The word “science” itself is ambiguous, it has several layers of meaning. Let’s look at some, without pretending to be exhaustive. First, science means the ideal of science as Socrates, Plato and Aristotle formulated it in opposition to doxa, the world of opinion. So science, or episteme, is that knowledge that is demonstrative, that not only affirms something, that not only persuades people, but provides the necessary evidence to know that things cannot be otherwise but in the way that its logical conclusion has led. So, the idea of achieving demonstrative knowledge, apodictic — apo means “no”, it is a negative, and deiksis means “to destroy”, therefore, indestructible — , the idea of an indestructible knowledge is the initial ideal of science.

Aristotle knew perfectly well that this ideal can only be realized in a partial and imperfect way. And yet, it was the same ideal that gave shape and meaning to scientific efforts even if frustrated. Aristotle understood the world of nature as the world where things are constantly changing and, therefore, did not believe in nature, but only in provisional stabilizations — it is much closer to quantum physics than to Newton’s world. And for that very reason, he said that the entire field of natural sciences could not be reduced to science in the strict and perfect sense. There was no episteme of nature: this is fundamental. There was no exact and perfect science of nature, therefore, knowledge of nature would always have to be tentative.

And this is the first layer of meaning of the word “science”: the ideal of science and the awareness that, for almost all domains of reality, this ideal will not be realized, but at the same time, you cannot abdicate it, because it gives the logical form of the effort that you are making. In other words, science approaches its ideal of apodictic knowledge as in an asymptote, a curve that is arriving, but never arrives. At any time, it is impossible to say whether you approached more or less, that is, there is no absolute distance, there is a distance that increases as it decreases. This means that the asymptote is characterized by the paradox. Therefore, science effectively existing has a paradoxical relationship with its ideal. This is what determines the logical way in which we recognize an activity as scientific, it is the measure of scientificity of science and, at the same time, it is the negation of that scientificity. In other words, compared to the ideal of science, no science is science, it is only an attempt to science. Aristotle’s formulation of the scientific method is the most perfect one anyone has ever given.

However, when from the sixteenth century on, a new intellectuality began to form that no longer had a complete scholastic formation, but only the minimum that the people of the nobility received attending some schools for some time, two or three drops of scholastic teaching, and thought they knew scholasticism, Aristotle, etc.

When we read Bacon, for example, he writes all of his work as a criticism of Aristotelianism and an inversion of Aristotelianism, that is what he imagines [to do]. And he says: “Aristotle uses a deductive method in which he starts from general statements and concludes the particular, therefore, he despises the observation and experimentation of nature. And we have to do the exact opposite, we have to use an inductive method; that is, we have to observe the facts and gradually create generalizations”. But observing the facts and gradually creating generalizations was exactly what Aristotle said was the only thing that can be done in the science of nature. In other words, it is the same as saying: Bacon ignored Aristotle’s philosophy totally and deeply, and simply did not understand what he was reading, or else he received false information. In the same way, Descartes also received false information.

Now, if the subject does not know where his activity is located within the historical development of the discipline he is practicing, then he is already out of reality. In other words: the reference he has, the totality of what he knows about what he is studying is placed outside the historical reality of that same activity. And that is already an element of serious alienation, because he does not know what the status quaestionis is. So we can say: all the critics of Aristotle, from the Renaissance onwards, who created modern science, had no idea what Aristotle’s philosophy is.

It was only in the 20th century that scholars discovered that Aristotle’s famous dialectic is the scientific method, after all. Today, among specialized scholars in the field, it is a total consensus. But for four centuries the history of the sciences unfolds in a complacent ignorance of its own place in the history of the development of the scientific method. This shift, this gap, between the content of the sciences and the place they have historically occupied will profoundly affect the content of the sciences themselves. The same so that, for example, you assume that you are Napoleon Bonaparte and begin to act logically on the premise that you are Napoleon Bonaparte, it is absolutely impossible that the falsehood of the premise does not end up introducing itself into the very acts that you are practicing. Science is the same.

In other words, when we let ourselves be impressed, for example, with what people say: “Ah, but how do you say this if science made interplanetary rockets, did the internet, did this, plus that?” Well, first of all: all these achievements, each one is just a technological application, there is no technological application that can be reduced entirely to a scientific explanation. Every technique consists of fusing heterogeneous knowledge, irreducible to a common explanatory principle, and to give them a bodily existence, to give this heterogeneity of causal lines a bodily existence. Which means, the effectiveness of any technique never proves any science. There is an abyss between the two. For example: if I decide to kill you and hit you in the head with a hammer, this is technologically brutal, literally lethal. Does it depend on whether I know the whole physiology of death? No. I can ignore this entirely.

