> Much of what goes for "spirituality" today is an
> effort to retrieve premodern metaphors. But this is not postmodernism which
> in its refusal of the universal and the mechanical seems fundamentally open
> to whatever comes in the future, contrary to the modern impulse through
> science, which was(is) to control it.
I am not convinced that it is productive to put science, as such, in
the "modern" camp. There are at least two ways to view "control" as
manifest in science: as a kind of pragmatism -- science is whatever
consistently "works" -- or as an attempt to construct an overarching
world view. It is my impression that the latter -- with its
imperatives for "unified theories" and its inability to permanently accept,
as equally correct, multiple paradigms for viewing the same phenomenon
-- is increasingly steered away from by the scienists themselves.
My perception is that there is now within science a considerable drift towards
pluralism and towards a tolerance for multiplicities of "local" explanations
which effect a "covering" of the territory without forming a unified
intellectual structure.
- malgosia
------------------
> effort to retrieve premodern metaphors. But this is not postmodernism which
> in its refusal of the universal and the mechanical seems fundamentally open
> to whatever comes in the future, contrary to the modern impulse through
> science, which was(is) to control it.
I am not convinced that it is productive to put science, as such, in
the "modern" camp. There are at least two ways to view "control" as
manifest in science: as a kind of pragmatism -- science is whatever
consistently "works" -- or as an attempt to construct an overarching
world view. It is my impression that the latter -- with its
imperatives for "unified theories" and its inability to permanently accept,
as equally correct, multiple paradigms for viewing the same phenomenon
-- is increasingly steered away from by the scienists themselves.
My perception is that there is now within science a considerable drift towards
pluralism and towards a tolerance for multiplicities of "local" explanations
which effect a "covering" of the territory without forming a unified
intellectual structure.
- malgosia
------------------