Going After Scientism Through Science Fiction

May 31, 04:09 AM

Current Headlines: By Walker, Daniel

Marxism is the science of the laws governing the development of nature and society, the science of the revolution of the oppressed and exploited masses, the science of the victory of socialism in all countries, the science of building communist society

- Stalin

With substrates of the type A-His-X-Y-B, the X-Y bond is cleaved most rapidly when it links two aromatic L-amino acids.

- J. S. Fruton

We interrupt this academic essay for an important news report: A Fiend is loose in our world, a terrible Monster that pretends to be something it is not: human. It seems human, but it is not human. It is taking over our world, and it is doing so by means practically invisible to us. It attacks human beings when they are alone, vulnerable, and often while they are unconscious. It takes over the body, destroying the human being at the material level, replacing each and every living human cell with an alien cell. It is becoming a global force, colonizing the human race, and things may have already progressed to the point where there is no way of defeating this invader. Soon, humanity may become extinct, and yet not one person will even know the difference. People will not know that they no longer are what they once were: human.

That scenario drives John W. Campbell's well-known short story "Who Goes There?" The story invites intriguing questions, especially those dealing with the subjects of authenticity and mistaken identity. The scenario from "Who Goes There?" can be discussed as analogous to many situations unfortunately not restricted to fiction. One analogy I have in mind with respect to mistaken identity involves a Monster very much with us today: Scientism.

I feel that this paper can be best appreciated by appealing to a rather large context, and so before I launch into the main body of my argument I want to appeal to that large context. I was inspired to write this paper by a troubling phenomenon that I have observed over the last several years, and in fact continue to observe today: The circulation of problematic understandings/representations of science in the Academy, especially those produced in the Humanities. Some of these poor representations have been employed as elements within cultural critiques of science and/or the "West." I think that the representations have been problematic primarily because those producing them have failed to distinguish between science and scientism. I believe that distinguishing between science and scientism not only can clear up misunderstandings with respect to the two terms, but also can facilitate more effective performances of cultural criticism, make available a relatively more critical and more rigorous notion of science to those who might otherwise (perhaps unhappily and/or "irrationally") distance themselves from science, and, with respect to the study of literature, correct for certain mis-readings so that works once interpreted as featuring anti-science themes are seen as involving anti-scientism themes. Considering this context will hopefully help the reader to view this paper as involving much more than a scientific apology, which is the last thing I want this paper to be read as. I insist that distinguishing science from scientism is a worthwhile enterprise that could serve many disciplines and should be taken as relevant, even critical, to forwarding many positive aspects of life.

The main portion of this paper is divided into three sections. section I aspires to offer a basic idea of what science is. section II describes my notions of scientism and psuedo-science. section III analyzes representations of scientism and discusses anti-scientism themes in a few works of Science Fiction.

I. Science

So I need to say something about what science is. In the Humanities the name that probably most quickly comes to mind for talking about science is Thomas S. Kuhn. I will quote Kuhn later in this paper since he has made an important contribution to the discourse on science, but with respect to answering the question, "What is science?" I think that it is worth starting this section by quoting professional scientists involved in "normal" scientific work- Kuhn did receive his PhD in physics, but was more of a historian and philosopher of science than what I am calling a working scientist.

Scientists have much to say on what constitutes science. Gregory N. Derry, a scientist, writes in What Science Is and How It Works that science can be thought of as "organized skepticism" (161). And he addresses the project of defining science by saying the following:

Scholars argue over whether science is a body of knowledge, a collection of techniques, a social and intellectual process, a way of knowing, a strictly defined method, and so forth. These arguments are not very interesting to me, since I accept all of these elements as valid partial visions of science. (ix)

If our goal is to understand science, then we certainly should avoid simplistic definitions. Complete visions may indeed be beyond us, but partial visions that are as inclusive as possible will help move us toward a better and more comprehensive understanding of what science is. Stephen Jay Could maintains that "science works with testable proposals" (397). And Carl Sagan has said both that "the scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined" (27) and that "science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas" (38). Stewart Richards, in his Philosophy and Sociology of Science: An Introduction, a book, the author makes clear, that is "about science written by a professional scientist," (vii) gives the following statement on science: "Science studies those aspects of our knowledge of the external world upon which there can be universal agreement, at least in principle" (9). Richards admits that science proceeds "as if the external world existed and, as a working principle, as if its laws were invariable" (9). Fortunately, the kind of everyday work done by scientists can also educate us about what science is, so that we are not limited to cataloging the many general statements scientists have made about the nature of their field.