So, any technological product can never depend on a scientific principle alone, that is absolutely impossible. For example, the principles that explain rocket propulsion cannot by themselves explain the greater or lesser resistance of the metals that the rocket is made up of, it depends on another line of scientific explanation that has nothing to do with propulsion, and so on. Imagine the amount of different materials and different technical elements needed to build a rocket; reduce them all to a common scientific principle. It’s not possible. We can never confuse the successes of technology with the ability that science would have to give a real explanation of the phenomena. One thing has nothing to do with the other, absolutely nothing. So don’t be impressed by these things. In fact, science has not always been the cause of technological progress. Historically, technology has often been ahead of science, but even this fact cannot be explained as an exceptional coincidence. The modus ratiocinandi of technology is not only distinct and independent from that of science, but it is the reverse of it; that technology has its own specific rationality, in which the scientific contribution is integrated as a material element among others, not as a founding and articulating form — in the Aristotelian sense. We will judge science not by the side effects it has had through its fusion with technology, but by its stated ambition to give us a naturalistic explanation of the phenomenon.

So, we have the first layer of meaning: the ideal of science;

Second layer: the difficulty, the tension that exists between science and, if possible, its ideal;

Third layer: the whole set of historically existing observations and theories, including the wrong ones; that is, it is science as a vastly varied set of knowledge, not only in its content, but in its level of validity;

Fourth layer: science as a socially existing activity, as a profession, which implies the existence of entities, subsidies, a series of political elements that make their existence possible;

Fifth layer: the idea of science as a social authority, as that instance that, before the people, is able to separate the true from the false;

Sixth layer: science as an alleged foundation of certain general philosophical beliefs, such as naturalism.

When you talk about “science”, you talk about these six senses at the same time. So this is enough for you to understand that the word “science”, when used in a debate, is not a rigorous concept, it is a figure of speech that compacts things enormously separated from each other. And often, when in a debate a person claims the authority of science, he is claiming the authority of an overall impression created by all this. And to complicate matters further, the history of the scientific method is composed of an inaugural falsehood that is committed by Bacon, Galileo and who knows how many, with regard to aristotelian scholastic thought: they created a false rupture. That is, from extremely deficient knowledge, not to say totally false, of what ancient scholastic science was, they believed they were creating something new, when they weren’t: they were simply repeating the same thing. And how is it that such an important activity, which has so much authority over society, can be so ignorant of its own history and, therefore, of the sources of that same authority?


The modern science observes certain things in some respect; therefore, it only observes aspects, and aspects cut out according to the hypotheses and constants that itself intends to observe. There is a highly subjectivist and abstractist element about it, which makes the whole philosophy developed from this tradition of modern science extremely subjective in nature.

At the beginning of modernity arises, especially with Lord Bacon, the idea that physical nature is a hidden code, that is, it does not reveal itself to us, but disguises itself, and therefore to understand it one must force it and you force it through the experiment. In the experiment, you force natural forces to act in an unnatural way so that you can understand what is the secret deep within nature. Every modern idea of ​​the scientific experiment is like this. You create an artificial situation, nonexistent in nature, using natural forces to do something that they usually don’t, and through this experiment you try to understand how they work in reality. The totality of modern science is that. Later, Kant will summarize this by saying, according to Bacon, that the scientist does not stand before nature as an observer, who accepts it as it is, but stands as a policeman who squeezes her and forces her to say something. It follows that these results obtained through this experiment do exist, but only under the conditions in which the experiment was designed. Through experiment you can hypothetically grasp a certain relationship between elements of nature, but in nature these relationships exist in the midst of billions of other relationships, of an infinite number of other relationships. You just detached one, observed it, and said, “This one exists”. If you had asked another question and invented another experiment, you would find something else entirely. That is, the number of experiments you can do is unlimited, but they will never reach the full range of nature. Second, these experiments show not how nature behaves in itself. Because it responds to human action and the way it works in itself is never exactly the same, there is always a slight difference, because everything that goes on in nature is a concrete fact.

Concrete fact is the fact taken not only in the logical relation that expresses it, but in all the accidents necessary for it to happen. It is precisely these accidents that the experiment isolates: the accidental element is removed and only the logical definition is left behind. In nature there is no such fact, only concrete facts. Imagine how many experiments humans have done since inventing this business. A large number, no doubt. But what is this set of experiments in the face of all concrete facts? It is zero. This means that the whole of what experimental science can know is nothing compared to real nature. And this real nature can be known in itself only by contemplative observation that accepts it in its entirety as a mysterious fact, which is what it really is. That is, the concrete reality taken in its total presence is a mystery, no doubt, and the totality of what science knows about nature is a bean, that does not say what nature is or does, but how it reacts to certain human questions and provocations.

