1998.03 从混沌中回归

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从混沌中回归
启蒙思想家对所有事情都知道得很多，今天的专家对很少的事情知道得很多，而后现代主义者怀疑我们根本不可能知道任何事情。本世纪最重要的科学家之一反其道而行之，认为我们可以知道我们需要知道的东西，而且我们将发现所有形式的知识背后的基本统一性。

作者：Edward O. Wilson
1998年3月号
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与普遍的观点相反，我认为十七和十八世纪的启蒙思想家们的观点大多是正确的。他们对合法的物质世界、知识的内在统一性以及人类无限进步的潜力所做的假设，是我们仍然最容易接受的，没有这些假设，我们会感到痛苦，并在我们越来越多地了解我们的生活环境时，发现有最大的收获。思想上最伟大的事业一直是，也将是把科学和人文联系起来的尝试。知识的持续分裂和由此产生的哲学混乱并不是现实世界的反映，而是学术研究的人工制品。


统一的关键是连贯性。与 "一致性 "相比，我更喜欢这个词，因为它的稀有性保留了它的精确性，而 "一致性 "有几种可能的含义。威廉-惠韦尔（William Whewell）在其1840年的综述《归纳科学的哲学》（The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences）中，是第一个谈到 "一致性 "的人--从字面上看，这是知识的 "跳跃性"，是跨学科的事实和基于事实的理论联系在一起的结果，创造了一个共同的解释基础。他写道："当从一类事实中获得的归纳与从另一类不同事实中获得的归纳相吻合时，就会发生归纳的一致性。这种一致性是对它所发生的理论的真理性的一种检验。

只有通过在自然科学中开发的方法才能确立或反驳一致性--我赶紧补充说，这种努力不是由科学家领导的，也不是冻结在数学抽象中的，而是与在探索物质宇宙中如此有效的思维习惯相一致。

对超越科学和跨学科的可能性的信念是一种形而上学的世界观，而且是一种少数人的世界观，只有少数科学家和哲学家分享。一致性不能用第一原理的逻辑来证明，也不能用任何明确的经验性测试来证明，至少目前还没有想到。它最好的支持不过是从自然科学过去一贯的成功中推断出来的。它最可靠的测试将是它在社会科学和人文科学中的有效性。团结一致的最强吸引力在于智力冒险的前景，而且，即使只是取得微小的成功，也能更好地理解人类状况。

为了说明刚才的主张，请想一想两条相交的垂直线，并想象一下由此产生的象限。将一个象限标记为 "环境政策"，一个 "伦理学"，一个 "生物学"，一个 "社会科学"。


我们已经认为这四个领域是紧密相连的，所以一个领域的理性探究为其他三个领域的推理提供了依据。但不可否认的是，在当代学术界，每个领域都是独立的。每个领域都有自己的从业人员、语言、分析模式和验证标准。其结果是混乱 -- 四个世纪前，弗朗西斯-培根正确地指出，混乱是最可怕的错误，"在论证或推理从一个经验世界到另一个经验世界的地方发生"。

接下来想象一下，在交叉点周围有一系列的同心圆。


当我们向内穿过这些圆圈，走向象限的交汇点时，我们发现自己处于一个越来越不稳定和迷失方向的区域。最接近交点的一环，也就是大多数现实世界问题存在的地方，是最需要基本分析的地方。然而，几乎不存在任何地图；很少有概念和文字可以为我们提供指导。只有在想象中，我们才能顺时针地从对环境问题的认识和对健全的政策的需求，到基于道德推理的解决方案的选择，到推理的生物基础，到对作为生物、环境和历史产物的社会制度的把握--然后再回到环境政策上来。

考虑一下这个例子。各地政府对管理世界上日益减少的森林储备的最佳政策感到茫然。几乎没有建立起可以达成协议的道德准则，而这些准则是基于对生态学的充分了解。即使有了充分的科学知识，我们也没有什么基础来对森林进行长期评估。可持续产量的经济学仍然是一门原始的艺术，而自然生态系统的心理效益几乎完全没有被发掘。


现在是在现实中实现这种领域的游览的时候了。这并不是一个供知识分子消遣的空想。受过教育的公众，而不仅仅是知识分子和政治领袖，能否轻松地围绕这些和类似的电路进行思考，从任何一点开始，向任何方向发展，将决定如何明智地选择公共政策。

问及是否能在最核心的领域取得一致，从而使正确的判断力能轻易地从一个学科流向另一个学科，这相当于问及在学科的聚集中，专家们是否能在抽象原则和证据的共同体上达成一致。我认为他们可以。对一致性的信任是自然科学的基础。至少对于物质世界来说，其势头是压倒性地朝着概念的统一性发展。自然科学中的学科界限正在消失，转而支持不断变化的混合学科，其中隐含着共生性。它们跨越了许多复杂的层次，从化学物理学和物理化学到分子遗传学、化学生态学和生态遗传学。没有一个新的专业被认为只是一个研究的重点。每一个都是新鲜想法和进步技术的产业。

恐怖和启蒙运动
思想统一的梦想是启蒙运动的产物，是跨越十七和十八世纪的伊卡利亚式的思想飞翔。这是一个为人权和人类进步服务的世俗知识的愿景，是西方对文明的最大贡献。它为整个世界开启了现代时代；我们都是它的继承人。然后--令人惊讶的是--它失败了。

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灵气不可能起作用。那么，为什么会有这种现象？
JORDAN KISNER
鉴于各学科重新融合的前景，了解启蒙运动的基本性质和使其衰落的弱点是极其重要的。这两点可以说都体现在孔多塞侯爵的一生中。没有任何一个事件比他在1794年3月29日的死亡更能标志启蒙运动的结束。当时的情况具有极大的讽刺意味。孔多塞被称为 "进步法则 "的先知。凭借其高超的智慧和富有远见的政治领导力，他似乎注定要从法国大革命中脱颖而出，成为法国的杰斐逊。但在1793年底和1794年初，当他正在撰写启蒙运动的终极蓝图《人类思想进步史图》时，他却成了法律的逃犯，可能被他忠实服务的事业的代表判处死刑。他的罪行是政治性的：他被认为是吉隆德派，是被激进的雅各宾派认为过于温和--过于合理--的一个派别的成员。更糟的是，他批评了由雅各宾派主导的国民大会制定的宪法。他在被逃亡中抓获的村民监禁后，死在了布格-拉-雷因监狱的牢房地板上。他们肯定会把他移交给巴黎当局审判。死因不明。当时排除了自杀的可能性，但他随身携带的毒药还是有可能的；外伤或心脏病发作也有可能。至少他免于被送上断头台。

法国大革命从孔多塞这样的男人和女人那里获得了知识力量。它因教育机会的增长而准备就绪，然后被人类普遍权利的理念所激发。然而，当启蒙运动似乎要在欧洲取得政治成果时，却出了大问题。起初看似微小的不一致，却扩大为灾难性的失败。30年前，让-雅克-卢梭在《社会契约论》中提出了后来激励革命的口号的思想。"自由、平等、博爱"。但他也发明了 "普遍意志 "这一决定性的抽象概念来实现这些目标。他写道，普遍意愿是由自由人的集会商定的正义规则，他们的利益只是为了社会和社会中每个人的福利服务。一旦实现，它就形成了一个 "永远不变、不可改变和纯粹 "的主权契约。"我们每个人都把他的个人和他的所有权力共同置于总意志的最高指导之下，而且，在我们的团体身份中，我们接受每个成员作为整体的不可分割的一部分"。卢梭继续说，那些不符合总体意志的人是异类，要受到议会的必要强制。一个真正的平等主义民主不可能以任何其他方式实现。


领导1793年革命的恐怖统治的罗伯斯庇尔很好地掌握了这种逻辑。他和他的雅各宾派同伴理解卢梭的必要力量，包括对所有反对新秩序的人进行即决谴责和处决。大约30万名贵族、牧师、政治异见者和其他麻烦制造者被监禁，17000人在一年内死亡。在罗伯斯庇尔的世界里，雅各宾派的目标是崇高而纯粹的。正如他在1794年2月（在他自己被送上断头台前不久）平静地写道："和平地享受自由和平等，统治永恒的正义，其法律已被镌刻在......人们的心中，甚至在不了解它们的奴隶和否认它们的暴君的心中。

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于是，平等主义的意识形态和野蛮的强制力轻松地共存，这在接下来的两个世纪里一直困扰着人们。启蒙运动的衰落不仅仅是被那些利用启蒙运动进行辩解的暴君所加速，也是被不断上升的、往往是有效的知识分子反对所加速。启蒙运动的梦想是通过自由智力使世界变得有序和充实，这在最初似乎是不可摧毁的，是所有人的本能目标。这场运动产生了西方的现代知识传统及其大部分文化。它的创造者是自柏拉图和亚里士多德以来最伟大的学者之一，他们展示了人类的思想能够完成什么。以赛亚-伯林（Isaiah Berlin），他们中最有洞察力的历史学家之一，公正地赞扬了他们，内容如下。"十八世纪最有天赋的思想家的智慧力量、诚实、清醒、勇气和对真理的无私热爱，至今仍是无与伦比的。他们的时代是人类生活中最美好和最有希望的事件之一"。但他们走得太远了，他们的最大努力还不足以创造他们所预言的持续努力。


完美性的危险
那么，这就是问题所在。尽管理性应该是人类的决定性特征，而且只需要再培养一下就能开出普遍的花朵，但它还是不够。人类没有注意到这一点。人类不这么认为。启蒙运动衰落的原因今天仍然存在，它照亮了人类动机的迷宫般的源泉。值得一问的是，特别是在这个我们对文化不满的冬天，启蒙运动的原始精神--自信、乐观、着眼于地平线--是否可以重获。而且要诚实地反问，它是否应该重获，还是如一些人所说的那样，它在最初的概念中就有一个黑暗天使般的缺陷？它的理想主义是否促成了恐怖，预示了极权主义国家的可怕梦想？如果知识可以被整合，那么 "完美 "的社会也可以被设计出来--一种文化、一种科学--无论是法西斯主义、共产主义还是神权主义。

然而，启蒙运动本身并不是一个统一的运动。与其说它是一条坚定、迅猛的河流，不如说它是一条沿着扭曲的河道运行的三角洲小溪的花边。在法国大革命时期，它已经非常古老。它产生于十七世纪初的科学革命，在十八世纪的欧洲学术界达到了最大的影响力。它的发起人经常在基本问题上发生冲突。大多数人不时地进行荒谬的离题和猜测，如寻找《圣经》中隐藏的密码和灵魂的解剖位置。然而，他们的意见重叠是广泛的、清晰的、有理有据的，足以承受这种简单的描述。他们都有一种激情，那就是揭开世界的神秘面纱，把思想从禁锢它的非个人力量中解放出来。


他们被发现的快感所驱使。他们一致认为，科学有能力揭示一个有序的、可理解的宇宙，从而为自由的理性讨论奠定持久的基础。他们认为，天文学和物理学所发现的天体的完美性可以作为人类社会的模式。他们相信所有知识的统一性，个人的人权，自然法，以及人类无限的进步。他们试图避免形而上学，即使其解释的缺陷和不完整性迫使他们去实践。他们抵制有组织的宗教。他们鄙视启示和教条。他们赞同，或至少容忍国家作为公民秩序所需的一种手段。他们相信，教育和正确的理性会给人类带来巨大的好处。少数人，如孔多塞，认为人类是可以完善的，有能力塑造和管理一个政治乌托邦。

弗朗西斯-培根和上帝的机器
科学是启蒙运动的引擎。更具科学态度的启蒙运动作者同意，宇宙是一个有序的物质结构，受精确的法律管辖。它可以被分解成可以测量和排列的实体，例如社会，它由人组成，人的大脑由神经组成，而神经又是由原子组成。至少在原则上，原子可以被重新组装成神经，神经可以被组装成大脑，而人可以被组装成社会，整个社会被理解为一个机制和力量的系统。启蒙运动的哲学家们认为，如果人们坚持神的干预，就应该把世界看作是上帝的机器。掩盖我们对物理世界的看法的概念限制可以被放宽，以改善人类在各个领域的状况。因此，孔多塞在一个仍然没有复杂事实压舱石负担的时代，呼吁用 "分析的火炬 "照亮道德和政治科学。

