Man as the Instrument

I am reading Incompleteness. Right now we are making a survey of the positivists and their Vienna Cirle thoughts. I find myself in that hazy place again. It is positivist vs. Platonist; radical empirical vs. realist/idealist (depending on who you talk to). And I wonder where there is room for the common experience in either view? Of course, these are all men of ideas talking about ideas. So perhaps it's natural that they don't have much to say about the place of sweat, blood and tears.

But I always find myself taking the sociologist's view. These men would not be but for the sweat, blood and tears of people that live along with them in their time and countless generations before that. How then can they find themselves discussing what they would deem complete theories of "What Is"(TM) which discount that perspective? Am I too Marxist here? I don't know.

Fugazi says "we need an instrument". I agree. Math is the only thing which seems to come close, but even that we don't understand well enough yet. Our attempts are fumbling at best. Grandiose, beautiful, inspired fumbling - but fumbling none the less.

Of course, you add the lack of instrument to the lack of commonality in the intellectual debate and you get the whole reason religion thrives today long after so many of those intellectuals predicted its demise. God may indeed be dead (in the Nietzschian poetic sense), but the churches remain full regardless. Because the people don't understand the new prophets' words - they preach from high atop Babel.

In the end, religion and god and all those ancient concepts are just an attempt to grasp that instrument. I struggle to help my own children understand the world. It would be great to have an instrument where I could just put it all through a lens and show them. I know there is none. But many grasp and find the same one that has been refined from the assumptions of our forefathers. Ironically, though, in their attempt to make something so grand and all seeing they still inject themselves. The god is always somehow among or of or akin to us in mind or spirit or even body. Man is the instrument again. And there the failure lies...