The criticism that philosophers of modernity — Bacon, Galileo, among others — made to scholastic science is that it always took nature as it presented itself, whereas they thought, “We have to force nature to do what we want”. Both things exist. You can look at it both ways, or even combine it. But if you take this new way, this new science, and superimpose the other, so you literally got out of reality, because science doesn’t investigate concrete facts, it only investigates certain relationships that are proportional to the question you asked. What is a scientific theory? What is a scientific hypothesis? The scientific hypothesis is the assumption that a certain set of facts will behave according to a hypothetical constant if you select the facts to investigate according to what that same constant determines. This is the same as saying that every scientific conclusion is tautological. What determines the clipping of the facts to be studied? The constant you want to find out. And when these facts then behave according to the constant, you say the experiment worked. But they have to work! They only go wrong if you selected wrong, or made the wrong observations, or if the constant you assumed does not exist.

This means that this set of constants observed by science are not reality, but certain possibilities that the human being has highlighted from the immeasurable background of reality, isolating them from all possible accidentalities, isolating them from all concreteness and looking only at that. Of course this has been very successful, especially in technical results, applications and unlimited techniques. Because if you did the cut yourself, you did it for some purpose and it is no wonder that you can accomplish that goal because you did the experiment exactly for that. Only having proceeded to act in the nature as a police officer — Kant says “investigative judge”, because in Germany at the time, the investigator was the investigative judge and not the police — one can say that the police officer get to know the people he’s investigating? No, because he only cares about them in some possible, isolated way of the whole, and get an answer to that specific question he asked. Can you say that people considered solely from the police point of view exist? No, they don’t exist, they are abstractions, of course. This is one aspect of them among millions of possible aspects. For any police event to happen, there needs to be an infinity accidents that are totally unrelated to the police interest. For example, such a crime happened on such a street, on the corner of such a building. Who built the building? If there was no building, no street, no crime could happen on that particular place. But is the construction of the building of any interest from the police point of view? No. It’s another science, another completely different art. The bandit fired, but it was very windy and there was a slight deviation from the projectile that hit another person. Is there a police method for studying the direction of the winds? No, this is another completely different science. If you take the whole of the existing sciences and articulate their points of view all of you get a series of lines that converge at some points. Do these lines make up a real universe? No way, they make up a set of hypothetical schemes — some work harder, others less — but none correspond to concrete reality.

From the moment this police point of view was adopted as a scientific norm, our whole view of material nature was determined by our police interest and not by nature itself. Two centuries later, Kant arrived and said that all our knowledge of nature results from the projection of our cognitive schemes onto an object that remains unreachable, that is, that we know nothing about nature itself, we only know about our own projected mental schemes. Later Michel Foucault, Thomas Kuhn, all these people, said:

“The structures of scientific theories all change suddenly, for nothing. You believe in one thing and the next day you don’t believe in anything, that is, it is all subjective”

This is the result of Lord Bacon’s choice. When you privilege the police point of view, you prefer the viewer’s point of view, not the object’s. As a result, as much as you know, everything will continue to seem subjective to you, because you have not complemented this active and interrogative viewpoint with the contemplative and passive viewpoint that accepts the whole of nature as it presents itself; you have suppressed nature as an object of real experience and exchanged it for nature as a scientific object, which, says Lord Bacon, is forcing nature to do what it does not naturally do in a kind of unnatural nature.

To compensate for this displacement from the material object, science introduces the element of measurement and mathematical accuracy. But mathematical accuracy obviously cannot reconstitute the object, because it also results from the police attitude and also from the subject. You make the measurement, it is not nature that measures itself. From the human point of view, the point of view of the researcher is privileged and from this comes naturally the modern subjectivism. Modern science is the direct author of modern subjectivism, it has no escape. This means that when a subject alleges, in a discussion, objective facts proven by science, he does not know what he is talking about. Modern science and subjectivism are exactly the same thing. Modern science came along with Descartes’ rationalist idealism, pursued Kant’s radical subjectivism, and ended with the current deconstructionism, in which no one else believes in anything, there is no objective reality or anything at all. This is all a kind of a childhood disease.

Modern science was born with this childhood illness of subjectivism. It will be necessary to cure it of this, but it can only be cured by articulating the active and interrogative point of view with the contemplative attitude of accepting the concrete reality.