science, philosophy, moods and alienation

[randall patrick]

Emile Cioran from On the Heights of Despair


"My soul is chaos, how can it be at all? There is everything in me: search and you will find out. I am a fossil dating from the beginning of the world: not all of its elements have completely cystalized, and initial chaos still shows through. I am absolute contradiction, climax of antinomies, the last limit of tension; in me anything is possible, for I am he who at the supreme moment, in front of absolute nothingness, will laugh."


Perhaps. Or perhaps he will cry out in terror and despair. Or whimper. Or scoff. Or go about the business of living his life indifferent to all that is not somethingness, instead.

It is never a question, however, of whether any particular reaction from any particular man in any particular circumstantial context is more or less authentic or appropriate. After all, underlying all such reactions is the essential [and ontologically incomprehensible] chaos of human existence.

You will read Cioran's words and my own reaction to them from within an incalcuable, ineluctable constellation of idiosyncratic variables and they may or may not resonate.

In other words, realistically we react to the world around us not from a rational philosophical vantage point so much as from within an ever swirling kaleidoscopic jumble of moods.

And what is a mood but a mental state that combines the biological parameters of human evolution with the reasoning mind with the ebb and flow of emotional and psychological states; all embedded, in turn, in the ebb and flow of a particular existential trajectory enscounced in the ebb and flow of enormously complex circumstantil contexts. All of which evolve and change over time until the ebb and flow ends abruptly [and for all time] in oblivion.

So: how are we to penetrate the inherent [and largley immanent] ambiguity and caprice of human imagination, intuition, and subjectivity with logic and epistemology? I would suspect we will never be able to. And why would we even want to? If we explain everything then everything becomes predictable. And if everything becomes predictable then human freedom is exposed as an illusion.

In fact, along a more conventional philosophical route, Simon Critchley considers this antinomy in his book Continental Philosophy. In particular, Chapter 7, "Scientism versus Obscurantism".


After previously discussing the manner in which both Rudolf Carnap [and the analytic philosophers] and Martin Heidegger [and the phenomenologists] saw each other's point of view as reflections of metaphysical gibberish, he then explores the relationship between science and philosophy and alienation:

"From a Continental perspective, the adoption of scientism in philosophy fails to grasp the critical and emancipatory function of philosophy: that is, it fails to see the possible complicity between a scientific conception of the world and what Nietzsche saw as nihilism. It fails fundamentally to see the role that science and technology play in the alienation of human beings from the world. This alienation can happen in a number of ways, whether through turning the world into a causally determined realm of objects that stand against the isolated human subject, or through turning those objects into empty commodities that can be surveyed or traded with indifference."

The good news, however, is that until scientists can unravel the extrordinary mystery that emanates up from out of human minds [and moods], I doubt we have much to fear from them. As long as philosophers acknowledge that human phenomenal interaction is not on par with, say, the interaction of celestial bodies, our freedom will remain more or less intact---embodied [and embedded] in an alienation of a completely different sort.

On the other hand, others argue this alienation is not really any less disquieting, discomfitting, disconcerting and/or despairing than the doom and gloom generally associated with nihilism.

The lesser of two predicaments, perhaps?

Probably. But the alienation that seems inherent in nihilism at least embraces human consciousness as subject [groping about for meaning from the cradle to the grave] rather than object [classified, tagged and then put on the shelf].

In other words, which rendition is the least alienating?

Too close to call, no doubt. And always reflecting the profoundly problematic proclivities of dasein.

rp