Mistanding at the limits of knowledge

At those reaches of knowledge which people find most liminal, there is almost guaranteed to be some opposition. Most of the opposition is passive aggressive – dismissed as boffins, philosophers live in a world detached from reality that could have no effect on anything in our day to day lives (tell that the Freud or Marx!).  Artists at the avante guard are considered equally wasteful of public funds, irrelevant, suspicious, and misguided or an outlet for the pretentious aspirations of the ‘elites’ to feel intellectually superior.  Science, like philosophy and art, is accepted where-ever it is ubiquitous but held under suspicion where-ever it is brought into clear focus.  Just ask a scientist whose work considers the consequences of anthropogenic climate change.   The term ‘rhetoric’ is now used exclusive in a pejorative sense outside of universities.  Often meaning either simply the words or set of words that a politician repeats, and always linked to politics, rhetoric is considered a close relative to a lie.  Then there is theology. Today, theology is rarely even considered a valid form of knowledge.  Only legacy universities teach it. 

There we have it, the five pillars of Renaissance education – art, science (& mathematics), philosophy, rhetoric and theology – still regarded with deep suspicion by the populace.  All have played extensive, and important, lead roles in the formation of Western language, culture, laws and institutions.  In short, those limits to how we behave – perhaps even what we are able to image – have been set by these five pillars – with language and its history of monotheistic expression at its base.  Remove any one of these fertile areas of study and our conscience, expression, infrastructure and society would be literally unrecognisable to us today (like the white colonialists who signed an Aboriginal man’s name as ‘little no-body’).

Yet none are considered particularly relevant or trustworthy by those without further education in them.   And it’s not only the lazy or uneducated who hold these reaches of knowledge under suspicion.  There is a famous division at universities between arts and science students: scientists believing arts students are lazy and unable to accept clean logic and objectivity.   Arts students complain that science students have no sound understanding of the ways in which politics, language or culture affect every aspect of understanding (including scientific understanding).

This divide is often a case of jumping to conclusions about what we don’t know based on what we already do.  Take Dawkin’s The God Delusion, in which he makes (quasi)scientific observations and then tries to apply them to theology, history, culture and politics.  The problem is that, while he knows a hell of a lot about evolutionary biology, honest inspection and reflection leads to a great deal of suspicion on his conclusions regarding the other topics mentioned.  He misreads the Bible, misrepresents what many people understand as a monotheistic God, misrepresents political movements and groups and misunderstands history.  I say these as plain matters of fact.  Considering a little more research might have cleared much of this up, many of his detractors argue that he doesn’t live up to his own standards of research.  Some find these misnomers evidence of deliberate misrepresentation.

Another researcher receiving a prestigious Australian scientific prize says that he hopes that one day, when energy is available freely and all provisions are met, science will replace ideology and the world will live in peace.  His inability to recognise this as ideology in and of itself almost masks his inability to recognise that science itself is inherently ideological. 

Yet sociologists and political scientists mistrust of hard numbers is a source of constant frustration to those working in the hard sciences. It has been contended that Thatcher recognised the threat of climate change before most of the politically progressive world because of her background in chemistry – she knows that ideology cannot change the facts.  What, after all, can a medical researcher do with Susan Sontag’s incredible analysis of aids as a metaphor? 

The point of all this?  I’m not sure.  But it is something I’m very interested in and there are some questions I’d like answered.   My methodology is going to be based on case studies where-ever possible. First, what are the merits of the subject/object dialectic?  Second, are art and science incompatible?   Third, is mathematics capable of being in itself, outside of language?  Fourth, have the ideological bases of the sciences shifted greatly from Empirical Reason and Logic, and all the terribly dangerous consequences of Enlightenment thought?  And finally, I will ask whether theology, arts, science, philosophy or rhetoric best express the disorder of things.

It’s something that over the coming period of time I’m hoping to do a bit of reading and writing on.  My first post on this, which is ‘coming soon,’ will be on the poetry of science.  It will ask why so many scientists and science philosophers complain about the lack of poets writing from a position of scientific understanding – and why do they all pick on WH Auden when complaining about it?  

In doing so, I will look at the letters of RP Feynman and some pre-God Delusion work by Richard Dawkins, as well as the poetry of Auden, Blake and Calvino.  

More to come.