Ritual, Scientific Experiment and Truth

 Human rituals have their roots in animal behavior, and the animal pattern has its roots in the need for repetition of living organisms, in the cyclical structure of physiological actions.

At the human level, ritual behavior involves a delimitation of space and time, as well as a different meaning of both with respect to the spaces and times of everyday experience. From the ritual ceremonies of cold societies, we observe the care and thoroughness of the shaman to determine with precision the spaces, times and elements that intervene in the rite.

Sacred space delimits the world, not only as a place of action, but also the scope of meaning of the things contained in that space. It is a space loaded with meaning: there is an order in things. Time itself acquires its meaning in relation to this order of things, and cyclically closes the space in the “tempo” of the rite, a tempo that is a symbol of the tempo of the World. What is not in the rite or is not referable to the rite has no reality. And the reality of the actions of the rite are based on their being acted out in that environment and being observed by its participants. The rituals, complemented and extended by the narratives of identity, the myths, are integrated into a unit of interpretive actions that give value to the vital actions of the group.

It is interesting to note that the word “rite” is a Latin word of Indo-European origin related to the Sanskrit word “rta” which means “truth”, but which also means in that language “sacrifice”, “law” or “faith”. Sanskrit is a wonderful box of conceptual fossils, as are Latin or Greek itself, and they allow us to see how impulses of human meaningful actions took later different developments, as is the case of the scientific experiment.

Our scientists and philosophers masks of identity are evolutions of the psychological mask of the priestly caste. Scientific ontology implies a whole system of beliefs, fundamentally of an epistemological order: there is an unquestionable belief in the scientific method, which in its ultimate form is something quite recent that culminates with the self-imposed need for theories to be falsifiable, that is, to be experimentally testable, a proposal from 90 years ago by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper that has enjoyed a fervent reception, and which is the culmination of the development of scientific thought in the Modern World (the Western world of the last 500 years). Obviously, cosmological theories about the origin of the Universe can hardly be falsified, because the Universe as a whole does not fit into an experimental laboratory, and particle accelerators function as poor scenarios of how that initial moment was, "in that tempo" of the ritual that reproduces the origin of the Universe, "in ille tempore."

However, particle accelerators, the most expensive toys built by physicists, are the epitome of the experimental phenomenon and are clearly contemporary forms of the great rituals of the past in which "Rta", the Truth, was acted and observed, thought and lived with passion as the reproduction of the order of things, "in ille tempore."

Experiments close time and space, as do all rituals, and as do games. In this pristine atmosphere, what happens there is declared real, and only what happens there. Something to be real has act in a cyclical tempo and can be reproduced at will. Things that happen only once are not scientific. Just as social rituals do, thoroughness is at the heart of scientific ritual action. A repetition in which some factor is different can mean that the ritual is not effective. Religions are full of examples of the obsessive attitude towards rituals, and our history has anecdotes about these tragicomic compulsions. We could mention many examples. It is enough to remember the so-called Ritual of Veneration of the Jain tradition, in which minor faults regarding posture or movement are considered as faults capable of ruining the effectiveness of the ritual, or the Christian ritual of communion, ineffective if not done on an empty stomach; and let us not forget the case of the schism within the Russian Church in the 17th century caused by differences of opinion about whether the correct thing was to cross oneself with two or three fingers, as Max Weber tells us in his Sociology of Religion.

The mechanization of ritual is the mechanization of experiment, the mechanical understanding of Reality. Unfortunately, the extension of the priest's intolerant zeal for the norm reached the realms of the amazing world of bureaucracy and of life in general. The mechanization of ritual, whether religious or scientific, obeys a common foundation: the reduction of vital liminality, the remedying of the fragility that life has in the face of the unknown. The repetition of a phenomenon is its taming, the annihilation of its fundamental root of enigmatic and hidden order behind appearances, and the substitution of general life experience by a liminoid, controllable representation, a simulacrum. Through ritual, liminality becomes a liminoid phenomenon, a controlled simulation (or at least that is the impression it gives) by subsuming to a simpler order the complexity of Reality. The liminal in relation to nature is that which remains open, unfinished, that which cannot be grasped and controlled, and carries a burden of “anomie,” or more precisely, of a non-human order. Control over this liminality is achieved through a strict embodiment of rituals in linguistic terms, that is, their explicitation in a metaritual narrative. The passage from the liminal to the liminoid occurs when we mechanize a scenario of experience, and introduce elements foreign to such a mechanical scenario in a conscious way, that is, we represent in well-known concepts (or accepted as well-known and “final”) the unexpected and surprising of the natural law that we invoke for the cognitive rite, but disarmed of all its anomic content, by granting it a very precise space-time for its occurrence, and some basic protocols for possible development.

In both the religious-social ritual and the scientific experiment, there is a blind belief in the effectiveness of the ritual itself. For science, any hypothesis that is not falsifiable in the experimental procedure has no place in the ritual. However, in traditional rituals everything that appears in the context of the ritual has a meaning by the mere fact of appearing in the ritual. For their part, ritually falsified scientific statements are condemned to the hell of unreality, forever expelled from knowledge and daily life, and those who contravene the guidelines of truth established in the ritual are persecuted. The false statements of traditional rites, that is, falsehood, evil and lies, are also expelled, but the action of their meaning transforms the entire rite. Its elements contain a life lesson and are incorporated into a more complex symbolization in the new ritual.

The ritual began aspiring to be an eternal present, but later fell prey to its own mechanization, to the vital dragon that seeks to repeat itself in order to achieve identity and close the liminal anomie. If we observe it in its development as an anthropological action from a mythopoetic point of view, if we apply a cyclical perspective to this development, making the whole history of humanity a single cycle (if we think of it in Trikala terms), we obtain an interesting perspective on the nature of what we have called and still call “truth”.

Truth is shown to us as the will to make existence real, as the will for identity and for the permanence of identities that firmly establish life, though the concept and our emotion about it do not stop in life. Its obstacle is not falsehood or error, but rather mechanization, liminoid action, blind repetition in which we abandon the sense of the present moment. The truth of the ritual is presented when a given action is no longer repeated but when the fundamental impulse of this Will for Reality is made to appear again in the here and now of the Space of Meaning (the space of the ritual). At that moment, the rite, whether scientific, religious, artistic or social, reveals a way of being of human Presence that will always be veiled by any repetitive experience. At the moment of “ille tempore”, we no longer see any particular mask, only the human light seeing beyond itself, nourishing itself with more Light.

But our scientific experimentation, uncritical with respect to its ontology and its epistemology, intolerant, arrogant and mechanized, cold and empty of the fire that sustains life and makes it worthwhile, our contemporary science (like so many other social rituals of our precarious humanity) does not seek any other Will for Reality than the Will to Power.