Brief Final Considerations on the Western Scientific Myth

It is important that the pseudo-mentality of Western civilization must be unveiled, for us, in all its true evil dimensions.

The Western world is rotten and corrupt, and the moral imperatives of Western liberalism work as a form of cultural imperialism, with consequences that can only be truly described as totalizing and totalitarian, as inorganic and mechanistic, thus deeply leveling.

Cultural imperialism, broadly speaking, constitutes in the will to power of the perverted form of the late Romano-German cultural ethos.

This ethos proposes as universal that which in truth has always amounted to the deeply particular. The progress of the Western scientific mentality is not the progress of society in itself, but rather the expression of a conditioned subjectivity.

The “truths” of Science are not, “true”, in the sense that the Romano-German mind attaches to them, but rather they are “true”, in the sense that they constitute a sort of technical utilitarian harness, a grasping around something that remains fundamentally alien and invisible to its sight.

The Western post-modern mentality represents, thus, the dissolution of the ephemeral truths of the Western society, a set of truths that had their origins back in the rationalistic and mechanistic age, into a morass of postmodern dissolution.

None of these ephemeral truths were “true” in a fundamental sense, in a deeper logical and ontological form, that evidences their connection to Being, but rather as the constituents of a particular mind, of a particular time frame, of a particular subjectivity.

Thus we must understand that the Cartesian inversion of Being and Consciousness constitutes, then, in the stand of an epoch predicated upon the dreamlike projection of immanent subjective consciousness, here taken apart from its realistic limitations and its inherent frame that the Ancients recognized it, and turned into a Deus Ex Machina, a dreamlike stupor in which the Real becomes a figment of man’s imagination, of his own sentimental and intellectual cogitations that come and go arbitrarily.

These cogitations, these shifting trends of human sentimentality, begin to embroider man’s view, his fundamentally sentimental twist, towards a profuse intellectual masturbation, of the mental image of reality overpowering our direct and clear intuition of this same reality that was natural to man before the Cartesian age.

This nihilism stems from the fact that our own society has become deeply entrenched into this dreamlike state. In sum, the Western scientific worldview constitutes the triumph of subjectivity, and the consequent en-framing that turns man’s intellect in the reverse, closing him from the ontological truth of Being which the Ancients sought, and turning him completely towards a phantom of the purely subjective projections of his own mind, and of his own ego.

Thus the triumph of Western Scientism constitutes the triumph of the Ego, the immanent subjectivity, over Truth, and the damning consequence of this victory is Nihilism – taken here as the only inevitable consequence of the forgetfulness of Being in the post-Enlightenment philosophy of this same reductionist Scientism, and its replacement by the projections of the Ego.

The Ego is the cosmological center of the modern civilization, just as the modern civilization persistently and blindly confuses the projections of purely arbitrary subjectivity with moral, ethical and metaphysical truths.

It is only too natural, then, that our society would become immersed in relativism. And it is also only too natural, then, that our society would become immersed in nihilism.

Thus we must judge the Western scientific revolution of the XVII century up to now for what it truly amounts: a Faustian pact, in which the genuine appraisal of Being was concealed and Truth was exchanged for Technical powers, improvements, and benefits.

Thus it is no wonder, that in this society there would not only be the flowering of a deep sentimentality, and that rationalism and sentimentalism are in a deep, close bonding. This is what, for instance, Rene Guenon tells us.

It thus remains, to the world in particular, that our age must necessarily witness the recognition that the Western Scientific Revolution is merely a projection of a particular, relative, peculiar and historical type of humanity – namely, the post-Christian Western humanity – and not a universal statement of man’s “progress”.

“Progress” is a myth. Western civilization and its exceptionalism, in itself, is a myth, but one that has deep ramifications in our day and age.

Insofar as the sciences of this materialistic age leave their specializations, and tend to deal with the philosophical, ontological, and cosmological dimensions of man’s reality, they constitute no particular assertion of immutable and inviolable truth, but rather a contingent projection of a deeply fragmented subjectivity. And insofar as they try to harness, control, and picture man’s fundamental ontological character, his own spiritual realities, they are completely powerless to give us anything but opinion.

Opinion, in this regard, cannot substitute what the Ancients took for Truth in an ontological sense. And in an ontological sense, it is impossible to reduce the many aspects of Truth down to mere quantitative measurements.

Rather, we must be aware that the “Scientific” Revolution does not constitute “true” Science, insofar as it neglects or ignores the question of Being and its reality entirely, OR simply tries to bury it underneath the chemise de force of mechanistic, quantitative cosmologies that are inherently lacking in coherence. “Scientific” Revolution, in the Western terms that we acknowledge, amounts merely to reductionism, to a hypertrophy of what amounts to a purely external, contingent, secondary vehicle of measurement of physical properties, to the neglect of the most fundamental, the sharpest, most vital questions which the ancient philosophers – for instance, the Thomists, the Peripatetic School, the Pre-Socratics, and Plato – dealt with as a central matter of course, and as a main objective and focus of their own work, their own primal questioning.

Therefore the age of “Scientific” Revolution is – not by any coincidence! - the age of ontological alienation and forgetfulness. This dimension, we see, was fully tackled, described and critiqued in its essence by Heidegger. And this entrapment into subjectivity, into pseudo-categories, together with the forgetfulness of the science of Being, is prima facie the main stepping stone of Nihilism as the fundamental pillar of modern technological civilization, of the Faustian pact that has since, alienated man from Being even as it gave him great technological advances.