Science and Society

Sciences
today often occupy ruts, separated from each other, each as incomprehensible to
non-specialists as languages were at the tower of Babel, and separated too from
the larger currents of culture.

But
it is a myth, Rosenstock-Huessy says (Christian Future), to believe that “sciences
can advance without regard to the society of which they are a part, and even
that their particular science can move ahead without paying any heed to the
philosophy of science as a whole” (84).

He
observes that science gained its power only because “at least half the energies
of Western thought [were] spent on the perpetual welding together of all
contemporaries by a common philosophy, a pervasive belief that all men lived in
one nature governed by universal laws. Until the public was disciplined by some
degree of unanimity, until a new philosophy taught the public to respect
science, the new academic exploration of nature had little chance of success.
Otherwise there would have been little cooperation, or support of particular
scientific experiments, or selection of important questions. Sciences without
philosophy are like spokes without a hub: the wheel must break” (85).