Because science is sometimes best appreciated through concrete examples, which in addition to lending understanding also helps to deflate certain confused approaches to science that deal with it only on the level of the abstract, I will discuss an example from the "Prologue" to Derry's What Science Is and How It Works. Here is Derry's profound question: "Why should you whip a meringue in a copper bowl?" (4). Since at least the eighteenth century, it has been known that whipping egg whites in a copper bowl produces a creamier meringue that is less prone to over-beating (Derry 4). For quite a while, no reason was given that provided any understanding, to refer to Stewart Richards' idea of science, that might result in a "universal agreement" on this "aspect of our knowledge of the external world." But now, thanks to science, we have been provided with such understanding. Albumen, that stuff we usually call egg whites, is "a complex substance containing many different proteins (ovalbumen, conalbumen, ovomucin, lysozyme, [and others]) suspended in water" (Derry 4). Whipping egg whites just so breaks up their chemical structure-"unfolds the amino acid chains"-and results in meringue, but too much whipping results in "curdled lumps" (Deny 4- 5). Using a copper bowl makes whipping meringue easier in that you are less likely to produce those unappealing lumps. But why? "The answer turns out to be related to the ability of conalbumen ... to bind metal ions (in this case, copper) to itself (Deny 5). Perhaps, then, we can hypothesize that "a small but significant number of copper atoms are scraped from the sides of the bowl into the egg white," (Derry 5) which would keep conalbumen's amino acid chains from unfolding and make the egg white easier to whip. And, to give Gould's point its day, we only have the chance to arrive at that conclusion because the above hypothesis is a "testable proposal." And testing, involving observations of "conalbumen/copper complexes" using particular light absorption experiments, has confirmed the hypothesis (Derry 5).

An entire paper could be written on the effort to define science and could include many more examples of scientific work, but I only want to offer a bare notion of what science is. Before I can consider that bare notion sufficiently offered, though, I want to briefly touch on three critical topics: Objectivity, Revolution, and Reduction.

Science is often confused with a set of remarkable claims that go under the name of objectivity. This objectivity is supposed to be completely free from the influences of emotions and prejudices, as well as free from non-scientific-oriented traditions, the most prominent of those being religious doctrines. Also, objectivity is supposedly a position that is based solely on empirical data, that data presented usually as facts, or propositions, and those propositions usually pertaining to objects. The observers and the data are supposedly independent of one other. In Science Deified and Science Defined: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture, Richard Olson traces the vision of science as it has developed over the centuries. Olson describes notions of science being capable of s\uch objectivity as a set of "positivistic assumptions that have perverted most of the traditional attempts to understand interactions between science and other institutions within Western culture" (5). Science does strive for universal agreement, and the struggle to achieve that is imbedded in problems too numerous to list here, but science does not pretend to be objective in the manner mentioned above. In fact, recent work in science, in particular in the area of theoretical physics dealing with quantum mechanics (I have in mind the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), has observed the effect of observation on observed phenomena within experiments. Although it would be a mistake to say that in light of that principle science has proven that it can't be or isn't objective, it is worth recognizing how actual work in science is dealing with the complex relationship between observer and observed phenomena. It is this sort of ongoing scientific work that involves dealing with the necessary interactions, what I called before the complex relationship, between constructed frameworks for the act of observing data and theoretical descriptions of data that highlight the way in which science is far from being objective in such a static sense. Socio-political, economic, and psycho- analytical approaches can certainly emphasize for us how science is not free from human emotions, motivations, and socio-political structures, and I am not contesting the fact that science is imbedded in human practice, practice often all too subjective. My purpose here is simply to make clear how science is not objective.

