We must keep in mind that the exactness which the natural sciences have achieved, or are trying to achieve, no matter how far it is carried, refers only to the mechanical exactness of both the process and the subject of perception. Such exactness does not give us certainty beyond the certainty of facts found in repeatable experiences. Exactness in this sense is in fact correctness, but it is not truth, for it is meaningless to talk of truth where merely something mechanically repeatable has been ascertained. Truth is not identical with repeat ability; on the contrary, it is what absolutely cannot be duplicated. Hence truth has no place in any kind of mechanics. The term "scientific truth" is therefore quite equivocal. It is based on experiments, and it is used where some mechanically exact phenomenon has been made intelligible, provable, and capable of being repeated.
But the fact that something can be proved, tested, and repeated is no criterion of truth. If the scientist asserts that this exactness is synonymous simply with truth, or with a higher truth, the assertion shows only that the scientist's terminology itself is inexact. What sense does it make to call the proposition, "Two times two equal four," a proposition memorized by first-year school children, a truth? Truth is not learned; one does not become more truthful by learning and by knowing much. Nor do we become truthful by exact thinking. A mathematical proposition does not become true just because it describes a fact with exactness, not even if it gets repeated a million times. The apodictical certainty of mathematical propositions lies entirely and completely within the field of exactness and correctness; but their content of truth equals zero, like that of any arithmetical proposition.
Scientific truths are not "higher" truths. Where they claim to be, these claims are usurpations by the mechanical exactitude. It would be better to discard the term scientific truth altogether because its validity is merely descriptive.
The striving for exactness characteristic of the natural sciences must here be gauged in a different manner – not with those measuring instruments developed for the purpose, but from a point of vantage entirely beyond all science and scientism. No one will deny that it is needful and legitimate to seek such a point of vantage, unless, of course, we make science our religion, surround it with walls of dogma, and sanctify all its methods. But this would render all investigation and analysis impossible.
We will start from an observation which no one who has ever made it can forget. For to observe our modern civilization means to raise the question: Is there not a direct connection between the increase of knowledge concerning mechanically exact processes and the fact that modern man, in a strange manner, loses his individuality, loses his balance, his grip upon life, feels increasingly endangered and susceptible to attack in the security that is his due? This inner security, of course, means something different from the security which can be bought by any kind of measurable method. For it concerns man's place and role in life and is related to human freedom. No methodical science can ever give to man that kind of security, not even the most systematic kind of exactitude. The trend of our exact sciences is not toward purely intellectual knowledge. On the contrary, it has been sharply opposed to the way Parmenides strove after knowledge; it is typically analytical, inductive, dividing. Thus, causality and, in its train, functionalism push to the fore, and all individuality is lost. Thus too, all things mechanical predominate, and with them that brutal optimism and conceit of civilization which characterize the course of the technological age; until eventually the point is reached where a man is broken by his blind lust for power, is punished, and thereby forced to change his way of thinking.
From: Friedrich Georg Jünger
The Failure of Technology
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