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The language we use is hugely important: it determines what we can understand.
Analyses of individual words and their possibilities of meaning can be an essential first step: without a knowledge of the words, we cannot grasp the whole. But at the same time, it is only the meaning of the whole that gives the individual words their full and proper significance.
Knowledge falters when imagination clips its wings or fears to use them. Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.
‘At one time we had wisdom, but little knowledge. Now we have a great deal of knowledge, but do we have enough wisdom to deal with that knowledge?’
A book gives time and space for ideas to be properly developed. The scientific paper, in particular the conventional contemporary science paper, is best suited to the dissemination of data, rather less well to the exposition of seminal ideas, though it does happen.
Experimental science often takes not just data and ideas out of context, but takes people out of one context and puts them in another.
Small variations in the way the task is presented may make a large difference to the results. Changes in novelty or complexity can mask relevant structures – or falsely identify irrelevant ones.
‘The underestimation of uncertainty in measurement of physical constants and compilations of recommended values seems to be pervasive.’
Scientific thinking gets crystallised too early, before it has had a chance to broaden and deepen; there is no longer a chance for ideas to evolve, to enter the necessary fallow period of unconscious gestation, without being prematurely forced into explicit form, and worse still in sliced form, so that what might have come to be a dawning new Gestalt is forever lost.
And in the end, science is not about producing data so much as thinking, to which the acquisition of data can be only a prelude or addendum.
No, the point is just this: that science is not immune from corruption on a fairly significant scale, and the significance is directly proportionate to the claims that are ritually made on science’s behalf.
As often in life, it is not what you know, but who you know that counts.
Since science is actually carried out by real people with all their complicated motivations, it is subject to all those human fallibilities, hardly peculiar to science, but from which science is not exempt.
‘One of the strengths of science’, writes historian of science David Hull, ‘is that it does not require that scientists are unbiased, only that different scientists have different biases.’115
This is not because young people are cleverer, and it cannot be that they know more: it is surely that their minds are more open than those of their seniors.
Closely examined, whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies.
We are rightly scandalised when the clergy put preservation of the comfortable edifice of the Church ahead of abiding by Christian principles in practice. Why are we tolerant of scientists who, mutatis mutandis, do the same thing?
‘A very great deal more truth can become known than can be proven.’
The right hemisphere view of proof derives its value from the context, and so can never be absolute, regnant for all regions of space and time, and never single or immune from evolution.
To see the limits of science empowers it; to see no limits to it strikes at the very heart of the enterprise.
I believe some of the political difficulties we are now experiencing in the Western world come from a lack of balance, in which wilful blindness to the problems in one’s own position eventually causes an ignorant and extreme reaction, when those who are at some level all too aware of what is being ignored and denied can finally contain themselves no longer.
It is, in other words, a critical discipline, more than a creative faculty, questioning our ways of thinking and keeping us from complacency, its first target being our ‘methods’ – which include itself.
Reason suggests a linear way of thinking, seeking chains of causation, which makes sense only in a limited environment. Its mode of operation is local, one bit at a time.
Reason suggests a global, holistic understanding, which makes sense only in the round. It is a seamless apprehension of the world.
The first is rigid, aims for certainty, tends to ‘either/or’ thinking, is abstract and generalised, ignores context and aims to free itself from all that is embodied, in order to gain what it conceives to be eternal truths. The second is deeper and richer, more flexible and tentative, more modest, aware of the impossibility of certainty, open to polyvalent meaning, respecting context and embodiment, and holding that while rational processing is important, it needs to be combined with other ways of intelligently understanding the world.
The problem is, however, that once one is inside the rationalist bubble, one can no longer see any need to break out of it, let alone any way of doing so.
Rationality is exclusive: reason is inclusive, balancing rationality with intuition, emotion and imagination.
And it is one of the messages of this book that imagination is not an impediment, but, on the contrary, a necessity for true knowledge of the world, for true understanding, and for that neglected goal of human life, wisdom.
I am saying that what I know is real enough, but it is only what I am able to see from where I am: a tiny portion of the whole.
Thus each individual consciousness is not fused with, but neither is it wholly separate from, that of others; nor is the world wholly separate from each consciousness.
one can only see from a certain standpoint, but this fact does not make all standpoints of equal value.
To find the ‘richest’ view, the one that seems truest to the world as a whole, in the sense that it resonates with our experience in the richest way, the imaginative exercise of inhabiting a number of points of view is required. Seeing things from as many points of view as possible, so that we don’t see them ‘meagrely’, is not mere subjectivity. Nor is it falsely claimed objectivity: in different ways it is the opposite of each.
Reason, like both science and, in a different way, morality, can bring a verdict into doubt only if it is grounded on something which is exempted from the doubting process.
These are choices, not laws: outside of courts there are no laws, only regularities.
logic is only an ‘unpacking’ of what is hidden in our premisses.
The linear path is responsible for the myth of progress. Philosophy progresses, if at all, by a process of circling one’s ‘object’, revisiting it from different angles, often over many lifetimes.
Indeed, like all knowledge from whatever source, it is something always subject to correction or further refinement. A Gestalt is never absolute and final: its value is that it replaces one that accounts for less or takes less into account.
Reason should be our servant, never our master.
‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’
Argument depends on language of some kind. There is a peculiar bias towards language and naming in Western culture. East Asians solve problems significantly better when not obliged to express themselves in words, as often do Westerners, as we will see in Chapter 17; but for East Asians language scarcely appears to be involved in the process at all.36
I commented that, inside the bubble (which I would identify with the left hemisphere’s reality) we no longer see the limitations of our viewpoint – precisely because of its limitations.
But the complete failure by many leading analytic philosophers to engage even tangentially with the most pressing problems of a civilisation in crisis is strikingly reminiscent of fiddling while Rome burns.
But that inescapably says something about the nature of twentieth-century analytic philosophy: its narrowness and its degree of abstraction from life.
The sort of ideas we attend to, and the sort of ideas which we push into the negligible background, govern our hopes, our fears, our control of behaviour. As we think, we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophic ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilization’.52 The importance of philosophy, if it is to mean anything, must lie far beyond the seminar room.
Analysis makes explicit what we are aware of in the first instance through intuition.
It is that the scientific process of breaking things down never offered an understanding of what something actually is, even if inanimate.
We need to know about parts only because it can help us see how the parts relate. Take away the relations and we are left with nothing.
‘It is equally excessive to shut reason out and to let nothing else in’.
conviction for the most part follows, not upon any one great and decisive proof or token of the point in debate, but upon a number of very minute circumstances together, which the mind is quite unable to count up and methodize in an argumentative form …65
The right hemisphere is more involved with the living process as it happens, the left with the post-mortem dissection that occurs once it has stopped.
