There are no "mere" facts

"... all "unconcealment" is bound up with mood, language and culture. Einstein's theories are meaningful only to someone trained to approach nature in a certain way, the way of Western modernity. Science requires a special mood and a special use of language. Facts are always interpreted in terms of particular, historically grounded ways of thinking: "there are no mere facts, but . . . a fact is only what it is in the light of the fundamental conception, and always depends upon how far that conception reaches""

Quoted from http://enowning.blogspot.com

A 'Scientific' Ethics?

The abstractions of science, not only within theory, but the objects of that theory, and the intepretations of the results of testing of those objects, whether via observation, experiment, survey, etc., are all initially abstracted on the basis of philosophical determinations of the things and the world from which they were abstracted. In turn these determinations always originate in a determinate philosophy, with specific assumptions, prejudices and tendencies. The more science declares its autonomy, the less visible these assumptions and prejudices become, and the less visible an assumption or prejudice, the more powerful its control. Consistency of result within a science based on such a determinate philosophy does not in any way guarantee the validity of the philosophy, as it is the predictable result of making the same assumptions at each moment of the scientific procedure.

As a result the sciences do ascertain correct concepts about the world and the things within it, but only in the manner that the philosophic base a priori considers valid. Nothing guarantees that these correct assertions are uniquely correct, complete, or even particularly important assertions about the things being studied. The validity of any science's results are strictly circumscribed within the conceptual framework to which it is indebted and of which it is incapable of questioning.

Within revealed religion, as based on the same metaphysical philosophy as the 'modern' sciences, the comparative complexity rendered necessary by the inability to leave meaning out, in the manner of the sciences, and by the inclusion of populist necessity of the inclusion of contradicting premetaphysical mythological tenets, creates a situation where the self consistency of the natural sciences, and thus their claim to a systematic connection to reality, is not obtainable. But given that the natural sciences rest on the same basic assumptions, the fundamental scientific claims cannot help but mimic the forms of the fundamental theological tenets. The 'One' haunts set theory, as that which presences only by absencing (the one as a set disappears under investigation into infinite divisibility into further multiples), in precisely the same manner that the holy ghost haunts the Christianity of anyone who takes the fundamental theological tenet "and god became man" combined with the death of that man with any seriousness. The origin of the universe in a singularity (the 'big bang' theory) makes the scientific posit of the universe's history a creationist account, whether that singularity itself has a further origin in a creator makes no difference whatsoever to the resulting account. It's not the case that American creationism is a Christianization of biology. It would be more accurate to say that it is a mythologization, in the sense of pre-conceptual, pre-metaphysical mythology, of the metaphysical/Christian biology that teaches evolution as a predestined, mechanistic causal set of temporally successive effects.

Science without philosophy has no basis in thought that could provide it with a means of abstraction necessary to its methodology. But philosophy contains far more than the basis of the natural sciences in terms of ontology, ethics and epistemology. A 'scientific ethic' is a worse round square than a Christian biology. The only potential effects of using 'modern' natural science as a basis for ethics are to either redouble the difficulty of questioning the assumptions and prejudices underlying ethics as they already exist, making those ethical assumptions that much more absolute and unquestionable, or negating ethics altogether via a reinterpretation of the base assumptions in light of a further assumption of predestination cloaked under a simplistic reduction of causality.

Description of the Moments of the Divine through a Post Religious Interpretation of the Trinity

The divine is here defined as that which allows the human being to dis-cover beings in that and how they are, their existence and essence, thought metaphysically. Within metaphysical theology three moments of the divine were posited as beings, persons, referred to in Catholic tenet as the Trinity.

Of the 'persons' in the Trinity, only Christ in his role as the second person, the Logos, is in fact a person per se. Returning to the original dynamic meaning of 'theo', 'to shine', the first moment of the trinity is the original 'shining' that allows beings to be experienced in that they are, in their pure existence. While Catholic theology was written in Latin the original Greek term Logos was reserved for the second person. Logos is the gathering-clearing enacted by the divine as it appears within man. It is this Logos, not mere speech but the entirety of context and world made possible linguistically that allows beings to be experienced as what they are, metaphysically in their essence.

The third moment is the reference to the divine itself rather than its actions. The 'ghost' is that apparition that is not graspable since it only presences through absencing. The absencing, the withdrawal of the divine itself that has always already occurred provides the first and second moments with their lighting and clearing respectively.

