Purposive Science as a balance between Reason and Passions
We have been arguing for some time for the idea of a human purposiveness that is inherent (although repressed) in humanity via our sapiens quality of knowing through which comes our special partnership with the Universe, interlocking our existence with the existential fabric of everything. But does this mean that an unleashing of the purposive humanity should distance us from our other human qualities that we call our passions?
Of course this is not any new dilemma, it has been agonised over throughout history and lies at the basis of most psychiatric theory and in the misanthropic nihilism of religious moralities. Transhumanist ideas tend to overlook the problem or insinuate a nihilistic continuation of our technological evolution in which passions will dissolve with transhumanist ascendence. Yet while, be it in conservative or progressive thought, passion seems to be a problem, might the problem not be the passion itself but the nihilistic framework around those passions? No, human passion is certainly not the fundamental problem for humanity. For human purposiveness to become a driving force in civilisation, it needs our passions to fuel that leap forward. For transcendence to take place into the authentically meaningful being we are meant to be in this Universe, we need that inspiration and energy that can only come through acting passionately.
Traditional philosophical wisdom must be harkened to here: the key to progress lies in our ability to advance harmoniously. Our specialness resides in our ability to reason, and we have to let that reason mediate between passion and cold-blooded deliberation without allowing reason itself to become a moralistic dogma itself. Reason, when over-balanced in its own favour leads to creativity-castrating phenomena and philosophical nihilisms like relativism and scepticism.
Reason is often mistrusted because it too easily becomes dogmatic. Reason illuminates the mind and frames part of reality within auras of truth which are themselves misleading subjective truths, for reason itself is a relative concept. For each reason there is a counter-argument, and for each counter-reason a counter-counter-reason – this is what scepticism shows us. Purposiveness, therefore, always has to be a human leap beyond reason as such and into the anchoring passion of faith. Nevertheless, faith itself has to be tempered by reason if it is not to fall into dangerously simple interpretations of ambiguous scripture twisted to save subjective purposes that we see so often in religious and ideological practice. The most feasible anchor we have for faith, however, is the product of reason that we call science.
Science is knowledge that is the fruit of investigation and experimentation and a careful analysis and counter analysis of results. The truths of science hold an ephemeral firmness until they are disproved, which science always must allow for. Science has a common law which saves it from being dogma, i.e., this is what we know until we come to know something else. However, the science we have at the present is unfortunately tied, in most cases grudgingly and reluctantly, to the nihilistic and all-consuming forces of the capitalist economy, and it is for this reason that any purposive revolution in humanity needs to bring science under its wing before any radical steps forward can come about. Humanity’s transcendental leap into its own humanity as humanity-fulfilled must come about through a passionate approach to science and an impassioned development of technologies that will harmonise our relationship with the Universe that we are existentially bound to in the profoundest way imaginable, interlocking us with the existential fabric of everything.
