Deep Science

     The maps produced by modern materialistic Scientism leave all the questions that really matter unanswered; more than that, they deny the validity of the questions. The situation was desperate enough in my youth half a century ago; it is even worse now because the ever more rigorous application of the scientific method to all subjects and disciplines has destroyed even the last remnants of ancient wisdom — at least in the Western world. It is being loudly proclaimed in the name of scientific objectivity that "values and meanings are nothing but defence mechanisms and reaction formations"; that man is nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energises computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information." Sigmund Freud even assured us that "this alone I know with certainty, namely that men's value judgments are guided absolutely by their desire for happiness, and are therefore merely an attempt to bolster up their illusions by arguments."
     How is anyone to resist the pressure of such statements, made in the name of objective science, unless, like Maurice Nicoll, he suddenly receives "this inner revelation of knowing" that men who say such things, however learned they may be, know nothing about anything that really matters? People are asking for bread and they are being given stones. They beg for advice about what they should do "to be saved," and they are told that the idea of salvation has no intelligible content and is nothing but an infantile neurosis. They long for guidance about how to live as responsible human beings, and they are told that they are machines, like computers, without free will and therefore without responsibility....
— E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, pp. 4-5.

     Our minds were made to know, and they "flourish" — no one has said this better than Aristotle — when they work meaningfully at that function. They need not be overweening nor claim omniscience; indeed, one of the important things they can know is their place. But that place exists, and it is not confined to the laboratory. To see, as E.F. Schumacher reminded us shortly before his death, that "only those questions which cannot be answered with 'precision' have any real significance" is the first step toward knowledge about these questions themselves.
     The most unnoticed reason for current skepticism is our assumption that earlier ages were mistaken. If their outlooks were erroneous, it stands to reason that ensuing eras will show ours to be mistaken too; so runs the argument, which is so taken for granted that it is seldom even voiced. But if we could see that our forebears were not mistaken — they just erred in details, but not in their basic surmises, which were so much alike that in Forgotten Truths I referred to them as "the human unanimity" — a major impediment to confidence in our global understandings would be to separate the reliability of our knowledge from questions of omniscience, to counter the suspicion that if we cannot know everything, what we do know must be tainted. I need not know the position of San Francisco relative to everything in the universe, much less what space and position finally mean, to be certain that, given the present position of our planet's poles, it lies predominantly west of Syracuse....
— Huston Smith, from "Beyond the Modern Western Mind-set," in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, p. 150.

....vast energies are directed to the study of animals in the hope that this will contribute to the understanding of human beings. This is like studying physics in the hope of learning biology. Since higher forms contain the lower, something about the higher can indeed be learned from studying the lower — everything, in fact, except what makes it higher. To think of human beings as "naked apes" bespeaks an entire approach, one that turns its back on man's distinctive essence. It is as if it were suddenly to occur to dogs that they might get further if they thought of themselves as "barking cabbages."
     The situation invites such satire, which in this instance is drawn from E.F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed. In that book the author arranges Aristotle's "four kingdoms" in an inverted pyramid that reads from the bottom up as follows:

human: matter + life + consciousness + SELF-AWARENESS
           animal: matter + life + CONSCIOUSNESS
                       plant: matter + LIFE
                              MATTER

The capitalized words with which each line ends denote the different substances or powers I have spoken of. All of these save matter are invisible — no one has ever seen life or consciousness or self-awareness — and are therefore beyond the range of science, yet it is obviously in these higher registers that our lives are lived.  Or better, as all our thoughts, emotions, feelings, imaginations, reveries. dreams, fantasies are woven of life, consciousness, and self-awareness, this latter triumverate is what we essentially are. And they are what values are as well, we can add to get us back to the point with which this section is basically concerned. I have conceded along the way that science's inability to deal with values does not prove that a value-competent epistemology is possible. But we shall never know whether it is or not until we accord life, consciousness, and self-awareness autonomous status, meaning by this, epistemologically, that they must be understood in their own right, as having their own properties and principles which instruments tailored to other things cannot probe; and ontologically, that they do not depend on the physical bodies that sometimes "house" them. If this ontological point sounds radical in saying right out loud that there are things that are not only invisible but without material components entirely, it at least brings into the open how far post-modern ontology is removed from where it needs to be. For until the value domain is respected in the way that science respects nature, deeming it worthy of infinite attention, it is naive to think that values will show us their deep laws. And — this final point is the one that current value discussions have yet to take into account, as President Muller's otherwise admirable statement illustrates — this full respect will not be forthcoming until the value domain (which to physical eyes, remember, is invisible) is accorded autonomy on a par with that of nature.
— Huston Smith, from "Checkpoints," in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, p. 166.