ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

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seen as radically alien to that science. Today it is usually
agreed that those attempts have for the most part failed. Few
would accept, for example, Kant's division of the world into
phenomenal and noumenal spheres, or Bergson's "intuition"
as an alternative path to a knowledge whose significance
would parallel that of science. Still these attempts are part of
our heritage. The history of ideas cannot be understood without
reference to them.
We shall also briefly discuss scientific positivism, which is
based on the separation of what is true from what is scientifically
useful. At the outset this positivistic view may seem to op
pose clearly the metaphysical views we have mentioned, views
that I. Berlin described as the "Counter-Enlightenment."
However, their fundamental conclusion is the same: we must
reject science as a basis for true knowledge even if at the same
time we recognize its practical importance or we deny, as positivists
do, the possibility of any other cognitive enterprise.
We must remember all these developments to understand
what is at stake To what extent is science a basis for the intelligibility
of nature, including man? What is the meaning of the
idea of progress today?
Diderot, one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment, is
certainly no representative of antiscientific thought. On the
contrary, his confidence in science, in the possibilities of
knowledge, was total. Yet this is the very reason why science
had, following Diderot, to understand life before it could hope
to achieve any coherent vision of nature.
We have already mentioned that the birth of modern science
was marked by the abandonment of vitalist inspiration and, in
particular, of Aristotelian final causes. However, the issue of
the organization of living matter remained and became a challenge
for classical science. Diderot, at the height of the Newtonian
triumph, emphasizes that this problem was repressed by
physics. He imagines it as haunting the dreams of physicists
who cannot conceive of it while they are awake. The physicist
d /\lembert is dreaming:
· living point . .. No, that's wrong. Nothing at all to
begin with, and then a living point. This living point is
joined by another, and then another, and from these successive
joinings there results a unified being, for I am a