The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinkerLloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Philosophy
The will to doubt : $b An essay in philosophy for the general thinker
Lloyd, Alfred H. (Alfred Henry)
Belief and doubt; Philosophy -- Introductions
So, to gather the threads together, two difficulties [p.080] have now
appeared as affecting the objectivism of science. The first, that of
burial in technique, gave us our starting-point, and the second has come
to light with discussion of the first. Thus, not merely is a would-be
objective science, through its bondage to technique, made formal and
empty, but also, as perhaps only the other side of the same truth, a
would-be objective science materially--that is, for its scientific
doctrines--and formally--that is, for its motives and methods--is always
in practice dependent upon the demands and sanctions of real life, and
so not purely, or not dualistically, objective after all. There is, in
brief, no other conclusion. Either science must be empty, a matter
merely of dead rites and dry symbols and irrelevant ideas, or it must be
pertinent and practical; and, if the latter, its boasted independence is
gone. A purely objective science seems to get only subjectivity for its
pains.
Yet this conclusion is easily misunderstood. It is far from denying any
meaning to such words as object or objectivity. The object is denied
only as an external independent existence. The object still remains to
experience as possibly of mediative value to its beholders, mediating
between the actual in their life and the possible, between the partial
life and the whole life, the old and the new, the social, which is
always narrow, and the personal. The whole must be always "objective" to
the part, the possible to the actual, the personal to the social; or,
conversely, the "objective," natural world can be only the convincing
witness to the part or to the actual or to the social, not that there is
an independent, wholly external world, but [p.081] that there is a whole
or a possible or a personal. "Truly, we are all one," writes Fiona
Macleod. "It is a common tongue we speak, though the wave has its own
whisper, the wind its own sigh, and the lip of man its word, and the
heart of woman its silence." We are all one. Man and nature, which man
beholds, or the subject and the object, of which the subject is
conscious, are one; but an objective science would hide this from us,
not tell it to us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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