What is wrong with Scientism is not that it is ‘material’ but that it is too abstract, too much in love with the hunt for the simplest formula, which today takes the form of a ‘theory of everything’. To be effective science must limit the part of reality that it deals with to what is relevant for its purposes. Because of this, as [Jacques] Barzun tells us, ‘the realm of abstraction, useful and far from unreal, is thinner and barer and poorer than the world it is drawn from’.
To abstract means to ‘extract’ or ‘remove’ something, whether it is an ‘abstract’ of a scientific paper you are interested in – that is, a brief description of it – or your idea of ‘tree’ from all the many, different ‘real’ trees you have encountered. One of the great sleights of hand that Scientism has pulled off is to convince the unthinking public that the thin, bare, poor world that it abstracts from – i.e. ‘pulls out of’ – our thick, luxuriant, rich world is the ‘really real’ world, the one that ‘objectively exists’, while the one we encounter and love and struggle with is a kind of subjective illusion, housed within our individual island consciousness. It manages this trick solely because of the practical effectiveness it provides.
My review of Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. Compare what Lachman says here with what Iain McGilchrist writes below:
As things become dulled and inauthentic, they become conceptualised rather than experienced; they are taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body. Heidegger called this process that of Gestell, or framing, a term which suggests the detachment of seeing things as if through a window (as in a famous image of Descartes's), or as re-presented in a picture, or, nowadays, framed by the TV or computer screen. Inherent in it is the notion of an arbitrarily abrupted set of potential relationships, with the context – which ultimately means the totality of Being, all that is – neatly severed at the edges of the frame. Because reality is infinitely ramified and interconnected, because its nature is to hide, and to recede from the approach of logical analysis, language is a constantly limiting, potentially misdirecting and distorting medium. Yet it is necessary to Heidegger as a philosopher. In its tendency to linearity it resists the reticulated web of Heidegger's thought, and his writing espouses images and metaphors of paths that are circuitous and indirect . . . suggesting threading one's way through woods and fields. It is interesting that Descartes's philosophy was half-baked while he slept in a Bavarian oven, the metaphor of stasis and self-enclosure revealing, philosophy and the body being one, the nature of the philosophy; whereas Heidegger was, according to Steiner, ‘an indefatigable walker in unlit places’: solvitur ambulando. Truth is process, not object.
Understanding, as distinguished from having correct information and scientific knowledge, is a complicated process which never produces unequivocal results. It is an unending activity by which, in constant change and variation, we come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.
I'm writing a piece about Arendt's ideas concerning understanding, thinking, and how these concepts differ from knowledge, and how her ideas compare in some ways to those of R.G. Collingwood. (But it's not done yet; this is space exploration for the mind!)
“Many of these complex systems are governed by feedbacks, and if stressed too much they can move to radically new equilibria. The feedbacks often allow Earth’s biosphere to operate as a control, as a thermostat if you like, on interactions between the atmosphere, land, and oceans.”
We can't learn and think too much about the environment. This is Mother Nature, Mother Earth we're talking about. Father Sky can stand down for a while. P.S. My review of this book is on deck.
