by
Damien F. Mackey
“Universities have drifted dangerously towards utility,
collapsing into being mere technical institutes”.
Dr. Gavin Ardley
Gavin Ardley’s Marvellous Perception of
the Nature of the Modern Sciences
This, by far my favourite book on the philosophy of modern sciences,
I have found to be highly enlightening with its explanation of the
clear distinction between science and philosophy – a distinction that
is becoming more and more blurred with the passing of time.
Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950) is available on-line (for example at):
https://brightmorningstar-amaic.blogspot.com/2010/06/gavin-ardleys-book-aqunas-and-kant.html
Chapter XVIII is the crucial one, for it is there that Gavin Ardley, following an insight from Immanuel Kant, puts his finger right on the nature of the sciences, or what the modern scientist is actually doing.
Whilst the precise realisation of this had escaped some of the most brilliant philosophers of science, it had not escaped Kant – who, however, then managed to bury this gem of insight under a mountain of pseudo metaphysics.
Other minds went close to discovering the secret, but failed to recognize the Procrustean nature of modern science, that is, the active imposition of laws upon nature, rather than, as is generally imagined, the reading of laws in nature.
Dr. Ardley will finally sum up his findings in this splendid piece (but one will definitely need to read his chapter XVIII):
Chapter XXI
THE END OF THE ROAD
The solution to the problem is now before us. The quest of the modern cosmologist for a satisfactory harmony of Thomism with post-Galilean physical science is nearing its goal.
The bifurcation made by the Procrustean interpretation of physics rescues the dualist theory from the impasse in which it has been struggling. With our discussion of voluntary active phenomenalism in Ch. XVIII in view, we can see precisely how there come to be two orders, each autonomous. The Scholastic metaphysician functions in one order, the modern physicist in the other, and there is no immediate link whatever between them. There is a clean divorce between the ontological reality, and the physical laws and properties which belong to the categorial order.
The link between the physical laws and the underlying causes is no longer of the first remove but of the second. The fundamental dictum of Wittgenstein is our guide here. [See p. 98.]: that a law of physics tells us nothing about the world, but only that it applies in the way in which in fact it does apply, tells us something about the world.
This all-important consequence of the Procrustean character of modern physics provides the solution to Phillips’ difficulty. [See p. 224. The difficulty of course arises from the failure to distinguish the physicists’ data from phenomena. We are careful to distinguish them.] It furnishes the essential supplement to the otherwise admirable doctrines of O’Rahilly and Maritain.
This doctrine of the two orders, soundly based, is very much more satisfactory than such a palliative as hylosystemism.
Now we can retain the Thomist doctrine in all its purity, but we have added to it another chapter, so that the post-Renaissance physical science may at last find a home in the ample structure of the philosophia perennis.
It is from Immanuel Kant that this doctrine of the nature of modern physics ultimately derives. Scholastics thus owe to Kant the recognition that he, albeit unwittingly, has made one of the greatest contributions to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas.
It is commonly stated that St. Thomas showed that there is no contradiction between faith and profane science. This is true of sciences of the real. But for sciences of the categorial we must look also to Kant. It is St. Thomas and Kant between them who have shown that there is no contradiction possible between faith and any profane science.
Let us now summarise the contents of these chapters.
The Bellarmine dichotomy between what actually is the case, and what gives the most satisfactory empirical explanation, has all along been the basic contention of the dualist philosophers. But the absence hitherto of an adequate explanation of how there can be these two separate orders has been the great stumbling block. It has driven other Scholastic philosophers virtually to abandon the dichotomy and try to work out a unitary theory. This has led to such a scheme as hylosystemism with its fundamental distortions of Thomism.
We have shown how illusory such unitary schemes must be, founded as they are on the shifting sands of current physical theories.
On the other hand we have supplied the missing explanation in the dualist theory. By pointing out the Procrustean categorial nature of modern physics, we have established its autonomy on a satisfactory basis. We have shown how the two orders can exist side by side without clashing. Hence the Thomist structure needs no alterations but only the extension of a wing to the house.
We have traced in outline the slow recognition by Scholastic philosophers of the part played by artifacts, or entia rationis, call them what we will, in the new physical learning which has been developing since the 17th century.
The time has now come for this recognition to be extended to a wider field than merely that of modern physics. We have seen in this work how systems of artifacts are to be found in a great variety of human pursuits. In nearly all our activities we avail ourselves of their assistance; we find at almost every turn a fabric woven of myths. Such a fabric is necessary to facilitate our passage through the world. But we must never lose sight of the fact that it is only myths and phantoms. We should never allow ourselves to be enslaved by our own creations: there are no bonds more insidious than those we impose on ourselves.
