THE DESIRE TO EXPLAIN EVERYTHING AND UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING HAS SULLIED
THE PURITY OF OUR SOULS AND TAKEN HEAVEN FROM OUR EYES. A.C.A. von
Eschenmayer, German Romantic
In an effort to redeem myself, this post will back away from the tangle
of debate and take a fresh new approch. I'll step back from the details
of our discussions and address several inter-related issues as they
appear in an historical movement called ROMANTIC NATURAL SCIENCE.
Romantic Natural Science ( RNS from now on) is a movement I should have
learned about in school, but I only recently discovered it while
researching for this forum. Like a lot of material out there, I quickly
became convinced that Pirsig knew about these thinkers even if he never
went into detail or mentioned their names. The similarities were just
too obvious to be ignored.
CONTEXT AND GENERAL DESCRIPTION
Please forgive me if this is old news, but it was new to me and so its
easy to imagine there are others who are unfamiliar with RNS. We're
talking about a movement that occured almost exactly two centuries ago
and only lasted a few years. To say it lasted for a generation would be
streaching it out a bit. It was never really a dominant view, but it has
never really gone away either.
There was a wider and longer-lasting Romantic movement at the time, and
RNS was certainly related to it, but the movement was specifically
focused on issues related to science, as the name implies. More
specifically, they were concerned with the relationship between physics
and metaphysics, the relationship between science and society, science
and history, science and art, science and religion. Generally speaking
RNS was interested in the relationship between science and human needs.
It was a reaction against Positivistic science, which dominated the
scene at the time. The Romantic Natural Scientists regarded Positivism
as de-humanizing, cold and abstract, morally aimless and they thought it
would destroy the connection between nature and ourselves.
HOW PIRSIGIAN IS THAT?
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling is considered the central figure in
this movement, so I have to mention him. He said, "what takes place in
nature must be explained from the active and mobile principles which lie
within it." He viewed the actions in nature not as a matter of cause and
effect, but rather as the interaction of different inherent "principles"
or "potencies", which very much reminds me of Pirsig's "B values
precondition A", where "values" replaces "cause and effect". He even
divided nature into three different realms or layers, which very much
resemble Pirsig's levels. One can even see Heisenberg's "pattern of
propablities". Clearly, these are similar metaphors because Schelling,
Pirsig and the scientist are all talking about the same thing; they're
getting at the nature of nature.
Most astonishing of all, Schelling imagined an original dualism that was
very much like Pirsig's. Instead of Dynamic and static, he called it
natura naturans and natura naturata, which can be translated as the
tendency to EVOLVE and the tendency to PRESERVE. Or as Pirsig put it at
the end of chapter 11, "Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot
grow. Without static Quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed".
And he imagined an underlying unity wherein nature is a finite
reflection of the infinite, a variation and differentiation of the
original undifferentiated reality. Like Pirsig he saw reality as
something that was evolving and growing. And they both recognized the
need for stability and preservation of what had already evolved. They
both saw the layers or "levels" of evolution in nature. They paint a
slighlty different picture of the same scene. I mean, Schelling's world
looks like the dance of Lila to me!
And along these lines, Steffens, who wrote THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION about
40 years before Darwin's theory was published. He was a pretty major
dude in the RNS movement. Steffens says, "SOCIETY derives from an
impulse which is identicle with the impulse towards formation in nature
generally." As you can see, his theory of evolution was not limited to
biology. He's saying that nature and society were formed by the same
process, very much like Pirsig. The MOQ's 4 levels are discrete, yet
unified by the Quality that created and sustain them.
H. Steffens wrote, "Do you want to investigate nature? Then cast a
glance inwards and in the stages of spiritual formation it may be
granted to you to see the stages of natural development. Do you want to
know yourself? Investigate nature and your actions are those of the
Spirit there." Microcosm is a good word to describe this idea. Thou art
that. Inside and outside are identicle. And listen to Novalis, another
major figure in the RNS movement. He said, "In physics the phenomena
have long been torn from their context and their mutual relations are
not pursued. Any phenomenon is a link in an incalculable chain." You can
see these guys are scientists of a different sort. They insist on the
unity and inter-relatedness of all things. They are anti-reductionists.
And their complaints about Positivism bear a striking resemblance to
Pirsig's criticism of SOM and it's scientific objectivity.
More generally speaking, the movement tried to unite science with
practicle everyday reality in many different ways. As I've mentioned,
they were very interested in the connections between science and
society. They wanted science to be free of superstition and prejudice,
but they thought it was a grave mistake to divorce science from ideas,
religion, art, history and even politics. I think its easy to see the
Pirsigian spirit in this. Thinkers in the RNS movement were 200 years
too early, perhaps, and may have been more successful it they'd had the
MOQ as an intellectual tool.
Maybe I've already said too much about the RNS movement. The main
purpose is to show that they imagined reality in ways that are similar
to Pirsig's picture. We see something like the Dynamic/static split, the
levels of static patterns, the evolutionary premise is there too. But
most of all I'd like you to notice their impulse to connect science and
society. I think it is really the heart of the matter. And to do that we
have to leave the failed romantics behind and see what solution Pirsig
came up with to reconnect science with society. Or in more precisely
Pirsigian terms, we have to see how the MOQ replaces SOM's amoral
objectivity with something better. We have to discover how the MOQ cures
the terrible loneliness and estrangement that goes with objectivity.
The short answer is social level mediation. Social level mediation
doesn't seem like much of an answer. Maybe its too easy to think of it
as "passing muster with the Jones" or "playing well in Peoria". But
seen in the larger MOQ context, social level mediation reconnects
science and society, cures the alienation, dissolves the mind body
problem and makes science more human and moral.
Social level mediation solves many of the problems the RNS thinkers
couldn't quite solve. I'm pretty sure the idea that social values and
structures are an entire level of reality in their own right is a new
concept. Pirsig didn't always see it. It was something he realized later
in his life, maybe even between the two books. But as you know he
imagines society as a kind of living organism, rather than just
collective human inventions or a collection of traditions. I won't beat
a dead horse, you know what the social level is, but what about social
level MEDIATION. What's that about?
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