The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

  As with all caricatures based on simplistic historical models of accreting “betterness” (whether by smoothly accumulating improvement or by discontinuous leaps of progress), and on false dichotomies of a bad “before” replaced by a good “after,” this description of the Scientific Revolution cannot survive a careful scrutiny of any major aspect of the standard story. To cite just two objections with pedigrees virtually as long as the conventional formulation itself: First, the break between the supposedly benighted Aristotelianism of medieval and Renaissance scholarship, and the experimental and mechanical reforms of the Scientific Revolution, can be recast as far more continuous, with many key insights and discoveries achieved long before the seventeenth century, and abundantly transmitted across the supposed divide. In an early rebuttal that became almost as well known as the basic case for a discontinuous revolution, the French scholar Pierre Duhem, in the opening years of the twentieth century, published three volumes on Leonardo and his precursors. Here Duhem argued that several cornerstones of the Scientific Revolution had been formulated by Aristotelian scholars in fourteenth-century Paris, and had also become sufficiently familiar and accessible that even the formally ill-educated Leonardo, albeit the most brilliant raw intellect of his (or any other) age, sought out and utilized this work, often struggling with Latin texts that he could only read in a halting fashion, as the foundation for his own views of nature. (Duhem developed his thesis under a complex parti pris of personal belief, including strong nationalistic and Catholic elements, but his predisposing biases, although markedly different from the a priori commitments of historians who built the conventional view, cannot be labeled as stronger or more distorting.)

  Second, and in an objection close to the heart of my own persona and chosen profession, the conventional view does seem more than a tad parochial in its nearly exclusive focus on the physical sciences, and upon the kinds of relatively simple problems solvable by controlled experiment and subject to reliable mathematical formulation. What can we say about the sciences of natural history, which underwent equally extensive and strikingly similar changes in the seventeenth century, but largely without the explicit benefit of such experimental and mathematical reconstitution? Did students of living (and geological) nature merely act as camp followers, passively catching the reflected beams of victorious physics and astronomy? Or did the Scientific Revolution encompass bigger, and perhaps more elusive, themes only partially and imperfectly rendered by the admitted triumphs of new discovery and discombobulations of old beliefs so evident in seventeenth-century physics and astronomy? (Because these questions intrigue me, and because my own expertise lies in this area, I shall choose my examples almost entirely from this neglected study of the impact of the Scientific Revolution upon natural history.)

  I derived much of the framework, and many of the quotations, for this opening section from the long and excellent treatise of H. Floris Cohen (The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry, University of Chicago Press, 1994), a work not so much about the content of the Scientific Revolution as about the construction of the concept by historians. Cohen locates much of the difficulty in defining this episode, or any other major “event” in the history of ideas for that matter, in the complex and elusive nature of change itself. We encounter enough trouble in trying to define and characterize the transformation of clear material entities—the evolution of the human lineage, for example. How shall we treat major changes in our approach to the very nature of knowledge and causality? Cohen writes: “To strike the proper balance between a perception of historical events as relatively continuous or relatively discontinuous has been the historian’s task ever since the craft attained maturity in the course of the nineteenth century.” The Scientific Revolution becomes so elusive in the enormity of its undeniable impact that Steven Shapin, something of an enfant terrible among conventional academicians, opened his iconoclastic, but much respected, study (The Scientific Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 1996), with a zinger rich in wisdom within an apparent self-contradiction: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”

  We may epitomize the fundamental nature of an episode so fecund in scope and effect, albeit so difficult to characterize, by citing any preferred motto or metaphor in the tradition of “crossing the Rubicon” or “opening Pandora’s box.” Something tumultuous, permanent, and revolutionary, both for the history of society and the history of ideas, occurred during the course of the seventeenth century. And we may epitomize this extended “event” as the birth pangs and adequate initial development of what we call “modern science,” with all its practical consequences for technology, and its intellectual implications for our definition and understanding of “reality” itself. Something happened. Something very big indeed, yet something that we have still not integrated fully and comfortably into the broader fabric of our lives, including the dimensions—humanistic, aesthetic, ethical, and theological—that science cannot resolve, but that science has also (and without contradiction) intimately contacted in every corner of its discourse and being.

  Thus, if we wish to understand the continuously troubled relationships between science and these other magisteria of our full being—in this case, and for this book, the interactions between science and the humanities—we would do well to begin at the beginning of modern science, by trying to understand how the seventeenth-century initiators of the Scientific Revolution understood their task, their challenges, their enemies, and their accomplishments. (I discussed the other great pseudo-conflict, the supposed struggle between science and religion, in a previous book, Rocks of Ages, Ballantine, 1999.) How, in particular, did these creators of modern science construe the traditional disciplines of humanistic study? How, in even more particular (and to foreshadow a primary theme of this book), did the perception of certain humanistic modes of study as impediments to be swept aside, rather than as allies to be cultivated, set an unfortunate, if understandable (and probably unavoidable), initial context for interaction? Why does this notion of inherent conflict continue to flourish, literally centuries after the growth and success of science destroyed any conceivable rationale for such pugnacity and philistinism? Perhaps a new kid on the block must be scrappy, vigilant, and predisposed to a taxonomy of us against them. But a prosperous and victorious adult should welcome both the moral and the practical obligations of generosity.