Self and World, or The Self= One's "own" World

Self/World:

i One's "own" World is the totality of what has been experienced and interpreted, including that experienced and interpreted at second hand and passed along.


ii Looked at from a different perspective, this is also the totality of the Self.


iii Most of the World is shared, without a fairly common sharing (within a given culture) actions that require common understandings (such as driving) would be impossible.


iv Most of what has been experienced and interpreted is inevitably second hand. Also much of it was concerned with the world as it was in earlier generations and times. That certain people seem "ahead of their time" is due to the majority interpretation being always "behind the time".


v This also means most of the self is shared and has not been grasped explicitly but through the interpretations of others (the 'One').


vi As a result individuation can only be a modification, and a relatively small one, of the primordially shared nature of the Self.


vii Conversation that is not a sharing of an originary stance towards a matter (idle talk, "shooting shit") is, in the case of someone not known well or a group, a mutual estimating of the degree to which the Self/World is shared and thereby the degree to which an a priori relation exists..


viii Conversation between those who know each other well it becomes a relaxing, tranquilizing break from the effort new interpretation requires, into the familiarity of a well-known set of interpretations and their resulting understandings.


ix The view on the World is perspectival to the individual Self-sense.


x World/Self are essentially pluralistic. Since the shared World has inherently plural origins, there is an evident distortion if only one perspective dominates.


xi The horizons of World involve space and time as pure intuitions, as Kant perceived, but space and time have to be reinterpreted as topological place and originary temporality. This also requires that the dimensionality of each be reinterpreted as horizonal.


xii The notion of the Subject is a unitary interpretation of the pluralistic Self. The Subject is essentially invental as a response to the evental, and as a result a fleeting phenomenon, once the evental situation that gives rise to the Subject is over and the Self becomes engrossed in everydayness the Subject ceases to actualize.


xiii The Subject is also simplistic in that most parameters of which the Self is cognizant are left out in order to make possible timely decisions in an ethical situation, as well as to perceive the Self as an actor within-the-World rather than self-identical with the World it itself experiences.


xiv The assessing "step back" is phenomenologically the experience of inventing the Subject. Since this "step back" is also key to the conceptual view conceptuality is essentially subjective, only in this way could it also be objective.


xv Ethics also thereby becomes essentially subjective, hence the need in any situational assessment of the ethics of one's actions (such as the legal system) motives and intentions become necessary, whereas under the moral law motive and intention were irrelevant.


xvi This invention of the conceptual stance via the Subject is the original experience of metaphysics. The posited unity of the Subject is also the root of the metaphysical demand for a unitary origin as a necessary part of explanation.


xvii The conceptual is of necessity one sided in its view, resulting in inherent abstraction in its understanding. The 'Notion' in Hegel that results from the overcoming of one sided conceptualization thereby makes possible the understanding of the concrete. In terms of ethics this both concretizes the situation and permits a simultaneous view of options rather than an oscillation between them.


xviii The options available within a given situation are always the already-projected possibilities open within the situational horizon. The act of projection itself potentiates specific possibilities, simultaneously rendering others inaccessible. Unless those potentials are actualized they can be reprojected as inaccessible possibilities when different possibilities are potentiated.

Why absolute knowing is not 'knowledge', and why every 'fact' is an illusion.

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An Answer to a (Rhetorical) Question from Zizek

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Science as Imaginative Projection.

Each science begins from an imaginative projection of beings as a whole and stakes its claim to a specific region of beings. The projection of the World is always Self-overreaching. This projection may be philosophical as mathematical, as in the case of the 'modern' natural sciences, or as experiential as in Aristotle, or in some other manner. Only to the degree that science is projected philosophically does it amount to more than a collection of sundry techniques.

The metaphysical projection of the 'universe' originated in the notion of the 'true', constantly present and unchanging nature of a reality that underlay all appearances. As part of the Reformation, this 'true' world as universe became limited to mathematical projection only. This move was neither scientific nor philosophical, but religio-political in nature.


The initial projection is not simply the milieu in which specific theories within the sciences appear, but determines the 'facts' that dispute with or corroborate those theories. Such 'facts' remain appearances interpreted already within an explicit or implicit projection of beings as a whole. The circularity of theory creation and data interpretation is founded on the imaginative projection.

