My first point is scarcely controversial: From the eighteenth century onwards, I maintain, science has been the major determinant of culture in the West. The influence may be direct or mediated, and the response affirmative or oppositional, but the fact remains that in every cultural domain science has played a pivotal role as the prime agent of change. Take philosophy or theology, social or political norms, art, morals or religious practice: the story is the same. Like it or not, science is the decisive factor—the great new revelation—to which society at large has for long been reacting in multiple ways. Even as technology, the offspring and partner of science, has radically transformed the outer life of Western civilization, science itself is having its impact upon our inner life: upon our basic beliefs, values and aspirations. Not everyone, of course, has become an outright materialist; but all, I submit, have been profoundly affected nonetheless.

From its inception the new science has prospered visibly, and commended itself within ever widening circles as the great liberator from ignorance and superstition. The age of Enlightenment was upon us, and in a very real sense, still is. Was not Bertrand Russell speaking for the modern world as such when he declared: “What science cannot tell us, mankind cannot know”? An exclusive faith in science appears indeed to be the hallmark of modernity.

That faith itself, however, has begun to falter as we have entered the era of postmodernism. It is not simply a matter of one worldview triumphing over another, as has happened in the past. The shift to postmodernism is far more radical than that; for it denies the validity, not just of an antecedent worldview, but of worldviews in general. Truth has been reduced in effect to a social convention, the local construct of a society. Partly in reaction, no doubt, to the tyranny of the scientistic Weltanschauung, one has set about to relativize all worldviews. What confronts us here is not simply a philosophic trend, but a cultural phenomenon: a cultural revolution, one can say. Think of the wholesale rejection of traditional norms, the pervasive distrust of authority, the radical disorientation which seems especially to afflict the youth of our day. There are of course notable exceptions and indeed counter-trends; but these do not offset the nihilistic tendencies in question. One has reason to believe, moreover, that there is a real connection between postmodernist philosophy—esoteric though it may be—and corresponding cultural trends, even if it may not be possible to construe that connection as a simple case of cause and effect. One can therefore speak of postmodernism in a broad sense, which includes its cultural manifestations.

What I wish now to point out is that postmodernism is not simply an oppositional reaction to the antecedent modernism, but is in fact implicit in modernity, that is to say, in the scientistic worldview itself. The universe as depicted by modern science is clearly unacceptable as a human habitat. The scientistic Weltanschauung is bearable, thus, precisely because no one believes it—I mean, fully, with all one’s being. We believe in the scientistic universe with a part of our mind, persuaded that the contention has been validated by rigorous scientific means; and yet we still suppose, in our daily lives, that the grass is green and the sky blue (which scientism denies)—not to speak of the fact that we take a man or a woman to be more after all than a “chemical machine.” We have learned to compartmentalize our beliefs: to pass in a trice from one Weltanschauung to another, incompatible with the first, and think nothing of it. This way of managing beliefs needs of course to be learned; it is what modern education has done for us. The art is acquired in schools and universities. The practice, to be sure, is astonishing, if only one stops to think of it; but we generally don’t. We have learned the art so well that we are hardly conscious of doing anything at all. As is the case in schizophrenia, we are unaware of our own inconsistency. Until of course we engage in authentic philosophical reflection; but even then we rarely perceive the magnitude of the dilemma. It takes a Kierkegaard or a Nietzsche, apparently, to become profoundly disturbed. For most of us the anguish is potential rather than actual, it seems.

It appears from these sparse indications that postmodernism is latent in the scientific mentality. To oscillate between two contradictory worldviews is to commit to neither: to commit to nothing at all. As a chronic condition the practice is tantamount to a denial of truth.

