Wisdom, Information and Wonder

What is Knowledge For?

Mary Midgley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134971916
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this book one of Britain's leading philosophers tackles a question at the root of our civilisation: What is knowledge for? Midgley rejects the fragmentary and specialized way in which information is conveyed in the high-tech world, and criticizes conceptions of philosophy that support this mode of thinking.

Part One Part One Can Specialization Damage Your Health?

Chapter One Moon-Monsters And Free People

DOI: 10.4324/9780203003879-1

It was indeed, said Er, a sight worth seeing, how the souls severally chose their lives.

(Plato, Republic, book 10, 620)

Minds In Jars

In H. G. Wells's novel The First Men in the Moon, the human explorer finds that the native lunar creatures vary greatly among themselves in shape, size, gifts, character, and appearance. Though they all belong to a single ant-like species, each one has been modified to fit its place in life exactly. In each, some single organ is enlarged at the expense of all the others:

‘Machine hands’ indeed some of them are in actual nature—it is no figure of speech, the single tentacle of the mooncalf-herd is profoundly modified for clawing, lifting, guiding, the rest of them no more than necessary subordinate appendages to these more important parts…. The making of these various sorts of operative must be a very curious and interesting process….Quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites confined in jars from which only the forelimbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection, while the rest of the body is starved….It is quite unreasonable, I know, but such glimpses of the educational methods of these beings affect me disagreeably.I hope,however that may pass off, and I may be able to see more of this aspect of their wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand-tentacle sticking out of its jar seemed to have a sort of limp appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although of course it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings and then making machines of them. (Emphasis mine)

The problem that Wells so sharply outlined in those last words is still with us. It is the subject of this book. All human advance needs specialization, yet this specialization conflicts with individuality. Both trends are necessary. In every growing civilization the various types of work, and the ways of life that go with them, grow ever more elaborate and diverge further and further from each other. Indeed, this constant forking is part of what we mean if we say that a civilization is growing at all, that it is not stagnant. But it forces the people involved to pursue increasingly different ideals. And there is one essential human ideal —the ideal of wholeness and balance of faculties —from which they are all constantly being driven further and further away.

Yet they are all originally whole people, and their range of personal needs does not necessarily narrow to fit this situation. The Selenite solution to this painful problem has appealed to many thinkers besides Wells and his explorer Cavor. It is the behaviourist one displayed in Brave New World. If only we could somehow phase out individuality —if people could be conditioned early enough in life to want nothing but what they get from their social role —then harmony would be easy. It could even be had without great spiritual sacrifice if each individual would only identify so completely with the whole as to share fully in the common experience. Each would then get all other fulfilments at second hand. Our inner lives would be actually wider and richer than they are at present —not narrower as they tend to be now for very specialized people.

The Corporate Dream

This ambitious project has tempted many large-scale theorists, from Plato to B. F. Skinner and beyond. But its unreality is clear enough when we attend to the actual difficulties of education. Children cannot really be brought up in jars. Individuality cannot be trained out of us like a bad habit. Either it persists as the mainspring of our energies or, if it is crushed, its collapse destroys the rest of our capacities. Human beings, in fact, are not blank paper at birth andcannot be conditioned to be social insects. The selfless communal consciousness which perhaps pervades a beehive is simply not an option for us.

It is true, of course, that the nearest thing to jar-imprisonment which is possible for humans does work up to a point. People who are brought up with only one option before them will usually pursue that option, and make the best of it. Thus a firmly imposed caste system, such as the Indian one, no doubt produces many reasonably contented potters, dancers, cultivators, and the rest. But its stability is only that of a widely accepted compromise, not of a true solution. Wasteful discontent and neurosis are still likely to prevail at all levels. Discord, both between individuals and within them, is still an everyday fact of life.

