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 Science as morality?

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Fixed Cross
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PostSubject: Science as morality?   Science as morality? Icon_minitimeMon Nov 21, 2011 11:34 pm

is this true?

"Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong." (Thomas Carlyle)

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PostSubject: Re: Science as morality?   Science as morality? Icon_minitimeTue Nov 22, 2011 12:22 pm

I worked on a bit on this here.
I wrote the following:

Leaving behind us (behind me at least) now the de debate over whether or not value ontology holds water / is "superior" to the will to power, on to an indication of its uses. For this I introduce this topic:

"Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong." (Thomas Carlyle)

If this is so, and this is no rock solid fact, but at the least a tempting thought, scientific thought would be the result of a valuing the world negatively in terms of self-value. To realize this is of course useful. It gives us the suggestion that science, if we do not radically deviate from our approach to it, and question the nature of its analyses, will keep on trying to negate, which means level.

Science does not permit inequality. Its logics are based on standardizing al value. What remains is value that van be standardized against the ground-value of science, which is not mans self-valuing per se. Science after all arose out of the minds who had to arm against nature, not in those who were "fit to it".

Philosophy, this is at least the tast that I see now as possible, would have to bestow a new, affirmative morality onto science. Science may, as further understanding into in the future be employed to invest in the world as it is (grows, becomes, emerges, stands forth), instead of trying to subdue this becoming.

A further study of the theme Nietzsche opens with, in the Birth of Tragedy, would be useful. Because the Greeks, in creating Apollo / the Apollonian did the same thing as what the scientist / inventor does - arming against the terribleness of nature -- but they did so by positing their own aesthetics against it, rather than to simply submit their judgment of nature to what was possible as a functionality of dominion. In other words, they created something that they could value higher in terms of self value, than they could value nature herself.

This is the genius of the Greeks, their noble genius, set against what must have arisen as the all-too-human genius which Carlyle describes. We must look at this dichotomy, science versus the Apollonian, to recognize in our own culture these two different types of valuing, for they both exist next to / intertwined into each other. In order to 'heal' our culture, to truly improve it, we have to make it possible first to distinguish what is Greek, and what is, in short, "nature-hating-ape".
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PostSubject: Re: Science as morality?   Science as morality? Icon_minitimeWed Nov 23, 2011 10:44 am

From Nietzsche's Nachlass, summer 1872-begin 1873:

Quote :
19[24]

Es handelt sich nicht um eine Vernichtung der Wissenschaft, sondern um eine Beherrschung. Sie hängt nämlich in allen ihren Zielen und Methoden durch und durch ab von philosophischen Ansichten, vergißt dies aber leicht. Die beherrschende Philosophie hat aber auch das Problem zu bedenken, bis zu welchem Grade die Wissenschaft wachsen darf: sie hat den Werth zu bestimmen!

19[25]

Nachweis der barbarisirenden Wirkungen der Wissenschaften. Sie verlieren sich leicht in den Dienst der „praktischen Interessen“.

"We are not concerned with a destruction of science, but with controlling it. She is in all here goals and methods through and through dependent on philosophical perspectives, but forgets this easily. The controlling philosophy must concern itself with the problem to which degree science may grow, she must determine the worth."

"Proof of the barbarizing workings of the sciences. They lose themselves in the service of "practical interests".
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PostSubject: Re: Science as morality?   Science as morality? Icon_minitimeWed Nov 23, 2011 11:40 pm

Fixed Cross wrote:
I worked on a bit on this here.
I wrote the following:

Leaving behind us (behind me at least) now the de debate over whether or not value ontology holds water / is "superior" to the will to power, on to an indication of its uses. For this I introduce this topic:

"Science must have originated in the feeling that something was wrong." (Thomas Carlyle)

If this is so, and this is no rock solid fact, but at the least a tempting thought, scientific thought would be the result of a valuing the world negatively in terms of self-value. To realize this is of course useful. It gives us the suggestion that science, if we do not radically deviate from our approach to it, and question the nature of its analyses, will keep on trying to negate, which means level.

I think this forumulation must be for the most part a correct one. Science digs in where it sees need for imroved understanding, it addresses reality in terms of "problems", sees every situation as a problem as such, a problem of thus-far unrealized knowledge-utility. Over time this problematizing becomes so given that we do not even see it, it becomes entirely normal to look at reality and the situations in reality with which we find ourselves confronted and see these problematically, as things to be "negated" ("solved"), at least in part.

