Agamben intervention 9/8/24

Silence of the Human Subjects vexxed by Science

Late add on PST at 3:25 PM

How do you fit mysticism into your scheme?

Professor ]ung:

Into what scheme?

Reply:

The scheme of psychology and the psyche.

Professor ]ung:

Of course you should define what you mean by mysticism. Let us assume that you mean people who have mystical experience. Mystics are people who have a particularly vivid experience of the processes of the collective unconscious. Mystical experience is experience of archetypes.

Question:

Is there any difference between archetypal forms and mystical forms?

Professor ]ung:

I make no distinction between them.

— Carl Gustav Jung, The Tavistock lectures, P. 110-111

“The raptures ... are varying forms of that shudder of awe and delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the universal soul. The nature of these revelations is the same; they are perceptions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul’s own question. They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after. Revelation is the disclosure of the soul.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Oversoul”Werner Heisenberg said, "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Bacon’s concept of experiment entailed a nature constrained by the “violence of impediments” and transformed by “art and the hand of man.” Interpretations of Bacon and his role in the rise of experimental science have a long history and have been discussed in numerous books and articles. At one end of the spectrum is the view of the Frankfurt School philosophers, who see Bacon as initiating a tradition of human power and dominion over nature. Thus mechanistic science itself, as it emerged in the seventeenth century, may be seen as complicit in some of humanity’s current ecological, medical, and human survival problems.

Often overlooked in the excitement of research is that the methodology of science requires interaction with the system we are studying. We observe its behavior, measure its properties, and build mathematical or conceptual models to understand it better. And to do this, we need tools that extend into realms beyond our sensorial reach: the very small, the very fast, the very distant and the virtually inaccessible, such as what is inside the brain or buried in the earth’s core. What we observe is not nature itself but nature as discerned through data we collect from machines. In consequence, the scientific worldview depends on the information we can acquire through our instruments. And given that our tools are limited, our view of the world is necessarily myopic. We can see only so far into the nature of things, and our ever shifting scientific worldview reflects this fundamental limitation on how we perceive reality.

Perhaps The Most Important Work of Our Time: The Elusive "Virus", The Control Experiment, & Jamie Andrews

Agamben

Science and Happiness

Despite the utility we believe we derive from them, science cannot make us happy, because man is a speaking being, who needs to express in words joy and pain, pleasure and affliction, while science ultimately aims at a mute being, that it is possible to know number and size , like all the objects in the world. The natural languages ​​that men speak are at most an obstacle to knowledge and, as such, must be formalized and corrected, eliminating as "poetic" those redundancies that we pay attention to first when we express our desires and our thoughts, our affections as well as our aversions.
Precisely because it addresses a mute man, science can never produce an ethic. That illustrious scientists have carried out experiments without any scruples in the interests of science on the bodies of deportees to Lagers or of condemned men in American prisons should not surprise us in this sense. Science is in fact based on the possibility of separating at all levels the biological life of a living being from its relational life, the silent vegetative life that man has in common with plants from his spiritual existence as a speaking being. It is good to remember this, today when men seem to have put aside everything they believed in, to entrust to science an expectation of happiness that can only be disappointed and betrayed. As recent years have shown beyond any doubt, men who look at their own lives with the eyes of their doctor are for this reason willing to give up their most basic political freedoms and to subject themselves without limits to the powers that govern them. Happiness can never be separated from the simple, trite words we exchange, from the cry and laughter of joy nor from the emotion that makes us cry, we do not know whether from pain or delight. Let us leave scientists to the silence and solitude of numbers, let us lucidly watch that they do not invade the sphere of ethics and politics, which is the only one that can truly satisfy us.

September 8, 2024