Why might it be dangerous to hold a physicalist view of nature?

Revising for today's mid-term, I made a mental note to return to the question: Why may it be dangerous to view nature as a mechanical system?

To begin by clarifying the question, I take this to be referring to a view concerning the constitution of the mind-independent world, namely that it is mechanistic, or systematic, or at least somewhat conceptually constituted. With these inelegant formulations, I'm struggling to substantively characterise the view expressed by physicalism, namely that nature really is constituted by the fundamental entities which physics describes (or attempts to describe).

So, I'll reframe the question as follows:

Why might it be dangerous to hold a physicalist view of nature?
Well, I'd like to consider this from the perspective of Husserl Crisis (1954). In the wonderfully-titled first section, he writes of 'The Crisis of the Sciences as the Expression of the Radical Life-Crisis of European Humanity'. In brief, he describes the problem as follows: the scientific quest for objective knowledge has led to a forgetfulness, which concerns two closely related phenomena: subjectivity and the life-world.  The sciences, Husserl charges, have forgotten the everyday life-world upon which they are based, and have conseqently become groundless. At the same time, they have become the dominant discourse in European society, such that they strongly determine the way that 'European humanity' looks at the world. As a result, we find ourselves in a situation where science is incapable of addressing all questions 'ultimate and highest'; where it cannot address questions which concern us in our living existence; particularly, I think, questions concerning non-instrumental values. According to Husserl, the positivistic conception 'decaptitates philosophy', because it fails to recognise the proper concern of the discipline, which is to consider questions 'of a higher dignity than questions of fact'. Accordingly, the crisis of science is revealed in 'the loss of its meaning for life.'

How did this situation come about? In brief, Husserl takes the sciences to have emerged from the insight that there is a difference between the manifold appearances of an object to a subject and the single unified object which lies behind these appearances. From the outset, science has been concerned primarily with proceeding from the experience of former to knowledge of the latter. Galileo cemented the final foundation for the 20th century crisis: his seminal work effectively ushered in what Husserl calls the 'mathematisation of nature'. From Galileo onwards, the ideal shapes of geometry were taken to be constitutive of reality (herein I'll call this the constitution assumption); the geometrical and mathematical truths of physics were taken to be the fundamental truths. The widespread view, since then, is that the ideal shapes of geometry and their representations in mathematics somehow reflect the true nature of reality. I think this view underwrites what we would now call physicalism.

In Husserl's words, the mathematisation of nature amounts to the view that 'the infinite totality of what is in general is intrinsically a rational all-encompassing unity that can be mastered, without anything left over, by a corresponding universal science.' Clearly, physicalism is an intellectually optimistic view, though it does not assume that such a final state of totalising mastery is actually realisable. Nevertheless, I can imagine Michael Morris, with an eye to John McDowell, suggesting that the basic thrust of such a hypothesis sounds rather idealistic.

Anyway, having pointed all this out, Husserl reminds us that, of course, we never actually experience the ideal shapes of geometry. They are abstractions from the life-world, which, according to Husserl, always contains a degree of indeterminacy. Perceptual objects are asymptotic in their progression towards the ideal, exact, geometrical object. Given this, we have reason to wonder how the constitution assumption which underwrites the physicalist view might be justified. In what I've read so far, Husserl does not consider how this might be argued for. * [ I'd like to research arguments for this view, perhaps I should read more McDowell. ]

In the meantime, we can remark that on this topic Husserl does ask 'is there not in the appearances themselves a content we must ascribe to true nature?' In other words, if we want to give a complete account of the natural world, do we not need to include both subjectivity and the life-world? If the answer is yes, and this cannot be done in a physical vocabulary, then we have a prima facie reason for rejecting the constitution assumption, ergo, physicalism. Here we rejoin the contemporary debate regarding the problem of consciousness, which I'm inclined to consider pretty 'hard'. (c.f. Chalmers (1995))

Why might physicalism be dangerous? Well, problems potentially arise from its neglect of the life-world as mentioned earlier. If it neglects or surpresses its origin in the life-world, then it forgets its originating purpose, as a creation of, and instrument for, the subject. Unless it is seen as such, science may come to dominate the subject, and humanity more broadly, and consequently lead to the neglect of important non-factual, perhaps non-cognitive, discussions concerning 'higher' questions.** If a pragmatic scientific mindset comes to be unduly dominant, it could lead to a severe impoverishment of humanity, of which technologism would be a symptom.

In short, I think the moral of the Crisis is this: remember that it is the life-world which gives rise to science, that the pursuit of science presupposes the normative horizon of meaning found within the life-world. Without the animating normative context of the life-world, science could not exist. In our understandable enthusiasm for scientific progress we should not neglect other important questions which present themselves to us, in particular those fundamental ones concerning non-instrumental value. The danger, writes Husserl, is that 'merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people.' And that, we might think, would be nothing less than the end of humanity.


Notes:
* Nietzsche (1885), discussing this topic, writes in Zarathustra 'What urges you on and arouses your ardour, you wisest of men, do you call it 'will to truth?' Will to the conceivability of all being: that is what I call your will! You first want to make all being conceivable: for, with a healthy mistrust, you doubt whether it is in fact conceivable. But it must bend and accommodate itself to you! [...] It must become smooth and subject to the mind as the mind's mirror and reflection.'

** It's not that physicalism precludes such discussions - many claim, for example, that the view is compatible with realism about other levels of description including moral discourse. I'm yet to see how this could work however, basically finding myself in agreement with Kim (1989) in my dissatisfaction with purportedly non-reductive 'supervenience' accounts.

References:
Chalmers, D. (1995) 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness', Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp. 200-19 [ available at URL = http://consc.net/papers/facing.html ]

Husserl, E. (1954) The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970) [ extracts available at URL = http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl.htm ]

Kim, J. (1989) ‘The Myth of Non-Reductive Materialism’, Proceedings and Addresses of the     American Philosophical Association, Vol. 63, No. 3, pp. 31-47.

Nietzche, F. (1885) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Hollingdale, R. J. (trans.) (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1969), p. 136