Manifesto.

Today, Science exercises an unprecedented effect on our everyday reality. The condition we call modernity is characterised principally by this fact, namely that life is caught in a process of ineluctable rationalisation on manifold levels. What began as a means of orienting ourselves in the world, of coming to some understanding of our environment, has evolved into vast and complex forms of social, economic, and political organisation. When we speak of the ‘technological age’ it is this encompassing transformation that is really meant, the inchoate outlines of a truly global system.

Our conception of things has transformed the nature of things, and the reality thus created now of course bears decisively upon our future. Science, in short, has come to play a significant hand in our fate. It seems pertinent, then, to ask, at this turning point in our history, precisely what science is.

For some, science is an endeavour that plays out in the background of life, so to speak, an abstract voyage of discovery ever thirsting after the real, yet ever falling short of the problems that we find ourselves confronting in the everyday. For others, science is the sole, authentic account of what there is, an enterprise that is destined to pervade every aspect of our lives. On this picture, whatever falls short of this worldview is ultimately branded an illusion or at least a lesser form of being.

These views – the everyday, the strictly scientific – diverge considerably but at the same time share a common assumption: the meaning of science and its associated methodology is largely assumed to be known. The contention of the SCK is that, although our scientific achievements are indeed staggering and doubtless praiseworthy in countless respects, the overall scientific venture nevertheless remains afflicted by a quite general misconception. One might say that the problem is one of interpretation. We have a strong grasp on things but lack an adequate understanding of the meaning of our grasp on things. The result is, therefore, not simply an all-out rationalisation of the real, but the forcing of a certain conception of rationality upon the world.

Modernity - or whatever else one wants to call the prevailing tendency of our time - is often experienced as a form of estrangement. This has been recognised by many thinkers. The paradox of course is that this feeling arises chiefly on account of the various structures we have brought into being. Our understanding of the world finds expression in the manifold ways in which we have shaped our world, but our experience of this world as individuals is often characterised by disaffection and alienation. This is reflected by the fact that the mind – our peculiar mode of being – is today thought to be one of the great enigmas of our time, one of the last unsolved mysteries. In short, the unprecedented proliferation of scientific knowledge on all levels coincides with a striking lack of knowledge on the level of the self. The SCK believes that this predicament is intimately linked to the aforesaid misconception in regard to science. The mind is inherently resistant to our present modes of knowledge not because it is inexplicable but because it calls for a quite different orientation.

The problem of self-knowledge is thus intimately linked to the problem of scientific understanding, which, as we have noted, is in turn closely bound up with the question of our collective fate. Now this may all be viewed as an elaborate attempt to turn the spotlight on mankind at a time when science seems to lead us in the opposite direction. But before we make any concessions on this front we must first raise a question concerning human nature itself, and ask whether it is right to equate a shift in focus, an emphasis on self-knowledge, with a neglect of the knowledge of nature. Why is it that we are able to have knowledge – not just knowledge of this or that but genuine insight into our reality? What is it about thought that makes this possible? Whatever distance we may feel from nature, we are in fact beings that have undoubtedly emerged from this same environment, and so are beings that are intrinsically related to this environment. The patterns of things share a deep analogue with the patterns of thought. To know the mind, then, is not to turn our back on nature but to know nature itself in another aspect.

It is an odd thing to know the mind, for the mind itself knows nature, and although it has emerged from nature and in some sense is natural, it nevertheless eludes, or is not exhausted by, naturalistic modes of description - if we mean by ‘naturalistic’ the way in which the mind typically understands other things. To know the mind is to go further than naturalistic forms of knowing. Self-knowledge is a self-referential form of knowing, it is thus not simply a different or competing form of knowing but a deeper form of a single two-fold mode of knowing nature.

Our claim, then, is this: the confusion we feel in face of the anomalous being of the mind is simply the sign of a more widespread inability to grasp the meaning and actuality of science. Hence the path beyond the present must involve the kind of self-knowledge advocated above, which opens the only real way to a comprehensive grasp of the truth of our reality.