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Science and the soul
Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man by Bryan Appleyard, 283pp. Picador, 1992
SOME YEARS AGO the
poet Ted Hughes expressed his dislike of science in characteristically
trenchant terms:
Scientific
objectivity has its own morality ... and this is the prevailing morality
of our time. It is a morality utterly devoid of any awareness of the
requirements of the inner world. It is contemptuous of the ‘human
element’. This is its purity and its strength. The prevailing philosophies
of our time subscribe to this contempt with a nearly religious fanaticism,
just as science itself does.
Bryan
Appleyard might well have used these words as the epigraph to his new
book, for they express its theme forcefully and succinctly. Appleyard
himself is even more succinct and only a little less forceful. ‘Science is
effective,’ he writes, ‘but what does it tell us about ourselves and how
we must live? The brief answer to this is: nothing.’
At
the heart of his argument lies the view that Western science is not simply
a neutral method of acquiring knowledge but that it is ‘a metaphysic like
any other.’ The foundations of this metaphysic were laid by Galileo, for
his discovery was that one of the most effective ways of understanding the
world ‘is to pretend that we do not exist.’ Appleyard comments that few
faiths or cults can ever have made such a bizarre demand of their
adherents as that which is contained in the doctrine of scientific
objectivity:
It is precisely as
if some sect had insisted only that its followers believe they were
invisible and all else would follow. Such a faith would be confined, we
assume, to a few eccentrics and inadequates. Yet science’s demand is even
more extreme, and we do not notice our own acquiescence, our own
eccentricity. And we do not notice because, astonishingly, the demand
produces results. It works.
It
is this view which runs through his essay on the history of science in
which he traces the development of physics from Plato and Aristotle
through Thomas Aquinas to Galileo, Descartes and Newton and their modern
descendants. Modern science gradually emerges not as the embodiment of
reason but as a form of worldly mysticism whose zeal for accumulating
knowledge about the inanimate and the non-human, and whose ‘rational’
commitment to technological power and material wealth has almost
completely obscured its radical anti-humanism.
The
view that the achievements of modern science are best understood not as a
testimony to the power of human reason, but as products of an
irrationalist cult which is governed by a doctrine of radical self-denial
will seem bizarre and extreme to many. One of the most striking aspects of
Appleyard’s argument, however, is its detailed congruence with so many
aspects of our cultural history. If we were to judge the argument purely
by its degree of ‘fit’ with the empirical evidence it might well be
thought that it is neither bizarre nor extreme but reasonable, balanced
and perceptive. It is precisely because Appleyard’s central proposition
does contain a core of truth, however, that his book, for all its
incidental wealth, is ultimately so disappointing.
Part of the problem has to do with the medicine which
he prescribes for our cultural malaise. With impressive tough-mindedness
he rejects some of the alternative therapies which are currently on offer.
He provides an excellent critique of the ecology movement and goes on to
rebut firmly the mysticism of science-gurus such as Fritjof Capra. Such
scepticism, however, only makes his own prescription more surprising. For
when, five pages before the end of the book, he finally produces it, it
turns out to be the oldest nostrum of them all and even comes in a bottle
clearly labelled ‘the immortal soul’.
‘People throughout history,’ writes Appleyard, ‘have
felt they have souls. This feeling is real...’. Human souls exist, he
argues, in the same way that Santa Claus exists, because both are embodied
in the language of those who believe in them. An imaginary monster exists
in the same way, but it has less existence because fewer people believe in
it: ‘To be a dreamed-of dragon is one form of existence,’ he writes, ‘to
be a believed-in Father Christmas is another, higher form.’ That any
writer can seriously propose that we can save our culture from the
corrosive power of science by affirming the existence of a human soul
which is accorded the same ontological reality as Santa Claus is
remarkable. In fairness to Bryan Appleyard it must be said that most of
his book is much more sensible than its conclusion.
This
conclusion, however, clearly points to the central weakness in the book’s
larger argument. Where it founders is on the question of the relationship
of science to religion. Appleyard in his role as cultural historian is
ever ready to be seduced by superficial schisms into ignoring the huge
continuities of Western history.
‘Science
contradicts religion as surely as Judaism contradicts Islam’ he writes, ‘–
they are absolutely and irresolvably conflicting views.’ The most obvious
problem here is that Islam developed directly out of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition and shares much of its world-view with Judaism – whose prophets
Muslims revere. At the same time modern science was the almost exclusive
creation of zealous Christians who were seeking not to escape their faith
but to confirm and magnify it. Descartes, Newton and Robert Boyle, to name
but three representative figures, all believed they had triumphantly
succeeded through their science in bearing witness to the majesty and
rationality of God.
Although
Appleyard seems to be sporadically aware of the deep religiosity of
Western science, he cannot bring himself to accept that many of the sins
he attributes to ‘science’ might more accurately be traced back to
‘religion’. He is, I believe, quite right to stress the degree to which
post-Newtonian scientism, with its hunger for mathematical clarity and
conceptual simplicity, is implicitly hostile to the self and to human
complexity. But his observation would carry much more weight were it
attended by the recognition that science’s contempt for the human is
rooted in the Christian doctrine of contemptus mundi and in the
traditional desire of the Christian intellectual to escape upwards from
the Satan-ridden world of human beings, into the divine empyrean. When
Stephen Hawking declares that his aspiration as a physicist is ‘to know
the mind of God’ he is speaking out of this same tradition. His words
should remind us that the epistemology of Western science has been both
shaped and scarred by Christian asceticism, the asceticism which was
developed throughout the middle ages in the monasteries of the West and
disseminated most triumphantly by the Reformation and the
Counter-Reformation.
In
his determination to blame ‘science’ for all our ills Appleyard distorts
this profound cultural continuity, averting his eyes from it whenever he
can. In doing so he fails adequately to recognise that ‘modern science’ is
not monolithic, and that Darwinian biology in particular is potentially
subversive of the very crypto-theological values which post-Newtonian
physics revered, and which Appleyard opposes under the impression that he
is opposing ‘science’ itself. If the truly subversive implications of some
of Darwin’s insights have yet to emerge, it is largely because Darwin
himself failed to break out of the prison-house of theological assumptions
he had inherited from Christian scientists such as Newton, Boyle and
Paley.
One reaction to this failed escape is for us all to
throw up our hands and loudly proclaim our belief in the reality and
complexity of the human soul in the hope that by doing so we can triumph
over science. The other reaction is to think more carefully, more
sensitively and more systematically about the very aspects of human
reality which science has traditionally neglected. Only if we do this is
it possible that our intellectual culture may yet triumph over its own
history, and over the spiritual extremism which shaped modern rationalism
and bequeathed to us a contempt for the ‘human element’ whose religious
origins we too readily forget.
A shotened version of this review first appeared
in the Times Literary Supplement in 1992.
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© Richard Webster, 2002
www.richardwebster.net
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