stage (although another sequence is possible as well). A number of prominent scientists acquired crucial intuitions for their discoveries in dreams or altered states of consciousness, or typically, these emerged in moments of rest just when rational activity had stopped. Feeling plays a much more significant role in relation to thinking than had been admitted until recently (Ciompi 1997). Feelings act as a cognitive operator. Feelings determine what we pay attention to and what we disregard. Furthermore, they determine what we remember and what we delete from our memory. Feelings function as a glue that binds individual rational facts into an overall image. Affects lie behind several different kinds of logic; over time they recede into the unconscious and leave behind mental habits and whole patterns of a world-view structure constructed of rational facts, albeit personally colored. For individuals, this mental undertone or mood manifests itself as amodeof thinking. Yet whole cultural epochs are colored by something – what was once called Zeitgeist and nowadays we call paradigm, episteme or system of truth. It is a collection of subconsciously accepted intuitions and creeds about the nature of the world that are not a subject of discussion in a given time period because they are taken for granted or are wholly unconscious. All subsequent thought and action, however, is derived from this as from self-evident assumptions. For example, in the era when Calvin and other religious leaders preached predestination, i.e. the inevitability of the course of events and the bureaucratic mechanisms of absolutist states were being built everywhere, Galileo founded mechanics and Descartes developed his conviction about the mechanical determinism of material processes. And yet the new scientific discoveries were not the cause, but the result of an altered religious and political frame of mind. Mechanics as a science was born in a new spiritual atmosphere, which had been at work for one or two generations already. By contrast, in revolutionary eras when the requirement for human freedom has been promoted, philosophical indeterminism regularly prevailed and the same value has been introduced into the concept of the physical nature of matter. Similarly, the wave and particle explanation of the nature of light has alternated in history. When clothes were composed of mere circles and spheres (Spanish fashion), men imagined light to be a stream of particles, tiny balls of atoms flying across space. And when clothes were covered by rhythmic elements (in rococo), the wave theory of light gained momentum. In reality, light has both wave and corpuscular properties. We cannot describe its nature unequivocally – that is why we speak about wave-particle duality today. Aesthetic sense also plays a role when designing equations in modern physics – fully consciously in the case of Poincaré or Pauli. Another well-known example is how the political-economic situation of England in the first half of the 19th century is reflected in Darwin’s theory – that is why he laid an emphasis on competition as the driving force of evolution. Kropotkin, on the other hand, saw progress in nature through cooperation in which Russian values are reflected. In fact, both com42 (6) Emil Páleš
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=