Sinec this solving takes place with respect to the platforms which have come before and over-determine the methodologies and intentions involved, we can indeed state that this negation is also a leveling.

Quote :
Science does not permit inequality. Its logics are based on standardizing all value. What remains is value that can be standardized against the ground-value of science, which is not mans self-valuing per se. Science after all arose out of the minds who had to arm against nature, not in those who were "fit to it".

Philosophy, this is at least the task that I see now as possible, would have to bestow a new, affirmative morality onto science. Science may, as further understanding into in the future be employed to invest in the world as it is (grows, becomes, emerges, stands forth), instead of trying to subdue this becoming.

Absolutely! Heidegger does a wonderful job outlining the "nature of technology" as schematization/control/leveling, an essential closure-ing (that is also nonetheless and often despite itself a disclosing of precisely the 'human element', if we know how to look for this). As Nietzsche also understood, science (or, with Heidegger, technos) needs to be submitted to a broader encompassing human will (valuing), and the extent to which we fail in this task is the extent we are co-opted by these processes and subdued within them, over-determined by their own logics and functionalities. Man developed as a product of these, this is very true, we are as much a product of technology-science as technology-science is of us. Yet at some point we must rise and take control, assert our own HUMAN will against the essentially inhuman will governing science/techos and its productions.

Quote :
A further study of the theme Nietzsche opens with, in the Birth of Tragedy, would be useful. Because the Greeks, in creating Apollo / the Apollonian did the same thing as what the scientist / inventor does - arming against the terribleness of nature -- but they did so by positing their own aesthetics against it, rather than to simply submit their judgment of nature to what was possible as a functionality of dominion. In other words, they created something that they could value higher in terms of self value, than they could value nature herself.

This is the genius of the Greeks, their noble genius, set against what must have arisen as the all-too-human genius which Carlyle describes.

Yes this is plausible. In "arming ourselves against nature" we posit "otherness" as the threat of raw uncontrolled nature as the higher value, the only thing above which is our ability for resisting this uncontrollability. Science continues to operate on the assumption that endless control of nature is ideal, to not have essential control is ruin.

Some control is of course required, as goes without saying, since man itself is indeed a controlling-nature, in large part. This is what we ARE as a species, a being. But what else resides within, what other potentials exist? As you say we cannot continue to posit values only negatively, against the other, what are needed now are affirmative, positive valuations. The negative valuations of the past may form part of our platform going forward into the future, and indeed these essentially closed forms are necessary for what is build upon and after them, in the same way that our own imaginative-creative thinking is dependent on the regular and entirely restrictive-closed organic-biological processes composing our physical body.

Quote :
We must look at this dichotomy, science versus the Apollonian, to recognize in our own culture these two different types of valuing, for they both exist next to / intertwined into each other. In order to 'heal' our culture, to truly improve it, we have to make it possible first to distinguish what is Greek, and what is, in short, "nature-hating-ape".

Yes, but even the Greeks posited from an essentially negative position when they proposed aesthetic "solutions" (Gods) to the fury of nature (and of human nature, their internal experiences of affects-desires-drives). If viewed in this way we first see what appears as a digression from Greek to scientist. But this must also represent a progression, an evolving: the valuing negatively with respect to and against "nature" (uncontrollability/unknowability as such, externally and internally) moving from an early stage to a later stage. I can see science as representing very much a more "authentic" or honest negative valuing, the Greek form of this negative valuing being an early pre-cursor or crude beginning positing form, less refined, less "itself". Science becomes a monster precisely because it takes the internal "contradiction" (to affirmative valuation as self-value, i.e. this contradiction being the negative valuing supplanting a more affirmative valuing potential) and exposes it, welcomes it openly, develops it further and brings it more fully in/to itself.

You are right we must learn to distinguish the Greek from the scientist -- in this distinction we can find a relief, a topography emerges wherein we begin to grasp precisely what it is about these valuing positings that is so detrimental and restrictive, so harmfully self-destructive. Of course if we employ Hegel here, it might indeed be possible that mankind must move through these stages dialectically in order to emerge at the other side, the inverse of all negative values-positing. In the present stage we then must work at forging the synthesis.
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