William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton's Sleep: A History of Science, Poetry, and Progress (Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine) [1 ed.] 1032459174, 9781032459172

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William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton’s Sleep

The history and philosophy of scientific ideas and the role poiēsis and imagination play in our understanding of science and progress are widely explored in this book. By examining the views of William Blake and other poets in the context of twentieth-century philosophers Hannah Arendt, Jacob Bronowski, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour and Karl Popper, amongst others, the book takes an eclectic approach drawing on examples from biology, history, literature, philosophy and economics, arguing for the reestablishment of imagination as a central attribute of science that may help to resolve some of our most pressing ecological problems as seen in the context of science and technology studies and what is loosely developing into the discipline of environmental humanities. Today, influential scientists looking at consciousness dismiss imagination regarding it at best as a mere epiphenomenon, a ghost in the machine, or at worst non-existent and to be denied. In this book, Keith G. Davies, who sees C. P. Snow’s debate on the separation of the arts and sciences as alive and well, traces the schism back to Plato but more importantly to the seventeenth century and David Hume’s removal of imagination in the conjunction between our observation of causes and their effects. Through extensive research and use of poetry, this book offers an alternative understanding of science with imagination and its continued significance in today’s world. This book is an excellent reference book for postgraduate students, professional researchers, William Blake scholars and the pejoratively labelled interested laymen with concerns in ecology and environmental humanities through offering a new perspective on the history of science and the role of imagination within this field. Keith G. Davies is an associate professor based at the University of Hertfordshire, where he teaches the science of crop protection and plant pathology. Dr  Davies has published widely on crop protection in over 80 refereed articles and book chapters and has also been actively involved in public engagement with science. This is his first book that brings together his scientific concerns with his broader cultural and philosophic interests around the relationship between science, the humanities and the nature of progress.

True reconciliation does not consist in merely forgetting the past. —N. Mandala We are all afraid – for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilisation, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do. The personal commitment of a man to his skill, the intellectual commitment and the emotional commitment working together as one, has made the Ascent of Man. —J. Bronowski

Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine

45 Pathogens Crossing Borders Global Animal Diseases and International Responses, 1860–1947 Cornelia Knab 46 Evidence in Action between Science and Society Constructing, Validating, and Contesting Knowledge Edited by Sarah Ehlers and Stefan Esselborn 47 George Wilson’s Vision of Early Victorian Science and Technology Unity in Variety David F. Channell 48 Transforming American Science Universities, the Government, and the Cold War Jonathan Engel 49 Human Extinction A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation Émile P. Torres 50 Tore Godal and the Evolution of Global Health Conrad Keating 51 William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton’s Sleep A History of Science, Poetry, and Progress Keith G. Davies

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-the-History-of-Science-Technology-and-Medicine/ book-series/HISTSCI

William Blake, the Single Vision, and Newton’s Sleep A History of Science, Poetry, and Progress

Keith G. Davies

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Keith G. Davies The right of Keith G. Davies to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-45917-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-45920-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-37926-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For my son Graham (20 March 1991–18 April 2007) Who assured me I believed in God

Contents

List of figures Preface 1 Unacknowledged legislators

x

xii

1

2 Providence and progress

17

3 Hegemony of science

34

4 Myopic evolutionists

50

5 Mind from matter

65

6 Matter from mind

81

7 City of imagination

97

8 Homo faber

114

9 Science and public affairs

131

10 Antidote for the future

148

11 Reawakening Newton

163

12 Where do we go from here?

179

13 Epilogue

194

Acknowledgements Name index Subject index

198

199

203

Figures

Frontispiece: Newton by William Blake 6.1 Kaninchen und Ente 6.2 A) Wittgenstein’s Rabbit Duck drawn and adapted from Philosophical Investigations 1953; B) Rabbit Duck drawn in the style of Ishihara’s colour-blind test semi-adapted to greyscale; C) same image converted to greyscale 7.1 De Antro Nympharum by William Blake describes a Neoplatonic vision of the manifest world in which human souls, which pre-exist as unmanifest beings in eternity, become manifest as mortal embodied beings before dying and ascending back into eternity. Hence Blake’s quotation “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” 7.2 Relativity scenario A) Represents two people sitting on a stationary bus 1 metre apart, P1 and P2; P1 throws a sweet (orange ball) to P2 which takes a certain length of time represented by T1 and T2. There are two observers involved; Observer 1 (O1) is on the bus while Observer 2 (O2) is not on the bus; both observers see the same thing – the sweet travels one metre between P1 and P2. Scenario B) is exactly the same, but the bus is moving from a to b in a time the sweet travels from P1 to P2; in this scenario Observer 1 (O1), still on the bus, witnesses the sweet travel 1 metre from P1 to P2, but because Observer 2 is not on the bus the sweet has travelled from P1 to P2, but in relationship to Observer 2 everything has moved in the direction of bus travel, so the sweet has moved along the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle (P1a–P2a–P2b) which is clearly further 8.1 The Ancient of Days by William Blake was his frontispiece to Europe, a Prophecy; it depicts Urizen surrounded by a globe amongst brooding clouds circumscribing the universe with a pair of compasses that can be interpreted to be symbolic of scientific reasoning and its sovereignty

xvi 86

90

101

107

118

List of figures

9.1 Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture at the British Library, St Pancras, London, based on William Blake’s portrait of Newton 9.2 Funding models: A) 50% of what can be known is known, with public funding of 25% and private funding at 75%; B) 30% of what is known is known and research funding is 100% public; C) 70% of what can be known is known and research funding is 70% private funding and 30% is publicly funded 11.1 Fourfold model of the universe consisting of the realms of RES EXTENSA, the physical world; RES COGITANS, the world of mind; RES PUBLICA, the collective world of humans and non-humans; all brought together and integrated by IMAGINATION occupying the central core (this Fourfold model can be rotated with any of the four realms occupying the central core); the Fourfold model is manifest within an unmanifest universe of potential layers of stratified stability

xi

131

145

173

Preface

The title to this book comes from a letter Blake wrote to his patron Thomas Butts, dated 22 November  1802, that finishes “May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep”. This book, therefore, is my exploration into the history and philosophy of scientific ideas and the role poiēsis and imagination play in our understanding of science and its progress. I grew up in a household not at all devoid of books, but there was certainly a divide between my mother’s and my father’s books. My mother’s books reflected a literary sensibility, the majority were poetry from the likes of Wordsworth and Tennyson through to Robert Service and included Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, together with a large number of anthologies and other literary works like C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien. On the other hand, my father’s books were predominantly technical, he had been in the Royal Corps of Signals during the Second World War as a wireless operator in India, and on return­ ing to England, he pursued his interest in wireless as a hobby; he became a licensed Radio Ham and had his own call sign. Growing up, I have clear memories of what my mother would refer to as “Daddy’s toys” on a big table located in the box room. It was full of half-made and partly dismantled radio transmitters and receivers with books full of electrical circuits and the like. He would no sooner have managed to build a radio transmitter and receiver to communicate with one part or another of the world, than he would be dismantling it and designing the next system to go that bit further and reach another part of the globe. Today’s mobile phone and internet would have astonished him beyond measure (he died in 1977). But in our household C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, and the divide between the literary world and the scientific world, was alive and well. This split between the arts and sciences was to come to a head at school when I had to decide which General Certificate of Education public exams I  was going to take at an advanced level. English and mathematics at an ordinary level were necessary qualifications, necessary to gain access to a university education, but the school timetable was restricted, and at the age of 16 I had to decide to follow either the arts or the sciences. In May 1973,