For us here and now, of course, this way of resolving the dilemma by conditioning is not usually supposed even to be thinkable. Novels depicting it, such as Brave New World, are mostly meant as warnings, not as models. But we need to think about this unthinkable project here, because it is bound to tempt us when we begin to look at the other horn of the dilemma. Wells was not just being perverse when he cast longing glances towards collectivity and the mystic unification of human life. Nor were Plato and Hegel and the other organic theorists who had done the same before him. They were all responding to the endless wasteful discord and confusion which actually reign in human affairs. The wish for harmony which guided them is a sane and valid human wish, flowing from quite as deep a level of our being as the need for individuality. Life among social mammals and birds always seems to be carried on in this dialectical way, in very incomplete harmony arising out of conflict, rather than by the more whole-hearted self-submergence of the social insects.

If, then, we cannot cure people of being individuals, can we start at the other end of the problem and avoid dividing our labour in the way that makes so much specialization necessary? Small and simple societies do indeed do this to some extent, but it is hard to see how larger ones could manage it. For any purpose beyond the barest human subsistence, we need work which splinters us into groups. The question is simply, how can we best guard against the dangers this brings?

The Fragmentation Of Knowledge

The best-known and most obviously sinister of these dangers is indeed the condition of the ‘machine hands’ -people who get stuck with arduous, boring, and undervalued work, work that nobody wants to do. But this danger does not stand alone. Others as pernicious are linked to it and block our efforts to deal with the whole tangle. In particular, there is a danger at the other end of the spectrum which needs attention. It lies in the condition of people whose work is officially very highly valued indeed. It is the effect of specialization on those who pursue knowledge.

To be alarmed at this effect is not to cast doubts on the value of pursuing knowledge for its own sake. Accepting that ideal entirely, we can still ask, ‘In what sense is a thing known if five hundred people each know one constituent of it and nobody knows the whole?’ Or again: what if this truth has a thousand constituents and half of them are not now known to anyone, but only stored in libraries? What if all of them exist only in libraries? Is it enough that somebody knows how to look them up if they should ever be needed? Indeed, is it enough that this person has access to a system which will look them up? Does the enquirer even have to understand the questions which these truths would answer? (Knowing what the questions are is a very important element in real knowledge.) What is needed if something is to count as being known at all?

This question has long been an important one, but recent developments in the sheer quantity of academic output have made it even more pressing. It is now claimed —and claimed by some as a triumph of progress —that human knowledge is doubling itself exponentially every seven years, a process held to have begun in the late 1960s.¹ The grounds given for this are that the number of scientific papers published in the world is increasing at this rate. Does anybody suppose that the reading-time available has increased so as to allow all this stuff to be read and digested? All academic departments are now bombarded with floods of incoming articles, only a tiny proportion of which could they possibly read, even if they did nothing else-whereas in fact they must find time to do their own work as well. The main effect of this flood of paper (apart from exhausting the world's forests) must therefore be to pile up articles which, once they are published, nobody reads at all.

Those who welcome this expansion say that this difficulty will be met by increasing the number of scientists so that the supply of readers will be large enough to keep up with the flood. But, even if this could be done, the trouble is not only that these scientists too, in their turn, will also write papers. It is the one just mentioned —that, if the knowledge provided is split up among too many recipients, it no longer constitutes knowledge at all. The strange policy atpresent favoured for our universities, of exalting research over teaching, simply means that this unusable store will be increased still faster, while the process of educating people to think about the knowledge they have will be starved and downgraded. Since the current plan also separates research institutions from teaching ones, it entails starving the researchers too of the essential stimulus that teaching so notoriously gives. Much the quickest way to find out that you do not understand something properly is to try to explain it to somebody else, and this has traditionally been the way in which difficult knowledge has been kept alive, working, and fertile —as much in the physical sciences as elsewhere.²

Living Or Dead?

Einstein was much concerned about this problem. He wrote, ‘Knowledge exists in two forms-lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.’³ Was Einstein right? If he was wrong, then we can stop worrying about this question and about many others as well. The libraries need then never be visited again except to fetch bits of useful information, as one goes to a shop to fetch butter, and all research not reasonably likely to be useful could be dropped. This conclusion is not a welcome one, but the other alternative is disturbing too. If Einstein was right, then our knowledge ought surely to be something alive in our consciousness. It should be working there, which means it must work as part of us. The memory-man at the fair cannot be our ideal model, however infallible his recall may be. Merely holding information as an inert piece of property, or handing it on like a dead fish to students, cannot be enough.

