How To Be Humanhe has sinews and bones, but not a cause. That they don’t, he
suggests, is the mistake scientists make when they present their
explanations of nature as causes of human behaviour. They fool
themselves and ‘grope around in the dark’ by confusing moral
causes with physical conditions.
So Socrates became disillusioned with the science of well-
being. When it came to matters of human fl ourishing – the
business of not just living but living well – it was neither asking
the right questions nor using the right tools. He diagnosed that
it is the dogmatic prioritisation of scientifi c explanations over
other factors, when those others are more important, that leads
the scientifi c worldview to overreach itself. He decided that he
would turn away from science. He did not want science to stop.
But he saw that if it is meaning that interests you, then it is
ethics, actions and fl ourishing you must study. In effect, what
Socrates had done was to identify a category of knowledge to
which science has no direct access. The domain in which the
latter works well is that of natural causes. But when it comes to
things like the good life, it may be able to contribute a few con-
ditions, but they are far from suffi cient. Questions of ethics and
meaning are unavoidable.
Metaphors in science
The mathematician Michael Atiyah, sometime Master of Trinity
College, Cambridge and President of the Royal Society, is one
modern scientist to have thought about this explanatory tres-
passing. He has deployed a particularly powerful comparison
to highlight the dangers of assuming that science’s success in
one sphere of understanding means it should be applied to all
others. He calls it a Faustian pact.
The devil says: ‘I will give you this powerful machine, and it
will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give
me your soul: give up something and you will have this mar-
vellous machine.’