When we imagine "the scientist," what exactly do we call to mind? No doubt there are lab coats and spectacles involved, but I'm wondering here about the nature of the person we picture, his character, his personality - and I wonder, all nonsense of lab coats aside, whether there is in reality - that is, outside our imagination - a True Scientist.
Well, the question brings us back to the first one, namely what we would imagine this True Scientist to be. Science itself is a way of knowing things; therefore, in order to understand this Scientist we must understand his way of knowing the world. Scientific knowledge at its purest and simplest is an attempt at universal knowledge; i.e. facts which are recognizable as "true" at any time or place, who don't owe their truth to chance circumstances or subjective considerations. A purely scientific mind would know all aspects of his world in this way; it would perceive objects, masses, forces and all other things in their relation to the sum total of objects, masses, etc. At bottom, we seem to be looking for a man who perceives reality without giving preferential treatment to any of its parts, a man without predilections, affinities, peculiarities or fancies - in short, a man without taste.
Now of course we can only imagine such a man, for as a pure archetype he is very unlikely to exist (although I'm sure we all know at least one person like him). The archetype itself sounds not very different from a man suffering from severe schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder, whose inability to experience pleasure affords him no inclination to favor one thing over another. All experience would enter the purely scientific mind democratically, each part being equal and carrying just as much weight as all other parts. Each experience would be discretely labelled - "Fact #00103472," for example - and placed in its proper (and observable) relation to all the others, regardless of its color, weight, ethnicity or political bent. Indeed, the space we're seeing is absolutely devoid of aesthetic considerations: facts of religious import are strung together with and determined by summer acidity levels in the tropics, while Stacey's opinions on abortion are linked inextricably with her mother's inability to properly digest gluten. The only important connections to be made here are the observable factual links between informations, and all are made with absolute adherence to the rules of logic - in other words, the end result of these connections, the "ultimate Idea" of the True Scientist, is completely and perfectly determined by the World. The man himself is passivity incarnate - he is a receptacle (a very well-built one), and nothing more.
But we know that such a man cannot exist, and if he does, he is certainly not a scientist; for in reality, there is no man without opinion, without belief, without taste and affinity and a preference for one thing over another. Each of us, be ye a secretary or a military strategist, has choices to make at all times, and each of us makes our decisions based on a little reason and a lot of desire. To exclude the scientist from the human condition is absurd, for it would mean that scientists existed in the vacuum described above - and yet popular mythology represents scientists as pure, detached, impartial and disinterested. We, however, know better: we know the scientist as artist.
We know the scientist whose eyes prefer green to blue, whose ears prefer music to noise and whose noses prefer lilies to shit. We know the scientist who prefers logic, not because he has to, but because he chooses to - because logic is beautiful. We know the scientist who arranges nature according to reason, rather than letting reason be rent asunder by the chaos inherent in nature. We know this man, because we know the work of this man: the theory, the hypothesis, the system, the paradigm. We know these products as products of the imagination, as products of creativity, as products of spontaneity - we know these products as works of Art. And like works of Art, we admire the theory and the paradigm, and we learn from them - and then we improve upon them.
If science were nothing more than the cold, disinterested collecting of facts, then science would be nothing more than an incoherent maze of unintelligible information - it would, quite literally, mirror reality. But science no more mirrors reality than Art does, and we know this because we have different words for all three - science is not reality, art is not reality, and reality is not on MTV. The more we fool ourselves into thinking that science equivocates truth, or that observation necessarily trumps meditation, the more we will view science as the world once viewed religion: absolutely.
