosmological sciences as well. Even many philosophers have moved beyond such views on matter, too.
You paint it all black and white… but there are grey tones everywhere in the sciences. One of the issues is that you apply normative moral conclusions concerning the nihilism of sciences when the notions of naturalism are about the external world, and have never been applied to the inner world of the Mind’s normativity, etc. Even those in philosophy of Mind that speak of the impersonal processes of the brain and its activities are not applying moral judgments, but scientific ones and the two domains of thought should not be confused. I think that’s where it all goes to hell in a handbasket when people seem to try to confuse those two separate ways of looking at things.
There are scientists that are atheist and those that are God fearing, but they all play by the same rules of the trade concerning the practice of the sciences. Obviously those that are outside of this realm make judgments on it as you do above. The turn to aesthetics is a return to Kant through Hegel and beyond… Even when scientists make such value judgments in their writings they step beyond the sciences and back into the humanities. One should never confuse the two domains of knowledge, at least that’s been the trend in philosophy of science for a long while. Sure a scientist or an artist can have aesthetic judgments, but those are ‘aesthetic’ not scientific judgments.
Even our conceptions of science have changed. It’s no longer about what ‘is’, but about what it ‘does’ that counts. One could spend years pursuing the notion of describing or representing what the universe is, what the earth is, what a human is, etc. But for most pragmatic working scientists its about what are the processes underlying the structure of the universe, the earth, the human, etc. Instead of pure description we have heuristics and models of the operations of things, objects, entities that tell us what outputs and inputs, couplings and decouplings, the powers and capacities manifested in these processes.
Even now in cosmology with the modeling of such unknowns as Dark Matter and Dark Energy – is there anything objective, tangible, natural about this? No. It’s all mathematical modeling based on numbers and data about what is missing in what we do know… it’s as if we were creating a completely negative science to discover what’s missing rather than what’s there… how explain such a science of absence rather than presence? Is there a reason why such philosophies of absence as post-structuralist philosophy came about at the same time that the sciences were uncovering these hidden aspects of the universe? To me there is always a unique interplay between all aspects of a culture, it’s just that we tend to separate them off into categories and like they did back in the 1950’s invent two-cultures, or as in philosophy a common sense or folk psychological worldview and a scientific image, etc. Why do we tend to always see things in such blinkered fashion?
I mean if you study the history of the sciences and naturalism they both grew out of the Christian humanist traditions… from within it, not outside it. They are still tied together even if we don’t accept it. Think about the miniaturization of technology for the past hundred years, then think about the endless miniaturization of philosophy that turned toward the minutiae of the smallest units of linguistic data. They go hand in hand… just like now we see something else happening, something beyond the Linguistic Turn, and the older Objective Positivistic sciences…
Think of Quatum Physics: what began as the assertion of material reality ended up as the realm of pure formulas of quantum physics… it’s like the search for the smallest structure in the universe has suddenly bloomed into these immaterial structures (Dark Matter) and immaterial processes or operations (Dark Energy) … how explain this as cold, impersonal, and objective… there is no way to describe this… but it can be modeled using heuristical devices.
well and the fact that it is more the consumers/users of technologies (who by and large are not scientists) the various corporate and government (to the degree that there is a meaningful difference any more) actors who are wrecking the epic havocs of our day…
True… if I were actually to fault the sciences it would be from the angel of the money trail: obviously scienctists need money for all those expensive toys they play with, so there agendas are usually set by funds, corporate pressure, think-tanks, major pharmokon industry, governmental agencies, etc. etc.
I know scientists like to think they are neutral, but hey your right dmf that went out the door with the atomic bomb long ago… the sciences are no longer neutral and never will be again… they follow the money just like all other capitalist enterprises. So one has to look not at the scientists as the culprits but as symptoms of a larger disease: Capitalism itself… this whole religious attack on the Secularization of the world always seems to lead back to the religionists need to Reenchant the world like some primitive return to the animistic faiths of early humans. It ain’t going to happen… obviously in pockets around the earth from technophobics, to global rave culture, to New Age, to pick your choices.. there will be resistance to the sciences, but truly the sciences came about in the first place because of the social pressures of history or they wouldn’t have appeared in the first place. To attack the thing that has created modern society is to reject our own lives… that, to me, is no answer, nor a way forward. Instead of attacking secular culture and values lets understand what comes next…. there are no returns, only ghosts in the closet of time.
Noir-realism,
Well, you make a number of interesting comments here, but I think they’re based on a misunderstanding. I’m not asserting that science is such and such. You’re free to take my argument here as conditional. Here’s the argument in a nutshell: IF you think science (or more specifically, philosophical naturalism) implies nihilism, think again! You’re left with the basis for an aesthetic interpretation of all of those natural facts.