这个梦想的伟大设计师不是孔多塞，也不是任何其他表达得如此出色的哲学家，而是弗朗西斯-培根。在启蒙运动的创始人中，他是精神上最持久的一个，他跨越四个世纪告诉我们，我们必须了解自然，包括我们周围和我们内部，以便使人类走上自我完善的道路。我们必须做到这一点，因为我们知道我们的命运掌握在自己手中，否认梦想将导致回到野蛮状态。在他的学术研究中，培根质疑古典 "精致 "学问的稳固性--那些基于古代文本和逻辑论述的中世纪形式。他摒弃了对普通学术哲学的依赖，呼吁对自然和人类状况的研究要有自己的条件，不要矫揉造作。他认为，由于 "人们的头脑在没有选择的情况下匆匆忙忙地吸收和珍藏了事物的最初通知，而其余的东西都是从那里来的，所以错误必须永远占上风，并且不被纠正"。因此，知识的构造并不完善，而是 "类似于一个没有基础的宏伟结构"。


培根通过反思他的想象力所能得到的所有可能的调查方法，得出结论说，其中最适合准确思考的是归纳法 -- 收集大量的事实和发现模式。为了获得最大的客观性，我们必须只接受最低限度的先入为主的观念。培根宣称有一个学科的金字塔，自然史是底层，物理学在上面，并将其归入底层，而形而上学在顶层，解释下面的一切--尽管可能有人类无法掌握的力量和形式。

他既不是一个有天赋的科学家（"我不能把针刺得那么好"），也没有受过数学训练，但他是一个杰出的思想家，他创立了科学哲学。作为一个文艺复兴时期的人，用他的名言来说，他认为所有的知识都是他的领域。然后，他作为第一个分类学家和科学方法的主要传播者，迈入了启蒙运动。

培根对科学的定义很广，包括社会科学和部分人文科学的预示。他坚持认为，通过实验对知识进行反复测试是学习的最前沿。但对他来说，"实验 "不仅仅意味着以现代科学的方式进行控制性操作。它是人类通过信息、农业和工业给世界带来变化的所有方式。他认为学习的伟大分支是无止境的，是不断发展的，但他还是雄辩地写道，他相信知识的基本统一性。他反对自亚里士多德以来盛行的各学科间的尖锐划分。

培根阐述了归纳法，但并没有发明归纳法作为对古典和中世纪演绎法的反驳。不过，他还是配得上 "归纳法之父 "的称号，他的名声在后来的几个世纪里都是靠这个称号。他所赞成的程序不仅仅是对事实的概括--例如，用一个现代的例子来说，"90%的植物物种的花是黄色、红色或白色的，并且有昆虫光顾"。他说，相反，要从这样一个没有偏见的现象描述开始。把它们的共同特征收集到一个中间层次的通用性中。然后再进行更高层次的概括--例如，"花朵已经进化出颜色和解剖结构，旨在吸引某些种类的昆虫，而这些是专门为它们授粉的生物。" 培根的推理是对文艺复兴时期盛行的传统描述和分类方法的改进，但它对构成现代科学核心的概念形成、竞争性假设和理论的方法没有什么预见。

在心理学方面，特别是在创造力的本质方面，培根的视野最为开阔。虽然他没有使用这个词（直到1653年才被创造出来），但他明白心理学在科学研究和所有其他形式的学术研究中的关键重要性。他对发现的心理过程有一种深刻的直觉。他了解这些过程被最好地系统化和最有说服力地传播的手段。"他写道："人类的理解力不是干巴巴的光，而是接受来自意志和情感的灌输；由此产生的科学可以被称为'如意的科学'。" 他的意思并不是要通过插入情感的棱镜来歪曲对现实世界的认识。现实仍然应该被直接拥抱，并毫不退缩地报告。但是，它也最好以它被发现的方式来传递，保留一种可比的生动性和情感的发挥。

我并不希望通过将弗朗西斯-培根排在如此高的位置，将他描绘成一个彻底的现代人。他远非如此。他的朋友威廉-哈维（William Harvey）是一位医生，也是一位真正的科学家，他在血液循环方面有一个基本的发现，他严肃地指出，培根写哲学就像一位大法官。他的短语是华丽的大理石铭文和开头的粉饰。他所设想的知识的统一性与今天的一致性概念相去甚远，与各学科之间刻意的、系统的因果关系相去甚远。他强调的是归纳式探究的共同手段，这种手段可以最有效地服务于所有的学习分支。他寻找最能传达所获知识的技术，为此，他主张充分运用人文科学，包括艺术和小说，作为发展和表达科学的最佳手段。按照他的广泛定义，科学应该是诗，而诗是科学。这至少有一个令人愉快的现代意义。

培根的哲学提高了少数但有影响力的公众的关注度。它有助于推动科学革命，而科学革命将在未来的几十年里精彩地绽放。时至今日，他的观点仍然是科学-技术伦理的核心。他是一个伟大的人物，由于环境的需要而独树一帜，实现了只有最伟大的学者才有的谦逊和无辜的傲慢的结合，令人感动。

达尔文和三个坐标
所有活在我们心中的历史都是由神话叙事中的原型人物构成的。我相信，这正是弗朗西斯-培根的魅力所在，也是他的名声经久不衰的原因。在启蒙运动的舞台上，培根是冒险的预言家。他宣布，一个新世界正在等待着我们；让我们开始漫长而艰难的征程，进入那片未被描绘的土地。勒内-笛卡尔是代数几何和现代哲学的创始人，也是法国有史以来最杰出的学者，是叙述中的导师。像他之前的培根一样，他召集学者们参与科学事业；其中有年轻的艾萨克-牛顿。笛卡尔展示了如何借助精确的推理来进行科学研究，对每个现象进行快速切割，并将其镂空。他解释说，世界是三维的，所以让我们对它的感知以三个坐标为框架。今天，它们被称为笛卡尔坐标。有了它们，任何物体的长度、宽度和高度都可以被精确地指定，并通过数学运算来探索物体的基本品质。笛卡尔通过重新制定代数符号完成了这一基本步骤，使其可以用来解决复杂的几何问题，并进一步探索三维空间视觉领域以外的数学领域。


笛卡尔的总体设想是，知识是一个相互联系的真理系统，最终可以抽象为数学。他说，这一切是在1619年11月的一系列梦境中产生的，当时不知为何，在一连串的符号（雷声、书本、恶灵、美味的瓜）中，他察觉到宇宙既是理性的，又是由因果关系贯穿的。他认为这一概念可以应用于从物理学到医学--也就是生物学--甚至是道德推理的各个领域。在这方面，他为学问的统一性信念奠定了基础，这种信念在18世纪深刻地影响了启蒙运动的思想。

笛卡尔坚持认为，系统的怀疑是学习的首要原则。根据他的观点，所有的知识都要在逻辑的铁架子上进行铺垫和检验。他只允许自己有一个不可否认的前提，这体现在著名的短语 "Cogito ergo sum" -- "我思故我在"。笛卡尔的怀疑体系仍然在现代科学中蓬勃发展，在这个体系中，所有可能的假设都被系统地排除了，从而只留下一套公理，在此基础上可以进行理性思考，可以严格地设计实验。


尽管如此，笛卡尔还是对形而上学做出了基本的让步。作为一个终生的天主教徒，他相信上帝是一个完美的存在，在他自己的头脑中表现为这样一个存在的理念的力量。鉴于此，他继续论证了心灵与物质的完全分离。这一计策使他得以将精神放在一边，而将物质作为纯粹的机制来研究。在1637-1649年发表的作品中，笛卡尔提出了还原论，即把世界看作是可以被分解和单独分析的物理部分的集合体。还原论和分析性数学模型注定要成为现代科学最强大的智力工具。(1642年是思想史上的一个重要年份：笛卡尔的《初步哲学的沉思》刚刚出版，他的《哲学原理》也即将出版，伽利略去世，牛顿出生。）

随着启蒙运动历史的展开，艾萨克-牛顿与伽利略并列成为响应培根号召的英雄中最有影响力的人物。他是一个不安于现状的探索者，有着惊人的智慧，他比戈特弗里德-莱布尼茨（Gottfried Leibniz）更早发明了微积分，但他的符号更清晰，也是今天使用的符号。与解析几何一起，微积分被证明是物理学以及后来的化学、生物学和经济学中的两个关键数学技术之一。

1684年，牛顿制定了重力的质量和距离定律，并在1687年制定了运动的三个定律。通过这些数学公式，他实现了现代科学的第一个重大突破。他表明，哥白尼假设的行星轨道和开普勒证明的椭圆轨道可以从力学的第一原理中预测出来。他的定律是准确的，而且同样适用于所有无生命的物质，从太阳系到沙粒--当然，也适用于二十年前引发他对这个问题的思考的那个掉下来的苹果（显然是一个真实的故事）。他说，宇宙不仅是有序的，而且是可理解的。至少上帝宏伟设计的一部分可以用几行字写在一张纸上。

万有引力和运动定律是一个强有力的开端。它们让启蒙学者们开始思考，为什么不采用牛顿的方法来解决人类的事务呢？这个想法发展成为启蒙运动议程的主要支柱之一。早在1835年，Adolphe Quételet就提出了 "社会物理学 "作为即将被命名为社会学的学科的基础。与他同时代的奥古斯特-孔德认为一门真正的社会科学是不可避免的。他说："人，"他呼应孔多塞，"不允许自由思考化学和生物学，那么为什么应该允许他们自由思考政治哲学呢？" 人，毕竟只是极其复杂的机器。为什么他们的行为和社会制度不应该符合某些仍未定义的自然法则呢？


鉴于在接下来的三个世纪里，还原论取得了一连串的成功，今天看来，还原论显然是构建物理世界知识的最佳方式，但在科学诞生之初，它并不那么容易被掌握。西方科学之所以在世界上占据领先地位，主要是因为它培养了还原论和物理法则，以扩大对空间和时间的理解，使之超出了无助的感官所能达到的程度。然而，这种进步使人类的自我形象离其对宇宙其余部分的感知越来越远，因此，宇宙的全部现实似乎逐渐变得更加陌生。二十世纪科学的统治符码，相对论和量子力学，已经成为人类思维的终极怪圈。它们是由阿尔伯特-爱因斯坦、马克斯-普朗克和其他理论物理学的先驱们在寻找可量化的真理时构想出来的，这些真理既为外星人所知，也为我们人类所知，因此可证明是独立于人类思维的。物理学家们取得了巨大的成功，但在此过程中他们揭示了没有数学帮助的直觉的局限性；他们发现，对自然的理解是非常困难的。理论物理学和分子生物学是后天习得的味道。科学进步的代价是谦卑地认识到，现实的构建并不是为了让人的头脑轻易掌握。这就是科学理解的基本原则。我们的物种和它的思维方式是进化的产物，而不是进化的目的。


神论的案例
现在我们来看看史诗舞台上的最后一个原型，即最里面的房间的守卫者。更为激进的启蒙作家对科学唯物主义的影响保持警惕，开始重新评估上帝本身。他们想象出一个服从于他自己的自然法则的造物主--这种信仰被称为神论。他们对犹太教和基督教的神论提出异议，认为其神性既是全能的，又对人类有个人兴趣，他们还拒绝了天堂和地狱的非物质世界。同时，很少有人敢走完全程，接受无神论，因为这似乎意味着宇宙的无意义，有可能激怒虔诚的人。因此，总的来说，他们采取了一个中间立场。他们承认，创造者上帝是存在的，但他只允许在他自己的作品中表现出实体和过程。

