Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & BarrelhouseWylie, Philip
Philosophy
Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & Barrelhouse
Wylie, Philip
Authors -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Patients -- Fiction; Philosophy -- Fiction
"Yes. And you needn't pretend I have no right to make the claim. You
scientists, self-styled, let a few doctors--ridiculed by the public and
unassisted by you--do the investigating of the consciousness you were
applying to electrons and protons. They used your method--the empirical
method. They have announced their results steadily for the past half
century. You never even looked them over. So now what are you? Big
cheeses in the high-tension labs. Mere mice, around the psychological
clinics. Hunting in your _Bulletin_ for a way to stop war when, really,
you haven't a good kindergarten knowledge of what war is and how it
comes about."
"If there were enough psychiatrists, then--we wouldn't have to worry?"
"Be sarcastic!" I said. "All you birds need a good psychiatrist." He
winced at that, rather sharply, I thought. But I didn't let up on
him. "Guys like you are aware enough to see that perhaps Hitler could
have used a psychoanalysis. You are not aware enough to see that any
president of any big engineering school could use it, too. Why? Because
you think pretty much as he thinks. And neither of you can see that
your thinking is largely emotion and only somewhat logic. The great
blunder of science was to imagine that science could be indefinitely
developed for the physical benefit of man and never concurrently
applied to his subjective needs, states, motives."
"It was hard enough for the early scientists to get across the simple
truth about objects. If they'd tampered with man's beliefs--they'd all
have been burned to death."
"What about you later scientists, then? Would anybody burn old Johann
Brink to death, today, say for studying Freud?"
Paul chuckled. "The picture is beyond imagining."
"Yeah. And I'm sick of it. All your eminent predecessors rushed ahead
investigating stars and bugs and drugs and air currents and left any
inquiry into man himself to philosophers--who were usually ignorant
even of physical science--or to James and Wundt and a few trying,
solitary people. You didn't ever really apply science. Not all science
to all reality. You just promulgated pure science along exactly half of
its possible lines--and called it a job. Looking forever at the light
outside--and never at the interior dark. Justifiable in a sense. But
not bright. And not really scientific at all."
"Hear, hear!"
"If the Greeks had worked out math and aerodynamics and built flyable
air frames--without bothering to study the problem of engines, we
would regard them as remarkably skillful imbeciles. They would have
littered old Attica with the fusilages of Piper Cubs and maybe B-29's
that couldn't get off the ground. In a sense, that's what they did do:
they pushed knowledge ahead along certain lines a certain distance--and
never followed through. You goons are still doing the same half-baked
job."
"You want us to quit studying physics and start picking up stuff about
the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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