PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE IN THE LIGHT OF THE PERENNIAL WISDOM

Modern science has become the sole arbiter or criterion of truth. It claims that it alone can know the truth and the nature of reality. This situation came to pass through a long historical trajectory of events such as the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, and European Enlightenment. It is scientism purporting to be science that is the problem, for when science claims a monopoly on the truth, it trespasses beyond its own domain of knowledge.

This book delivers a powerful intellectual critique of the foundations of modern science, rigorously exposing its ontological and epistemological limits according to sacred science, metaphysics, and the spiritual principles that exist at the very heart of every sapiential tradition.

What can be known through the five senses pertains to the corporeal realm and cannot transcend it. Modern science by and large only recognises this way of knowing without realizing that "Empiricism … refutes itself." (p. 4) Empiricism is unaware that it is limited to the relative order and knows nothing of the Absolute and that it is the unmanifest order that can fully know the manifest. No discussion can be had until it is recognised that "modern science condemns itself to fundamental errors. It is incapable of providing a sufficient view of the world, and yet lays claim to total reality." (p. 104) Its underpinnings are truncated due to being cut off from metaphysics, and thus "It is flawed … in its very foundation, or rather in its lack of it." (p. 103)

Empirical means of knowing are only one way of knowing, just as reason is another way of knowing. With this said, "Reasoning alone cannot arrive at truth, because man would not be able to recognise the truth arrived at as truth if he did not possess the essence of this truth a priori." (p. 14) The authors explain that "Man can know things because their principial realities are imprinted in his very spirit," (p. 89) and point out that "The phenomena of this world are symbols of their divine archetypes, and can thus serve to lead us back to their source." (p. 65)

Each human faculty is connected to an interrelated level or degree of reality. Within both the human being and the cosmos there are in fact multiple degrees of being or reality. The authors write, "the traditional outlook always accounts for multiple states of being." (p. 36) Human faculties pertain to the horizontal and vertical dimensions as noted here: "There are not only degrees in reality, there are also modes; the former are in 'vertical' order while the latter are 'horizontal' and situated in the appropriate manner at each degree." (p. 47) The tripartite constitution of the human being and that of the cosmos, of which the human being is a small mirror, consists of Spirit/Intellect, soul, and body or the spiritual, psychic and corporeal states.

The Platonic doctrine of anamnesis or "recollection" is conceivably the clearest epistemology of the premodern West, which corresponds to the epistemologies of all the religions. Anamnesis is the faculty of the Intellect that is synonymous with Spirit, sometimes known as intellection or intellectual intuition. The authors explain that "Anamnesis bases the possibility of knowing an object on man's having its knowledge potentially." (p. 31) They add the following about this doctrine:

For the Platonic recollection of the fundamental truths to become actualized in a man, a purification of the heart is necessary—in order that earthly shadows may awaken in him their principial realities. The aim of all the religions is to help man remember what he knew—to remove the rust that covers his heart, symbolically speaking—so as to enable him to reestablish his contact with the truths contained in his inner being. (p. 33)

Hence from a metaphysical point of view "Science … is nothing but recollection." (p. 95) It is through this intellectual recollection that the human being can apprehend what is integrally human and the cosmos at large. Beyond the Cartesian bifurcation lies transpersonal knowing: "Total knowledge is situated beyond the bipolarity subject-object, because there is only one, individual Reality." (p. 116)

Modern science lacks an integral understanding of causes and its higher order in metaphysics. The ancients always applied the principle that "the greater could never come from the lesser." (p. 68) In the ancient world, "Traditional man knew that there is no end to the knowledge of phenomena." (p. 70) Knowledge and science for the ancients were inseparably connected to sacred science, metaphysics, and spiritual principles; however, this is not the case for modern science:

By ignoring epistemological foundations and metaphysical principles, modern science reduces man's intelligence to the lowest of his cognitive faculties, namely, his senses and reason, and reality to its most outward and contingent aspect, namely, matter. The perennial wisdom, or the Sophia Perennis, on the other hand, offers a full account of man's faculties of knowledge and a comprehensive description of the structure of reality. (p. 111)

By the same token the authors provide a very important point pertaining to "modern psychology…[where] reality is extended to the realm of the psyche, but not beyond it…. It … contradicts itself in its very principle." (p. 50) There is a contradiction because the ego cannot know itself and requires a transpersonal dimension to know itself. In contrast, perennial psychology as found across the diverse cultures of the world includes Spirit, soul, and body and their corresponding degrees and modes of reality.

This book under review is a precious and remarkable work, which merits wide attention. It is unique in situating modern science in the light of the universal and timeless wisdom of the world's religions and what can be gleaned from them. It offers the integral principles to return science to its origins in metaphysics so that the human being as the microcosm can rejoin with the macrocosm, opening science to truths of higher realities as known in all times and places as sacred science.