As already stated, Kuhn is worth quoting in relation to the project of understanding science. I think Kuhn's work is significant enough to mention here because at times a narrow idea of science is mistaken for the notion of science that I want to forward. One of Kuhn's major contributions to the discourse on science was to distinguish between what he called "normal science" and periods of "scientific revolution." For Kuhn, normal science "means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements" (10). Those achievements that are both "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity" and "sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve" are called "paradigms" (10). Scientific revolutions, on the other hand, are "non-cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by an incompatible new one" (92). The sociology that displays the degree to which older paradigms are given up only after a dynamic struggle has occurred is interesting in itself. But for my purposes here what this simple but nonetheless rich observation helps to produce is a more inclusive and richer vision of science, which is one involving work that builds on established foundations as well as work that shatters old foundations and creates new ones. Science aspires to be elegantly coherent but is not an eternally stable field. It is a study not only open to change but also based on change. Kuhn's work has been treated in a variety of ways, and his work has been used to suggest interesting analogies between science and other fields as well as to support rather non-scientific projects. My use of Kuhn is applied only to science, to understanding what science is and what it is not.

Reduction is an issue that seems very much connected to misunderstandings of science. Reduction is indeed operative in science, but it is important to understand the difference between appropriate and inappropriate acts of scientific reduction. In science, reduction is the practice of "subsuming the particular to the general" (Derry 195). Examples of appropriate acts of reduction would be the reduction of "Kepler's laws to a special case of [Newtonian] dynamics" and "the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics" (Derry 195-6). What is of critical importance is that "successful reductions must involve clear and precise correspondence between all terms in the two theories or sciences" (Derry 196). That is a significant requirement, one perhaps not often available to those writing in the Humanities, but as long as we keep it in mind we should be able to understand how science is reductive only in ways that are appropriate and intelligible. Thus, "chemistry is reducible to physics," but to claim that sociology is reducible to physics-whether you are reducing sociology to psychology, psychology to biology, biology to chemistry, and then chemistry to physics, or however you go about it-is "absurd" (Derry 196). Far from being guilty of the massive accusations percolating in newspaper editorials, and even I will insist in professional, academic classrooms, conferences, and publications, that spread a fear of science as evil and inhumane, science is not out to do anything like reduce love to a chemical reaction. Science may observe that people claiming to experience moments of feeling like they are in love exhibit a particular chemical reaction somewhere in the body, but science reduces only when it can, and it isn't out to reduce any person or place in a way that will result in a loss of meaning and/or significance.

II. Scientism (and pseudo-science)

Just as there are many statements about science that can be used to contribute to a vision of what science is, so there are quite a few notions of scientism that can be gathered in the effort to better understand the Monster that it is. A serious difficulty exists with the gathering of statements about scientism, however, in that some statements about what scientism is carry an interpretive problem. Some statements on scientism feature an incomplete or even erroneous notion of what science is as that against which they contrast their idea of what scientism is. At the very least, statements on scientism have left the nature of science unclear. For example, in Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas writes that with the "principle of scientism... the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures" (67). "What the sciences do"? And that set of activities being explained through the "methodological analysis of scientific procedures"? Here I think we have a possible instance of what Kuhn calls "normal science" being mistaken for science as a whole. Doing so restricts (perhaps the right word to use is "reduces") the idea of what constitutes science in such a way that the creative, imaginative, and even revolutionary aspects of science are lost. What has happened in Habermas' definition of scientism, in my opinion, is nothing less than a covert slandering of science. Even though he seems interested in labeling the bad guy as scientism and going after that antagonist, I do think some interpretive issues come up in his project with respect to science. Elizabeth Cummins Cogell argues that "scientism is not the scientific method nor its findings, per se," but rather "it is the obsession with the objective-empirical perspective, to the exclusion of any other type of knowledge" (98). That is a trickier statement, but I do read Cogell as implying that science or the scientific method is or is based on this "objective-empirical perspective." Science, then, would significantly involve the objective-empirical perspective, but would not exclude other types of knowledge. Scientism would exclude other types of knowledge. Such a distinction might seem fine, and again it is scientism that gets targeted, but in my opinion a flawed idea of science is loaded as an element in an attack on scientism. And so, unlike the case with science, it is difficult to gather definitions of scientism, because so many discussions of scientism contain unacceptable (if only because they are at the very least too ambiguous to be of use here) notions of science.

