I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith: that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two.1
Most people today would be liable to regard the eventual chuckle and fleeting moment of delight that follows the apprehension of a felicitous metaphor as a fulfilment of its greatest promise. But if, as Shelly suggested, metaphors are not mere rhetorical devices but spiritual instruments that serve to disclose “the hitherto unapphrehended relations of things,” then metaphors are also theories. This is to say that metaphors are not merely ways of conceptualizing already perceived phenomena, but rather organs of perception of those phenomena to begin with.2 In the context of scientific research, by extension, the reigning metaphor will condition what questions and research methods will seem rational vis-à-vis a scientific study of nature. For instance, it is rational to model the behavior planets according to physical laws, but not the behavior of cats. Going further, it is possible to describe a smile with reference to “a partial contraction of the zygomaticus, etc.” but not without virtually entirely having lost the plot. Thomas Kuhn famously articulated the function of these tacit paradigms in his meteoric 1963 text, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions:
But paradigms differ in more than substance, for they are directed not only to nature but also back upon the science that produced them. They are the source of the methods, problem-field, and standards of solution accepted by any mature scientific community at any given time. As a result, the reception of a new paradigm often necessitates a redefinition of the corresponding science. Some old problems may be relegated to another science or declared entirely “unscientific.” Others that were previously nonexistent or trivial may, with a new paradigm, become the very archetypes of significant scientific achievement. And as the problems change, so, often, does the standard that distinguishes a real scientific solution from a mere metaphysical speculation, word game, or mathematical play. The normal-scientific tradition that emerges from a scientific revolution is not only incompatible but often actually incommensurable with that which has gone before.”
…
Science does not deal in all possible laboratory manipulations. Instead, it selects those relevant to the juxtaposition of a paradigm with the immediate experience that that paradigm has partially determined. As a result, scientists with different paradigms engage in different concrete laboratory manipulations.
Kuhn’s work served to popularize what earlier thinkers, like Kant, Goethe, Steiner and the entire tradition of phenomenologists had also observed and argued: that, pace the naïve empiricists, it is impossible to separate what is seen from our way of looking for it.
Another seminal thinker whose works served as a tributary to this stream in philosophy was Robin Collingwood. In the “Introduction” to his 1945 text, The Idea of Nature, Collingwood proposes that three metaphors have informed our theory of nature through history, and by extension, our research into it: the organism, the mechanism, and the historical narrative, the latter incorporating elements of both of the prior views while discarding others.3 Whereas the most ancient view regarded nature as a living being and therefore, as essentially homogenous with the one doing the regarding, the stance of the mechanic or the engineer would have represented the paradigmatic scientific attitude of the three centuries following the scientific revolution, which Collingwood designates, somewhat idiosyncratically as “the Renaissance view.” He goes on to suggest that the modern approach to understanding nature is best modelled on that which historians adopt to address the subject matter of their discipline, in which events are brought into coherent sequences by a sort of “scientific storytelling.” This may strike the contemporary reader as improbable so I would like to explore the proposition and ultimately hope to demonstrate that it has been and remains the most comprehensive and coherent approach of the three in that it can also describe itself.
What Collingwood terms “the Renaissance view” is the familiar physicalistic and mechanistic view of nature that many of us have grown up with. That a mechanism, in principle, entails a mechanic who provided its intelligent design need not be unduly stressed. Instead, the emphasis is laid on configurations of force and matter behaving according to natural laws that admit of quantification. The Ancient view, by contrast, does not conceive of nature as a machine but as a sort of body or physiognomy. As indicated, we do not learn very much about a face by conceiving of it in abstraction from the person whose face it is. Collingwood, in my view, overleaps an intermediary view between the Ancient and Renaissance views which I would designate as “the Mediaeval view,” and characterize nature as image or artwork. It’s possible to perform a chemical assay of Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” to determine how he made the paint. But, obviously, the painting will not be understood in any way that looks past the phenomenal experience of it. Nature is the “First Testament.”
But enough on these antique moments: as promised, I wish to explore some implications of “nature as history.” Collingwood quotes the philosopher A.N. Whitehead’s remark that “there is no nature at an instant” to argue that the contemporary conception of nature, if all the most recent scientific evidence and attitudes were taken in good faith, would regard phenomena not as “things” or “objects” but as “events.” Facts must be led back to the acts that produced them. Lending a more thorough reality to forms in time invites the reflection that, just as there exists a minimum space in which a shape, object, or substance can exist (smaller than the which you could no longer fit a shape or object, but only part of that shape or object), so there is a minimal duration into which a temporal form, or an event, can fit, shorter than the which the event could not fit, but only a part of the event. And an event is composed of moments heterogenous to the event which they compose, just as phonemes are not of the same nature as the words which they compose and an molecule of dihydrogen monoxide is not wet. This view could be called “the musical theory of nature” because a melody likewise requires a certain duration to unfold and if the duration is shortened beyond this minimal limit, the music will first disappear and eventually, sound altogether will follow it, since a sound is composed of frequency, which likewise has a durational minimum. Music may appear as sound or as silence depending on our scale of analysis and in just the same way does our perception of nature depend on the scale by which we observe it; how we look conditions what we see. Certain phenomena are imperceptible if scrutinized from too close just as they are likewise indiscernible if seen from too far away. The universe itself, in its aeonic flowering and metamorphosis, is an iridescent flame or firework from the standpoint of eternity.
