2025-07-27

Science and ascetic ideal

Whenever a physicist is looking at anything, they have 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, a thing that can’t be broken into atoms? There are two ways. First one is to deny. There is no consciousness. There is not a thing that can’t be broken into atoms. Consciousness is a made up thing as ghosts and such. It’s imaginary or illusory. But here comes the question: who’s having the illusion? However you bend the atoms unto themselves, they can’t form a mental experience. Second line of attack on consciousness is to substitute. We start to weave the usual web of causes. They lead us to the brain. Whatever happens there, we say, is our personal experience. That’s impossible. 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. It’s what we worship and see as ideal 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 it matters more than corporeal experience. Why? Due to something called the power of better argument. We strive to arrive at better argument. Empirical science is so powerful, in most cases, that to maintain its credibility we are ready purge the selve. The power of better argument is not about persuasion. This is strive to power, the advantage of superior knowledge. In its peak, it leads to self-denial, worship of science before life.

We can speak of scientific nihilism. I’ve known it. It’s when you see all and everything as a collection of particles. To really yield to this view means to surrender everything we hold dear, everything that makes us human.

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. In classrooms, we tell stories of atoms, of waves, of intricate tech designs, we observe the reproductions of experiments and utter - it’s true. Just as skilled narrator of Iliad who described in minute detail the design of warrior shields and the origin of people approaching Troy on ships. The listeners, hearing so many details, uttered same - it’s true.

Narrative nature of science recedes only when you actually go to the lab, do the experiment and see what you theorized really 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 largely on his own creative powers and who knows all that is done by other people, 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.

As a kid, I was religious or rather superstitious. The abstract figure of all-embracing God filled the whole world with meaning. Until I had Physics class in school. The old world crumbled. A new all-embracing wordlview filling the world with meaning didn’t step in. Now I see, it’s possible - 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.