神论信仰以减弱的形式持续到今天，给了科学家一个寻找上帝的许可。更确切地说，它促使一小部分人对他（她）进行部分勾勒，这些勾勒来自于他们的专业思考。

然而，很少有科学家和哲学家，更不用说宗教思想家，非常认真地对待科学神学。一个更连贯、更有趣的方法，可能在理论物理学的范围内，是尝试回答以下问题。一个由离散物质粒子组成的宇宙是否只可能有一套特定的自然规律和参数值？换句话说，人类的想象力，可以设想其他的法律和价值，从而超越了可能的存在吗？任何创造行为都可能只是我们可以想象的宇宙的一个子集。在这一点上，据说爱因斯坦在一次新神论的反思中对他的助手恩斯特-施特劳斯说："我真正感兴趣的是上帝在创造世界时是否有任何选择。" 这条推理可以相当神秘地延伸到制定 "人择原理"，它断言自然法则，至少在我们的宇宙中，必须以某种精确的方式设置，以便允许创造能够询问自然法则的生物。是有人决定这样做的吗？


启蒙神学和神学之间的争议可以概括为以下几点。基督教的传统有神论植根于理性和启示，是知识的两个可想象的来源。根据这种观点，理性和启示不能冲突，因为在对立的领域，启示被赋予了更高的作用--正如宗教裁判所在罗马提醒伽利略在正统和痛苦之间做出选择时的情况。与此相反，神论赋予理性以优势，并坚持有神论者用理性来证明启示的合理性。

十八世纪的传统神学家面对启蒙运动的挑战，拒绝退让一寸土地。他们争辩说，基督教信仰不能屈从于理性的贬低性测试。深刻的真理存在，是人类无助的头脑所无法掌握的，上帝会在他选择的时间和方式上向我们揭示这些真理。

鉴于宗教在日常生活中的核心地位，有神论者反对理性的立场似乎......嗯，合理。十八世纪的信徒们认为通过理性和启示来进行他们的生活并不困难。神学家们赢得了这场争论，仅仅是因为他们没有看到令人信服的理由来采用一种新的形而上学。启蒙运动第一次明显地陷入了困境。

因此，神论的致命缺陷根本不是理性，而是情感。纯粹的理性是不受欢迎的，因为它没有血性。剥离了神圣的神秘感的仪式失去了情感的力量，因为庆祝者需要服从于更高的力量，以完成他们对部落的忠诚本能。特别是在危险和悲剧发生的时候，不合理的仪式就是一切。理性主义无法替代对一个无懈可击的仁慈的存在的屈服，也无法替代被称为超越的信仰飞跃。可以想象，大多数人都非常希望科学能够证明上帝的存在，但却不希望衡量他的能力。

神论和科学也未能使伦理学系统化。启蒙运动对道德推理的客观基础的承诺无法兑现。如果存在一个不变的世俗的道德前提领域，那么启蒙运动时期的人类智力似乎太弱了，而且变化不定，无法找到它。因此，神学家和哲学家们坚持他们原来的立场，要么服从于宗教权威，要么阐述主观感知的自然权利。他们似乎没有任何逻辑上的选择。被宗教神圣化的千年规则似乎或多或少是有效的。人们可以无限期地推迟对天体的思考，但日常的生死问题需要道德上的决断力。

对启蒙运动方案的另一个更纯粹的理性主义反对意见仍然存在。为争论起见，假设启蒙运动支持者最奢侈的主张被证明是真的，科学家们可以展望未来，看看什么行动方案对人类是最好的。这不是把我们困在逻辑和揭示命运的笼子里吗？启蒙运动的主旨，就像预示着它的希腊人文主义一样，是普罗米修斯式的：它所产生的知识是通过将人类提升到野蛮的世界之上来解放人类。但是可能会出现相反的情况：如果科学探索削弱了神性的概念，同时规定了不可改变的自然规律，那么人类就会失去它已经拥有的自由。也许只有一种社会秩序是 "完美的"，而科学家们会找到它--或者更糟糕的是，谎称已经找到了它。宗教权威，文明的哈德良之墙，将被攻破，极权主义意识形态的野蛮人将涌入。这就是启蒙运动世俗思想的黑暗面，在法国大革命中被揭开，最近又被 "科学 "社会主义和种族法西斯主义的理论所表达。

另一个担忧是，科学驱动的社会有可能扰乱上帝设定的世界自然秩序，或数十亿年来的进化。给予科学太多的权威有可能转化为自我毁灭的不虔诚。科学和技术的无神创造实际上是现代文化的强大和引人注目的形象。弗兰肯斯坦的怪物和好莱坞的终结者（一个全金属的、由微芯片引导的弗兰肯斯坦的怪物）对它们的创造者造成了破坏，包括那些穿着白大褂、傲慢地预测一个由科学统治的新时代的天真的天才。风暴肆虐，敌对的突变体蔓延，生命死亡。国家之间用毁灭世界的技术相互威胁。甚至是温斯顿-丘吉尔，他的国家被雷达所拯救，在日本原子弹爆炸后，他担心石器时代会 "乘着科学闪亮的翅膀 "回来。

浪漫主义的兴起
对于那些因此担心科学是浮士德式的而不是普罗米修斯式的人来说，启蒙计划对精神自由--甚至对生命本身--构成了严重威胁。对这种威胁的回答是什么？叛变! 回归自然人，重新确认个人想象力的首要地位和对不朽的信心。通过艺术找到逃往更高境界的方法；推动浪漫主义革命。1807年，威廉-华兹华斯（William Wordsworth）用当时在欧洲蔓延的运动的典型话语，唤起了一种超越理性的原始和宁静的存在的光环。

我们的灵魂看到了那不朽的大海
把我们带到了这里。
可以在瞬间前往那里。
看到孩子们在岸边运动。
并听到强大的水声不断滚动。
随着Wordworth的 "无法沟通的力量的呼吸"，眼睛闭上，思想飞扬，重力的平方距离法则消失。精神进入了另一个现实，超出了重量和尺度的范围。如果不能否认物质和能量的约束性宇宙，至少可以用灿烂的蔑视来忽略它。毫无疑问，华兹华斯和他的十九世纪上半叶的英国浪漫主义诗人的作品是非常美丽的。他们用另一种语言讲述真理，并引导艺术进一步远离科学。

浪漫主义也在哲学领域开花结果，它重视反叛、自发性、强烈的情感和英雄的眼光。浪漫主义的实践者在寻找只有内心才有的愿望，他们梦想人类是无边无际的大自然的一部分。卢梭虽然经常被列为启蒙运动的哲学家，但实际上是浪漫主义哲学运动的创始人和最极端的幻想家。在他看来，学习和社会秩序是人类的敌人。在1750年（《科学与艺术论》）到1762年（《爱弥儿》）的作品中，他颂扬了 "理性的睡眠"。他的乌托邦是一个最低限度的国家，在这个国家里，人们放弃了书籍和其他智力的装饰品，以培养良好的健康和感官享受。卢梭声称，人类最初是一个处于和平自然状态的高贵的野蛮人种族，后来被文明--以及学术--所腐蚀。宗教、婚姻、法律和政府都是权贵们为了自己的私利而制造的骗局。普通人为这种高级骗局付出的代价是罪恶和不快乐。


在卢梭发明了一种惊人的不准确的人类学形式的地方，由歌德、黑格尔、赫尔德和谢林领导的德国浪漫主义者，开始把形而上学重新纳入科学和哲学。其产物Naturphilosophie是一种情感、神秘主义和准科学假设的混合体。约翰-沃尔夫冈-冯-歌德（Johann Wolfgang von Goethe）在其论述者中是最杰出的，他最想成为一名伟大的科学家。他将这一雄心置于文学之上，他对文学的贡献是不朽的。他对科学作为一种思想，一种对待有形现实的方法的尊重是毫无保留的，而且他理解其基本原则。他喜欢说，分析和综合应该像吸气和呼气一样自然交替进行。同时，他对牛顿科学的数学抽象提出批评，认为物理学在解释宇宙的目标上过于雄心勃勃。

歌德很容易被原谅。毕竟，他有一个崇高的目标--不亚于将人文科学的灵魂与科学的引擎结合起来。如果他能预见到历史的裁决，他一定会感到悲伤：伟大的诗人，可怜的科学家。由于缺乏今天所说的科学家的本能，他的综合研究失败了，更不用说必要的技术能力了。微积分让他感到困惑，有人说他连云雀和麻雀都分不清。但他以一种深刻的精神方式热爱自然。他宣称，人们必须对自然界培养一种密切、深刻的感情。"她喜欢幻想。她把人笼罩在迷雾中，她促使人走向光明。那些不愿意接受她的幻觉的人，她会像暴君一样惩罚。那些接受她的幻觉的人，她会把他们压在心底。爱她是接近她的唯一途径"。我想，在哲学家的天堂里，培根早就对歌德进行了关于心灵偶像的演讲。牛顿会立即失去耐心。

德国浪漫派的主要哲学家弗里德里希-谢林（Friedrich Schelling），试图不是用诗歌而是用理性来固定科学的普罗米修斯。他提出了一个万物的宇宙统一体，超越了人类的理解。事实本身永远不可能超过部分真理。我们所感知到的那些事实只是普遍流动的片段。谢林的结论是，大自然是有生命的--一种创造性的精神，它将认识者和被认识者结合在一起，通过越来越多的理解和感受走向最终的完全自我实现的状态。

在美国，德国的哲学浪漫主义反映在新英格兰的超验主义中，其最有名的信徒是拉尔夫-瓦尔多-爱默生和亨利-大卫-梭罗。超验主义者是激进的个人主义者，他们反对杰克逊时代盛行的美国社会压倒性的商业性质。他们设想了一个完全建立在他们个人精神气质中的精神世界。然而，他们比欧洲的同行更喜欢科学--见证了梭罗在《种子的信仰》和其他著作中许多准确的自然史观察。

狭隘的专业化时代来临了
自然科学家们在对启蒙运动议程的强烈反对下，大多放弃了对人类精神生活的研究，将另一个自由发挥的世纪让给了哲学家和诗人。事实上，这一让步被证明是科学界的一个健康决定，因为它使研究人员远离了形而上学的陷阱。在整个19世纪，物理和生物科学知识以指数级的速度增长。与此同时，社会科学--社会学、人类学、经济学和政治理论--像新崛起的公国和伯爵一样，在硬科学和人文学科之间的空间里争夺领地。在统一的启蒙运动愿景下，伟大的学习分支以其目前的形式出现--自然科学、社会科学和人文科学。

启蒙运动在方向上是轻蔑的世俗化的，同时也是对神学的依赖和关注，它把西方人的思想带到了一个新的自由的门槛。它抛弃了一切，抛弃了各种形式的宗教和民间权威，抛弃了一切可以想象的恐惧，而把自由探索的伦理放在首位。它描绘了一个宇宙，人类在其中扮演着永久的冒险家的角色。两个世纪以来，上帝似乎在以一种新的声音对人类说话。

然而，到了19世纪初，这个辉煌的形象正在褪色。理性断裂，知识分子对科学的领导力失去信心，知识统一的前景急剧下降。启蒙运动的精神在政治理想主义和个别思想家的希望中继续存在。在随后的几十年里，新的学派如雨后春笋般涌现：边沁和米尔的功利主义伦理，马克思和恩格斯的历史唯物主义，查尔斯-皮尔斯、威廉-詹姆斯和约翰-杜威的实用主义。但核心议程似乎已被无可挽回地放弃。在过去的两个世纪中吸引了思想家的宏伟构想失去了大部分的可信度。

科学在自己的道路上前行。它继续每15年在从业人员、发现和技术期刊方面翻一番，就像它自1700年代初以来所做的那样，最终在1970年左右才开始趋于平稳。它不断升级的成功开始使有序的、可解释的宇宙的想法再次得到信任。这一启蒙运动的基本前提在数学、物理学和生物学等学科中获得了地位，而培根和笛卡尔在这些学科中首次提出了这一概念。然而，还原论的巨大成功，即其关键方法，对整个启蒙运动计划的恢复起到了反作用。正是因为科学信息以几何级数的速度增长，大多数研究人员很少考虑统一性，甚至更少考虑哲学。他们认为，有效的东西就是有效的。他们在处理充满禁忌的心灵运作的物理基础方面仍然比较缓慢，这个概念在17世纪末被誉为从生物学到社会科学的大门。

