The Dis-Unity of Knowledge and the Mis-Formation of the Modern Mind, Part 2

This is the second part of an essay in three parts. The first part dealt with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the current sad state of affairs in our universities and research labs. I would even write of the sad state of affairs in the minds of modern Western men, as individuals and as communal beings. This second part deals with an essay by Peter Augustine Lawler, Defending the Humanities, dealing with a commencement address given by Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic. The third part will deal with my personal take on this, largely an apologia of the last 25 frustrating and seemingly wasted years of my life, that is, an apologia of my efforts to provide a Christian worldview, which is a somewhat disparaged term I’m willing to take over and use for my understanding of created being and its relationship to the Creator. Modern-day humanists, literary men and philosophers and theologians and historians and others are devoted to passing on a tradition allied with the moral goodness, including freedom, of Western Civilization but they don’t seem to notice that the tradition is itself a phase of Western Civilization which reflects earlier understandings of the explorable, empirical realms of created being. We men of the West inhabit a great work become a collection of relics and we haven’t yet shown the courage and the faith to speak the deeper and richer truths we now see in created being, the thoughts God manifested as sufficient for the story He’s telling.

—————

The essay, Defending the Humanities, written by Peter Augustine Lawler starts:

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, gave by far the most thoughtful and combative commencement address this year, at Brandeis. He defended the humanities as our genuine counterculture. His defense of the humanities was intellectual?—a defense of philosophers, theologians, poets, novelists, artists, and so forth, as knowers. In short, he defends “the reason of the philosophers” against the merely “instrumental reason” of technologism.

As Lawler and Wieseltier freely admit, many scientists and engineers including many of the most prominent ones are not technologists in the sense of the above quoted paragraph. Einstein thought his way to concepts before even looking for the proper mathematical tools to use those concepts in physical theories; he was no manipulator. He was also a very serious musician said to be very competent on both violin and piano. Einstein isn’t so unusual in this regard. When I went to college, I was surprised at the number of physics professors who were serious musicians.

It’s hard to the point of near impossibility to be a truly civilized man in the 21st century for the simple reason that you can’t be truly civilized apart from a living civilization and there doesn’t seem to be any such entity, only rubble and artifacts and some functioning infrastructure from Western Civilization, including that built in non-Western regions in imitation of the West.

Nowadays, we barbarian children have managed to keep the machinery going better than might have been expected and this is a major reason for the seeming power of instrumentalists and technologists and scientistic thinkers. The children look at our medical systems in that sense, as ways of solving those problems which can be solved by way of CAT scans and chemotherapy. Since those are the problems for which they are offered solutions, the confused masses see those problems and try to forget about the problems which are still more important but for which we are promised no solutions or even a good formulation of our situation. Even the most naive of the Left or Right have learned that American Imperialists have no more to offer than Maoist Leapers or Soviet Planners when it comes to the basic issues of meaning and of the dropping morals and morale of the younger generations. The only answers, to questions we mostly didn’t ask, are provided by those medical buildings going up where once stood factories and decent inner-city housing for working class families. There are also the answers provided by wifi and cell-phones with more computing power than IBM big-iron machines of the 1960s, though most of us can’t imagine what the questions might be.

The serious arts, musical and literary and visual, are the domain of many who call themselves humanists and the common man is often pointed toward artistic confusion of meaning and attacks on what he was taught to value. I consider that confusion to be necessary in an age in which the future has been fading as fast as it was announced by one avant-garde or another, but I wouldn’t expect such an attitude on the part of a retired machinist looking at his never-employed 20 year-old grandson and longing for the days of John Wayne and Donna Reed and Joe DiMaggio. His other grandson, 25 with a freshly printed Ph.D. in history or literature or philosophy or mathematics, might well be as lost as his never-employed cousin.

