Wisdom (Metaphysics 2006, Colorado)
43. Tocqueville, Democratic Customs, and the Influence of Science on Descartes, Kant and Marx
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7b-wisdom-2006-colorado/043-tocqueville-democratic-customs-and-the-influence-of-science/

[0:00] He talks about the influence of democratic customs upon the whole life of the mind, and of course he insists that it makes us emphasize the practical more than the theoretical, and immediately applicable than the more theoretical or more remote. You see it in a way reinforcing the customs coming from the mathematical union of natural science and technical science, which turn natural science into a kind of technical science, and according to the great Heisenberg, change the attitude towards nature from a contemplative one to a pragmatic one.

[0:48] Well, in another way, democratic customs emphasize the practical, and how the crowd is looking for something to make life a little bit easier, and everything that makes life easier in a practical sense is the most wonderful invention, and so on.

[1:16] When he talks about the influence of democratic customs upon fiction, one very interesting thing is that he says democratic customs make men look to the future for their poetic inspiration. You want to get out of the present, right? Why aristocratic customs make you look to the past. Well, you think of the greatest work of Greek fiction there, which is the Iliad of Homer, and he's going back into the somewhat dim past and imaginatively enhancing it, undoubtedly, and he sees a whole tendency there.

[2:00] Even the Greek tragedians, they go back to Oedipus or whoever it is, but these things are not what the future. There are things in the past that have been handed down to us, and so on. In that respect, Shakespeare is still someone in the aristocratic tradition, because he's always going back to something in the past.

[2:27] But as you know, the more famous forms of fiction, you know, Star Wars and all these things, they're set in the what future, right? Um, 1984 has passed now, but when it was written, that was in the future, right? Brave New World. These things became very popular.

[2:53] So there's a tendency in democratic customs to look for the future for their inspiration. So he makes a lot of interesting observations, huh? But not every influence is to be traced to democratic customs and fiction, huh?

[3:16] Probably the tendency to be more prose than than poetic meter, right? That we have in our, you know, I mean Homer and the Greek tragedians and so on—they were all in verse and so on, huh? And that seems too formal, aristocratic, you know, and not democratic enough. So we're more prosaic in our fiction, huh? But our fiction is also influenced by the mathematical union of natural science and technical science.

[3:45] Now the most obvious influence, of course, is science fiction because that's all technology, huh? Gadgets, you know, of you know the gadgets and the really things, huh? But the detective story, huh, is a form of fiction that's very had quite a life in modern times. And the detective story takes off from the theoretical aspect of modern science, and so the great Einstein there, I think in the evolution of physics, refers to the admirable stories of Sherlock Holmes and how this is like what science is in its theoretical aspect.

[4:30] Einstein also said that creating a scientific theory is like writing a novel, huh? Something very imaginative, huh? Now, as teaching philosophy of science, sometimes I would use that story of Sherlock Holmes about the prime horse, huh? That has disappeared before a race, huh? And Scotland Yard is down there trying to find evidence for what has happened to the horse, who stole it, what happened, and of course they're frustrated and can't make progress.

[5:02] So finally, they bring in Sherlock Holmes from London, right? And Sherlock Holmes arrives and gets down to the grass. The grass, ah, there it is. Yeah, there it is. And Lestrade, whoever it is, with Scotland Yard, you know, a surprise, you know. Well, we've been all over the ground, you know, and and and how could you have come down in a few minutes, you know, found this piece of evidence?

[5:28] Holmes says, "I was looking for it. " And he'd already framed an hypothesis of what had happened, huh? And that hypothesis led him to look for something, and therefore to find something that would have been very difficult to find otherwise. I remember Einstein. I think he was talking about Kepler's, yeah, it's Kepler, and he's saying how hard it would have been to have found this if you had not had this theory in mind that you were trying to, but check.

[6:02] And it suggested you look in a particular place in a very you know precise way that no one would probably have done unless they had this thing in mind. So it illustrates something of the way the mind works in science from the detective stories.

[6:22] And detective stories are like science in that they have a kind of more narrow problem that they're dealing with. Who done it? While the great Greek fiction is about what happiness and misery, that's a more universal, more fundamental thing. But science is concentrating upon more particular problems you have to to solve. Like Sherlock Holmes has to solve something very particular. What happened to the horse? Who did this?