But are you saying there’s no such thing as scientific objectivity? Even a pragmatist should admit there’s a difference between the depersonalization involved in the scientific methods and the venting of emotions that’s commonplace in nonscientific discourses. How postmodern are you about science?
For me the sciences have moved beyond nihilism: this sense of a moral vacuity, or meaningless of existence. Sciences are not about value judgments. Neither am I a postmodern relativist, either. What I attack is the notion of objective truth in sciences which was part of the physicalist metaphysic for 80 years now. In fact I object to the term – truth in the sense it implies… truth is not some static, objective aspect of reality based on a descriptive, representativist metaphysic. The last time I read physics books or even biogenetics truth is a concept, and interface, a filter and heuristic tool used to not describe external objects, but to infer by indirect means from the use of other apparatuses the effects on things by way of technologies such as the new brain (neursciences) scanning technologies, in biogenetics through specialized modeling, in physics through the Hadron collider etc.
The idea of an objective order of visible data we can approach through our senses empirically and test have been over for a long while. We are in the age of immaterial relations inferred from the effects on tinier and tinier invisibles. Most of it done with non-representational modeling based on algorithms and mathematical or probalistic data sets.
That is our hard science now. The notion of Objective Science is a particular term to denote positivist and analytical sciences from the 30’s own. That is what I mean by it, not what I described above. If you see objective in the common sense view of it – this is not what I meant, but rather the actual use of the term in philosophy and the sciences of that era. With the development of quantum theory all that went out the door…
Let me try to clarify: scientific objectivity… we start with the notion of objectivity itself which implies obviously a particular stance toward reality, yes? The modern concept of scientific objectivity didn’t come into existence until the 19th century. The concept of “truth to nature,” employed in early scientific atlases, was the forerunner of scientific objectivity. The idea behind truth to nature was to present an idealized version of the object under investigation, which was often done using composite drawings. A large interpretive (i.e., subjective) element was thus inherent in this process. During the mid-19th century, realistic depictions came to be valued over idealized ones and objectivity came to be seen as a moral virtue, giving a new meaning to truth to nature. Individual objects were depicted in atlases instead of composite drawings. The invention of photography during this period allowed for easier standardization of pictures in the atlases. Interpretation and value judgments were de-emphasized as the modern concept of scientific objectivity emerged.
Scientific objectivity is an ideal goal that scientists strive to achieve. Unfortunately, because science is a human enterprise, complete objectivity can never be attained. However, the scientific method is designed to safeguard against bias as much as is possible.
As we know, being human, when new conceptions or ideas emerge that question the prevailing scientific objectivity on a particular event, thing, object there is usually a long period of infighting among scientists themselves before they acknowledge something as valid or not. Hell, we know that Einstein never did really accept a lot of the findings concerning quantum mechanics. He thought there was something fundamentally wrong, but was never able to prove it.
Think of the evolution of psychology as it emerged and finally entered the stage we are now in of neurosciences, etc. There is no scientific objectivity in the sense of some eternal truth of an event, thing, or object, etc. There are theories that have been tested, validated, peer reviewed and excepted as partial statements of the fact rather than as concrete objective facts. Ideal… Models, math, apparatuses that measure and quantify, methods of probalistic repeatability and stoachastic inference, etc.
It’s still just a human enterprise and not without its critics. So if this is what you mean by scientific objectivity then I can except it. But from the way you used it in your essay it seemed a different connotation was involved? Maybe I’m wrong. If so then I admit my error.
Noir-realism,
I agree with most of what you’re saying here. For example, I agree that physics is highly structural now, due to its leaning on math in the absence of data.
Have you read my article on scientific objectivity, called “Humanization and Objectification: Why the world doesn’t speak for itself”? The link’s below.
Still, I think you’ve over-thinking the article. All I need is a *relative* difference between science and most other disciplines. Scientific work is relatively more objective than, say, philosophy or religion. What that means is that scientific methods systematically bypass the scientist’s subjectivity (their personality, biases, etc). If you deny that relative difference, you’re into postmodern relativism. If you accept it, you might be interested in knowing that that objectivity doesn’t entail nihilism, since it leaves us with the potential for an aesthetic experience of nature. That’s all.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/08/humanization-and-objectification-why.html
The experiment described here:
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/27/282939233/good-art-is-popular-because-its-good-right
seems to argue against your assertion that works of art possess aesthetic value independent of some perceiver:
“Likewise, what’s objective in the case of aesthetics is something’s potential to make the aesthetic appreciation of it worthwhile. That potential isn’t added entirely by the art appreciator, since that person opens herself up to being pleased or disappointed by the artwork. She hopes to be pleased, but the art’s quality is what it is and the truth will surface as long as she adopts the aesthetic attitude towards it, ignoring her prejudices and giving the art a chance to speak for itself, to show what it has to offer.”