对大局缺乏兴趣还有另一个更卑微的原因：科学家根本没有必要的智力能量。绝大多数的科学家从来都只是一个职业勘探者。这一点在今天比以往任何时候都更真实。他们专注于专业；他们的教育没有为他们打开世界的广阔轮廓。他们获得了他们所需要的培训，以前往边疆并做出他们自己的发现--并尽可能快地做出这些发现，因为在边疆的生活是昂贵和危险的。最有成效的科学家被安置在价值百万美元的实验室里，他们没有时间去考虑大局，也看不到什么利润。美国国家科学院的花环，即2100名当选成员佩戴在他们的衣襟上作为成就的标志，包含一个科学黄金的中心，周围是自然哲学的紫色。大多数领先的科学家的眼睛，唉，都定格在黄金上。

因此，我们不应该惊讶地发现，物理学家不知道什么是基因，而生物学家则猜测弦理论与小提琴有关。在科学界，赠款和荣誉是为了发现，而不是为了学术和智慧。一直以来都是如此。弗朗西斯-培根，利用使他升任大法官的政治技巧，亲自向英国君主恳求资金，以实施他统一知识的伟大计划。他从未得到一分钱。笛卡尔在其名气最大的时候，被法国宫廷隆重地授予一笔津贴。但这笔钱仍然没有着落，帮助他被赶到了 "岩石和冰块之间的熊之地 "的更慷慨的瑞典宫廷，在那里他很快死于肺炎。

同样的专业原子化困扰着社会科学和人文科学。世界各地的高等教育院系都是专家的聚集地。要成为一个原创性的学者，就是要在一个由类似的世界权威组成的多语种加尔各答中成为一个高度专业化的世界权威。1797年，当杰斐逊担任美国哲学学会主席时，所有具有专业水准的美国科学家和他们的人文科学同事都可以在哲学厅的演讲室里舒适地坐着。大多数人可以合理地讨论整个世界的学问，当时的世界还很小，可以看到整体。他们今天的继任者，包括45万名科学和工程领域的博士学位持有者，将使费城人满为患。一般来说，专业学者没有什么选择，只能把研究专长和研究议程在他们之间进行切割。要想成为一名成功的学者，意味着要把职业生涯花在膜生物物理学、浪漫主义诗人、早期美国历史或其他一些此类受限的正式研究领域。


二十世纪，包括建筑在内的艺术领域的现代主义进一步加剧了专业知识的碎片化。大师们的作品--布拉克、毕加索、斯特拉文斯基、艾略特、乔伊斯、玛莎-格雷厄姆、格罗皮乌斯、弗兰克-劳埃德-赖特以及他们的同行--是如此的新颖和有话可说，以至于无法进行通用分类，也许除了这一点。现代主义者试图不惜一切代价实现新的和挑衅性的目标。他们确定了传统的限制性束缚，并自觉地打破它们。许多人拒绝现实主义的表达方式，以探索无意识。弗洛伊德既是文学风格家又是科学家，他启发了他们，并有理由被列入他们的行列。精神分析是一种力量，它将现代主义知识分子和艺术家的注意力从社会和政治转移到私人和心理上。用美国历史学家卡尔-肖尔斯克（Carl Schorske）的话说，他们将自己领域内的每一个话题都置于 "无情的变革离心机 "之下，他们的目的是自豪地宣称二十世纪的高级文化独立于过去。他们不是虚无主义者；相反，他们试图创造一个新的秩序和意义的水平。他们是完全的实验主义者，希望参与到一个激进的技术和政治变革的世纪中，并完全以自己的方式塑造其中的一部分。

因此，启蒙运动所遗留的自由飞行，在浪漫主义时代使人文科学脱离，到了二十世纪中叶，已经完全消除了借助科学统一知识的希望。斯诺（C. P. Snow）在他1959年的红场演讲中所描述的两种文化，即文学和科学，已经不再处于对话状态。

后现代主义之谜
所有的运动都趋向于极端，这大约就是我们今天的情况。从浪漫主义到现代主义的旺盛的自我实现，现在产生了哲学上的后现代主义（通常称为后结构主义，特别是在其更多的政治和社会学表达中）。后现代主义是启蒙运动的最终对立面。两者之间的区别可以粗略地表达如下。启蒙思想家认为我们可以知道一切，而激进的后现代主义者认为我们可以什么都不知道。

哲学后现代主义者，一个在无政府主义黑旗下的反叛团队，挑战科学和传统哲学的基础。他们中的激进分子提出，现实是一种由头脑构建的状态。在这种建构主义的夸张版本中，人们无法发现任何 "真实 "的现实，也没有外在于心理活动的客观真理，只有由统治社会团体传播的流行版本。鉴于每个社会都为同等压迫力量的利益而创造自己的准则，伦理学也不可能有坚实的基础。


如果这些前提是正确的，那么，在表达真理和道德方面，一种文化和其他文化一样好，每个文化都有自己的特殊方式。政治上的多元文化是合理的；社区中的每一个种族群体和性偏好都具有同等的有效性，值得社区支持，并在教育议程中得到强制代表--也就是说，如果这些前提是正确的。他们的倡导者说，这些前提必须是正确的，因为不这样说就是偏执，这是一种大罪。最重要的是，如果我们同意在这个例子中放弃后现代主义对普遍真理的禁止，并且所有人都同意为了共同的利益而同意。因此，卢梭被重新激活了。

后现代主义在解构中表达得更加明确，解构是一种文学批评的技术。它的基本前提是，每个作者的意义对他自己来说都是独一无二的；他的真实意图和其他与客观现实有关的东西都不能被可靠地确定。因此，他的文本可以接受来自评论家头脑中同样孤独的世界的新鲜分析和评论。但评论者也会被解构，评论者的评论者也会被解构，以此类推，无限倒退。这就是解构主义的创造者雅克-德里达的意思，当他说出 "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte"（"文本之外没有东西"）的公式时。至少，这是我认为他的意思，在仔细阅读了他、他的辩护人和他的批评者之后。如果激进的后现代主义的前提是正确的，我们永远无法确定他的意思。反过来说，如果那是他的意思，也许我们就没有义务进一步考虑他的论点。这个难题，我倾向于搁置为 "德里达悖论"，它类似于克里特悖论（一个克里特人说 "所有克里特人都是骗子"）。这个问题有待解决，但人们不应该在这个问题上感到任何重大的紧迫感。


科学家们被要求对他们所说的话负责，他们没有发现后现代主义的作用。反过来，后现代主义对科学的姿态也是一种颠覆。它包含了对重力、周期表、天体物理学和类似的外部世界的支柱的暂时接受，但总的来说，科学文化被看作是另一种认识方式，而且是一种主要由欧洲和美国白人男性设计的心理姿态。

人们很想把后现代主义放在历史的好奇心柜子里，与神学和超验唯心主义并列，但它现在已经渗入了社会科学和人文科学的主流。在那里，它被视为一种元理论（关于理论的理论）的技术，学者们通过这种技术，与其说是分析科学学科的主题，不如说是分析解释为什么特定的科学家以他们的方式思考的文化和心理因素。分析师将重点放在 "根基隐喻 "上，即思想家头脑中的那些统治性图像，他据此设计理论和实验。例如，心理学家Kenneth Gergen在这里解释了现代心理学是如何被人类作为机器的隐喻所支配的。

不管人的行为有什么特点，机械论者实际上不得不把他从环境中分割出来，用刺激或输入元素来看待环境，把人看作是对这些输入元素的反应和依赖，把心理领域看作是结构化的（由相互作用的元素构成），把行为分割成可以与刺激输入协调的单元，等等。
简而言之，为了正视这个问题，心理学有可能成为一门自然科学。作为那些希望以其他方式保持心理学的人--许多学者也是如此--的可能补救措施，格根列举了可以考虑的其他或许不那么有害的心理生活根基隐喻，例如戏剧性、市场和规则的遵守。心理学，如果不允许被太多的生物学所污染，在未来可以容纳无穷无尽的理论家。


随着隐喻的多样性被添加到种族多样性和性别二元论中，然后被政治化，学校和意识形态也爆炸性地倍增了。通常在方向上是左派的，比较熟悉的一般后现代主义思想模式包括非洲中心主义、建构主义社会人类学、"批判"（即社会主义）科学、深层生态学、生态女权主义、拉康精神分析、拉图式科学社会学和新马克思主义，此外还必须加上围绕和贯穿它们的解构主义和新时代整体主义的所有令人困惑的品种。

他们的追随者们在比赛场上焦头烂额，有时很出色，通常不是，容易使用行话，令人捉摸不透。每个人都以自己的方式似乎在向十七世纪被启蒙运动抛弃的神秘主义漂移--而且不是没有表达过相当的个人痛苦。已故的米歇尔-福柯是思想史上伟大的政治权力解释者，他处于 "西方思想生活的顶峰"，文学评论家乔治-斯恰拉巴敏锐地写道。

福柯正在努力解决现代身份最深刻、最棘手的难题....。对于那些相信上帝、自然法则和超验理性都不存在的人，以及那些认识到物质利益--权力--以各种微妙方式腐蚀、甚至构成以往每一种道德的人，一个人如何生活，一个人可以坚守什么价值？
如何坚守，坚守什么？为了解决这些令人不安的问题，让我们从远离福柯和存在主义的绝望开始。考虑一下这个经验法则：如果哲学立场既让我们困惑，又关闭了进一步探究的大门，那么它们很可能是错误的。


对于福柯，我想说，如果我可以的话（我并不是说听起来很讨人喜欢），这并不是那么糟糕。一旦我们克服了发现宇宙并非以我们为中心的震惊，大脑所能掌握的所有意义，以及它所能承载的所有情感，还有我们可能希望享受的所有共同冒险，都可以通过破译遗传的有序性来找到，这种有序性承载着我们这个物种穿越地质时间，并在它身上打上深层历史的残留物。理性将被推进到新的水平，情感将在潜在的无限模式中发挥。真实的东西将从虚假的东西中分离出来，我们将很好地理解彼此，因为我们是同一物种，拥有生物上相似的大脑，所以理解得更快。

对于那些担心知识界日益消解和不相关的人，这确实令人震惊，我建议一直有两种原创思想家--那些在看到无序时试图创造秩序的人，以及那些在遇到秩序时试图通过创造无序来抗议的人。两者之间的张力是推动学习前进的动力。它使我们在一个曲折的进步轨迹上向上提升。在达尔文式的思想竞赛中，秩序总是获胜，因为--简单地说--这就是现实世界的运作方式。

作为今天不受约束的浪漫主义的庆祝者，后现代主义者丰富了文化。他们对我们其他人说，也许，只是也许，你是错的。他们的想法就像烟花爆炸的火花，向四面八方飞去，没有后续的能量，很快就会在无维的黑暗中眨眼消失。然而，少数人将持续足够长的时间，在意想不到的地方投下光芒。这是看好后现代主义的一个原因，即使它威胁着理性思维。另一个原因是它为那些选择不以科学教育为负担的人提供了解脱。另一个原因是它在哲学和文学研究中创造的小产业。还有一个，也是最重要的一个，就是它对传统学术的不屈不挠的批判。我们将永远需要后现代主义者或他们反叛的同类人。因为要加强有组织的知识，还有什么比不断地保护它不受敌对势力的影响更好的方法呢？约翰-斯图亚特-米尔（John Stuart Mill）正确地指出，当领域中没有敌人时，教师和学习者都会在他们的岗位上睡着。如果在某种程度上，违背了所有的证据，违背了所有的理由，关键的东西掉了出来，一切都沦为认识论的混乱，我们将找到勇气承认后现代主义者是对的，并且本着启蒙运动的最佳精神，我们将重新开始。因为，正如伟大的数学家大卫-希尔伯特（David Hilbert）曾经说过的，他很好地抓住了人类精神中通过启蒙运动所表达的那一部分，"我们必须了解。我们必须了解，我们将了解"。("我们必须知道，我们将知道。")


