E.F. Schumaker
EF Schumacher was a british economist, here he goes off into philosophy. He has a bone to pick with scientific dogma, calling for a more holistic view of the world than the materialstic Scientism that goes on in modern western society today
In short, the whole base of our society is deteriorating under what our prevalent beliefs have become and we need a new way to look at things, which is of course, provided. Good stuff to think about – I’m not sure what I think of it yet – but it’s nice to have some controversy of idea.
Thus Cartesian evidence goes straight to mechanism. It mechanizes nature; it does violence to it; it annihilates everything which causes things to symbolize with the spirit, to partake of the genius of the Creator, to speak to us. The universe becomes dumb. 9, Jacques Maritain
Levels of being, m being matter, x life, y consciousness, and z self-awareness. 18:
A person, for instance, entirely fixed in the philosophy of materialistic Scientism, denying the reality of “invisibles” and confining his attention solely to what can be counted, measured, and weighed, lives in a very poor world, so poor that he will experience it as a meaningless wasteland unfit for human habitation. Equally, if he sees it as nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms, he must needs agree with Bertrand Russell that the only rational attitude is one of “unyielding despair.” 35
I’m pretty sure I’m with his views on religion. I don’t know what god is, and can’t claim to be christian or of any other religion. To me religion is a way of explaining things and dealing with the world just the same as science.
Knowledge comes about insofar as the object known is within the knower.
39, St. Thomas Aquinas
As a materialistic scientist, he believes that life, consciousness, and self-awareness are nothing but manifestations of complex arrangements of inanimate particles – a “faith” which makes it perfectly rational for him to place exclusive reliance on the bodily senses, to “stay in the head,” and to reject any interference from the “powers” situated in the heart. For him in other words, higher levels of Reality simply do not exist, because his faith excludes the possibility of their existence. 45
Faith chooses the grade of significance at which the search for knowledge and understanding is to aim. 45
We must shut the eyes of sense, and open that brighter eye of our understandings, that other eye of the soul, as the philosopher calls our intellectual faculty, ‘which indeed all have, but few make use of.’ 47, John Smith
These two quotes say the exact same thing, the first is from the book and the second is from my memory. Just a fun thing to notice.
For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone sees the invisible. 47, Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173)
on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux. (One can only see well with the heart, the essential is invisible to the eyes.) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, d.1944
The change of Western man’s interest from “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things” (Thomas Aquinas) to mathematically precise knowledge of lesser things – “there being nothing in the world the knowledge of which would be more desirable or more useful” (Christian Huygens) – marks a shift from what we might call “science for understanding” to “science for manipulation.” The purpose of the former was the enlightenment of the person and his “liberation”; the purpose of the latter is power. “Knowledge itself is power,” said Francis Bacon, and Descartes promised men they would become “masters and possessors of nature.” In it’s more sophisticated development, “science for manipulation” tends almost inevitable to advance from the manipulation of nature to that of people. 53
The old science looked upon nature as God’s handiwork and man’s mother; the new science tends to look upon nature as an adversary to be conquered or a resource to be quarried and exploited. 54
Ishmael anyone?
The progressive elimination of “science for understanding” – or “wisdom” – from Western civilization turns the rapid and ever-accelerating accumulation of “knowledge for manipulation” into a most serious threat. As I have said in another context, “We are now far too clever to be able to survive without wisdom,” and further expansion of our cleverness can be of no benefit whatever. 55
It is however important for us to realize that mankind is doomed to live more and more under the spell of a new scientific, social, and political mythology, unless we resolutely exorcise these befuddled notions whose influence on modern life is becoming appalling… For when gods fight amongst themselves, men have to die. 59, Etienne Gilson
Religion is the reconnection (re-legio) of man with reality, whether this Reality be called God, Truth, Allah, Sat-Chit-Ananda, or Nirvana.
I’d even add science into the above mix. But:
Reality, Truth, God, Nirvana cannot be found by thought, because thought belongs to the level of being established by consciousness and not to that higher level which is established by self-awareness. 71
The term “heart” is of particular significance in the Orthodox doctrine of man. When people in the west today speak of the heart, they usually mean the emotions and affections. But in the Bible, as in most ascetic texts of the Orthodox Church, the heart has a far wider connotation. It is the primary organ of man’s being, whether physical or spiritual; it is the center of life, the determining principle of all our activities and aspirations. As such, the heart obviously includes the addictions and emotions, but it also includes much else besides: it embraces in effect everything that goes to compromise what we call a “person.” 73
This one of my ideas about God, something within everything roughly analogous to spirit. Also evocative of Chris Alexander’s Wholeness.
Mathematics, after all, is far removed from life: At its heights it certainly manifests a severe kind of beauty and also a captivating elegance, which may even be taken as a sign of Truth; but equally certainly, it has no warmth, none of life’s messiness of growth and decay, hope and despair, joy and suffering. This must never be overlooked or forgotten: Physics and the other instructional sciences limit themselves to the lifeless aspect of reality, and this is necessarily so if the aim and purpose of science is to produce predictable results. Life, and even more so, consciousness and self-awareness, cannot be ordered about; they have, we might say, a will of their own. 105
I can’t say that I agree with this, but it’s nice to think about.
And lo! there is the cell, and once the cell has been born there is nothing to stop the emergence of Shakespeare, although it will obviously take a bit of time. There is therefore nor need to speak of miracles or to admit any lack of knowledge. It is one of the great paradoxes of our age that people claiming the proud title of “scientist” dare to offer such undisciplined and reckless speculations as contributions to scientific knowledge, and that they get away with it. 113
Evolutionism is not science; it is science fiction even a kind of hoax. It is a hoax that has succeeded too well and has imprisoned modern man in what looks like an irreconcilable conflict between “science” and “religion.” It has destroyed all faiths that pull mankind up and has substituted a faith that pulls mankind down. [...] Evolutionism… is the most extreme product of the materialistic utilitarianism of the nineteenth century. The inability of twentieth-century though to rid itself of this imposture is a failure which may well cause the collapse of Western civilization. For it is impossible for any civilization to survive without a faith in meanings and values transcending the utilitarianism of comfort and survival. 115
...descriptive science becomes unscientific and illegitimate when it indulges in comprehensive explanatory theories which can be neither verified nor disproved by experiment. Such theories are not “science” but “faith.” 115