The thought-police of the "hard sciences"

Re: Techno-Capitalism and Post-Human Destinies - I by Debashish on Sat 02 Dec 2006 11:17 AM PST Profile Permanent Link What Sri Aurobindo is pointing to here is one of the other major epistemic shifts determining modernity, one in the location of Truth. It is also intiamately related to the shift I have introduced above, the one in the ideology of production. In and by itself, the shift in the location of truth is the objectification of the physical world, the world "graspable" by the senses as the legitimate domain of knowledge.

Other domains and disciplines of knowledge, the self for example or the psyche with psychology as its method and discursive accumulator or the study of "wisdom," philosophy, become peripheralized or seen as derivatives to the physical concern - philosophy becomes natural philosophy, an archaic term which will be replaced by Science and psychology becomes a seeking for cognitive structures of thought based in the human brain or behaviors embedded in the grammatologies of language or awkward accomodations of arbitrary or partial intuitions with empirically based studies of symbology, always suspect to the thought-police of the "hard sciences." This shift and its new assumptions (nomos/doxa) bring an enthusiastic flurry of inventions of the extensions of the senses to "establish" this domain of truth and milk it for its knowledge and its utilization and begins the momentum which will drive it to greater and greater discoveries of its field obtained through the exclusion of all other "archaic" fields of knowledge.

The necessary relationship between Science and Technology that develops thereby is one that the noble drive for "truth-seeking" likes to represent as a fraternity with Science as the elder brother, but which contemporary philosophers have seen as life-motivated and resting on the other shift which I have outlined above - the capitalistic shift driving Technology and Science (in that reverse order) in a much swifter accelaration than the thirst for Knowledge as Science itself could have managed or even what RC has elsewhere called the Will to Technology as the Will to Power, the defining drive of the Asuric Superman.