Charles Brown wrote:
Perhaps a scientific worldview enhances achievement of self-determinaton through greater mastery of necessity and thereby freedom. Radical acknowledgement of objective reality implies the existence of subjective reality.
Darwin, Lewontin, Levin and Gould's work concern an area with a lot of non-human wills (improper wills ?), animal psychology. A dialectical materialist approach to biology is not identical with Hegel's.
Whitehead's ontology is "a scientific worldview." It's a sublation of the scientific materialist form of science that includes, for instance, a sublation of relativity and quantum theory.
The sublation produces an ontology consistent with the existence of "freedom" not only as self-determination, but as self-determination potentially able, in the case of human being, to take the form of a "will proper" and a "universal will." As I've pointed out before, Whitehead makes "science" in this enlarged sense "the essence of freedom" understood as "the practicability of purpose," a conception of freedom he explicitly associates with "the economic interpretation of history."
Scientific materialism has no logical space for self-determination in any form let alone this one, i.e. no room for "will" where we mean by this some degree of self-determination. This produces logical incoherence, as in the claim that science so conceived can enhance human "freedom."
A "will proper" contrasts with an animal "will" which has more of less "limitation or a content which is immediately extant through nature."
"The Will Proper, or the Higher Appetite, is (a) pure indeterminateness of the Ego, which as such has no limitation or a content which is immediately extant through nature but is indifferent towards any and every determinateness. (b) The Ego can, at the same time, pass over to a determinateness and make a choice of some one or other and then actualize it." (Hegel, The Philosophical Propaedeutic p. 2)
In the articles I recently cited, Julie Nelson appropriates an "object relations" psychoanalytic interpretation both of the dogmatic misidentification of "science" with scientific materialist ontological premises and of the inability of minds dogmatically attached to these premises to comprehend alternative premises such as the premise that relations are "internal." On this basis she makes the following claims:
"This feminist critique of economic methodology, then, springs not from
ad hoc dissatisfaction with various aspects, but from a deep analysis
of the social, historical, and psychosexual meanings the traditional
image of science holds for its participants. The idea that the
universe may be open, in some ways fundamentally unpredictable, and
intrinsically purposive - in contrast to being a closed system,
ultimately distillable into formulae, controllable, and fundamentally
indifferent - is not simply a reasonable alternative ontology that can
be carefully weighed for its logical implications and neutrally
evaluated for its relative merits. As Harding writes, 'it requires a
great deal more than just 'clear thinking' to dislodge ... ontologies
from their status as obvious' (1999: 130). The idea of an open
universe feels fundamentally _scary_ for those who sense that not only
their status as scientists set above the objects they study, but also
their safety vis-a-vis chaos, their 'manhood' (whether actual, or, in
the case of female scientists, symbolic), and their very own distinct
selfhood are threatened unless they can keep the living, novel,
relational aspects of nature safely at bay.
"Feminists who delve into the historical, social, emotional, and
psychosexual dynamics that have kept women suppressed and oppressed
have found a complex of dualistic, hierarchical belief patterns that
manifest themselves not only in the social realm, but also in
intellectual (and religious and artistic) endeavors. Historically,
well-reasoned criticisms of neoclassical economics - targeting its
unrealistic assumptions, narrow methodology, over-formalism, false
detachment, etc. - have been legion, as any perusal of a bibliographic
database will show. Also historically, they have generally failed to
alter the mainstream ideas of the discipline. Yet the present feminist
analysis does not simply add to this legion of critiques; it suggests,
at a basic emotional and motivational level, that such critique is
suppressed because it is _feared_. It points out how reasonableness is
taking a back seat to emotional reaction, in this drama. This feminist
analysis takes us back to the territory of critique of Enlightenment
dualisms once more but this time with feeling." ("Once more, with
feeling: Feminist economics and the ontological question," in Feminist
Economics 9(1), 2003, p. 111(I think Doug once tried to initiate a discussion on this list of an earlier version of these claims.
Ted
