This book is concerned with the human search for knowledge, and in particular with our attempts to structure knowledge, to form it into coherent systems. In this chapter I want to argue that these attempts are motivated by a desire to find unity in the seeming diversity of the world. That motivation is evident in the early Greek scientists, who thought there must be a single basic substance behind all the varying forms of matter: Thales believed it was water, Heraclitus said fire. As another example, Ptolemyâs model of the universe , with its concentric spheres moving around the earth, held sway in the West for well over a millennium, in part because it combined the wandering movements of the planets into a system that was both harmonious and unified.
In the modern era, what Einstein prized most about his theories of relativity was their unifying power: the Special Theory discarded the absolute time and space of Newtonian physics and combined them into a single matrix of âspacetimeâ , and the General Theory further correlated spacetime with mass. âIt is a magnificent feeling,â wrote Einstein, âto recognise the unity of a complex of phenomena which to direct observation appear to be quite separate things.â 1 Contemporary theoretical physicists devote their energy to discovering the relationship between the four forces which they recognise, viz. gravity, the electromagnetic force and the weak and strong nuclear forces. The last three have been combined with moderate success in the so-called Grand Unified Theories or GUTs; now physicists are aiming to include gravity too in a TOE or Theory of Everything , and they may well succeed before I have finished weaving together the argument of my book.
To claim that unity is the goal of knowledge does not mean that it can necessarily be attained. It may be that the universe is so rich and complex that we shall need to continue using different kinds of language for different kinds of reality. 2 Or it may be that Hegel was right: each synthesis becomes in its turn a thesis, which generates an antithesis because of what it leaves out, so that another new synthesis is then required. What is unmistakable is the urgency of our desire to find wholeness. Plato acknowledged it two-and-a-half millennia ago, when he spoke of the eros which draws us towards the unities behind phenomena: eros, the longing that can also manifest itself in our attraction to bodies that evince symmetry and beauty.
It is a striking fact, and one of obvious relevance to the theme of this book, that mathematicians and scientists working on the largest and most fundamental questions often speak about the aesthetic qualities of their equations and theories . They talk of their elegance, or beauty, or more specifically of the criterion of symmetry. The physicist Paul Dirac, for example, praises the great mathematical beauty of Einsteinâs general theory of relativity. 3 How are non-mathematicians to understand such claims? Perhaps the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1919, p. 60) gives us a clue, in his comparison of mathematics and poetry:
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty â a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Russellâs references to delight and almost transcendent exaltation suggest that theories such as Einsteinâs possess beauty because of their unifying power, their ability to draw together vast areas of knowledge; but also because they reflect and express in human language (symbolic or real) a harmony and unity in the external world. This double reference, both internal and external, is well conveyed in a much-quoted sentence of the mathematician, Ian Stewart (2007, p. 279): âThe true strength of mathematics lies precisely in this remarkable fusion of the human sense of pattern (âbeautyâ) with the physical world, which acts both as a reality check (âtruthâ) and as an inexhaustible source of inspiration.â
Our delight in the unifying power of knowledge, then, is in part a delight at the âfusionâ (to use Stewartâs word) between our knowledge and the outside world, a sense of rightness or harmonisation. In 1862, Darwin predicated the existence of a then unknown moth that acts as specialised pollinator for a particular orchid in Madagascar; the moth was discovered half a century later, in 1907, and its pollinating function was confirmed in 1992 (Ardetti et al. 2012). In the 1960s Peter Higgs predicated the existence of an elementary particle, the Higgs Boson; its existence was confirmed, again half a century later, in 2013, by scientists at the CERN laboratory near Geneva. The excitement attending such confirmations is based in part on a sense that our knowledge fits with the world around us. Miroslav Holub recounts a comparable sequence in which a prediction about vulcanism on Jupiterâs satellite Io was confirmed by pictures transmitted from Voyager I. Himself both scientist and poet, Holub compares the satisfaction obtained from such episodes with the satisfaction from a great poem (2001, pp. 59â60). In the next chapter I shall argue that poetry, like science, seeks a unity, an harmonious relationship, between the thinking self and the external world.
There is a touch of paradox about the notion that systematic knowledge aims at unity, since such knowledge involves polarities or binary oppositions (Some would claim, indeed, that human knowledge and language are entirely structured by such binary oppositions). The most fundamental opposition or dichotomy is that between the knower and the known. One of the earliest polarities to be formed in individual human development, and one that is crucial to the development of cognition, is that between Self and Other. Thereafter with our bilateral brains and bodies we continue to divide the world into polarities such as male/female, right/left, light/dark, mind/body, and to use these polarities of means of understanding. But this does not invalidate the goal of unity, for polarities can exist in a complementary fashion within unity, on the Yin/Yang principle. A good example is our binocular vision, based on separate images from the left and right eye, but usually producing a single image with greater clarity and depth than that of either eye alone. 4 Heraclitus thought that within his elemental fire the process of kindling was balanced by that of going-out, and he acknowledged the paradoxical coexistence of unity and polarity when he wrote that âGod is day/ night, winter/ summer, war/ peace, satiety/ famine.â 5
If unity really is the goal of knowledge, if its aim is integrative and holistic, then the specialisation of knowledge must be in some sense a distortion. I say âin some sense,â because specialisation can be a strategy through which knowledge of the whole advances. For example, highly specialised attempts to predict the future position and velocity of subatomic particles such as electrons led to Heisenbergâs famous Uncertainty Principle , with its implication of very general significance that the knower cannot be separated from the known, the observer from the observed, as in the old Cartesian epistemology. But just as in biological evolution, specialisation may have detrimental effects rather than beneficial ones. Much damage has been done by specialised thinkingâby thinking which failed to take account of the whole picture, or deliberately ignored itâin fields such as medicine, agriculture and engineering. The discipline of economics, in particular, is notorious for using its own criteria without regard to their possible effects on individuals, communities and the environment.
As part of this pattern of specialisation, our universities are increasingly split into separate disciplines, and then into sub-disciplines. âSpecialization spreads from year to year. We have Professors not only of Biochemistry but of Nucleic Acid Biochemistry, not only of Oncology but of Radiation Oncology, not only of Parasitology but of Molecular Parasitologyâ (Morgan 2006, p. 36). And once microbiologists are placed in a separate department from biologists, or historians from sociologists, institutional inertia ensures that they gradually stop speaking to each other. In fact they may become virtually incapable of speaking together, since a discipline tends to develop a specialised language which reinforces the tacit assumptions of the discipline about what is worth describing and what is significant. In this context of the specialisation of knowledge, the notion of a âpoetry of knowledgeâ has come to seem almost unthinkable. But if knowledge strives for unity, as this chapter argues, then the specialisation of knowledge must not be allowed to lead to its fragmentationâor rather it cannot lead to fragmentation without falsifying knowledge itself. In future chapters, I shall argue that poetry by its very nature tends to make connections, and is therefore on the side of unification rather than fragmentation.
Some Counter-Arguments
Is it really the case that the pursuit of knowledge springs from a desire to find unity in the world? Do we not sometimes search for knowledge simply for its utility? Of course we do. But I would argue that even the most utilitarian accumulation of knowledge tends to engender unifying principles, if only because such principles are useful in themselves. Take the encyclopedic compilation of data about plants by the physician Dioscorides (first century CE), one of the most influential works in the history of medicine and botany. Diosc...