Monkey's Uncle
Fun With Atheism Issue, Fall/Winter 1985
Editor: E.T. Babinski
WHAT IS REDUCTIONISM?
It is merely the old trick of making things absurd by reducing them to their lowest terms. It is trying to explain away the music of Kreisler as a mere scraping of cats' entrails with horsehair. Or explaining away a handwritten Shakespearean sonnet as mere ink-worms scrawled on train-track flattened tree guts.
"Words placed in a random order would obey the laws of vocabulary but not those of syntax. If the words were rearranged in a proper syntactical order, the laws of vocabulary would not be annulled but a new and higher principle or order would also come to expression. Each higher level relies on the principles of action in the next lower one -- there could be no syntax without vocabulary and phonology -- but the higher level cannot be derived from, reduced to, or accounted for by the lower. Thus each level in a text is given its meaning by the next higher level. But what is the meaning beyond the text that gives meaning to the whole text?
-- from Via's Kerygma and Comedy in the New Testament
MAN IS ONLY AN INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE (since he obtains energy by 'burning' carbohydrates via a simple oxidation/reduction reaction) "Dr. Frankl's junior high school science teacher used to walk up and down the class explaining to his pupils that life in its final analysis is nothing but combustion, an oxidation process. The boy Frankl at once jumped to his feet and said, 'Dr Fritz, if this is true, what meaning then does life have?' Now imagine what it means that thousands and thousands of young students are exposed to indoctrination along such lines, are taught a reductionist concept of man and a reductionist view of life."--from Ayala's (ed.)
Studies in the Philosophy of Biology
THE ORGANISM IS ONLY DNA'S WAY OF MAKING MORE DNA. THE HUMAN MIND IS A DEVICE FOR SURVIVAL AND REPRODUCTION, AND REASON IS JUST ONE OF ITS VARIOUS TECHNIQUES. 'BELIEFS' ARE REALLY ENABLING MECHANISMS FOR SURVIVAL . . . THUS DOES IDEOLOGY BOW TO ITS HIDDEN MASTERS THE GENES--from E.O.Wilson's Sociobiology, and On Human Nature
Contra Wilson, notice that "the eye is, in an important sense, a device for informed movement and so for survival. But this does not mean that it can serve no other purpose. Constable and Rembrandt used it for all sorts of other ends and it would be mere confusion to suggest that these ends were somehow unreal, or that they were illicit and ought to be abandoned. Again, play no doubt has a function. It has been developed among human beings, as it has among the young of other intelligent species and sometimes among adults too, for evolutionary reasons which presumably have something to do both the satisfactory working of the higher faculties, with the need for practice in developing them, and with the sort of social interactions needed in a society which is much freer and less mechanical than those of the insects. It seems sensible to say that this tendency evolved because it has some value in promoting survival--that is, as a result of its having that value. But to say 'then it is only a means to survival' would miss the point entirely. What evolved was not only a tendency to act in certain ways, but a capacity for delighting in certain things, and thereby of taking them as ends. The ends of art and sport are now our ends. They are not delusions, nor provisional and superficial forms of the real end, survival. And the end of reason, similarly, is not survival, nor reproduction, but consistency and truth. People, even childless people, can die for these things. There is nothing confused in their doing so."--from Mary Midgley's Heart and Mind (St. Martin's Press)
"In an elemental sense, the egg only exists to produce the chicken. But the chicken does not exist only in order to produce another egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is, or may be, valuable in himself." --from G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World? (Dodd, Mead & Co.)
"The motivation of living creatures does got boil down to any single basic force, not even an 'instinct of self-preservation.' It is a complex pattern of separate elements, balanced roughly in the constitution of the species, but always liable to need adjusting. Creatures really have divergent and conflicting desires. Their distinct motives are not (usually) wishes for survival or for means to survival, but for various particular things to be done and obtained while surviving. And these can always conflict."--from Mary Midgley's Beast and Man (Cornel Univ Press) "In the last analysis most common things will be found to be highly complicated. Some men of science do indeed get over the difficulty by dealing only with the easy part of it: thus, they will call first love the instinct of sex, and the awe of death the instinct of self-preservation. But this is only getting over the difficulty of describing peacock green by calling it blue. There is blue in it. That there is a strong physical element in both romance and the Memento Mori makes them if possible more baffling than if they had been wholly intellectual. No man could say exactly how much his sexuality was colored by a clean love of beauty, or by the mere boyish itch for irrevocable adventures, like running away to sea. No man could say how far his animal dread of the end was mixed up with mystical traditions touching morals and religion. It is exactly because these things are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance of all the difficulties begins. The materialists analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and go home to their tea."--from G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World? (Dodd, Mead and Co.)
ANOTHER REDUCTIONIST ERROR IS TO BELIEVE THAT WHEN YOU HAVE DISCOVERED THE EMBRYONIC FORM OF A PHENOMENON YOU HAVE ALSO DISCOVERED AN 'EXPLANATION' OF IT. AS IF THE ACORN 'EXPLAINS' THE OAK TREE!