For the purposes of this paper, then, I am going to begin offering an idea of what scientism is by starting with the following: Scientism is like science, but is corrupted by dogmatic attitudes and practices that remove many if not all critical qualifications that go into defining science as a way of constructing aspects of our knowledge about the external world that are dynamic, local, at times intuitive, particular, open, subjective, social, cultural, skeptical, demanding of observation, based on testing, overt, self-critiquing, and at times even revolutionary. Where science would admit that the external world is assumed and that the problem of the existence of the external world is something thousands of years of philosophy has yet to settle conclusively, scientism insists that the external world truly exists, absolutely, objectively. Where science admits that in order to function it treats its laws as if they were invariable and all the while remains open, overall, to change, perhaps should even be treated as praxis based on an always possible perpetual revolution, scientism claims that the laws of science are invariable and it is not open to revolutionary change. Scientism is static, global, obtuse, closed, objective, claims to be acultural, is often resistant to skepticism and demands for tests, is covert, and is self-affirming. Scientism is often forwarded as the only viable means to knowledge and even as the oracle for all reasonable human behavior, and so scientism is often the mode of thought with respect to not only traditional objects of science but also to objects of politics, religion, philosophy, and many other fields of study usually located in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. That is important to stress: Scientism isn't just science gone dogmatic that deals with the sorts of things with which science is concerned- Scientism often claims as its natural turf arenas within \which proper science wouldn't be caught dead. There are as many possible permutations and partial visions of scientism as there are of science, but it is the unqualified and dogmatic attitude of scientism and its application to areas usually not considered appropriate for science that for me quickly characterizes scientism.

Pseudo-science is closely related to scientism. Pseudo-science explicitly claims to be a science, but is in fact nothing like a science in practice or in theory. You can have scientism and yet not have a pseudo-science, because not all scientistic practices explicitly claim to be scientific. Every pseudo-science that I have come across, though, has been scientistic. The premiere example of a pseudo-science is "Creation-science" or any related effort by a religion to support itself under the guise of science. For example, one version of Creation-science takes the Bible as literally true, and will argue that the Earth and in fact our entire universe is something a bit over a dozen thousand years old. When scientists point to radioactive dating techniques on Earth that suggest the planet is somewhere around 5 billion years old and offer spectral analyses and other observations/calculations from Astronomy that suggest that our universe is something like 15-20 billion years old, the Creation scientist will give something similar to the following argument: If God is all powerful and all knowing, could create the entire universe out of nothing, then He could also create something that already had the properties of being "old" despite the fact that He had just created it, and such a creation would be there to test our faith, and would prove nothing. Such an argument is remarkable in many ways, but the relevant point is that the proposal is not testable. Being something we cannot test, it is not up for scientific study and a discipline which asserts it as such is a pseudo-science. Although the Creation-scientist may use technical terms, construct some valid (though perhaps not always sound) logical arguments, and even demonstrate some familiarity with certain elements of some field of science or some scientific experiment(s), Creation-science is a pseudo-science. Only when a project is not scientific and yet claims to be scientific is it a pseudo-science.

III. Scientism and Anti-Scientism in Science Fiction

An effort to distinguish between science and scientism if it does little other than react to academic and popular understandings/ representations of science by presenting definitions and descriptions risks presenting a picture of a problem that is not merely dry but even tragically disengaging. By looking at works of literature, usually placed in the genre called science fiction, that involve significant treatments of the very human and very important problems that can be related to scientism, I think we can better appreciate the importance of ridding our world of this Monster. In this section, then, I will try to engender such an appreciation by analyzing how scientism is represented and how the theme of anti- scientism functions in the following works of science fiction literature: 1) Yevgeny Zamyatin's We; 2) "The Machine Stops," by E.M. Forster; and 3) Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.