Behind the shadowy world we have created to be our servant, there lies the real world. A phantom is but a sorry companion to any man. It is the real world, the world which ever is, to which we must turn our eyes, and from which comes our strength.
[End of quote]
Christopher Dawson summed it up
“If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind,
they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things. They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is
the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile”.
Christopher Dawson
The insightful words of Christopher Dawson (d. 1970) here seem to me closely to echo the sentiments of Dr. Gavin Ardley, in his masterpiece, Aquinas and Kant. The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950), who wrote in his Chapter III (“The Nature of Modern Physics”):
The Classical, or Realist, Theory of Modern Physics
The classical writers on scientific method, men like John Stuart Mill, and the English empiricists generally, took it for granted that modern physics was, like ancient physics, endeavouring to discover the nature and functioning of the physical world about us. Only, they believed, it was doing it much more successfully than was the ancient and medieval physics.
They saw the change that came over physics in the days of Galileo as a change occasioned by increased attention to observation and experiment. They accused the Aristotelians of paying too little attention to observation and too much to a priori notions. Liberation from the medieval straight-jacket, and careful experiment and measurement, coupled with the powerful instrument of mathematics, was believed to be the reason for the great strides forward in physical science from Galileo onward.
Physics was thus regarded as a truly empirical science. The physicist was supposed to observe uniformities in Nature and to generalise these into laws.
Some varied this a little by pointing out that physicists take hypotheses and then put them to the test of experiment.
If experiment verifies the hypothesis then we have discovered a valid law or theory of physics. By these means, it was believed, were discovered such laws and principles as Newton’s Laws of Motion and the Law of Universal Gravitation, the Conservation of Energy, the Wave Theory of Light, the Atomic Theory of Matter, and so on.
Physics was thus held by these philosophers and logicians to be slowly wresting out the secrets of Nature, to be steadily unfolding before us the constitution of the physical world. The uniformity of Nature is revealed in the true laws of physics, and renders them immutable.
Physics is subject at every turn to the test of experiment, and anyone can upset a theory simply by showing that some observation is contrary to it. Thus physics abhors authority and anything that smacks of the a priori. Consequently the modern physicist reviles the old Aristotelian physicist who, he believes, was bound hand and foot by authority and a priori notions.
By this slow empirical advance, it was believed, there was built up this great edifice of modern physics; an edifice which today occupies one of the most prominent positions in our intellectual horizon, while in practical applications it has transformed daily life by surrounding us with a countless multiplicity of instruments and amenities.
Although the classical empiricist logicians were not all agreed on what was, precisely, the scientific method, yet on the general picture they were unanimous. [Footnote: See further Ch. XI, on Scientific Method.]
The Eddingtonian Theory
Nevertheless there has long been a minority which has held other views about the nature of physics and scientific method. In recent years these views have pushed their way more and more to the fore. The revolt has been rather tentative up to the present, but in this chapter we will extend it further and develop its consequences.
The John the Baptist of the Movement was Immanuel Kant. In more recent times the principles were revived by Poincaré.
[Footnote: Some account of the various transitional theories will be found in later chapters, notably in Ch. XVIII in the Section on Modern Physics and Scholastic Philosophy.] But the new interpretation has received its greatest impetus from the works of the late Professor Eddington, who gave a most elegant expression to what others had long been struggling to articulate. The new approach is based on the mode of acquiring knowledge in experimental physics. It pays little attention to what the physicist says, but much attention to what he does. It looks away from the world to the activity of the physicist himself. To Eddington and his school of thought, the laws of physics are subjective, arbitrary, conventional, dogmatic, and authoritarian. This is, of course, precisely the reverse of the classical theory which believes the laws to be supremely objective. But the new theory holds that the laws of physics are not the laws of Nature but the laws of the physicists. The laws of physics are always true, not because they represent uniformities of Nature, but simply because the physicist never lets them be untrue.
Newton wrote in the Principia that ‘Nature is pleased with simplicity and affects not the pomp of superfluous causes’. The classical empiricist logician would heartily endorse this dictum, although he might be puzzled if asked how he knew it to be true. But the alternative view would insist that it is not Nature which is pleased with simplicity, but the physicist. Whether Nature is pleased with simplicity or not we cannot tell, at least not within the province of experimental science. But we know that the physicist is pleased with simplicity and will exercise all his ingenuity to achieve it. The simplicity of the laws of physics, then, tells us much about the physicist, but nothing immediately about Nature.
This reorientation towards physics can be expressed very neatly by using the parable of Procrustes, and saying that physics is a PROCRUSTEAN BED. Procrustes lived in ancient Greece. He was a brigand who terrorised Attica until finally he was vanquished by Theseus. Now Procrustes had a bed, and it was his practice to make travellers conform in length to that bed.