[7:03] The horror story has a great deal of play in modern science. Doctor Jekyll and Mister I mean modern fiction, Frankenstein, all these things. These these monster monsters are in these stories, huh? But monsters originally mean something unnatural, and of course because of modern science you're interfering with nature. You're getting something unnatural, and therefore maybe something monstrous, huh? And so nothing like that in ancient fiction, huh? So you can see the influence of not only democratic customs but these scientific customs or these customs deriving from the the union of natural science and technical science, where one is acting upon nature and transforming it, and therefore possibly getting something monstrous, huh?

[8:05] Like Mister Hyde, you know, or Frankenstein, or you know all these other things that we have movies about all the time, huh? Men turning into flies, and

[8:18] so on. Incredible Incredible Shrinking man, and so on. When he talks about the influence of democratic customs upon religion, huh? De Tocqueville says that democratic customs naturally suggest pantheistic ideas, huh? And he notes how these pantheistic ideas have come into German philosophy, huh? And how they come into French literature. And if you ever read the Enchiridion Symbolorum there, which is a collection of official documents and condemnations by Rome and so on, in the 19th century you're always correcting some.

[9:07] German Catholic theologian for his pantheistic ideas, and even Küng and Rahner and so on, like that in the 20th century, well, from time to time, seem to be falling into a kind of pantheism.

[9:24] So you see the, of course, for students, you often take the example of the, you know, the force be with you, right? You know, this force is a kind of pantheistic idea, and after you die, you become part of the force, of the good side or the bad side or something. But it's a pantheistic idea of God, and you can see the influence, you know, of democratic customs.

[9:50] You know, no thought behind this, just, just naturally, you know, that's what it is—the force, you know, cosmic energy or something. And so, it's a very interesting book, and he talks about the influence of democratic customs in the fourth part on government, how it tends to what centralization,

[10:16] and so to some extent, you can see that in American political history, because even financially speaking, local government and state governments spend much more than the federal government to begin with, and gradually things become more concentrated in in the central government, the federal government, or even in the three branches of government. The legislature kind of loses power to the executive; it becomes more concentrated. So you see that tendency towards centralization as a result of democratic customs.

[11:01] So this is a vast subject. These three major sources, of course, people wonder. You know, is there some connection between this emphasis upon equality? In democratic customs, where equality seems to be the dominant thing, and the equation there in modern science, where equality is the dominant thing, well, I don't know. You don't want to push things too far, but there's certain, you know, likeness there.

[11:46] I know Heisenberg there in the different lectures there, when he's talking about the early Greeks and so on. He's talking about the kaleidoscope and the plethora of things in the world, but to order to understand them, you have to introduce some order, right? He says. So he sees the same thing that all the great thinkers see. Order means some kind of unity, he says. Right? Some kind of equality.

[12:16] Well, I used to contrast the beginning of Thomas Aquinas's proemium there to the Nicomachean Ethics, we're following Aristotle in the twelfth book of Wisdom. Aristotle in the twelfth book of wisdom, I'm talking about the universe as a whole, distinguishes between the order of things among themselves or to each other, and the order of all of them to an end.

[12:50] And how the order of them to an end is on is the reason for the order they have to each other. So you could say all the parts of the chair are ordered to one end, which is sitting, and sitting explains the order which one part has to another part. That shows why the back comes in at a slightly obtuse angle rather than to the seat, rather than in say an acute angle or something like that, huh?

[13:18] So Thomas is talking about how the order of things among themselves is for the sake of their order to the end. Well, the end is always better, right? It's not equal; it's better than that which is for the sake of it, right? And when these Thomas will often say, when many things are ordered to one end, one must be ordered and the other ruled, right? So he thinks of order more in terms of what inequality, right?

[13:46] I see as the kind of first thing he thinks about, huh? And Heisenberg thinks of order being based upon unity, but unity meaning here equality. But you kind of see that, right? Now Heisenberg is undoubtedly influenced by the fact that that modern science is dominated by something called the equation, which is named from equal, right?

[14:13] But is there some Connection between that equality and the equality that the democratic mind wants. There may be a connection between both of them, and that pantheism that we spoke about before. Tocqueville talks about how democratic customs lead to pantheistic ideas. That seems to be agree with our experience of democratic customs, but maybe scientific customs, which emphasize equality, incline men to pantheistic ideas as well, because pantheism treats things as more equal rather than having a god who's entirely distinct from things, like the mind of Anaxagoras and ruling things.

