Science and ascetic ideal

Author: lamescholar - 2025-07-27

Whenever a physicist is looking at anything, he has a universal approach to understand it: to break it down into the chain of physical events. This universal approach stumbles when we approach human beings. How a physicist addresses the mind, the experience? Well, there are two ways. First is to deny. There is no consciousness. It’s a made up thing as ghosts and such. It’s imaginary or illusory (but who’s having the illusion?). Second one is to substitute. We start to weave the usual web of causes that lead to the brain where some stuff happens and this stuff is what our personal experience is. Well, no. Experience is something immediate. It can’t be something that we arrive at through a long story about external world. This story can relate to experience, but it can’t embody it.

I think what happens here is what Nietzsche called ascetic ideal. When we worship the ideal that is bigger than life itself. Pure art, pure science, science for its own sake (in reality, for hidden selfish reason). The ideal worshiped to the extent that we surrender the corporeal, vivid experience. Why? There is something we call the power of better argument. We strive to arrive at better argument. The breakdown unto causal chains, the empirical science are so powerful in most cases that to maintain their credibility we purge our selves. The power of better argument is not in the eyes of the observer. It is in the vanity of the thinker. This is strive to power, power of advantageous knowledge. It leads us to self-denial, worship of empirical science.

We can speak of scientific nihilism. I’ve known it. The condition when you see all and everything as a collection of particles. If we really succumb to this view, surrendering everything that we hold dear, what makes us human, then we die, socially, in the pursuit of self-destructive pride.

Atomism or quantum physics shouldn’t be an ontology. I think we should hold science for what it is: a story. A useful story, a convincing story. But it’s bad at returning from its odyssey into the world of causal chains back to the world of human experience. We tell stories of atoms, of waves, of intricate tech designs, we observe the reproductions of experiments and utter - it’s true. Just as when narrator of Iliad describes in minute detail the design of warrior shields and the origin of people approaching Troy on ships. The listeners, hearing so many details, utter same - it’s true.

Narrative nature of science recede only when you actually go to the lab, do the experiment and see what you theorized actually happen (within a margin of error). But can we ever really escape from the narrative in science? We would need to write the experiment from the scratch and not get it from the textbook. We would need to check all presuppositions that we just accept when we exercise the procedures. We would need to extract all the reactants from the Earth with our own hands or at least know who does it in the distant part of the globe. These are practical problems, not gnosiological. If we imagine a man who’s in his work relies mostly on his own creative powers, science can be what it claims to be - the grasping of the world.

Science is creative destruction. Science can elevate something to the status of existing in the world only to bring it down after new experimental breakthrough. In this regard, it is opposite to the myth that tells profound story that sprawls via side plots. Science is good at uprooting the false and establishing what’s really standing, but just as with capitalism, uprooting the tradition doesn’t foster a human life.

I was religious or rather superstitious. The abstract figure of all-embracing God filled the whole world with meaning. But then I had Physics class in school. This world crumbled. And new all-embracing wordlview filling the world with meaning didn’t spawn. There is a possibility of it - the commons. But it’s not in the world to be found. Our world is empty, or rather, full with non-places. Meaning is to be brought into the world.