Of late, and especially because of my monthly philosophy group meetings, I have been delving into Wolfgang Smith's writings. I started with his last major book, "The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology: Contemporary Science in Light of Tradition," and am now working on his, "Science and Myth (With Response to Stephen Hawking)," which is really a chapterized collection of excellent essays concerning different aspects of perennial philosophy and it's impact on knowledge and scientific enterprise.
There is great writing throughout "Science & Myth," and I'd love to quote the entire book, so get a copy and read it for yourself if you have the slightest interest in philosophy. Today's reading of chapter three brought forth to my mind these lovely mind tickling passages (the first is from pp60-61; the second from pp62-65):
" Getting back to "scientism" in the first sense--the reification, namely, of the physical universe--let us now ask ourselves how this self-contradictory world-view could have imposed itself upon a major portion of mankind. One might think that the operational validity of physics--the fact that "it works" and gives rise to a miraculous technology--leaves us no choice; but whereas this may be partly true in the case of the uninformed, it can hardly be so when it comes to scientists of first rank. To recognize what ultimately stands at issue, we need to remind ourselves that man was made, not to play positivistic games, but to know truth, to know being. It is no more possible for him to renounce the being of things than it is to stop breathing; his hunger for being--and indeed, for Being itself, which is God!--is relentless, and cannot finally be appeased by anything less. And so it comes about that when being has been excluded from his purview by an act of epitemic closure, the scientist himself feels compelled to bring it back, to reinstate it somehow in his universe. Admittedly it is possible to obviate the reification of the physical, as we have noted: but only at the cost of locating being in some other domain. It is safe to say that for all but the most wise or the ultra-sophisticated, it will be the physical-concept universe that is reified, and the few who manage to avoid this pitfall will likely succumb to some alternative mode of scientism. There is in fact only one way to obviate scientistic illusion, and that is the way of authentic philosophy: one needs to see the whole picture--the epistemic circle plus the unlimited speculative field within which it is drawn--in order not to be deceived. The moment, therefore, that a science loses contact with what Borella terms "the general science which is philosophy"--in that very instant the birth of illusion is bound to take place. Something alien and indeed contradictory to science is unwittingly smuggled in, and thenceforth masquerades in scientific garb: thus does science of the post-Galilean kind beget scientism. The die has been cast in a radical act of epistemic closure, which cuts the human individual off from true being, or subjectively speaking, from his own true ground and "higher" subconscious.17"
{17. This does not mean that the scientist makes no use of this "subconscious" in the exercise of his scientific functions; as we have noted before, he does, most assuredly, make use of it. My point, rather, is that in the name of epistemic closure the existence and rightful function of that faculty is implicitly denied.}
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