[15:06] And in that regard, you know, I often compare Anaxagoras and Einstein a bit when we talk about Anaxagoras's greater mind. And I first compared them in what way they are alike. They both come to the idea of a greater mind that reveals itself in nature, in the order, and therefore the intelligibility of nature. And they both come to this idea of a greater mind as a natural philosopher or a natural scientist, not as a believer of the religions that are in their time.

[15:49] But they differ in that Anaxagoras says that this greater mind must be separated from things, and he gives a very good reason why it must be separated from things, and that is that the ruler must be separated from the ruled; otherwise, he can't rule them. And so he developed that reason. Einstein speaks of the greater mind as mixed with things, and he himself had called his own position pantheistic.

[16:16] but. He doesn't seem to give any reason for it, and so in the absence of a reason for it, I suspect the influence of what custom there, right? And both democratic customs, but scientific customs, emphasizing equality, dispose one more to be pantheistic, where there is more equality of things. We're all part of the big mishmash, right?

[16:43] You know, while you think of the force, you know, the force doesn't seem to be superior to those who make it up. You know, it seems to be some kind of a mishmash of those who have died before, cosmic energy, and so on. So

[17:04] these are could be reinforcing each other, right? I am not saying the one equality is the same as the other, or the one is the cause of the other. There is kind of a harmony, kind of a fitting together, right? You see.

[17:21] Okay, now let's maybe talk a little bit about. The influence of these three major sources of the modern world as customs, in particular now the influence of them upon the modern what philosophers.

[17:42] I think perhaps the second one has the greatest influence, and maybe after that the the third one, but I think even the first one might have some influence. Let me mention just two things here. There are two philosophers: Adam Smith and Karl Marx.

[18:04] Adam Smith, as you know, is in the history of philosophy. Some people read in ethics his theory of moral sentiments. What's the most famous book of Adam Smith? The Wealth of Nations. Yeah, that's strange that the most famous work, the greatest work, I guess, of a philosopher, an 18th century philosopher, there should be the Wealth of Nations. It's kind of hard to imagine that Plato and Aristotle, although they did talk about wealth and certain things dangers about it too, and so on, but that that should be their chief work about the Wealth of Nations.

[18:49] Kind of strange. That might seem to be what a sign of a certain influence of the mercantile character, commercial character of the modern city. There's an emphasis upon that, so that for this philosopher, his major work is about that.

[19:14] Scotland in the 18th century. If you look at economic history of Scotland in the 18th century, it's a remarkable example of a country that begins the 18th century being extremely poor and very inferior to England, economically speaking. But the the Scots are learning from the English,

[19:38] and then it's you know a kind of a perfect or classic example of an economic takeoff. You know that Scotland goes from a very poor country to relatively well-to-do country in the course of the 18th century, while many other countries in the world remain what stuck in a kind of poverty and so on. So that phenomenon of his own country, huh? What has happened to? We see at the end of the 18th century the English were now learning from the Scots, just the reverse, right?

[20:15] So it's a remarkable example of an economic development of a country. You know, the old economic takeoff that that people talk about. So that might have you know inspired him for this, you know. But it seemed that it's an influence of the economic era. Now, Karl Marx, as you know, tries to explain everything ultimately by the economic mode of what production, right? Which is a rather strange thing to be doing.

[20:47] I used to joke about it, you know, when I was at Laval. They'd come out of class here in the late afternoon, and we go over to the swimming pool. And you could, for ten cents, you get your swimming trunks and your, you know, soap and your your towels and so on. But of course, you've been sitting in class; your little your body temperature has gone down, and so you know, slow to jump in the cold water at first, right?

[21:12] But we always did it first. You take a hot shower, then you're in the water there. So I would give a Marxist interpretation, you know, how Thales arrived at the idea that was the beginning of all things. He wasn't doing anything, you know. He was cut off from the practical, and then you know everybody else is out there swimming vigorously and doing things, you know, and and you know thinking about things.

[21:35] He's sitting back there and seeing the delight people taking the water, and water must be the beginning of all things, right? This is the start of that speculative philosophy because you've been cut off from the economic mode of production. You're doing things, but anyway, that's just a joke. But you see something kind of unusual about Marx, right? And the dominance of the economic is that this is going to be what ultimately responsible for everything else in society.

