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Karen Tesson writes:
The classical approach to enquiring about the world has long been dominant in Western society. This view originated in Ancient Greece, notably in the writings of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that knowledge of the natural world should be based on what is perceived to exist there. He maintained that one could use the concrete and material evidence gathered by our senses as a start point, from which one could build an understanding of the world that is based on reasoning and logic. In subsequent years, Aristotle’s rationale-based approach was discarded in favour of the church-led dogma that dominated the natural sciences during the Middle Ages. Centuries later however, the philosophers who were instrumental in the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries returned to Aristotle’s line of thought, and his evidence-based rationale became highly influential in their own philosophies. In fact it remains so in modern times, and even today we still sometimes refer to “Aristotelian logic”, as it has played a fundamental role in how many think about the world. The Scientific Revolution, which took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was brought about by a succession of philosophers including Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and Newton. These giants of the philosophical world all contributed towards a line of thought that was to become the mechanistic worldview. This contrasted strongly with the prevailing view that had developed during the centuries that spanned the period between the Greek philosophers and the Scientific Revolution. During those “dark ages”, the Christian church dominated philosophical thought, and consequently, until the Scientific Revolution began in the sixteenth century, with the works of Copernicus, it was widely believed that the cosmos, and everything within it was created, maintained by, watched over and judged by an external Creator. Theology, philosophy and science were, at that stage, inextricably linked. Fundamental in this view was a geocentric model of the cosmos, where the Earth lay at the centre of the universe (placed there by God), orbited by all the other heavenly bodies (planets, stars and so on). Copernicus however, was the first to suggest that the earth lay not at the centre of the universe, but that it was but one part of a system of planets that orbited the sun. At first this model was, predictably, shunned by the Christian church, which considered it to be heretical. Slowly however, as a result of work by philosophers such as Kepler and Galileo, and later Descartes and Newton, the model began to gain acceptance. What was most significant about this newly emerging view of the cosmos was that it no longer demanded that God the creator be situated at the centre of the universe, controlling and causing action in all other areas. Rather, in the new scientific view, God was believed to be the creator of a machine-like system of parts that function together as a complex whole. God created the system and the laws by which it functioned, but his action was not necessarily required to explain the action of the system. Like a clockwork mechanism, once started, the cosmic machine would run of its own accord. The French philosopher, Rene Descartes was a key instigator of this mechanistic view (Sagan, et al ,1997; Tarnas, 1991). Descartes began from the initial assumption that the only thing of which he could be certain was the existence of his own doubting mind. With this as a “first principle”, (the only one of which he could be certain to be true), he used a process of logic and reasoning to develop further philosophies about the nature of being. Principally, he developed a theory whereby all things in the world exist as either “res cogitans” (thought, spirit, experience and the like) or as “res existans” (material substance, matter, the physical world etc.). Descartes proposed that the only beings in the universe that embody “res cogitans” are God, and human beings (because we have consciousness). Descartes’ logic led him to assert therefore that all things that are neither God or human, are machine-like automata that function according to a set of pre-determined rules. Descartes believed that it was possible to deconstruct the “machine” and gain an understanding of the whole by examining the component parts. It was, however, Isaac Newton who managed to distill and unite the newly emerging mechanistic worldviews of these various philosophers into a physical model that would transform Western science (Tarnas, 1991). Newton developed three fundamental physical laws (inertia, force and equal reaction), along with his theory of universal gravitation, which explained and exposed the mechanisms by which a heliocentric (sun centred) cosmic model would work, as well as a great many other natural phenomena. So, as a result of the work of these various pioneering philosophers, the Scientific Revolution took place, and the mechanistic worldview was born. The birth of this view was to be pivotal to the development of Western science. The Cartesian/Newtonian view of the world as a giant machine has permeated through history to become fundamental to the way that most scientific research is carried out today. Today, most scientists implement a mechanistic view in the form of a methodology, where systems of any sort are considered to be constructed from “parts”. In this methodology, physical and living systems alike are disassembled, to their “component parts”, before being described and investigated. The knowledge gained in this piecemeal manner is then reassembled, to build a picture of the whole system. This approach is known as reductionism. The reductionist approach, whereby systems are deconstructed to smaller and smaller components in order to gain an understanding of the whole system, has become deeply embedded in the way analytical research is conducted today. One area where one might suppose the mechanistic view not to have become so dominant is in the life sciences, where because one is dealing with living organic systems, it might be thought that some other paradigm, such an organic model, as opposed to a mechanistic one, would be favoured. But paradoxically, the conventional approach to biological science is often highly reductionist. This stems again from the powerful influence of Descartes