Collingwood also suggests that, together with the implication of “a principle of minimal duration,” inherent in the implications of embracing the modern view is the reintroduction of a notion long-since banished, at least nominally, to the outer darkness of pseudo-science and Aristotelianism: to wit, the principle of teleology. In the organic view of nature congenial to the ancients, teleology was something self-evident, and likely so much so that it scarcely would have been commented on. After all, life is, from a certain standpoint, the embodiment of teloi. This is to say no more than that the development and behavior of organism can be neither explained nor even really perceived as behavior except by appear to intentional action. It can be difficult to grasp the significance of disputes of teleology as a principle of biology in this context but, in essence, the program of conceptualizing nature mathematically and mechanically, which defined the so-called scientific revolution, entailed that our conception of nature be scoured clean of all innate purpose and development. Darwin’s evolutionary theory represented a triumphal moment in the march of this program because it finally promised to remove the “elephant in the ointment” of the mechanical view—the self-evident manifestation of teleology in all living creatures. The Darwinian theory of evolution explained this appearance of teleology as an illusion entirely reduceable to an underlying non-teleological mechanism that was blind and random, and “selective” only in the a posteriori and therefore equivocal sense of an entity persisting insofar as it avoids any occurrence that brings its existence to an end.
But this theory of evolution swept a great deal under the rug, not the least of which is that this universe must contain, by the very logic of the existence of such a theory itself, pockets of teleology in the form of scientists devoted to the purpose of proving its non-existence. If our own minds, and the mind of the greatest scientists did not evolve to grasp true theories of nature, but only to promote reproductive fitness, why should we believe their claims? Conversely, if our minds and the minds of scientists are capable of grasping true theories, then clearly the view of “blind evolution” that the Darwinian theory advances needs to be scrapped and replaced with one that includes the dimensions of life and mind that are obvious to anyone not taken by an ideological commitment to reject the essential basis of these things.
Collingwood outlines several further implications of the idea of “nature as history” but I would like to pivot from the general thrust of this essay to follow the main current of argument intimated in the last paragraph to a conclusions that is perhaps implicit in Collingwood’s treatment but nowhere stated as such. Namely, that the idea of nature as history is history, and is moreover the only imaginative paradigm is capable both of encompassing and accounting for the procession of paradigms that Collingwood and other thinkers who have investigated the history of science have observed. Paradoxically, a story can “break the forth wall” and include the teller of the story among the characters of it. Indeed, any comprehensive history must do this. Only a scientific paradigm that accommodates the scientist himself in its scope of vision can achieve any semblance of completeness. It perhaps high time, then, that we put away notions of absolute calculability, Grand Unifying Theories mathematically conceived, and the conceit of the absolute third-person view-from-nowhere perspective on nature that have characterized the reigning paradigm of the last centuries and rather accept that all of these features were hallmarks of one chapter among the several Gospels of the First Testament, many of whose pages are still to be written between now and Judgement Day.4
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 167
In other words, we cannot abstract our way of seeing from what we see and still suppose that we have really understood the phenomena in question, much less ourselves and our relation to them.
In some ways, for instance, the historical theory of nature integrates the dynamism and temporality of the former with the lawfulness and quantifiability of the latter while rejecting the physical determinism and Creator entailed by it.
Christ declares:
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.
Logos, from a root that originally meant “to gather into one,” means “collection,” “text,” “definition,” “speech,” “word,” “argument,” and “principle.” But it also means “story,” which is a gathering of apparently disparate phenomena into a coherent narrative.
Hi Max,
I am going to take a fantastic leap here by saying that what Rudolf Steiner brought forth beginning in 1900 was designed to create a new paradigm that Thomas Kuhn came upon some 63 years later, and yet, he never heard of Rudolf Steiner. So, what does this mean? Kuhn had the audacity to see the working of so-called "paradigm-shifts" in the eras of the scientific revolution, which are commonly called the Renaissance and Enlightenment, c. 1500-1800 AD. Yet, he failed, as his predecessor, Robin Collingwood, to see the real dimension of history. Only Owen Barfield in 1957 comes forth to save the day on behalf of Steiner. So, this is an extremely important and perceptive essay.
Yet, according to Steiner, we can trace a history going back to earlier, more primordial times. For example, at the time of Christ, two thousand years ago, we have the figures of Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who are given special account in the Gospel of John. Now, what if it can be shown that these two reincarnated in the 20th century for a special mission? It is still the same history that Kuhn and Collingwood speak about from the past. Yet, this becomes the history of the future. It comes from a source that is accessible to all. The Akashic Records are available there.
Please check out these inter-related references:
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/three_great_myths.html
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/creamyth.html
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/structureevolutiondestinyman.html
http://www.beezone.com/beezones-main-stack/christ_equals_emsquared.html
http://fearnomore.vision/human/what-man-represents
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds6.html The Seven Stages of Life