Preface

xiii

Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man had been broadcast and this had had a marvellous effect on me because, although it was about scientific discovery, his approach was broader. It was narrative in style and exposition, and it set science in its cultural evolutionary context, as he says: [T]hat series of inventions by which man from age to age has remade his environment, is a different kind of evolution – not biological, but cul­ tural evolution. I call that sequence of cultural peaks The Ascent of Man. The series of television programmes and subsequent book made a deep impression on me and has allowed me throughout my scientific career to see what I was doing as an applied agricultural scientist in its broader cul­ tural context. Anecdotally, as an undergraduate I went into the college book shop one day to pass a little time between classes, and I was absentmindedly browsing the shelves. Surprisingly to me, there on the shelf in the humanities section was a Penguin paperback book titled William Blake: Introduced and edited by J. Bronowski. Without hesitation I bought a copy which I still possess. I have already mentioned that my mother had a love of poetry and I had grown up with her reading poetry to me. Although I cannot remember her reading me any Blake, I am quite sure she most likely did as Blake is an Eng­ lish poet everybody knows. And although many English may not know that the lines of Blake that everyone can recite by heart come from the preface to his book titled Milton: To Justify the Ways of God to Men, they will imme­ diately recognise the opening lines known to them as the hymn Jerusalem: And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God On England’s pleasant pastures seen? Jerusalem had become popular as a patriotic hymn during the First World War and is based on the legend of Joseph of Arimathea, a secret disciple of Jesus who visited England to escape persecution and led to the founding of the first Christian church at Glastonbury. The hymn was subsequently taken up by the Woman’s Suffrage Movement and then popularised by the Woman’s Institute as their anthem. Today, it is sung throughout the United Kingdom and other parts of the British Commonwealth and therefore well recognised throughout the English-speaking world. Hence, through my mother and through school morning assemblies where we had sung hymns including Jerusalem, Blake had been known to me for a very long time. But reading this copy of William Blake by Bronow­ ski took me out of my comfort zone, it made me feel conflicted and con­ fused. How can I put it at its most simple? Blake rattled my cage! You can read his Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and many of these poems are

xiv

Preface

unquestioningly sublime. Take a well-known example like the one from his Songs of Experience, The Tyger: Tyger Tyger, burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame they fearful symmetry? He is asking a question about the nature of creation, and in the penultimate verse Blake juxtaposes the Tyger as a predator against its metaphorical prey the Lamb, which begs the question about the intervention and benevolence of God, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” He had asked the same question earlier in his Songs of Innocence in the poem The Lamb: Little Lamb who made thee Dost thou know who made thee and Blake goes on to answer this question, Little Lamb I’ll tell thee, Little lamb I’ll tell thee; He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a Lamb. We have here Blake’s notion of contraries, of his notion of innocence and experience, sketched out explicitly together with its religious and in par­ ticularly its Christian overtures. By the end of 1973, I had begun to study biology, chemistry and physics, and Bronowski’s Ascent of Man had played its part in my decision to pursue a scien­ tific path. To quote Bronowski’s Ascent of Man, “We are nature’s unique experi­ ment to make the rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex.” Now there is an inspirational statement if ever there was one. It held a sentiment for me as I stepped into the shoes of those enlightenment philosophers where reason reigned and helped to dispel all those religious superstitions. However, it was Blake’s religious and Christian overtures that I found the most difficult to understand, his criticism of those scientific and enlightenment thinkers. Those icons such as Isaac Newton, John Locke and David Hume he persistently ques­ tioned. What would he have made of Darwin who had not yet set sail on HMS Beagle. As I have already said, Blake’s questioning rattled my scientific cage! But something else happened to me in 1973, which had a profound effect on my thinking. My mother died, and no Christian platitudes were going to heal that grief! I  increasingly became a card-carrying orthodox athe­ ist where, just like every other organism of the planet, I was a product of Darwinian evolution, and here the scientific single vision of reason ruled. You are born, you beget and you die. I read Nietzsche, and God was Dead. I became an advocate of orthodox atheism and followed the paradigm of

Preface

xv

the Richard Dawkins and the Daniel Dennett models. However, I believe firmly in the view that you can become dedicated to only things that you are not sure about. So, over the years as I continued my career as an applied scientist, William Blake continued to rattle my cage, and C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures continued to haunt me. I read eclectically but certainly not exhaus­ tively. I  am an interested amateur when it comes to philosophy, and this book is a product of those ruminations. In 2007, another tragedy occurred. My 16-year-old son Graham died while training to climb Kilimanjaro. We had together watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth about anthropogenic climate change, and we were going to climb the highest mountain in Africa together. I had failed to reach the summit in 1981 during my overland return to England from Malawi, where I had worked on an integrated rural development project in the Shire Valley. It was to be a father–son expedition to see the glaciers on the summit before they disappeared from anthropic climate change. Anthropic climate change can arguably be traced back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution, and, according to Bronowski, we are still negotiating our way through this revolution, as he says: We are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; we had better be, for we have many things to put right. But it has made our world richer, smaller, and for the first time ours. And I mean that literally: our world, everybody’s world. This book, one-sided though it is, is dedicated to my son and the discussions we had started but would never be able to follow up.

xvi Preface

Frontispiece: Newton by William Blake Source: (Image open access from Wikipedia).

1

Unacknowledged legislators

A change of sensibility In the summer of 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley visited the Chamonix Valley. He was not the first English poet to have visited; Wordsworth had been there before him and both had been moved by the profound immensity of the highest summit in the Alps, Mont Blanc, and of course its glaciers. The Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815), marking the end of the Napoleonic Wars, was barely over a year away, and he was living on his grandfather’s annual legacy of £1,000. Mary Godwin, daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, with whom he had eloped after leaving his first wife Harriot Westbrook, had given birth to their second child, William. In the January (Mary’s firstborn had died the year earlier after two weeks) and they, together with Claire Clairmont, Mary’s stepsister, were on a European tour. The tour through A Part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland would be documented and was published the following year as a History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. During this trip they visited the Chamonix valley and had become enraptured by Mont Blanc with its glaciers and rivers. Mary recounts: Pinnacles of snow intolerably bright, part of a chain connected to Mont Blanc. I never knew – I never imagined what mountains were before. The immensity of these aerial summits excited, not unallied to mad­ ness. And remember this was all one scene, it all pressed home to our regard and our imagination. Though it embraced a vast extent of space, the snowy pyramids which shot into the bright blue sky seemed to overhang our path; the ravine, clothed with gigantic pines, and black with its depth below, so deep that the very roaring of the untameable Arve, which rolled through it, could not be heard above. 1, pp23–24 Mary goes on, “Nature was the poet, whose harmony held our spirits more breathless than that of the divinest.” It is not surprising that the text, organ­ ised by Mary in a series of four letters, concludes with Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni, a poem which captures and expresses a new sentiment towards the world. DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-1

2

Unacknowledged legislators

A History of a Six Weeks’ Tour contained the writings of a poet who had been expelled five years previously from Oxford University for refusing to admit authorship of a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism. It there­ fore heralded a new genre of travel writing. First, it had mainly been put together by a woman, Mary, and second, it openly referred to the political situation of the time, including the French Revolution and the Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This Enlightenment philosophy would be the foundation of the Industrial Revolution and at its height under­ mined the intellectual ballast of Christendom, hitherto supported through organised religion, and was shifting. Do not forget, within the Anglican clergy of Britain at the time, the view put forward by Bishop James Usher (1581–1656) that God created the earth on 23 October 4004 bce was the most commonly held opinion. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, all three volumes, would not be published for another 15 years or so, and the whole debate around the age of the earth would not be substantially questioned until 1859, on the publication of Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. But the intellectual tectonic plates were loosening, especially for Shelley as he stood on the bridge over the River Arve confronted by and contemplating Mont Blanc and its glaciers. But I have digressed – Mont Blanc as a poem is interesting, and there is nothing new I can really add, or bring to the table that has not already been said, but it is our starting point and our point of departure. The poem can be contrasted with the works of others, particularly the Hymn Before Sun-rise in the Vale of Chamouni in which Coleridge asks readers to celebrate the moun­ tain and its environs and requests them to worship through his “Hymn” of religious sensibility to the “Invisible alone”. Indeed, in a letter to a friend he describes himself as, “under the influence of strong devotional feelings”2, p498 as becomes evident when he writes: Oh dead and silent Mount! I gaze upon thee, Till thou, still present to the bodily sense, Didst vanish from my thought: entranced in prayer I worshipped the Invisible alone. . . . Awake, my soul! Not only passive praise Thou owest! Not alone these swelling tears, Mute thanks and secret ecstasy! Awake, Voice of sweet song! Awake, my heart, awake! Green vales and icy cliffs, all join my Hymn.3 Shelley, 20 years Coleridge’s junior and can be regarded to be of a different generation, has feelings that are less religiously inclined and more scientific; he looks on the mountain differently with his more atheistic world view,

Unacknowledged legislators

3

but this is not without its tension. The mountain, “The everlasting universe of things”, confronts the mind of man, “flows through the mind”, and its physical presence dwarfs and challenges his imagination. But Shelley does not retreat into religious certainty but meditates on the mountain’s nature and beyond. For example, in the fourth stanza of the second version: The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams, Ocean, and all the living things that dwell Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain, Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of the year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound With which from that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, their death and birth, And that of him and all that his may be; All things that move and breathe with toil and sound Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell. Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible: And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains, Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power Have pil’d: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle, A city of death, distinct with many a tower And wall impregnable of beaming ice.4, pp46–49 The poem, seen as part of a meditation, exploits Mont Blanc as a metaphor that contains the juxta opposing powers of balanced harmony as seen against malevolent discord. From this position, the poem is heuristic and carries a message from which we can learn about the nature of the world. But there is within the poem another confrontation that can be spotted in the lines, “when feeble dreams/Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep/Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound/With which from that detested trance they leap”. Here, perceptions of the human mind, “dreams” and their lack thereof, “dreamless sleep”, are combined together with the word “trance” and begs the question as to the nature of the human mind in relationship to external reality, in this case Mont Blanc. This theme, the relationship between the external world and the internal human mind, we will return to again. But we are running ahead of the story, and we must take stock. The year following Shelley’s expulsion from Oxford (1812) he had made the

