Science, Culture and Integral Yoga :: 100 rh. Re: a response to the question why, how

1) Science must be made absolutely pure. For in practical operation and average thinking, it is shot through with non-scientiﬁc assertions and attitudes. Pure and strict science in its application to the whole sphere of the existent has been magniﬁcently achieved by individual scientists, but on the whole our spiritual life is far removed from it.

2) Superstitious belief in science must be exposed to the light of day. In our era of restless unbelief, men have snatched at science as a supposedly ﬁrm foundation, set their faith in so-called scientiﬁc ﬁndings, blindly subjected themselves to supposed experts, believed that the world as a whole could be put in order by scientiﬁc planning, expected science to provide life aims, which science can never offer —and expected a knowledge of being as a whole, which is beyond the scope of science.

3) Philosophy itself must be methodically reclariﬁed. It is science in the age-old and enduring sense of methodical thoughts, but it is not science in the pure modern sense of an enquiry into things, leading to universally valid, cogent knowledge, identical for all.

4) The fallacious identiﬁcation of philosophy and science by Descartes, a misconception in keeping with the spirit of these last centuries, has made science into supposedly total knowledge and has ruined philosophy.

Today the purity of philosophy must be gained along with the purity of science. The two are inseparable but they are not the same thing; philosophy is neither a specialized science along with others, nor a crowning science resulting from the others, nor a foundation-laying science by which others are secured.

Philosophy is bound to science and thinks in the medium of all sciences. Without the purity of scientiﬁc truth, the truth of philosophy is inaccessible.

Science has its own realm and is guided by philosophical ideas which grow up in all the sciences, though they themselves can never be scientiﬁcally justiﬁed.

The modern aspiration for consciousness of truth has become possible only on the basis of the sciences of the last century, but it has not yet been achieved.

The work required for its realization is among the most urgent needs of the present historical moment. In opposition to the disintegration of science into unrelated specialties, in opposition to the scientiﬁc superstition of the masses, in opposition to the superﬁciality brought upon philosophy by the confusion of science and philosophy – scientiﬁc research and philosophy must join hands on the path of authentic truth.

(Jaspers, 1950)

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