Yevgeny Zamyatin's novel, We, is a dramatization of what happens when an entire population becomes ruled by scientism, when a state practices scientism as its religion, creed, and political philosophy. In We, people do not have names but are declared as variables (1-330, D-S03, etc) and can be literally liquidated if they are diagnosed with the dreaded sickness of developing an individual soul. In the introduction to her translation of We, Mirra Ginsburg writes on the nature of the fundamental problem turning the world of We. The society in We certainly does "claim to be based on the purely rational" (xv), and is in fact operating according to a scientistic notion of what constitutes the purely rational, and Ginsburg is right to point out how such a society becomes "deadly, dehumanizing, and absurd" (xv). In this novel, everything is reduced to forms of socially-constructed scientistic living. Even love is reduced to a formula, "L = f(D)" (153). In this novel, there is no "I." There is only We. Here we have the oxymoron of objectivity constructed as a populace. But some members of this populace, having been taught how to think logically, how to view the world scientifically, and they struggle with the oxymoron and resist the contradiction that they have been cast as.

D-503, a mathematical philosopher and rocket scientist, is the protagonist who struggles with the contradictions of his State (of being). He has been taught that the revolution which created his society is the final revolution, and yet he is challenged by the knowledge that he can not "name the final number" (174). In a world operating according to the dictates of such a radical and complete scientism, all beings are objects and everything can be known- people live in usually transparent homes in a glass city, because all objects can and must be observed. Unknowns are represented by the variable "X." For those raised in the world of VM?, "it is unnatural for a thinking, seeing being to live amidst irregulars, unknowns, X's" (176). But life is riddled with such X's, and the scientific training possessed by D-503 enables him to observe these X's and ultimately to see himself as an "X," if not always as an "I." The X-istential nature of being drives D-503. His effort to overcome an identity as a fixed number, thanks in part to his training as a mathematician, owes its degree of success to the last phrase and sentiment of the work, "Because Reason must prevail" (232). Here is the critique of scientism, and not science. Here is an idea of reason that is not scientistic, a reason that serves humanity, and reason can distinguish between scientism and science, why one should not be adhered to and why the other can only sometimes be of service and value.

Whereas We involves scientism cast as a totalitarian government, 'The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster features a scientism cast as a religion in the form of the ideology of an overarching civic maintenance system, The Machine. It is a world of "buttons and switches everywhere" (43). In this setting of automated living, blasphemy is a sin, "You mustn't say anything against the Machine" (42). The dependents of the Machine are human beings living in underground, identical places. In "The Machine Stops," places are created the same, and so those who are products of place are in turn constructed much the same. People live without the desire to move: why go anywhere, when everywhere is the same? By fixing people in such a way, the efficient Machine provides for all needs, and with the Machine doing everything there is no need to produce people capable of fixing the Machine. The people who are produced are incapable of experiencing a life outside their cell, and become "seized with the terrors of direct experience" (45) if presented with the option of traveling down the dark tunnels that connect the various cells of their underground world. These people never touch one another, and they fill up their time giving and attending lectures which are information-based and do not involve much in the way of creativity or critical thought. The information in which they trade is supposed to be "useful," but the only use for the information is the giving and attending of lectures, so that knowledge is never genuinely applied beyond its reproduction (information as simulacra). It is this mentality that dramatizes the sort of mindset that would be created if science were treated as something static and never self-questioning, and this science-in fact, scientism-ruled the world.

Typical of many fictional dystopias, in "The Machine Stops" there is one person, Kuno, who sees the truth and dares to venture beyond the immediate reach of this automated, scientistic world. Kuno declares, "it is we who are dying, and ... down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine" (54). Kuno explores the outer reaches of his world, and actually comes to a place above the Machine in the open air (air which is free and dangerous), but he is dragged down by the Mending Apparatus, dragged back down to mother.

Eventually, the Machine, the Mother and Monster, begins to falter. As it breaks down, it takes two actions in an effort to maintain order and efficient operation: 1) it abolishes the respirators, so that no one can go above ground; and 2) the scientism already practiced by the people becomes an official religious doctrine: "undenominational Mechanism" (58). It must be understood that the Machine was made long ago by human beings, programmed to care for human beings and so the restrictions it creates can be traced back to those static programs, those scientistic formulations. When people have no way of reacting to the breakdown of the Machine in a way that is productive, the Machine forwards a religion to manage the emotional stability of a populace unable to cope on a material and scientific level. Function after function is lost, including the Mending Apparatus so that the instrument of correction is itself "in need of repair" (60). Of course no one can fix the machine, because all have been fixed (made impotent/sterile with respect to reproducing humanity as functional). In the end, the communication system goes out, and mother and son, Vashti and Kuno, Machine and at least a portion of Humanity, die together.

