The appeal to shared experience

Science is about sharing. Objectiveness is a means to being universal, which means shared among all of us.

The factual character of modern science — what we call its objective nature — arises chiefly from the fact that its results can be shared. The method of Descartes — the observation of limited events that are tied to a limited and machine-like view of some phenomenon — creates a circumstance in which we all reach roughly the same results when we do the same experiments. It is this which allows us to reach a picture which is shared, and this in turn which then leads us to call the picture so created an “objective” picture.

However, wholeness cannot be observed like this.

To see the phenomenon of life as it really is, the methods used cannot be tied to the crutch of mechanism as the basis for the sharing of observations and results.

The matters in this book are as objective — as dependent on experience and as likely to give sharable, repeatable, results — as the experiments and observations that are permitted by Cartesian method. But they extend and supplement the arena of permissible scientific observations in such a way that the self of the observer is allowed to come into the picture in an objective way.

I want to emphasize that this method of observation, like the method of Descartes, still refers always to experience. It is empirical in nature. It dismisses fantasy and seeks constantly to avoid speculation. In this sense, it is as empirical as the method of Descartes. But where Descartes only allowed observation to focus on the outer reality of mechanisms in the world, my method requires that we focus on the inner reality of feeling as well.

#book/The Nature of Order/1 The Phenomenon of Life/9 Beyond Descartes: A new form of scientific observation#