MACROSCOPE
Science and the Theft of Humanity
In science's renewed interest in the human condition, a humanist sees the promise of a dialogue and a new golden age
Geoffrey Harpham
Once upon a time, thinkers simply thought. They pondered deep
questions using all the resources at their disposal, and expressed
astonishing insights in language at once precise and poetic,
descriptive and evocative. Human life was illuminated by being
compared to a chariot pulled by two horses of different
temperaments, a flowing stream or the task of pushing a stone up a
hill. Thought was not compartmentalized, and the same
person—Aristotle, for example—could think productively
in what would today be considered several distinct modes, including
philosophy, political science, ethics and biology.
This spirit of consilience prevailed until quite recent times. Isaac
Newton and Francis Bacon were considered by their contemporaries to
be ornaments of English "literature," and many whom we now
call scientists were called "natural philosophers" in
their day. The term "scientist" was only invented in the
19th century as a kind of counterpart to the term
"artist"; according to the Oxford English
Dictionary, the earliest use of the term was 1840, when William
Whewell proposed it as a way of describing "a cultivator of
science in general." Anthologies of English literature often
include the work of Charles Darwin; he was, in the view of many, as
great an artist as he was a scientist, a man driven to explain in
rational terms things he first apprehended in a state of wonder,
delight, and a well-nigh poetic enchantment. And Sigmund Freud, who
considered himself a "biologist of the mind," wrote in a
way that deployed imagination, rhetoric and narrative without
feeling he was compromising his scientific mission.
During the years Freud was doing his clinical work in Vienna and
Paris, however, knowledge was being organized by a new kind of
institution that had little tolerance for evocative richness.
Inspired by the example of the University of Berlin, other
institutions of learning were beginning to detach themselves from
theology and classics and devote themselves to research. In the
United States, the Johns Hopkins University and the University of
Chicago were among the first to commit themselves to the research
paradigm and thus to the establishment of graduate schools as an
integral, even central part of the institution. In institutions with
robust graduate schools, notions of training, research and
professionalism entered the scene of education, and academic
departments became like silos, each with its own mission, its own
methodology, its own credentialing process.
Most significantly, each department or discipline laid claim to its
own set of questions, and encroachment was regarded as something
worse than poor manners. Thus, for example, professors of psychology
agreed not to pronounce on philosophical matters, and indeed, the
new discipline of psychology ascended to the status of being a
modern branch of knowledge only on the condition that it silently
relinquished Freud, whose many interests appeared, in the new
context, the mark of a disorderly mind. The only reminder in the
modern university of the golden age before disciplinarity was in the
very credential that certified disciplinary expertise: the degree
called Doctor of Philosophy.
In the Academy's Workrooms
In the modern university, all disciplines strive to distinguish
themselves from all others. In doing so, they repeat at a lower
level a primary distinction between the humanities and the sciences,
with the former taking human beings and their thoughts, imaginings,
capacities and works as its subject and the latter taking on the
nonhuman world, of which the human can be seen as a mere epiphenomenon.
Within the humanities, each subfield claims its own territory.
Philosophy, for example, examines the conditions of human life and
thought, focusing in particular on the question of free will and
choice that informs both ethics and aesthetics. Its mode can be
described, very broadly, as analysis. History focuses its efforts on
the archive of specifically human endeavor and achievement, and this
focus provides not only a subject, but also a certain scale and
style of analysis. As a discipline, history is primarily predisposed
not to analysis but to chronology or narrative, which is capable of
representing events in a causal series.
Criticism of the arts defines itself more by its
object—paintings, musical scores or performances, buildings,
films or literary texts—than by its methodology, which can
incline either toward philosophy in the form of analysis, or toward
history, the production or reception of the artifact. Sometimes
multiple approaches are comprehended in the same critical work. As
its subject is creativity, criticism of the arts must itself be
creative in determining its own orientation, its own projects, its
own methodology.
The demarcation of fields makes it possible not only to achieve
precise sectoral knowledge, but also to mark the progress of
knowledge as limited sets of problems are solved, one after another.
Compartmentalization also, however, creates a host of unintended
consequences, and some of these have proved to be just as productive
as the intended ones. By limiting the kinds of questions that can be
posed, departmental thought intentionally screens out certain
features of reality, and while this partial blindness can be counted
as a necessary condition of modern knowledge, it creates the
conditions for an interdisciplinary reaction that blends two or more
approaches to achieve results unobtainable by either: hence
biochemistry, sociobiology, genetic engineering, architectural
ethics and countless other innovations that are virtually invited by
the limitations of disciplinarity.
