Gandhi, The Enlightenment and Myths About The Scientific Method
Written by Abhilash // October 2, 2010 // Science & Technology // 11 Comments
Celebrating Gandhi Jayanti, 2nd October, 2010
Gandhi and the Enlightenment
When I was asked to write a post on Gandhi’s views on Science I was a little hard pressed for material. His views on Science are scattered and scant as well as vaguely stated. In fact, his greatest “critique” of science has been equated to his opposition of large scale machinery. This has resulted in him being glibly branded as a nostalgist who was opposed to progressive industrialisation (though some of his writings reveal that he was not opposed to machinery per se but merely industrialisation that further marginalised India’s poor, who stood to benefit the most from industrialisation). His ethical considerations about industralisation seem reasonable though it will be naive to draw any inferences about Gandhi’s attitudes on Science from these views. I shall not discuss this in the post.
Reading through the scant literature on Gandhi and Science I was quite intrigued by his ideas about the Enlightenment. Gandhi’s views on the Scientific Enlightenment were often convolved with his views on ‘The West’ and he was openly opposed to the Enlightenment (though see this for a more nuanced view). In his Collected Works he writes:
“We are dazzled by the material progress that western science has made. I am not enamored of that progress. In fact, it almost seems as though God in His wisdom had prevented India from progressing along those lines, so that it might fulfill its special mission of resisting the onrush of materialism” (CW 35: 524)
I find this view very representative of the anxieties felt by a whole generation about the scientific enterprise. In particular the notion that “materialistic” Science did not need any “transcendental reality” to explain Nature rendered it (Nature) “disenchanted“. Similar metaphysical anxieties about the scientific enterprise have seeped into contemporary debates on Science and Religion. I strongly believe that much of the confusion in debates like these stems from a flawed/incomplete understanding of the modern scientific method. So in this post I’ll try to clarify some myths about the scientific method. In the end I hope to convince you that far from painting a cold, sterile picture of Nature, the scientific method provides us an utterly enchanting and magical view. This would be a fitting tribute to Gandhi on his birthday.
The Scientific Method
The scientific method can be characterised by two salient features-
1. Construction of abstract concepts which help us to describe reality.
2. Making hypotheses about principles using these abstract concepts about natural phenomena and testing these hypotheses against data.
The first point is often not emphasised enough in expositions about the scientific method. Abstract concepts like mass, momentum or entropy are not set out to us on a platter. What we have access to instead, are phenomena. The best we can do is try to design a grammar of concepts that help us to think of these phenomena. For instance the notion of entropy is not at all obvious when we set out to understand the world. Instead we observe that events tend to have a certain “directionality” (eggs can be made into an omelet but an omelet cannot be made into an egg) and entropy is a useful concept to explain this observation.
Beyond framing concepts, the scientific method makes hypotheses using these concepts. For instance, one can have a suite of hypotheses about the entropy of an egg- it can increase, decrease or remain the same. These hypotheses are tested against data and are accepted or rejected with a certain level of confidence (for instance data accumulated through repeated experimentation tells us that the entropy of the egg will remain constant or increase with a very high degree of certainty).
It is important to point out a crucial feature of the scientific enterprise here: Science does not provide us with absolute truths! All it does is does is make hypotheses and as we accumulated more and more data our confidence in our hypothesis either increases or decreases. At some point, a threshold is crossed and we start calling a hypothesis “right” (read “highly probably conditional to current data”) as opposed to others which are “highly improbable conditional to current data”.
As we have continued to accumulate data from more extreme situations over the past century (radiation from deep space, observations of extremely cold atoms, to name a few) we have had to revise our conceptions about Nature (often dramatically so) and as we continue to gather more data it is likely that our fundamental notions about reality will be revised.
The New Enlightenment
I would like to emphasise that understanding the world through the scientific method does not need any supernatural addendum “to give it meaning” (I’ll use a separate post to justify this in detail, but take my word for the moment). Also people often squirm at the possibility that this method will never lead us to an “absolute truth” (in some ill-defined Platonic sense). But so be it! As Richard Feynman put it very eloquently in his interview The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: “Reality might just be like an onion with an infinite layers”.