To this point, art has been as useless as politics and religion and philosophy in the great task of re-establishing meaning in a world which seems less a world and more a collection of interacting but unrelated entities. I dealt with the failure of even a good thinker to see the need for a world and not just a mostly coherent collection of entities in an early blog essay, Henri Bergson: Almost Seeing a World, I claimed:

Bergson had many profound insights into reality… Oddly enough, while seeing much that lay outside of the playing field of pragmatists, such as William James, he also didn’t see even a universe let alone a world or the greater Creation of which this universe is only a phase.

Lawler tells us “for the philosophers, reason opens each of us to the truth about all things, including who we are, and there’s a lot we can comprehend that we can’t and would never want to control. Reason, for the philosophers, has a moral dimension?—it’s about knowing and doing good, and knowing and avoiding evil.” He’s right and I’m trying to do exactly this by first coming to understand Creation in its entirety, by way of a Christian understanding of our physical world seen as morally ordered, in my terms: seen as a world. More than that, I try to provide a framework for understanding our human being and the being of this world at the level of complex entities which participate in narratives but this framework also opens up this world as an entity shaped from various realms of being, the more concrete being shaped from the more abstract. My original motive wasn’t metaphysical—in fact, I was in an anti-metaphysical and highly empirical stage at the time I began to develop what I call a `worldview’, a disparaged term in Lawler’s circles—for good reasons; I was warned it was often used for scientistic and other wrongful understandings of reality.

My worldview rests upon an abstract realm of being, that which is the raw stuff of Creation, the manifestation of the fundamental truths God judged sufficient for the purposes of forming various realms of being, of shaping complex entities in this concrete realm, and of telling certain stories. All the truths we can know are found in that raw stuff in some sense, the truths of transfinite set theory and those of possible moral relationships between and among created beings of all types. My worldview is not your scientistic Grandfather’s worldview. While the scientistic worldview is “a comprehensive, one-dimensional explanatory scheme of all that exists,” my worldview is an open explanation of how our concrete universe came to be and then became the setting for morally purposeful stories being told by God, stories lived by various sorts of complex and simple entities including some moral creatures called human beings. And my worldview would crush all dualisms, not in the interest of any form of reductionism but rather in the interest of `created being’; I have written, only partly tongue-in-cheek, of matter being `frozen soul’.

Maybe some don’t think my worldview coheres or maybe they don’t like it for other reasons. Fine. In this essay, I’m merely advocating that philosophers, at least as communities, should now be in the business of making greater sense of what we’ve learned, even making sense at the level of all contingent being. No scientists, scientistic or humanistic, are stopping us from this great work. In an age such as our own, cheap and `simple’ ideas can drive good ideas out of the public squares and even out of the libraries, but good ideas win eventually. Good ideas can not only point us in the direction of meanings and truths but they are also interesting, good food for minds which would be strong. As Jacques Barzun told us at the end of From Dawn to Decadence, we pull ourselves up from barbarism when such minds discover the good ideas of the past; true civilizations come to life or back to life when those minds grow strong enough to produce good, new ideas. I’ve claimed in my writings that we can—at least in principle—shorten the barbarian period by courageously and consciously working toward those good, new ideas even as much of our civilization is still decaying.

If humanists wish to be seen as more than keepers of collections of books and artifacts, then they should set to work, or find students to educate who will be capable of one day setting to work at this great task. Men of faith and courage are needed to tell us how to make sense of the alleged wisdom found in all of that traditional knowledge as well as all of modern empirical knowledge. The world has been suddenly revealed by historical events as well as evolutionary biology to be richer and more complex than Aristotle or Augustine or Maimonides or Newton had ever anticipated. More commentaries on Edmund Burke’s political ideas and more efforts to recover the original versions of serious works of literature are worthwhile. It would be still better for new thinkers to propose fresh political concepts for understanding human communities far more complex than Burke could have imagined. We need new Melvilles rather than a new attempt to recreate Pierre before those frantic hours of drastic rewrite to meet the demands of the publisher. We need to produce thinkers and artists and doers worthy of study by future generations.