"I was sitting under a tree with a great biologist. Suddenly he exclaimed, 'I would like to know something about this tree!' He, of course, knew everything that science had to say about it. I asked him what he meant. And he answered, 'I want to know what this tree means for itself. I want to understand the life of this tree. It is so strange, so unapproachable.'"--from Paul Tillich's The Shaking of the Foundations. "Science has raised the possibility that there are as many different consciousnesses in the world as there are organisms capable of perception. It also has raised the possibility that consciousness may arise in ways that seem very alien to us. The symbiotic superconsciousness I vaguely sense in forests is not outside scientific possibility... Instead of myths peopled with talking trees, we must begin to create the opposite... Instead of inflating our human consciousness to fill trees, we must let the trees into our minds. We are very different from trees, but we are also like them. As we learn how they live, we learn a great deal of how we live."
-- David Rains Wallace's The Klamath Knot (Sierra Club Book)
WE ARE, EACH OF US, AN ISLAND UNIVERSE IN A SEA OF SPACE
-Aldous Huxley
On the other hand, "Nothing that exists is an island unto itself...everything that holds membership in the world is an element of a seamless garment--the 'ragged edges' of every individual reality splay off into those of another, and the world is a wedding"
--Nathan Scott
TO AN ASTRONOMER, MAN IS NOTHING BUT AN INFINITESIMAL DOT IN AN INFINITE UNIVERSE.
"An interesting point of view," remarked the bishop, "but you seem to forget that your infinitesimal dot of a man is still the astronomer."--from The Wit and Wisdom of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (Prentice-Hall)
THAT ALL THE MATTER OF THE COSMOS, GATHERED TOGETHER, COULD BE CONTAINED IN A DIE; THAT ON THIS LITTLE EARTH HANGING IN THE VOID WE ARE BUT FURTIVE AGGREGATES OF DUSTY STATISTICAL CLOUDS; THAT ACCORDING TO SCIENCE AND ITS TRUTH ALL IS VOID IN THE DIMENSIONS OF THE UNIVERSE (MILLIONS OF LIGHT-YEARS IN SPACE, BILLIONS OF TERRESTRIAL YEARS IN TIME) . . .
Obviously, the miracle is that there are forms! That there are consistency, landscapes, faces. . . and that vacuity could have given birth to the plenitude of bodies, that light should have become vision, energy emotion, structure myth, and gravitation desire -- from Denis de Rougemon's Love Declared "A strange mystery it is that nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking mother"
-- from Bertrand's Russell's "A Free Man's Worship"
"Music at its highest, as in Bach or Mozart, is pure play. . . The intricate melodies flow on and on, and there never seems any necessity from them to stop. Bach and Mozart composed them in tremendous quantities, with the same Godlike extravagance to be found in the unnecessary vastness of nature. . . in countless suns blazing away so many billion kilowatts of energy; vacant planets spinning in profusion; flowers blooming in their myriads in impenetrable jungles; weeds, insects, fish, birds, micro-organisms swarming upon the earth . . . Returning to the human arena, this may be compared to the long Alleluias of Gregorian chant, the endless arabesques of Persian miniatures, the illuminated margins of medieval manuscripts, the wind-swept bamboos of Chinese painting, and the entirely satisfying and purposeless figures of the dance as it may sometimes be seen in Russian ballet. Such playfulness is the very nature of the divine Wisdom. . . Indeed, every attempt to find plan and purpose and respectable rationality in this universe, whether on a supernatural or a merely naturalistic basis, is bound to end in absurdity, and of the two the naturalistic explanations are the more absurd. Perhaps the song of birds is 'explainable' simply as a device for sexual attraction; perhaps the radiant wings of insects are no more than protective coloring; perhaps the beauty of the morning-glory is merely to entice the bee, appealing no doubt to his acute aesthetic appreciation of color and form. Perhaps. But if the aim of so much splendor is merely to stimulate the sexual processes of purely instinctual organisms, the mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse.
"The trouble is that we are too proud to be children and appreciate the playing of God...
For there is so much tragedy on the surface of life that were there not somewhere, right in the center of things and in the center of each and every pain, a state of absolute and unconfined joy accessible to all, the whole realm of Being must be damned."
--from Alan Watts' Behold the Spirit (Random House Inc.)
"The problem of darkness does not exist for a man gazing at the stars. No doubt the darkness is there, fundamental, pervasive, and unconquerable except at the pin-points where the stars twinkle; but the problem is not why there is such darkness, but what is the light that breaks through it so remarkably; and granting this light, why we have eyes to see it and hearts to be gladdened by it"
-- from Santayana "Plotinus and the Nature of Evil"
"It is consciousness running around like a dog with its tongue out -- literally cynicism -- that asks the too simple question and shapes up the vulgar answer. To be conscious of the nature of the sacred or of the nature of beauty is the folly of reductionism"
--from Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature
