Collaborative thinking

There is a fragment from Parmenides’ famous poem cited by Aristotle in Metaphysics Book 4 that I have always thought characterizes one side of the human spirit. It runs as follows:

For as each has a mixture of much-wandering limbs (meleôn poluplagtôn), so is the mind (noos) of human beings; for it is the same thing which thinks, namely, the nature of the limbs in human beings, in all and in each human; for the more is thought (to gar pleon esti voēma) (Barnes: ‘for that of which there is more is thought’; Freeman: ‘for it is excess which makes thought’).

(Parmenides, fragment 16, Diels and Kranz, 1951–2 (DK); Aristotle, Metaphysics 4, 1009b 21; Theophrastus, De Sensu 3 (DK, Test. 46, I.226); Barnes, 1991: II.1594; Freeman, 1966: 151)

Whatever Parmenides might have meant in the above passage, namely, that mind results from the mixing of qualities in the body (if a mind–body distinction is not simply anachronistic at this stage), what is striking about this view is that thought is not a question simply of balance, equilibrium or equality of physical qualities (e.g. the hot and the cold, according to Theophrastus), but rather of two fundamental features. First, it is a question of surplus, excess or ‘the more’. Thought is not reducible to its constituent parts or mixture; its essential characteristic is going beyond any constituent part or a capacity to think beyond every line or boundary imposed upon it. And second, mind is a function of ‘much-wandering limbs’, that is, it needs many instruments or disciplines.

Something like this, I suggest, is what is embodied in the idea of a university, namely, the freedom to transgress boundaries in every direction, the freedom for thought to go beyond even itself, and the rise of constantly developing sets of disciplines to unpack and form a set of learning boundaries – or ‘disciplines’ – (disciplinae in Latin) – to frame this (rather alarming) freedom.

However, with the rise of different models for the university – purely technical models in nineteenth-century Germany or business models in the contemporary world, the ‘more’ of thought has become increasingly challenged, as well it might, since the more can indeed be unproductive, wasteful, subversive and anti-educational; it may even be a chimaera based upon outmoded models of mind, according to which mind is a ‘thinking thing’ (Descartes) or some hidden essence or ‘soul’ (Plato) in some way distinct from the brain-constituents that make its appearance possible. From a neuroscientific viewpoint, it may be urged, mental functions are nothing ‘more’ than brain locations. The ‘more’ of thought is a pre-modern illusion. One of the most famous applications of this quasi-reductive model to both mind and university, a model much more drastically articulated by various forms of modern utilitarianism and hard behaviorism (e.g. Skinner, Watson) came from Gilbert Ryle’s attack on ‘Descartes’ myth’ in The Concept of Mind. According to Ryle, Descartes’ mistake is like the mistake of a visitor to Cambridge or Oxford who, after being shown all the different colleges, asks: ‘but where is the university?’. There is, of course, no university apart from the colleges; there is no ghostly, psychic entity lurking behind appearances (Ryle, 2002: 13–25). One may well reply that such a constituent-collection model has no life or vision without the living ability to call itself into question or to ask for ‘more’. But there is no question that in the context of much reductionist thought such views have had a major impact upon ways we view our contemporary seats of ‘higher education’. The classic extreme version of this is, of course, Mr Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times: ‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts’ (Kaplan and Monod, 2001: 47). But, extreme or not, many find Dickens’ criticisms to be both ‘fair and urgent’, since public policymakers turn to rigid utilitarian norms to find ‘a principled, orderly way of making decisions’, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, and ‘the simple utilitarian idea of what rational choice consists in dominates not only economic thought and practice, but also – given the prestige of economics within the social sciences – a great deal of writing in other social sciences as well, where “rational choice theory” is taken to be equivalent to utilitarian rational choice theory as practiced in neoclassical economics’ (Nussbaum, 1991).

So, on this overall and very common view, the university is nothing more than its constituent parts – its various divisions are changeable, measurable according to objective criteria and, like everything else in society, subject to the laws of supply and demand. What works gets funded and should get funded. Divisions or disciplines whose worth cannot be properly measured should be eliminated. ‘Academic vision’ is just another phrase for any supposedly forward-thinking administrative decision-making that fits the correct definition of an overall technical model of the university, and for such a model the position of the arts and humanities has looked increasingly precarious for the last 50–100 years.

However, as many people have pointed out, there are several problematic, and perhaps not mutually compatible, assumptions behind this overall model. First, there is the assumption that all the current major disciplines are relatively objective entities capable of being measured according to independent and common criteria.

The problem here, however, is that they are not objective, value-free entities subject to dispassionate, subject-less scrutiny; each discipline is itself in flux, admitting a range of different approaches: quantitative, mathematical, theoretical, qualitative – and, inevitably, normative; and there is no privileged external viewpoint (beyond fiat or fashion) from which to dissect or diagnose all of them.

Second, there is the assumption that the fine arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences are to be set out as if they were relatively equal parts of a definable – and exhaustive – whole sum, like booths of a fair or market. One can then, in principle, sample the wares of each before deciding which to buy. One problem here, however, is that education and scholarship are much more about discovery and transformation than about simple consumerism. The real danger about education (that can make strange bed-fellows of otherwise diametrically opposed interest-groups) is that it threatens to transform people.

Third, there is the assumption, related to assumption 2 above, that the buyer determines the value of each discipline and that, since the dominant educational model employed is economic and a question of market value, the primary determinant of value is pragmatic and monetary, that is, the successful short-term pragmatic functioning of the discipline (according to its ‘shelf-life’) and the money, influence and customary prestige it attracts.

Again, one problem with this assumption is that while the market model is powerful and, to a certain extent, necessary, it is also limited and short-sighted. The more pressing question is the quality of civilization and insight rather than comfort or the quantity of material components. Even in the natural sciences, funding can empower and yet equally stunt (perhaps more so) creative possibilities. Young scientists can be compelled by the need to secure grants and to be relatively docile parts of group-oriented research to lose touch with their own creative possibilities. And if a mature scholar with real promise loses her or his funding, there is no way back to what might have been and no way forward without financial ‘mission-approval’. End of career.

Finally, there is the assumption, implicitly opposed to assumption 3 above, that even if the sciences are ‘essential’ because they work, solve actual problems and attract money, we still need the arts and humanities because they ‘humanize’ education or give education – that is, scientific or social scientific education – the human vision it needs.

But the problem with this assumption is that, if you already have systems that produce working results, there is no clear need to support a superstructure that adds little or nothing of definable value and that functions less and less as an animating principle of anything. Science is about the way things are; humanities and the arts are about conjecture, the way things might or could be. So if science may also make claims outside of its own special domains (as has invariably been the case – neuroscientists make claims about consciousness, religion, etc. all the time); and if it does so on the basis of fact, such claims are at least plausible; whereas if the humanities also make such claims outside or even inside their own domains, such claims are based only on conjecture, not fact, and are, therefore, far less plausible than the fact-based conjectures of science.

This is, in my view, a powerful objection and in order to put it into a broader perspective I shall argue here that, despite the natural flux in disciplines, the discovery of new ones and the disappearance of older demarcating lines, we need the broad divisions of the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences (and their individual and cross-divisional collaborative functionings) for several reasons that I shall take up in turn: the need, first, to avoid a single viewpoint; second, to cultivate a broad range of arts and sciences and the integration of different collaborative perspectives, even when we fail to do so; and third, to open the human subject to dimensions not necessarily reached by any single discipline through which we may arguably come to see particular people or things in their particularity or individuality in a deeper way as if for the first time.

The collaborative vision I have in mind has the following features: (a) it interlinks selves, others and things, (b) it interlinks different communities and a world, (c) it interlinks all the emerging range of characteristics of what it means to be human, and (d) it involves all disciplinary ventures (arts, humanities, social and natural sciences) in a collaborative way that transcends, and yet is exemplified in, educated individuals.

Something of this collaborative vision is what gave rise to the emergence of the universities in the first place in the West and it cannot be eliminated or stop being developed, I suggest, without risking the continued existence of this fundamental collaborative exercise of the human spirit.

Let me take up the need for more than a single viewpoint first. The reason that this is even an issue is because people have often assumed that a single discipline should be a model for every other discipline. At the end of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, physics was just such a model, apparently built upon a mechanistic view of the universe (nothing intrinsically wrong with this – the complex seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are often under-appreciated) and upon a coherent system of demonstrable facts (again, not surprising since, from Kant onward, ‘truth’ has come to mean ‘consistency’ rather than earlier versions such as ‘adequateness’ to ‘reality’).

It is one of the great ironies of history that this mechanistic model has been turned on its head, not only because of electron microscopes, uncertainty and chaos theories, but because physics now appears to be built upon various cosmological theories that postulate diverse intelligible entities from gravitrons to mathematical strings, the existence of some, or even most, of which has not yet been observed or demonstrated. From the latter part of the twentieth century, predominant emerging models seem to be either business or neuroscientific. In the case of the former, it remains unclear how far it is possible to incorporate any systematic view of ethics, for instance, into good business practice (despite common-sense calls that any sustainable business practice requires morality – but whose morality, and whose rationality?). And in the case of the latter, despite optimistic forecasts that the answers to everything including consciousness, morality and spirit, are to be found exclusively in the isolated brain, it is surely absurd to suppose that successful localized experiments (and the fashions built upon them just as much in the sciences as elsewhere) will rid us of the need to see Rembrandt, Chagall, hear Mozart, Beethoven or Pushkin or read Shakespeare and the Bible. In the words of Raymond Tallis, Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the University of Manchester, in a review of V. S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human (2010):

Until we clear up the ground-floor aspects of human consciousness – in particular, first-person being – claims to advance our understanding of its higher levels, and of the grand edifice of civilization, by peering into intracranial darkness will not withstand even the most cursory examination. Why should anyone imagine that studying an organ many hundreds of thousands years old would give insights into complex historically and culturally influenced matters of artistic taste? While it is incontrovertible that a brain in some sort of working order is necessary for everything from the most primitive tingle to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, that is the beginning, not the end, of the story. To look for humanity and society and civilization in the isolated brain is rather like listening to an acorn in the hope of hearing the sound of the wind through an oak wood. (Tallis, 2010: C7)

While I do not necessarily agree with the precise emphasis of everything in Tallis’ assessment, I do think it eloquently confirms what I want to argue: the single viewpoint, canonized model or even Grand Unified Theory does not appear to be sufficient or even to work.

We can, however, go further. As Michael Polanyi has argued, if the only two disciplines we had possessed earlier in our history were physics and chemistry, then we should never have been able to predict the future existence of machines, much less the mechanistic model that is supposedly intrinsic to physics and chemistry. If a ‘boundary condition’, in Polanyi’s terms, is extraneous to the process it delimits – in Galileo’s experiments on balls rolling down a slope, for instance, if the angle of the slope was not derived from the laws of mechanics, but chosen by Galileo; or in Galileo’s famous telescope observations of the Moon and Jupiter the interpretation of what he was seeing was not derived from mechanics or astronomy but from art and what he knew about perspective (a favorite example of Leslie Real) – and if the same holds true for ‘machine-like boundaries’, namely, ‘that their structure cannot be defined in terms of the laws which they harness’, then ‘if the structure of living things is a set of boundary conditions, this structure is extraneous to the laws of physics and chemistry, which the organism is harnessing. Thus the morphology of living things transcends the laws of physics and chemistry’ (Polanyi, 1969: 227).

In my view, this does not mean that the older hierarchical view of disciplines should be retained, namely, the view that theology and philosophy should transcend all other disciplines. It should mean instead, I suggest, that the limiting conditions of any one discipline may only be seen from the different perspectives of other disciplines, and that, in this case, philosophy, history, theology and literature are as much in need of physics, chemistry and biology as are the latter of the former.

But why should we need the broader range of arts and sciences we have today? Most people do not understand much of contemporary art, dance or music; and, if polls are to be trusted, most of the population enjoy the benefits of scientific advances but are blithely unaware of muons or anti-muons and could not tell the difference between a virus and a bacterium. In fact, virtually no one alive today could estimate the relative speeds of the earth, sun and solar system if the heliocentric hypothesis is correct as we all proudly assert. So, for all our presumed sophistication, very few of us are capable of functionally living in a post-Galileo, post-Copernican universe if we have no idea how fast we must be travelling if the earth goes around the sun. Something close to a calculation of the fantastical, but actual, speeds involved if the heliocentric hypothesis is correct was first formulated by Ptolemy, and then by Plutarch in a literary-philosophical dialogue written in the second century, but then rejected precisely because they so obviously offend the apparent facts of our common-sense experience. So my overall point is this: even failure to get things right may be just as important an indicator as success of the vaster collaborative effort required to get at the ‘truth’ of anything.

So let me take up the question of a minimally integrated view of what higher education should be striving for. Typically, in practice, this amounts to ‘general education requirements’, or the equivalents, that are designed to prevent students from taking classes exclusively in one area. More broadly, it amounts to the understanding that an undergraduate degree should prevent any student from studying only himself or herself (as if an American student were only to study American Studies in the narrowest possible way) and that it should compel students to explore ‘otherness’ in as many different forms as possible, from biology to poetry.

One further way of thinking about this is from the mutually implicating perspectives of four basic questions we might naturally ask ourselves.

First, what is it like to be me? Or who am I or who should I be?

As E. F. Schumacher puts it in A Guide for the Perplexed (his take on Moses Maimonides’ classic of the same title), the possibility of integration is destroyed when ‘one or several’ of these questions – from self-knowledge (question 1) to thing-knowledge (question 4) – remains unasked or when a question is approached ‘with instruments and methodologies appropriate only in quite another field’ (1978: 62–3). In other words, to obtain any clear integrated view of reality we need to relate and integrate these questions or to recognize that while ‘little can be learned about human nature by anyone who confines his studies to the field of appearances (question four) … [s]imilarly little if anything can normally be learned about the mineral [world] from studies of one’s own inner experiences’ (i.e. question 1) (Schumacher, 1978: 118).

At the same time, question 4 (or the province of the natural sciences) must be able to inform question 1 (self-knowledge) since we know it to be true – and not only for evolutionary biology (as Leslie Real points out to me) – that any understanding of human nature is genuinely approachable only by examining the nature of other things, namely, other species. And again, if we do not even recognize, much less integrate, questions 2 and 3, namely, the second-person standpoint (which Martin Buber famously summed up in the I–Thou relation), then we may miss altogether what it means to be human. As Hermann Cohen, a ‘Neo-Kantian’ who taught at Marburg at the turn of the twentieth century, puts it, the very possibility of any meaningful morality depends upon the integration of the second-person points of view (questions 2 and 3) with the first-and third-person perspectives (questions 1 and 4): ‘self-consciousness cannot mean the consciousness of the self as a unique person … Self-consciousness is in the first case determined through the consciousness of the other. The uniting of the other with the one generates self-consciousness for the first time as that of a pure will’ (Cohen, 2005 [1904]: 206–7). Or, again, John Stuart Mill comments upon the lack of a particular kind of imagination in his kinsman Jeremy Bentham as ‘that which enables us, by a voluntary effort, to conceive the absent as if it were present, the imaginary as if it were real, and to clothe it in the feelings which, if it were indeed real, it would bring along with it. This is the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another’ (Mill: 2001 [1838]: 339).

In sum, self-knowledge is surely necessary, but it is worse than useless if it is based only on the ‘I’ or first-person perspective. It must be balanced by an equally intensive study of the second, third, and fourth questions. Similarly, knowledge of other things, whether descriptions and appearances or instructions to make thing work, is intensely valuable, as showers and airplanes make clear, but it can be practically useless if I cannot communicate with others or with myself or if my life has no real meaning.

Of course, in real life we have to make practical choices and these choices will sometimes close doors of opportunity, doorways to paths we might have taken. But perhaps the most important point for higher education is that we remain aware of what might have been or, indeed, of what should be the case, if not for ourselves then at least for education as a proper imaginative possibility for the future of civilization. Charles Darwin comments with dismay upon what he takes to be the atrophy of parts of his mind and imagination, namely, the loss of what he calls ‘the higher aesthetic tastes’ such as a taste for Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Byron, etc. in favor of his mind seeming ‘to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact’, and he goes on to suggest that the ‘loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature’ (Darwin, 1888: 138–9). I think that what Darwin points out for the aesthetic tastes may also be true for many humanists and artists if they fail or refuse to acknowledge dimensions of sensibility or rationality in the social or natural sciences: opportunities not taken or refused.

But the central point of importance, I suggest, in a world saturated with economic utilitarianism is that we should be aware of the failure or of what we risk losing, and never lose sight of it. In this there is more common ground among the disciplines and broader divisions than there is often supposed to be, for many scientists recognize the need for ‘higher aesthetic tastes’ or, as Martha Nussbaum puts it, for ‘cultivating humanity’. But the converse should in some measure also be true, namely a willingness for humanists and artists to break the boundaries of their own disciplines and help to create a conversation across the divisions in which a narrow view of scholarly-scientific credibility does not trump every other consideration.