There are benefits to understanding and applying science. They are innumerable – medicine for the body and mind, understanding of nature, predicting storms, peering into the stars. But I think science has a limit when it comes to the essence of what it is to be human. Such questions can only be pondered dialectically, philosophically, with the mind. Love, compassion, hate, greed, ambition, jealousy.
I don’t think psychologists will ever pick apart the physical brain enough to ever understand why we fight and hate, or why we love. Ultimately the physical search is futile. I’m finding it hard to explain this at the moment. I’ll just finish off with a quote:
… Although the workings of the world never contravene mechanical considerations, they only make sense, and become fully intelligible, in the light of metaphysical considerations; that the world’s mechanics subserve its design.
If this were clearly understood, no trouble would arise. Folly enters when we try to “reduce” metaphysical terms and matters to mechanical ones: worlds to systems, particulars to categories, impressions to analyses, and realities to abstractions. This is the madness of the last three centuries, the madness which so many of us – as individuals – go through, and by which all of us are tempted. It is this Newtonian-Lockean-Cartesian view – variously paraphrased in medicine, biology, politics, industry etc. – which reduces men to machines, automata, puppets, dolls, blank tablets, formulae, ciphers, systems, and reflexes. It is this, in particular, which has rendered so much of our recent and current medical literature unfruitful, unreadable, inhuman, and unreal. (Awakenings, Oliver Sacks; Vintage Books 1999)