If they were too short he stretched them out until they fitted, and if they were too long he chopped of their legs until they were the right length.
This is a parable of what the physicist does with Nature. He makes Nature conform to what he wants, and having done so announces that he has discovered a law of Nature: namely that all travellers fit the bed. Hence it is that the laws of physics are always true. It is because the physicist makes Nature conform to them. He runs Nature out into moulds, so to speak. A law of physics is not something discovered in Nature, but something imposed upon Nature.
In brief, physics is a put-up job. The physicist puts it all in implicitly at the beginning, and then draws it out explicitly at the end. Physics is manufactured, not discovered. Eddington puts the matter in his own inimitable style. [Footnote: Eddington, A. S.: The Philosophy of Physical Science (Cambridge, 1939), p. 109.]
[End of quotes]
Christopher Dawson wrote, in Progress and Religion (Sheed and Ward, 1938, p. 236), concerning mathematics and the universe:
The rise of modern physics was closely connected with a transcendental view of the nature of mathematics derived from the Pythagorean and Platonic tradition. According to this view, God created the world in accordance with numerical harmonies, and consequently it is only by the science of number that it can be understood. ‘Just as the eye was made to see colours’, says Kepler, ‘and the ear to hear sounds, so the human mind was made to understand Quantity’. (Opera 1, 3).
And Galileo describes mathematics as the script in which God has written on the open book of the Universe. But this philosophy of mathematics which underlies the old science, requires a deity to guarantee its truth. If the laws of mathematics are simply the creation of the human mind, they are no infallible guide to the ultimate nature of things. They are a conventional technique which is no more based on the eternal laws of the universe than is the number of degrees in a circle or the number of yards in a mile. ….
Why is Modern Physics so Successful?
A reader queries:
“I did read one review of Ardley's book and the reviewer (who seemed sympathetic to the philosophia perennis) said that [Ardley] doesn't really answer the question as to why modern physics is so successful”.
This is the review to which the reader refers:
http://bjps.oxfordjournals.org/content/II/6/167.full.pdf
REVIEWS
Aquinas and Kant, Gavin Ardley, Longmans Green & Co., London, 1950.
Pp. x + 256. 18s.
THE author of this book is greatly perturbed about the ultimate basis of our knowledge of the universe, and the conflicting character of modern thought in philosophy and physics. And well he may be. The rise of Neo-Thomism in one form or another is a feature of our generation. No less marked, however, is the advance of theoretical physics associated with the names of Poincaré, Eddington, and one or two others of comparable calibre. Again, as Mr Ardley remarks, St Thomas Aquinas and Kant seem strange bedfellows indeed, as Aristotle and the Fathers were aforetime. Observing that the latter pair were eventually 'reconciled,' he believes that a corresponding state of bliss for the former couple is only a matter of time.
Kant's idea of a physicist was that of an extremely active person, by no means content to receive laws from nature, but perpetually engaged in the task of formulating laws of his own which he 'fastened' upon nature, and to which she was obliged to conform. All that is said about the Procrustean bed and the chopper is most apt, and indeed on this view, deserved.
Nevertheless, according to Mr Ardley, it is a grave error to imagine that this coercive technique is intrinsically necessary; it is merely a device to secure power for mankind.
Over against this stands metaphysics in serene detachment, ready as always to admit the practical advantages of ‘saving appearances,' whether in classical physics or in modern metrical technology, but claiming the absolute title to the possession of philosophical truth. Seldom has the precept 'between us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . .' been restated in starker form. Why, therefore, it is asked, are we in fact confronted with physics heaping triumph upon triumph in almost every department of twentieth-century life? Mr Ardley replies in effect that had a divergent system of 'categorisation' been set up, things might have worked out differently. This riposte is very disappointing, being nothing short of wholly irrelevant, since what we want to know is why physics, as commonly understood, should be any good at all.
No reasonable person has anything but reverence for the philosophia perennis, yet this book cannot be said to have helped to bring the natural sciences of to-day within its broad and generous frontiers. Unfortunately, too, Mr Ardley's style lacks attractiveness; it is rather that of a school-teacher admonishing an unwilling class, and underlining for them, as he goes along, what they are meant to learn by heart.
IAN RAWLINS
Introduction
That modern science and technology (centred around modern physics) have been stupendously successful no alert human being today would probably deny. And it is due to its stunning success in our modern world that we humans have tended to elevate “science” to the virtual status of ‘deity’. We, for all intents and purposes, idolise it.