  My motivation to write this book stems largely from a personal sense of puzzlement. From earliest memories (once I passed through the policeman and fireman stages of universal boyhood, and once I bowed to reality and admitted that I would never occupy center field in Yankee Stadium as a professional address), I wanted to become a scientist “when I grow up”—in particular, once I learned the technical term for folks who study fossils full time, a paleontologist. I could cultivate no immediate family member as mentor or role model, for my closest relatives possessed smarts in abundance, but had not enjoyed access to higher education and professional life. I always loved, for reasons of personal pleasure rather than any “ought” of class or culture, several areas of what traditional taxonomy calls the arts and humanities—from the largely passive delights of reading; to more ambulatory pleasures of a taste for architecture (beats the hell out of birdwatching, if you ask me, for those of a taxonomic bent, as buildings stay put and don’t need to be seen at 6:00 A.M. or some other odd time better spent elsewhere); to serious and active participation, still continuing, in choral singing.

  I never sensed any conflict among these passions; after all, I seemed reasonably well integrated, at least in my own head and being (my hedgehog side). Indeed, in the naively narcissistic way of childhood, I imagined myself as a perfectly reasonable common denominator of all these activities (my foxy interests). Moreover, lacking direct or familial experience, I didn’t even know that science was supposed to conflict with, or even be substantially different from, the arts and humanities.

  I did learn the conventional t
axonomies later, but they never made any sense to me. I do acknowledge, of course, the historical reasons for conflict—and much of this book, including these opening sections, explores this currently illegitimate basis for suspicion and separation. I also understand that basic pursuits of the sciences and humanities often differ intrinsically and logically, so much so that the techniques of one domain frequently cannot, in principle, answer the questions of the other. In the most obvious example, science tries to ascertain the factual structure of the natural world, whereas criteria for judgment in the arts invoke aesthetic concerns that do not translate into the scientist’s language of “true” and “false”—and truth just isn’t beauty, however much we may value both, and whatever Mr. Keats found on his Grecian urn. Similarly, and even more broadly—thus providing an even riper bone for false contention when either side misperceives its limits and claims dominion in the other side’s magisterium—no factual conclusion of science (a statement about the “is” of nature) can logically determine an ethical truth (a statement about the “ought” of our duties).

  Still, all these obvious and well-rehearsed distinctions aside, I have long felt that the similar goals and mental styles overwhelm the legitimate differences in materials for study and modes of validation. The commonalities of creative thinking, and the psychology of mental drive and excitement, seem to transcend the logical differences of subject or approach. (I would not try to distinguish the emotions of exaltation felt in singing a particularly moving passage in Bach’s Passion settings from the excitement of solving a tough little puzzle in the systematics of Cerion [the land snail of my personal research], and saying to myself, “Oh, so that’s how it goes!” Late in his life, a celebrated senior colleague stated to me, during a chance encounter on the New York subway of all places, that he continued to love and practice research with all his heart because its pleasures could only be likened to “continual orgasm.”)

  Moreover, however logically sound and however sanctioned by long historical persistence, our taxonomies of human disciplines arose for largely arbitrary and contingent reasons of past social norms and university practices, thus creating false barriers that impede current understanding. I do not say this to make the obvious point that such boundaries and specializations foster a natural human tendency to jargon and parochialism, but for the much more cogent and useful reason that the conceptual tools needed to solve key problems in one field often migrate beyond our grasp because they become the property of a distant domain, effectively inaccessible to those in need. For example, I feel that I made some breakthroughs in my own field of paleontology only when, remembering the fox’s strategy, I explicitly realized that the necessary apparatus for understanding much of life’s evolutionary pattern lay in the methodologies established by historians in departments of our humanities faculties, and not in the standard experimental and quantitative procedures so well suited for simple, timeless, and repeatable events in conventional science.

  Although the supposed conflict of science and religion has received more press, and has also induced far more actual mayhem over the centuries, the interactions of science with the arts and humanities have been explicitly contested for just as long, and with just as much feeling. In fact—thus my rationale for opening this book at a conventional beginning, that is, at the “official” inception of modern science in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century—this perceived conflict received a canonical formulation right at the starting gate, and has experienced several reincarnations ever since, with different names awarded to the same players, who make the same basic moves (including invention of the same strawman caricatures of the other side), in each “new” episode.