[22:06] And the economic mode of production does have some influence only upon the social structure of the thing, and and the social structure upon the political right, and then this upon the what higher reaches, okay? But there it seems to me you

[22:26] Marx has been very influential in many ways. Somewhat diminished in recent times, although it's kind of a standard joke there. I am in Massachusetts that the economics department at UMass has still got a lot of you know Marxist economists, and each time I said at my own college there, kind of make fun of the fact that there's this

[22:52] no work economy economics, you know, still being taught there while you have these other successful you know market economies. But anyway, Karl Marx regarded as his greatest work, Das Kapital, right? Okay, which was presumably a work in what economics, right? And and again, that seems to show some influence, right, of the mercantile origin of the modern city, and therefore the mercantile or commercial origin of the modern city, civilization, or the.

[23:32] The character of it might bring such things as the most important things in life, right? The most influential things in life, huh? Okay. I don't mean to say that's the only influence upon Karl Marx, huh? Or even the only influence upon Smith, but it seems to bring together something that the Greek philosophers would never have made, that was central to their the development of their thought, huh?

[24:08] Now, as I. I said before the second major source of the modern world is customs. The mathematical union of natural science and technical science, which turned, you might say, the contemplative attitude towards things, towards natural things, into a more pragmatic attitude. What can we do with it rather than what is it?

[24:38] This seems to have had a greater influence upon the modern philosophers, and you can see in the 17th and 18th century. centuries we usually divide the philosophers before Kant into the rationalists and the what empiricists, right?

[25:03] In the first rationalist, the so-called father of modern philosophy, Descartes, you can see already the influence upon this, and he is contributing in a way to the development of this kind of knowledge. But I guess it was analytical geometry, huh?

[25:22] But he's trying to give us a pragmatic attitude towards these things, you know. They take one example there: the image that he has of our knowledge, comparing it to a tree. Well, the roots are metaphysics, whatever that is for him. The trunk is what physics, and then you have mechanics, medicine, you know, ethics. No, it's all practical. That's the fruit of it all, right? Everything is subordinated to that, huh?

[25:54] And Descartes, if you read his Discourse and Method and so on, he wants to give us a knowledge that's quite different than his class. Instead, one that will give us power over bodies, you know, for medical reasons and so on. So he's he's

[26:14] you might say a propagandist for this new kind of knowledge, but he also partakes of it to himself to some extent. Now, among the empiricists, the first empiricist we usually read is is Bacon, right? Bacon obviously, if you read Bacon, you know he's talking about this entirely. So he's always talking about the union of knowledge and what power,

[26:43] and Weizsäcker, you know, in talking about the world view of the physicist in the 20th century, says that's what it is. We see more than ever. It's true that knowledge and power are are joined, and so they don't want a knowledge that doesn't give them power over nature. And so it raises the question in my mind. Are they lovers of wisdom or lovers of power when they're seeking knowledge?

[27:13] More, the sine qua non of the knowledge they pursue is one that would give them power. huh? The sine qua non is not a knowledge that would give them wisdom, but a knowledge that gives them power. So are they lovers of wisdom anymore? Are we calling them philosophers equivocally? Are they really more lovers of power? Right. They might sometimes talk about some of the things that the Greeks talked about, but is their end or purpose wisdom or is it power?

[27:42] Locke, huh? You go to Locke. say, I take another empiricist. Locke says, "I'm just clearing the paths for more Newtons." huh? Okay. Newton, according to Cassirer, there in the philosophy of enlightenment, became the model for all human knowledge at the success of Newton's system of the world and so on.

[28:20] Now, some people, you know, say that Bacon and Descartes and so on, these guys and their thinking, and of course before them in some ways Machiavelli, but in regard to this, that these guys are responsible for this union of natural science and technical science. Well, they may be partly responsible for it because they are propagandists for this. Heisenberg, refers back to Bacon, there is, you know, is propagand propagating this this thing.

[29:00] But sometimes they also are involved in it, right? In the development itself, it's kind of hard to say to what extent a man is following a custom that is already in his time or developing, and to what extent he's, you know, propagating that custom or opposing it. Right.

[29:24] From my point of view, that's a somewhat muddy question at times. And what I want to see is primarily is that this union, right, however it takes place, is a major source of the modern world as customs. I mean, in terms of the modern world, just I mean, obviously anything that runs electricity is a result of this. It's kind of hard to imagine everything in our houses and buildings and so on, and cars and so on, and computers and telephones and so on.

