Science

A space where cohabit contradictory obviousnesses is irrational. A rational space, on the other hand, is a space where everything converges towards a radical non-contradiction. In other words, a coherent space. Humanity does not cease conquering such spaces. See, for example, the gigantic 'scientific' effort in our Occident.

With the coherence of a space - and even of several spaces - there remains however the problem of the total space of knowledge and praxis of humanity. An absolute space, indeed, includes necessary every particular space. The same applies to the absolute coherence which cannot exclude any regional or insular coherence.

The reason is necessarily absolutely including. Our actually constituted rationalities, however, remain always compartmental and provincial. On this side only of an 'absolute absolute'.

It is in its reason's nature to be conquering. It cannot repudiate its natural 'imperialism' without denying itself.

The reason is by itself the sovereign judge of possibility and impossibility. Norm of possibility and impossibility, the reason means thus the limit of human freedom. In it, indeed, freedom opens a quasi infinite field, but reason remains itself the ultimate including necessity for freedom.

It is between the double necessity of being - already is not the non-being! - and of reason that opens the space for the human possibility, that is a space where man can articulate ad infinitum the new world of human culture.

'Science' is not simply made up or constituted science, that is the imposing building of the whole of concepts, knowledge, methods, laws and theories. The state of science at a given time of its process is never but one relative and revisable state. Behind constituted sciences works the constituent science, that is the living conquest of the scientific reason. A never completed adventure of scientific intelligibility.

Science is a logically and rationally coherent construction which holds its truth and its certainty of this coherence itself. Science is a construction. It is not an illumination of a transcendent mystery. It is not either a reflection or a photography of reality. It is construction in the passive and active meaning of the term. Not an absolute entity but the fruit of a work, of a human work. The truth of this construction comes neither from its conformity to 'reality'', nor of its practical effectiveness, but from its own dialectically progressive process towards logical and rational coherence. Science on the move is itself its own verification. There is thus an internal critical approach of the totalizing process which guarantees the truth of the process itself. The scientific reason operates critically its own validation.

Science is built up while postulating a certain space of intelligibility. This space is totalitarian. Nothing, in principle, escapes this intelligibility, even if, in fact, temporarily, there remains a mystery on remote regions. This space is coherent: the same type of intelligibility governs it right through. This space is homogeneous: inside there is no rupture of intelligibility. This space is structural: it does not relate on being but on structures articulable according to calculable ratios. This space is deterministic: the relationship between the parts and the relationship between the whole and the parts is necessary and results in logical-mathematical relations; even the 'indeterminism' is treated in a deterministic way. This space is objective: it strictly carries on a 'what', exclusive of all 'project' and of all 'intention'. In such a space the assertions are basically hypothetical-deductive.

Does this space which science must absolutely postulate, under penalty of denying itself, recover the totality of any possible space of intelligibility? Can thus this totality constructed by science be identified with the absolute totality? Such was formerly the claim of the naive metaphysic presuppositions of scientism. Critique cannot be without revealing the scientific totalizing as itself included in a more including dimension. 'Regionalism' is a permanent temptation of the human spirit. We measure always the 'cosmos' with the measurement of our possibilities.

The Greeks founded mathematics and posed the mathematical ideal as principle of any science. Paradoxically the value of their discovery was going to play like obstacle and limit. Such was the seduction of the idea that any compromising with its 'other', namely the concrete reality, seemed unthinkable. See the slow access of the various fields to the scientific statute. The more concrete they are the longer it took to access to this statute.

The demon of Laplace. 1812. With an optimism without limits Laplace had imagined a omniscient 'demon', an ideal observant who would embrace the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom. For such an intelligence nothing would be dubious and the future like the past would be present at its eyes. Our scientist had thought about every thing, except the essential, that is the price of information! In fact, as Brillouin shows it, such an exhaustive observation would require infinite information requiring an infinite energy costing an infinite anti-entropy. Enough to waste all the universe before being able to know it in its entirety! But if science is not even able to buckle itself, how could it buckle the human domain?

Science is dialectical overtaking of dogmatism and scepticism. Both find the truth in their going beyond. Here is an epistemological turning of major importance which opens the modern prospect on the scientific truth. Science cannot be constituted any more as a dogmatic absolute. It is going critically relative. Such a relativism is not a sceptic one since the reason justifies it.

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