SCIENCE, LANGUAGE AND THE HUMAN CONDITION
Morton A. Kaplan
New York: Paragon Press, 1989
revised edition 250 pp., $14.95
Morton Kaplan's book Science, Language, and the Human Condition is unusual for a philosophical work today, because it finds a contemporary way of addressing the question of the connectedness of all that is accessible to human culture. Its tenor is such as to revive philosophy's ancient goal of preparing the citizen for civic life. From this ancient purpose sprang philosophy, etymologically, the love of wisdom, or what Kaplan calls synoptic knowledge. Wisdom, though no longer what professional philosophy--or science, for that matter--seeks, is nevertheless what Kaplan tries to recover for philosophy. It is what we all yearn for, some despairingly, some hopefully--whether from science or from religion, from the pronouncements of scientists such as Feynman, Hawking, or Chargaff, or their acolytes such as Carl Sagan or Capra, or from religion, traditional or New Age. It was this mission that philosophy originally addressed, then abandoned in modern times, and is now recovering through the work of critical and integrative philosophers such as (to mention a few) Stephen Toulmin, Robert Neville, Stanley Cavell, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Morton Kaplan.
Imagine students--or better, visitors from the workaday world--in search of knowledge about any matter of importance. Where would they go? The university is the recognized place in our culture where knowledge is gained and proclaimed. So the visitors wander from class to class to find out what is taught in psychology, economics, biology, physics, literature, religious studies, and philosophy. They expect, if not a whole picture, at least reliable fragments of a whole picture. They have the image of wisdom or synoptic knowledge as a classical garden, with paths and flower beds edged by box, with clipped hedges and even rows of shade and fruit trees, each division under the care of a special department, all marked, measured, and named. Instead they find the academic garden to be more like a tropical jungle of intertwined and competing growths, controlled by no single order, inhabited by birds, insects, reptiles, and other moving things, all vividly calling attention to themselves by sound or color as if each--and none else--had ultimate significance.
Knowledge is presented in fragments, the result of specialization. Our visitors begin by thinking of them as fragments of one picture, pieces of a single jigsaw puzzle. But they discover there is no single picture of the world presented or presupposed by the academy today. Fragments of specialized knowledge often refer to incommensurable pictures; they seem to be fragments of fragments of knowledge--about immaterial mind and material brain, about imaginative thinking and rote computing, about open, creative life and its closed biochemical routines, about moral freedom and the determinism of nature, about the human appropriation of knowledge and the science of what is in-and-for-itself regardless of human values.
To the bedazzled and befuddled visitors the university comes to appear like a great and exuberant playground of ideas, where knowledge is sport and where the knowledge-sports are as many and as unrelated as the physical sports to which sports fans flock. Not that sports are unserious; after all, players in every sport can be serious and
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