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.
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