4

Unacknowledged legislators

acquaintance of Thomas Love Peacock seven years his senior and a satiri­ cal novelist and poet. They became close friends with a literary interaction that lasted throughout the rest of Shelley’s life. In 1820, Peacock published a book titled The Four Ages of Poetry, 5 which although satirical and humorous focused on The March of Intellect. Broadly speaking, Peacock, who poked some fun at the bandwagon of progress, argued the utilitarian position that science and technology were in the ascendant and eclipsed anything poetry could contribute to society. Shelley’s response to this was to write his A Defence of Poetry, which would be published only posthumously in 1840, 18 years after Shelley’s death (1822), and finished with the now-famous sen­ tence, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.4, p279

Utilitarian poetry Before addressing Shelley’s Defence, which was a direct reaction to Peacock’s beguiling Four Ages of Poetry,5 we should look at Peacock’s book in a little more detail. Peacock, as his title implies, divides the world societies into four stages each of which is associated with a different poetical style. However, the different ages do not progress as we might imagine. The earliest age, which he calls the iron age, is generally a lawless age of warriors where the maxim is, “to keep what we have and to catch what we can”, it’s an age where the sword rules, and people are moved by the verses of “rude bards” and led by “ruder chiefs”. Surprisingly, we then jump straight into the golden age where society lives by way of institutions governed by rules and the poetry is, “retrospective”, and people, “live more in the light of truth and within the interchange of observation”. This is a society in which personal power and the familiarity with gods has waned; knowledge of ancestors increases in importance and has become respected; poetry is now the method by which harmony is brought to society, and this is passed on to the next generation. To Peacock, the golden age is the age of Homer. As society develops and civic life becomes more complicated, the golden age gives way to the silver age where the poetry bifurcates. One strand Peacock calls the “imitative”, the other “original”. The silver age is charac­ terised by, “an exquisite and fastidious selection of words”, words that are still harmonious and original, but they are deployed in a rather repetitive manner. Here the seeds of poetries demise have been sown. According to Peacock, and I quote here in full: This state of poetry is however a step towards extinction. Feeling and passion are best painted in, and aroused by, ornamental and figurative language; but the reason and the understanding are best addressed in the simplest and most unvarnished phase. Pure reason and dispassion­ ate truth would be perfectly ridiculous in verse, as we may judge by versifying one of Euclid’s demonstrations. This will be found true of all dispassionate reasoning whatever, and all reasoning that requires

Unacknowledged legislators

5

comprehensive views and enlarged combinations. It is only the more tangible points of morality, those that command assent at once, those which have a mirror in every mind, and in which the severity of reason is warmed and rendered palatable by being mixed up with feeling and imagination, that are applicable even to what is called moral poetry: and as the sciences of morals and of mind advance towards perfection, as they become more enlarged and comprehensive in their views, as rea­ son gains the ascendancy in them over imagination and feeling, poetry can no longer accompany them in their progress, but drops into the background, and leaves them to advance alone.5, pL11970 In the silver age, we see reason and dispassionate truth taking precedent, with poetry playing the second fiddle. The new knowledge that the silver age is accumulating is better conveyed in prose leaving the poets to reinvent themselves which is what they do in the next stage of development, in what Peacock refers to as the age of brass. In the brass age, the poets attempt to reclaim their illustrious history by a return to nature; they wish to convey and regain their earlier status with a return to the iron and golden ages. But who are these poets that wanted to return to nature? They are the Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and colleagues, and they become the butt of ridicule. In Peacock’s argument, in the progression of the four stages, from iron to golden and then on to silver and brass, in two of the stages, the silver and brass ages, poets have no worthwhile role. Presumably, therefore, this is why the poetic progression of ages culminates not in Peacock’s own age as being golden but as having fallen in material status from gold to mere brass. The Lake Poets are accused of ignoring social history and human nature. Instead, according to Peacock, they cultivated phantasy at the loss of “mem­ ory” and “reason”, thus bringing forth a “fairyland” that prematurely has­ tens the age of brass to its “dotage”, and where: The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingre­ dients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment: and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveller like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, nor in any class of life an [sic] useful or rational man.5, pL12100 Clearly, poetry has become dissolute and lost its path. For Peacock, coming now towards the end of his book, he wants to hammer home his point and says: But in whatever degree poetry is cultivated, it must necessarily be to the neglect of some branch of useful study: and it is a lamentable spectacle to see minds, capable of better things, running to seed in the specious indo­ lence of these empty aimless mockeries of intellectual exertion.5, pL12100

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Unacknowledged legislators

He sees poets as wanting to return to the “Homeric” age of a bygone era. He sees it as a profession which has absolutely no use to society and would prefer them to use their intellects to the betterment of society by becoming, “mathematicians, astronomers, chemists, moralists, metaphysicians, histo­ rians, politicians and political economists”. These are the professions he deems as useful. It is the charge against the poets of the necessity of social usefulness that Shelley attempts to undermine.

Defending poetry Shelley understands Peacock’s case as one of the application of reason for social usefulness and wants it rejected. He does this by stating that reason is not the only product of the human mind, imagination is an equally impor­ tant function of mind. Peacock acknowledges imagination but has con­ demned it for bringing forth “phantasy” and the life of “fairyland”. And so, it is here that Shelley starts to build his argument stating that the two aspects of the human mind are reason and imagination; reason is responsible for the mind’s analytical powers while imagination is responsible for the principle of synthesis and the mind’s creative powers. Reason is for the enumeration and quantification of things that are known. Up to this point both Shelley and Peacock would likely agree. But Shelley goes further and states that the imagination is for the perception of the value of those quantities and argues that poetry, defined as “the expression of the imagination”,4, p248 expresses the greater truth while reason is just the tool. “Reason”, he says, “is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirt, as the shadow to the substance.” To Shelley reason plays the lesser role. Shelley now needs to support his case that imagination is primary. Peacock had argued that society develops, and its poetry also went through different stages – iron, golden, silver and brass – following the same progression. Shel­ ley’s approach is to suggest that as society develops from the savage lawless state to more developed ages, this is mirrored in the individual, “what the savage is to ages what the child is to years”, and during this development: Man in society, with all his passions and his pleasures, next becomes the object of the passions and pleasures of man; an additional class of emotions produces an augmented treasure of expressions; and language, gesture, and the imitative arts become at once the representation and the medium, the pencil and the picture, the chisel and the statue, the chord and the harmony.4, pp248–249 And I am tempted to add, “the pen and the poem”, for Shelley goes on: Poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and archi­ tecture and statuary and painting; they are the institutors of laws and

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the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.4, p250 But this is a much broader claim than saying that poetry is just useful, it is saying in no uncertain terms that poets through their imagination and insight into the “invisible world” are fundamental and the bedrock of civil society. Their usefulness is just a stepping stone to bigger social issues. So what are these bigger social issues and what are Shelley’s claims? Here I want to turn to the scholarship of the late Dr J. Bronowski (1908–1974), who took up the cause to defend poetry in his book The Poet’s Defence.6 Bronowski is interesting because his learning crosses the boundary between the arts and the sciences. Originally, he came to Britain as an immigrant just after the First World War and spoke practically no English; therefore, as a young teenager, he was learning the languages of English literature at the same time he was learning the formal languages of modern science. As a bright and motivated pupil his growth of knowledge across the arts and the sciences occurred together; to him the languages of literature and science were not compartmentalised in the same way most people’s are in Britain, even until today. He was therefore an outsider; born in Poland in a Jewish family in 1908, he arrived in London by way of Germany in 1920, and on arrival, in his own words, “I came to England when I was twelve and when I landed I could speak, rather badly, two words of English which I had learnt on the channel boat.”7, p1 Seven years later, after attending The Central Foundation Boy’s School in London, he entered Jesus College, Cambridge to undertake the Mathematical Tripos where he became the Senior Wrangler on graduation. While in Cambridge, he maintained broad interests, continued to write poetry, and co-edited the literary magazine Experiment with William Empson. After completing his PhD in mathemat­ ics and then being somewhat peripatetic, his career focused in applying his mathematical knowledge to scientific problems, which, during the Second World War, took him into operations research and the modelling of bomb­ ing operations.8, pp85–97 As someone with scientific, artistic and philosophic sensibilities, it is perhaps not surprising that he was caught on the horns of a dilemma, the ethical dilemma between knowledge for its own sake and knowledge of its usefulness. In the context of what he was doing during the Second World War, it was its military usefulness that was paramount, and this tension between science and social usefulness would remain a theme throughout his life. His ambition was: to create a philosophy for the twentieth century which shall be all of one piece. . . . In my view, we are in a better frame of mind today to conceive a natural philosophy than at any time in the last three hundred years. This is because the recent findings in human biology have given

