Constituents of Matter / 6 / 6.2 / 6.2.2

6.2.2 Exiled From Science, Where Did MAN Go?

Modern science understands observed behavior as a modification of an axiomatically asserted behavior. The mechanism which implements this modification places the cause of the modification in the presence of all other objects of experience in the world and is mediated by objects of explanation man conceives in his mind for that purpose. Man himself finds no place in this structure beyond of course that of having done the conceiving, having appropriately quantified the experience that the theory explains, and executing whatever experiments are deemed necessary to verify that theory. His removal from the structure of our representation of nature was motivated by the need to render our cognitions thereof objectively communicable to each other. Modern science thus gradually replaced the man-centered descriptions of experience with objective ones. Personal time, which characterizes events in relation to our concomitant activities, was thus replaced by physical time which relates those events to the objective ticking of a clock: the telephone rang not ‘just as I was coming into the office’ but at exactly 12 o’clock. Personal distance, which characterizes our remove from an object in terms of the importance we assign to that object in our project, was replaced with physical distance which measures that remove with the help of a yardstick: an object which is hard for us to reach is not ‘far away from us’ but at exactly one meter beyond my reach. The subjective description of how natural objects behave has in this manner been replaced by quantified ones obtained with clocks and yardsticks, both of which are easier to communicate to others, while the subjectively constructed reasons for the observed behavior have been replaced with experimentally deniable assertions.

But is modern science truly as objective a description of nature as it claims herself to be? Has man been as completely banished from the structure of his own scientific project as we are led to believe? We have argued extensively in this essay that the agents which have the ability to mediate the interactions between objects which constitute our experience are neither objectively real nor purely abstract, but that they are nevertheless something rather than nothing; they are something in between, something we have called an object of explanation. Their ontological structure was revealed in Chapter 4 as different-and-yet-the-same. Of course, one may be tempted to take this ontological structure as the merely undiscovered, and many a participant in the scientific project succumbed to this temptation. According to this point of view, a molecule was always the object which our next experiment will demand it to be, except that we were not yet aware of that fact; successive use of these entities in explaining various features of experience cumulatively reveals them to us as they have always already been. But for this materialistic point of view to make any sense, the objects we have introduced to explain the structure of matter would have to be objectively real, already actually possessing their properties before they were needed to explain anything, precisely how Einstein had envisioned them to be in his EPR paper. Needless to say, for us who have argued above that objects of explanation have only reflected reality, such an interpretation is strictly unacceptable.

There is however an alternative interpretation of this ontological structure. We submit, that another way in which the different-and-yet-the-same structure could in fact be the case, is if objects of explanation were never ontologically finished; the ontologically unfinished collects the different stages of its finishing under the same concept which is in the process of thus being finished. In this regard, therefore, they would be intriguingly similar to man, who is himself never completely finished. This similarity should not surprise, since the scientific project is in fact a human project and, as such, it must reflect who and how man is. More importantly, however, the similarity reflects the fact that getting things involved with each other requires an agent which is possessed of a particular manner of being. We suggest that unfinishedness is the ontological structure appropriate for such an agent. Whether the agent is a man, who continually involves things with each other in order to fulfill his various project, or an object of explanation, which involves objects of experience with each other in order to explain the various experiential arrangements in which they are included, it must exhibit the ontology of an unfinished entity if it is to remain itself each time it is called into new service.

Indeed, consider man first. Existing as he does in order to maintain himself in being, man is continually engaged in projects designed to make use of things for the sake of that maintaining. In this manipulative engagement with the world, man runs ahead of himself to prefigure possible projects, but, while doing so, he never loses connection with who he is, as the projects he envisions are all invariably aimed at satisfying his own, not anybody else's, needs. In other words, man presents things to himself by running from the future, where he resides, towards his past, where he collects who he had previously chosen to be. But precisely because he resides in the future, he continuously chooses who he wants to be and therefore man’s Being is never finished until, having died, he stops choosing projects to pursue and thus fully becomes his own past; as an entity who becomes, man’s Being is never complete. In a similar manner, just as man is constantly called upon to become by choosing himself, an object of explanation is always called upon to change its content in order to be able to explain yet another experiential situation. Unlike objects of experience which are finished as given, objects of explanation are not; their manner of being is to change in order to meet the explanatory demand imposed on them while always remaining the same; they must, in other words, be unfinished.

It appears then, that objects of explanation play the same role in science that man plays in the world of things: it gets objects involved with each other. By sharing with him his ontological structure, objects of explanation have, so to speak, returned man to modern science; expelled through the front door of science by Descartes, man seems to have come back to it through the back door. We submit that this return was made necessary by the separation science introduced between its objects and the consciousness which observes them. Recall the quotation from Heidegger’s Being and Time given in Chapter 4 of this essay:

Perception is not to be interpreted as a procedure by which a subject provides itself with representations of something which remain stored up inside as having been thus appropriated, and with regard to which the question of how they agree with actuality can occasionally arise...the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one's booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it.

Because, modern science had thus incorrectly separated its objects from the man who contemplates them, it must forever question ‘how our perceptions agree with actuality’ and try to explain why they do. In a pre-scientific comportment, on the other hand, where man is not separated from things but rather lives in-the-world alongside them, there is no need to explain their behavior. As described above, what allows that to be the case is man’s manner of being: guided by a pre-conceptual understanding of the world, he employs things by involving them with each other into his projects. Therefore, if it is to guide our manipulation of its objects, scientific explanation must re-introduce the manner of being which allows man to manipulate things. Hence, objects of explanation must possess the same manner of being as man.