Hayek points out that modern science fought against the old analogies to replace them with relations that go beyond mere appearances.
Take the stars, for example. They make patterns easily discernible to a child, but what is that to science? A real star for science is found in relations that are not sensuous but mathematical. Superceding the classification based on the senses, the new method of the natural sciences claimed greater precision and universal consent in their focus on quantitative relations. The question will be whether the definition of science is complete once it has thoroughly eclipsed the qualitative relations. In other words, must the prejudice of the old analogies against science become the prejudice of science against the traditional analogies in order to be science?
Hayek writes,
Nor is Science as such interested in the relation of man to things, in the way in which man's existing view of the world leads him to act. . . When the scientist stresses that he tries to study things independently of what men think or do about them. The views people hold about the external world are to him always a stage to be overcome.
You have suggested a sort of detente through compatibility or complementariness. What appears contradictory should not be considered exclusive if we allow the point of view. The the strictures of the logical mode of thought--especially the principle of non-contradiction--may block us from considering the integrated, but disparate categories or levels of phenomena which in and of themselves still exhibit analogical relations.
Suggesting a complementariness is but the beginning of a long and arduous task toward understanding it. You know how the Greeks pushed to find the underlying principle. I am willing to pony up my cautionary conjecture. The nature of the kinds of compatibility is likely to be multitudinous.
I'll add a second in the form of a question. Our noetic ability to acknowledge disparate relations as being simultaneous--can that faculty be mistaken as the principle of complementariness? I think an answer to that is important, especially when we have had Logos to be a running candidate.
Mathematics enters into knowledge of the stars very early. Primitive societies needed to understand the seasons and to know when to plant and when to harvest. Therefore you early develop a four-quarter calendar, with solstices and equinoxes.
Astronomy grows out of astrology. Astrologers needed mathetmatics to calculate stellar and planetary affects. In the Renaissance, Tycho Brahe was an astrologer, as I recall, and developed the math that led to the theory of eliptical orbits in his efforts to pin down astrological calculations more accurately.
Modern astronomers still use the constellations for reference, as well as measurements in degrees, because it makes it easier to locate something with the human eye. So the change from viewing stars and planets as gods or as celestial objects set in crystaline spheres inhabited by spiritual beings to objects made of the modern elements moving by gravity was not a sudden switch but something gradual.
As C. S. Lewis often notes, and plays with in his trilogy beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, the universe changed from something filled with light, life, and spirit into something dark, empty, and lifeless, but a good part of the change is more a matter of attitude than of scientific advancement.
In its origins, science was intimately connected with magic, because both are concerned not only with knowledge, but with a desire for power and control over nature and other people. Skeptical modern scientists tend to confuse science with religion, thinking both are superstitious. But religion is the desire to do what God wants and to do right toward others; magic is the desire to displace God and gain power for oneself. In that regard, magic and superstition are closer to science than to true religion.
P.S., I don't have Hayek here in the house, but I suspect he has more of the traditional modern view of what analogy means. But I suspect that analogy can be much deeper and truer than what we think it was.
Actually, McInerny argues that when Thomas Cardinal Cajetan, the first great Thomist interpeter, explained what Aquinas meant by analogy, he got it wrong, and for that reason it tended to be misunderstood from that point on. Quite a large claim to make, but I think McInerny makes a convincing case, and it's his third book or so on Aquinas.
As McInerny puts it, with his detective-story style interrupting his philosophical style, “[E]tiam Homerus dormitat and when Cajetan nodded, his head hit the table” (p. ix). That's why I would recommend his book, because I think he rescues analogy from its weaker senses.
Oh what a tantalizing question, cornelis! I'm all over it, like flies on honey. Please give me the time I need to gather my sources and reflect, so as to make an articulate reply. At the very least, this is a question I need to "sleep on."
Be speaking with you soon. Thank you so very much for writing!
I'll add a second in the form of a question. Our noetic ability to acknowledge disparate relations as being simultaneous--can that faculty be mistaken as the principle of complementariness? I think an answer to that is important, especially when we have had Logos to be a running candidate.
It seems we need to drill down to what the complementarity principle actually states. I think of it as a kind of rebuke to Aristotle’s third law — the law of the excluded middle, as defended most cogently by Einstein, in a rebuke or refutation of his friend Bohr, who first dreamed up complementarity in the first place.
Einstein said,
…if two descriptions of a phenomenon are mutually exclusive, then at least one of them must be wrong. His friend Niels Bohr — the “father” of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (which Einstein never would accept) — saw things differently. Bohr said you need both of these seemingly mutually exclusive entities in order to make a complete description of the system to which both refer, each in its way, but each only partially.In short, the law of the excluded middle produces a kind of digital, or “either-or” style of thinking that ill comports with the way human beings actually live their lives. It lives in an artificial world of "true-false," “yes-no,” “black-white,” “0-1.” Though this “style of thinking” works perfectly well for computers, human experience actually demands that we acknowledge that life cannot be sorted into such clean, distinct categories, with the understanding that “at least one of the terms must be wrong”; that both terms are valid in some way, and both necessary to give us the “complete” picture of man’s relations to himself, to the world, and to other men.
I don’t see the complementarity principle as necessarily related to “compatibility.” Indeed, the point seems to be that what the principle states is seemingly “incompatible” things find resolution at a higher state of reality, according to (forgive me) a Logos, or ultimate standard of logic and reason, that pervades our universe, from its beginning, and which ever points to a “beyond” of material existence.
To give an example of what I mean:
Let’s say I’m at the Met listening to a performance of the aria “Un bel Di” from Puccini’s magnificent Madama Butterfly —which I experience as a sound waveform and (more subtly) as a pressure wave that affects my visceral body. An analog recording could be made of the aria, and later digitized (i.e., “quantized”) so it can be played on state-of-the-art audio equipment.
But which of these is most authoritative, most “real”: the performance of the soprano and orchestra directed to and actually experienced by me and the other members of the audience? Or the analog recording, or the digital recording?
It seems according to modern-day science, the analogue and digital descriptions are perfectly respectable, and even superior to the actual event that led rise to them (because they are allegedly more “universal” in terms of descriptive power.) In short, some modern scientists seem to want to “reduce” the world to its description. But what they seem to forget is the description is not, nor cannot be, the same exact thing as what it describes. It is a "reduction" of the actual situation that provoked the making of a description in the first place.
But to the extent that people forget this distinction, we get the sad example of a John Derbyshire. To see the world through the filter of the scientific description exclusively — as John Derbyshire seemingly has sunk to on another thread running here (“God and Me”) — is to miss the point of life altogether. (And I so admire Derbyshire; been reading him for years in National Review; would hope for a better take on life by and for him than he produces in the “God and Me” essay. Poor man!)
It seems to me that what science intends to do is to “take man out of the picture” altogether. Which is a ridiculous expectation! Jeepers, Bohr had it exactly right when he said [paraphrasing here] that science is not the natural world itself. Science is a description of man’s relations to that world, which is entirely dependent on man. So how can man ever become irrelevant???
What has “killed” Derbyshire is his willingness to accept a reduced (I would even say a defaced) description of the world, and then to go “live there.” This is the very description of a “second reality.” No man prospers by living in a second reality. No wonder Derbyshire seems so grim, so sad, despite his manifest talent and genius.
Oh, I have so much more on this difficult subject. But this will have to do for now. Thank you ever so much for writing, cornelis!
Thank you ever so much for including me in this discussion.
p.s.: Hayek seems to me to have exactly the right take on our problems....