and Newton, who sought to explain nature in terms of mechanism. In biological laboratory science the approach is often highly reductionist. For biological lab work, the conventional approach is to extract an organism, let us suppose it’s a plant, from its natural living environment, and place in a sterile and “controlled” laboratory, where all aspects other than those that are being examined are controlled or accounted for. Ostensibly this is done to simplify the investigation, so that only one part of the complex ecosystem that the plant normally inhabits need be examined, i.e. the plant itself. Often the focus of interest is at a level lower than the whole organism. So, to further study the functioning of the plant, it is broken down, to leaves, flowers, roots etc. and each part investigated separately. Scientists have even developed techniques that allow them to culture parts of an organism after they have been removed from the system, as in plant cell culture, where parts of a plant can be kept alive in a Petri dish, through the addition of nutrients, hormones etc., and the exclusion of microbes such as bacteria, that would otherwise cause the cells to decay. The principle is that many different researchers may work on different aspects of plant structure and function, and that the findings they all individually make can be pieced back together to create an understanding of the plant as a whole. The connection of the parts that have been studied using a reductionist approach usually involves a search for sequences and cause-and-effect relationships. A system that has been analysed reductively is often characterised by the exposition of linear relationships between elements, and by hierarchies. Hierarchies within a system are significant, as they engender a structure where some elements of the system take precedence over others. Hierarchies, whether real or imposed, suggest that parts of a system are more powerful than others. A key goal of reductionism and classical analysis is to produce an understanding of systems that permits their behaviour to be predicted. Once behaviour of a system can be predicted, and cause-and-effect relationships within it are understood, one has the potential to exert control over it and to have influence over its future behaviour. The apparent advantage of the reductionist approach is that it breaks complex problems down into manageable parts, and there is no question that Western reductionist science has told us a great deal about the world in which we live, as well as giving us many tools with which we can control it. Western science, and its reductionist methodology have given us breakthrough technologies, such as antibiotics, medicines and so on. It has at the very least given us a place from which to start our investigations, allowing us to build our knowledge of the world around us piece by piece, working from the simple to the complex. This reductionist approach, however, make some significant assumptions. The first of these is that the world can be broken down into smaller manageable-sized parts, and that the things we learn about these isolated parts will actually relate to the whole systems from which they originate. The second is that it that is possible to make clear distinctions between the different parts of a system, and that one could take an imaginary pair of scissors and “cut out” the object of interest so that it can be separated from its environment. This view has been referred to as “discretism” (Rayner, 1998). In a discretist approach, objects and phenomena of interest are defined so that they may be identified independently from their surroundings. The discretist view also has some important philosophical implications, and could be said to require a number of “leaps of faith” to be able to work in the real world. At a fundamental level, discretism assumes that any entity within a system can be defined independently from its context, and that it is possible to conceptualise any part of a system as an independent entity. This appears easy to do when dealing with say, berries on a blackberry bush – we can pick the berries and hold each one individually in our hands. But in many systems parts cannot be so readily distinguished, such as a “seat” on a long gym bench, or the branches on a tree. In these examples it is much harder to distinguish where one seat ends and the other begins, or where trunk turns into branch. So, one of the repercussions of a discretist approach is that boundaries in the system of study are required to be precise. This can either be achieved through identifying physical structures – as in the blackberries (the berries are apparently distinct from the bush, as they can be “picked off”), or through imposition, which is what one would have to do to define a “seat” on the bench. In a discretist paradigm it is thought to be possible to separate anything from anything else; to pick out “A” from “that which is not A”. This polarised view should be familiar to those who have studied Western philosophy, as it is sometimes known as the “Law of the Excluded Middle”, it reflects the Aristotle’s “two value logic” and the Cartesian concept of “Dualism” (Haste, 2000). Dualism separates entities in a bipolar fashion. As I mentioned earlier, Descartes proposed that the workings of the mind could be separated from the body, effectively creating a clear distinction between that which is “thought”, and that which is “substance” (Tarnas, 1991). Dualistic thinking is one of the dominant features of the classical worldview. This mode of thought encourages us to make clear distinctions between one thing and another, be it subject and object, observer and observed, content and context, self and other, male and female (Haste, 1993), and inner and outer (Rayner,1997). These bipolar distinctions have directed the paths of Western thought, promoting a focus on clear categories of being, and a steering away from that which is “fuzzy”, without boundary, or ambiguous (Haste, 2000). As a result of dualistic thinking and approaches, which have been particularly influential in Western science, the predominant scientific viewpoint is one that values clear definitions, and seeks to clear up ambiguity or lack of clarity. That which is “between”, a “best fit” or an “uncertainty” is less valued. Part 2: A shift away from classical approaches Back to Table of Contents |
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