Critique of Western Methodology

Abstract

Young people look around in vain for social and intellectual leadership and for the beginning of a new era when a new workable theory about the important questions of our time has effected the whole society. What they find, however, is nothing but provincial opinions of the same kind as any one else’s. They look for the grand perspective of a satellite; they are ready to settle for that of an eagle; but what they find is that of a gopher. They look for a doctrine that affects the life of one’s culture, of one’s science, of one’s state. Instead, they find lecture-room jargon, and pale restatements of the views of predecessors.

We have mastered the physical mechanism sufficiently to turn out possible goods; we have not gained a knowledge of the conditions through which possible values become actual in life, and so are still at the mercy of habit, of haphazard, and hence of force... With tremendous increase in our control of nature, in our ability to utilize nature for human use and satisfaction, we find the actual realization of ends, the enjoyment of values, growing unassured and precarious. At times it seems as though we were caught in a contradiction: the more we multiply means the less certain and general is the use we are able to make of them.

John Dewey

Man is stranger to his own research; He knows not whence he comes, nor whither goes Tormented atoms in a bed of mud, Devoured by death, a mockery of fate; But thinking atoms, whose far-seeing eyes, Guided by thoughts, have measured the faint stars, Our being minggles with the infinite; Ourselves we never see, or come to know.

Voltaire

Knowledge is one. Its division into subjects is a concession to human weakness.

Sir H. J. Mackinder