Humanity first--Science second

[coberst]

Humanity first—Science second

The scientific method has made MAN INTO A CIPHER. We had created a science that has become a Science; we have created a monster that can be spelled with a capital “S. Women and men served best when they were hidden, unobserved behind the tubes and belts. Newton’s method demanded an observer who was inconspicuous and replaceable by a machine whenever possible. The laws governing the movement of the spheres where number one; humanity was the machine’s servant.

The Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth century, began with a belief; the belief “that nature was kind and good. After the Lisbon earthquake and resulting fire there precipitated a reexamination. While others succumbed to despair Rousseau optimistically proposed an ideal; Liberty had to be the goal of all institutions. It was to be a well-defined ideal, “a model of man. Morality must be a human design forming “a secular map for human moral action.

Rousseau was offering “the Science of Society something great, unprecedented—just what it needed: an ideal type of man¦it was holistic, spiritual, nonreductive, descriptive, phenomenal¦to describe man taken as a total thinking, feeling, free agent. Rousseau showed that morality could be designed by woman and man in accordance to an ideal created by them. Rousseau determined that the “science of man could have meaning only as “an active ideal-type science.

Newtonian science left little room of such an idealistic model. It propounded a science of Science; the scientific method made man into a cipher, which served best when served lest. Rousseau pushed back; make humanity first and science second. When humanity is placed first “Existence is the thing—Man—the mass of men—Humanity; human music not the music of the spheres, that’s what interests man, the man of flesh and blood.

The scientific method has made man into a cipher. Women and men served best when they were hidden, unobserved behind the tubes and belts. Newton’s method demanded an observer who was inconspicuous and replaceable by a machine whenever possible. The laws governing the movement of the spheres where number one; humanity was the machine’s servant.

The seventeenth century Enlightenment determined that knowledge should be controlled based upon the needs of humanity. The spirit of the age demanded a science of man that could run parallel with Newtonian science of objects. The judgment of this age was that mechanistic Science was morally unedifying. The Age of Enlightenment rediscovered the concept of alienation as it applied to women and men. Humanity became alienated from their nature by the Science of science. Subjects were deprived of their subjectivity in servitude to machines.

The Enlightenment gave us a science worthy of men and women, a subjective science, a science of human value and not a neutral science of machines. What are the greatest gifts for mankind, if not those that point the way to the maximization of liberation of human creative energies?