Modern science has made tremendous progress in a few hundred years. Our quest for an understanding of the universe and life itself has revealed an immense complexity encompassing reality as we experience it. This disillusionment has challenged our ancient belief systems and compelled us to reconsider our faith and our philosophy. Any scientific progress, however, is impossible without conflicts. Though we all tend to take scientific research for granted, believing it to be purely empirical, for any great revolution in science you need a very consistent contradiction of faith and this we learn from the 19th C. German philosopher Friedrich Hegel. ‘Dialectics’ Hegel insisted that knowledge is a very dynamic process. Philosophers like Socrates believed firmly in arguments. Any true knowledge is an outcome of oppositions. Hegel’s dialectical method emphasized on three aspects of logic- thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
The non-objective nature of science Hegel believed that science in itself can’t be an absolute objective truth. The truth can only be arrived at through consistent subjective narratives, which often clash. Any object in itself cannot have a defined symmetry unless there is an observation made. Therefore, unless there is a counter-narrative for an original proposition of the object, there can’t be an evolution of knowledge about the object. This complicated machinery of thought is what Hegel assumed to be at the root of any scientific or epistemological progress. Modern science has only helped to strengthen his argument. Quantum theory has deconstructed reality to an array of probabilities. This fundamental uncertainty has implications in all branches of scientific knowledge, even in biology. Therefore, to truly grasp the essence of any scientific truth there is a very basic need for a healthy criticism of any empirical proposition. For every thesis, we need an antithesis. To every narrative, there has to be a counter-narrative. The road to science is not a straight one. It is filled with contradiction and paradoxes. It must be. Truth never comes in packages, it is always scattered. The attempt of any scientific or philosophical search has to be a reconciliation of these ‘half-truths’. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits." ~Karl Marx
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About Me
Rajit Roy
An existential romantic, an agnostic and a prospective biologist. Archives
September 2018
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