  The original version swept through late-seventeenth-century intellectual life as the debate between Ancients and Moderns (with Aristotle and the Renaissance pitted against Bacon and Descartes, as so amusingly depicted by Jonathan Swift, who sided with the Ancients against upstart science, in his deliciously satirical “Battle of the Books”—as discussed in chapter 7). My generation learned the argument primarily through C. P. Snow’s widely cited, but rarely read, disquisition on the “two cultures.” (Snow, a scientist by training and a novelist and university administrator by later practice, delivered his famous talk on “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University in May 1959. He spoke of the growing gap between literary intellectuals and professional scientists, noting for example how “one found Greenwich Village talking precisely the same language as Chelsea, and both having about as much communication with M.I.T. as though the scientists spoke nothing but Tibetan.”)

  In the years around our millennial transition, scholars resurrected the same debate as the “science wars” between “realists” (including nearly all working scientists), who uphold the objectivity and progressive nature of scientific knowledge, and “relativists” (nearly all housed in faculties of the humanities and social sciences within our universities), who recognize the culturally embedded status of all claims for universal factuality and who regard science as just one system of belief among many alternatives, all worthy of equal weight because the very concept of “scientific truth” can only represent a social construction invented by scientists, whether consciously or not, as a device to justify their “hegemony” (the supposed code word of postmodern cultists) over the study of nature.

  This book takes an idiosyncratic, but basically historical, approach to the supposed conflict between science and the humanities by admitting the appropriateness, even the inevitability, of struggle at the birth pangs of modern science, but then arguing that we got stuck, centuries ago, in this superannuated assumption of inherent struggle, when no legitimate rationale—logical, historical, or practical—supports its continuation. Rather, in our increasingly complex and confusing world, we need all the help we can get from each distinct domain of our emotional and intellectual being (the fox’s diversity again). Quilting a diverse collection of separate patches into a beautiful and integrated coat of many colors, a garment called wisdom (even better than the hedgehog’s prickly cover), sure beats defeating or engulfing as a metaphor for appropriate interaction. My argument proceeds in four statements:1. Initial conflict between science and the humanities (“the rite and rights of a separating spring” in the title to this first part) inevitably attended the birth of modern science in the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. Big and established boys never cede turf voluntarily, and newcomers must be prepared for a scrappy fight, if only as a ritual of initiation.

  2. I shall document, with idiosyncratic examples in the three following chapters, this inevitable and initial estrangement between science and the humanities by asking what the architects of the Scientific Revolution thought they needed to overcome (chapter 2 on a specific example of conflict with humanistic and religious traditions; chapter 3 on issues with the humanities; chapter 4 on the tensions with religious power and orthodoxy). Then, in Part II, I shall show how these founding scientists failed to complete their own mission, in part because they could not do so without some central insights from the humanities.

  3. This conflict, initially understandable, became both silly and harmful long ago. Science triumphed in those broad areas rightly belonging to its techniques and expertise. On the other hand, science has no business contending for intellectual turf outside the limits of its stunningly successful methods. Thus the time for peace arrived long ago—and peace would bring such blessings and benefits to both perceived sides, as each has so much to learn from the successes of the other (as I document by particular examples in chapter 8). Of the famous list of contrasts in the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, we have reached the latter stage in each case: a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time of war, and a time of peace.

  4. Although such pronouncements may be deemed unfashionable in an age that exalts pluralism and rejec
ts definite solutions, I argue in chapter 9 that we can identify a right and a wrong way to achieve a proper healing of our age-old conflict between science and the humanities. This proper path stresses respect for preciously different insights, inherent to the various crafts, and rejects the language (and practice) of hierarchical worth and subsumption. Consilience, in the definition of the word’s inventor, arises from a patchwork of independent affirmations, not by subsumption under an imposed ensign of false union.

  2

  Scientific “World-Making” and Critical Braking

  PERHAPS THERE SHALL NOT ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND, BUT THIS ISLAND nation does flaunt some impressive examples of stability—an attribute greatly fostered by the arresting fact that no full-scale invasion by foreign forces has overrun the country since 1066. The Oxbridge universities provide several striking examples, including New College, Oxford, named for its inception in 1379 as an upstart among older segments of the university. Similarly, several named chairs have continued for centuries. Stephen Hawking, for example, now serves as Lucasian professor of mathematics, the same chair and title held by Isaac Newton. Cambridge also continues to maintain the prestigious Woodwardian professorship of geology, the first chair in this subject ever established at an English university. Moreover, this title represents more than a merely abstract name, backed by ancient investments still yielding sufficient current interest—for the university’s geological museum began its collection with two beautiful cabinets, still intact and proudly on display, built for John Woodward to house his collection of rocks and fossils. The collection also survives therein, essentially complete, and still under the care of the Woodwardian professor.