28. AUTHORIZED VERSIONS OF EVENTS

   The scientific method is designed to yield an authorized version of the story of an event.  Since it insists that scientists must carefully indicate the factors they can control in the construction of their experiments, it requires a story, and the story in question is presumably validated as the authorized version if the experiment can be repeated by other scientists.

    I have a great respect for the fruitfulness of the scientific method, but little respect for scientists who pretend that they alone seek knowledge.  This pretense found its classical expression in Laplacean determinism whose adherents insisted that, if we knew the present position and momentum of every entity in the universe, we could, in principle, predict every future state of the universe and retrodict every past state.  But the death knell of this pretension was sounded by Hume's empirical critique of rationalism.  Hume's argument was straightforward.  To know the existence of any entity, we must interact with it.  But any experience (or experiment) tells us only how this entity interacts with the prevailing conditions.  Since conditions are constantly changing, hypotheses and theories are ungrounded extrapolations.  Centuries later, Nietzsche encapsulated this critique in a penetrating question, "Is science a will to knowledge or to ignorance?"  In his usual provocative manner, he insisted that science is a will to ignorance, since scientists ignore conditions they cannot yet identify and control in order to master conditions they can identify.  Today, however, most philosophers of science suggest that scientific inquiries are governed by a criterion of falsifiability.  In this context, a bad hypothesis is better than no hypothesis at all, and an hypothosis which pretends to confer certain knowledge is best of all, since it offers more possibilities for revelatory falsifications.  As a consequence, however, scientists become specialists who end up knowing more and more about less and less.

    Most importantly, Nietzsche's suggestion that the scientific method encodes a will to power reveals why it is virtually useless in the exploration of person-to-person interactions between unique individuals marked by every event in their personal histories.  Any effort to control the interaction by either violates the personal dimensions of the experience.  As a result, they must learn to speak in a narrative voice if they hope to probe the formative influence of their personal histories on their interactions with one another and to share their discoveries in vulnerable self-revelations.

    Instances in which lovers find themselves at cross-purposes with one another provide paradigm examples of the difference between fruitful and destructive uses of stories.  Thus, an event which taps tangled feelings, buried memories and unresolved struggles plunges one or both into the grieving process.  And since imagination plays a crucial role in grieving, they engage in imaginary conversations.  These conversations have a narrative structure which allows endless retellings of the event in a futile search for the final word on the matter.  When the internalized storyteller co-opts the role of victim in the event in question, this version of the story automatically casts the other in the villian-role.  If the story is an obvious outcome of keeping score, the storyteller can admit to minor flaws, yet come out ahead on the final count.  If the storyteller hopes that the infliction of an equal pain may somehow evoke an empathetic response, the conversations may exploit vulnerabilities revealed by the other in previous interactions.  In short, the conversations may express what one feels and thinks in countless counter-productive ways.  But they can also create an empty space in which one can listen to the word of love voiced by the movements of the indwelling Spirit, let go of judgments and strategies, admit that there are no authorized versions of the event in question, and attempt to give voice to vulnerable self-revelations honestly.

    To be fruitful, these vulnerable self-revelations must function like scientific theories.  Since I am attempting to express honestly what I think and feel about the event at the moment, I must present it as the authorized version.  But I must also expect that your version of the event, by falsifying my understanding of your motives and intentions, will call me to revise my version of the story in ways that expose the previously hidden influence of past events in my personal history on my initial reaction.  And if I am honest, I will see that the exchange of vulnerable self-revelations has become possible because earlier interactions have fostered trust that we will both remain faithful as we transform misunderstandings into deeper understandings and cultivate the sympathetic imaginations that inspired the metaphors of intimacy projected by the great Hebrew prophets.