Geology Reference
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alayan Buddhists, strongly suggest that this four-fold system has a certain cross-cultural
archetypal resonance.
In our own culture, mainstream science is based principally on the deliberate cultiv-
ation of the thinking function, which is overly dominant not only in science but in the
culture as a whole. Feeling—the evaluative, ethical function—is left out of science, so
we might suspect that scientists as practising professionals could greatly benefit from a
solid grounding in ethics as part of their training. In conventional science, sensation and
intuition serve thinking as auxiliary functions. Sensation, the raw perception of colours,
sounds, tastes, touches and smells, is obviously essential for doing science, for without
it the world cannot register within our awareness.
However, the impulse in conventional science is to convert raw sensory experience
into numbers or abstractions as quickly as possible, often using sophisticated scientific
instruments to gather numerical information about phenomena rather than use the naked
senses directly. This mode of sensing marginalises the phenomenon, and inhibits the
possibility of the perception of depth and intrinsic value in the thing being studied. I
suffered from this problem for many years, a condition that I call
quantificationitis.
A
key symptom was the inescapable compulsion to devise ways of measuring just about
everything. Dense, richly tangled vegetation caused me intense suffering, for how on
earth was I to measure all the multifarious ways in which branches, stems and vines
curled around each other like a multitude of coiling snakes? How to measure all the
subtle colours and leaf shapes that delighted the senses, but boggled the intellect?
Thinking, the function most valued by our culture, is used in conventional science to
devise experiments and to construct mathematically coherent theories and accounts of
how the world works. The predominant style of thinking used in conventional science
is reductionism, in which, as Descartes taught, one attempts to gain complete under-
standing and mastery of a phenomenon by breaking it down into its component parts.
Once the behaviour of each part is known, the reductionist approach teaches us that the
behaviour of the whole will become intelligible as the summed effect of the individu-
al components. Reductionism is built on a broader set of important assumptions, such
as that objects matter much more than the relationships between them, that the world is
ordered hierarchically, that knowledge can be objective, and that the knowing intellect
can wholly detach itself from the material world in order to attain a purely objective,
'God's eye' view of any given phenomenon.
Reductionism works very well if we want to design things like cars and computers,
but its success is more limited in areas such as biology, ecology or in the realm of human
social life where complex, non-linear interactions are the norm. In these areas we need to
apply a different style of thinking which builds on and incorporates reductionism whilst
moving beyond it. Physicist Fritjof Capra points out that this new approach, which he
