Modern Materialism and the Reign of Science

“Everyone will tend to be rather the same … Alike. (…) a race of scientists and mathematicians, each dedicated to and all working for the greater glory of the super-civilization.” – Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

From “Astrology, the Manifesto ¼”
By Patrice Guinard

“Everyone will tend to be rather the same … Alike. 

(…) a race of scientists and mathematicians, 

each dedicated to and all working for 

the greater glory of the super-civilization.” 

-Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Modern materialism is that state of mind engendered by the hypertrophy of the mental faculties, by the invasive presence of mechanized technology, by the obsession with understanding reality by means of the skylight of “reason with a small r,” and by the consequent shrinking of our existential and emotional horizons. In the modern technopoly, it has gone out of fashion to formulate synthetic judgments (Kant) be they a priori or a posteriori. Whatever is not “scientific” is not considered to be knowledge, but rather literature. Experimental reason, which reigns as absolute master, does not seek to understand what is, but rather to describe and explain what operates. The scientific agenda is knowledge raised upon the foundation of a particular ability. It does not respond to the “why,” but rather, to the “how.”

It jettisons important metaphysical questions, which have lost all meaning within the context of the processes of science. The technosciences do not explore the foundations and the principles of their reality. They do not even respond to the questions raised by their own results, such as the question of physical constants (the speed of light, the charge of the electron, the constant of gravity, etc.) [15] 

From a metaphysical point of view: “Scientific knowledge of nature provides (…) no effectively illuminating knowledge about nature, no ultimate knowledge.” [16]  Judgment is enslaved to data and to the results of empirical techniques: “Simple sciences of facts form a simple humanity of fact.” [17]  Scientific knowledge is not only burdened with “facts,” it is burdened as well with its instruments of measurement and its system of experimentation. The instrumental approach was born at the beginning of the 17th century. “Before 1590, the repertoire of instruments used in the physical sciences was limited to those used for astronomical observation.

In the following hundred years one observes the introduction and use of the telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the barometer, the air pump, the indicator of electric charge, and a number of other experimental apparatuses (…) In less than a century the physical sciences became instrument-based.” [18]  This technological revolution led to the formulation of objects calculated, measured and controlled by instruments the underlying reality of which remains outside awareness.

It was analysis of the function of the steam engine which led Sadi Carnot to the formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It was use of the telescope which led Galileo to the discovery of the moons of Jupiter. It was not simply a matter of looking through the telescope; he had to adjust his way of looking to the telescope. As Bachelard puts it, “instruments are simply materialized theories.” [19] 

Techno-scientific practice codifies instrumental operations. Max Horkheimer points out the dangers of the instrumentalization of reason within a technological and technocratic society: the use of technical means with the goal of maximum efficiency and without care for the ends, the reduction of human action to the rationally planned, and the unlimited extension of technical power over things and over reified individuals. [20]