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Not a polluted drain in Tobago, 2024
From gazing at the stars Newton and Galileo were inspired to launch a scientific revolution, whose material universe was telescopically visible (although Newton’s gravity, like his God, wasn’t). Of course they got a leg up from the Muslims, particularly their mathematics and their observation-based astronomy and optics, but it was Galileo’s radical idea to restrict natural philosophy – wisdom about nature – to physical phenomena that could be observed and quantified, such as speed, weight, volume, length, force, angle, direction. From that he concluded, “Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.”
(He should have said it was how God drew the universe because European mathematics was essentially geometric – a resurgence of the Greek idea that knowledge, like beauty, is visible.)
Visibility elicits two divergent concepts of truth. In one approach, seeing leads to knowledge. You know what you see with your own two eyes. Science is based on observation. On the other hand, what you see depends on where you stand, different people necessarily hold different points of view of the same thing. It all depends on perspective, which is a more slippery, relative truth. Thus, vision generates conflicting ideas of both “objective reality” as opposed to “subjective interpretation”; truth versus viewpoint; fact versus take. Those questions of matter and mind or objective and subjective are some of the most contested and misunderstood in modern philosophy.
Something that’s “objective” exists whether or not someone “subjectively” perceives it. Bacteria existed objectively long before people knew of them, indeed before humans existed. A tree that falls in the forest has fallen whether or not any creature has seen or heard it. Objective facts are measurable and are amenable to mathematical manipulation.
In the new sciences of nature Islamic concepts were rejected. No longer was the observer part of a divine, ethical order. Knowledge was delinked from a spiritual purification whose goal was not just to control nature but arrive at wisdom. The new European sciences saw the observer as detached, neutral, “objectively” above a passive object. His knowledge was a power over nature; it had no ethical or spiritual dimension.
Maths no longer resided alongside Beauty and Goodness in Plato’s transcendental Realm of Forms. Galileo had dragged it down to earth to make sense of messy, sensuous reality. “The universe,” he concluded, “is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures.”
What about the qualitative dimensions of the world that were considered subjective? Such as its taste, texture, smell, colour? They are considered by scientists from Galileo to today’s physicists as “secondary qualities” that are not intrinsic to the things as such. Rather, they reside in the perceiver’s mind, alongside the sadness, joy, curiosity, fear, anger and pleasure they might evoke – not amenable to scientific study. Subjective experiences exist in a mind, which is necessarily coloured by experience and knowledge.
Colours are subjective, scientists argue: what is objective are the electro-magnetic wavelengths that hit our eyes. That has led them to routinely claim that colours do not “really” exist, but are merely mental representations of what are just different wavelengths of light. The subjective perception of colours help us navigate reality, they argue, like the icons on your computer’s monitor that help you navigate its digital storage – they aren’t real files or folders, just as the redness of a rose doesn’t objectively exist.
That’s not so much a fallacy as specious reasoning. Just because something is created by minds does not mean that it does not “really” exist. Flowers evolved “colours” to attract pollenating bees, fruits display colours to declare their ripeness so they would be picked and their seeds dispersed. Animal species co-evolved to take into account one another’s colours of camouflage, warning or attraction – the leopard’s unchanging spots, the red-black-yellow brightness of the coral snakes, a mother’s irresistible areolae. If those colours aren’t really real because they are only experienced in the eyes of the beholder, then even more unreal is the music and language that humans co-created, including the words you are reading at this very moment.
Scientists lay claim to “objective” knowledge, independent of their circumstances and points of view, although modern science is riddled with European biases, starting with the concept of “objectivity”. Nonetheless, it has been hugely successful in bringing to light deep insights into physical reality and generating tremendous power to build things and manipulate nature. As such, financed by the trade in African blood and tears, science jump-started the industrial revolution.
Scientific knowledge is, however, based on an essentially mechanical idea of reality; it cannot accommodate the meaningfulness of life or its subjectivity. But the real world teems with meaning. The simplest bacterium inhabits a world vibrating with meaningfulness – this means food, that means danger, this is good for it, that is bad for it. Even a virus has favourable environments and hostile ones. Things matter to life – that is the essential meaning of meaning. That’s what I mean when I say that you mean the world to me. What’s more, every living creature lives in meaningful symbiosis with others. Contrariwise, no physical or chemical reaction has any meaning. None are either good or bad, better or worse. Physics and chemistry, their materialist theories and equations, cannot conceptualise meaning, far less grasp how matter could generate it.
Unless it replaces its philosophic foundation, scientific materialism will continue to have no intrinsically social or ethical meaning. Despite its undoubted efficacy – for all its marvels, its rockets and fMRI scanners, cell phones and GPS, its genome sequencing, data centers and Large Hadron Collider – it still only gets things done by brute force. And its blindness to meaning is the collateral damage. Our planet’s devastated ecosphere, the surveillance that invades our privacy to manipulate our thoughts and further enrich and empower a few psychopaths, the growth of biopiracy and biocapitalism and the weaponization of constructed ignorance, all bear sad testimony to that.
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Kim Johnson is currently the Director of the Carnival Institute of Trinidad and Tobago, and is considered by some to be the foremost historian of pan. In the 1990s he worked as a journalist. In 2001 he was awarded a PhD in sociology from UWI, Mona and thereafter as a Senior Research Fellow at The Academy for Arts, Letters, Culture and Public Affairs at The University of Trinidad and Tobago. In 2011 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga prize for excellence in Arts & letters.