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In response, scientists and philosophers who feel strongly about
liberating potential of a spare, materialistic worldview began to patrol borderlands between high-grade knowledge scientists have of natural systems and low-grade opinions that in view of science's most ardent defenders, dominate other spheres of culture and lead back toward superstitious and authoritarian world of yester-year. 'Demarcating' science from other, less cognitively worthwhile forms of understanding was already a major feature of Darwin's world. A line beyond which Newtonian paradigm could not apply was drawn at boundary between physics and biology. We have seen how hesitant Darwin was to cross that line and what happened when he did. Twentieth-century people are sometimes prone to congratulate themselves for being above these quaint Victorian battles. They may have less reason to do so, however, than they think, for fact is that throughout our own century, same sort of battles with emotional overtones no less charged, have been waged at contested line where biology meets psychology, and more generally where natural sciences confront human sciences. Dualisms between spirit and matter, and even between mind and body, may have been pushed to margins of respectable intellectual discourse. But methodological dualisms between what is covered by laws and what is to be 'hermeneutically appropriated' are still very much at center of our cultural, or rather 'two cultural', life. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are even now busy reducing mind-states to brain-states, while interpretive or humanistic psychologists are proclaiming how meaningless world would be if mind is nothing but brain. Interpretive anthropologists are filled with horror at what would disappear from world if rich cultural practices that seem to give meaning to our lives were to be shown to be little more than extremely sophisticated calculations on part of self-interested genes. Conflicts of this sort would have given Darwin stomachaches almost as bad as ones he endured over earlier demarcation controversies."
Hermeneuts is a new epithet for alchemists such as myself who OBSERVE and try to fit ALL facts together and don't eject anything 'from science's confining Eden'.
"The rhetorical pattern of these battles is still depressingly similar, in fact, to Huxley's confrontation with Wilberforce. Hermeneuts ridicule scientists like Hamilton, Dawkins, and Wilson when they suggest that nothing was ever known about social cooperation until biologists discovered kin selection. Reductionists in turn criticize hermeneuts, now transformed largely into 'culturists', for bringing back ghosts and gods, just as their nineteenth-century predecessors were taxed with being 'vitalists' every time they said something about complexity of development. Humanists identify scientists with an outdated materialistic reductionism. Scientists insist that hermeneutical intentionality is little more than disguised religion.
Perhaps, a way out of this fruitless dialectic between 'two cultures', can be found if each party could give up at least one of its cherished preconceptions. It would be a good thing, for example, if heirs of Enlightenment {Credited to Bacon, Shakespeare, Jonson and others with an alchemical background.} would stop thinking that if cultural phenomena are not reduced to some sort of mechanism, religious authoritarianism will immediately flood into breach. They should also stop assuming that nothing is really known about human beings until spirit of reductionism gets to work. Students of human sciences have, after all, been learning things alongside scientists ever since modernity began. Among other things they have learned that humans are individuated as persons within bonds of cultures and cultural roles, they are bound together with others in ways no less meaningful and valuable than ways promoted by strongly dualistic religions. By same token, it would be helpful if advocates of interpretive disciplines would. abandon a tacit assumption sometimes found among them that nature is so constituted that it can never accommodate rich and meaningful cultural phenomena humanists are dedicated to protecting, and that therefore cultural 'ought never' to be allowed to slip comfortably into naturalism. Humanists seem to have internalized this belief from their reductionist enemies, whose commitment to materialism is generally inseparable from their resolve to show up large parts of culture, especially religion, as illusions. These opponents, we may safely say, take in each other's laundry."
I wonder if these authors and their reductivist buddies are aware that all humanists are not without ability to incorporate hard physical science to an even higher factual degree than they do. The quantum physicists like Wigner (Nobel laureate), Schrödinger and Heisenberg think that humanistic richness is robbed by reductionist unspiritual thinking. The global reifying thrust of materialism (Dr. Boddy of U of T, anthropology) is hopefully, in due course, going to return to a global deifying thrust of spiritualism. The only REALITY is NATURE and it assuredly includes ALL observable facts not just 'Toilet Philosophy'.
If I may be allowed to quote someone who tries to keep an 'open mind' and use WHATEVER WORKS even if it isn't 'modernity'. I choose to quote a wholistic doctor by name of Zoltan Rona who has his M.D. and M. Sc. He edited 'Encyclopedia of Natural Healing' in 1997 which says on pages 33 and 34:
“It is misleading to call natural health movement ‘alternative medicine’ as is often done. Natural Medicine is considered founder of contemporary Western medicine. What we now call modern medicine is actually an aberration, result of social change at dawn of industrialization in eighteenth century."
Columnist in The ES Press Magazine Author of Diverse Druids Many books available at World-Mysteries.com include one this is an excerpt from called Integrating Soul and Science
