A passage in the NY Times about the latest study on the Antikythera mechanism brings us back to Tarnas' discussion of the attempt to bring Romantic and scientific thought together. Tarnas notes that Goethe felt that, "the human spirit does not simply impose its order on nature, as Kant thought. Rather, nature's spirit brings forth its own order through man, who is the organ of nature's self revelation."

That view is certainly in line with the proposal that man's and nature's aspirations (whether explicitly identified or not) are shared.

What's more it helps explain the point that Dr. François Charette of the University of Munich museum in Germany made with regard to the Antikythera mechanism. Noting that the mechanism, made around 150-100 B.C., employed gears that weren't seen again for 1,000 years, Charette noted that "The gear-wheel, in this case, had to be reinvented."

Note that he said reinvented, not rediscovered. Without making this a semantic argument and instead focusing on the face value of what he said, how does man come to the same brilliant, world changing invention more than once?

Could it be evolution of wheels and gears, such that there were millions that again fell by the wayside in the 1,000 years after Antikythera? Or could it be that a geared wheel is some perfect ideal naturally affixed in our minds?

Staying with the passage in the first post of the evening, Tarnas goes on to say:

"The modern experience was still vexed by a profound incoherence, with the dichotomies of the Romantic and scientific temperaments reflecting the Western Weltanschauung's seemingly unbridgeable disjunction between human consciousness and unconscious cosmos."

He closes the section a few lines later by adding:

"Modern man was a divided animal, inexplicably self-aware in an indifferent universe."

These passages beg a few key questions:
1. Are the cosmos unconscious, or (while not self aware) do they have aspirations?
2. If the cosmos have aspirations, are they nonetheless indifferent to humanity or simply singularly focused and so far beyond the realm of our understanding?
3. If the cosmos have aspirations, are they at odds with our own?
4. Are we "inexplicably" self aware, or rather ironically, or accidentally. Does the answer put us out of sync with the aspirations of the cosmos, or somehow preclude us from being a tool in the cosmic aspiration?

In a short but interesting interview with Daniel Dennett on TheTech.org, Dennett describes natural selection as generating "exquisitely well designed materials," but adds that the process is "profligate" and "wasteful." In other words, it is a very inefficient process.

However, we are seeing increasing evidence that organisms use their genes efficiently, with different creatures putting the same genes to similar but different uses. This is another example of the power of science to explain how.

What's missing is the why. We know that the process of natural selection aids in survival, but why do the very simple organisms from which all the complexity of life originated incessantly push for change? What was wrong with the status quo? Are they always compelled by their environment?

The answer could be - in reference to the prior post - that no those organisms weren't always pushed by their environment and that instead all nature including humans has aspirations. Science seems to be taking up the gauntlet on this, and certainly that's what FC was in a way pursuing, and we more so.

In his fascinating timeline of Western thought, The Passion of the Western Mind, Richard Tarnas describes the conflict between scientific thought and Romantic perspectives in a post-Kantian world. He notes on p. 377 that "both scientist and artist simultaneously experienced the breakdown and dissolution of the old categories of time, space, causality, and substance. But the deeper discontinuities between the scientific universe and human aspiration remained unresolved."

The key term here is human aspiration. When we look at the motive, spoken or unspoken, that has driven art, religion, literature, and even scientific inquiry, we have to come back again and again to human aspiration. Where there's a conflict between science and the humanities -- and in spite of some efforts by the likes of E.O. Wilson to resolve them, they've been present since Copernicus -- it can be largely pinned on the fact that science hasn't, doesn't, or can't enfold human aspirations into its explanations.