This is the first in a series I am writing for the Readers and Book Lovers Group. I am starting with some thoughts from Robert Rosen's book Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations (Originally Pergamon Press, 1985). This is volume one in the International Federation for Systems Research International Series on Systems Science and Engineering. Before all that technical stuff makes you run off let me assure you that what I am doing is to show that the technical aspects of this or any intellectual endeavor are necessarily embedded in the liberal arts (for lack of a better term) side of our knowledge. The first parts of this book as well as his later book, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life go a long way to break down the wall between the technical and the more general aspects of what we are. In other places I have spelled out the relation between all this and the political life we share here on Kos. The central theme of all this is explained in the first Chapter where Rosen explains where these ideas came from. They were developed while he was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara California in 1972. That Center was the founded byRobert Maynard Hutchins (January 17, 1899 – May 17, 1977) who
was an educational philosopher, dean of Yale Law School (1927–1929), and president (1929–1945) and chancellor (1945–1951) of the University of Chicago.
Please notice that he became president of the University of Chicago at the age of 30! In many ways this series is his legacy more than anything else. Hutchins was a humanitarian of a very special kind.
While he was president of the University of Chicago, Hutchins implemented wide-ranging and controversial reforms of the University, including the elimination of varsity football. The most far-reaching reforms involved the undergraduate College of the University of Chicago, which was retooled into a novel pedagogical system built on Great Books, Socratic dialogue, comprehensive examinations and early entrance to college. Although the substance of this Hutchins Plan was abandoned by the University shortly after Hutchins resigned in 1951, an adapted version of the program survives at Shimer College in Chicago.
So now you know why this apparently very technical subject is more than appropriate for readers who are normally not into technical stuff. Hutchins was the originator of a view of science and technology that is now coming into its own. Modern complexity theory has come to realize that the artificial division between science and humanities has held us back. As Rosen said back then
For Hutchins, the intellectual community was both means and end
The common good of every community belongs to every member of it. The community makes him better because he belongs to it. In political terms the common good is usually defined as peace, order, freedom and justice. These are indispensable to any person, and no person could obtain any one of them in the absence of the community. An intellectual community is one in which everyone does better intellectual work because he belongs to a community of intellectual workers. As I have already intimated, an intellectual community can not be formed of people who cannot or will not think, who will not think about anything in which the other members of the community are interested. Work that does not require intellectual effort and workers that will not engage in a common intellectual effort have no place in the intellectual community.
This is a heavy requirement and what I'll be doing is looking at the relationship between the technical and the non-technical aspects of knowledge to see why this division , in some real ways, violates the spirit of Hutchins intellectual community. Read on below as I lay the foundations.
At various times, and in a variety of ways, others have addressed the gap between the humanities and the technical. Yet the attitude of Hutchins was profoundly special. It is even more special as it permeates the revolutionary work of Robert Rosen. As I carry on with what Rosen started I can not help but hunger to see us come to grips with the failure of our modern society to integrate knowledge. As will be a constant theme in all that I say, we have failed to understand that dominant part of our Western intellectual heritage that permeates everything we do. The Cartesian reductionism, Cartesian duality and the use of the machine metaphor are implicit in all aspects of our intellectual life. Hutchins saw this clearly and he had a vision of a way to get us back on track. That vision was overpowered by the very intellectual patterns he sought to rectify. Hutchins knew the dangers of compartmentalization of knowledge. He underestimated the power that this mind set had. Rosen tells us :
He viewed the Dialog(my emphasis) as a continuation of what he called "the great conversation". In his view
The great conversation began with the Greeks, the Hebrews, the Hindus and the Chinese, and has continued to the present day. It is a conversation that deals - perhaps more extensively than it deals with anything else - with morals and religion. The questions of the nature and existence of God, the nature and destiny of man, and the organization and purpose of human society are the recurring themes of the great conversation...
More specifically, regarding the Dialog at the Center, he said,
Its members talk about what ought to be done. they come to the conference table as citizens, and their talk is about the common good...It does not take positions about what ought to be done. It asserts only that the issues it is discussing deserve the attention of citizens, The center tries to think about the things it believes its fellow citizens ought to be thinking about.
We seem to have lost this. I want to try to open a new dialog that captures these qualities. We are living in a time that is hard to describe or pin down because of the acceleration of communication. It is possible that a lot of what we are experiencing is a direct result of the way in which communication has been changing, it seems, on an almost daily basis. It makes writing essays of this kind seem rather archaic at best. Yet we struggle on. The interest today is in the struggle for power, not in what to do with that power. The latter seems to be mostly the means to the end.
Hutchins seemed to foresee this at least in a general sort of manner. His sense was that the science and technology had a special power to dominate our thinking in the context of the Cartesian mode of thinking that relies upon reduction and compartmentalization as the norm. Rosen offers this quote from Hutchins in 1931:
Science is not the collection of facts or the accumulation of data. A discipline does not become scientific merely because its professors have acquired a great deal of information. Facts do not arrange themselves. Facts do not solve problems. I do not wish to be misunderstood. We must get the facts. We must get them all... But at the same time we must raise the question whether facts alone will settle our difficulties for us. And we must raise the question whether...the accumulation and distribution of of facts is likely to lead us through the mazes of a world whose complications have produced the facts we have discovered.
These words have meaning far beyond the context of Rosen's book. In particular, they pertain to today's politics in a very important way. This needs to be thought about carefully as we try to make a political victory ours in November. These ideas have been echoed by George Lakoff in many ways in his many writings. They are not ideas to be ignored without peril.
The byproducts of the failure to heed the ideas Hutchins expresses and the failure to bring discourse back to the open exchange of ideas rather than the isolation of one specialty from another, has done great harm to our ability to live in a way that in any manner could resemble a community. I say this in a more general context than the one in which Hutchins spoke. We are in dire need to talk to each other in ways we can mutually understand. My small effort here will be aimed at helping us regain that ability.
9:42 PM PT: I forgot to mention that the second installment will be here tomorrow same time same place. I'll be answering comments tomorrow on this one as well.