The scientific method has, over the past century, dramatically changed our picture of reality. We have come far from the “sterile” picture of reality painted by Newton and his cohorts. We know for instance that Nature behaves in a radically different way at small scales. Newton’s simplistic picture of gravity as a force has been replaced by the much more elegant picture of Einstein’s general relativity where it is a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime itself. Genetics and molecular biology have given us an atomistic description of evolution explaining how complex organisms capable of reading and writing blogs emerged from single-celled organisms. Cosmology has revealed that our universe is not static and unmoving like Newton believed but is expanding and began at a finite point in the past. Indeed, looking from our island of history, 100 years after Gandhi voiced his anxieties about the enlightenment, science has painted a picture of reality which is very elegant, beautiful and certainly not sterile. Had Gandhiji been alive, he sure would have appreciated this.
11 Comments on "Gandhi, The Enlightenment and Myths About The Scientific Method"
It seems that your notion of “science” is confined to the experimental regions . (So was also probably Gandhi’s and hence you are in “elite” company) But you also seem to try to derive advantage by pulling Einstein into the mess by doing a clap happy paraphrasing of his ideas.
At some point you seem to be very jubilantly claiming that, “Science does not provide us with absolute truths!” but you seem very sure that universe began from a finite point in the past. Wonder what makes you so sure of this!
I am also very confused about your reading of evolution as something which explains how blog readers and writers emerged from single celled organisms! Can you illuminate it with an example like tracking down the past descendants of this blog writer back to its single celled predecessor? (I can only wish you luck in this endeavor if you take it up)
You claim that, “repeated experimentation tells us that the entropy of the egg will remain constant or increase with a very high degree of certainty”. Like you linked to some research papers for your other interesting claims, can you maintain the high standards you have set for yourself by linking to some paper which substantiates this claim of yours? (I am very curious to know what experiment {on eggs?} showed such a thing and what is precisely meant by “high degree of certainty”)
Hi Anirbit,
“but you seem very sure that universe began from a finite point in the past.” I should have paraphrased this more accurately as “I am far more certain that the universe began at a finite point in time as opposed to the alternative hypothesis that it has existed forever given current observations”. As you might notice I make the statement at a rather “charged” section of the post where the statement was made for purely rhetorical purposes and hence should be taken with a pinch of salt.
“Can you illuminate it with an example like tracking down the past descendants of this blog writer back to its single celled predecessor?” One *cannot* track back the descendants of a *particular* blog writer to a single-celled organisms. Instead evolution provides us with a consistent picture about how a particular species evolved from unicellular organisms and since I am a part of a species I can make a statement “I evolved from a single celled organisms”
“I am very curious to know what experiment {on eggs?} showed such a thing and what is precisely meant by “high degree of certainty”)”
If you have noticed then this was meant to be a fairly “popular” science post and the eggs example is used again for rhetorical purposes! So there are no research papers which use eggs (at least none that I know of).
Again, before you read too much into the article- remember its a popular science post. I might write more detailed posts on evolution etc. at a later point where we can have a more detailed discussion.
“It seems that your notion of “science” is confined to the experimental regions . (So was also probably Gandhi’s and hence you are in “elite” company) But you also seem to try to derive advantage by pulling Einstein into the mess by doing a clap happy paraphrasing of his ideas.”
Can you elaborate why you think this notion of “science” is confined to experimental regions? My understanding is that all of science tries to make hypotheses which can then be believed with a certain degree of certainty given the data available at that point. Can you give a counter example?
The entire idea of looking at science as merely producing frameworks for explaining known data is as regressive as it can get. This is sort of the kind of belief that many experimental physicists proclaim about theoretical physics.
I can go on for pages and pages explaining why so much of science simply not as you wish to believe it is. (Probably this central ignorance of science beyond what is popularly known is behind Gandhi’s interesting ideas) To use the most stereotyped example Einstein’s Theory was not born to explain some data! (and even today there is only a little bit of data in support of it but then there are deeper considerations why it is rightfully considered to be central to our understanding)
If the only reason people did science was to explain some freaking piece of data then just so many things would never have been done! I wonder whether geometry would have been at all discovered.