Gavin Ardley, author of the book under consideration in this series, Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950), was not critical at all of the modern sciences as a legitimate human endeavour – a part of God’s invitation to man to “subdue the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Ardley’s Chapter XI: “The Quest for a Scientific Method” is relevant to this present article. Speaking of the early efforts to comprehend the methodology that was leading to such scientific success, Ardley wrote:
The great success of physical science in the post-Renaissance world led to much speculation about the secret of its success. It has been the general opinion that this secret must lie in some way in the method employed in the new sciences.
If we could discover precisely what this method is, and make it explicit, then, so it was thought, we should be able to use it more effectively, and, no doubt, extend its employment to even wider fields. Consequently ever since the 17th century much attention has been paid to the quest for this scientific method.
We have already considered Francis Bacon as the ‘politician’ of the new movement to extend man’s power over Nature (Ch. IV). Francis Bacon was also the author of one of the first attempted formulations of the method of the new science. He laid down rules which he believed would, if followed, lead automatically to our complete mastery over Nature. His method consisted in collecting and recording all available facts, performing all practicable experiments, and finally, by means of certain rules, making out connections between all the phenomena so observed.
However, this procedure or method, as laid down by Bacon, turns out on closer acquaintance to be barren. It is much too simple and naïve to meet the situation. Nature in fact is not nearly as simple and orderly as Bacon had supposed. The practising scientists went on developing their sciences along their own lines without reference to Bacon’s supposed automatic method.
[End of quote]
Dr. Ardley, who was both philosopher and scientist, far from reviling the “world of physics”, which he regarded as “a world of deep and abiding beauty”, was at pains, nonetheless, to explain just what kind of world it actually is, and - relevant to the question posed in this article - “why is it so successful?”:
Chapter III
THE NATURE OF MODERN PHYSICS
Physics and Nature
The world of modern physics is not the natural world.
It is a remote domain of artifacts more removed from the world of Nature than the worlds in which Mr Pickwick and Hamlet dwell. The world of physics is austere and exacting, but withal a world of deep and abiding beauty. It is this aesthetic quality, perhaps even more than the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity and the desire for power, which explains its hold on its exponents. The beauty of pure mathematics has been recognised at least since the days of Plato. Pure physics has this beauty too, and in addition an intangible quality peculiar to itself which is well known to those who have entered its inner temples. This, rather than the exploration of nature, must be the physicist’s apology.
But it may well be asked now: what is the relation between physics and Nature?
If physics dwells apart, how does it come into contact with Nature. And furthermore, it may be asked, why is it so successful?
In a general way, the solution of the first part of this question lies in the fact that the process of systematic experiment is selective and transforming. Hence it is that the transition is made from Nature to the abstract world, and vice versa. This is the link between the two worlds.
As regards the second question – why, if physics is an abstract and arbitrary system, is it so successful? – we might ask in return, what is the standard of success? How much more or less successful physics might have been had it been developed in different ways from the way it was in fact developed, we do not know.
If the net dragged through the world by the physicists had been quite different, the outcome might have been very different too. It may have been much more successful, or much less so. We have no standard of comparison for success, so the question is scarcely profitable.
In discussing success it may be helpful to compare together two different branches of physics. The classical mechanics as applied to the solar system was generally regarded as a dazzling success. But on the other end of the scale the theory of electromagnetics is regarded today by most students of the subject as being in a state of well-nigh hopeless confusion, although with experience it can be made to work moderately well. Evidently some wrong turning was made early in the development of this latter branch of physics, and with the root trouble, whatever it is, firmly entrenched, the subject appears to be growing in disorder and chaos rather than improving. Evidently it would be better to start afresh from the beginning and drag some quite different net through the world in this particular realm.
Such considerations as these should give us pause before we speak lightly of the ‘success’ of physical science.
A variant on this question Why if arbitrary then success? is to insist that if a law or theory enjoys success, then, in the same measure, it is probable that Nature is really like the situation envisaged by that law or theory. E.g. if the law of Gravitation is well established in physics, then there must really be this Gravitation in the world, and so on. In answer to this objection we cannot do better than quote the words of Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he propounds much the same doctrine concerning the laws of physics as we have in this chapter. In the course of a most penetrating discussion of the subject he remarks:
The fact that it can be described by Newtonian mechanics asserts nothing about the world; but this asserts something, namely, that it can be described in that particular way in which as matter of fact it is described. The fact, too, that it can be described more simply by one system of mechanics than by another says something about the world. [Tractatus, 6.342.]
If the laws of physics were really found in the world, then the laws would tell us something about the world. But if the laws of physics are superimposed on the world, then the laws themselves tell us nothing about the world. [Footnote: This incidentally provides the solution to the controversy which raged throughout the Middle Ages concerning the status of the various systems of astronomy. See Appendix.] Only the character of the particular description which we effect in terms of the super-imposed law has any bearing on the world. It is only in this second order manner that we make contact with the world. …. Hence there is no foundation for the assertion that in modern physics a law or theory, if successful, tells us what Nature is like.