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a new direction to scientific thought. . . . There cannot be a decent philosophy, there cannot even be a decent science, without humanity. For me, the understanding of nature has as its goal the understanding of human nature, and of the human condition within nature.9, p15 Bronowski was speaking here as a scientist, but it is noteworthy that at the time Shelley was writing, the word scientist was unknown and indeed would not come into use until 1834 over ten years after Shelley’s death. But it would be 100 or more years and the two major wars of the twentieth century that would start to question and start to undermine the values of the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution that followed. But I am again getting ahead of my narrative. Bronowski’s first book The Poet’s Defence was published in 1939 around the start of the Second World War and remember he was a poet himself; he enjoyed the language of poetry as much as he enjoyed the language of sci­ ence, and he had a broad social group mixing with artists as well as scientists while he had been a student at Cambridge. He modelled for Rita Coblentz, a sculpture who later became his wife and who stimulated his interest in William Blake (1757–1827) by giving him a volume of Blake’s verse to pass the time as a model. Blake, that London-bred but quintessentially English poet whose major theme, according to Kathleen Raine, is “the confronta­ tion of science and imagination”.10, p9 Blake, who with the other Lake poets, is part of that romantic tradition that questions the industrialisation of the processes of production, together with its revolution in social living, and that had led to mechanisation and the building of those Dark Satanic Mills.11, p481 Is it any wonder that this theme, the confrontation of science and the imagination, would garner Bronowski’s attention? The Poet’s Defence surveys literary criticism and Bronowski picks those critics who he believes serve the promotion of poetry. The nature of poetic criticism has a long history, and he starts with the Elizabethan poet Philip Sidney (1554–1586), who wrote An Apology for Poetry, the alternative title of which was The Defence of Poesy. We can see how this subject matter rumbles down the ages and finishes with the poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), whose death is in the same year as Bronowski’s publication. His book brings together groups of contrasting poets, but this lineage does not follow a strictly chronological order. Bronowski juxtaposes the contrasting views of people like Sidney and Dryden against Shelley who were non-contemporary writers. He contrasts these with Wordsworth with Coleridge, who were contemporaries but eventually fell out, and then later Swinburne and his heirs who lead to Yeats. Bronowski’s approach was not to reveal the devel­ opment of the different poets over time but to reveal two beliefs that were at odds. As Bronowski argues: Shelley is commonly taken to be an idealist because he is vague and hopeful. I have been at pains to show that Shelley has no ideal. Shelley

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held vaguely to poetry because he liked it; but his faith was in science because he was in awe of it. Shelley’s Defence of Poetry is at last, that the poet is a kind of scientist, and even is a better scientist than scientists.6, p12 He goes on: If we believe that only science can tell the truth, I think that it is our busi­ ness to get on with being scientists. If we believe this and are still poets, we are holding up the world as grossly as those who burn books. . . . We may find excuses for poetry: as makeshift propaganda. . . . But these are only excuses for doing what we like . . . and we should face the knowledge that poetry is doomed.6, p12 Bronowski does not think that poetry is “doomed”, but he thinks that the split between idealistic truth and the useful truth of the material world echoed down the ages in a debate about the nature of “Nature”. John Dryden (1631– 1700), Britain’s first poet laureate, Bronowski proposes, “thinks that Nature is made by the mind, and Wordsworth thinks of it as given to the mind.” Whereas Dryden, under the influence of Ben Jonson, holds an idealistic view of Nature, dating back to Plato’s ideal forms, Wordsworth on the other hand thinks it is a product of the senses. This split between being made by the mind and being given to the mind through the senses is interesting and a theme to which we will return. But for now, if we are to believe Bronowski, people read poetry because it conveys a notion of truth. Yeats, who is the final poet discussed in The Poets’ Defence is seen as a worldly poet and one who, “has made the life of the senses the ideal from which poetry takes its worth.” For Bronowski: [S]ocial living is material living, and anyone who tries to dress it up in ideals is only the cover for someone who will ask us to go hungry. I [Bronowski] believe that ideals and social living are two different fields. But social living is not the whole life of man. It is all his life of sense and his life in the world. It is not all his life in the mind. The mind of man has knowledge of truth beyond the near truths of science and society. I believe that poetry tells this truth.6, p11 But has there been a slight of hand here that conveniently splits ideals (mental) and material (social) living into two different fields? In my view, the debate regarding the split between the ideal as a product of mind and usefulness as pertaining to material living is an issue that is still unresolved down to today.

Sedition and soldiers The poet who highlights this split more than any other is William Blake (1757–1827), who lived at a time of great social change. Blake was excluded from Bronowski’s The Poets’ Defence but is the focus in a following book,

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William Blake and the Age of Revolution,12 he is a poet many people have thought obscure and some full of lunacy. Bronowski thinks otherwise, and to him Blake was a man of his time. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, woollen cloth had made up one-third of England’s exports, but cotton was gaining fast, and it would overtake wool at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Woollen cloth, made by people living at home in their villages, had made England a rich country, but cotton, which was not subject to the same regulations, heralded industrialisation, and social living that had survived in villages using money became one based on capital. He therefore lived through the development and advent of industrial capitalism in which cotton was spun and woven in a factory based on mechanisation. Blake’s view was that materialism had put humanity to sleep and their lives diminished by civic institutions promoting capital that resulted in the loss of freedom and harmony. As he says in his prophetic work Jerusalem: I see the Four-fold Man, The Humanity in deadly sleep And its fallen Emanation, The Spectre & its cruel Shadow. I see the Past, Present & Future existing all at once Before me. O Divine Spirit, sustain me on thy wings, That I may awake Albion from his long & cold repose; For Bacon & Newton, sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion: Reasonings like vast Serpents Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations.11, p635 The “Four-fold” – edness is a reoccurring theme throughout Blake, but it is fundamental to the foundations of Jerusalem, the emanation of Albion, a Holy City of Peace that is the source of people’s inspiration and liberty. The city is represented by the four points of the compass, North, East, South and West, which correspond to different universal natures of our humanity: Urthona, imagination; Luvah, love and emotion; Urizen, reason, and Tharmas, the body and senses. This Fourfold nature is symbolised by Blake in different ways and at different times, but as many readers have observed, this flexibility of symbolism makes reading him and interpreting him difficult, and often some have thought him mad. To complicate matters further the conception of Jerusalem, with its Fourfold nature is also reflected in every individual’s Fourfold being as The Mundane Egg.1 This Egg is a form of pro­ tection which, according to Foster Damon,13, pp287–289 has shrunk and is cur­ rently undergoing incubation due to our fallen nature that only by hatching can we re-enter Eternity. We therefore have two of Blake’s contraries, repre­ senting inspiration and liberty, in Jerusalem, versus The Mundane Egg, repre­ senting the withdrawn and cocooned. But where and how did Blake think this loss of consciousness at the cost of protection came about? I turn my eyes to the School & Universities of Europe

And there behold the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire,

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Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth In heavy wreathes folds over every nation: cruel Works Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other, not as those in Eden, which, Wheel within Wheel, in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.11, p636 In Jerusalem the Fourfold natures are held in balance by their contraries: imagination with reason; love and emotion with the body and the senses, because for Blake, “Without contraries there is no progression.” But if one of these natures was to dominate, the system would become unbal­ anced and ossify, and Blake blamed and attacked Urizen, reason, as the culprit, he thought it had eclipsed imagination to humanities detriment and it had become dehumanised. The rate of social change in which Blake had to make his living was historically unprecedented, and accord­ ing to Bronowski, he “lived in the most violent age in history”.12, p173 This is interesting, for as we shall see, Blake’s poetry manifestly changes from his early writings that are lucid and comprehensible to his prophetic works which become increasing incomprehensible and obscure. Why should this be? George III was on the throne of Great Britain and Ireland from 1760, three years after Blake’s birth, to 1820, seven years before Blake’s death in 1827 and returning to Bronowski: When Blake was born, the population of England was less than seven millions. It had almost doubled before he died. The cost of living doubled; wages did not . . . He learned to think as a man during the American War. His years of promised were turned to defeat in the war against the French Revolution, from 1793 to 1802. Defeat deepened to poverty and bitterness in the war against Napoleon, from 1803 to 1815, “We have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.” And this war did not end at Waterloo. The Sedition Acts, the Combination Laws, the suspension of Habeas Corpus were still rid­ ing with the yeomanry against the Manchester suffrage meeting at St Peter’s Field in 1819.12 *** The intellectual zeitgeist of Britain at the time was understandably in ferment and together with the increase in population there was a migration of work from the village cottage to the factory, a migration promulgated by the enclosures act and the increasing division of labour associated with the Industrial Revolution. This change in the practice of work was best articulated by the empirical thinkers of the enlighten­ ment, and especially those that had gained traction to dominate political economy were the ideas of Adam Smith (1723–1790), who published