共融的承诺

如果当代学者努力鼓励知识的融合，我相信，文化事业最终将演变为科学--我指的是自然科学--和人文科学，特别是创造性艺术。这些领域将继续成为21世纪学习的两个主要分支。社会科学将在其每个学科内分裂，这个过程已经开始了，其中一部分将与生物学融合或连续，而另一部分将与人文科学融合。它的学科将继续存在，但以彻底改变的形式存在。在这个过程中，人文科学，包括哲学、历史、道德推理、比较宗教和艺术的解释，将更接近科学，并部分地与科学融合。

我承认，自然科学家的信心往往显得过于强大。科学提供了这个时代最大胆的形而上学：相信如果我们做梦，努力去发现、解释、再做梦，从而反复进入新的领域，世界将以某种方式变得更清晰，我们将掌握宇宙的真正陌生性。而这些奇怪的东西都将被证明是有联系的，是有意义的。


英国神经生物学家查尔斯-谢林顿（Charles Sherrington）在其1941年的经典著作《人之初》（Man on His Nature）中谈到，大脑是一台 "有魔力的织布机"，永远在编织着外部世界的图画，拆掉后重新编织，发明其他世界，创造一个微型的宇宙。有文化的社会的公共心灵--世界文化--是一个巨大的织布机。通过科学，它获得了绘制外部现实的能力，远远超出了一个人的思维范围，而在艺术中，它找到了构建叙事、图像和节奏的方法，比任何单独的天才的产品都要多得多，无法估量。对于科学和艺术这两种事业来说，织布机是相同的，对它的起源和性质有一个普遍的解释，从而对人类的状况也有一个普遍的解释。

在教育方面，寻求一致性是更新文科的破碎结构的方法。在过去的三十年里，文艺复兴和启蒙运动留给我们的学问统一的理想，在很大程度上被放弃了。除了极少数的例外，美国的学院和大学已经将他们的课程分解成了小学科和专业课程的浆糊。虽然每所院校的平均本科课程数量增加了一倍，但普通教育中的必修课程比例却下降了一半以上。科学在同一时间被封存起来；在我写这篇文章的时候，只有三分之一的学院和大学要求学生至少学习一门自然科学课程。这种趋势不可能通过向学生强行灌输一些这个和一些那个的跨学科知识来扭转；真正的改革将旨在使科学与社会科学和人文科学在学术和教学中保持一致。每个大学生都应该能够回答这个问题。科学和人文学科之间的关系是什么，它对人类福祉有什么重要意义？


每个公共知识分子或政治领袖也应该能够回答这个问题。提交给国会的立法中，已经有一半有重要的科技成分。每天困扰人类的大多数问题--种族冲突、武器升级、人口过剩、堕胎、环境破坏和地方性贫困，仅举几个最顽固的问题--只有通过将自然科学的知识与社会科学和人文科学的知识相结合才能得到解决。只有跨越边界的流畅性才能提供对世界真实情况的清晰看法，而不是通过意识形态和宗教教条的视角，或者仅仅作为对当前需求的近视反应。然而，我们绝大多数的政治领导人主要或完全接受社会科学和人文科学的培训，而对自然科学知之甚少或一无所知。公共知识分子、专栏作家、媒体审讯员和智囊团的大师们也是如此。他们最好的分析是仔细和负责任的，有时也是正确的，但他们智慧的实质基础是零散的和片面的。

一个平衡的视角不能通过零散的研究学科来获得；必须追求它们之间的统一性。这种统一将很难实现。但我认为它是不可避免的。在智力上，它是真实的，而且它满足了人类本性中令人钦佩的一面所产生的冲动。只要能缩小学习的主要分支之间的差距，知识的多样性和深度就会增加。之所以如此，是因为实现了基本的凝聚力，而不是尽管如此。这项事业之所以重要，还有一个原因：它赋予智力以目的。它承诺，地平线外是秩序，而不是混乱。我认为，我们将不可避免地接受这个冒险，去那里，并找到我们需要知道的东西。



EXPLORE
HEALTH
Back From Chaos
Enlightenment thinkers knew a lot about everything, today's specialists know a lot about a little, and postmodernists doubt that we can know anything at all. One of the century's most important scientists argues, against fashion, that we can know what we need to know, and that we will discover underlying all forms of knowledge a fundamental unity.

By Edward O. Wilson
MARCH 1998 ISSUE
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IN contrast to widespread opinion, I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right. The assumptions they made about a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential for indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily to heart, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding as we learn more and more about the circumstances of our lives. The greatest enterprise of the mind always has been and always will be the attempt to link the sciences and the humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and the resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.


The key to unification is consilience. I prefer this word to "coherence," because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas "coherence" has several possible meanings. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience -- literally a "jumping together" of knowledge as a result of the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He wrote, "The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs."

Consilience can be established or refuted only by methods developed in the natural sciences -- in an effort, I hasten to add, not led by scientists, or frozen in mathematical abstraction, but consistent with the habits of thought that have worked so well in exploring the material universe.

The belief in the possibility of consilience beyond science and across the great branches of learning is a metaphysical world view, and a minority one at that, shared by only a few scientists and philosophers. Consilience cannot be proved with logic from first principles or grounded in any definitive set of empirical tests, at least not any yet conceived. Its best support is no more than an extrapolation from the consistent past success of the natural sciences. Its surest test will be its effectiveness in the social sciences and the humanities. The strongest appeal of consilience is in the prospect of intellectual adventure and, if even only modest success is achieved, a better understanding of the human condition.

To illustrate the claim just made, think of two intersecting perpendicular lines, and picture the quadrants thus created. Label one quadrant "environmental policy," one "ethics," one "biology," and one "social science."


We already think of these four domains as closely connected, so rational inquiry in one informs reasoning in the other three. Yet each undeniably stands apart in the contemporary academic mind. Each has its own practitioners, language, modes of analysis, and standards of validation. The result is confusion -- and confusion was correctly identified by Francis Bacon, four centuries ago, as the direst of errors, which "occurs wherever argument or inference passes from one world of experience to another."

Next imagine a series of concentric circles around the point of intersection.


As we cross the circles inward toward the point at which the quadrants meet, we find ourselves in an increasingly unstable and disorienting region. The ring closest to the intersection, where most real-world problems exist, is the one in which fundamental analysis is most needed. Yet virtually no maps exist; few concepts and words serve to guide us. Only in imagination can we travel clockwise from the recognition of environmental problems and the need for soundly based policy to the selection of solutions based on moral reasoning to the biological foundations of that reasoning to a grasp of social institutions as the products of biology, environment, and history -- and thence back to environmental policy.

Consider this example. Governments everywhere are at a loss regarding the best policy for regulating the dwindling forest reserves of the world. Few ethical guidelines have been established from which agreement might be reached, and those are based on an insufficient knowledge of ecology. Even if adequate scientific knowledge were available, we would have little basis for the long-term valuation of forests. The economics of sustainable yield is still a primitive art, and the psychological benefits of natural ecosystems are almost wholly unexplored.


The time has come to achieve the tour of such domains in reality. This is not an idle exercise for the delectation of intellectuals. The ease with which the educated public, not just intellectuals and political leaders, can think around these and similar circuits, starting at any point and moving in any direction, will determine how wisely public policy is chosen.

To ask if consilience can be gained in the domains of the innermost circles, such that sound judgment will flow easily from one discipline to another, is equivalent to asking whether, in the gathering of disciplines, specialists can ever reach agreement on a common body of abstract principles and evidential proof. I think they can. Trust in consilience is the foundation of the natural sciences. For the material world, at least, the momentum is overwhelmingly toward conceptual unity. Disciplinary boundaries within the natural sciences are disappearing, in favor of shifting hybrid disciplines in which consilience is implicit. They reach across many levels of complexity, from chemical physics and physical chemistry to molecular genetics, chemical ecology, and ecological genetics. None of the new specialties is considered more than a focus of research. Each is an industry of fresh ideas and advancing technology.

TERROR AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT
THE dream of intellectual unity was a product of the Enlightenment, an Icarian flight of the mind that spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A vision of secular knowledge in the service of human rights and human progress, it was the West's greatest contribution to civilization. It launched the modern era for the whole world; we are all its legatees. Then -- astonishingly -- it failed.

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Given the prospect of renewed convergence of the disciplines, it is of surpassing importance to understand both the essential nature of the Enlightenment and the weaknesses that brought it down. Both can be said to have been embodied in the life of the Marquis de Condorcet. No single event better marks the end of the Enlightenment than his death, on March 29, 1794. The circumstances were exquisitely ironic. Condorcet has been called the prophet of the Laws of Progress. By virtue of his towering intellect and visionary political leadership, he seemed destined to emerge from the French Revolution as the Jefferson of France. But in late 1793 and early 1794, as he was composing the ultimate Enlightenment blueprint, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, he was instead a fugitive from the law, liable to a sentence of death by representatives of the cause he had so faithfully served. His crime was political: He was perceived to be a Girondist, a member of a faction found too moderate -- too reasonable -- by the radical Jacobins. Worse, he had criticized the constitution drawn up by the Jacobin-dominated National Convention. He died on the floor of a cell in the jail at Bourg-la-Reine, after being imprisoned by villagers who had captured him on the run. They would certainly have turned him over to the Paris authorities for trial. The cause of death is unknown. Suicide was ruled out at the time, but poison, which he carried with him, is nevertheless a possibility; so is trauma or heart attack. At least he was spared the guillotine.

The French Revolution drew its intellectual strength from men and women like Condorcet. It was readied by the growth of educational opportunity and then fired by the idea of the universal rights of man. Yet as the Enlightenment seemed about to achieve political fruition in Europe, something went terribly wrong. What seemed at first to be minor inconsistencies widened into catastrophic failures. Thirty years earlier Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract, had introduced the idea that was later to inspire the rallying slogan of the Revolution: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." But he had also invented the fateful abstraction of the "general will" to achieve these goals. The general will, he wrote, is the rule of justice agreed upon by assemblies of free people whose interest is only to serve the welfare of the society and of each person in it. When achieved, it forms a sovereign contract that is "always constant, unalterable, and pure." "Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will, and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole." Those who do not conform to the general will, Rousseau continued, are deviants subject to necessary force by the assembly. A truly egalitarian democracy cannot be achieved in any other way.


Robespierre, who led the Reign of Terror that overtook the Revolution in 1793, grasped this logic all too well. He and his fellow Jacobins understood Rousseau's necessary force to include summary condemnations and executions of all those who opposed the new order. Some 300,000 nobles, priests, political dissidents, and other troublemakers were imprisoned, and 17,000 died within the year. In Robespierre's universe the goals of the Jacobins were noble and pure. They were, as he serenely wrote in February of 1794 (shortly before he himself was guillotined), "the peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality, the rule of that eternal justice whose laws have been engraved ... upon the hearts of men, even upon the heart of the slave who knows them not and of the tyrant who denies them."

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Thus took form the easy cohabitation of egalitarian ideology and savage coercion that was to plague the next two centuries. The decline of the Enlightenment was hastened not just by tyrants who used it for justification but by rising and often valid intellectual opposition. Its dream of a world made orderly and fulfilling by free intellect had seemed at first indestructible, the instinctive goal of all men. The movement gave rise to the modern intellectual tradition of the West and much of its culture. Its creators, among the greatest scholars since Plato and Aristotle, showed what the human mind can accomplish. Isaiah Berlin, one of their most perceptive historians, praised them justly as follows: "The intellectual power, honesty, lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind." But they reached too far, and their best efforts were not enough to create the sustained endeavor their vision foretold.


THE PERIL OF PERFECTIBILITY
THIS, then, was the problem. Although reason supposedly was the defining trait of the human species, and needed only a little more cultivation to flower universally, it fell short. Humanity was not paying attention. Humanity thought otherwise. The causes of the Enlightenment's decline, which persist today, illuminate the labyrinthine wellsprings of human motivation. It is worth asking, particularly in this winter of our cultural discontent, whether the original spirit of the Enlightenment -- confidence, optimism, eyes to the horizon -- can be regained. And to ask in honest opposition, Should it be regained, or did it possess in its first conception, as some have suggested, a dark-angelic flaw? Might its idealism have contributed to the Terror, which foreshadowed the horrendous dream of the totalitarian state? If knowledge can be consolidated, so might the "perfect" society be designed -- one culture, one science -- whether fascist, communist, or theocratic.