Stanislaw Lem's Solaris provides us with a complicated representation of scientism and a compelling, thematically unified work of anti-scientism. There are a number of dimensions to Lem's representation of scientism, and in this paper I will only touch on some of the interconnected aspects of this book. What makes Solaris so successful is the way in which Lem unifies the theme of anti- scientism thr\ough the masterfully crafted relationship between aspects of the representation of scientism and the very human consequences of living a scientistic life.

My assertion is that scientism is dogmatic science and/or science applied in inappropriate contexts, situations simply not compatible with scientific work. One way in which Lem represents scientism is by showing us the throes of normal science in an environment without a paradigm. "Just when a measure of success had been achieved in unraveling this problem, it turned out, as often happened subsequently in the field of Solarist studies, that the explanation replaced one enigma by another" (19). To some degree, science is always tentative, and always working out problems. It has been punctuated by revolutions, but those moments have usually been relatively brief. What happens in Solaris is that the revolutionary times just keep on rolling. Applying Kuhn's notions of normal science, paradigms, and scientific revolutions, we see in Solaris the consequences of bringing science somewhere where it does not belong, where it can't function, where no paradigm can be established so that the work of normal science can begin. Thus, normal science comes off as absurd, and those doing the work are described as "a faceless mass of industrious collectors and compilers" (167) whose work may never mean anything. "Analytically- based speculations concentrated on scrupulous examination of a growing body of data" (166) will provide nothing of positive value unless some connection to a meaningful structure can be at least tentatively manufactured. And that meaningful structure would require a testable formulation. Confounding the scientific method, the scientists studying Solaris find it "impossible to obtain a repetition of any previously observed phenomena" (21). And so here we have an inability to come to a universal agreement, because the aspects of knowledge of the external world are different, and no testing is possible because the conditions are always changing. While "new theories proliferated" (24), those new theories did not change the result that "the sum total of known facts was strictly negative" (23).

In this story where scientists all are dumbfounded yet at least a few of them continue to struggle to make science work where it seems unlikely to ever function, the character of Rheya has a significant role to play. Rheya is real, whereas Kelvin is a measurement of the real. Snow points out to Kelvin that Rheya is "a mirror that reflects part of your mind" (154), but Rheya is more than merely a mirror, or some sci-fi take on simulacrum. I believe she is a message to Kelvin that comes from the Ocean, but that is not to say the Ocean is aware of sending the message (or that it is not). There is a reaction between the Ocean and Kelvin that results in what I take to be the message, a message perhaps only available from my take on Kelvin's character and life. Merely speculating on the true nature of the Ocean is not my intention, and would to some degree miss what I take to be the major point of the text. Rheya states, "I am not a human being, only an instrument.... an instrument of torture which loves you and wishes you nothing but good" (143). While there's room there to apply some feminist concerns with the female depicted as a nag (see page 110 of your copy of the Interplanetary Cookery Book for other feminist treats), I take that statement as a literal, telling claim about the function of Rheya. She wishes Kelvin nothing but good, and she will be instrumental in moving Kelvin closer to being able to live a good life. In order to travel that path, however, Kelvin must endure a number of painful episodes as he approaches the climax of his ordeal, a reaching for the Ocean, a reaching for the realization that life as a whole is not an appropriate object for science.

Others first try their hands at making contact with the Ocean. Lem's novel involves a long narrative on Solarist studies cut into pieces with each piece denoting a special aspect of the effort to communicate with and/or communicate about something truly alien, something for which communication itself might be alien. Dr. Sartorius comes up with the idea of X-raying images of brainwaves into the ocean. Kelvin states, 'The idea of using X-rays to preach sermons on the greatness of mankind seems absolutely ridiculous to me" (128), but that does not stop Sartorius. What is more telling here is that the "greatness of mankind" is reduced by Sartorius to scientism. He directs Kelvin not only on what to think about, but also on how to think, on how to be while the brain scan is taken:

