Embracing The Phenomenology of Science

A man opens the door holding a large knife. He speaks in a loud voice incomprehensible to the people sipping their lattes (half of which are in plastic to go cups but the people are not going anywhere, at least for the duration it takes to finish their drinks). The man’s voice rises in intonation. Everyone removes their earphones. Its seems miraculous, the man speaks again and everyone hears. Yet still, they don’t seem to understand. “Is that anyone’s bike in-front of the tree?” Everyone stares in a caffeinated daze. It is as if the words ‘bike’ and ‘tree’ hold no meaning. Finally, a man with a heavy british accent remembers how he arrived at the coffee shop. Its his bike. The two men and the knife walk out.

This paper is for my philosophy of science class. Writing it makes me wonder how experimental science arrived in the minds of people such as yourself. Stop reading for a moment and ask yourself. Its not a rhetorical question, its an experiment. Perhaps your confused, you thought you were reading a philosophy paper. You were told philosophical papers were not suppose to ask questions, they were suppose to provide analytical responses. Perhaps your even the professor who proposed such an idea to a class of eager (or not so eager) students. Or maybe your just an ant, or a butterfly, or a bowl of rice. But either way you are reading a philosophy paper, its just not in the format you were taught it should be in. It states things that you were probably taught are a waste of time. An old women once said. “Don’t worry so much about ‘suppose to,’” that was good advice.

It just so happens that I personally wondered about the above question to the point my head hurt. So, I opened up a few books to get some ideas about the emergence of experimental science. Well, it seems experimental science can trace its roots to the seventeenth century. Francis Bacon challenged traditional ways of knowing with scientific inquiry. Galileo furthered this tradition with the rejection of Aristotelian science, the application of mathematics to the real world, and the use of experiments to prove observable phenomenon. He is probably most famous for being prosecuted on the basis of embracing the Copernicus heresy. That means they wanted to kill him because he thought the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. Newton got hit in the head with an apple (but no one blamed the tree) and advanced empirical science and the idea of scientific truth. Through natural observation of falling objets (i.e.. apples) he established the law of gravity. Einstein was a really horrible student when he was young. But he was actually a genius, he just thought differently than the way everyone wanted him to in school. What he really craved was a unified theory that would explain everything (imagine scary mad scientist laugh), but that didn’t happen in his life time. However, he did think of a pretty neat idea called the special theory of relativity. Basically, the theory is about the relationship between space and time and how this effects all phenomenon. You see, what Einstein found out was that at faster speeds things age slower, light travels at a fix speed, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light without going back in time. The theory has a lot more to it, but as stated above this is philosophy paper. So for a much better description I highly encourage further reading. If Special relativity was not crazy enough, let me tell you about quantum mechanics. Apparently if you walk into a wall enough times you will find yourself on the other side. This is totally not bogus information and should not be attributed to my insanely unacademic writing, but rather to actual experimental science. Its really only observable on the atomic and subatomic level though and not on the paper in you hands or projected on your screen. The idea is that these little things called waves have packets of energy and behave like particles. So it is as if the tide drank an energy drink and became a bouncy ball, but never lost its wave characteristics. Anyways, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics don’t mix. They totally conflict, which leaves scientist scratching their heads and wondering about the same question I asked you to think about earlier. Who knows maybe you will live Einstein's dream and find a universal theory to explain everything. But its a lot more likely that you will stare out your bedroom, office, or classroom window and wonder why you bothered reading this nonsensical paper.

Outside the large window facing King St. a man prunes a tree. Or perhaps its a large bush. Whatever it is, it has branches. A pattern of the branches fall on the concrete. A student looks up from her sprawling notes to watch the phenomenon. The man works quickly, cutting with precision and a kind of aesthetic intensity. He is clearly absorbed in his work. Or perhaps this is just pleasure. The girl closes her textbooks, throws away her cup, and walks out smiling. The man looks into the coffee shop window (it seems wider than the first time he looked inside), he runs his finger along the blade of his knife and walks away smiling.

The mechanistic world view reduced life to a machine. Descartes compared life to a finely functioning clock. Just as clocks have intricate gears and pulleys, the world has atoms and particles. Now, you might say clocks are really incredible and that you wouldn’t mind being called a clock. But comparing the world to a clock, as incredible as they be, has had devastating implications for the way we view life. The metaphor of the clock suggest that the world is not alive, its just a machine. If a clock isn’t working it can be ‘fixed.’ Thus, with the mechanical view the world became something that just needed to be ‘fixed,’ or dominated. You might say don’t we want to ‘fix’ the earth? Don’t we want to end drought, elevate hunger, end wars? Well, if you believe that the earth is a living system, you might say that you wish the earth could be ‘healed,’ you might even wish that we could be healed.

The man with the knife returns. The image of a swinging blade, leaves, and sky blur together clouding the view of King St. and the eyes of a few coffee whores. For an epoch of time all they have drank is coffee and ideas. But now they are confronted with actual ‘bikes’ an ‘trees.’ Not the words, but the sensual objects they describe. A doctor told the boy at the counter that his stomach lining has become inflamed from drinking too much coffee. “I thought he was only going to take off a few branches.” “Me too, why do you think he is cutting it?” “I don’t know, I don’t know...” Every part of the tree categorizable green lies moaning on the streets reflected in pupils dilated by stress and sleep depravation. The doctor who told the boy about his stomach lining does not know if it was a tree or a bush. The boy does not know if it was at all.