The Enlightenment itself, however, was never a unified movement. It was less a determined, swift river than a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels. By the time of the French Revolution it was very old. It emerged from the Scientific Revolution during the early seventeenth century and attained its greatest influence in the European academy during the eighteenth. Its originators often clashed over fundamental issues. Most engaged from time to time in absurd digressions and speculations, such as looking for hidden codes in the Bible and for the anatomical seat of the soul. The overlap of their opinions was nevertheless extensive and clear and well reasoned enough to bear this simple characterization: They shared a passion to demystify the world and free the mind from the impersonal forces that imprison it.


They were driven by the thrill of discovery. They agreed on the power of science to reveal an orderly, understandable universe and thereby lay an enduring base for free rational discourse. They thought that the perfection of the celestial bodies discovered by astronomy and physics could serve as a model for human society. They believed in the unity of all knowledge, individual human rights, natural law, and indefinite human progress. They tried to avoid metaphysics even as the flaws in and incompleteness of their explanations forced them to practice it. They resisted organized religion. They despised revelation and dogma. They endorsed, or at least tolerated, the state as a contrivance required for civil order. They believed that education and right reason would enormously benefit humanity. A few, like Condorcet, thought that human beings were perfectible and capable of shaping and administering a political utopia.

FRANCIS BACON AND GOD'S MACHINE
SCIENCE was the engine of the Enlightenment. The more scientifically disposed Enlightenment authors agreed that the cosmos is an orderly material construct governed by exact laws. It can be broken down into entities that can be measured and arranged in hierarchies, such as societies, which are made up of persons, whose brains consist of nerves, which in turn are composed of atoms. In principle, at least, the atoms can be reassembled into nerves, the nerves into brains, and the persons into societies, with the whole understood as a system of mechanisms and forces. If one insists on a divine intervention, the Enlightenment philosophers maintained, one should think of the world as God's machine. The conceptual constraints that cloud our vision of the physical world can be eased for the betterment of humanity in every sphere. Thus Condorcet, in an era still unburdened by the ballast of complicating fact, called for the illumination of the moral and political sciences by the "torch of analysis."

The grand architect of this dream was not Condorcet, or any of the other philosophes who expressed it so well, but Francis Bacon. Among the Enlightenment founders, he is the one who most endures in spirit, informing us across four centuries that we must understand nature, both around us and within ourselves, in order to set humanity on the course of self-improvement. We must do it knowing that our destiny is in our own hands and that denial of the dream will lead back to barbarism. In his scholarship Bacon questioned the solidity of classical "delicate" learning -- those medieval forms based on ancient texts and logical expatiation. He spurned reliance on ordinary scholastic philosophy, calling for a study of nature and the human condition on their own terms and without artifice. He observed that because "the mind, hastily and without choice, imbibes and treasures up the first notices of things, from whence all the rest proceed, errors must forever prevail, and remain uncorrected." Thus knowledge is not well constructed but "resembles a magnificent structure that has no foundation."


By reflecting on all possible methods of investigation available to his imagination, Bacon concluded that the best among them for accurate thought was induction -- the gathering of large numbers of facts and the detection of patterns. In order to obtain maximum objectivity, we must entertain only a minimum of preconceptions. Bacon proclaimed a pyramid of disciplines, with natural history forming the base, physics above and subsuming it, and metaphysics at the peak, explaining everything below -- though perhaps in powers and forms beyond the grasp of man.

He was neither a gifted scientist ("I can not thridd needles so well") nor trained in mathematics, but he was a brilliant thinker, who founded the philosophy of science. A Renaissance man, he took, in his famous phrase, all knowledge to be his province. Then he stepped forward into the Enlightenment as the first taxonomist and master purveyor of the scientific method.

Bacon defined science broadly to include a foreshadowing of the social sciences and parts of the humanities. The repeated testing of knowledge by experiment, he insisted, is the cutting edge of learning. But to him "experiment" meant more than controlled manipulations in the manner of modern science. It was all the ways in which humanity brings change into the world through information, agriculture, and industry. He believed the great branches of learning to be open-ended and constantly evolving, but he nonetheless wrote eloquently on his belief in the underlying unity of knowledge. He rejected the sharp divisions among the disciplines that had prevailed since Aristotle.

Bacon elaborated on but did not invent the method of induction as a counterpoint to classical and medieval deduction. Still, he deserves the title Father of Induction, on which much of his fame rested in later centuries. The procedure he favored was much more than merely making factual generalizations -- such as, to use a modern example, "Ninety percent of plant species have flowers that are yellow, red, or white, and are visited by insects." Rather, he said, start with such an unbiased description of phenomena. Collect their common traits into an intermediate level of generality. Then proceed to higher levels of generality -- such as, "Flowers have evolved colors and anatomy designed to attract certain kinds of insects, and these are the creatures that exclusively pollinate them." Bacon's reasoning was an improvement over the traditional methods of description and classification prevailing during the Renaissance, but it anticipated little of the methods of concept formation, competing hypotheses, and theory that form the core of modern science.

In psychology, and particularly in the nature of creativity, Bacon cast his vision furthest ahead. Although he did not use the word (it was not coined until 1653), he understood the critical importance of psychology in scientific research and all other forms of scholarship. He had a deep intuition for the mental processes of discovery. He understood the means by which those processes are best systematized and most persuasively transmitted. "The human understanding," he wrote, "is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would.'" He did not mean by this to distort perception of the real world by interposing a prism of emotion. Reality ought still to be embraced directly and reported without flinching. But it is also best delivered the same way it was discovered, retaining a comparable vividness and play of the emotions.

I do not wish, by ranking Francis Bacon so high, to portray him as a thoroughly modern man. He was far from that. His friend William Harvey, a physician and a real scientist who made a fundamental discovery, the circulation of the blood, noted drily that Bacon wrote philosophy like a Lord Chancellor. His phrases make splendid marble inscriptions and commencement flourishes. The unity of knowledge he conceived is remote from the present-day concept of consilience, far from the deliberate, systematic linkage of cause and effect across the disciplines. His stress lay instead on the common means of inductive inquiry that might optimally serve all the branches of learning. He searched for the techniques that best convey the knowledge gained, and to that end he argued for the full employment of the humanities, including art and fiction, as the best means for developing and expressing science. Science, as he broadly defined it, should be poetry, and poetry science. That, at least, has a pleasingly modern ring.

Bacon's philosophy raised the sights of a small but influential public. It helped to prime the Scientific Revolution, which was to blossom spectacularly in the decades ahead. To this day his vision remains at the heart of the scientific-technological ethic. He was a magnificent figure, standing alone by necessity of circumstance, who achieved that affecting combination of humility and innocent arrogance present only in the greatest scholars.

DESCARTES AND THE THREE COORDINATES
ALL histories that live in our hearts are peopled by archetypes in mythic narratives. This, I believe, is part of Francis Bacon's appeal and the reason that his fame endures. In the tableau of the Enlightenment, Bacon is the herald of adventure. A new world is waiting, he announced; let us begin the long and difficult march into its unmapped terrain. René Descartes, the founder of algebraic geometry and modern philosophy, and France's pre-eminent scholar of all time, is the mentor in the narrative. Like Bacon before him, he summoned scholars to the scientific enterprise; among them came the young Isaac Newton. Descartes showed how to do science with the aid of precise deduction, cutting to the quick of each phenomenon and skeletonizing it. The world is three-dimensional, he explained, so let our perception of it be framed in three coordinates. Today they are called Cartesian coordinates. With them the length, breadth, and height of any object can be exactly specified and subjected to mathematical operations to explore the object's essential qualities. Descartes accomplished this step in elementary form by reformulating algebraic notation so that it could be used to solve complex problems of geometry and, further, to explore realms of mathematics beyond the visual realm of three-dimensional space.


Descartes's overarching vision was of knowledge as a system of interconnected truths that can ultimately be abstracted into mathematics. It all came to him, he said, through a series of dreams in November of 1619, when somehow, in a flurry of symbols (thunderclaps, books, an evil spirit, a delicious melon), he perceived that the universe is both rational and united throughout by cause and effect. He believed that this conception could be applied everywhere from physics to medicine -- hence biology -- and even to moral reasoning. In this respect he laid the groundwork for the belief in the unity of learning that was to influence Enlightenment thought profoundly in the eighteenth century.

Descartes insisted that systematic doubt was the first principle of learning. By his light, all knowledge was to be laid out and tested on the iron frame of logic. He allowed himself only one undeniable premise, captured in the celebrated phrase "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think, therefore I am." The system of Cartesian doubt, which still thrives in modern science, is one in which all assumptions that can be are systematically eliminated, so as to leave only one set of axioms on which rational thought can be based and experiments can be rigorously designed.


Descartes nonetheless made a fundamental concession to metaphysics. A lifelong Catholic, he believed in God as a perfect being, manifested by the power of the idea of such a being in his own mind. That given, he went on to argue for the complete separation of mind and matter. The stratagem freed him to put spirit aside and concentrate on matter as pure mechanism. In works published over the years 1637-1649 Descartes introduced reductionism, the study of the world as an assemblage of physical parts that can be broken down and analyzed separately. Reductionism and analytic mathematical modeling were destined to become the most powerful intellectual instruments of modern science. (The year 1642 was a signal one in the history of ideas: with Descartes's Meditationes de Prima Philosophia just published and his Principia Philosophiae soon to follow, Galileo died and Newton was born.)

As Enlightenment history unfolded, Isaac Newton came to rank with Galileo as the most influential of the heroes who answered Bacon's call. A restless seeker of horizons, stunningly resourceful, he invented calculus before Gottfried Leibniz, whose notation was nevertheless clearer and is the one used today. In company with analytic geometry, calculus proved to be one of the two crucial mathematical techniques in physics and, later, chemistry, biology, and economics.

In 1684 Newton formulated the mass and distance laws of gravity, and in 1687 the three laws of motion. With these mathematical formulations he achieved the first great breakthrough in modern science. He showed that the planetary orbits postulated by Copernicus and proved elliptical by Kepler could be predicted from the first principles of mechanics. His laws were exact and equally applicable to all inanimate matter, from the solar system down to grains of sand -- and, of course, to the falling apple that had triggered his thinking on the subject twenty years previously (apparently a true story). The universe, he said, is not just orderly but also intelligible. At least part of God's grand design could be written with a few lines on a piece of paper.

The laws of gravity and motion were a powerful beginning. And they started Enlightenment scholars thinking, Why not a Newtonian solution to the affairs of men? The idea grew into one of the mainstays of the Enlightenment agenda. As late as 1835 Adolphe Quételet was proposing "social physics" as the basis of the discipline soon to be named sociology. Auguste Comte, his contemporary, believed a true social science to be inevitable. "Men," he said, echoing Condorcet, "are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology, so why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?" People, after all, are just extremely complicated machines. Why shouldn't their behavior and social institutions conform to certain still-undefined natural laws?


Given its unbroken string of successes during the next three centuries, reductionism may seem today the obvious best way to have constructed knowledge of the physical world, but it was not so easy to grasp at the dawn of science. Western science took the lead in the world largely because it cultivated reductionism and physical law to expand the understanding of space and time beyond that attainable by the unaided senses. The advance, however, carried humanity's self-image ever further from its perception of the remainder of the universe, and as a consequence the full reality of the universe seemed to grow progressively more alien. The ruling talismans of twentieth-century science, relativity and quantum mechanics, have become the ultimate in strangeness to the human mind. They were conceived by Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and other pioneers of theoretical physics during a search for quantifiable truths that would be known to extraterrestrials as well as to our species, and hence certifiably independent of the human mind. The physicists succeeded magnificently, but in so doing they revealed the limitations of intuition unaided by mathematics; an understanding of nature, they discovered, comes very hard. Theoretical physics and molecular biology are acquired tastes. The cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind. This is the cardinal tenet of scientific understanding: Our species and its ways of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution.


