The Principle of Objectivation

Nine years ago I put forward two general principles that form the basis of the scientific method, the principle of the understandability of nature, and the principle of objectivation.

Since then I have touched on this matter now and again, last time in my little book Nature and the Greeks. I I wish to deal here in detail with the second one, the objectivation.

Some people seemed to think that my intention was to lay down the fundamental principles which ought to be at the basis of scientific method or at least which justly and rightly are at the basis of science and ought to be kept at all cost.

Far from this, I only maintained and maintain that they are - and, by the way, as an inheritance from the ancient Greeks, from whom all our Western science and scientific thought has originated.

The misunderstanding is not very astonishing. If you hear a scientist pronounce basic principles of science, stressing two of them as particularly fundamental and of old standing, it is natural to think that he is at least strongly in favour of them and wishes to impose them. But on the other hand, you see, science never imposes anything, science states.

Science aims at nothing but making true and adequate statements about its object. The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists. In the present case the object is science itself, as it has developed and has become and at present is, not as it ought to be or ought to develop in future.

Principle 1. ‘Nature can be understood’

This stems from the Milesian School, the physiologoi.

Since then it has remained untouched, though perhaps not always uncontaminated.

The present line in physics is possibly a quite serious contamination. The uncertainty principle, the alleged lack of strict causal connection in nature, may represent a step away from it, a partial abandonment.

It would be interesting to discuss this, but I set my heart here on discussing the other principle, that which I called objectivation.

By this I mean the thing that is also frequently called the ‘hypothesis of the real world’ around us. I maintain that it amounts to a certain simplification which we adopt in order to master the infinitely intricate problem of nature.

Without being aware of it and without being rigorously systematic about it, we exclude the Subject of Cognizance from the domain of nature that we endeavour to understand.

We step with our own person back into the part of an onlooker who does not belong to the world, which by this very procedure becomes an objective world. This device is veiled by the following two circumstances.

1. My own body (to which my mental activity is so very directly and intimately linked) forms part of the object (the real world around me) that I construct out of my sensations, perceptions and memories.

2. The bodies of other people form part of this objective world.

I have very good reasons for believing that these other bodies are also linked up with, or are, as it were, the seats of spheres of consciousness.

I can have no reasonable doubt about the existence or some kind of actualness of these foreign spheres of consciousness, yet I have absolutely no direct subjective access to any of them.

Hence I am inclined to take them as something objective, as forming part of the real world around me. Moreover, since there is no distinction between myself and others, but on the contrary full symmetry for all intents and purposes, I conclude that I myself also form part of this real material world around me.

I so to speak put my own sentient self (which had constructed this world as a mental product) back into it - with the pandemonium of disastrous logical consequences that flow from the aforesaid chain of faulty conclusions. We shall point them out one by one; for the moment let me just mention the two most blatant antinomies due to our awareness of the fact that a moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role ofa non-concerned observer.

The first of these antinomies is the astonishment at finding our world picture ‘colourless, cold, mute’. Colour and sound, hot and cold are our immediate sensations; small wonder that they are lacking in a world model from which we have removed our own mental person.

The second is our fruitless quest for the place where mind acts on matter or vice-versa, so well known from Sir Charles Sherrington’s honest search, magnificently expounded in Man on his Nature.

The material world has only been constructed at the price of taking the self, that is, mind, out of it, removing it; mind is not part of it; obviously, therefore, it can neither act on it nor be acted on by any of its parts.

(This was stated in a very brief and clear sentence by Spinoza, see p. 122.)

I wish to go into more detail about some of the points I have made.

First let me quote a passage from a paper ofC.G. Jung which has gratified me because it stresses the same point in quite a different context, albeit in a strongly vituperative fashion.

While I continue to regard the removal of the Subject of Cognizance from the objective world picture as the high price paid for a fairly satisfactory picture, for the time being, Jung goes further and blames us for paying this ransom from an inextricably difficult situation. He says:

All science (WissenschaJt) however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so.

The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence.

Of course Jung is quite right.

As a psychologist, he is much more sensitive to the initial gambit in question than a physicist or a physiologist.

Yet I would say that a rapid withdrawal from the position held for over 2,000 years is dangerous. We may lose everything without gaining more than some freedom in a special - though very important - domain. But here the problem is set.

The relatively new science of psychology imperatively demands living-space, it makes it unavoidable to reconsider the initial gambit. This is a hard task, we shall not settle it here and now, we must be content at having pointed it out.

The psychologist Jung complained about the exclusion of the mind, the neglect of the soul in our world picture.

I should now like to adduce in contrast, or perhaps rather as a supplement, some quotations of eminent representatives of the older and humbler sciences of physics and physiology, just stating the fact that ’the world of science’ has become so horribly objective as to leave no room for the mind and its immediate sensations.

Some readers may remember A.S. Eddington’s ’two writing desks’; one is the familiar old piece of furniture at which he is seated, resting his arms on it, the other is the scientific physical body which not only lacks all and every sensual qualities but in addition is riddled with holes; by far the greatest part of it is empty space, just nothingness, inter- spersed with innumerable tiny specks of something, the electrons and the nuclei whirling around, but always separated by distances at least 100,000 times their own size.