Greetings all,
I watched a few weeks ago a movie staring Wayne Dyer entitled "Ambition to Meaning (Finding your Life's Purpose)". I thought it was an interesting movie but Dyer has made one of the many common errors that Rudolf Steiner talks about in Chapter 11 of Philosophy of Freedom. Since I was just completing that chapter for my online You Tube project, I had that concept on my mind. This chapter is about Purpose and in Steiner's day (which it still seems to be alive and well now) people believed that things had a purpose. Like animals served a purpose or things were created for a purpose. Steiner's argument was that Purpose could only be applied to the field of human action. So if I decide to go to school, that is my purpose. Whatever one has for an intention, they create purpose through their actions.
Dyer makes the huge error when in the movie he states that an acorn has a purpose. In Chapter 11, Steiner refers to that as Lawfulness. So what people typically assign as Purpose, in reality it is Lawfulness. The chapter is super short and so I recommend reading it because that is really the whole point in that chapter.
Dyer creates this whole world view based on this idea. Although I like some of what I saw in the movie, I am a firm believer in forming clear and precise concepts and here he uses the word Purpose incorrectly. It is in fact Lawfulness.
The world is not necessarily purposeful. What we perceive in the world is Lawfulness. That things have a certain order and structure and laws. That is not Purpose and much like what Steiner said, Purpose is only applicable to human action.
Steiner also talked about how the scientists in those days felt we had to understand the Purpose of nature and of the things within the world to truly know it but we do not.
Today I came across a podcast that basically used this false concept of Purpose. It can be found at: https://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=why-people-believe-what-they-do-09-04-10&sc=WR_20090415&posted=1
I listened to half of it and the purpose of these experiments was to understand people's thought processes. The psychologist really did not make sense because she said at one point they conducted experiments where they asked people questions like "Why does it rain?" or "Why do owls have big eyes" to see how they answer it. One of her statements was owls have big eyes to see better, etc but I was quickly reminded of how Steiner talked about how scientists (this bitch was no high quality scientist BTW... what I call an intellectual poser!) would confuse Purpose with Lawfulness.
The first problem with this woman's argument was why even ask people these questions? There really is no answer and it forces people to make up some stupid answer when we all know the real answer is "I don't know" because no one really knows and it really is IRRELEVANT in our search for knowledge. Does it matter why an owl's eye is large? Just study it for god's sake. Why does it rain? It just does, does knowing why it rains help me with understanding the process, Fuck no! Do you think these people will honestly answer that? No they will BS their way because no one likes to be perceived as STUPID. Ms. Lombrozo, you of all people should know that.
Secondly, as a scientist, you do not study the WHY but the HOW, the process. You just study and observe and create experiments. Whether an owl has big eyes and if it helps them to see better is irrelevant of a connection. There are plenty of species out there with small eyes and great vision. Again, no co-relation but because the 'scientist' is insistent that things have a purpose, they make these false leaps in knowledge.
I believe this woman's argument is based on the faulty use of the idea of Purpose and thus is forming poor scientific data and conclusions.
Again this woman's field is psychology which is concerned with the WHY of human behaviour and she has falsely carried that over into the field of science. Science, however, does not care about the Why. It just studies things as they are. It doesn't need to know the purpose of things. The question why is really only used to help understand a process better but sometimes asking the question why just gets in the way and leads to nowhere, especially when trying to figure out the purpose of things that we ourselves did not create.
The whole reason she is confusing Purpose with Lawfulness is because her field is psychology and not science, and psychology deals with human action and it is considered okay to apply Purpose to many things as long as it pertains to human action.
I just have been noticing lately thanks to working on my Steiner project, how people are creating these false world views based on this simple confusion between Purpose and Lawfulness.
Who said a man who lived from 1867-1925 was still irrelevant??!!
4 comments:
That's just it! That man from 1867-1925 is still very much relevant, even more so, as more and more wrongly-educated people confuse Lawfulness and Purpose, such as Psychology bleeding into Science, and many other such examples.
And this is an immense problem with education today, especially in the secular public schools from Pre-school to Grade 12(but most private and religious schools too). Every day in my job as Educational Assistant supporting Special Needs children, I see such dribble and falsehoods pass the lips of so-called educated people, namely the teachers. There are few, very few, teachers who can think clearly and correctly, and who then dare to express their clear, concise thoughts, to buck the repressive, misleading, ill-informed system.
Alas, such is the state of our mislabelled "modern" world!
I agree as well. It really pains me when people can't think clearly and then they continue to perpetuate this unclarity.
I would argue, however, that a scientist who does not consider the why isn't a scientist. Maybe this individual person's experiment is or isn't valid -- but the why is just as important a part of knowledge as the how and the what. It's only when you know the why, you can expand and extrapolate. If you just know the how and the what, you can never really progress.
Knowing that planets go around the sun, and understand the Law of Universal Gravitation, are two different things, for example.
JGH
I think my use of Why is different from how this woman was using Why. Yes I suppose Why is important but some Why questions as I mentioned, lead you no where. You have to ask the right Why questions and this woman wasn't. That's just not good I think.
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