Lawler writes wisely when he tells us:

We can see neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and economics as both science and scientism today. Neuroscience becomes scientism when neuroscientists really believe and aggressively claim that what they know can displace theology, philosophy, poetry, and so forth. Evolutionary psychologists succumb to scientism when they believe and aggressively teach that there’s a readily comprehensible evolutionary or genetic explanation for all we say and do, and that human behavior can be explained pretty much the way the behavior of members of the other “eusocial” species can.

Still, there is too much negativity in those words. Rather than writing much about the scientistic attitudes of some neuroscientists and evolutionary psychologists, why have humanists not succeeded in producing an understanding of our world, not the world as it could have been plausibly understood in 1513 or 1713, let alone 13, but the world as it can be plausibly understood in 2013? We have those interesting but dangerous scans of brains as simple decisions are made; typically, the `doing’ regions of the brain are active and movement begins before the `thinking’ regions are active. What does this mean? Perhaps—as I’ve proposed in my writings, we do most of our moral thinking by forming habits for those future activities? Perhaps creatures such as ourselves, living in such a world as this, don’t typically have the time to ponder the screams of fear and pain coming from that burning building or the unexpected gunfire to the rear of our rifle company? Propose something different if you wish, but don’t merely complain the neuroscientists don’t respect human moral freedom for they truly have discovered some facts which don’t agree with most traditional moral philosophies.

Humanists have to be realistic and have to acknowledge the `specific sciences’ (as St. Thomas called them) currently have a dominant role in setting the agenda for modern thought. This shouldn’t be at all surprising or upsetting. It’s largely true that Augustine of Hippo began the long project of building Western Civilization when he discovered history in the modern sense. We entered the modern age on the shoulders of those thinkers who wrote philosophical books and novels obsessed with making sense of new political realities and barely imaginable political possibilities.

Literature and art and music and even philosophy aren’t much good at navel-gazing; they need stuff to work with. It’s not at all surprising or upsetting that our generation and a few to come might be downright obsessed with making sense of black-holes and multiple levels of infinity and genes. Are the concepts of broken symmetries less worthy of artistic attention than were the ways in which Henry V helped to forge a sense of England as a true nation?

I consider this dominance of science to be no more than an accident of history, using `accident’ somewhat in its philosophical sense. It seems true to me that, for various reasons, including the sheer fecundity of modern empirical knowledge-seeking enterprises, many of the interesting problems of the modern world, even those which are strongly `man-centered’ are stated in terms more `scientific’ than not. Someday, we’ll have poets who will use those terms to speak truths as beautiful as any found in the writings of Virgil or his apprentice Dante. The problem isn’t that we have instrumentalists denying truths or scientistic thinkers squeezing those truths out of those terms but rather that those poets haven’t yet arisen. Or maybe they have arisen and the humanists in the universities and publishing firms aren’t looking or aren’t capable of seeing something in front of them if it doesn’t fit into well-documented schools of thought.

During this modern age, we have gathered mountains of empirical data, some of which has been turned into information, a bit less into knowledge, little into wisdom. In a meaningful sense, we’ve processed our modern empirical knowledge into forms hinting of a new understanding of what we Christians would call Creation but we’ve destroyed the integrity of our inherited understandings, though certainly not all of the parts of those understandings. We have no blueprint for building a new civilization or reforming Western Civilization—choose your favorite and remember that historians will sort it out in 500 years or so. In any case, many stand around claiming that our old home doesn’t meet our current needs and is in bad shape. Others complain that we don’t pay proper respect to that home. I see no reason to believe that anyone other than me has proposed a way of moving forward to building a new home which will meet our current needs while including what is good in that old home, though perhaps on the shelves of the library or in the niches devoted to serious art or interesting artifacts.

And that brings me to Part 3 of this essay which I hope to publish soon on this website, Acts of Being.