Georges Metanomski - Relativistic Dialectic - Part One - HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS AND THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVOLUTION - Georges Metanomski - Athenaeum Library of Philosophy

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Relativistic Dialectic
 
Part One
Georges Metanomski
HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS
AND THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
The brilliant scientist, mathematician, logician, philosopher and bon vivant we know as Georges Metanomski fought for the Polish Home Army in Nazi occupied Poland.

As a child of a Polish Ghetto, where there were no schools, he never attended any regular educational establishment. After the war autodidact youngsters like Metanomski were admitted into Universities as free students. He diligently followed some courses at various places and finally was authorised to join the branch of Einstein's team which was established in Warsaw Mathematical Institute by Infeld, where he worked on Relativity.

    Metanomski was struck by the similarity, if not equivalence of his intuitive anti-dogmatism, and the physical principle of relativity. Says Metanomski: "Physics admits of exclusively relative propositions. When we say that a stone is heavy, we imply a relation to the earth: we know that it would be quite light on the moon, that in the cosmic space its weight would totally disappear. In Physics an absolute statement is neither true, nor false; it is just a meaningless and logically indeterminate noise".

    According to Metanomski, in the human domain absolute propositions are equally absurd, but we lack an authority, a humanistic Galileo, or Einstein, to reinforce this truth. Consequently, he conceived the idea of extending the relativity principle over the entire human universe of discourse. It found the enthusiastic support of Infeld, and the young scientist managed to establish its first foundations with the great man's help.

Under the name of Relativistic Dialectics it became the obsession of his life to which he has dedicated 40 years. It has never been recognized by the establishment, which is quite understandable: for it calls into question all sorts of social, religious, political and scientific dogma upon which our society is founded.

But let Georges Metanomski provide the last word himself:

"I would be contradicting myself by pretending that Relativistic Dialectics is the last word of wisdom, that it is absolutely true. If I learned anything from Infeld and Einstein, it's their fundamental conviction that every theory, every model in the moment of its formulation becomes obsolete, calls itself in the question and becomes a challenge for the successive one, which is going to replace it. In this sense I would like to present Relativistic Dialectics in this site.

INTRODUCTION.

    The human being distinguishes himself from other living creatures mainly by his reason. During his prehistory he applied it unconsciously, just happening to be more ingenious than other animals, without worrying about the why's and the how's of it. Prehistory switches to history when reason becomes conscious, aware of itself. For our culture this milestone corresponds with the beginning of the Greek philosophy.

Now, history appeared for a long time to be accidental. It seemed to be governed by "Cleopatra's nose", by some king happening to be more cunning than another, by sudden rain making some road too muddy for artillery. In this state history could be merely described, but not rigorously, scientifically investigated. First trial to approach it as a science is due to Marx, who proposed the "means of production" or, as we would say today "technology", as an objective criterion allowing to distinguish among various historical epochs and to explain their transitions.

However, this criterion, restricted to economy, indeed to its part concerned with production, seems to narrow. Human being is more than a mule turning in a treadmill, than a honey gathering bee. Or, to stay within RD terminology, "technology" is purely "objective" and leaves the "subjective" term of the Dichotomy "Human Situation" undetermined.

Therefore we propose to supplement it with a "subjective" criterion, which we shall call "SPECIFIC DOMAIN" of human Reason. In order to define it let's have a look at the history starting with the origins of the Greek philosophy.

At its very beginning, the intellectual interrogation was restricted to one single domain: philosophy. One started soon to distinguish within it various sub_domains: ontology, epistemology (theory of cognition), ethic, aesthetic, logic. Nevertheless, they stayed parts of philosophy and continued to be approached with a unique, purely speculative methodology. At the next step some domains got emancipated and established themselves as independent disciplines with proper methodology, usually more rigorous and experimental, more scientific, than pure speculation. First of them were MATHEMATICS, ASTRONOMY and POLITICS in Greece. Shortly afterwards ETHIC established itself as LAW in Rome. Middle Age saw the emancipation of THEOLOGY, with its proper scholastic methodology (exceptionally not more scientific). Renaissance started the emancipation of Objective Science and the 19_th century that of Psychology and Logic, where by "Logic" we understand traditional logic, that of Cantorian Paradise, prior to the Crisis.

Current established view considers Logic as the last emancipated domain and leaves to philosophy its two remaining domains: ONTOLOGY and EPISTEMOLOGY.

We define SPECIFIC DOMAIN as the last emancipated domain and propose it as supplementary criterion of classification of historical epochs. Consequently, each stable epoch will be associated with a SPECIFIC DOMAIN and each transition with a new domain raising claims to independence. Transitions may be revolutionary, when the old SPECIFIC DOMAIN will not give up and the new has to struggle for emancipation.

Thus, we may refer to Middle Age as to the epoch of THEOLOGY, and to Renaissance as to OBJECTIVE SCIENCE revolution. Indeed, the theological Middle Age used all available social and political means to oppose the new scientific ideology. No prior period saw as many stakes, no one had more appearances of Middle Age than Renaissance. As a rule, the obsolete SPECIFIC DOMAIN comes to its apogee when it is still socially, but no more intellectually ruling. All established institutions are still founded upon obsolete principles, the new domain manifests itself via a few individuals such as Copernicus, Galileo, Keppler and Leonardo da Vinci, who are persecuted and sometimes murdered as Giordano Bruno; fanaticism and intolerance propagate themselves through the masses. The old domain seems to triumph just before abdicating.

Finally OBJECTIVE SCIENCE won and established itself as the SPECIFIC_ DOMAIN of the epoch of Rationalism. Further transitions followed. The limited scope of this chapter forces us to skip them and to pass directly to the contemporary situation.

As we have said above, Logic is the last officially established domain. We live officially in a logical world. Logic based set theory is the official foundation of mathematics, which, in turn claim to be the most fundamental science. Human beings are classified, discriminated and exterminated on the base of absolute logical concepts, such as race, nation or religion. Informatics is considered as applied predicate calculus, a branch of symbolic Logic.

Contrarily to this established opinion it is our thesis that:

WE LIVE CURRENTLY AMID THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVOLUTION.

According to our definition this means that EPISTEMOLOGY became unofficially the SPECIFIC DOMAIN of our time, that the social, scientific and technological development have revealed new aspects of existence which cannot more be grasped and investigated with help of Logic, but require some other more conform context. This context, the applied EPISTEMOLOGY, has already been developed and is locally used by small intellectual elite in chosen, deepest scientific domains, mainly in physics. However, society, environment and related domains decisive for the future of mankind consider their main problems as logical contradictions and consequently disregard them as unsolvable.

Relativistic Dialectic is an attempt to define the essentials of applied EPISTEMOLOGY and to show how it allows us to investigate and to solve problems which appear to Logic as untreatable contradictions.

The term REVOLUTION applies to our context literally: contemporary fanatical discrimination and extermination of hundreds of millions making Renaissance and Inquisition look like children play is one of social manifestations of Logic based dogmatic ideologies defending their obsolete establishment.


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