Was den Menschen zum Menschen macht

Scientism

4 Min. Lesezeit

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: Szientismus

Scientism is the thesis that natural science is the only or paradigmatic form of cognition. What science cannot answer, on this view, cannot be answered at all. Within the Personhood ontology, scientism is classified as a form of theoretical oblivion of the person.

Performative Self-Contradiction

The thesis “only natural-scientific cognition is genuine cognition” is itself not a piece of natural-scientific cognition. It is not empirical, not falsifiable, not experimentally testable. If it is true, then by its own criteria it is not genuine cognition.

Spaemann puts this pointedly: naturalism is “the only philosophy that explicitly understands itself as non-philosophical and precisely thereby becomes uncritical.”

Methodological Naturalism

Methodological naturalism is the restriction of the natural-scientific method to natural causes. As a methodological self-limitation within natural science, it is legitimate: Thomas Aquinas himself would agree — natural philosophy investigates the causae secundae (secondary causes) without recurring at every step to the causa prima (first cause).

Methodological naturalism becomes problematic only when it is universalized into an ontological thesis: “in natural science we admit only natural causes” turns into “there are only natural causes.” This transition is the core of scientism.

Ontological Naturalism

Ontological naturalism asserts: there is only the natural — no immaterial souls, no freedom in the strong sense, no God. It is a metaphysical thesis that presents itself as anti-metaphysical.

From the standpoint of the Personhood ontology, ontological naturalism is a form of theoretical oblivion of the person, because it reduces personhood to natural processes. It contradicts the substance-ontological concept of person: if there is no spiritual substance, the person cannot be understood as a spiritual being.

Reductionism

Reductionism asserts that all phenomena are reducible to a more fundamental level: biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, consciousness to brain processes. It is self-refuting: if all mental states are “nothing but” physical processes, then the conviction “reductionism is true” likewise has no truth-value but only a causal genesis.

Reductionism contradicts personhood: the person as a spiritual substance with freedom, intentionality, and dignity is in principle irreducible. Edith Stein’s analysis of empathy, Hildebrand’s value-response, Scheler’s value-ethics — all of these have a qualitative character that is lost in any reduction to physical processes.

Phenomena Beyond Naturalism

Four phenomena on which naturalism founders:

  1. Qualia (German): the redness of red, the painfulness of pain — qualitative contents of experience that elude all quantitative description (Jackson’s “Mary’s Room,” Leibniz’s mill argument)
  2. Intentionality: acts of consciousness are directed toward something (Brentano). No physical state is of itself directed toward something else
  3. Freedom: Aquinas argues that the will is moved by what is cognized as good, yet is not determined by it. Freedom is self-determination through reason
  4. Dignity: the ontological dignity of the person is an objective value that cannot be reduced to natural properties

Lifeworld

Husserl’s Crisis text (1936) diagnoses the forgetfulness of the lifeworld in the natural sciences: the pre-scientific, qualitative, meaningful world of everyday experience is the foundation of all scientific abstraction. Natural science presupposes it and cannot replace it.

Objectivism — the thesis that the mathematical-physical world is the “true” world — confuses a model with reality. The lived world is no less real than the physical one; it is even more primary, because it is the starting point from which all science takes its origin.

Ontological Classification

Superordinate concept: Theoretical oblivion of the person

Ontological relations:

Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.

Further sources:

  • Spaemann, Robert: Das Natürliche und das Vernünftige (1987). Munich: Piper. (German) (Critique of naturalism)
  • Spaemann, Robert: Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O’Donovan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. (The person is irreducible)
  • Seifert, Josef: Erkenntnis objektiver Wahrheit (1972). Salzburg: Pustet. (German) (The autonomy of essential intuition)
  • Husserl, Edmund: Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936). (German) (Forgetfulness of the lifeworld)
  • Nagel, Thomas (1974): “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review 83(4), pp. 435–450 (The irreducibility of consciousness).
  • Plantinga, Alvin: Warrant and Proper Function (1993). New York: Oxford University Press. (The evolutionary argument against naturalism)
  • Plantinga, Alvin (2011): Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. New York: Oxford University Press. (Critique of methodological naturalism)
  • Planck, Max (1937): “Religion und Naturwissenschaft.” In: Vorträge und Erinnerungen. Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1949, pp. 318–333. (German) (Critique of positivism from within physics)

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