[30:02] Everything that requires the what. Harnessing of electricity and so on for making things and so on. If all that was eliminated, where would we be? you know, So in a material way our whole civilization would be what quite different. Our fiction would be quite different. All kinds of things of the sort.

[30:27] Now. In addition to people like Bacon and Descartes and so on, as this knowledge or kind of knowing gets established, this union, then people are born into a a city, a civilization where this is there, and they partake of it. And now it's what clearly prior to the individual thinkers, so you go to Kant at the end of the 18th century, the latter part of the 18th century, and Kant was a Newtonian physicist, in a way before he was a what philosopher.

[31:18] And he's going to see everything to some extent colored by his being immersed in Newtonian physics. Kant, by the way, I guess proposed a theory about the origin of the solar system, and Weizsacker, the other pupil of Heisenberg, is supposed to have perfected that in the 20th century.

[31:43] So he was actually trained in Newtonian. physics? Yeah, he was an Newtonian physicist in a way before he was a philosopher, and so you find some physicists saying, you know, from from being physicist, he became you know a straight philosopher, you know, there. But this is a step down because philosophy is obviously a step below being a physicist. But anyway, we'll

[32:10] go into the details, obviously, of the critique of pure reason. But that's kind of the fundamental work there, and you do something, you know, analogous for that and the other parts of philosophy. But in I guess it is the second preface that he wrote to the critique of pure reason. We have to go back to that preface because he's kind of standing back from the work, right, and kind of seeing it in a larger perspective, like I said, we have to do sometimes.

[32:38] And in that second preface, you maybe you read it when you were in school, but Kant says some very interesting things, and a couple of things here, especially worthy of mention. One is, as I mentioned when we were doing the ninth book of wisdom, and Aristotle is talking about how you have to draw the lines there in geometry before something becomes actually understandable. Well, Kant, when he's talking about the success of modern science, says there was something like that success in ancient geometry, but he says the success of ancient geometry arose when they realized they couldn't just sit there and contemplate the triangle.

[33:36] Or whatever it was, huh? They had to do something with it, huh? And they had to make something, huh? And then they had to draw the lines and so on, and then geometry started to have progress, huh? So that we, what he emphasizes there, is that we know by making, huh? And then he gives some examples of Galileo experimenting and Torricelli and so on, and you probably know those examples better than I do, huh?

[34:10] But he sees a likeness between that, huh, and the kind of making that's in geometry. So he's standing back, huh? And he says they discovered that they had to experiment, right? And they had to have some kind of hypothesis they're trying to test and so on by these, and that's why they constructed this experiment, huh?

[34:35] So one thing that Kant is emphasizing in the second preface is that we have to make in order to what know, huh? And Weizacker, in that worldview of physics, says exactly the same thing, huh?

[34:54] As we go out towards the outer reaches of space and so on, we realize more and more that only that which could be of our making can be understood by us, huh? Now

[35:09] that's a very important thing, but if you're accustomed only to that knowledge of the natural world, of its knowledge of the natural world, then you might see kind of universally, and this is the force of custom on which you're accustomed to, that this is the only way man can know by, in a way, making what he knows. We do make an experiment, right? And of course Heisenberg talks about how as you go deeper down into matter, it becomes impossible to separate the natural from the artificial, because at that level there's no way to know whatever you're trying, whatever you're going to end up knowing, except by acting upon it in a way that significantly changes it, huh?

[36:05] And so the distinction between nature and art becomes blurred, which is kind of paradoxical because the distinction between the natural and the artificial is made in the philosophical part, you might say, of natural science, the books of natural hearing, and this more particular knowledge that you have down here in physics can't make the distinction. In one sense, it's more confused, huh? But partly because it's knowing these things mathematically.

[36:41] And you know something, mathematics abstracts from the distinction between the natural and the artificial, but also because you're knowing by experiment, and the experiment is acting upon nature. So are you really knowing the natural? You see, or are you interfering with it? Huh?

[37:07] Okay, that's one thing very important. But you can see that Kant is seeing all knowledge, right? Both in mathematics and natural philosophy, or natural science, there were the two basic parts of looking philosophy, right? But now he's seeing the whole of this as knowing by making, huh? Okay.

[37:38] Now Karl Marx, coming afterwards, if you look at the eleven theses on Feuerbach, which as Engels teaches us, you know, contained the brilliant germ of the new world outlook, as he says. And and of course, I remember years ago from Jacques de Monléon from Paris, there on the on the eleven theses, and you can spend the whole semester on the eleven theses, you know, unfolding this germ of the brilliant germ of the of the new world outlook.

