Modernity brought with it a set of postulates that would change the history of Western humanity. The divine authority of the Church and religion would be replaced by the dominion of rationality: scientific knowledge would distinguish the true from the false, the real from the superstitious.
The historical process of imposing reason and science as privileged knowledge involved silencing and censoring other types of knowledge, which, from the burning of witches and the evangelization of territories, were struggling to survive(1). The new structures of legitimacy were sustained on the scientific method constructed by the positivist movement: the verification of universal theories through experience, that is, the need to see to believe.
Being a global model, the new scientific rationality is also a totalitarian model, insofar as it denies the rational character to all forms of knowledge that are not governed by its epistemological principles and methodological rules(2).
Scientific development, paradoxically, gradually reached the same conclusion as social sciences: no knowledge is objective or autonomous from the human that accesses this knowledge.
It turns out that the scientific method, despite its meticulous search for objectivity, would always be affected by the positioning of whoever executes it, and by a contingent piece of reality from which it tries to generate universal conclusions.
The mental, cultural, and historical structures of the researcher, their interests and objectives, conscious and unconscious, will always permeate the outcome of the work.
Beyond this historical and social characterization of the subject who seeks to acquire knowledge, there are increasingly more studies, theories, that try to raise awareness about the fact that what we sensorily perceive and the reality that surrounds us is in truth a projection of our interpretation.
For example, Heisenberg and Bohr demonstrate that it is not possible to observe or measure an object without interfering with it, without altering it, and to such an extent that the object that comes out of a measurement process is not the same one that went into it. (…) The idea that we do not know the real but rather what we introduce into it, that is, we do not know the real, but rather our intervention in it, is well expressed in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: It is not possible to simultaneously deduce the errors of the measurement of speed and position of particles; whatever is done to reduce the error of one of the measurements increases the error of the other(3).
On the other hand, when we observe the units that make up the material world and come to study atoms, we discover that they are constituted in 99.9999999% of empty space. If matter is constituted mainly by empty space, what our senses perceive is more linked to neuronal reactions that project images in our brain in sensations like sight, than to an external, autonomous, unalterable reality(4).
If our brain is the one that configures reality as it experiences reality and matter is composed mostly of empty space, what is the influence of historical-cultural conditioning, factors that permeate the minds of people, minds that will then send signals to these brains and neuronal networks, which will generate stress or love hormone.
The question about the mechanisms of the functioning of the non-material world and the way in which it influences us is linked to the ignorance of fundamental truths that the scientific method and rationality could never solve.
What force drives the functioning of the heart? How do shamans from different ancestral tribes manage to heal what Western medicine could not? What happens to consciousness before and after death? What are dreams?
These questions were not always uncertain or marginalized as they are today in our Western cultures, a product of the imposition of Catholic religious beliefs and then the faith in modern science.
These questions relate to subjugated knowledge: historical contents that were buried and knowledge disqualified as non-conceptual or insufficiently elaborated. Naive knowledge, hierarchically inferior. Knowledge buried by erudition and knowledge disqualified by the hierarchy of knowledge and science(5).
Currently, the inversion of the postulate of believing to see seems to allow us to approach tools – both new and ancestral – to understand our reality and achieve a healthy and just life. To what extent do our believes configure our reality? What happens when we allow space in our mind to heal the pains and question the dogmas? How do we intervene in our nervous systems and everything we do not know because it is not physical-material, and how can these benefit or harm us?
From diverse disciplines, such as medicine and nutrition, these knowledge are opening up new possibilities for reflection. We learn to analyze the effects of hormones and stress, our own and that of the animals we consume, exploited as a commodity. It is not necessary to deny the technological development and knowledge that modern science has made possible, nor its value – which is huge -, however, it seems that it is time to expand the possibilities towards a terrain where the empirical method and experimentation through the senses can no longer lead us.
It should be as follows: first, distinguish which is the scientific knowledge that provide us with technical and technological progress and which has been developed by the propulsion of corporate and capitalist interests in ways that are not beneficial. Second, elucidate the power structures that these scientific knowledge establishes, by delegitimizing and disqualifying other knowledge as invalid. Perhaps the process of transcending empiricism should involve a cultural change that moves us from the place of dominion, that is, to undertake a collective search for knowledge that at the same time accepts letting go of control, as it can no longer obtain universal, exact, and absolute certainties.
The security that experimental verification provides us makes us insecure in the face of the possibility of accessing new planes of consciousness, we become slaves to the need for certainty, the fear of uncertainty.
There are two possibilities: either the universe is a gigantic coincidence, a mass of chemical combinations, of dispersions, contractions determined by mere chance, or – which would be more merciful – there is a hidden reason, an ultimate purpose for which the things that happen and also our lives make sense. (…) scientific minds suspect the first possibility. Sensitive minds, however, prefer to bet their lives on the second. But to do so, one must open the door to the sacred, to mystery, or to what has simply been forgotten(6).
1.Federici, S. (2015). Calibán y la Bruja. Mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
2.De Sousa Santos, B. (2009). Una epistemología del sur. México: Siglo XXI, CLACSO.
3.Ob. cit.
4.García, A. D. (2020). El Biosoftware. Rosario.
5.Foucault, M. (2000). Defender la Sociedad. Curso en el College France (1975−1976). Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
6.Maicas, N. (1999). Prólogo. En Kusch, R. América Profuma. Buenos Aires: Biblios.
