Another quick thought about scientism

Last updated on: September 5, 2018 at 9:52 am by Dan Peterson

Another quick thought about scientism 2018-09-05T09:52:55-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Washington DC Temple as we saw it yesterday from the Beltway. (Photo by James Jordan)

Aristotle famously distinguished four types of causation: efficient causation, material causation, formal causation, and final causation.

The difference between them can be illustrated very easily with reference to, say, Michelangelo’s well-known statue of the young David of the Old Testament, about to fight the giant Goliath.

Let’s take the material cause first. In this particular case, it’s the Carrara marble of which the statue is made. (Yes, yes. Just to reassure you Greek philosophy buffs, I know about hyle or prima materia.) Absent the marble (or some other material as a substitute), there would be no statue at all.

Next, the formal cause. It’s the shape of the statue. It’s what makes the object a statue. If the shape were different, the statue wouldn’t be a statue of David. If the marble were “unshaped,” it wouldn’t even be a statue. It would merely be a piece of stone.

The final causation is the reason for which the statue was made. (It’s the telos. Hence, the word teleology.) In this particular case, Michelangelo made the statue of David in response to a commission from the overseers of the Office of Works of the Cathedral of Florence, who were mostly, it seems, members of the Arte della Lana, the influential Florentine woolen cloth guild.

The efficient cause, which I consider here last, is what took the marble and, because of the commission, shaped it into a statue of David. Michelangelo—with his chisel and hammer, I suppose—is the efficient cause of the statue of David that stands in the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Florence today.

How do those four causes relate to today’s science?

In the case of Michelangelo’s David, geology and chemistry might have some important things to say about the marble from which the artist sculpted it. But no scientific discipline, in the typical sense of the word science, will have much of interest to say about the form of the sculpture, or the life of the artist who made it, or the reason for which he undertook the project. Such things would fall rather clearly, within the realm of art history; the socio-political, economic, and cultural history of Florence and the Italian Renaissance; the biography of Michelangelo; and, yes, in this particular case, the study of the Hebrew Bible. (Who was David? What was his story?)

To claim that these subjects, too, would be best treated—or, even, only adequately treated—by science would be, as I understand the term, to engage in scientism.

Certainly a psychologist, as a psychologist, might—perhaps—have something interesting to say about Michelangelo’s life and career. But psychology as a field (dare I say this?) straddles the line between science and, in a non-fine-arts sense, “art.” And while, at times, experiments in psychology laboratories surely tend toward rigorous science, retrospective speculations about Michelangelo’s inner life centuries ago would almost certainly not rank up there with double-blind laboratory experiments.

Nor would studies of Renaissance chisels or Florentine sheep wool or the hydrology of the Arno River or metallurgical analyses of Medici-owned gold contribute very much to our understanding of the David.

In other words, there are areas of reality that largely elude the reach of science, areas to which it is largely or wholly irrelevant. And this is absolutely not to speak ill of science—any more than it would be to note that stethoscopes cannot enlighten us about the totality of human life and experience. They weren’t designed or intended to do so.

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