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Science and Man's Need for Meaning
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10771 |
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NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
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1 / 1986 |
4,873 Words |
| Author
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W.H. Thorpe
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In recent years a group of psychoanalysts in this country, and others elsewhere, have described how one of the major threats to health and sanity today is what they call the "existential vacuum" feeling of inner emptiness, of aimless lives set down in the desert of modern scientifically-oriented society--the result, in a word, of the widespread assumption that science is the only "philosophy" in which one can believe.
The existential vacuum is regarded as due to the frustration of the most basic motivational force in man--the will to meaning. (In contrast to the Adlerian will to power and the Freudian will to pleasure.) The argument is that people do not care so much for pleasure or for the avoidance of pain; but that they do care profoundly for meaning. This need or demand for meaning is regarded as one of the most basic features of man.
Science, of course, as we all know, answers the need for "understanding" in the more limited sense, and is opening ever-enlarging vistas of the stupendous complexity and beauty of the created universe. But in general, this does not, by itself, help to assuage the need for meaning. Belief in "meaning" in this sense, rests on religious faith or on an accepted system of myths as to the nature of the world and the relation of man to it.
Darwinian thought influences science
From the biological point of view the modern crisis was ushered in by the theory of evolution by natural selection. I think that there is no doubt that, in Western countries, the retreat from organized religion is, in the long run, mainly based on the slow dissemination of the changed world picture, especially that originating from Darwin's work, with the overwhelming evidence it seemed to supply, of the importance of chance in the origin and development of man.
For obviously, mankind, before the nineteenth century, was by no means denied full satisfaction of his needs; he had it of course in Western countries as a result of the Judeo-Christian vision which gave man a clear place in the world system and a faith and hope in the future.
But not only this: in Western Europe there was a very wide basic belief in, and acceptance of, a world system and man's place in it which could be held with or without the Judeo-Christian picture, and which in general reinforced some of the most important of its beliefs and attitudes
This was "the Great Chain of Being," which served to express the unimaginable plenitude of God's creation, its unfaltering order, and its ultimate unity. This "chain" or "ladder," if one likes to regard it so, was thought of as stretching from the foot of God's throne to the meanest of inanimate objects. Every speck of creation represented a link in the chain.
But its importance for my story now is that the top of every inferior class touched the bottom of a superior one--so that where the steps were in contact, as at the boundary between rocks and plants or between plants and animals or between animals and men there were transitional forms in which both higher and lower grades cooperated. And so at the top the noblest entity in the category of bodies was the human body, which touches the fringe of the next class
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