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his book The Wealth of Nations in 1776, when Blake was not yet 20, and in which Smith states: This great increase in the quantity of work, which, in consequence of the division of labour, the same number of people are capable of per­ forming, is owing to three different circumstances; first, to the increase of dexterity in every particular workman; secondly, to the saving of the time which is commonly lost in passing from one species of work to another; and, lastly, to the invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many.14 Discussion of the machine is never far away in Smith’s thoughts; it helped to build this new-found wealth of nations, which one might arguably suggest would lead to increased prosperity for all, but in fact led to the prosperity of the few. Up until the Industrial Revolution the politics of the economy could be said to be founded on an Economy of Famine. This was an agricultural economy in which its productivity was at the mercy of the weather. A bad harvest would lead to food insecurity, the start of a causal chain from nutri­ tion and health to disease and then on ultimately leading to starvation and death. This is an economy that still exists in many parts of the world today. But it contrasts greatly with what might be called an Economy of Profit, that economy so well described in The Wealth of Nations. And indeed, there were many within Blake’s circle of friends and acquaintances, like William Godwin (1756–1836), Thomas Paine (1737–1809) and the publisher Joseph Johnson (1738–1809) who were radical and highly critical of this new conservatism. It is noteworthy that Johnson refused to publish Blake’s The French Revolution, which was never actually completed. But, following the French Revolu­ tion (1789) and Pitt’s concern that this revolution might spread to Britain from France, this ultimately led Parliament to produce the Sedition Acts, also known colloquially as the “Gagging Acts” (1795). Here, Bronowski draws attention to the fact that there is a change in Blake’s writing and says: [I]t [the writing] has taken on a smoky vagueness with which now Blake is clouding his thought. . . . the change is deliberate, a disguise. . . . Blake chose to give these forces such forms, because his mind worked in large and shifting abstractions. But he chose now to call these forms Orc, Rintrah, and Palama­ bron, because he dared not call them Lafayette, Pitt, and George III.12, pp79–80 These were clearly dangerous times and publications were under constant scrutiny from government censorship. The first part of Paine’s Rights of Man was published on 13 March 1791 by Joseph Johnson and sold well and influ­ enced the likes of dissenters and democrats, London craftsmen, and the skilled factory-hands of the newly industrialised north.12, p71 Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the publication of the second part

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of Rights of Man followed the following year, the latter of which subsequently led to the imprisonment of the printer, and Blake warned Paine that an arrest warrant had been issued and advised him to escape to France. Blake’s own work of this period, The French Revolution, which becomes increasingly vague, never made it to the press and remained incomplete.12, pp71–72 For the next several years Blake worked hard, but that work was becom­ ing increasingly difficult to find to earn enough to make a living; in 1795, following a period of cold wet weather there was a poor harvest that led to the bread riots, and George III, on his way to Parliament, was mobbed by a crowd.15 During this period of increasing dearth, Blake became increas­ ingly reliant on the patronage of people like Thomas Butts (1757–1845), a senior civil servant, and the liberal, gentleman of letters and poet, William Hayley (1745–1820), who lived around 60 miles away in Felpham on the South Coast. Therefore, in the autumn of 1800, due to the lack of work in London, Blake moved with his wife into a cottage at Felpham where he stayed for the next three years to be near Hayley. But this stay was also not without incident because in his final year at Felpham (1803) he was accused of sedition at Chichester by Private John Schofield. The charge was brought by Schofield following an incident in which Blake physically removed him from the grounds of his Felpham cot­ tage. The details need not concern us, and the removal of Schofield was probably a misunderstanding on Blake’s part and at a politically less sensitive time nothing would have happened. But this was a politically sensitive time, and Schofield’s accusation was likely based on the fact he knew Blake and his patron Hayley were not, “church and King’s men”.12, p113 In the event Blake was acquitted, to the apparently raucous jubilation of the court, but report­ ers agree that, had it been known in Chichester that Blake had connections to people like Godwin, Paine and Johnson back in London, the result may have been dire and may even have led to an imprisonment for Blake. A point I have been attempting to convey here is that Blake’s increasing poetic obscurity was the result of the politics of the time, a survival strategy, and that in the context of this chapter, poets want to convey the truth as they see it, and at times, that is a message of dissent against the prevailing political power of the day (today Ai Weiwei in China springs to mind). Blake wanted to speak truth to power, and at this sensitive time his clarity becomes cloudy and questionable. But interestingly, his contemporary liberal-minded Jacobin poets, the likes of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey who all had much the same aspirations at the start, reacted very differently: [O]ne by one the Jacobins retreated. . . . Wordsworth took a sinecure. Coleridge proclaimed himself heir to Burke. Southey became a writer for the Tory Quarterly Review.  .  .  . Blake alone did not sink to the outlook of these men, that their society was a fortress beleaguered by the poor. He went on hating King Hunger more than King Ludd, and governments more than crowds.12, p174

14 Unacknowledged legislators

Heaven and hell Around the time of Blake’s return to London in 1803 there is a manuscript, The Pickering manuscript, named after B. M. Pickering (1836–1878) one of its nineteenth-century owners, which contains some ten poems includ­ ing both The Mental Traveller and the Auguries of Innocence. It is unknown whether or not Blake intended it for publication or to be given to a friend or patron,13 but it was not published until well after Blake’s death. However, the manuscript contains a mixture of ballad-like poems some of which are proverbial, lucid and easy to follow, like Auguries of Innocence, while others, like The Mental Traveller, are obscure and difficult to interpret. So within the one manuscript both innocence and experience are set against each other as contraries in true Blakean style. After its first four-line opening, to which I  will return, the Auguries of Innocence continues with a series of couplets that juxtapose each other with memorable aphorisms that run throughout the poem’s 130 and some odd lines. Here we recognise that each particular statement is connected to a diversity of thoughts as imaginative acts. Picking examples from the start of the poem: A Robin Red breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage A dove house fill’d with doves & Pigeons Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions. A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate Predicts the ruin of the State. A Horse misus’d upon the road Calls to Heaven for Human blood.11, p431 Here we can all relate to the truth of the messages about freedom, shelter, food, and the misuse of power, but in the poem before Auguries, The Grey Monk, Blake is even less guarded: “I die, I die!” the Mother said, “My Children die for lack of Bread.11, p430 It is the openness of these lines that suggest at a time of the “Gagging Acts” these poems were perhaps not for public consumption. However, they do demonstrate that poets, whether obscure or not, speak the truth as they see it, and this returns us to the issue of poetry being useful. Auguries of Innocence begins with the memorable lines: To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.11, p431

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These lines take individual and particular objects, Grain of Sand and palm of your hand, and connect them unforgettably to the universal concepts of Heaven, Infinity and Eternity. The knowledge that there is a connection between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between unity and diversity, between the subject and the object, tells a truth about the nature of the human imagination. This is the kind of knowledge, Bronowski6 would say is, “truth beyond the near truths of science and society”, which are measur­ able and open to reason. The lines at the beginning of Auguries of Innocence convey a wonder and awe similar in sentiment to those Shelley articulates in his poem Mont Blanc when he talks of: The everlasting universe of things Flow through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark – now glittering – now reflecting gloom – Now lending splendour, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings4, p43 But these two examples from Blake and Shelley are unmeasurable and highly subjective. I began this chapter with Shelley’s claim, in answer to Peacock’s conten­ tion that poets had to be useful, that Shelley thought them useful because, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” It is clear that Blake had no wish to become a “legislator”, because, as Bronowski argued, Blake’s sometime obscurity was “deliberate” and a “disguise” to overcome the political sensitivity of his day, and his vagueness was self-protection. Blake’s obscure, and to many insane, poems notwithstanding, this begs the question as to what is at the core of his writing. There are two abiding threads throughout Blake’s writing which can be traced through all his writing but which are explicitly expressed in The Mar­ riage of Heaven and Hell where, “Good is Heaven” and “Evil is Hell”. First, he thought human existence was possible only through dialectic, “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate.”11 And second, he thought that imagination is fundamental, “What is now proved was once only imagin’d,”11 and this is provided by the mind, not given to the mind. Mind is energetic and primary. But this begs a further question, what is contrary to imagination? I would suggest, Blake would have said reason, because “Good is the passive that obeys Rea­ son. Evil is the active springing from Energy.” Therefore, both imagination, which is full of energy, and its contrary, reason, which is good and passive, complement each other. We cannot live solely by imagination, for imagina­ tion without reason is the path to lunacy; we are back again at poetry being useless. But neither can we live solely by reason, because reason without imagination is passive and dead. The truth of poetry is that it brings reason and imagination together in happy conjunction, a conjunction from which we can learn, understand and hopefully progress.

