The Future of Post-Human Chemistry

Book excerpt: Is chemistry really so valuable that, as Theodore L. Brown (2011) and his colleagues continue to claim in the twelfth edition of their work in 2011, chemistry is “the central science” in connecting the physical sciences with the life and applied sciences? (WK 2011 & 2011; C. Reinhardt 2001) This crowning of chemistry, however, can be contrasted with an opposing view, as Michael Polanyi once questioned the centrality of chemistry, when he wrote that “[n]o inanimate object is ever fully determined by the laws of . . . chemistry,” so other fields of study are just as important. (BQ 2011) Contrary to these conflicting views about chemistry (and other ones discussed in the book), chemistry, in relation to substances and their changes, is neither possible nor desirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. This challenge to the conflicting views about chemistry does not mean, however, that chemistry is useless, or that those fields of study related to chemistry like astronomy, physics, geology, mathematics, material science, biology, psychology, computer science, and so on should be ignored too. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Instead, this book provides an alternative, better way of understanding the future of chemistry —especially in the dialectic context of substances and their changes—while learning from different approaches in literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. This book offers a new theory (that is, the creational theory of chemistry) to go beyond the existing approaches to literature in an original way. If successful, this seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about chemistry, from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its “post-human” fate.