Quest for the Unity of Knowledge

David Lowenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138613157
• eBook ISBN: 9780429876424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design General

Is unity of knowledge possible? Is it desirable? Two rival visions clash. One seeks a single way of explaining everything known and knowable about ourselves and the universe. The other champions diverse modes of understanding served by disparate kinds of evidence. Contrary views pit science against the arts and humanities. Scientists generally laud and seek convergence. Artists and humanists deplore amalgamation as a threat to humane values.

These opposing perspectives flamed into hostility in the 1950s "Two Cultures" clash. They culminate today in new efforts to conjoin insights into physical nature and human culture, and new fears lest such syntheses submerge what the arts and humanities most value.

This book, stemming from David Lowenthal's inaugural Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, explores the Two Cultures quarrel's underlying ideologies. Lowenthal shows how ingrained bias toward unity or diversity shapes major issues in education, religion, genetics, race relations, heritage governance, and environmental policy.

Aimed at a general academic audience, Quest for the Unity of Knowledge especially targets those in conservation, ecology, history of ideas, museology, and heritage studies.

Chapter 1

Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage?¹

Is unity of knowledge desirable? Is it possible? “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing,” declared Blaise Pascal, against the faith in their ultimate synthesis held by many.² Dispute is legion. Contrary views especially pit science against the arts and humanities. Scientists tend to laud the prospect of unity and seek convergence. Many in the arts and humanities decry amalgamation as a threat to transcendent human values.

The conflict came to a head just a century ago. On 6 April 1922 at the Société française de philosophie in Paris the greatest philosopher of the time, Henri Bergson, encountered rising star Albert Einstein, then about to receive the Nobel Prize in physics (as did Bergson in literature in 1927). The occasion’s topic was Time, long Bergson’s concern, newly revolutionized in Einstein’s theory of relativity. In a 30-minute talk, Bergson lauded Einstein’s cosmic clock-time but deplored his neglect of time as lived, a durational metaphysics informed by history, experience, memory, and anticipation. Einstein retorted with a dismissive rebuff: “There is no philosophical time.” There was only the physicist’s objective time, set by the speed of light, and the psychologist’s instinctual folk time. This appalled Bergson, who saw the universe in constant change, fluctuating, contingent, and unpredictable. And Einstein’s reductive dualism ill became the scientist who, while obsessively seeking a unified explanation of the universe’s immutable laws, averred that he took the unity of nature as an act of faith.

Yet Bergson was widely felt to have lost the debate. Einstein’s temporal logic came to dominate discourse, relegating “intuitive” artistic and literary approaches to secondary, subsidiary import. No longer able to fathom science’s increasing complexity, most humanists stopped trying. “In the face of the rising influence of science,” concludes historian of science Jimena Canales, Einstein’s “time of the universe” and Bergson’s “time of our lives” traversed “dangerously conflicting paths … , pitting scientists against humanists, expert knowledge against lay wisdom.” Rivalry between “science and the rest”—philosophy, metaphysics, humanities, and the arts—has embroiled scholars and statesmen and the general public ever since.³

In the mid-20th century that divergence erupted in the Two Cultures debate, a notorious Cambridge dispute between physicist C. P. Snow and literary scholar F. R. Leavis. Their quarrel revealed and inflamed deep-seated animus in and beyond academe. Stereotypes polarized the aloof mechanistic scientist against the free-spirited compassionate artist. Discordant aims, methods, parlance, and moral stances poisoned their exchanges. Enduring strife fueled mutual mistrust and ill-will: each assailed the other as ignorant, regressive, narrow-minded, rigid.

This chapter traces the conflict’s history in Western culture. Medieval Christian unity based on sacramental certitudes gave way to dualism unleashed by the Reformation. Early-modern empirical science and Enlightenment progress reanimated faith in universal goals, now to be won by observation and experiment rather than theological inquiry. But the cult of romantic individualism, together with the growing specialization of knowledge, hardened the breach between science and art. Previously marginalized in academe, physical science by the mid-20th century supplanted the humanities in public esteem, becoming the model to which the arts and social sciences aspired. When public faith in science later frayed, the arts and humanities rebutted science’s claims to objectivity. Widespread skepticism led humanists to reject empirical evidence of truth and to disparage the quest for unifying knowledge as a scientistic chimera. The new millennium brought efforts to repair the breach, fueled by converging concerns among poets, painters, and physicists.

