The chauvinism of science

The separation between state and church must therefore be complemented by the separation between state and science.

This separation of science and state may be our only chance to overcome the hectic barbarism of our scientific-technical age and to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realised.

But while a democracy makes some effort to explain the process so that everyone can understand it, scientists either conceal it, or bend it, to make it fit their sectarian interests.

It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society.

Combining this observation with the insight that science has no special method, we arrive at the result that the separation of science and non-science is not only artificial but also detrimental to the advancement of knowledge. If we want to understand nature, if we want to master our physical surroundings, then we must use all ideas, all methods, and not 'just a small selection of them.

At all times man approached his surroundings w' h wide open senses and a fertile intelligence, at all times he made incredible discoveries, at all times we can learn from his ideas.

Modern science, on the other hand, is not at all as difficult and as perfect as scientific propaganda wants us to believe.

It is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action.

A science that insists on possessing the only correct method and the only acceptable results is ideology and must be separated from the state, and especially from the process of education.

Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method , (Humanities Press, 1975), p.

Anything goes.

Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.

Paul Feyerabend, in Against Method , (Humanities Press, 1975), p.

no more science and art

We will have to reformulate many (maybe all) of the categories we have use until now. An example: we will have to replace the category of "subject-object" with the category of "intersubjectivity," which will invalidate the distinction between science and art: science will emerge as an intersubjective fiction, art as an intersubjective discipline in the search for knowledge; thus science will become a form of art and art a variant of the sciences.

Vilém Flusser, "Memories," in Ars Electronica, ed. Timothy Druckrey (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), p. 206.