Is there an aesthetic method analogous to the scientific method? If so how would you describe it? Science has institutional processes like peer review and the requirement that experimental results be repeatable before they are accepted to minimize the influence of individual prejudice. Is it really possible to exclude one’s own prejudices from one’s aesthetic experiences? If it is possible is it desireable, given how much pleasure most of us get from seeing our prejudices confirmed?
If I understand you correctly, you seem to be trying fo use aesthetics as a replacement for faith in human culture. I think that project is unlikely to succeed because aesthetic judgements are arbitrary, except for example phatness, which is actually a judgement about fertility disguised as an aesthetic judgement. It may be possible to see other aesthetic judgements as disguises for other, more practical judgements, but the process of mapping aesthetic judgements to judgements regarding for example evolutionary fitness would be a scientific process, not an aesthetic one.
The analogy is limited, like all analogies. Science is about getting the right answers. Art is about transcendence, mind-expansion, existential authenticity (character development), etc.
Aesthetic appreciation is a matter of seeing something for what it really is, without projecting onto it. That’s what scientists do, but it also happens to be what art appreciators do.
Do we get pleasure from expressing our personality? Sure we do. But that’s not a refined, aesthetic pleasure. Anyway, who says art has to be pleasurable? Maybe it can present us with a challenge, such as a cosmicist one in the case of the universe-as-monstrous-artwork.
I don’t think aesthetic judgments are necessarily arbitrary. But again, it’s not about getting at the truth. It’s about the effects of an aesthetic reaction. What becomes of the naturalistic appraisal of nature? What becomes of us when we see objectified facts as monstrous?
You say “I don’t think aesthetic judgments are necessarily arbitrary.” Mathematical calculations are not arbitrary because rules define the valid procedures for mathematical calculation. Do you mean to imply that there are rules (or something rule-like but less binding) which define valid procedures for aesthetic judgement?
The creation of art is an expression of one’s personality. Surely if the appreciation is art is a refined aesthetic pleasure the creation of art is also a refined aesthetic pleasure?
Both those things having been said, I think that there are rule-like processes for valid aesthetic judgment. I think that many of our responses to (for example) some kinds of dance music are not properly aesthetic. Learning to distinguish aesthetic from other kinds of judgments is the first task of the novice aesthete.
Regarding math, mathematicians explore alternative realities by defining the rules and following the implications. This has led to the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics. The arbitrariness is in the selection of the axioms, which gets the system off the ground.
We can define “aesthetics” in different ways. I agree that art expresses our personality. However, I disagree with politically correct liberalism which says our opinions are all equally valid, because we all have human rights. I agree with Nietzsche, Strauss, Spengler, and others who divide our species into the spiritual elites and the anti-philosophical herd. The former have better taste in art (and in ideas, fictions/myths, etc)–and that’s so even though aesthetics is indeed subjective.
You see, the elites are better human beings! They’re existentially authentic, not robots possessed by memes, instincts, and so forth. The elites have greater depth to their character. Most importantly, they appreciate the tragedy of natural life. So superior taste in art, for me, is determined by philosophical and spiritual depth of character. As I say in “Authenticity and the Cost of Self-Creation,” it’s a matter of being cursed with the anxiety that comes from autonomy, which comes in turn from having the power to control yourself with higher-order thoughts. The herd lacks that freedom and thus they prefer kitsch–both in terms of art and religion (exoteric theism).
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2013/07/authenticity-and-cost-of-self-creation.html
Are you suggesting the idea of having this aesthetic view all the time, Ben? Not just some of the time, with the times set by some sort of structure oneself decided to adopt (possibly after designing the structure), but instead doing it all the time?
I suspect that Buddhist enlightenment (detachment) can be interpreted along these aesthetic lines. But we like to express ourselves, so it’s hard to be permanently objective. Maybe we appreciate art all the more when we contrast the aesthetic experience with the profane experiences.
Buuuut no actual method of controling when you do one or the other?
Wont that just lead to…higgledy piggledy thinking, where thinking rocks from one to the other, not taking into account the affect one has on the other (not even treated it as an effect). Kinda like mixing business and pleasure?
There’s a lot to say about how people balance their sacred and profane interests. Religionists have been grappling with that problem for thousands of years. There are lots of problems here about hypocrisy and so on, but I don’t see how this is especially a problem for what I’m saying about the compatibility of scientific objectivity with the aesthetic interpretation of nature.
Buuut no actual method, Ben? I mean, even a reference to there being a number of methods that keep a hard line between doing one and the other (rather than teetering between them with no real grasp of what perception is informing an action) would do – don’t even need to point at a specific one. It’s not exactly anything to grapple with, just a system of deliniation – one could decide to try one for X months then change to another system.
but I don’t see how this is especially a problem for what I’m saying about the compatibility of scientific objectivity with the aesthetic interpretation of nature.
Are you actually saying having the aesthetic view all the time?
