Astrology and Science

Some time back I wrote an essay where I argued that astrology is not a science in the current understanding of the term. I still agree with what I wrote there – but I would now emphasize one particular part of that statement – astrology is not a science as we currently understand the word science.

For astrology to be viewed as a science we need to rethink what we mean by the word, and what that says about the world, and about what is real.

Most people don’t realize that the meaning of the word science has changed drastically over the past two hundred years. That is what I want to look at here.

This involves going back into the history of our language, and recovering some of the meaning of the term Science that has been lost in the last century.

I want to give an example here of an older text where the use of science is obviously different from how we currently use the term.

The following quote is from the British Platonist Thomas Taylor, who was writing around 300 years ago. He is referring to a passage in the dialog Parmenides by Plato where the train of logic is using a series of negations to prove what an absolute being or God could not be – god neither exists nor does not exist. The entire train of logic is abstract and makes no reference to any empirical data.

In the late Platonist metaphysics this train of logic is taken as pointing to a conception of the One and the Good, the highest principle of things, that by definition is beyond everything we can conceive or say about it, including saying that it has being. The quote from Taylor follows here, emphasis mine.

And here it must be observed that this conclusion respecting the highest principle of things, that he is perfectly ineffable and inconceivable, is the result of a most scientific series…For that which so consistently distinguishes the philosophy of Plato from others is this, that every part of it is stamped with the character of science.

Along with being the first person to translate all of the Platonic dialogs into English, Taylor also translated some works by the late Platonic philosopher Proclus that Taylor considered to be science in this sense.

The Elements of Theology by Proclus is modeled on Euclid’s elements, as is another book by Proclus that is a theological and philosophical commentary on Euclid. It is laid out as a logical and scientific argument, starting with logical axioms and building a systematic conceptual structure built on the first principles. The structure of philosophy and theology is built up as a logical and scientific structure.

The massive work by Proclus on The Theology of Plato, laying out the levels of the great chain of being with descriptions of the gods at each level, is similarly laid out as a closely reasoned argument that Proclus viewed as scientific – but in that work Proclus is including discussing various heirarchies of the gods. For Proclus, speaking of the Gods is a form of science.

Clearly, both Proclus and Thomas Taylor had a very different conception of science than the current meaning as based solely on empirical observation and experiment. If Taylor used science in that way then that meaning must be part of the history of the English language.

Fortunately there is a way a way to recover some of that history. A very good place to start is with dictionaries. We can examine how newer dictionaries have changed by comparing their definitions of words, with how words were defined in older dictionaries.

The 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster is one of the most important and influential English dictionaries ever compiled, and is a masterpiece of definition, etymology, language history and usage.

The Webster dictionary went through numerous changes through the years, and the last edition to preserve much of the older language meaning and usage is the 1913 edition. Almost all later dictionaries have dropped much of the earlier usage.

Both the 1828 and 1913 Webster dictionaries are available online. There is also a printed facsimile edition of the the 1828 Webster available, and it is a marvelous and fascinating piece of work. Looking through the 1828 dictionary and then comparing a modern dictionary is like going from a 5 star gourmet restaurant to a MacDonald’s drive-through. That is a reasonable metaphor – language in the older dictionary is so much more varied, spicy and flavorful, and language in the new dictionary is stripped down and flavorless.

When our language is stripped down, our thought is stripped down and our experience is impoverished. In the modern world we live in a fast-food reality.

As with the quote from Thomas Taylor above, these old dictionaries point to a very different world, and a very different concept of science. That is what we will examine here.

These quotes are from Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) – I am excerpting from the full definition of the term, which is quite long. The quotes from the dictionary are in italics, with my emphasis in bold on key parts, and my comments are in regular font.

1. Knowledge; knowledge of principles and causes; ascertained truth of facts.

There are two other important words here, principle and cause, both have which have changed and have shrunk in meaning over time.

Firs, the word principle means beginning, starting point, basis that from which everything else follows. To know the principle of something is to know its source.

The word cause has also greatly changed and reduced in meaning over the years – in modern scientific sense of the term cause is always something physical that can be measured.

In traditional philosophy Aristotle laid out 4 different kinds of causes. Modern science has kept only the efficient cause, meaning the physical, cause and effect chain of events. Cause in the traditional sense here has connotations of Aristotle’s formal cause – that which gives the shape of form – and the final cause – its end or purpose. Modern science has no place for purpose or meaning, and without that dimension astrology is meaningless.

If we conceive God’s sight or science, before the creation, to be extended to all and every part of the world, seeing everything as it is, . . . his science or sight from all eternity lays no necessity on anything to come to pass. –Hammond.

Just using God and science in the same sentence tells you we’re living in a different world here. Link this to the concept of principle in the definition itself, and science is being used in a spiritual sense as pointing to the ultimate reality prior to the physical from which all else springs.

Shakespeare’s deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. –Coleridge.

2. Accumulated and established knowledge, which has been systematized and formulated with reference to the discovery of general truths or the operation of general laws; knowledge classified and made available in work, life, or the search for truth; comprehensive, profound, or philosophical knowledge.

