There is another aspect of science that I find particularly refreshing. It has no real agenda. What I mean is that by its very nature science cannot be forced in any particular direction. The necessarily open nature of science (notwithstanding the secret work carried out in the Cold War and in some commercial laboratories) ensures that there can only ever be a democracy of intellect in this, perhaps the most important of human activities. What is encouraging about science is that it is not only powerful as a way of discovering things, politically important things as well as intellectually stimulating things, but it has now become important as metaphor. To succeed, to progress, the world must be open, endlessly modifiable, unprejudiced. Science thus has a moral authority as well as an intellectual authority. This is not always accepted.
I do not want to give the impression that this book is all about science, because it isn’t. But in this introduction I wish to draw attention to two other important philosophical effects that science has had in the twentieth century. The first concerns technology. The advances in technology are one of the most obvious fruits of science, but too often the philosophical consequences are overlooked. Rather than offer universal solutions to the human condition of the kind promised by most religions and some political theorists, science looks out on the world piecemeal and pragmatically. Technology addresses specific issues and provides the individual with greater control and/or freedom in some particular aspect of life (the mobile phone, the portable computer, the contraceptive pill). Not everyone will find ‘the gadget’ a suitably philosophical response to the great dilemmas of alienation, or ennui. I contend that it is.
The final sense in which science is important philosophically is probably the most important and certainly the most contentious. At the end of the century it is becoming clearer that we are living through a period of rapid change in the evolution of knowledge itself, and a case can be made that the advances in scientific knowledge have not been matched by comparable advances in the arts. There will be those who argue that such a comparison is wrongheaded and meaningless, that artistic culture – creative, imaginative, intuitive, and instinctive knowledge – is not and never can be cumulative as science is. I believe there are two answers to this. One answer is that the charge is false; there is a sense in which artistic culture is cumulative. I think the philosopher Roger Scruton put it well in a recent book. ‘Originality,’ he said, ‘is not an attempt to capture attention come what may, or to shock or disturb in order to shut out competition from the world. The most original works of art may be genial applications of a well-known vocabulary…. What makes them original is not their defiance of the past or their rude assault on settled expectations, but the element of surprise with which they invest the forms and repertoire of a tradition. Without tradition, originality cannot exist: for it is only against a tradition that it becomes perceivable.’8 This is similar to what Walter Pater in the nineteenth century called ‘the wounds of experience’; that in order to know what is new, you need to know what has gone before. Otherwise you risk just repeating earlier triumphs, going round in decorous circles. The fragmentation of the arts and humanities in the twentieth century has often revealed itself as an obsession with novelty for its own sake, rather than originality that expands on what we already know and accept.
The second answer draws its strength precisely from the additive nature of science. It is a cumulative story, because later results modify earlier ones, thereby increasing its authority. That is part of the point of science, and as a result the arts and humanities, it seems to me, have been to an extent overwhelmed and overtaken by the sciences in the twentieth century, in a way quite unlike anything that happened in the nineteenth century or before. A hundred years ago writers such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Thomas Mann could seriously hope to say something about the human condition that rivalled the scientific understanding then at hand. The same may be said about Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, Claude Monet, or Edouard Manet. As we shall see in chapter I, in Max Planck’s family in Germany at the turn of the century the humanities were regarded as a superior form of knowledge (and the Plancks were not atypical). Is that true any longer? The arts and humanities have always reflected the society they are part of, but over the last one hundred years, they have spoken with less and less confidence.9
A great deal has been written about modernism as a response to the new and alienating late-nineteenth-century world of large cities, fleeting encounters, grim industrialism, and unprecedented squalor. Equally important, and maybe more so, was the modernist response to science per se, rather than to the technology and the social consequences it spawned. Many aspects of twentieth-century science – relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, symbolic logic, stochastic processes, hormones, accessory food factors (vitamins) – are, or were at the time they were discovered, quite difficult. I believe that the difficulty of much of modern science has been detrimental to the arts. Put simply, artists have avoided engagement with most (I emphasise most) sciences. One of the consequences of this, as will become clearer towards the end of the book, is the rise of what John Brockman calls ‘the third culture,’ a reference to C. P. Snow’s idea of the Two Cultures – literary culture and science – at odds with one another.10 For Brockman the third culture consists of a new kind of philosophy, a natural philosophy of man’s place in the world, in the universe, written predominantly by physicists and biologists, people best placed now to make such assessments. This, for me at any rate, is one measure of the evolution in knowledge forms. It is a central message of the book.
I repeat here what I touched on in the preface: The Modern Mind is but one person’s version of twentieth-century thought. Even so, the scope of the book is ambitious, and I have had to be extremely selective in my use of material. There are some issues I have had to leave out more or less entirely. I would dearly have loved to have included an entire chapter on the intellectual consequences of the Holocaust. It certainly deserves something like the treatment Paul Fussell and Jay Winter have given to the intellectual consequences of World War I (see chapter 9). It would have fitted in well at the point where Hannah Arendt covered Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1963. A case could be made for including the achievements of Henry Ford, and the moving assembly line, so influential in all our lives, or of Charlie Chaplin, one of the first great stars of the art form born at the turn of the century. But strictly speaking these were cultural advances, rather than intellectual, and so were reluctantly omitted. The subject of statistics has, mainly through the technical design of experiments, led to many conclusions and inferences that would otherwise have been impossible. Daniel Bell kindly alerted me to this fact, and it is not his fault that I didn’t follow it up. At one stage I planned a section on the universities, not just the great institutions like Cambridge, Harvard, Göttingen, or the Imperial Five in Japan, but the great specialist installations like Woods Hole, Scripps, Cern, or Akademgorodok, Russia’s science city. And I initially planned to visit the offices of Nature, Science, the New York Review of Books, the Nobel Foundation, some of the great university presses, to report on the excitement of such enterprises. Then there are the great mosque-libraries of the Arab world, in Tunisia Egypt, Yemen. All fascinating, but the book would have doubled in length, and weight.