The Snow/Leavis confrontation, 1956–1962

Sixty years ago physicist-novelist C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution famously deplored the science–humanities divide. The long-standing gulf between the two cultures was deepening; riven by mutual “incomprehension and dislike” they had “almost ceased to communicate at all.” Scientists felt outcast aliens in British academe. Despite its vital wartime role, science was marginalized in the Oxbridge that supplied most government and industry leaders. To be sure, science was robustly pursued at those universities. But it was an unknown realm to most students there. In elite schools science took a back seat or was totally ignored. The cream of Britain’s youth was ignorant of elementary physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, mathematics beyond the multiplication table. Snow was often asked “what do you mean by mass, or acceleration—the scientific equivalent of saying, can you read?” In short, most of “the cleverest people in the western world” had no more insight into modern physics than their Neolithic ancestors. Snow thought the divide worse than before the First World War, when prime ministers Salisbury, Gladstone, and Balfour took serious interest in science. Trendy linguistic trivia now heightened Luddite arrogance. Literary “intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution,” charged Snow. Their animus against science and technology stymied urgent social needs. The “moral component” engrained in science he thought absent from literary culture.⁴

Snow triggered a withering rejoinder from F. R. Leavis, doyen of literary criticism. Leavis derided Snow’s “complete ignorance of … the history of civilization.” Leavis saw no moral resource in science. Science tells us how to do things, not why we should do them. Its province was means not ends. The sway of science and technology left the precious arts and humanities precariously beleaguered; Leavis feared the demise of high culture in a science-centered world.⁵

Reactions were sharply skewed, but most agreed the divide was disastrous. Far from demolishing Snow’s argument, Leavis’s ad hominem polemic confirmed its “truth and timeliness,” wrote crystallographer J. D. Bernal. There was “almost no contact between science and philosophy” in 1950s academe, “still less between science” and the arts. “We all live in our watertight compartments.”⁶ W. H. Auden’s wartime education segregated “the tough who measure from the tender who value.” Novelist Antonia Byatt’s 1950s schooling “predestined all thirteen-year-olds to be illiterate or innumerate (if not both),” with the bias “that to be literary is to be quick, perceptive and subtle. Whereas scientists were dull, and also—in the nuclear age—quite possibly dangerous and destructive.”⁷

Oxbridge scientists dismissed arts confreres as frivolous lightweights. To attract a literary girl, Ian McEwan’s 1960s science student steeps himself in Milton, and suspects “a monstrous bluff.” For he found “nothing on the scale of difficulty he encountered daily” in his science course.

He and his lot were at lectures and lab work nine till five every day, attempting to grasp some of the hardest things ever thought. The arts people fell out of bed at midday for their two tutorials a week … There was nothing that they talked about … that anyone with half a brain could fail to understand. He had read four of the best essays on Milton. He knew. And yet they passed themselves off as his superiors, these lie-abeds.⁸

American academe was scarcely less partitioned. Harvard historian of science George Sarton had launched the journal Isis in 1912 to bridge the humanist-scientist gulf. Considering the two-cultures rupture “the most ominous conflict of our time,” he later forecast that “the intolerance of both” would worsen it. Litterateur Lionel Trilling faulted their extreme isolation. Earlier humanists had found science and mathematics “almost as readily accessible to understanding and interest as literature and history.” But by 1971 science was alien to most. “Its concepts do not engage emotion or challenge imagination. Our poets are indifferent to them.”⁹ Nobel physicist I. I. Rabi found science “no longer communicable” to the educated majority. Naturalist Loren Eiseley saw a toxic brew of “fear, professionalism, and misunderstanding” disjoining art from science.¹⁰