This is a most important conclusion.
[End of quote]
Yes, the key issue is, as Ardley has put it, “what is the standard of success?”
In the writings of two recent popes, Benedict and the present pope, Francis - neither of whom could be accused of being anti-mathematics or anti-science (see below e.g. Benedict’s XVI “the magnificent mathematics of creation”) - one can discern the two orders about which Ardley has written, both legitimate, but with the higher order deserving of the more attention. Josef Ratzinger/Pope Benedict, writing in
has this to say about the limitations of modern science, of “functional truth”, and how the total pursuit (idolisation) of it can make one blind to ““truth” itself”:
….
Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world.
At this point, modern man is tempted to say: Creation has become intelligible to us through science. Indeed, Francis S. Collins, for example, who led the Human Genome Project, says with joyful astonishment: "The language of God was revealed" (The Language of God, p. 122). Indeed, in the magnificent mathematics of creation, which today we can read in the human genetic code, we recognize the language of God. But unfortunately not the whole language. The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself — who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong — this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness toward "truth" itself — toward the question of our real identity and purpose.
[End of quote]
Recently someone on TV remarked that “technology has made everything possible”. That it “has improved our health, provided us with a far better lifestyle, and can even bring about peace”. No one argues that science and technology have brought massive material, at least, benefits to our world. And, following Dr. Ardley (and having to disagree with his reviewer, Rawlins), one could say that perhaps it could have provided us with even greater benefits, here and there, if researchers had, say, ‘dragged some quite different net through the world in this particular realm’.
But has science and technology actually made our world a happier place in which to live?
And is there really a technologically-achieved peace?
No, because modern science has not within itself the capacity to bring a deeper peace.
That is apparent from Benedict’s comment above that a full immersion in the pursuit of “the functional truth about man” must inevitably lead to “an increasing blindness toward “truth” itself — toward the question of our real identity and purpose”.
Hence, the modern phenomenon of ‘identity crisis’, hence alienation, often leading to suicide.
Pope Francis has, I believe, come to the rescue with his blueprint for the modern world, Laudato Si’, which, by no means decrying the pursuit of genuine scientific endeavour, warns of excess. Sometimes, less is more.
Pope Francis puts modern ‘progress’ into a real perspective when he writes:
Pollution, waste and the throwaway culture
20. Some forms of pollution are part of people’s daily experience. Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths. People take sick, for example, from breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in cooking or heating. There is also pollution that affects everyone, caused by transport, industrial fumes, substances which contribute to the acidification of soil and water, fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and agrotoxins in general. Technology, which, linked to business interests, is presented as the only way of solving these problems, in fact proves incapable of seeing the mysterious network of relations between things and so sometimes solves one problem only to create others.
21. Account must also be taken of the pollution produced by residue, including dangerous waste present in different areas. Each year hundreds of millions of tons of waste are generated, much of it non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive, from homes and businesses, from construction and demolition sites, from clinical, electronic and industrial sources. The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth. In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish. Industrial waste and chemical products utilized in cities and agricultural areas can lead to bioaccumulation in the organisms of the local population, even when levels of toxins in those places are low. Frequently no measures are taken until after people’s health has been irreversibly affected.
22. These problems are closely linked to a throwaway culture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish. To cite one example, most of the paper we produce is thrown away and not recycled. It is hard for us to accept that the way natural ecosystems work is exemplary: plants synthesize nutrients which feed herbivores; these in turn become food for carnivores, which produce significant quantities of organic waste which give rise to new generations of plants. But our industrial system, at the end of its cycle of production and consumption, has not developed the capacity to absorb and reuse waste and by-products.
We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them. A serious consideration of this issue would be one way of counteracting the throwaway culture which affects the entire planet, but it must be said that only limited progress has been made in this regard.
[End of quote]
I have found some of what Pope Francis has to say in this Encyclical letter very Ardleian. This led me to write in my article:
‘For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing’.
(Luke 12:23)
https://www.academia.edu/13601104/_For_life_is_more_than_food_and_the_body_more_than_clothing_._Luke_12_23_
Quality Over Quantity
What appeals to me personally about the pope’s Laudato Si’ encyclical letter is the resonance I find in parts of it with my favourite book on the philosophy of science, Dr. Gavin Ardley’s Aquinas and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950). ….
