Abstract
The cultural climate in the Western World since the end of classical antiquity has been affected by two currents of thought: one of a rationalist stamp, the origin and development of which can be found in the Mediterranean area and the other was of a gnostic nature, which had already established itself, having started in the East, in the known world by the Hellenistic period. This latter way of thinking never gained the upper hand in the West, but neither did it ever completely disappear, on the contrary, it exerted a much greater influence than as one would expect in a civilisation and culture where reason has always been the main guiding reference point for action.
“Any activity lacking a scope is, for this very fact, deprived of sense ...Without a scope, science cannot even elaborate an idea of its own form.” (I. R. Shafarevich, “On Certain Tendencies in the Developments of the Mathematics” from the Opening Lecture held at the University of Göttingen in 1973)
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Notes
- 1.
By compiling his monumental work on the connexion between magic and scientific experimentation Lynn Thorndike [86] was persuaded that from the Roman Empire through the XVII century social and moral customs in Western civilisation allowed for a peaceful cohabitation of these opposite approaches to investigate the laws of nature. He finally pointed out the great interest in the occult which was particularly common at German Universities. We may here add that this cultural climate strongly affected a plethora of deleterious esoteric circles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
- 2.
One has only to recall the prolific work of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) and his proposal of a “Goethian” interpretation of science as an inner perception. His ideas, ranging from medicine to mathematics, as fascinating as they may be, merely represent, from a scientific point of view, examples of fuzzy reasoning—although Steiner himself, who was familiar with basic scientific notions which he had learned in a course of engineering at the Technische Hochschule of Vienna, did often ask his followers to elaborate them in depth.
Following in Steiner’s footsteps, Hans Horbiger (1861–1931) developed a fantastic cosmogony of a Gnostic-Manichean nature, which was very well-received by fathers of the Nazis ideology. Adolf Hitler himself was a fervent supporter of Horbiger’s ideas since he believed that they provided a scientific basis for a cosmic vision of catastrophes and regenerations, in which cleared the way for the historical mission of a chosen German race.
- 3.
Among the numerous and variegated esoteric circles which arose in the second half of the nineteenth century, that of Helena Blavatski stands out. Blavatski was the founder of a Theosophical Society which yielded a plethora of neo-pagan movements, whose doctrines focussed on pre-Christians German and Celtic cultures. One of these was Thule, a German secret society that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, has woven together mystic elements of Pan-Germanism (Thule used the swastika as symbol). In Germany, after the economic and social disaster following World War One, a considerable number of high officers of the Wehrmacht found shelter in various Thule groups.
- 4.
Let us consider, for example, the problems of experiments on elementary particles, i.e., on the one hand, the proliferation of unexplained phenomena that grows continuously with increasing collision energy attained and, on the other, the tremendous costs of the accelerators needed to create sub-nuclear particles, which, due to their conditions necessary for their existence and to their short transitory effects, are only interesting to a small circle of specialists.
- 5.
Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953), an eminent philosopher, was founder of a current of scientific thought called “ Logical Empiricism”.
- 6.
For instance, this may represent the case of a car driven at full power if we assume that air resistance increases with the car speed.
- 7.
We must consider that the “size” of our knowledge is necessarily linked to the size of the world of our experiences that defines the knowable space.
- 8.
Peter Medawar, an eminent and renowned English biologist, Nobel Prize laureate for Physiology in 1960, published works on philosophy of science. One of the most popular is a short, but dense essay entitled “ The Limits of Science ” [39].
- 9.
Unfortunately, we are forced to realise that, in the last decades, most of the ideas emerging from these circles, though sometimes yielding high but ephemeral levels of consensus, thanks to the media, become not only heretical, but also completely absurd.
- 10.
Robotic warfare is a recent, dramatic trend toward losing humanity [101]. Neuroscientists are presently devising the “cyborg-soldier”, a hybrid man-machine, which can communicate and “interact” with a weapon system via cerebral stimuli. No doubt, these pursued objectives represent the slippery slope towards man’s moral suicide.
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Ronchi, C. (2014). Orthodoxy Versus Heresy. In: The Tree of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01484-5_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01484-5_5
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