Poachers on Unguarded Turf
But the most exciting and unpredictable unintended consequence of
disciplinarity is the opportunity it creates for poaching, which
happens when one discipline opts out of the gentleman's agreement
allotting certain questions to certain disciplines and starts
answering questions it is not even supposed to ask. This is
happening today. Certain disciplines of science—having endured
the skeptical and even debunking attention of philosophy, history,
gender studies, cultural studies and literary studies, not to
mention "science studies"—have for some time been
engaging in a quiet counteroffensive by making a series of little
raids, each one limited in its scope and aspirations but potentially
immense in the aggregate, on the one question above all that has
been ruled off limits for them—the question of the human.
This question is so large that it has not been approached directly
even in the humanities disciplines, which have presumed rather than
interrogated it. Each of the fundamental categories of humanistic
research—history, philosophy and criticism of the
arts—investigates a basic or elemental feature of human being.
Philosophy is particularly interested in the limits of human
autonomy, of the capacity for self-determination, self-awareness and
self-regulation that is central to our conceptions of free will,
reason, the capacity for self-regulation and moral accountability.
These issues anchor one of the traditional cores of philosophy,
ethics, and also inform the more recent emphasis on language and
representation that has dominated much professional philosophy since
the "linguistic turn" that began in the 1930s. Where
philosophy presumes human autonomy, history presumes human
singularity, the distinctness of the species from other animals, the
environment and machines. Criticism of the arts focuses on human
creativity, which it defines as the human capacity to produce
meaningful representations or forms.
These presumptions have governed scholarship in the humanities, but
while humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human
nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been
getting to work. One of the most striking features of contemporary
intellectual life is the fact that questions formerly reserved for
the humanities are today being approached by scientists in various
disciplines such as cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience,
robotics, artificial life, behavioral genetics and evolutionary
biology. (Indeed, some of the most suggestive work is being done not
just outside the humanities but outside the university, by inventors
and innovators in the for-profit sector.)
Aspects of the question of autonomy are being taken up not just by
philosophers but by investigators in cognitive science, genomics,
biochemistry and the technology of bioinformatics. In all these
fields, the presumed autonomy of the free human subject is being
interrogated and complicated. The presumption of singularity that
informs history is also being pressed hard by those working in
computational science, animal intelligence, genetic engineering and
evolutionary biology, all of which are making it harder to speak in
traditional ways about the splendid self-sufficiency of the human species.
And creativity—the most splendid of all properties of human
being, according to the humanities—is now being itself
redefined by linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience and even
software development, which are assigning new meanings to this term,
meanings that do not necessarily funnel back to the individual human
being in a state of inspired frenzy.
Through Open Doors, Discourse
Autonomy, singularity, creativity—each of these terms
names both a long-standing concern of the humanities and a set of
contemporary projects being undertaken in the sciences.
Many such projects—from the relatively familiar such as
stem-cell research and the Human Genome Project to the more exotic,
such as attempts to upload the component parts of consciousness into
a computer, bioinformatics, and advanced nanotechnology—appear
to have serious implications for our basic understanding of human
being. These projects may well force us to modify our understanding
of traditional moral and philosophical questions, including the
definition of and value attached to such presumptively nonhuman
concepts as "the animal" and "the machine."
Humanists, who have been only partially aware of the work being done
by scientists and other nonhumanists on their own most fundamental
concepts, must try to overcome their disciplinary and temperamental
resistances and welcome these developments as offering a new
grounding for their own work. They must commit themselves to be not
just spectators marveling at new miracles, but coinvestigators of
these miracles, synthesizing, weighing, judging and translating into
the vernacular so that new ideas can enter public discourse.
They—we—must understand that while scientists are indeed
poaching our concepts, poaching in general is one of the ways in
which disciplines are reinvigorated, and this particular act of
thievery is nothing less than the primary driver of the
transformation of knowledge today. For their part, those
investigating the human condition from a nonhumanistic perspective
must accept the contributions of humanists, who have a deep and
abiding stake in all knowledge related to the question of the human.
We stand today at a critical juncture not just in the history of
disciplines but of human self-understanding, one that presents
remarkable and unprecedented opportunities for thinkers of all
descriptions. A rich, deep and extended conversation between
humanists and scientists on the question of the human could have
implications well beyond the academy. It could result in the
rejuvenation of many disciplines, and even in a reconfiguration of
disciplines themselves—in short, a new golden age.