Academics are often aware of this problem. But they tend to speak of it resignedly as something quite insoluble. They often believe that the mere recent increase in the amount of knowledge inevitably involves its continual subdivision into smaller and smaller fractions distributed among more and more holders. ‘The days of the Renaissance polymath are past,’ they say; ‘greater riches now demand a less unified kind of safekeeping.’

If this gloomy conclusion were true, it would mean that we have moved into the condition of misers whose wealth has become so cumbrous that they must lock it away for safety and cannot actually use or enjoy it at all. (Perhaps indeed a miser maybe defined as someone who has no idea what to do with any given resource except to store it.) As we shall see, the right use of knowledge is simply not compatible with this indefinitely continued subdivision. It involves understanding, which means treating knowledge as a whole. Without that wider outlook, the whole ideal of knowledge as it has always been understood evaporates.

But of course the wider outlook has not become impossible. What it requires is not that every scholar should master all the details of all subjects. That feat would have been impossible already in Renaissance times. What is needed is that all should have in their minds a general background map of the whole range of knowledge as a context for their own speciality, and should integrate this wider vision with their practical and emotional attitude to life. They should be able to place their own small area on the map of the world, and to move outside it freely when they need to. This is not even necessarily a particularly time-consuming business. It is a matter of a different general attitude much more than of detailed indoctrination. At an academic level, things could be dramatically improved if the first and last sections of papers, where the reasons for raising the question and the consequences of answering it are discussed, got much more attention, and the quality of reasoning shown in them was given far more weight than the mere number of papers published -a number which, considered as a measure of merit, is of little more value than the number of the writer's hairs. More widely, however, much of the change could be achieved in childhood simply by attending to the questions which children spontaneously ask, and to a range of other wide questions which link these spontaneous questions together. Once this is done, it saves a great deal of time in detailed teaching. Details make much better sense when they have a context, and what makes sense is far easier to remember. For the point is not just that different specialities need to be related to each other. It is that they all need to be related to everyday thinking, and made responsible to it. They must even acknowledge their own emotional aspect —which is invariably present —and relate that to everyday feeling. All this is of course disturbing, since remoteness from everyday thought and feeling, or even actual contempt for them, is often one of the first things that higher education seems to teach people. The reasons why I think this apparently awkward suggestion has to be made, and the ways in which it can finally come to seem less outrageous, will I hope emerge in the course of this book.

Strange Journey, Strange Conclusion

Indefinitely increasing narrowness of specialization is not, in fact, an inevitable effect of increasing knowledge. It is largely a historical accident, helped on by various chance features of modern life, notably in the way universities are organized. It is a good deal more marked in North America than in Europe, and more so still in Britain. It has, unluckily, received a bizarre boost lately from the wide use of computer jargon, which (reasonably enough for its own purposes) treats knowledge simply as a pile of loose bits of information. The strange effect of trying to combine this notion with a traditional exaltation of knowledge can be seen in the euphoric conclusion to a recent book about the Anthropic Principle. The authors describe the grand climax of the whole cosmic process thus:

At the instant the Omega Point is reached, life will have gained control of all matter and all forces not only in a single universe, but in all universes whose existence is logically possible. Life will have spread into all spatial regions in all universes which could logically exist, and will have stored an infinite amount of information, including all bits of knowledge which it is logically possible to know. And this is the end.⁴

In case there is any doubt about the importance of this event, a footnote adds that ‘A modern-day theologian might wish to say that the totality of life at the Omega Point is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.’ By this storing of information, the universe has, in fact, become God.

This passage is evidently not meant to be a modest, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Can Specialization Damage Your Health?
• Part Two The Role Of Science
• Part Three The Role of Philosophy
• Suggestions for further reading
• Notes
• Index