Human orders – scientific, artistic, social, economic, and political – are fictions. They are untrue, not because they necessarily are false, but because they necessarily are incomplete. All of our human orders, however inclusive we may try to make them, turn out to be some degree exclusive. And so we are always being surprised by something we find, too late, that we have excluded. Think of almost any political revolution or freedom movement or the ozone hole or mad cow disease or the events of September 11, 2001.
In the lecture series given in Cambridge in 1951 that formed the basis of his book Science & Humanism, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger observed:
It seems plain and self-evident, yet it needs to be said: the isolated knowledge obtained by a group of specialists in a narrow field has in itself no value whatsoever, but only in its synthesis with all the rest of knowledge and only inasmuch as it really contributes in this synthesis toward answering the demand, τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; “Who are we?”
Schrödinger is recalling the words of the third-century Greek philosopher Plotinus; but his point is of a contemporary relevance that it is impossible to overstate. It is reinforced by the words of the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, whose work on mapping the brain is renowned: “The problem of neurology is to understand man himself.”
From the Marginalia Review of Books
Thank you for writing with the Marginalia Review of Books. We are delighted to publish your essay, “Science and Metaphysics: A Family Quarrel”, which is available to read and share both as a web-page and PDF.
This exclusive day with Iain McGilchrist live on stage celebrated the launch of the paperback edition of The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World and included two lectures Iain had not presented before in this context.
