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Western science from Euclid and Ptolemy via Galileo, Newton, Darwin, to modern molecular biology is built on the dichotomy real/apparent. The ancient denial of abundance and the inversion of values it implied (the perceived world in which we make plans, love, hate, suffer, and the arts which try to deal with this world are on a lower plane of reality than the abstract constructions of theology, philosophy, and the sciences) affected Western civilization and, through it, the entire world. Even the most determined opponents of Western ways of life admit that science offered surprising insights and found new ways of alleviating scarcity and suffering. Moving away from common sense and common experience into a world of abstract notions did have advantages. But these advantages were distorted and turned into a menace by the basic incoherence of the enterprise.
Western science from Euclid and Ptolemy via Galileo, Newton, Darwin, to modern molecular biology is built on the dichotomy real/apparent. The ancient denial of abundance and the inversion of values it implied (the perceived world in which we make plans, love, hate, suffer, and the arts which try to deal with this world are on a lower plane of reality than the abstract constructions of theology, philosophy, and the sciences) affected Western civilization and, through it, the entire world. Even the most determined opponents of Western ways of life admit that science offered surprising insights and found new ways of alleviating scarcity and suffering. Moving away from common sense and common experience into a world of abstract notions did have advantages. But these advantages were distorted and turned into a menace by the basic incoherence of the enterprise.
Conquest of Abundance, Chicago – London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. p.16.
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