On the Irreducibility of World and Man

The Problem of Reductive Thinking

It is the common outlook of most when asked to account for a phenomenon either of man or society or the world, to default to either a single explanation or a single cause in a way that precludes other explanations. Not only that, but even experts who are drunk on their own pride of credentials and status often frame questions as to only allow for a sole cause and explanation, usually of their own field of expertise. And of these proposed accounts one finds many outliers, not just few that can be dismissed as such, but ones that manifest the holes in the monarchiology¹ of intellectual discourse in various fields.

Although this epistemological poverty has many aspects contributing to its prevalence, be it political, social, methodological, etc., we will mostly tackle the philosophical principles underlying this tendency. But first let me demonstrate how this shows up in reality: the chief among those and most notorious is the psychologist who invokes childhood or dreams—depending on what school of thought he belongs to—every time he encounters a case, or that neuroscientist who insists that consciousness is nothing but patterns of brain states, an emergent property of the brain and nothing else, and the economist who reduces all social phenomena to market dynamics. These classes all have this in common: that they only tackle questions on the basis of one aspect. Although it is understandable to some extent given that we are reared in a scholar environment that favors hyper-specialization to the detriment of broad knowledge, this itself robs both the world and the man of their rich multifaceted incarnate embodied being and abstracts their personal and experiential character into a pattern in order to project concepts and theories on it for fragile understanding.

This in turn is absorbed and trickles down on a wider level to society and is parroted by the people who trust the authority of the experts and in turn reflects it back to them in a vicious loop where the people reduce themselves to those conceptual frameworks and the experts in turn reduce further the scope of their analysis. This validates the method of those studying and the relatability of those being studied, which makes breaking this cycle even harder, which is why I admit that the critiques on the philosophical level will not be enough for some and that one has at some point to examine himself deeper and especially on the aspects that resist explanation, the mystical dimension of man, for him to see that the reduction is not only intellectual but even deeper as it obscures that aspect of him which is where people find themselves truly beyond the mental idols of what he perceives themselves to be.

The Philosophical Foundations

Now this tendency depends on some philosophical assumptions which are the possibility of exhaustive knowledge of the world by the human mind and either materialism on one end or idealism on another, as well as determinism. Since in order to flatten the descriptions of effects to necessary causes requires determinism, even when someone believes otherwise, it is assumed by default to be able to do that move. And also in order to flatten those causes to material causes that supposes materialism or idealism for the other extreme of metaphysics—though this is quite uncommon nowadays—and in order to be able to put forward theories as fact which explains those phenomena from their effects, it is supposed that what is being described is perfectly exhaustively knowable. It is also worth noting that each of these can entail the other: if materialism is the case, that might and has led to the conclusion that we can formulate neat laws that govern that matter based on causes—material causes—and that since those laws do not change, then particular causes lead to specific effects which entails determinism and so also makes abstracting those laws conducive to exhaustive knowledge of how the world and life within it work.

These assumptions and the framework they construct either leads to dogmaticism in natural knowledge on account of the perfect knowability it claims or to radical subjectivism on account of the instability of starting points and axioms from different perspectives of study, since if it be granted that each field that employs this method is perfectly scientific and rely on empirical data, then the contradictory and varied accounts from different fields are equally true.

The dogmatic aspects has been manifested especially through physics and biology who both claim supremacy over all other fields and pride themselves on being most scientific, and they in turn subordinate other fields and make them hybrid by introducing interpretative frameworks to their investigations, as is evolution for psychology, neuroscience and history and physics for all sciences frankly. And for the subjective aspects they are shown through the various theories that each field might give to one specific phenomena, as in when the psychologist, neuroscientist and sociologist each explain human behaviour respectively through cognitive patterns, the subconscious, childhood traumas or brain structure and chemical imbalances or social isolation and economic inequality…etc.

The Critique of Reductive Assumptions

Now beyond the final product of those assumptions on sciences, let us deal with them directly. As for materialism, it has no way of accounting for the laws that govern that matter or even the laws of the mind by which I mean logic and all that is presupposed by science as first principles which have no place in a material world, especially since those are not subject to change in themselves and any claim that they can change or do change will leave us in epistemological nihilism and anarchism. This is the hole at the heart of materialism. Let us go digging further for other holes in the other assumptions, particularly for determinism: if we are determined to every action, thought and all matter is subject to that as well, then we lose all grounding for the possibility of arguing since arguing itself presupposes that we can change our own minds on matters of thought which hinges on having free-will to do that as well. As if it is so, we are arbitrarily compelled to hold our own positions or change them irrespective of whether they are true or not since determinism which compels us is not truth-tracking, or else we will all hold to the correct view of things and that from these it will come clear that we are only performing a play whose script is already written in us whose result is fate.

As for the assumption that we are able to fully grasp phenomena being studied, it is rather not claimed directly but a hidden assumption which drives investigation and it has been initially the product of Enlightenment with its naively optimistic attitude, which still implicitly influences if not the internal scientific community, the public discourse around it, as to provide a unified narrative about the state of the art of knowledge, which leads to a sort of divide that when expressing such views of mine to the lay people it sounds anti-scientific but it is the current philosophical consensus in the post-modern era after the collapse of logical-positivism within the philosophy of science, after Kuhn² and Feyerabend³ specifically.

It is also quite a huge assumption to claim in itself given our limited capacity, our forgetfulness and our cognitive shortcuts which often violate rationality and our vulnerability to deception, to then adopt an attitude that assumes that the human mind is fully capable of grasping the full body of knowledge that cosmos offers is hubris and it is foolish. As for the supposition itself, it suffers from these vulnerabilities, so that if we could know everything, we would have to know what are the boundaries of reality and what constitutes that totality—this often hinges on assuming materialism—and even if all that was was matter, we could not know that all, if we could not know if the universe is finite or infinite over space, and if it was not, that would mean that there is something other than matter which defeats the starting point since otherwise the universe would be infinite which also would mean that we cannot know it perfectly since it is infinitely extended.

Furthermore it is that all knowledge is mediated through concepts and language which involve abstraction and selection which is the process by which we shave away the particularities of common objects and phenomena as to categorize them linguistically which also involves the selection of what constitutes the common attributes as opposed to the particularities and so that all that we can know is that which can be generalized and communicated in speech which means that that which escapes our linguistic capabilities is unknowable and not that it does not exist necessarily, although we can arrive at some level of knowledge—personal knowledge—of things that resist our literalization though the kind of knowing is not the same.