> Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical level because

> Furthermore, the widely repeated claim that modern science necessarily produces disenchantment is equally a mistake. It fails on a philosophical level because it has been impossible to successfully and fully demarcate ‘science’ from other domains. As Larry Laudan, the greatest living philosopher of science, has shown, ‘there are no epistemic features which all and only the disciplines we accept as “scientific” share in common’ and, moreover there is no unitary scientific method. There is, however, a result they share in common: > The rise of the natural sciences is credited with a demonstrable, ever-quickening increase in human knowledge and power; shortly before the modern age European mankind knew less than Archimedes in the third century B.C., while the first fifty years of our century have witnessed more important discoveries than all the centuries of recorded history together. Yet the same phenomenon is blamed with equal right for the hardly less demonstrable increase in human despair or the specifically modern nihilism which has spread to ever larger sections of the population, their most significant aspect perhaps being that they no longer spare the scientists themselves, whose well-founded optimism could still, in the nineteenth century, stand up against the equally justifiable pessimism of thinkers and poets. The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself. -- Hannah Arent You might say that's being blind and alone, and knowing it. I still don't agree that this necessarily needs to lead to pessimism or nihilism or disenchantment, I am joyful because I want to be, not because I have reasons for it I couldn't dissect and disappear with "rational thought". But what I observe is that, we seem to have regressed from that, we love to pretend objectivity is even available to us, and think science is somehow the opposite of "mere subjective experience". It's still just subjective experience, on a larger scale by more people, but that doesn't make it fundamentally different. Heisenberg knew this, we no longer, and I wonder why that is. > How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? -- Friedrich Nietzsche, "The Parable of the Madman" (1882)