THE CASE FOR DEISM
WE now pass to the final archetype of the epic tableau, the keepers of the innermost room. The more radical Enlightenment writers, alert to the implications of scientific materialism, moved to reassess God himself. They imagined a Creator obedient to his own natural laws -- the belief known as deism. They disputed the theism of Judeo-Christianity, whose divinity is both omnipotent and personally interested in human beings, and they rejected the nonmaterial worlds of heaven and hell. At the same time, few dared go the whole route and embrace atheism, which seemed to imply cosmic meaninglessness and risked outraging the pious. So by and large they took a middle position. God the Creator exists, they conceded, but He is allowed only the entities and processes manifest in his own handiwork.

Deistic belief, by persisting in attenuated form to this day, has given scientists a license to search for God. More precisely, it has prompted a small number to make a partial sketch of Him (Her? It? Them?), derived from their professional meditations.

Few scientists and philosophers, however, let alone religious thinkers, take scientific theology very seriously. A more coherent and interesting approach, possibly within the reach of theoretical physics, is to try to answer the following question: Is a universe of discrete material particles possible only with one specific set of natural laws and parameter values? In other words, does the human imagination, which can conceive of other laws and values, thereby exceed possible existence? Any act of Creation may be only a subset of the universes we can imagine. On this point Einstein is said to have remarked to his assistant Ernst Straus, in a moment of neo-deistic reflection, "What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world." That line of reasoning can be extended rather mystically to formulate the "anthropic principle," which asserts that the laws of nature, in our universe at least, had to be set a certain precise way so as to allow the creation of beings able to ask about the laws of nature. Did Someone decide to do it that way?


The dispute between Enlightenment deism and theology can be summarized as follows. The traditional theism of Christianity is rooted in both reason and revelation, the two conceivable sources of knowledge. According to this view, reason and revelation cannot be in conflict, because in areas of opposition, revelation is given the higher role -- as the Inquisition reminded Galileo in Rome when he was offered a choice between orthodoxy and pain. In contrast, deism grants reason the edge, and insists that theists justify revelation with the use of reason.

Traditional theologians of the eighteenth century, faced with the Enlightenment challenge, refused to yield an inch of ground. Christian faith, they argued, cannot submit itself to the debasing test of rationality. Deep truths exist that are beyond the grasp of the unaided human mind, and God will reveal them to our understanding when and by whatever means He chooses.

Given the centrality of religion in everyday life, the stand of the theists against reason seemed ... well, reasonable. Eighteenth-century believers saw no difficulty in conducting their lives by both ratiocination and revelation. The theologians won the argument simply because they saw no compelling reason to adopt a new metaphysics. For the first time, the Enlightenment visibly stumbled.

The fatal flaw in deism is thus not rational at all but emotional. Pure reason is unappealing because it is bloodless. Ceremonies stripped of sacred mystery lose their emotional force, because celebrants need to defer to a higher power in order to consummate their instinct for tribal loyalty. In times of danger and tragedy especially, unreasoning ceremony is everything. Rationalism provides no substitute for surrender to an infallible and benevolent being, or for the leap of faith called transcendence. Most people, one imagines, would very much like science to prove the existence of God but not to take the measure of his capacity.

Deism and science also failed to systematize ethics. The Enlightenment promise of an objective basis for moral reasoning could not be kept. If an immutable secular field of ethical premises exists, the human intellect during the Enlightenment seemed too weak and shifting to locate it. So theologians and philosophers stuck to their original positions, either by deferring to religious authority or by articulating subjectively perceived natural rights. No logical alternative seemed open to them. The millennium-old rules sacralized by religion seemed to work, more or less. One can defer reflection on the celestial spheres indefinitely, but daily matters of life and death require moral decisiveness.

ANOTHER, more purely rationalist objection to the Enlightenment program remains. Grant for argument's sake that the most extravagant claims of the Enlightenment's supporters proved true and scientists could look into the future to see what course of action was best for humanity. Wouldn't that trap us in a cage of logic and revealed fate? The thrust of the Enlightenment, like the Greek humanism that prefigured it, was Promethean: the knowledge it generated was to liberate mankind by lifting it above the savage world. But the opposite might occur: if scientific inquiry diminishes the conception of divinity while prescribing immutable natural laws, then humanity can lose what freedom it already possesses. Perhaps only one social order is "perfect" and scientists will find it -- or, worse, falsely claim to have found it. Religious authority, the Hadrian's Wall of civilization, will be breached, and the barbarians of totalitarian ideology will pour in. Such is the dark side of Enlightenment secular thought, unveiled in the French Revolution and expressed more recently by theories of "scientific" socialism and racialist fascism.

Still another concern is that a science-driven society risks upsetting the natural order of the world set in place by God, or by billions of years of evolution. Science given too much authority risks conversion into a self-destroying impiety. The godless creations of science and technology are in fact powerful and arresting images of modern culture. Frankenstein's monster and Hollywood's Terminator (an all-metal, microchip-guided Frankenstein's monster) wreak destruction on their creators, including the naive geniuses in lab coats who arrogantly forecast a new age ruled by science. Storms rage, hostile mutants spread, life dies. Nations menace one another with world-destroying technology. Even Winston Churchill, whose country was saved by radar, worried after the atom-bombing of Japan that the Stone Age might return "on the gleaming wings of Science."

THE RISE OF ROMANTICISM
FOR those who thus feared science as Faustian rather than Promethean, the Enlightenment program posed a grave threat to spiritual freedom -- even to life itself. What is the answer to such a threat? Revolt! Return to natural man, reassert the primacy of individual imagination and confidence in immortality. Find an escape to a higher realm through art; promote a Romantic revolution. In 1807 William Wordsworth, in words typical of the movement then spreading over Europe, evoked the aura of a primal and serene existence beyond reason's grasp.

Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.
With Wordworth's "breathings for incommunicable powers" the eyes close, the mind soars, the inverse square distance law of gravity falls away. The spirit enters another reality, beyond the reach of weight and measure. If the constraining universe of matter and energy cannot be denied, at least it can be ignored with splendid contempt. Beyond question, Wordsworth and his fellow English Romantic poets of the first half of the nineteenth century conjured works of great beauty. They spoke truths in another tongue, and guided the arts still further from the sciences.

Romanticism also flowered in philosophy, where it placed a premium on rebellion, spontaneity, intense emotion, and heroic vision. Searching for aspirations available only to the heart, its practitioners dreamed of mankind as part of boundless nature. Rousseau, although often listed as an Enlightenment philosophe, was actually the founder and most extreme visionary of the Romantic philosophical movement. To him, learning and social order were the enemies of humanity. In works from 1750 (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts) to 1762 (Emile) he extolled the "sleep of reason." His utopia is a minimalist state in which people abandon books and other accouterments of intellect in order to cultivate good health and enjoyment of the senses. Humanity, Rousseau claimed, was originally a race of noble savages in a peaceful state of nature, and was later corrupted by civilization -- and by scholarship. Religion, marriage, law, and government are deceptions created by the powerful for their own selfish ends. The price paid by the common man for this high-level chicanery is vice and unhappiness.


Where Rousseau invented a stunningly inaccurate form of anthropology, the German Romantics, led by Goethe, Hegel, Herder, and Schelling, set out to reinsert metaphysics into science and philosophy. The product, Naturphilosophie, was a hybrid of sentiment, mysticism, and quasi-scientific hypothesis. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, pre-eminent among its expositors, wanted most of all to be a great scientist. He placed that ambition above literature, to which he became an immortal contributor. His respect for science as an idea, an approach to tangible reality, was unreserved, and he understood its basic tenets. Analysis and synthesis, he liked to say, should alternate as naturally as breathing in and breathing out. At the same time, he was critical of the mathematical abstractions of Newtonian science, thinking physics far too ambitious in its goal of explaining the universe.

Goethe can easily be forgiven. After all, he had a noble purpose -- nothing less than the coupling of the soul of the humanities to the engine of science. He would have grieved had he foreseen history's verdict: great poet, poor scientist. He failed in his synthesis through lack of what is today called the scientist's instinct -- not to mention the necessary technical skills. Calculus baffled him, and some said he could not tell a lark from a sparrow. But he loved nature in a profoundly spiritual way. One must cultivate a close, deep feeling for Nature, he proclaimed. "She loves illusion. She shrouds man in mist, and she spurs him toward the light. Those who will not partake of her illusions she punishes as a tyrant would punish. Those who accept her illusions she presses to her heart. To love her is the only way to approach her." In the philosophers' empyrean, I imagine, Bacon has long since lectured Goethe on the idols of the mind. Newton will have lost patience immediately.

Friedrich Schelling, the leading philosopher of the German Romantics, attempted to immobilize the scientific Prometheus not with poetry but with reason. He proposed a cosmic unity of all things, beyond the understanding of man. Facts by themselves can never be more than partial truths. Those we perceive are only fragments of the universal flux. Nature, Schelling concluded, is alive -- a creative spirit that unites knower and known, progressing through greater and greater understanding and feeling toward an eventual state of complete self-realization.

In America, German philosophical Romanticism was mirrored in New England Transcendentalism, whose most celebrated adherents were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Transcendentalists were radical individualists who rejected the overwhelmingly commercial nature of American society that came to prevail during the Jacksonian era. They envisioned a spiritual universe built entirely within their personal ethos. They were nevertheless more congenial to science than their European counterparts -- witness the many accurate natural-history observations in Faith in a Seed and other writings by Thoreau.

THE AGE OF NARROW SPECIALIZATION DAWNS
NATURAL scientists, chastened by such robust objections to the Enlightenment agenda, mostly abandoned the examination of human mental life, yielding to philosophers and poets another century of free play. In fact, the concession proved to be a healthy decision for the profession of science, because it steered researchers away from the pitfalls of metaphysics. Throughout the nineteenth century knowledge in the physical and biological sciences grew at an exponential rate. At the same time, newly risen like upstart duchies and earldoms, the social sciences -- sociology, anthropology, economics, and political theory -- vied for territory in the space created between the hard sciences and the humanities. The great branches of learning emerged in their present form -- natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities -- out of the unified Enlightenment vision.

The Enlightenment, defiantly secular in orientation while indebted and attentive to theology, had brought the Western mind to the threshold of a new freedom. It waved aside everything, every form of religious and civil authority, every imaginable fear, to give precedence to the ethic of free inquiry. It pictured a universe in which humanity plays the role of perpetual adventurer. For two centuries God seemed to speak in a new voice to humankind.

By the early 1800s, however, the splendid image was fading. Reason fractured, intellectuals lost faith in the leadership of science, and the prospects for a unity of knowledge sharply declined. The spirit of the Enlightenment lived on in political idealism and the hopes of individual thinkers. In the ensuing decades new schools sprang up like shoots from the base of a shattered tree: the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Mill, the historical materialism of Marx and Engels, the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. But the core agenda seemed irretrievably abandoned. The grand conception that had riveted thinkers during the previous two centuries lost most of its credibility.

Science traveled on its own way. It continued to double every fifteen years in practitioners, discoveries, and technical journals, as it had since the early 1700s, finally starting to level off only around 1970. Its continuously escalating success began to give credence again to the idea of an ordered, explainable universe. This essential Enlightenment premise gained ground in the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and biology, where it had first been conceived by Bacon and Descartes. Yet the enormous success of reductionism, its key method, worked perversely against any recovery of the Enlightenment program as a whole. Precisely because scientific information was increasing at a geometric pace, most researchers thought little about unification, and even less about philosophy. They thought, What works, works. They were still slower to address the taboo-laden physical basis for the workings of the mind, a concept hailed in the late 1700s as the gateway from biology to the social sciences.

There was another, humbler reason for the lack of interest in the big picture: scientists simply didn't have the requisite intellectual energy. The vast majority of scientists have never been more than journeymen prospectors. That is truer than ever today. They are professionally focused; their education does not open them to the wide contours of the world. They acquire the training they need to travel to the frontier and make discoveries of their own -- and make them as fast as possible, because life at the edge is expensive and chancy. The most productive scientists, installed in million-dollar laboratories, have no time to think about the big picture, and see little profit in it. The rosette of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, which the 2,100 elected members wear on their lapels as a mark of achievement, contains a center of scientific gold surrounded by the purple of natural philosophy. The eyes of most leading scientists, alas, are fixed on the gold.