Science is . . . a complement of cognitions, having, in point of form, the character of logical perfection, and in point of matter, the character of real truth. –Sir W. Hamilton.

And now we have definition number three.

3. Especially, such knowledge when it relates to the physical world and its phenomena, the nature, constitution, and forces of matter, the qualities and functions of living tissues, etc.; — called also {natural science}, and {physical science}.

This third definition is really the only one left in the modern dictionary. In current usage science starts and ends with measurable physical phenomena. It can be measured in a lab, it can be calculated, it can be exactly replicated in controlled circumstances – and it has no dimension of meaning, or awareness, or consciousness, or value.

A little bit later is this paragraph talking about the different dimensions of science.

Note: Science is applied or pure. Applied science is a knowledge of facts, events, or phenomena, as explained, accounted for, or produced, by means of powers, causes, or laws. Pure science is the knowledge of these powers, causes, or laws, considered apart, or as pure from all applications. Both these terms have a similar and special signification when applied to the science of quantity; as, the applied and pure mathematics. Exact science is knowledge so systematized that prediction and verification, by measurement, experiment, observation, etc., are possible. The mathematical and physical sciences are called the exact sciences.

As far as I can tell we have lost half of the meaning in the modern world – science and applied science are now effectively synonyms. What Webster calls pure science has dropped out of our usage.

In this next paragraph talks about a distinctive usage of the term science which is almost the inverse of the way we currently use the term.

Usage: {Science}, {Literature}, {Art}. Science is literally knowledge, but more usually denotes a systematic and orderly arrangement of knowledge. In a more distinctive sense, science embraces those branches of knowledge of which the subject-matter is either ultimate principles, or facts as explained by principles or laws thus arranged in natural order.

The term literature sometimes denotes all compositions not embraced under science, but usually confined to the belles-lettres. [See {Literature}.] Art is that which depends on practice and skill in performance. “In science, scimus ut sciamus; in art, scimus ut producamus.

And, therefore, science and art may be said to be investigations of truth; but one, science, inquires for the sake of knowledge; the other, art, for the sake of production; and hence science is more concerned with the higher truths, art with the lower; and science never is engaged, as art is, in productive application.

And the most perfect state of science, therefore, will be the most high and accurate inquiry; the perfection of art will be the most apt and efficient system of rules; art always throwing itself into the form of rules.” –Karslake.

In this paragraph the meanings of science and art are very nearly reversed from their usage today. The ‘science of ultimate principles’ is gone. The other, science for ‘the sake of production’ is really all that is left today. The whole concept of science being ‘more concerned with the higher truths’ is pretty much unthinkable.

There are no higher truths in modern science – as there is no higher world than our material world of phenomena to support such a science. Without that higher world, astrology is meaningless superstition.

This is not just change in language but an impoverishment of our experience because we have lost the meaning of some concepts used to describe it.

I think it is very important that we become aware of just how impoverished much of our modern use of language is, and how it limits the possibilities of thinking. With the modern reduced meaning of the term, the “divine science” of astrology turns into an irrational superstitious oddity that has the connotations of words like supernatural and psychic. Astrology lies outside the modern scientific rules of what is real.

I have seen some very fine modern astrologers fall into this linguistic trap. In their eagerness to defend astrology as a “science” in the modern reductionist sense of the term, they rush to emphasize how it is important to distinguish astrology from “mere” fortune-telling or psychic arts.

Because of the lack of awareness of the change in meaning of science, I think we are using science in too narrow a sense here, and so we are discounting or missing the ways in which the practice of astrology has real affinity with psychic arts like tarot reading.

Truth in advertising disclaimer here – I read tarot and Lenormand fortune-telling cards myself, and I can’t draw a hard and fast line between what I do with the cards and what I do with astrology.

In a larger sense, the practice of astrology can’t exist in a linguistic and philosophical vacuum, with no system of thought to support it. We need a way of thinking about astrology that makes sense of it, and that gives it a coherent philosophical underpinning. That is the purpose of this post, and is the main theme of the current series of posts I am writing.

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I now would say that I agree that astrology is indeed a science, but I am using the term in a way much closer to that of Thomas Taylor and the Platonist tradition, as pointing to the spiritual principles, order and structure that underlies and upholds our existence in space and time. Astrology as a science may indeed have a physical dimension, but more importantly it has a spiritual and philosophical underpinning.

I do not discount the work of astrologers like David Cochrane to give astrology some empirical and statistical justification, but I do not think we can limit astrology to that realm. Astrology is too big and multi-faceted to be contained within the bounds of the modern concept of science.

If we are to be effective astrologers, and to argue our case well, we need to think clearly, we need to be clear about the meaning of the words we use – and, when we are using words like science outside of the usual connotations of the term in common discourse, we need to be very clear and explicit about that.

We are not just recovering astrology, we are also recovering a richer worldview and context within which astrology makes sense – and also recovering a divine context for our minds and our reality.