[38:11] You know what Engels says? You know, the rest of us were at best talented, but Marx was a genius. Okay, just so you know that.

[38:22] And if you read the Eleven Thesis of Forabach, that's what it seeds, right? What he does, in a sense, is to say we can only know what we make, huh? And to talk about something you can't make is really not is just a figment of your imagination, huh? And you could say that as you go from Kant to Marx, you go from not only seeing that we know apparently only by making, right?

[38:56] But we know, therefore, only what we make. Okay. Because obviously the way we know is the way things are. You know, most philosophers answer yes to that question. Aristotle answered no, but if the way we know is the way things are, and we know only by making, then we only know what we make, right? And therefore Marx can be even more anti-Christian than Kant himself, because he sees himself now as God, right?

[39:28] Of course, if you go back to the Marx's doctoral thesis, I don't know if you ever seen the preface to the doctoral thesis, but You know, we reject anything that does not admit the human mind as the highest divinity. Says Says Marx. Prometheus is the first hero in philosophy because he he revolted against the god. You know, Zeus. And so on. So you see a tremendous influence in a very anti-god eventually here in Karl Marx.

[40:02] But you see Marx is really kind of taking over what Kant has really brought out, and there's a lot of truth about the nature of this kind of knowledge that Kant has seen. And when you read Niels Bohr or people of this sort, even Einstein, you can see that they don't simply agree with Kant in the details. They're kind of an orientation in the way they ask the questions and so on.

[40:28] Has that Kantian influence. So there you see the tremendous influence of democratic what? Not democratic customs, but the customs derived from this mathematical union of natural science and the mechanical arts or natural science and technical sciences. Heisenberg says it.

[40:54] Now, the second thing that apart from that, the second thing in the in the second preface. To the critique of pure reason, it's very interesting. I think is that Kant has two beautiful proportions, okay, that he uses to discuss these things. And he says that our reason must learn from nature in some in some sense. He's not completely close to that, but he has two very interesting proportions.

[41:40] And you can put in the form of question, but he's more stating the conclusion. Should our reason learn from nature as a student learns from his teacher, or should our reason learn from nature as a judge learns from the witness? Or you could maybe say even the lawyer, but he used the word judge more than dramatic system right? Okay.

[42:13] Now, what's the difference between learning from nature as a student learns from his teacher, and learning from nature as the judge or maybe the lawyer learns from the witness? Or he says the student comes in and listens to what the professor's got to say, right? The judge or lawyer doesn't go into the court and listen to the witness might want to say. No, the witness has nothing to say before the judge or lawyer puts a question to him, and then the witness is supposed to answer the question.

[42:53] As simple as that, you see that correctly procedure, right? And Kant answers the question, doesn't really ask the question explicitly as I'm doing, but he gives it two proportions.

[43:11] That reason must learn from nature as the judge or lawyer learns from the witness, huh? And I think there's some truth that in experimental science, this is the way the judge or I mean the way the scientist learns from nature. He has a definite hypothesis in mind, and this leads him to ask a definite question of nature, and nature then answers that question. Okay.

[43:54] Kant insists that this is the only way that the mind can make progress in its knowledge of nature. And I remember reading a trial lawyer one time saying that when you go into the courtroom, you better know which why you're going to ask what you're going to ask. Otherwise, you might very well end up with witness saying something that's going to harm your case. So you have to have kind of a idea before you go in there, which what you're trying to show, that will lead you to ask just this question the witness, and not the question that the other lawyer might want to ask of him, and bring out this rather than that.

[44:47] And Schrodinger, Schrodinger, the great physicist, Erwin Schrodinger, who perfected the mathematics of wave mechanics and showed the equivalence of wave mechanics and quantum mechanics. Schrodinger, you know, has one of his essays there. That's well, something they called Science and Humanism, the collection of essays. Something they called Science, Theory, and Man. Dover puts it out. My edition has got Science, Theory, and Man has been put under Science and Humanism.

[45:18] This is a third title too, but anyway, it's a collection of different papers of Schrodinger. And there's one paper entitled "Is Science a Fashion of the Times?" It's kind of unusual for a scientist to be saying this, but he realizes that there are questions we could have put to nature other than we did, experiments we could have performed, right? Or we could have put these questions to nature and done these experiments before we did those ones, and that there's something kind of historically contingent in the structure of our science by reason of what hypotheses we had, which led us to ask these questions rather than those questions and do these experiments rather than those.