Whereas the ancient sciences (scientiae) involved a study of actual reality, the more abstract modern sciences (e.g. theoretical physics), involve, as Immanuel Kant had rightly discerned, an active imposition of a priori concepts upon reality. In other words, these ‘sciences’ are largely artificial (or ‘categorial’) - their purpose being generally utilitarian.
Ardley tells of it (Ch. VI: Immanuel Kant):
Kant’s great contribution was to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well nigh unrecognised.
We may, in fact we must, refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of metaphysics.
But, putting the metaphysical experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle of our categorial activity. Later, in Ch. XVIII, we will see in more detail how this principle is essential to the modern development of the philosophia perennis.
Kant was truly the philosopher of the modern world when we look judiciously at his work. As a motto for the Kritik Kant actually quotes a passage from Francis Bacon in which is laid down the programme for the pursuit of human utility and power. [Footnote: The passage is quoted again in this work on [Ardley’s] p. 47.]
As we saw in Ch. IV, it was Bacon above all who gave articulate expression to the spirit behind the new science. Now we see that it was Kant who, for the first time, divined the nature of the new science. If Bacon was the politician of the new régime, Kant was its philosopher although a vastly over-ambitious one.
It appears to be this very sort of Baconian “régime” that pope Francis is currently challenging, at least, according to Stephen White’s estimation:
While much has been said about the pope’s embrace of the scientific evidence of climate change and the dangers it poses, the irony is that he addresses this crisis in a way that calls into question some of the oldest and most basic assumptions of the scientific paradigm.
Francis Bacon and René Descartes — two fathers of modern science in particular — would have shuddered at this encyclical. Bacon was a man of many talents — jurist, philosopher, essayist, lord chancellor of England — but he’s mostly remembered today as the father of the scientific method. He is also remembered for suggesting that nature ought to be “bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” Descartes, for his part, hoped that the new science he and men like Bacon were developing would make us, in his words, “masters and possessors of nature.”
At the very outset of the encyclical, before any mention of climate change or global warming, Pope Francis issues a challenge to the Baconian and Cartesian view, which sees the world as so much raw material to be used as we please. Neither Descartes nor Bacon is mentioned by name, but the reference is unmistakable. Pope Francis insists that humanity’s “irresponsible use and abuse” of creation has come about because we “have come to see ourselves as [the Earth’s] lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will.”
Not truth, but power lust, will be the prime motivation of these, the Earth’s “lords and masters”, or, as Ardley has put it, “not to know the world but to control it”:
What was needed was for someone to point out clearly the ‘otherness’ of post-Galilean physical science, i.e. the fact that it is, in a sense, cut off from the rest of the world, and is the creation of man himself. The new science has no metaphysical foundations and no metaphysical implications. Kant had the clue to this ‘otherness’ in the categorial theory, but he took the rest of the world with him in the course of the revolution and hence only succeeded in the end in missing the point.
Most people since then, rightly sceptical about Kant’s wholesale revolution, have been quite hostile to the Kantian system in general. Others, perhaps without realising it, have rewritten the revolution in their own terms, and thus have perpetuated Kant’s principal errors (as e.g. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).
A thorough sifting out of Kant has long been required in order to separate the gold from the dross.
….
Kant’s mistake was to think that the world had to be transformed to know it. The truth is that the world may be transformed, if we so dictate, and then it is not to know the world but to control it. ….
[End of quote]
I went on to muse about a possible Ardleian connection:
From what follows, I wonder if the pope - or at least White in his comments - may have read Ardley’s book. Dr. Ardley had (on p. 5) pointed out that there are two ways of going about the process of analyzing or dissecting something, depending on one’s purpose. And he well illustrated his point by comparing the practices of the anatomist and the butcher. When an anatomist dissects an animal, he traces out the real structure of the animal; he lays bare the veins, the nerves, the muscles, the organs, and so on. “He reveals the actual structure which is there before him waiting to be made manifest”. The butcher, on the other hand, is not concerned about the natural structure of the animal as he chops it up; he wants to cut up the carcass into joints suitable for domestic purposes. In his activities the butcher ruthlessly cleaves across the real structure laid bare so patiently by the anatomist. “The anatomist finds his structure, the butcher makes his”.
Thus White: “Put another way, Pope Francis insists that the material world isn’t just mere stuff to be dissected, studied, manipulated, and then packaged off to be sold into service of human wants and needs”. And again: “The utilitarian mindset that treats creation as so much “raw material to be hammered into useful shape” inevitably leads us to see human beings through the same distorted lens”.
White continues:
The pope repeatedly warns against the presumption that technological advances, in themselves, constitute real human progress. In a typical passage, he writes, “There is a growing awareness that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies elsewhere.” The pope writes critically of “irrational confidence in progress and human abilities.” He writes hopefully of a time when “we can finally leave behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress.”