Some demurred: Britain’s government science minister dismissed the two cultures “legend” as academic politics, and American biologist Stephen Jay Gould as snooty Oxbridge twaddle.¹¹ But most admitted the gulf and traced it to a cultural elitism that equated science with ‘stinks’ at, say, lowbrow Sheffield University. Conversely, among American scientists the poet Auden felt “like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing-room full of dukes.”¹²

Yet American statesmen no less than British were “ignorant of if not definitely hostile to [scientific] intellect and reason,” charged Rabi. “Our intellectual leaders today know … only two things about the basic conceptions of modern science: that they do not understand them, and that they are now so far separated from them” that they may never find out what they mean, judged science historian Gerald Holton. And the separation was “steadily increasing.”¹³

Scientific disdain festered among American literati proudly confessing ignorance of the structure of the universe or one’s own body, the behavior of matter or of one’s own mind. The irrelevance to them of empirical science made “cleavage between the two cultures … inevitable,” thought philosopher Jürgen Habermas in 1970. It has scarcely lessened since. A Nobel laureate biologist who tells London partygoers he is a scientist instantly detects “panic and disengagement,” and changes the subject to literature or music.¹⁴

Snow’s Two Cultures still rouses rancor. “It might seem extraordinary that a debate initiated nearly sixty years ago can still provoke strong views.” But, writes science historian Frank James, such longevity shows that underlying issues “about the place of science in culture and society … have not gone away.” With scientific illiteracy “as prevalent as ever,” held Britain’s minister for business and skills in 2009, Snow’s key themes “still resonate. We are still trying to bridge the gap.”¹⁵

A Huxley−Arnold precursor, 1880–1882

The Snow–Leavis conflict had a famed Cambridge antecedent. Eighty years earlier, biologist T. H. Huxley and poet-essayist Matthew Arnold had taken up the same gauntlet, revealing an epistemic gulf almost as profound. Absent, though, was the animus; Huxley and Arnold were like-minded friends. Huxley’s 1880 lecture lamented the disjunction of science from literature and the current fashionable disdain of science. “Advocates of scientific education [are] pooh-poohed by the men of business [and] excommunicated by the classical scholars” convinced that physical science “touches none of the higher problems of life.” Only a grounding in Greek and Roman antiquity would do. Hence “scholarly and pious persons” remained ignorant of “the first principles of scientific thinking [and] of established scientific truths.”

Huxley claimed more for science than Snow would do. Like many late Victorians, he fancied human affairs like physical matters governed by universal laws of nature. Scientific methods would yield definite social knowledge. Anarchy and despotism would be overcome when men “deal with political, as they now deal with scientific questions,” in conformity with nature’s strict order. “The chief business of mankind is to learn that order and govern themselves accordingly.”

For academics’ persisting dismissal of science Huxley blamed unworldly medieval Catholicism. As seen by 12th-century university founders,

Scriptures, as interpreted and supplemented by the [Papacy], contain[ed] a complete and infallibly true body of information. Theological dicta were [as fixed as] the axioms and definitions of Euclid. … All material existence was but a base and insignificant blot upon the fair face of the spiritual world.

“The only thing really worth knowing in this world was how to secure” the promised place in a better hereafter. “The study of nature, the playground of the devil,” had no bearing on this divine purpose of human life. And despite the subsequent expansion of knowledge about nature, academic clerisy seven centuries later still viewed the material world with contempt, the ancient classics as “the sole avenue to culture.”¹⁶

In rebuttal, Matthew Arnold concurred that science mattered but disputed Huxley’s contention that litterateurs ignored it. Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s Principia, Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin were integral to scholarship; true humanism...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: Environmental Humanities, the Stockholm Archipelago Lectures, and David Lowenthal
• Abbreviations in endnotes
• Introduction
• 1 Unifying knowledge—miracle or mirage?
• 2 Man and nature
• 3 Island polymaths
• 4 Purity and mixture
• 5 Heritage universal and divisive
• 6 Past into present
• Conclusion
• Index