If the purpose of scientific pursuit was merely (or even largely!) to produce a “grammar” to explain phenomenon then I am pretty sure that even today we would have been hopelessly breaking our heads to trisect angles using ruler or compass or to write computer programs to find integral solutions to polynomial equations.
{Thankfully intelligent souls have shown us that both of these things are impossible to do and clearly there was no phenomenon they had in sight to find an explanation for!}
Also about birth of universe in a finite time in the past, I would strongly urge you to provide evidence for why you believe this to be right and not forever existence theories or many others alternative scenarios. I am not withstanding a possibly abominable reading of the literature and miscommunication to the public on the flimsy pretext of a “charged” section of a text! (which thoughtful writers would have learnt to avoid by the time they are in their “CriticalTwenties”)
@Abhilash
Thanks for your reply.
* Can you provide evidence in support of this claim that human beings evolved from single celled organisms? I didn’t mean that you should be able to track back the predecessors for any particular human being, but I was asking if you can trace it generically even for the species as a whole.
* Your evasive claim of “popular” science is not something I am impressed about. Popularization of science can’t be tolerated at the cost of ridiculous reductions of it. Hence even if I am ready to believe that no paper ever testing entropy increase claim of yours on eggs, I am going to demand evidence for the principle of monotonic increase of entropy that you seem to claim. I don’t know what you are hiding in the murky caveat of “to a high degree of certainty” !
Typo: “..no paper ever *tested*..”
Hello,
well, Abhilash sir seems to be very right in his notion about science which has been very eloquently described when he says in science we try to frame a grammar that help us to think about phenomena.
for example, in rotational dynamics, something called torque has been defined, that will systematize or rather simplify, our analysis of the observations that we make about nature.
as Feynman says in physics we always try to define quantities creampiled with sensibility, so the quantity r vector corssed with f vector, provides best measure of the rotation of the body under the effect of force.
I have myself read Gandhi’s view points on science/technology etc.
Needless to say, my respect for Gandhi not withstanding, most of his view points on technology and science are highly ignorant in the first place, regressive in the second and reflect a political fear of ‘threat to a moral civilization’ from an amoral force.
Quickly on all three:
(1) Ignorant:
In most of his writings, it appears that Gandhi does not get the scientific methodology at all. Science is about discovering the underlying causes of nature, giving a conceptual framework of thought that is derived from a few underlying principles having being derived by close and continuous observation of how nature behaves.
It appears that Gandhi does not think that a close study of nature and understanding how nature operates is a scholarly endeavor worth pursuing.
(2) Regressive:
Gandhi’s fears about materialism is not a fear of science per-se but a fear of engineering, or technology if you wish.
Needless to say, the questions of whether technology is useful or not and has added ‘value’ to human societies is a legitimate question, fit for debate and a very hard one as well.
However, the view point that somehow technology civilization can be reversed cannot be substantiated considering it is now closely interlinked to all spheres of human economy and human life and will stay here, like it or not. So a statement like ‘India is fortunate to have escaped the technology civilization’ is missing the point that sooner or later to acquire economic capability, India WILL need to acquire a technology muscle.
(3) Political fear
Gandhi’s struggle was closely interlinked to the freedom struggle of his country, so most of his view points are naturally closely linked to the struggle.
In many of his writings, criticizing the west, it is obvious that Gandhi places India on a higher moral plane (at places he has called India ‘the cradle of spirituality’ etc.) vis a vis west, whereby the special moral quality of India then needs to be sheltered from ‘immoral forces’.
Such a thinking is driven by a highly charged political panic and distorts his view point to an extent where in many of his writings, he is unable to give an objective appraisal of the scientific and technological achievements of the West that has come through much effort, hard work and perseverance.
It’s worth noting that Gandhi’s most famous disciple Nehru put a premium on scientific and technological development (definitely one of his greatest achievements). Nehru understood the scientific method as well as anyone else. But in the same breath the made the mistake of assuming that socialism is the best way to achieve such development.
I think Gandhi the spiritualist may also have genuinely appreciated the oneness with nature that human beings share which science has revealed (especially through the study of cosmology and evolution).
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