Nevertheless:
This isn’t to say that Pope Francis is anti-technology or even, as some have suggested, anti-modern, but he is deeply critical of both our technological mindset and modernity’s utilitarian propensities. While he acknowledges with gratitude the benefits humanity has derived from modern technology, which has “remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings,” he also calls into question — forcefully — the idea that utility is the proper measure of our interaction with creation.
[End of quote]
There may be a better way of doing things in the pursuit of what pope Francis calls an “integral ecology [which] transcend[s] the language of mathematics and biology, and take[s] us to the heart of what it is to be human”.
A too rigid mathematics can make for a cruel master.
Gavin Ardley’s Obituary
[This Obituary of her father was kindly indicated to me by Gavin’s daughter, Elizabeth.
Taken from: http://prudentia.auckland.ac.nz/index.php/prudentia/article/view/783/739].
We received earlier this year the sad news of Gavin Ardley’s death on 12 March [1992?]. Among other achievements in his life, he was a founder of Prudentia, and devoted to its fortunes a great deal of energy and affection. He had also been a member of the Department of Philosophy in the University of Auckland for twenty five years, retiring in 1981. Since we announced his death briefly in our last number, several people have written to us, recording their sorrow and respect.
Dr Bruce Harris writes from Macquarie:
I first met Gavin Ardley in England, and then knew him as a colleague at Auckland for many years. It soon became apparent that Gavin had much in common with the Classics staff, particularly through his deep attachment to Plato and his love of teaching the Platonic text in the setting of Greek philosophy generally. He valued the study of ancient
thought not only for its inherent worth but as the source of those humane values he sought to practise in his own work as an academic. The intellectual history of the western world was for him a continuum from its ancient past, and his religious convictions were also closely linked with that history. His contributions to Prudentia reflected the breadth of his interests and his essential humanitas. He had only a limited sympathy with the linguistic philosophy fashionable in modern Philosophy departments, and would like to claim that it began as footnotes to Plato!
The journal began from conversations we had in the late sixties, springing from a feeling that the usual journals in our fields did not sufficiently encourage cross-disciplinary interests. It was launched on a shoe-string budget, dependent entirely on the good offices of Mr Mortimer of the University Bindery. It is good to see that its title has been retained
and that its scope is still wide — ‘the thought, literature, and history of the ancient world and their tradition’.
In these days of relative neglect of the humanities in universities (at least in funding), it is important that those working in ancient studies and the source of our whole western intellectual tradition be seen to present a united front. Gavin Ardley certainly adorned that tradition in Auckland.
Dr Dougal Blyth writes:
I knew Gavin only in the final years of his long teaching career at Auckland, when he supervised a research essay on Aristotle’s Metaphysics for me, and taught courses on Plato’s Laws and Republic, which I attended as part of my M.A. in 1979-1980. I was one of a small group of postgraduate students Gavin then had, including Hermann de Zocte, Paul Beech and Carl Page, among others.
Gavin’s method of teaching was leisurely, ordered, measured. He displayed in his own pedagogic manner the aversion to that ‘enthusiasm’, as he called it, which he thought so little of in passionate polemic. Among the scholarship on the importance of leisure in education and philosophy to which he directed our attention was a paper of his own on the role of play in Plato’s philosophy, and the balance to be had between the pedant and the boor (a very Aristotelian ideal). In teaching the Laws, he emphasized the appropriateness and significance, for the meaning of the dialogue, of its speakers and their context: old noblemen, with nothing better to do in the heat of the sun than to rest in the shade and discuss government; a conversation neither idle nor practical. Just such a conception seemed to govern the pace and direction of his readings from lecture notes and small group discussion, which form his postgraduate teaching took.
I found Gavin’s mode of direction of my independent work congenial, useful and, again, relaxed. In suggesting additions to my bibliography, he drew upon a wide reading knowledge beyond the confines of recent analytical criticism of Aristotle. He delicately elicited slightly more precise formulations of my points, indicating questions yet to be addressed, in a manner almost suggestive of the possibility that if one was so inclined, one might just as well overlook them. One day I was surprised to hear him encourage ‘the clash of ideas’; another to find him asleep in his office armchair.
After he retired, I saw Gavin relatively frequently about the campus and in the University Library, researching in the New Zealand and Pacific collection, during the few years before I left to study overseas. He certainly approved, from a distance, of my efforts with the classical tongues. I met him again when I returned on a visit in 1986. He walked more slowly and had more time to chat, quite willing to stop and hear about my intervening experiences and plans. His ever urbane yet humble manner, his cheery yet reserved demeanour, and his kind eye, along with a spirit seemingly embodying a model of gentlemanliness from another, more refined age, will remain as a cornerstone for me of my memories of those years as a student at the University of Auckland.
