Milestones of Modern Science: applied science misapplied to human ends?Milestones of Modern Science: applied science misapplied to human ends?
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
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Ernst Mayr, 1904-2005.
"This endeavor automatically leads to a consideration of Darwin, for no one has influenced our modern worldview – both within and beyond science– to a greater extent than this extraordinary Victorian."
Mayr, Argument, p. ix.
"It begins in delight and ends in wisdom . . . in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects or cults are founded upon, but in a momentary stay against the confusion."
Robert Frost
on the emotional end product of poetry.
Claudius Ptolemy's conception compared to Dante Alighieri's view of the world.
On the belief that "a Weltanschauung is one of the ideal wishes of mankind"
"Unfortunately it is not tenable; it shares all the pernicious qualities of an entirely unscientific Weltanschauung and in practice comes to much the same thing. The bare fact is that truth cannot be tolerant and cannot admit compromise or limitations, that scientific research looks on the whole field of human activity as its own, and must adopt an uncompromisingly critical attitude towards any other power that seeks to usurp" the power one has to think independently or judge rationally for themselves."
Sigmund Freud, 1918.
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
"The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859, when the On the Origin of Species was published was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859."
"School . . . bored the young naturalist intolerably."
". . . he devoted more time to collecting beetles, discussing botany and geology with his professors."
Mayr, 1991, pp. 1 & 3.
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| Magritte, "False Mirror," 1928 | |
"seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective. . . . the viewer both looks through it, as through a window, and is looked at by it, thus seeing and being seen simultaneously." |
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"This is the assembly of life that took a billion years to evolve. It has eaten the storms -- folded them into its genes and created the world that created us. It holds the world steady."
E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 15.
Storm over the Amazon, E. O. Wilson contrasts :
Violent nature contrasted with resilient life
Amazonas is "one of the great surviving wildernesses of the world, stretching 500 kilometers…"
p. 3
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
geography | worldview | contradiction | summary
In Leo Marx, the Machine in the Garden, he begins by describing Shakespeare's worldview of a particularly fascinating event based loosely on a true story about a wreck in the Bermudas in the play called "The Tempest."
The topography of The Tempest anticipates the moral geography of the American imagination.
An allusion to world view:
"The radical change in the character of society and the sharp swing between two states of feeling, between and Arcadian vision and an anxious awareness of reality are closely related: they illuminate each other."
"it brings the political and psychic dissonance associated with the onset of industrialism into a single pattern of meaning."
The Machine in the Garden, p. 30.
Ernst Mayr, Argument, 1991, p. 1.
geography | worldview | contradiction | summary
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
And again:
"Shakespeare leaves no doubt about the difference between the original state of nature as Gonzalo imagines it and as it actually exists in the world of The Tempest."
The Machine in the Garden, p. 51.
"...but rather as a sample of the rhetoric of progress surrounding the symbol of the machine."
p. 193.
"The answer is that man " . . . is indeed, 'lord of creation'; and all nature as though daily more sensible of the conquest, is progressively making less and less resistance to his dominion."
p. 196.
"To look at a steamboat, in other words, is to see the sublime progress of the race."
p. 197.
geography | worldview | contradiction | summary
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
Serious contradictions create psychic and social dissonance leading to political intolerance, or discord.
Biological facts:
Mayr argues that progress is a Victorian ideal overthrown by the Darwinian revolution.
American beliefs :
Marx suggests that the industrial symbolism discoverable in machinery is a signature of the emergent expression of and a faith in this ideal of progress.
So the beliefs reinforcing archaic assumptions are contradicted by the existence of evidence to the contrary.
Cultural retardation due to widely held assumptions.
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist who lived from 1898-1967. The False Mirror, 1928 is at MOMA, specialists there argue that the painting "seems to insinuate limits to the authority of optical vision: a mirror provides a mechanical reflection, but the eye is selective and subjective." The artist Man Ray owned the painting from 1933 to 1936 just before the outbreak of World War Two.
Leo Marx, Machine in the Garden.
Ernst Mayr, One Long Argument.
The Darwinian Revolution, of the 19th century.
What is a world view? | Mayr's worldview | Freud | Current biology | Clash of views | Contradictions
