2.2 Scientific Revolutions
Last modified 05/17/2008
| Our large scale analysis of the eonic sequence uncovers something we often notice without realizing its significance, the seeming double birth of science. We see the spectacular change in the course of world history with the onset of the scientific revolution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, clear correlates of the modern transition. But we often forget that this is really a rebirth and that there was a 'scientific revolution' in the earlier Axial period, especially in the era of the Greek Axial. This, we can see now, is hardly an accident! And we notice with some suspense for the future that it is as if the first birth was stillborn, science seeming to virtually die out in the middle, or mideonic, interval of our eonic sequence. This characteristic outcome in relation to the eonic sequence, along with the strong eonic correlation, leads us to a larger perspective on the history of science, with the realization that there is an element of historical dynamics to its appearance and gestation, and that this factor may reflect significantly on the way we come to understand the place of science in culture. In a word, there is a larger historical process involved, something more than merely the steady pace of scientific research. The part cannot, as some would have, overtake the whole. This factor should remind us that the emergence of scientism in the wake of the Enlightenment is suspicious just on these grounds. We have derived a question about science by no other means that simple inspection of its historical periodization! And we have already seen that the larger Enlightenment has as it were already anticipated this problematic and issued forth its correction, prior even to the emergence of scientism. We need to adopt the full scope of modernity as the matrix of future action, prepared to restore the balance of the deeper secularism we discover, and an example of that balance we have already indicated in the elegant symmetry of the causal and freedom poles of a secular dialectic. | ||
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