The Platform Of Scientific Inquiry

Bohr, at a meeting of eminent scientists famously quipped: ‘We are all agreed that your theory is crazy..the question is whether it is crazy enough to…be true‘

Scientific Inquiry today, cut loose from the monastic disciplines that were a requirement in the first houses of Learning, ignorant of the simplest Meditative and Mindfulness Practices, severs the observer from that which is observed.

The perch of the contemporary Scientist, the post from which he views, is located at an arbitrary point, a point no Scientist would accept as legitimate if it were within his own domain of investigation.

Instead of stepping back and becoming ‘Subdued to the material at hand’ [Russell], the modern Scientist sits on a mountain of venerated paradigms, inherited conventions, embedded preferences and respectable presumptions.

What is it about this word ‘Objective’? Why does everybody and his aunt want to be ‘Objective’?

It’s like if you weren’t objective, you believed in Santa Claus [whose hard to locate these days, fearing gender and race discrimination lawsuits]. Even Art Critics hint at objective criteria for high-art, known of course only to the Critic. The confusion is palpable in the wrenching obscurantism of today’s Art Dialogues.

There is no a priori reason why ‘Objectivity’ is any better than ‘Subjectivity’. It simply reflects the muted suspicion that Truth is independent of me and my views.

Truth is quite indifferent, happily so, to the Subject and its pretenses. Including its divide of the World into ‘Subject and Object’.

The way out is well-mapped. The Observer must be investigated first before inquiry on the Observed. The lens must turn inwards. Self-Mortification must go the full distance.