ch9 The Tyranny of Science: Overcoming Problems

1. ch9 The Tyranny of Science:Overcoming Problems By Jeu-Jenq YUANN 台灣大學哲學系 【本著作除另有註明外，採取創用CC「姓名標示－非商業性－相同方式分享」台灣3.0版授權釋出】

2. 2 Where comes monotheism? • 1. It is a matter of power. • Why? • Because whenever God is proved to be the only one, there is always a way to compare the power among gods.

3. 3 Where comes monotheism? • The result of comparison always shows that God can be only one, otherwise there would be the stronger and the weaker gods. • The results were the same: the abstraction gets the upper hand. • The gods increased in power, and lost in individuality.

4. 4 Where comes monotheism? • 2. The travelers were relying on gods of other cities which shared power abstractly with their local gods. • The abstract power existing in all gods can be extracted in order to make the aliens feel protected. • The gods lost their local characters, but their power emerges abstractly.

5. 5 The philosophers’ participation • The philosophers did not see this as a loss, but as a GAIN. • They thought it is a better way to bring the ordinary people to Truth or Reality. • They fortify it with arguments which unveil the true face of nature, not only the changing opinions.

6. 6 Xenophanes’ arguments • If cattle had hands, and if they can paint, then in drawing their gods, they would draw cattle. • Should Xenophanes be praised? • M. Eliade, K. Popper all say yes! • But Feyerabend says no! • Why? • Because whoever is convinced by this argument accepts the abstract idea of monotheism beforehand!

7. 7 What wrong to accept gods which look like the local people? • The idea of monotheism is not established on a more powerful argument. • It is accepted as a matter of course for whoever is willing to think abstractly. • To these people, you do not need to offer an argument because they will believe in it anyway.

8. 8 The problem: • The early philosophers such as Xenophanes and Parmenides took individual faces away from the gods and replaced them by faceless principles. • Milosz, the humanitarian, goes one step further. He takes face away from people and replaced them by a faceless abstract and uniform notion of humanity. • Why would we call this act “humanitarian”?

9. (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) was a Polish poet, prose writer and translator of Lithuanian origin and subsequent American citizenship. From 1961 to 1998 he was a professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the UC Berkeley. In 1980, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 9 Who is Czesław Miłosz Wikimedia Commons: MDCarchives

10. 10 The Humanitarian Answer • Milosz: • Human reason is beautiful and invincible; • No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, no sentence of banishment can prevail against it. • It establishes universal ideas in language and guides our hand to write Truth and Justice with capital letters, and lie and oppression in small. • It is the enemy of despair and the friend of hope.

11. 11 Is the Humanitarian Answer Correct? • Is it true that “Human reason is beautiful and invincible”? • Has the invincibility of human reason ever been recognized democratically? • Can science represent “Truth and Justice” which are esteemed for being only ones in capital letters. • God is also esteemed for being the only one in capital letters.

12. 12 Is the Humanitarian Answer Correct? We have to come back to the ominance of rationalism. How did it happen in the first place? It happened because of our preference for the abstract tradition. The Prevalence of the Abstract tradition implies the pervasiveness of “forgetfulness”!

13. 13 The Result: Science of today • The science of today is: • Business enterprise. • Military research. • Opinions of influential schools • A firm faith. • Never Truth which is just an orphan in the world without power and influence, yet blames other opinions lies, puts itself above, and demands to build the world anew.

14. 14 我們是不是也該想想， • 為什麼我們總是喜歡將自由、民主與科學放在一起？ • 它們具有相同的本質嗎？ • 為什麼我們在這些抽象概念下，願意拋棄從前的傳統與想法，建立一個全新的社會呢？ • 推動這些概念的決心與毅力是理性判斷下的結果呢？ • 還是宗教迷信下的結果？

15. 15 The European science and the Chinese science: • How did it happen that an event that revolutionized technology everywhere, china included occurred in ‘backward’ Europe and not in advanced China? • Because Europe had an abstract philosophy? • How can an abstract philosophy lead to concrete advances? • Perhaps because the arise of new standards which changed the way we looked at the old world? • There is no single answer possible!

16. 16 The case of Pythagoras • When we try to implement or receive a rational principle, we might mistakenly conceive a rule of Truth. • When one day for some reasons we do not know we need to correct the once deeply believed Truth, we need to adapt ourselves by drawing us out of the old beliefs. • This happens all the time and what can we learn from this experience? • Do not hold thumb rules as binding laws of truth.

17. 17 The case of Pythagoras • 畢達哥拉斯學派的基本理念是數字（整數）。 • 這是一個學派的基本信念，也是第一個以數字為基礎的學派。 • 但是，在1X1的正方形中（a2），它的對角絞線所開的平方為這個正方形兩倍大的正方形（b2）。 • 所以，b2＝ 2a2。依照原則而言，b必然是偶數，而a是奇數。 • 假如b＝2c，那麼4c2＝2 a2；2 c2＝a2；這表示說，a必然是偶數。 • 那麼，這裡出現了矛盾，因為a既是奇數，又是偶數。 • 這個發現對於當時的畢氏學派引發極大的震撼，卻在不久候的柏拉圖的書中成為希鬆平常的概念。

18. 18 What can we learn from this? • Language is ambiguous and any attempt to nail it down would be the end of thinking, loving, acting, in short, of living. • And the fact that some scientists think that they have nailed things down while still coming up with revolutionary discoveries and that science students are trained to be precise in a very narrow sense and have to catch up with ambiguity later on only shows to what extent we are ruled by ideology and how little attention we pay to the principles we are ready to explain and defend at the drop of a hat.

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