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Note 1. The Mundane Egg has a history dating to before Blake and can be traced to Thomas Burnet (1635–1715) and his Sacred Theory of the Earth in which he questions the quantity of water required to produce the biblical flood. See Robert Macfarlane Mountains of the Mind 2003 Granta Books.

References 1) Shelly, M. (1817) History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (Kindle Edition). Project Gutenberg. www.gutenberg.org 2) Coleridge, S.T. (2017) The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated & Kindle Edition). Musaicum Books. 3) Coleridge, S.T. Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni. www.poetryfoundation. org/poems/43988/hymn-before-sun-rise-in-the-vale-of-chamouni 4) Shelley, P.B. (1995) Poems and Prose. Everyman. 5) Peacock, T.L. (1820) Works. The Four Ages of Poetry (Kindle Edition). The Perfect Library. 6) Bronowski, J. (1939) The Poet’s Defence. Cambridge University Press. 7) Bronowski, J. (1951) The Common Sense of Science. Heinemann Educational Books. 8) Sandefur, T. (2019) The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. Prometheus Books. 9) Bronowski, J. (1973) Ascent of Man. BBC Publications. 10) Raine, K. (1991) Golgonooza: City of Imagination. Golgonooza Press. 11) Keynes, G. (1966) Blake Complete Writings. Oxford University Press. 12) Bronowski, J. (2008) William Blake and the Age of Revolution. Faber and Faber. 13) Foster Damon, S. (1988) A Blake Dictionary. University Press of New England. 14) Adam, S. (1776) An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chap­ ter 3). Book Four. 15) Ackroyd, P. (1995) Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson.

2

Providence and progress

Birth of providence In the last chapter I ended by establishing that Reason and Imagination were in confrontation with each other, and then, by following Blake’s approach, suggested that human progress was dependent on this and/or other similar dialectical confrontations. The notion of progress has become hardwired into the current human psyche, and there is not a day that goes by where we are not, either explicitly or implicitly, assumed to hold the notion that it is good. It is the universal panacea, and it has therefore in its own right arguably become a religion in that it plays a significant function binding our intellectual and emotional needs together with our individual and social aspirations as a global community. It has become, and to steal Shelley’s phrase, an unacknowledged legislator of the world, or at least to be its unac­ knowledged legislator behind the propaganda. It would therefore perhaps be useful to unpack this word, “Progress”, and to see from where it arose; see what if anything it replaced; and to see if we can put the word into a twenty-first century context and thereby gain some perspective on it as a motivational idea behind our current actions. There are two basic ideas that we have inherited from the earliest of times dating back to the Greeks, and these can be summarised first, in the notion of flux, dating back to Heraclitus (c. 550–c. 480) that everything changes and is summarised in his statement, “No man ever steps into the same river twice”, and second, the notion of stasis, of which Zeno (c. 490–c. 430) was the famous exponent through his use of paradox. Zeno argues that at any one (duration-less) instant in time, an arrow shot from a bow, is motionless; therefore, if time is made up of instants, motion is impossible. I  do not want to get caught on the whys and wherefores of these viewpoints, but just to make a common-sense observation that an arrow shot from a bow at a target has direction over time and can be said to make “progress” towards the target. But this physical description relating to an object in flight has more to do with the facts and whether it is true or false and not whether it is good or bad. However, as Bury argues, when

DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-2

18 Providence and progress

applied to social movements and the ideas that precede political action, it is again whether an idea is true or false and not whether it is useful or injuri­ ous that is important.1, p1 It is in this social and political context that the idea of progress has this quasi-religious connotation as it is contextualised within a moral or ethical framework. Remaining with the Greeks and the centre of Western civilisation in the Mediterranean, the notion of change around the time of Plato (c. 427–c. 348) and Aristotle (c. 348–c. 322) was one that was cyclical; there were the politics of cities where the day-to-day struggles were the outcomes of good and bad rulers, but the idea of historical development did not exist as the changes from one age to the next, say from the stone age to the iron age, was imperceptible and too slow.2, pp15–16 There are, as the comparative mytholo­ gist Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) has pointed out, many myths and legends the themes of which have common rites of passage where the hero under­ goes – separation, initiation, and return, for example, like Prometheus and the bringing of fire in the ancient Greek legend or much more recently the character Frodo in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a world of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a deci­ sive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.3, p30 These mythical stories become embedded in the various cultures and get passed on; traditionally, these cultures did not contain any concepts with respect to the idea of historical development where time contained within it a sense of direction. Returning to Bury1, p16 and his investigation into the origin and the concept of progress, the word progress itself can be traced back to Lucretius (c. 97–55 bc) a descendant from the Epicurean School of thought in his book The Nature of Things. Lucretius views the world from a materi­ alist standpoint in which things are governed by natural law, and he quotes the passage1, p16 that uses the word progredientis, but interestingly subsequent translators, of which there are several, rarely if ever use the word progress. For example, Frank Copley translated the passage as: all such things else, money, and life’s delights, from top to bottom, poetry, painting, the cunning sculptor’s art, the searching, the trial and error of nimble minds have taught us, inching forward, step by step.4, p146 Where the phrase, “inching forward” conveys a notion of progress but most translators do not use the word; this may be because the modern concept is not compatible with the ancients’ concept, and indeed, Bury draws our attention of an earlier section of book V in which a time would come when

Providence and progress

the universe would fall into ruins. Lucretius states:

1, p16

19

Turning to Copley’s recent translation,

begin by observing sea and earth and sky. . . . those three bodies, three aspects so dissimilar, three such fabrics will die in a day; that great, geared world, held massed and ordered for ages, will come crashing down.4, p115 And so the point is clearly made that although the ancients had a word that conveyed the concept of progress, this was subsumed within a system that was circular in which any process of societal development, or indeed any growth of knowledge by later generations, ultimately crumbled, and therefore, the modern notion of progress as directional was illusionary. This pessimistic view of the ancients prevailed until and throughout the Middle Ages, a period of increasing Christian hegemony with the incul­ cation into society of Christian theory built by the Fathers and especially St Augustine (ad 354–430). But, according to Bury, for a society to function this overall pessimism needed to be balanced with a modicum of optimism, and this came with the idea of Providence, an idea based on the notion that happiness was possible for a small number of people in the next world. Christian doctrine upheld the view that “apprehends history not as a natu­ ral development but as a series of events ordered by divine intervention and revelations.”1, p21 This was a world view incompatible with an idea of progress, especially as it was also combined with an idea of original sin. Here everyone was born immorally, a view stemming from the book of Genesis and the fall of Adam and Eve, and they should all be punished. The period we are talking about from a European perspective is dis­ puted, but J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) suggests it runs from around the time of Beowulf to the start of the Renaissance. The story of Beowulf, an epic poem composed sometime between the seventh and the end of the tenth century, is about a hero, Beowulf, who takes on the monster Gren­ del, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon, who are a threat to the community. In 1936, Tolkien addressed The British Academy5 and drew our attention to the fact that this poem marked a transition from a pagan world view to a Christian world view: In Beowulf we have, then, an historical poem about the pagan past, or an attempted one – literal historical fidelity founded on modern research was, of course, not attempted. It is a poem of a learned man writing of old times, who looking back on the heroism and sorrow feels in them something permanent and something symbolical. So far from being a confused semi-pagan – historically unlikely for a man of this sort of period – he probably brought first to his task a knowledge of Christian

20 Providence and progress

poetry, especially that of the Cædmon school, and especially Genesis. He makes his minstrel sing in Heorot of the Creation of the earth and the lights of Heaven.5, p26 In Beowulf we therefore have a product of the education that came with Christianity and the predilection to fate, providence, and the afterlife, as opposed to the previous heathen view of the here and now. This view built on Christian doctrine would last all through the Middle Ages, but where were the seeds that would overcome the ideas of providence, the afterlife and original sin, and would kick-start the Renaissance that would replace them and that led to the Idea of Progress?

