Transcript:
Okay, so reductionism is when you take a phenomenon and you try to reduce it down to its principles and, sort of, its individual parts in order to figure it out. And this is true in a sense that things will often be made up from parts and dismantling them and breaking them up – reducing them to their core principles – is a good way of figuring out a lot of things out. The problem with reductionism is that it’s making a false assumption that all things are reducible, whereas a phenomenon is sometimes a synthesis of the individual parts that made up that phenomenon. So in that case it has new properties, it’s its own unique entity, it’s not necessarily reducible, and then you can not apply reductionism. I guess Hegel’s idea of the collective could be an example of that. I don’t think you can apply reductionism to Hegel’s conception of the collective.
Empiricism. Okay, empiricism is true in the sense that most information we get, or a large portion of it, is through our senses and that scientific methods and experimentation and evidence are really good ways to figure things out and know systems. The problem with empiricism is that it denies an entire other channel of knowledge that exists within the human being, and that’s the more mythological, primordial, intuitive side. I’m actually reading Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning right now and he’s actually talking about this – about how there’s these two realms: there’s the empirical and there’s the mythological and both are ways to know the world, to actually know it. And if you ignore one, you are not knowing everything. But empiricists don’t like that because they don’t feel safe within… things that are not measurable, so they deny that part.