Make an effort to eliminate any intrusion of individual personalities, and concentrate on the matter in hand. Earth and Solaris; the body of scientists considered as a single entity, although generations succeed each other and man as an individual has a limited span; our aspirations, and our perseverance in the attempt to establish an intellectual contact; the long historic march of humanity, our own certitude of furthering that advance, and our determination to renounce all personal feelings in order to accomplish our mission; the sacrifices that we are prepared to make, and the hardships we stand ready to overcome. (160-61)

That speech is important because it participates not only in the sort of scientistic approach I discussed above, but it highlights the worst form of scientism: bad science applied where science does not work and in a context in which all other ways of knowing and living are treated as obstacles.

With respect to the reader's (or should I only say my?) experience of the Ocean, Lem succeeds in doing two remarkable things: 1) He gets the reader to practice scientism, that is he pushes the reader to try and figure the Ocean out using their own grasp of science; and 2) He gives the reader scenes of wonder and beauty on both a grand, fantastic scale, as well as on a very intimate scale. For me, this performs the theme of the text through the reader. There is a revelation, and it is awesome, and it is a result of finally distinguishing between science and scientism and between a scientistic way of life and a way of life that involves science only when appropriate.

While reviewing one of the many types of formations, the symmetriads, Kelvin thinks of how "it is not their nightmare appearance that makes the gigantic symmetriad formations dangerous, but the total instability and capriciousness of their structure, in which even the laws of physics do not hold" (117). We cannot reduce human experience to physics, and this lesson is what the Ocean can be taken to perform. At one point Kelvin refers to it as a "symphony of geometry" that human beings cannot hear, and sees the completed symmetriad as representing "a spatial analogue of some transcendental equation" (119), but Kelvin does not yet have any real understanding of what that might mean, of what his contradictions employing scientific terms communicates. What it means is not trivial, but profound-yet the meaning must be felt in order to be understood, and sometimes the way to feel meaning is to observe the inability to make direct contact with it, to grab it and possess it and communicate it ... sometimes the meaning is in the reaching for meaning, and only for the one doing the reaching.

At the end of the novel, Kelvin goes down to the surface of Solaris, and encounters the Ocean. This encounter, I think, is a metaphor for the critical message of the book, for the anti- scientism point behind this grand representation of a life suffering from scientism. At the shore, on the edge of this great, mysterious thing that generations of scientists have wondered about and theorized on, Kelvin tries a little hands-on experiment. "I went closer, and when the next wave came I held out my hand .... the wave hesitated, recoiled, then enveloped my hand without touching it" (202-203). The wave does not react violently toward him, and in fact is described as like "some strange beast patiently waiting for the experiment to finish" (203). The lesson is simple, and yet in the context of the story of a man who lost the love of his life and blames himself for her death perhaps because he chose a scientistic life over a more balanced life in which science is given its good but nonetheless reduced place, it is sublime.

Clues to what this message, this anti-scientism lesson, has to teach us can be found throughout the text.

It's almost as if you are purposely refusing to understand.... If the truth is hard to swallow, it's not my fault.... We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos.... We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors.... We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us-that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence-then we don't like it anymore. (72)

A scientistic mode of living is a retreat from full being, from robust becoming. Although Solaris features a remarkably unified theme of anti-scientism, it must be understood that this anti- scientistic position is based on intense and personal experiences and judgments. We witness Kelvin's ordeal, but Snow's and Sartorius' may be just as self-involved and as different from each other's as Kelvin's. It is not necessarily true that the reaction that occurs between the Ocean and Kelvin is the Ocean's "message" to humanity, but I do think it is a message that we can interpret through Kelvin. It says that love, the meaning of life, the universe as a true whole, and the way for humanity (what you can take the Ocean to represent, with the life-cycles of some of its for\mations as analogous to the life-cycles of loving relationships as to the nature of science), are not merely objects of science. It also says that life must not be lived solely according to the values of the scientific project. And Lem manages to deliver this message through moments of dread, terror, love, guilt, wonder, sorrow, and recovery. Lem wants us to face the idea loaded into the line, "Man has gone out to explore other worlds and other civilizations without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, and without finding what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed (157). As the "young scientists" at one point in the narrative on Solaris suggest, it is "a touchstone of individual values .. . essentially a test of ourselves" (23).

