Habits

I recognized a fellow visitor of a lecture from the copy of the Groene Amsterdammer that was distributed. On the way home on the train, the student - culture studies - talked about a philosophical movement that she had lectured on. Within the post-structuralist tradition, language refers to nothing outside of itself: words and concepts are symbols that refer to each other. But there is no outside of it. Creativity… love… they are our concepts, no more, no less. There is nothing outside of the language. It made her somewhat pessimistic.
I got an association with a caption I read in the beautiful museum Nemo. "Make life" was written on a sign. A large sealed glass flask with liquid in it swung back and forth. It repeated an experiment from the twentieth century in which amino acids are formed. Ingredients: water, ammonia, some basic molecules, and sparks of electrical discharge. Conditions such as those that presumably existed on Earth billions of years ago. Amino acids produce RNA and DNA, which are the basis for self-reproducing organisms. Fascinating process. Worth dedicating to a study. Motivation and fascination for hordes of scientists to dedicate their lives and efforts.
The inscription 'Making life' plays with two meanings of life. On the one hand, I understand that the Nemo window dressers understand the word 'life' as chemists and biologists do: self-reproducing organisms. On the other hand, there is the concept of life as our own, personal life. With a life course that depends on all kinds of coincidental factors, but in which we are nevertheless very aware of ourselves, of our own identity. A life that we have not chosen ourselves, but in which you gradually get to know yourself, as it were.
The interesting thing is that the fascination with the origin of life can only exist within the second conception of 'life'. Within the scientific conception of life, there is no fascination: it will be a molecule of sausage how it originated: it simply is there. After all, it was energetically beneficial to arise from a reaction of previous matter and energy. So back to the two different views of the concept of 'life': only when you read 'life' in the second sense, does it make sense to speak of a motive. "Life" like that spoken of in the butt has no experience of fascination.
The tension between these two meanings becomes clear when the museum combines the words 'life' and 'make' in this one inscription. Making life: life - that you cannot control, that you have not chosen yourself, and in which you can only partly make your own choices - make - control, create, reproduce. The title 'Making life' has that fascinating in it. It explores the boundaries of what humans can and cannot do: where are our boundaries? Pushing that boundary is what scientists have been doing for centuries.
Nevertheless - even by leading scientists - the fascination with life is reduced, as for example to neurobiological processes. The tone is: science understands and controls reality. This removes the tension from the inscription 'make life'. It's beaten to death. People's fascination for life in general, for their own personal life, is then skipped. The consequence is to undermine the fascination that has been the driving force for scientific discoveries for centuries. No science without motivation. No science without a scientist.
This brings us back to post-structuralism in the train. I see a similar shift in the philosophers who claim that there is nothing outside of language. (This is irrespective of whether this does enough justice to this philosophy, because I am concerned with the absence of fascination that the student heard in it.) The reduction to language and nothing but the language does not do justice led to a kind of pessimism . It does not do justice to the confidence that lies in the motivation of scientists and philosophers themselves.
She had heard a more positive view in that evening's lecture. We had listened to Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who spoke at Radboud University. He offered a different view against the reductionist 'outside language there is no other reality' view. While language falls short of fully describing reality, it is still the best possible description to date. Reality fascinates us to keep coming to new discoveries. And find more refined descriptions. I think William's optimistic vision is stronger because it also does justice to the scientist and his motivation.
A question from the audience to the ex-Archbishop was: What is faith? To this he answered with the difficult to translate 'habits of trust': the habits, the tendency to trust. Habits of trust. So without immediately wanting to record on what or who that trust is exactly based on. These accessible words recognize the fascination as a source of creativity for students and scientists. They provide scope for not losing sight of the scientist behind the science.