What is science in the light of the genetic circle?

[TheVisionofEr]

1. Science (episteme) is first purposed as a subject matter by the early Greek philosophers. Thus, as distinct from, or determined against, everything else, is endowed to man and his outlook by philosophic thinking.

2. However, the genetic circle is more difficult. Since, the common sense meaning of "science" (namely, a specific qualified form of the western thinking, experimental science linked to general formulation of laws) is what we grow into in our youth before we can think. It, however, has neither a theoretical nor an empirical meaning at first. It is simply "science" as we use the word naturally and perhaps even in contradistinction to philosophy and art.

3. The meaning of science for people born after 1900 in the English speaking countries differs radically from what it meant for the Western tradition. In America, the inventor (e.g., Edison) was for the longest time more prestigious than the scientist, who was a mere calculator and theorizer largely despised by the pragmatic spirit of the country. In this sense, until well beyond WW1 the scientist and the philosopher were identical in the public imagination (as useless idiots).

4. Where do we start? Which is the starting point? Growing into the meaning as infants learning to speak? Or, on the other hand, the history of western philosophy understood as the progressive thinking through as the theory of objects until it becomes a demand for mere "facts" in contradistinction to science or knowledge as historically understood? At the moment science becomes a mere art, or empirical endeavor, it ceases to bestow anything human onto the human being, and becomes objective.

[RCSaunders]

However, the genetic circle is more difficult.

Perhaps it depends on the participants.

[TheVisionofEr]

Perhaps it depends on the participants.

It could be that some participants outstrip history by participating most of all in the dawning of the current. Whereas Jung suggests, by observation, that participants live in the light of all the strata of the European consciousness (which is now a world consciousness). One remark he makes is that among the most modern there is often found a tendency to appear cloaked in the ancient (the status of this supposed observation, and its compelling character to the understanding, however, are not wholly clarified).