Conclusion

Sandra Harding has written that "Neither God nor tradition is privileged with the same credibility as scientific rationality in modern cultures" (16). In a recent article, Ben Bova quotes Galileo as having said that scientists "seek to investigate the true constitution of the universe-the most important and the most admirable problem there is" (33). While "scientific rationality" does receive a unique credibility, it has earned it. In conjunction with an understanding of just what "scientific rationality" involves, the important and difficult task is determining when and where and how to employ science. "The true constitution of the universe" is a phrase that some scientists might continue to use today, and not merely as a reference to an important scientist from history, and such usages risk something unfortunate, because such usages might confuse those not educated about science so that the set of romantic and passionate feelings of people working in science who value the world and their part in developing an understanding of it is confused with the nature of science. Most of us will never produce the sort of work that is referenced in a statement like, "with substrates of the type A-HisX-Y-B, the X-Y bond is cleaved most rapidly when it links two aromatic L-amino acids" (Fruton 125), much less achieve a level of development as professional scientists capable of understanding not only the meaning but also the significance of such a statement. In such context, as producers and reproducers of ideas in the Humanities, including ideas of ideas in the Sciences, we must retain a critical eye, and distinguish between the many kinds of statements that can be made in and about science by scientists and non-scientists alike.

It is worth distinguishing between science and scientism. If we do not read closely and write carefully, if our notions of science are poor, then we will not distinguish between science and scientism, and anti-scientism works will be confused with anti- science works. If we take literature seriously, and we want to use literature as part of a project to address history and even aspire to contribute to the evolution of social life in a positive direction, then I contend that the sort of bifurcation between science and the rest of life (rather than between scientism and a life enhanced but not reduced to/by science) that some of those in Humanities draw is extremely unfortunate. Confusing science for scientism helps no one, risks terrible problems, and it removes science as a possible ally to human endeavors.

Works Cited

Bova, Ben. 'The New Outlook for Astrobiology." Analog: Science Fiction and Fact. (Dec 2002). 24-33.

Campbell, John W. "Who Goes There?" Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology. Eds Patricia S. Warrick, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. 84-129.

Cogell, Elizabeth Cummins. "The Middle-Landscape Myth in Science Fiction." Science Fiction Studies 15. 83-99.

Derry, Gregory N. What Science Is and How It Works. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1999.

Forster, E. M. "The Machine Stops." Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology. Eds Patricia S. Warrick, Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. 41-63.

Fruton, J. S. "Mechanism of Pepsin Action." Science and Scientists: Essays by Biochemists, Biologists, and Chemists. Eds. M. Kageyama, et al. Tokyo: Japan Scientific Societies P, 1981. 123-28.

Ginsburg, Mirra. "Introduction." We. New York: Eos, 1999. v-xx.

Gould, Stephen Jay. "Sex, Drugs, Disasters, and the Extinction of Dinosaurs." The Writer's Presence. 3rd Edition. Eds. Donald McQuade and Robert Atwan. Boston: Bedford, 2000. 396-403.

Habermas, Jurgen. Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro Boston: Beacon, 1971.

Harding, Sandra. The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1986.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3rd Edition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.

Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. San Diego: Harvest, 1987.

Olson, Richard. Science Deified and Science Defined: The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture. Volume 2: Front the Early Modem Age through the Early Romantic Era, ca. 1640 to 1820. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

Richards, Stewart. Philosophy and Sociology of Science: An Introduction. New York: Schocken, 1984.

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World. New York: Random, 1995.

Stalin, J. V. Marxism and Problems of Linguistics. Trans. People's Republic of China. Peking: Foreign Language P, 1972.

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York: Eos, 1999.

Daniel Walker completed his undergraduate work in Philosophy and his graduate work in English at CaI State Fullerton. He wishes to thank Professor John Rieder of the University of Hawaii at Manoa for supporting his efforts to write this essay. He currently works as the Corporate Editor at K2 Network, and is also pursuing several creative writing projects.

Copyright University of Texas at Brownsville Spring 2007

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