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Etymology is hugely revealing. Slippages in meaning tell us about the direction in which we may have drifted without even being aware of the drift, much as rifts in the bedrock speak to us of continental drifts that made the landscape in which we live, but which we cannot perceive.
History is always relevant, because life is not a series of moments, but a continuous flow. One of the most ignorant remarks ever made, representing the machine world view for which we are now paying, and will continue to pay, a very high price, is Henry Ford’s ‘history is bunk’.
First, notice that a process, unlike a thing, suggests the importance of not just the whatness, but the howness.
As I will argue, the most fundamental truths, of both a physical and psychical nature, can ultimately be expressed only in terms of poetry.
A whole set of beliefs could be mutually coherent and entirely false: everything depends on where you start from.
Very little that we take for granted as most essential to life – love, energy, matter, consciousness – can be convincingly argued about, or even described, without becoming ultimately self-referential. You have to experience it to know it: all we can do is point.
Truth is uncertain not because it is empty, but because it is full – rich, complex, manifold.
It doesn’t matter what the theory dictates, if it doesn’t ‘answer’ in practice.
The problem arises because we jump from an awareness of a distinction to the assumption of a division.
A good relationship is one in which each party is maximally fulfilled as a differentiated individual, without this in any way detracting from the relationship, but rather being a condition of the possibility of a good relationship at all – and indeed also a consequence of such a relationship.
Thus a good society is not one in which individuality is lost, but one in which it is fulfilled; yet, at the same time, that individuality must not be a threat to the cohesion of the society. There is such a thing as tyranny of individuals over society, as well as society over individuals.
All the same, we could make an imaginative attempt to stand aside from our usual viewpoint. Indeed, one of the crucial functions of the imagination is to enable us to take various perspectives on the world: it enables us to ‘see how it looks from over there’.
To recall the primary myth of the Master (RH) and his emissary (LH), the Master knows he needs the emissary, while the emissary does not know that he needs the Master. The tendency is for the one that sees less (the emissary) to believe that he sees all, while the one that sees more (the Master) sees there are things he doesn’t know; just as those who think they know it all know less than those who know they do not.
A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.’23 The first emphasises an outcome that closes down the process. The second emphasises the process, which is itself the desired outcome.
So it is that one mode of truth is first formulated theoretically, abstractly, conceptually; and then tested, if at all, only afterwards. Meanwhile the other is constantly tested during its formulation – in the process of becoming truth.
We can’t have correctness, we can only have a maximally attentive, maximally open, testing out of our ideas on the world as we experience it.
Thus, when one speaks truth, one hopes that people will agree, but they can always find reasons not to agree if they are determined enough not to hear.
That is the point: there is still a structure of better and worse, even where better or worse cannot be finally demonstrated so as to avoid dissent.
Though truth is always my personal judgment, it is not just possible, but necessary, that my judgment should take into account yours and many others. It is far from random, but is, rather, informed by experiment, perception, reason, intuition and imagination. That doesn’t make it less reliable than being informed by a single source, such as reason, might have done, but more reliable.
The point at stake is one that is familiar in Western thinking since Aristotle: between a valid argument and a sound one. An argument is said to be valid if its logical structure, as here, is correct. It is only said to be sound if both the structure and the premisses are correct, which here one of them clearly is not.
It is relevant that ‘the right hemisphere … relates the sign to its referent. For the left hemisphere the relation of the sign to its referent is of less importance than for the right hemisphere; the left hemisphere deals with the interrelation of signs.’
As far as the left hemisphere is concerned, truth is fidelity to a closed system which defines its own reality. Internal, theoretical, consistency is more important than truth to experience. The right hemisphere, meanwhile, thinks that it might be worth checking by looking out of the window, where, whatever it may say on the piece of paper, a porcupine is not, actually, a monkey, nor are tropical winters cold.
I will suggest that its contribution is of great value, but that there are intrinsic limits to what it can be expected to tell us, and that these limits all too often go unrecognised.
Science can deal in each case with the first type of question, in which an explicit, mechanistic explanation is enquired about, and the accompanying framework that makes it comprehensible is taken for granted; but not in the second, in which that framework is transcended.
We may think that our theories are shaped by observations, but it is as true that our observations are shaped by theories. This means we can be blind to some very obvious things in our immediate environment. We don’t look where we don’t expect to see, so that our expectations come to govern what we can see.
That’s because the price of the pursuit of knowledge by any means whatever is eternal vigilance.
All models are in this way a partial fit, giving a selective view of the matter.
Obscurantism is the refusal to speculate freely on the limitations of traditional methods. It is more than that: it is the negation of the importance of such speculation
Ideas, including scientific ideas, do not live suspended in a vacuum, but have relationships across time, and at a point in time, with others, forming out of observed regularities the ‘models’, ‘laws’ and ‘principles’ which are our own creations, shaped as much by what they do not include as by what they do.
Adding to their contingency is a simple and very obvious point, the limitation imposed by our sense organs – and our brains.
Our alternatives are not single truth or chaos.
competing theories lead to differing observations as much as differing observations lead to competing theories.
Just because we can’t measure values, they are neither less important, nor less rightly operative, in science: the confusion comes from science’s reluctance to accept as real what cannot be pinned down and measured.
Truth is a matter not merely of quantity, but of quality; not just of degree, but of the manner of its holding.
besetting danger is not so much of embracing falsehood for truth, as of mistaking part of the truth for the whole.
‘There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.’
For a start, science depends on good hypotheses. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but it is essential to the nature of science that it imaginatively selects its assumptions, which it discards only when they don’t work.
It therefore requires the exercise of imagination from the outset, which alone can supply interesting and potentially fruitful hypotheses, and eliminate intuitively unfruitful ones. While respecting the data out of which they emerge, good hypotheses always ‘go beyond’ the immediate facts.
Theories arise from seeing something inspired by empirical data’.
That results precede arguments ‘was a commonplace for ancient mathematicians … The Greeks did not think much of propositions they happened to hit upon in the deductive direction without having previously guessed them’.
‘The words or the language, as they are written or spoken’, wrote Einstein, ‘do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined … The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type.’
The whole enterprise of science as she is practised is dependent on imagination in order to interpret what it is one is seeing.
Better still would be to accept that objective is a relative term, and that truth is, too: complex, multifaceted, rarely if ever single, never simple. Which, to repeat, since the point is so vital, does not for an instant imply giving up on it altogether.
Science understandably does not find a purpose, because purpose is not something its way of thinking recognises.
In conclusion, the point I wish to make – and I cannot emphasise it strongly enough – is that just because what we rightly take to be scientific truths are not ‘objective’ in the sense that nothing human, contingent and fallible enters into them, this does not mean they have no legitimate claim to be called true.
Movement is the cause of all life.
It is nonsense to conceive of nature as a static fact, even for an instant devoid of duration. There is no nature apart from transition, and there is no transition apart from temporal duration.
‘biology today is little more than an engineering discipline’.
References to (1) actively co-ordinated processes, expressing a sense of (2) wholeness, inextricably linked with (3) values, (4) meaning and (5) purpose – each leading separately and together, to the phenomenon of (6) self-realisation.
Each of these five characteristics singly – and a fortiori together – suggests the sixth: a process of ‘self-realisation’. The organism as a whole acts in a co-ordinated fashion to create and respond to meaning in the pursuit of value-laden goals, whereby it is fully realised and fulfilled as an organism.
