Science...

Science, Secularity, and Deficiency Allama Jafari is very aware of the condition that modern man finds himself when he is surrounded in a de-mythologized, technocratic, sterile, and meaningless secular world.

Ever since Nietzsche had the courage to announce that which was already becoming obvious to those whose eyes could see, that the rationalization, bureaucratization, and secularization of the lifeworld had caused the “death of God”, that life was becoming increasingly meaningless outside of the individual's limited projection of relative meaning into his / her life, and that as Dostoevsky said, “if God is dead, all things are possible,” man has been faced with the realization that science and the capitalist market, those tools that were originally meant to liberate him from his irrationality and his oppressive chains to nature, had actually left in him an existential void.

If God is dead, as Nietzsche's madman exclaimed to the men of the market, then not only is everything permissible, it is permissible precisely because it is meaningless. This meaninglessness is the true specter that not only haunts Europe, but the secularized world as a whole.

The pervasive detachment and disenchantment with the world that secularity birthed into existence has not only become a problem for the everyday man in his lifeworld, but has become a driving undercurrent in the way we approach human existence through the social sciences. As society has devalued the sacred, Das Heilige , the metaphysical meaningfulness of life and existence, it left mankind with little left but a thick description of what is the case.

The Vienna school, better known as “positivism,” is a scientific method that is a symptom of this demystified, de- sacralized, and meaning deprived way of approaching the world. It is rooted in the instrumental rationality of efficiency, calculation, techno-reason, detachment, and mathematization of all sphere's of life – its erasure is meaning, spirit, eschatology, metaphysics, and all things unaccounted due to their non-physicality.

Allama Jafari reads this diminished existence as if it were a horror story written by a depraved author bent of updating Dante's religiously inspired inferno for a modern secular audience who no longer find themselves religiously literate.