We should not be surprised, therefore, to find physicists who do not know what a gene is, and biologists who guess that string theory has something to do with violins. Grants and honors are given in science for discoveries, not for scholarship and wisdom. And so it has ever been. Francis Bacon, using the political skills that lofted him to the Lord Chancellorship, personally importuned the English monarchs for funds to carry forth his great scheme of unifying knowledge. He never got a penny. At the height of his fame Descartes was ceremoniously awarded a stipend by the French court. But the account remained unfunded, helping to drive him to the more generous Swedish court, in the "land of bears between rock and ice," where he soon died of pneumonia.

The same professional atomization afflicts the social sciences and the humanities. The faculties of higher education around the world are a congeries of experts. To be an original scholar is to be a highly specialized world authority in a polyglot Calcutta of similarly focused world authorities. In 1797, when Jefferson took the president's chair at the American Philosophical Society, all American scientists of professional caliber and their colleagues in the humanities could be seated comfortably in the lecture room of Philosophical Hall. Most could discourse reasonably well on the entire world of learning, which was still small enough to be seen whole. Their successors today, including 450,000 holders of the doctorate in science and engineering alone, would overcrowd Philadelphia. Professional scholars in general have little choice but to dice up research expertise and research agendas among themselves. To be a successful scholar means spending a career on membrane biophysics, the Romantic poets, early American history, or some other such constricted area of formal study.


Fragmentation of expertise was furthered in the twentieth century by modernism in the arts, including architecture. The work of the masters -- Braque, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Joyce, Martha Graham, Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and their peers -- was so novel and discursive as to thwart generic classification, except perhaps for this: The modernists tried to achieve the new and provocative at any cost. They identified the constraining bonds of tradition and self-consciously broke them. Many rejected realism of expression in order to explore the unconscious. Freud, as much a literary stylist as a scientist, inspired them and can justifiably be included in their ranks. Psychoanalysis was a force that shifted the attention of modernist intellectuals and artists from the social and political to the private and psychological. Subjecting every topic within their domain to the "ruthless centrifuge of change," in the American historian Carl Schorske's phrase, they meant proudly to assert the independence of twentieth-century high culture from the past. They were not nihilists; rather, they sought to create a new level of order and meaning. They were complete experimentalists who wished to participate in a century of radical technological and political change and to fashion part of it entirely on their own terms.

Thus the free flight bequeathed by the Enlightenment, which disengaged the humanities during the Romantic era, had by the middle of the twentieth century all but erased hope for the unification of knowledge with the aid of science. The two cultures described by C. P. Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture, the literary and the scientific, were no longer on speaking terms.

THE RIDDLE OF POSTMODERNISM
ALL movements tend toward extremes, which is approximately where we are today. The exuberant self-realization that ran from Romanticism to modernism has given rise now to philosophical postmodernism (often called post-structuralism, especially in its more political and sociological expressions). Postmodernism is the ultimate antithesis of the Enlightenment. The difference between the two can be expressed roughly as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believed we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.

The philosophical postmodernists, a rebel crew milling beneath the black flag of anarchy, challenge the very foundations of science and traditional philosophy. Reality, the radicals among them propose, is a state constructed by the mind. In the exaggerated version of this constructivism one can discern no "real" reality, no objective truths external to mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups. Nor can ethics be firmly grounded, given that each society creates its own codes for the benefit of equivalent oppressive forces.


If these premises are correct, it follows that one culture is as good as any other in the expression of truth and morality, each in its own special way. Political multiculturalism is justified; each ethnic group and sexual preference in the community has equal validity and deserves communal support and mandated representation in educational agendas -- that is, again, if the premises are correct. And they must be correct, say their promoters, because to suggest otherwise is bigotry, which is a cardinal sin. Cardinal, that is, if we agree to waive in this one instance the postmodernist prohibition against universal truth, and all agree to agree for the common good. Thus Rousseau redivivus.

Postmodernism is expressed more explicitly still in deconstruction, a technique of literary criticism. Its underlying premise is that each author's meaning is unique to himself; neither his true intention nor anything else connected to objective reality can reliably be determined. His text is therefore open to fresh analysis and commentary from the equally solipsistic world in the head of the reviewer. But the reviewer, too, is subject to deconstruction, as is the reviewer of the reviewer, and so on in infinite regress. That is what Jacques Derrida, the creator of deconstruction, meant when he stated the formula "Il n'y a pas de hors-texte" ("There is nothing outside the text"). At least, that is what I think he meant, after reading him, his defenders, and his critics with some care. If the radical postmodernist premise is correct, we can never be sure what he meant. Conversely, if that is what he meant, perhaps we are not obliged to consider his arguments further. This puzzle, which I am inclined to set aside as the "Derrida paradox," is similar to the Cretan paradox (a Cretan says "All Cretans are liars"). It awaits solution, but one should not feel any great sense of urgency in the matter.


Scientists, held responsible for what they say, have not found postmodernism useful. The postmodernist posture toward science, in turn, is one of subversion. It contains what appears to be a provisional acceptance of gravity, the periodic table, astrophysics, and similar stanchions of the external world, but in general the scientific culture is viewed as just another way of knowing, and, moreover, a mental posture contrived mostly by European and American white males.

One is tempted to place postmodernism in history's curiosity cabinet, alongside theosophy and transcendental idealism, but it has seeped by now into the mainstream of the social sciences and the humanities. It is viewed there as a technique of metatheory (theory about theories), by which scholars analyze not so much the subject matter of a scientific discipline as the cultural and psychological factors that explain why particular scientists think the way they do. The analyst places emphasis on "root metaphors," those ruling images in the thinker's mind whereby he designs theories and experiments. Here, for example, is the psychologist Kenneth Gergen explaining how modern psychology is dominated by the metaphor of human beings as machines:

Regardless of the character of the person's behavior, the mechanist theorist is virtually obliged to segment him from the environment, to view the environment in terms of stimulus or input elements, to view the person as reactive to and dependent on these input elements, to view the domain of the mental as structured (constituted of interacting elements), to segment behavior into units that can be coordinated to the stimulus inputs, and so on.
Put briefly, and to face the issue squarely, psychology is at risk of becoming a natural science. As a possible remedy for those who wish to keep it otherwise, and many scholars do, Gergen cites other, perhaps less pernicious root metaphors of mental life that might be considered, such as dramaturgy, the marketplace, and rule-following. Psychology, if not allowed to be contaminated with too much biology, can accommodate endless numbers of theoreticians in the future.


As diversity of metaphors has been added to ethnic diversity and gender dualism and then politicized, schools and ideologies have multiplied explosively. Usually leftist in orientation, the more familiar modes of general postmodernist thought include Afrocentrism, constructivist social anthropology, "critical" (that is, socialist) science, deep ecology, ecofeminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Latourian sociology of science, and neo-Marxism -- to which must be added all the bewildering varieties of deconstructionism and New Age holism swirling round about and through them.

Their adherents fret upon the field of play, sometimes brilliantly, usually not, jargon-prone and elusive. Each in his own way seems to be drifting toward that mysterium tremendum abandoned in the seventeenth century by the Enlightenment -- and not without the expression of considerable personal anguish. Of the late Michel Foucault, the great interpreter of political power in the history of ideas, poised "at the summit of Western intellectual life," the literary critic George Scialabba has perceptively written,

Foucault was grappling with the deepest, most intractable dilemmas of modern identity.... For those who believe that neither God nor natural law nor transcendent Reason exists, and who recognize the varied and subtle ways in which material interest -- power -- has corrupted, even constituted, every previous morality, how is one to live, to what values can one hold fast?
How and to what indeed? To solve these disturbing problems, let us begin by simply walking away from Foucault, and existentialist despair. Consider this rule of thumb: to the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.


To Foucault I would say, if I could (and I do not mean to sound patronizing), it's not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are the same species and possess biologically similar brains.

To those concerned about the growing dissolution and irrelevance of the intelligentsia, which is indeed alarming, I suggest that there have always been two kinds of original thinkers -- those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward. It lifts us upward on a zigzagging trajectory of progress. And in the Darwinian contest of ideas order always wins, because -- simply -- that is the way the real world works.

As today's celebrants of unrestrained Romanticism, the postmodernists enrich culture. They say to the rest of us, Maybe, just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from fireworks explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light in unexpected places. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism, even as it menaces rational thought. Another is the relief it affords those who have chosen not to encumber themselves with a scientific education. Another is the small industry it has created within philosophy and literary studies. Still another, the one that counts most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need postmodernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? John Stuart Mill correctly observed that teacher and learner alike fall asleep at their posts when there is no enemy in the field. And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the postmodernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment we will start over again. Because, as the great mathematician David Hilbert once said, capturing so well that part of the human spirit expressed through the Enlightenment, "Wir müssen wissen. Wir werden wissen." ("We must know, we will know.")


THE PROMISE OF CONSILIENCE

IF contemporary scholars work to encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe, the enterprises of culture will eventually devolve into science -- by which I mean the natural sciences -- and the humanities, particularly the creative arts. These domains will continue to be the two great branches of learning in the twenty-first century. Social science will split within each of its disciplines, a process already rancorously begun, with one part folding into or becoming continuous with biology, and the other fusing with the humanities. Its disciplines will continue to exist but in radically altered form. In the process the humanities, embracing philosophy, history, moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them.

The confidence of natural scientists, I grant, often seems overweening. Science offers the boldest metaphysics of the age: the faith that if we dream, press to discover, explain, and dream again, thereby plunging repeatedly into new terrain, the world will somehow become clearer and we will grasp the true strangeness of the universe. And the strangeness will all prove to be connected and make sense.


In his 1941 classic Man on His Nature, the British neurobiologist Charles Sherrington spoke of the brain as an "enchanted loom," perpetually weaving a picture of the external world, tearing down and reweaving, inventing other worlds, creating a miniature universe. The communal mind of literate societies -- world culture -- is an immensely larger loom. Through science it has gained the power to map external reality far beyond the reach of a single mind, and in the arts it finds the means to construct narratives, images, and rhythms immeasurably more diverse than the products of any solitary genius. The loom is the same for both enterprises, for science and for the arts, and there is a general explanation of its origin and nature and thence of the human condition.

In education the search for consilience is the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts. During the past thirty years the ideal of the unity of learning, bequeathed to us by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, has been largely abandoned. With rare exceptions American colleges and universities have dissolved their curricula into a slurry of minor disciplines and specialized courses. While the average number of undergraduate courses per institution has doubled, the percentage of mandatory courses in general education has dropped by more than half. Science was sequestered at the same time; as I write, only a third of colleges and universities require students to take at least one course in the natural sciences. The trend cannot be reversed by force-feeding students with some of this and some of that across the branches of learning; true reform will aim at the consilience of science with the social sciences and the humanities in scholarship and teaching. Every college student should be able to answer this question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare?


Every public intellectual or political leader should be able to answer that question as well. Already half the legislation coming before Congress has important scientific and technological components. Most of the issues that vex humanity daily -- ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environmental destruction, and endemic poverty, to cite several of the most persistent -- can be solved only by integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that from the social sciences and the humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as it appears through the lens of ideology and religious dogma, or as a myopic response solely to immediate need. Yet the vast majority of our political leaders are trained primarily or exclusively in the social sciences and the humanities, and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true of public intellectuals, columnists, media interrogators, and think-tank gurus. The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided.

A balanced perspective cannot be acquired by studying disciplines in pieces; the consilience among them must be pursued. Such unification will be difficult to achieve. But I think it is inevitable. Intellectually it rings true, and it gratifies impulses that arise from the admirable side of human nature. To the extent that the gaps between the great branches of learning can be narrowed, diversity and depth of knowledge will increase. They will do so because of, not despite, the underlying cohesion achieved. The enterprise is important for yet another reason: It gives purpose to intellect. It promises that order, not chaos, lies beyond the horizon. Inevitably, I think, we will accept the adventure, go there, and find what we need to know.