I doubt it would be possible to experience absolutely everything as art all the time, because we’re often preoccupied or distracted in our daily life. But I think this perspective can be in the back of our minds. By comparison, Christians might not literally always be thinking of Jesus every minute of their life, but they try to keep him in their minds, by thanking or praising him whenever they get the chance. Again, it’s a matter of balancing the sacred with the profane and this is a very old problem.
I think such a model tends to have them forget Jesus when it’s convenient or profitable to them to do so. I’m reminded of a test that was run where someone was made to be late by the scientists to give a talk on good samaritanism – they come across someone who was distraught as they travel to give the talk. Most walked quickly on by to their late talk.
Without some metric for determining what is ‘balanced’, balancing just seems to be whatever is convenient and profitable, but without concious recognition of such selfishness and so will deny any such behaviour on their part (after all, they give speaches on good samaritanism!).
Do we get onto talking about an objective metric for balancing? Or is it more convenient to leave it up in the air and say it’s a very old problem?
We do both, it’s the greatest piece artwork in progress.
With an audience of one.
? I’m not getting something
Speculative critique. Each individual veering between the two views veers in their own particular way, individually. It might seem like some grand global artwork (as you put it, it’s ‘the’ artwork. Ie a singular reference) but really you don’t match how other people are veering back and forth, and so have nothing really in common. The apparently global artwork really only has an audience of one. There are about seven billion of these apparently global artworks. Possibly slightly less where people actually align themselves (even if temporarily) with emperic means – thus actually having something in common (emperic need not be any big complicated thing – boardgames generally align people emperically)
Short version: There’s only one audience member for ‘the’ piece artwork.
Ok, I guess my thinking is we are evolving according to the supposition that there are shared qualities that occur. So yes, I think that determining the rubric for the real is good. We are moving without knowing. But I think there will be even more effective methods in the future. I don’t know what that means re effective.
my thinking is we are evolving according to the supposition that there are shared qualities that occur.
I don’t think I’m getting something, now?
Optimist, pessimist. It’s all nature doing what nature does. Our agency in our response to facts of nature is illusory.
Yes, but is saying that attempting to encompass the subject as if you’ve grasped the whole thing somehow? Just as much as the optimist or pessimist feels they’ve grasped the whole thing?
My saying that is as much nature doing what nature does as the optimist or the pessimist, if that’s what you’re asking.
If it’s exactly the same, why add it?
@Callan
Nature does a near infinite variety of things, none of which is exactly the same as any other. You’re nature doing what nature does as you. Would it make any difference in how you subjectively experience yourself to have a heartfelt knowledge of that as true?
No, it just strikes me as another kind of dualism on your part – you’re doing things/saying things and not accounting for why, giving nature as an excuse for non accountability. As if somehow your words aren’t coming from anywhere that’s accountable (maybe Scott would rag on any sense of accountabilityt as being just a bit close to ‘measure is without end’ or such).
I know, you just read me as a denyer of materialism and you read me as if I needed some heartfelt knowledge. No, I just find that ‘Nature did it’ as such an empty statement it creates some amount of room for non accountable behaviour.
Scotts previous post on socio-cognitive polution was about people like students using naturalistic knowledge as an excuse for them not actually doing the course they ostensibly set out to do, but to still wrangle credit for it.
Thank you very much for your thoughts on the matter. You’re wrong however, that I “read” you in anyway at all, other than as generous.
In my view, if you’ll permit a metaphorical attribution of intentionality, nature very much holds it’s local expressions accountable. For example, natural selection, red in tooth and claw, tallies an account on the living. Much more incrementally, but no less naturally, those too clever students may be held accountable and I, as well, am being held to account by you for claiming that there’s some significance to my “empty statement.”
It’s just that the accounting rules have no objective moral foundation. They simply emerge from the laws of physics in a purposeless, meaningless process.
Cheers,
Jack
Yeah, and ‘my mistake’ is the sort of red in tooth and claw we can have without having to test every little damn thing by having people actually risk dying. It’s the little death, instead. Pity the world when we lose it because people use the cognitive science buzz words to avoid saying it.
And no, I’m not holding you to account (not succeeding at doing so), because no utterance of ‘my mistake’ is occuring from you. I’m getting an all is well signal from you, using alot of ‘all is meaningless process’ stuff to snow over the engagement.
It’s just that the accounting rules have no objective moral foundation.
No, that’s an absence and it’s not an absence driving you to post.
My own generosity is to write with the idea you’d find this line of enquiry interesting to pursue, even if it turns out to not be applicable in the end and even if it’s not that flattering a line of enquiry. If you don’t find it interesting then whatev’s – this medium allows too much for uninterested people to simply advertise their position then take no one somehow reaching from the computer screen and grabbing them as confirmation of their position. So if there aint no interest, then whatev’s.