Providence to progress The start of the Renaissance can arguably be traced back to the Arabs and their migration into Southern Europe bringing with them their knowledge of astronomy, literature, mathematics and medicine. So, about the same time whilst Britain was being Christianised in the North of Europe, articulated in the poems like Beowulf, the South of Europe was being exposed to Islamic ideas from the Moors who were migrating onto the Iberian Peninsula from North Africa carrying with them materialistic ideas and the notions of those polytheistic ancient Greeks we have already mentioned. It is perhaps not difficult to envisage that there was going to be a battle of ideas between these two very different world views; views which echo the contraries dis­ cussed in the previous chapter between poetry and usefulness. There is here the creative tension that would produce the European Renaissance, that upwelling of creativity across all cultural fields of architecture, art, music and science. I bring in here the word science deliberately, because it is just another word for knowledge, but this form of knowledge, and more specifically its practice, brings with it a revolution in thought which would transform the world irrevocably, a transformation in which the notion of progress is fundamental. There is a view of history that it is made by Great Men, usually middleaged and white, and that they were geniuses. This is not a view I would want to perpetuate, but I think there are individuals, both men and women and from all walks of life, who for whatever reason act as a lens of their time. Before, on one side of the lens, they collect several threads of thought that they weave together and bring them into focus; the world is remade anew bringing forth a host of new possibilities. These possibilities then diverge, and the world is seen in a different complexion, and we then do things differently. In a sense this is no different from what any creative per­ son does at any moment in history, and the scientific revolution is one of these moments. Although my narrative will necessarily discuss individuals, it should be remembered that a change in the zeitgeist is brought about by community of individual people, and each one will have slightly different

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view, just as each of us has a different notion of the colour “red”. The point I would want to stress is that this is a process of thought that very much goes against the essentialist thinking expressed by those two Great Men, Plato and Aristotle, but I am getting ahead of myself, and this is an area to which we will return. The individual that I  think probably catalyses a change in the zeitgeist from which the Idea of Progress will eventually emerge is Francis Bacon (1561–1626). Indeed, the word catalysis will not enter the English language for another 300 years. Bacon was born three years before Shakespeare and died ten years after; they were contemporaries, and they were both Elizabe­ thans. Bacon might be regarded to be the inventor of the scientific method, a method based on inductive reasoning, where he formalised the process in which particular observations are followed by a process of logical deduc­ tions to synthesise a generalised truth. But this process was not just for idle speculation and intellectual satisfaction, it was for the purpose of improving human life, as Bury states, Bacon: declared the advancement of “the happiness of mankind” to be the direct purpose of the works he had written or designed. He considered all his predecessors to have gone wrong because they did not apprehend that the finis scientiarum, the real and legitimate goal of science, is “the endowment of human life with new inventions and riches” . . . The true object, therefore, of the investigation of nature is not, as the Greek philosophers held, speculative satisfaction, but to establish the reign of man over nature . . . . . . in laying down the utilitarian view of knowledge he contributed to the creation of a new mental atmosphere in which the theory of Progress was afterwards to develop.1, pp52–53 His was a utilitarian approach to science, an idea that would be picked up by Peacock some 200 years later in his utilitarian approach to poetry that we observed in the first chapter. The fact that science was at the service of human utility was the new zeitgeist, and it was experimental. The words of the ancients were not to be accepted without question, and as Bury suggests, Bacon was highly critical of Plato’s and Aristotle’s approach: In all their [the ancients] systems and scientific speculation “there is hardly one single experiment that has a tendency to assist mankind.” Their theories were founded on opinion, and therefore science has remained stationary for the last two thousand years.1, p53 As an ancient, Plato’s society, as articulated in his Republic, is utopian, and Bacon was no less ambitious in his conception, but this was a period of increased navigation and exploration in which the zeitgeist changes from the ancient’s “non ultra” to “plus ultra”, and Bacon’s society as portrayed in

22 Providence and progress

his New Atlantis, composed in around 1623, is one in which there is a total change in emphasis: The heads of Plato’s city are metaphysicians, who regulate the welfare of people by abstract doctrines established once and for all; while the most important feature in the New Atlantis is the college of scientific investigators, who are discovering new truths which may alter the con­ ditions of life.1, pp59–60 But metaphysics would remain central for another 100  years or so, until David Hume (1711–1776) would condemn all that did not “contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence . . . to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”6, p173

Spirits of the machine We therefore have here science in the ascendency based on its role to amelio­ rate the condition of people’s lives, with a rejection of metaphysics together with a concomitant growth in optimism. And with this came an increasing faith in reason, which we have already mentioned, but at this time human psychology was still all of a piece, but a split would occur with the work of René Descartes (1596–1650) and his “cogito ergo sum”, “I think therefore I am”. In this statement, there is I believe an irrevocable split between mind and matter based on reasoning that chimes down the centuries to today. This split between mind and matter also emphasises another split, the split between man and machine. Prior to Descartes, artists like Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Michelangelo (1475–1564) had been dissecting human corpses in the most exacting manner, and, here, the depictions of the human body are a wonderful illustration of art and science combined. These beautiful drawings reveal the relationships between bones, muscles and nerves, not without their implications, because as Bruce Mazlish has highlighted: The moral is clear. Renaissance scientific illustrations make us “see” that humans and machines function in the same way and that they may be made to share interchangeable parts. The continuum is envisioned even before it can be thought.7, p17 The philosophy of Descartes leads on to beg the question as to the relation­ ship between men and machines. The physician Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–1751) is very clear on his position and did not pull his punches when he wrote his book L’homme Machine; the medical doctor has become a mechanic. In this book, he espoused the materialistic view that man was simply a machine, something that people had in common with other ani­ mals including their behaviour, where the differences are only a matter of

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This mechanistic and fundamentally degree and not of substance. materialistic view arguably anticipates much of the late twentieth-century research on animal behaviour and languages.8, pp104–131 However, although, by the middle of the eighteenth century the idea of progress was still not a part of everyday thinking. Admittedly, the scientific revolution was well under way; Isaac Newton (1642–1727) had published his mathematical treatise Principia that laid down the laws of mechanics, and Alexander Pope (1688–1744) had articulated the mood in his epitaph, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night: God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.” The age of reason was gaining momentum, particularly in its use in solving the daily problems of living and generally creating an envi­ ronment of optimism. In this, it had laid the seeds to the idea of progress, but the idea itself required development and needed to be brought about by other changes, namely in economics, manufacturing and technology. This was also a period of increasing trans-Atlantic trade, shipping was on the rise, and ports on both sides of the Atlantic were expanding. This was the height of the slave trade; textiles and manufactured goods were taken to West Africa, slaves were then picked up and taken across the Atlantic to the Americas to work on the plantations, and then sugar, tobacco and cotton were returned to Europe. This is a time at which the “Instrument-makers were the unsung heroes of the scientific revolution”,9 an influential exam­ ple of which is the marine chronometer, designed to be carried on board ship, by John Harrison (1693–1776). By using this highly accurate precision instrument that told you the time in Greenwich, combined with a sextant, longitude, that is, how far distant either East or West of the Greenwich meridian, could be calculated. It thereby made it possible to pinpoint the position of your boat, and this transformed navigation at sea.10 Similar highprecision instruments were being developed and improved in a whole series of areas such as optics, where methods of lens grinding improved telescopes and microscopes; and again, in the areas of weights and measures, where developments in thermometers, barometers and accurate balances were all being improved. The term Homo loquens, a phrase referring to the fact that people are loquacious, likely dates back to the philosopher and linguist J.G. Herder (1744–1803) and his book Treatise on the Origin of Language.11 Arguably, a large proportion, perhaps even the majority, of human evolution and devel­ opment stems from the development of language and our wish to commu­ nicate. Indeed, from our ability to domesticate horses to ride around and building boats; from the development of the wheel to building roads; from writing to the printing press; from the development of flight to the launch­ ing of satellites; all this down to the present-day internet and the smartphone in our pocket, is focused on communication. One form of communication that expanded greatly in the eighteenth century with increasing transpor­ tation of goods, especially coal, associated with industrialisation were the canals. Canals for irrigation date back to the Romans, and rivers had for a 7, pp26–30