John Morton, Emeritus Professor of Zoology, wrote in the University News:
Born in 1915, Gavin Ardley graduated from Melbourne University in both physics and philosophy. For a spell he lectured in nuclear physics and studied the beta ray spectrum of Radium E. From war service in northern Australia, he went to Britain where he researched on Galileo. He came back in 1948 to teach science at Geelong Grammar School. 1954 to 1955 saw him back in Scotland as a master at Gordonstoun.
After the war Gavin had a year’s working spell in the Australian outback, moving about by railway jigger. This was an experience he was to value all his life. It was in the bush camps, with their assorted human company, that he determined his future should be in philosophy. This was to bring him to Auckland in 1957.
In a University where we could still easily get to know each other, Gavin Ardley was a colleague to be valued. He came to stand for some important things.
He’d have been wryly amused if told this. Yet he felt an intense privilege in belonging to the University. Drawing from the past capital of generosity and freedom, he believed we were also there to extend it. He knew how to use time unhurriedly. He’d have deplored nothing so much as crowded classes and syllabi, with students thinking themselves there to be crammed. Universities, he was one to say, ‘have drifted dangerously towards utility, collapsing into being mere technical institutes’. Right through the years Gavin was to take seriously the ties of friendship. As president of the Senior Common Room, in the old Pembridge days across Princes St, he did much to create its early bonds. In the University his personal links went well beyond his own discipline, spacious enough as philosophy (still with psychology and politics) must at first have been. But Gavin’s command also of science, history, theology, English literature, international politics was wide and impressive. With an acute, inquiring mind, there never seemed to be the astringence that would have made him a specialist or, in the modern research sense, a deep-sampler. More than analytic, his world view was reconciling, unfashionable for a philosopher as it might seem. ‘Today’, he once lamented, ‘world views are optional extras, a matter of personal taste, carrying no authority. So we all just muddle along’.
For Gavin Ardley, as with Catholic St Anselm, belief needed to precede understanding. On such foundation, any accounting for the world had to rest; never, he would insist, to be ‘comprehended’. But enough of it could be ‘apprehended’ to be enjoyed. It was with this enjoyment — ‘play’ in its best understanding — that he believed philosophy, or even the stringent, self-critical discipline of science, was to be done.
For Gavin it involved, too, the versatility to get along with all kinds of people and fortunes. Gavin Ardley’s lectures were beautifully structured and delivered. He was among the last of us to keep the traditional gown. For the last lecture I heard him give (it was on Martin Buber), he’d been called in from retirement and began without introduction. Fascinated, a student broke in, ‘But who are you? Where do you come from?’ With bland enjoyment Gavin explained, ‘I’m a gardener’.
In retirement he was devoted to his home garden in Parnell. With the same temper he seemed to cultivate his scholarly field, and to see the world. He never lost his fascination with travel, as in Europe and the Middle East. Above all, there was his abiding love of outback Australia. In Auckland for many years he was a keen stalwart of a tramping group.
In political caste Gavin Ardley had to be accounted a fine vintage Tory. Get an ideology, he’d have said, and you’re dead. So he revered Burke. And he most of all distrusted intellectual Pharisaism, and what used to pass for ‘enthusiasm’. He disliked supposed thought that was ill-thought or shoddy. Like modern Oakeshott he might have accepted politics as a civil ‘conversation’. Carried on with integrity, it could occasionally be serviceable to the world.
Gavin’s interests in policy and diplomacy went almost globe-wide. As its president, he was to bring Auckland’s Institute International Affairs to a new level of life, with a choice of exciting contemporary speakers.
Of his writings, the most pleasurable to a layperson is perhaps his Renovation of Berkeley's Philosophy (1968). Just as lucid was the early book Aquinas and Kant: the Foundation of Modern Science (1949). He jointly founded and edited the classics/ philosophy periodical Prudentia. Here I recall his elegant little essay on Aristotle’s respect for particulars and the diversity of things; it showed me — inter alia — why Aristotle is still the prototypal biologist.
Almost to the close of his life Gavin Ardley kept his Common Room ties alive. Where else, but in the opportunity of such exchange, was the centre of a university? He was a generous man that books read, good talk, and the silence of the outback had all contributed to form. Like his own notion of the philosopher, he was himself a ‘grave-merry man on the side of common sense’.
In his retired years we’d know where to find him, coming in to Old Government House late on Fridays with the familiar black beret Hilaire Belloc might have worn. As the years drew in, these visits got fewer. I wish that, on those last Fridays, I’d turned up more often.
….