While modern science has created many advances it also has limitations. This is because modern science has failed to see the earth as a living system. Modern science may have created medical advances which can extend the life of individuals through advance treatments of such illnesses as heart disease. However it has failed to see the individual’s illness as part of a larger social issue of poor nutrition, or an even larger environmental issue of the impact of agriculture and factories on the earth. What we need is a new perspective of the earth as a living system and a science that observes the interconnectedness of life.

Restless, xe pulls xe knees up to xe chest and put them down again. Xe scribbles a drawing of the the branches falling on the concrete, but the branches are arms, and the arms are Celtic knots. xe opens a book, reads a quote from King Lear, “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak Yet Again,” and closes it. Books talk but they don’t communicate and xe is tired of conversations with xeself. Outside xe watches the sky change colors, xe is overwhelmed with the knowledge that the earth is moving. Is the sky really changing colors, or is xe perception changing (or is the world’s perception changing? Xe hopes so...). Suddenly xe has the urge to look left. There is a row of stumps. They were never really trees or bushes. Xe is not really a girl or a boy. They just were. xe just is. And no one really understands color.

There are new directions in science combining quantitative and qualitative knowledge. There are in fact so many that it would be exhaustive to list all of them. A few of the most known are Holism, Systems thinking, and Gaia Theory. The scientific method I would like to focus on is Gothean science because it is not only a theory but a whole new approach to viewing natural phenomenon. Actually, it can be thought of as the phenomenology of science.

Goethe lived during the romantic period and was largely known for his work as an author until recently. Goethe, personally always believed it was his work as a scientist that he would be remembered for. It differs considerably from other forms of phenomenology in that it relies on actual observation of the natural world, where typically phenomenology focuses on the mind. Goethe practiced what he called gentle empiricism through the observation of pure phenomenon. Instead of observing individual parts of an organism as is done in the traditional empirical approach, he observed the organism in connection to its environment. Through the observations of an organism’s change in form over time he coined the term morphology. With the view that nature is a living thing he studied plants, color, and biology. Many contemporary scientist in fields as diverse as botany and optics, as well as many artist and designers, have embraced the phenomenology of science in favor of a sterile mechanical world view.

At the table where I sit in a totally not ergonomic chair, I drink from a bright red ceramic latte cup and boast to note paper about my minds cartographic abilities. The pages of Life Is A Miracle by Wendell Berry and Goethe’s Way of Science edited by David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc are open and marked. I stare at a few leaves I collected from the tree, or the shrub, or whatever it was that man cut down--pushing all us coffee whores into vertigo, causing us to reorient ourselves in relation to our coffee shop with a large window (now a window with a much wider view of King St. than it had when the man with a knife first looked inside.) As I stare at the leaves twirling between my fingers I think maybe I am just staring at a reoccurring pattern. Leaves are a lot like fingers. If I loose a finger am I still me? if a plant looses its leaves it it still it? If I loose my fingers, leaves, limbs, branches, heart, trunk, veins, roots--The branches are limbs, and the limbs are celtic knots, and celtic knots are patterns. At what point does the pattern become something different? The books were never opened, the note paper is blank, the red cup has water in it, and I am not sitting. I’m walking with xe and the boy and the girl and the man with knife and we are all talking with the tree about life. But we never meet.

Everything is interconnected, even if we don’t notice it immediately. Everyone is connected to everyone, although we may have no apparent social ties. Everything we do from throwing away a coffee cup, to conducting a genetic experiment, to cutting down a tree has an effect. Not only does embracing an organic world view give us happy warm hippy feelings about ‘mother nature’ it forces us to think about how the mechanical world view has ethically and emotionally separated us from ourselves and our environments. Philosophy of science can particularly help scientist develop a participatory relationship with nature in which they become ethically responsible for their work. Perhaps a new organic direction in science will even create a paradigm shift in thought, a revolution of absolute adoration for everything.

Binge

The fighter planes fly overhead, their sound is violent--an arial show, entertainment. But actual bombs are dropping and a mother is scared to go to the grocery store everyday for the last twenty years. Sunday, my great grandmother died. Many people never meet their great grandmother, even in heaven--she will wear a purple housecoat and I will forever serve her four year old burnt toast in my memory of the oldest daughter of twelve. Children die of hunger now and now and now... I lay out poison for ants and cry at the calamity. The planes rip through my eardrums, the closet doors rattle, and I feel afraid like the time I was small and I hung myself inside a party dress as if I were flat--I became a ghost at the sound of my stepfather’s truck coming up the driveway. They will fight again, dishes will fly. Than my mom and I will go to the grocery store, buy cheese, bread, and grapes to stuff into our hearts ripped open by those white planes, those white dishes... Even now, the throttle echoes in my belly and I feel afraid that even in ninety years I will never understand death. So I go to the grocery store, I buy a loaf of bread, and while watching the clouds shift I consume its entirety, so that I can feel alive.