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Given that the scientistic worldview is humanly untenable, it behooves us to ask whether the Weltanschauung in question is essential to science as such. As one knows, modern science began as an amalgam of Cartesian metaphysics and Baconian empiricism, the incongruity of which was spotted soon enough by leading philosophers. The union, it turns out, is not a true synthesis, and what matters, in fact, is not the Cartesian ontology, nor its epistemology, but precisely the Baconian method. It is Bacon’s novum organum, his “new machine for the mind,” that enables the enterprise of modern science, a science in which “human knowledge and human power meet in one” as Bacon had foretold. To be sure, the Cartesian conception of res extensa (of “bare matter”) has played a vital role in the motivation and guidance of scientific inquiry. As a Kuhnian paradigm, however, the notion of a clockwork universe is expendable; it is not an essential of science, but only a transitional aid. What ultimately counts is the methodology, the Baconian character of the enterprise.

The primary reductionism of science is thus methodological; it applies, not to reality as such, but to the means by which we propose to grasp and harness reality. Directed as it is to the objective of control, the Baconian enterprise is inherently designed to count, measure, and quantify; nothing in fact fulfills the Baconian guidelines more perfectly than a mathematical physics. This methodological reductionism, however, does not presuppose, nor entail, an ontology; it is metaphysically neutral, one can say. But whereas science does not de jure authorize a reductionism of the ontologic kind, it does so de facto; in a word, science begets scientism.

The primary scientistic dogma is none other than the Cartesian metaphysics, masquerading as a scientific truth. It is this hypothesis that disenfranchises human perception by subjectivizing the perceived object; the world as we perceive it is thereby demoted to a phantasm, a kind of waking dream, while the external universe, denuded of its so-called secondary qualities, is equated to the intentional object of physics: it becomes henceforth the physical universe of modern science. It was Alfred North Whitehead, let us recall, who long ago pointed out the fallaciousness of this scientistic dogma. “Bifurcation,” he called it, inasmuch as the perceived object would be split in two: “one is the conjecture,” he commented, “and the other is the dream.” But what has actually been split in two, it appears, is the modern mind itself. As Gilbert Durand has put it: “Dualism is the great ‘schizomorphic’ structure of Western intelligence.”

To be precise: Bifurcation proves to be the basic scientistic dogma, the plank that supports the entire edifice of scientistic belief.¹Take Darwinism (to cite but the single most important example): In response to those who still think of Darwinism as a well-substantiated scientific theory, I will refer to the growing scientific literature which proves that it is not.²The point I wish to make is that Darwinist doctrine has from the start derived its real support from two unacknowledged considerations; if it were not for this undeclared backing, I contend, the theory would have been abandoned long ago, and might never have been taken seriously to begin with. The first consideration is this: Given bifurcation—plus the associated idea that the universe consists of atoms or fundamental particles moving to no purpose, whether by chance or in accordance with deterministic laws—given this reductionist scenario, I say, there is in essence no other way of conceiving biogenesis and speciation. And this, I surmise, is the principal reason why scientists continue to cling to some form of Darwinism, despite its astronomical improbability. The second consideration is simpler still: The alternative to Darwinism appears to entail the notion of a supernatural power, an agent superior to man—and nothing, it seems, is more abhorrent in a secular-humanistic age.

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One sees that assumptions of a philosophic nature, as well as ideological commitments, do affect the scientific enterprise, which in fact is not quite as “scientific” as one tends to suppose. Scientists are human, after all, not robots or computers; and the postmodernist philosophy of science does after all have a point. And yet, surprisingly perhaps, there is such a thing as “hard” science: a rigorous discipline capable of real discovery. Such science carries its own exactitude which no man can bend, and discloses objects or theorems which—like Mount Everest—are simply there. Hard science, it turns out, is wiser in certain ways than the scientists who engage in its pursuit, and wiser in a sense than the society sponsoring the enterprise. With a single decree it can abolish a long-standing expectation or disqualify some hallowed canon of scientistic belief; it has in a very real sense a life of its own, independent of social conventions, philosophic bias, or ideological orientation. Apart from technical competence and occasional genius, it demands just one thing from the scientific community: integrity, namely, a certain respect for truth. And happily it can be said, to the honor of that community, that its members have by and large proved worthy of this trust.

