Flex and Spex in Early October 2024
Notes on Mr. Godel and the Whole Shebang
THE “MISMEASURE” OF MAN
“Modernity is the age where the past no longer carried any certainty of evaluation, where man, no longer being the measure of things, must search for new grounds of human community as such.” — M. Passerin d ‘Entraves
The coy among us might have concocted a more appropriate title to affix to the material we covered. “It’s all relative” might be one. However, one so coy may also be inclined to leave the matter laying as such, not willing or able to take the time to investigate the implications and repercussions that can be and are being derived from the particulars of such a provocative conclusion.
For the hipper of today’s academicians, there is no question that all is indeed relative. Minerva’s old owl roosts nevermore in the halls of much of academe; the long shadow of post-modernist skepticism dimly colors any optimistic temptation to obtain a liberal education. It’s liberating potential has been dashed, trashed and smashed by the likes of Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, whose theories have turned all previous forms of understanding the world on their heads (again). Or so goes the claim.
Our particular readings mirror this development in the peculiar world of the natural sciences. While skepticism has long been regarded as the hallmark of doing science (i.e., scientific investigation), prior to the “relativist school,” such skepticism was practiced under the pretense that certain truths had been established, thus allowing for the possibility of falsifying future claims that might be preferred under this or that domain or area of science. Such paradigms set the standards for peer review and abetted the determination of what was actual science. Dogmatic at least superficially, this structure served science reasonably well for centuries, providing stable guideposts for its progress.
With the advent of relativism, embodied at least in our readings in the guise of Lobachevsky, the pretenses of truth are undermined. For if mathematics is unable to provide the certainty that science once desired, then nothing could--so highly regarded were its truth claims. Indeed, one might say that with Lobachevsky the empire of science collapses, once its emperor (mathematics) is shown to be wearing no clothes. With Lobachevsky the destruction of logic begins, but the implications of his work end up writ large upon the whole of science — and more.
It is this “more” that has preoccupied me these last few weeks. At first, the conclusions that I began drawing were grim indeed. There seemed, in the end, no escape from the “truth” that the relativists posited. If even natural scientists were supporting the claims of the post-modernists, perhaps there was no way out of this relative mess. That was what I thought a month and a half ago.
I discovered an exit, or should say “rediscovered” one, thanks in part to Arendt. Reading her book, The Human Condition, provided me with a little ammunition for a critique that I had already began developing since the first days of our class. This critique actually has its roots in and is profoundly influenced by the Frankfurt School’s critique of logical positivism. While the Frankfurt critique falls a little short in terms of fully adequately addressing the claims of the relativists, it, in combination with Arendt’s insights, lays, it seems to me, a basis for developing an argument that is up to the task of meeting the relativists’ claims.
More than anything else that she has written concerning the area of science, Arendt’s attachment of the concept of “earth alienation” to modern science is most instructive. Earth alienation, for one thing, according to Arendt, is “the absolute renunciation of the senses for the purpose of knowing” (287). This came about, she claims, by way of “the mathematization of physics.” By mathematization, she means the process by which algebra was inserted into the study of nature, displacing geometry. This displacement occurred so that science was no longer confined to terrestrial measures and measurements. To quote Arendt, “Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of finitude” (265). In effect, the former hallmark of science, the empirical dependence on sense perception, is mathematicized out of importance: our sense data and movements are reduced to mere mathematical symbols.
Now, this move away from empiricism is premised upon the correct notion that our senses limit our understanding; that is, there is more to the world than meets the eye — and the nose, and the mouth, and ears, etc. But in rejecting empiricism — the world of “hard facts” — science embraced theory; and it is my contention, much too strongly. The old way of doing science, consisting primarily of rigorous experimentation, has been too hastily jettisoned in favor of essentially “doing math” — seeing to it that theoretical advances are of a rigorous logical construction. “Truth” is redefined to mean consistency, completeness, soundness, etc. Any notion of a term’s absoluteness — in particular, truth’s — is deemed not only illogical, but nonsensical.
Given this characterization of the relativist school, in a sense the critique that Habermas made of Freud’s theory of the unconscious obtains here as well. While the relativist inclination would be denial, I would argue that their work is every bit as “meta-scientistic” as Freud’s. Not only are the claims of the relativists impervious to falsification, as were Freud’s, but just like Freud, they believe that sooner or later, the “truth” of their claims will bear themselves out, one way or another. In other words, technology will “catch up” with the relativists’ postulates and prove them either right or wrong — their contentions reminiscent of the Darwinian belief that future excavations will eventually fill in the huge gaps in the fossil record, thus proving the verity of evolution. And in so adopting such a strategy, the relativists leave themselves open to the same critique that the Darwinians are.
Arendt quotes Schrodinger stating that no model based on our “large scale experiences” will ever be “true” for what we eventually discover with our “mental eye.” This sounds all well and good; Schrodinger is merely reminding us of the limitation of our senses. He is in the relativist camp, as we all are, as far as this part of their argument goes. But what we need to remind Schrodinger, as well as the relativists, is that sometimes empirical facts are capable of debunking theories.
For example, astronomers have recently discovered, by way of the “repaired” Hubble Space Telescope, that the universe is expanding at a much slower rate than had been previously thought. Thus cosmologists are now suggesting that the universe may not be as old as once believed. The problem that this discovery creates is that such time is not regarded as enough for galaxies to form. So here, technically at least, we have an empirical fact potentially contributing to the demolition of a whole theory held dear by most cosmologists.
In my view, this sort of refutation of a scientific hypothesis is fast-becoming a rare event. At one time, this refutation was part of the norm of science. But as science embraces theory, this sort of refutation becomes more and more difficult to make and harder and harder to come by, making the issues of “repairing” the Hubble telescope an interesting topic for speculation. These refutations are being closed off, I would argue, due to science’s (and hence our) growing dependence on technology. Technology is the practice to science’s theory. It is technology that will be the bearer of the “truthfulness” of the hypotheses of science.
But what if science does not merely “wait” for technology to catch up with it? What if science’s theoretical dependency does not merely inform its technological practice but burdens it, in the sense of directing it toward self-serving ends? As Arendt puts it:
If, therefore, present-day science in its perplexity points to technical achievements to “prove” that we deal with an “authentic order” given in nature, it seems it has fallen into a vicious cycle, which can be formulated as follows: scientists formulate their hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these experiments to verify their hypotheses; during this whole enterprise, they obviously deal with a hypothetical nature.
This vicious circle is not unique to the natural sciences. If we turn to the political realm, similar cases can be found. The most obvious would probably be the Marxist theory of history as it was “applied” to the U.S.S.R. by the likes of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. This theory informed the political practice of these three men, all of whom, it could be said, refused to allow the facts of the particular social conditions of the U.S.S.R. get in their way of seeing that Marx’s theory was deployed.
It’s difficult to imagine any modern or “post-modern” scientist of the same arrogant caliber as Stalin; but there is no denying the arrogance of the relativist “facts-be-damned” attitude and its insistence on “narrative neutrality.” If I understand Godel correctly, he is saying that there is no such thing as “narrative neutrality,” and the neo-inductionist claims of the relativists are bunk. We must begin somewhere, with something, as Euclid did. The Euclidean “world” may appear obsolete from our post-modern standpoint, and its concomitant narrative grossly overstated; nonetheless, both have provided us with standards to live by. Godel proves that we have always needed these standards--they have always been a part of us — and a true measure of man and for his world must be based on more than logical rigor. There is more to our lives than math.
