I
commented previously on Steven Pinker’s essay in The New Republic: “Science
Is Not Your Enemy An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled
professors, and tenure-less historians”.
This essay rubbed a sore spot in contemporary intellectual culture. The New
Republic’s literary editor, Leon
Wieseltier, responded with a lengthy essay: “Crimes Against
Humanities Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don't let it happen”. Ultra-Darwinian philosopher Daniel
Dennett has responded in turn at The Edge website with “Let's Start With A
Respect For Truth”.
Wieseltier
does not reject science, to be sure, but he is clearly afraid of it.
The question of the place of science in knowledge, and in
society, and in life, is not a scientific question. Science confers no special
authority, it confers no authority at all, for the attempt to answer a
nonscientific question. It is not for science to say whether science belongs in
morality and politics and art. Those are philosophical matters, and science is
not philosophy, even if philosophy has since its beginnings been receptive to
science. Nor does science confer any license to extend its categories and its
methods beyond its own realms, whose contours are of course a matter of debate.
This is a manifesto with a long
pedigree. There are many claims to
intellectual (not to mention legal and political) authority: the philosophers,
the scientists, the churches, the courts, etc.
Let us assume that each has its place.
Who gets to decide who gets what place?
In Galileo’s time it was the Church.
In modern America, it is the Courts that get to decide whether evolution
or intelligent design will be taught in schools. Wieseltier
is arguing for a more limited authority.
Philosophy must decide what questions science can address.
Wieseltier
confers this authority on philosophy because he is worried about science “invading”
the realm of the humanities.
Science is a regular source of awe and betterment. No humanist
in his right mind would believe otherwise. No humanist in his right mind
would believe otherwise. Science is plainly owed this much support, this
much reverence. This much—but no more.
Dennett responds scathingly.
Pomposity can be amusing, but pomposity sitting like an
oversized hat on top of fear is hilarious. Wieseltier is afraid that the
humanities are being overrun by thinkers from outside, who dare to tackle their
precious problems—or "problematics" to use the, um, technical term
favored by many in the humanities. He is right to be afraid. It is true that
there is a crowd of often overconfident scientists impatiently addressing the
big questions with scant appreciation of the subtleties unearthed by
philosophers and others in the humanities, but the way to deal constructively
with this awkward influx is to join forces and educate them, not declare them
out of bounds.
That strikes me as
correct. There is clearly a tension here
between the humanities (along with political philosophy and ethics) and the
physical sciences. Just as some
ethicists worry that neuroscience threatens moral responsibility, Wieseltier worries that scientific analysis
of literature threatens the beauty of great writing. If that is true, building a wall between the
sciences and humanities is no viable solution.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
I
confess that I am largely free from the anxiety that eats away at Wieseltier. That is largely because I think that what he
calls the humanities and philosophy have the same root as all the
sciences. That root is the awareness of a difference between how things look, at
first glance, and how they really are.
The
world looks flat. Is it? No.
Philosophy begins with the recognition that our opinions (how it looks
to me or to us) are not reliable. It
seeks to replace opinions with knowledge by relentless questioning. Modern science is grounded in a refined
strategy of questioning. It seeks to phrase
each question in a way that its solution can be guaranteed by experiment. Since many important questions cannot be
phrased that way (what is a species?) modern science necessarily limits
itself.
Poetry
in all its forms begins with the same basic insight. What Romeo or Caesar or Oedipus think they
are doing is not the same when viewed by a third person. Poetry proceeds differently from philosophy
in so far as it looks rather than
questions. All forms of modern fiction
radiate out from classical poetry just as modern science radiates out from
classical philosophy. Short stories, for
example, dig into the difference between the view of each character and the
character viewed from outside, in context.
There
is indeed a tension between poetry and philosophy. If you don’t believe me, ask Plato. A tension is not, however, an opposition, let
alone an exclusion. A unified view of
the human things is not in the cards.
Looking and questioning will produce different results as applied to all
the human things. There is no point in
trying to hobble the one or the other.
We probably can’t get to the bottom of things. It were best to allow both sides to keep
digging.
