For those overexcited vitalists who like to pretend that everything is alive, science deadens existence. Similarly, for those conceited anthropocentrists who like to imagine that Man is at the heart of the universe, science displaces and dehumanises.
Thus, for many people - not just poets and priests, but, regrettably, a significant number of philosophers - hostility towards science is second nature and they long for a re-enchantment of the world; to see things once more with the eyes of children, primitives, or the practitioners of occultism.
But, of course, not only would it be extremely foolish to try and return to an earlier, pre-scientific age of superstition and sorcery, but one might challenge the very presumption that knowledge kills. For in fact, knowledge does no such thing; on the contrary, it stimulates a taste and a desire for ever greater understanding and, as Nietzsche writes, the will to truth is ultimately what distinguishes men from animals and higher human beings from the lower; "the former see and hear immeasurably more, and see and hear more thoughtfully" [301].
Of course the world of rational enquiry is indebted to its religious inheritance - Nietzsche happily admits that the modern sciences would never have developed if the way had not been prepared by "magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a hunger ... for hidden and forbidden powers" [300] - but it's natural science and not supernatural fantasy that makes the world ever fuller, ever more complex, ever more wondrous.
The fact that many people refuse to see this is ultimately because the severity of science - what Nietzsche describes as its inexorability in all matters great and small - makes the uninitiated feel dizzy and afraid. They can’t catch their breath in the rarefied atmosphere created by those who have left the muddy waters of myth and religion behind.
But for those of us who have become accustomed to the discipline of science and its experimental practice, there is no place we'd rather live than in this "bright, transparent, vigorous, electrified air" [293].
See: Nietzsche; The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1974). The numbers in the body of the text refer to sections, not pages.
Science itself -'hard science', as the suspiciously phallogocentric collocation has it - may or may not be a fiction, but science fiction is surely that genre that depicts science's imaginal underlay. ('Scio' = 'I know', and I cannot 'know' anything.) Human beings had to dream of, and film, and write about the fantasy of going to the Moon, for example, in order for the US lunar landings of 1969 to physically transpire. The suspicion is that all 'reality' is of this kind - that is, a late arrival, an afterthought, ineluctably 'post'.
ReplyDeleteRecalling how Nietzsche spoke of our words as the shells of thoughts that already lay dead in our mouths, and Freud's vision of the psyche as an iceberg whose greater part was buried in the depths, we infer the painter Francis Bacon's amusing indifference to the drug of the Real ("The mystery lies in the irrationality by which you make appearance – if it is not irrational, you make illustration") is what kept his art urgent, true and strange. Which is to say - in the idiomatic sense of 'more real than real' - unreal.