In terms of the mathematical projection, physics is posited as the basic science. However the initial projection, itself conceptual, is driven by the conceptual development of tools through technology. Rather than driving technology, 'modern' natural science is inherently an accounting-for beings (facts as technologically interpreted) in the manner and mode in which they have already been revealed and made to appear by technology. Thus the actual base science within the modern period is and continues to be accounting as accounting-for.

In the sense that physics and chemistry maintain explanatory power in their accounting-for specific results can be judged within the bounds of the metaphysical projection, reduced as it is to a projection of measurability only.

Taxonomic empirical studies such as zoology are based solely on the classificatory nature of technological enframing. On the basis of accounting-for they appear as mere inventory-counting.

Studies such as archaeology and anthropology amount to no more than an imaginative form of tourism unless they are utilized as techniques within the science of history.

Why "Christian Science" is a Redundant Term

Put simply, Christianity projects a fictional reality based on assumptions (ideology) that themselves have their foundation in the specifically Christian description of the theos. Science, that is, modern mathematical science, as opposed to other forms of knowledge acquisition, measures that projection of reality and no other. Western science is thus by definition ontotheological Christian science.

'Scientific atheists', or secular humanists, or whatever their current favoured self-description happens to be, both assume the Christian theos and deny it simultaneously. The founding assumptions of science have no basis without the specifically Christian projection of the nature of the theos, mathematical projection has no justification in terms of believing it describes reality, nor do theories or the experiments designed to justify them have any meaning in terms of describing reality. They measure and describe the projection of reality they began with, which is inherently a Christian projection.

Were a non-believer) to deny the possibility of a being that has the attributes of the Christian theos in a non-contradictory manner (an a-theist has by definition accepted the theist assumptions, and merely calculated the number of existent theos to zero - a calculation that affects nothing of consequence since the assumptions about the theos remain intact), that non-believer would have to also abandon the assumptions that arise from it and have no alternative justification, such as:

• the privileged vantage point (and with it privilege in general)


• the notion that a concept is anything more than an abstract fiction


• the possibility of projecting "reality as a whole" either imaginatively or (which comes down to the same thing) mathematically


• the belief that theory is anything more than a convenient fiction that under certain circumstances can roughly predict behaviour


• the belief that an experiment can demonstrate anything universal.

The result? All of the tenets and methods of post-Cartesian science must be abandoned along with any faith that the results of those methods demonstrate anything other than that theory predicts and experiment demonstrates what was always implicit in the initial, fictional, and inherently Christian mathematical projection.

This ideological projection is, in fact, the common sense world as most westerners experience it. The question that poses itself, at this point, is whether an experience of reality that does not require ideology (belief, faith) is possible. The way that self-consciousness experiences itself and reality inherently requires ideology due to its hermeneutic basis. But is there a demonstrated experience of reality that both includes the experience of self-consciousness, while going beyond it in a manner where ideology becomes irrelevant? While such an experience has been explicitly described by a good number of people, to those who have not themselves experienced it at best one can demonstrate its possibility, due simply to the limitations of self-conscious conceptual thinking.

Why Heidegger appears difficult ...

"If you find yourself making sense of Heidegger by relating what he's discussing with concepts from another philosopher, you're mistaken. Heidegger understands things in a different way, so the challenge is to discover how to think along with him. The difficulty isn't that his way of thinking is particularly complicated, but that it is different."

- Quoted from http://enowning.blogspot.com, commenting on the book "
Heidegger's Later Writings
A Reader's Guide. Lee Braver, London, Continuum, 2009."

Nevajay I. - How is it Possible to Conceive Being in Science

Nevajay I. - How is it Possible to Conceive Being in Science




The above link is an interesting essay on an interesting question. While science requires an understanding of Being in order to justify itself and its work, it avoids this question itself and more and more tries to discredit the work done as being irrelevant to the scientific enterprise.




As I am currently working on the inapplicability of the reductionism inherent in the methodologies of the natural sciences to the human being, and the resultant failure of Sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology, and Neuropsychology to achieve anything close to the sometimes outrageous claims made for these endeavours, the loss of their supposed subject matter by their methodology, and the resulting speculative and inherently biased nature of their 'findings' is of real concern to me in terms of the ease with which it can be misused by 'sciencists' who view science in ideological and religious terms.