[45:58] There's something a little bit arbitrary about that, huh? And you know yourself in the courtroom if if you had only one lawyer in the courtroom and he's trying to prove one side, and he might not bother for these other ones, huh? So it's kind of interesting that that that that he sees that, huh? And Louis de Broglie, you know, talks a little bit about the that the history of science as being somewhat history, you know, and not science.

[46:26] That there's something contingent about the way things happen a bit, but but now if I ask the question that Kant asks, should reason learn from nature, as a student learns from his teacher, or as a judge or a lawyer learns from the witness?

[46:55] I would answer both ways. And then, as a student from a teacher first, and then later on, perhaps right, as a judge or a lawyer from the witness,

[47:16] and in in my knowledge and experience of what we call sometimes the philosophy of nature, in the more narrow sense, the although in another sense, a broader sense, but I mean, sometimes philosophy of nature was was a synonym for natural science, right? But sometimes we use the word philosophy of nature for the first part of natural science, the general part that you have in the eight books of natural hearing, and

[47:48] there I say the Greeks are listening to nature like a student listens to his teacher. And Heraclitus, one of the fragments, you know, speaks of they say moderation is the greatest virtue, and wisdom is to speak the truth and to act in accord with nature, giving ear thereto. Well, the ear, of course, is always the sense of what of learning from another, huh? So a very concrete way he has of speaking.

[48:24] And one of the meanings I give for the title of Aristotle's book, the eight books of natural hearing, it's called natural hearing because you're hearing about nature, you're listening, but also because you're listening to nature, you're hearing nature speak,

[48:48] and and but you're using the word hearing, you're talking about nature as a what teacher, nature is teaching us. Now, one thing that agrees with this what I'm saying here about that, when Aristotle in the first book of wisdom,

[49:11] after the proemium, Aristotle is going to see in the rest of book one whether he can learn wisdom from the natural philosophers before him, huh?

[49:26] The men who pursued wisdom before him, and as I've mentioned before, that has two parts, right? He first narrates, huh, their opinions and the reasons for their opinions, and then he examines whether what they said is sufficient or not, huh? Now I don't know if you read, remember having read that narration, huh? But Aristotle speaks there

[49:58] as if nature was leading them on, huh, to ask the next question. And Kant, in the second preface, there, when he's rejecting learning from nature as a student learns from a teacher, that's no good. You got to learn in this way, right? You know, we can't be a nature's leading strings. Now, as far as I know, leading strings was the harassed mother, you know, who's got things to do in the kitchen or wherever, and the kid may run off and get into injuries and these, you know, things.

[50:33] Once in a while, I've seen a mother with these things attached to the child. Have you ever seen that? And you can kind of pull them back if he gets a little bit too far away or something. But this is the way Aristotle speaks there in the first book of wisdom. That nature led them to ask the next question. They're being led by nature in the same way that the teacher leads the what student.

[51:00] So I would say in answer to the question that one should learn from nature in both ways, but as I said, first as a student learns from his teacher, and that can take you a considerable distance, but then maybe later on, you have to perform experiments to get further into nature. We'd still be thinking that water is right an element in the Greek sense, the four elements, without doing an experiment, right?

[51:45] There's no way around the four elements of of Empedocles without doing experiments, huh? And so I would say that we should learn from nature in both ways, but in a certain order. First, as a student learns from his teacher, then secondly. But you can see that Kant may be right about how we learn from nature in experimental science. That it's more like a judge or lawyer learning from the witness than a student from a teacher.

[52:21] But he's also saying that's the only way, right? You see, and there you see the influence of custom. It seems to me because he's immersed in the experimental sciences, and immersed in physics. He was a working physicist, and apparently a fairly good one, at least. Weizsäcker was perfecting some of the things he did, and so on.

[52:47] And so, as Aristotle said, you know, man's accustomed to this way, and he thinks it's the only way. And that's what Kant's doing, huh? So those are two things that are very interesting in Kant, huh?

[53:03] So you see, upon Kant and also upon Marx too, he's influenced by this second factor. There are other men you could take besides these. But it seems to me that's very piquant what they're saying, and very, very

[53:22] significant