It needs now to be pointed out that something momentous and utterly unexpected has taken place within the scientific domain in the course of the twentieth century: science has begun at last to discern its own inherent limitations, its own categorical bounds. Not that it has disavowed its exactitude: not at all! What science has disavowed is the scientistic notion that these exactitudes apply in principle to every domain, that de jure science encompasses all truth. It has moreover arrived at this recognition of its own incapacity, not by way of some supra-scientific intuition, but by strictly scientific means. What stands at issue are indeed theorems, discoveries as inexorable as the certitudes of mathematics or the fundamental laws of Nature. I propose now to cite a few major examples of such twentieth-century “limit theorems,” spanning the gamut from mathematics and physics to biology and cognitive psychology; the cultural implications of these discoveries will occupy us later. For the moment it suffices to note that these remarkable findings are supportive of my “absolutist” claims in behalf of what I have termed hard science.

I will cite, as my first example, the Incompleteness Theorem established in 1931 by Kurt Gödel, a twenty-five-year-old Austrian mathematician, which arguably constitutes the most important discovery of a logical kind in our century. Gödel’s theorem disqualifies, at one stroke, the long-held expectations of leading authorities, the likes of David Hilbert, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell, who thought that a formal system inclusive of all mathematical truth could be found. What the young Austrian proved—once and for all!—is that a consistent formal system rich enough to accommodate ordinary arithmetic is necessarily incomplete; there simply is no formal structure encompassing all mathematical truth. It may be noted that Gödel’s theorem has a certain postmodernist ring: by restricting the scope of a single theory, a single formal system, it seemingly opens the door to a pluralist outlook tolerant of alternative positions. But even so, it does not compromise the absolute claims of truth: Gödel’s result, after all, is a theorem of mathematical logic, validated by a rigorous argument, an incontrovertible proof. It does not in any way relativize mathematical truth; and one might add that Gödel was personally a Platonist, worlds removed from postmodernist skepticism.

My second example has to do with quantum theory, which can be viewed as entailing a limit theorem of a very different kind. What first comes to mind is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which limits the accuracy with which the values of conjugate dynamic variables of a quantum system (such as position and momentum) can be ascertained. What stands at issue, as one believes today, is not simply an incapacity on the part of the experimentalist, but the fact that dynamic variables of a quantum system do not, in general, have a definite value. An electron, for example, may not have a definite position or a specific momentum, and in any case, can never have both at once. It follows that Heisenberg Uncertainty restricts the applicability of pre-quantum physics to a macroscopic domain within which quantum effects can be neglected. And this is one way in which quantum theory can be seen as entailing a limit theorem.

There is however a second way, which proves to be deeper than the first. Let us view the universe from a non-bifurcationist perspective by affirming the objectivity of the perceived object: a red apple, for instance, which thus comes to be situated once again in the external world (as it was in pre-Cartesian times, and is in daily life). The red apple needs then to be distinguished from the “molecular apple,” which is not red, and is in fact imperceptible. One thus arrives at the recognition that physics deals perforce with two ontological domains: the physical, constituted by quantum particles and their aggregates, and the corporeal, containing perceptible objects (and hence the instruments of measurement). The two domains are of course intimately related—failing which physics would be impossible—and the relation, it turns out, is given by a function which, to every corporeal object X, assigns the corresponding physical object SX.³This said, I can state my claim: Quantum theory, in its own way, distinguishes sharply between X and SX—even though physicists don’t. It does so (in the standard formulation) through the phenomenon known as state vector collapse, which has mystified physicists—for the simple reason that a discernment between X and SX is incomprehensible from a bifurcationist point of view. State vector collapse has to do with the act of measurement, which terminates perforce on the corporeal plane: no wonder the phenomenon proves mystifying so long as one implicitly denies the existence of that plane. It turns out that the physical universe—the domain of physical science—does not, after all, coincide with the world at large. Even the simplest corporeal entity—a perceptible drop of water, for instance—proves to be more than a molecular aggregate; it exceeds the physical domain, not in a quantitative sense, to be sure, but categorically. Quantum theory, thus, entails an ontological limit theorem: it discerns the transcendence of the corporeal domain vis-à-vis the physical.