24 Providence and progress

long time been a means of communication between towns and villages, but not all were navigable by boat, and so began the cutting of canals, and what became colloquially known in Britain as The Cut. They would generally fol­ low river valleys and the rivers would flow in and out, punctuated by locks, with the water necessary for their use collected in upland rain catchment areas and diverted into reservoirs that would then feed the canal system as required. The water within the canals was regulated by sluices, and they were amazing feats of civil engineering that required a good deal of geologi­ cal knowledge to be built successfully. I bring in the development of canals deliberately because to be built suc­ cessfully they required a detailed knowledge of geology, and as we have seen in the previous chapter, biblical accounts of the flood were being questioned by people like Thomas Burnet, and then later by uniformitarians like the geologist James Hutton (1726–1797), who influenced the canal builders. One practical and successful canal builder was the surveyor William Smith (1769–1839). He was the son of a blacksmith with minimal education, and, following his apprenticeship, Smith set up his own business and became involved in the construction of a canal serving the North Somerset coal­ fields.12 The project was a success, and thereafter, he became increasingly involved in various canal and similar projects that required surveying. Smith was soon travelling widely up and down the country and becoming inti­ mately knowledgeable about all matters geological. Studying the different strata and collecting fossils, he realised that certain types of fossils were always associated with certain strata and he documented these facts with great care. From his point of few, this knowledge was useful information for his busi­ ness, and he would not have classified himself as a scientist, he was too lowly born for that, and he knew little or nothing of the debates that were being conducted at the time in the Geological Society of London. Nevertheless, he began to produce plates of the fossils and maps of the different strata and eventually produced the first geological map of part of Great Britain. Unfortunately, this map making was mainly done at his own expense, and he eventually ended up in a debtor’s prison. But he had had a glimpse of a world where: Although the chemical composition of a stratum may vary from one place to another, its fossils remained constant. .  .  . A  descent below ground is a descent, not into the mythic Underworld, but into the Earth’s own remote history. . . . the orderly and legible succession of strata, each with its characteristic fossils, “must readily convince every scientific or discerning person, that the earth is formed as well as gov­ erned, like the other works of its great Creator, according to regular and immutable laws”.12, p61 Following his release from prison, Smith returned to his work as a canal sur­ veyor, but his knowledge would eventually be recognised and formed the

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foundation of the work of the Cambridge academic Charles Lyell, whose Prin­ ciples of Geology (1830–1833) would go on to greatly influence Charles Darwin. Geology, in the first half of nineteenth century, was the natural science that joined laws of nature to history but not yet to progress. Utility, was still the order of the day, being pushed ever onwards by entrepreneurs like Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) and Josiah Wedgewood (1730–1795) who, based in the Midlands, were members of the Lunar Society. This was an informal group of friends who would travel by the light of the full moon and meet to discuss vari­ ous projects like the role of narrow-gauge canals. In a series of letters around 1771, Darwin discussed the building of such a canal that would run from the Grand Trunk Canal (Now the Grand Union Canal) to the centre of Lichfield: My plan is therefore to make a narrow Canal about 7 ft wide from Fradley Heath to Lichfield, which is three miles and ½, to carry Boats of only 4 or 5 Tons burthen, to be drawn by one Man, to draw but one foot of Water, to be about 4 ft wide and 30 ft long.13, p101 Cost margins were important, and Darwin estimated a regular canal would cost around £7000 and bring in an annual profit for transporting, “coal and lime and Small-Beer from Burton” of around £100; the narrow-gauge canal he believed “would cost less than £300 per mile”.

Labour and value In the year 1800, the population of England was around eight million, 200 years before, 1600, the population was roughly half of this, so it had doubled in 200  years.14 This was a period of steady population growth, society was undergoing change, and the mode of subsistence went from one based mainly on land and agriculture as the means of production, to an economy based on capital, manufacturing and the role of labour. When land and agriculture were the means of production, and the goods produced were exchanged by merchants, wealth was in the main static, it rested on the pro­ ductivity of the “soil”. However, a new dynamic view was slowly coming into being, a view advocated by Adam Smith (1723–1790) in his book The Wealth of Nations. In this book he acknowledges that land was primary for wealth creation but rather than being static, was indeed dynamic in nature, and he repeatedly stressed the importance of labour and its circulation: Whatever obstructs the free circulation of labour from one employment to another, obstructs that of stock likewise; the quantity of stock which can be employed in any branch of business depending very much upon that of the labour which can be employed in it.15, p95 This approach formalised Smith’s “labour theory of value” as advocated in his book The Wealth of Nations and published in 1776. This was the decade

26 Providence and progress

prior to the start of the French Revolution, and there was a strand of Euro­ pean thought that had sprung from the writings of authors like, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who in The Social Contract, the decade before Smith, made the famous observation that, “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains”. And Nicolas de Condorcet (1743–1794) whose book, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, published posthu­ mously in 1795, the decade following the French Revolution, argued for a world view based around the idea of the perfectibility of humankind. This strand of thought about human perfectibility naturally crossed the chan­ nel and set off the great debate between the journalist, political thinker and optimist William Godwin (1756–1836) and clergyman and pessimistic thinker Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). This was a debate between optimism and pessimism, and we are back caught in a creative tension, a tension in which Blake’s view of the necessity of contraries for the nature of progress is fundamental. The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 had kicked off the start of the French Revolution, a revolution which would last until the end of the century. During this period the English establishment, under George III’s rule, were continually worried that the rioting would be imported across the Channel into Britain; and as we have discussed, this led to a strengthening of the sedition laws and a political clamp down by Parliament in London. If we now turn to the preface of Malthus’s Essay on Population, originally pub­ lished in 1798, we find that the motivation of its author is to address the issue regarding whether human society can be improved as Godwin suggests, a conjecture of which Malthus is highly sceptical. As a starting point Malthus looks at the nature of human populations, and looking at evidence makes the observation that as food is indispensable it follows that as “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state . . . the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Although Malthus’s main argument is focused on contradicting Godwin’s position, he also takes on Condorcet’s views, and draws further attention to the fact that although the government had brought in palliative measures such as the poor laws, these, he observes, had had no effect on ameliorating the condition of the poor and indeed, “defeat their own purpose”. This Malthusian prediction, although very bleak, was welcomed by many of the more conservative members of society who saw the French Revolu­ tion as a disrupting force to the social order, and this contrasted greatly to those romantic poets, who we discussed in the prior chapter, who were sympathetic to the idea of social perfectibility. The Scottish Enlightenment encapsulated in the minds of people like Hume and Smith, who became friends, were at bottom empirical and pragmatic. Smith who had originally been appointed at the University of Glasgow as a philosopher introduced history into political economy and changed its operation by which eco­ nomic benefit could accrue. For Smith, it was necessary to deregulate both

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labourer and manufacturer and allow them both to pursue their own advan­ tage in an atmosphere of laissez-faire, thereby: [T]he new manufacturers of England could peacefully accomplish the “revolution” of freeing Britain from outworn and outmoded regula­ tions and hinderances to economic progress.16, p355 This was primarily a philosophical and political “revolution”, but others, like Malthus, who addressed the social issues of the day were developing ideas that went beyond political economy and drew in other natural sci­ ences. One such man of ideas was of course Charles Darwin (1809–1882). He had studied medicine in Edinburgh, and, although he was horrified at what he witnessed in the operation theatre, he had come under the influ­ ence of Robert Edmund Grant (1793–1874), a trained medical doctor who had given up medicine to study marine life. Nothing was sacred to Grant. As a freethinker, he saw no spiritual power behind nature’s throne. The origin and evolution of life were due simply to physical and chemical forces, all obeying natural laws. Like his French heroes, the maligned Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Etienne Geof­ froy St Hilaire – evolutionists both – he believed that a new imaginative vision was needed.17, p34 Grant who had travelled widely throughout Europe became Darwin’s mentor. And so, it would be Darwin’s ruminations on the observations he had made while on his travels on HMS Beagle, together with Grant’s men­ torship and the ideas he had come across in Malthus’s essay, and applying this to the natural world, that would be the key to his theory of evolution based on natural selection or ‘The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’. In The Origin of Species, originally published in 1859, Darwin was careful not to use the word progress and make the claim of there being higher or lower states of organisms. However, in The Descent of Man, first published 1871, there are references to the word progress in Chapter 5, interestingly, both of the uses of this word are applied to the discussions about nations and their institutions. In other words, they are used in the context of political econ­ omy. It is only by the end of the century when Darwin’s fellow evolutionist Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913) is assessing the successes and failures of the nineteenth century that he states: That book [The Origin of Species], together with those that suc­ ceeded it, has so firmly established the doctrine of progressive devel­ opment of species by the ordinary process of multiplication and variation that there is now, I believe, scarcely a single living naturalist who doubts it.18, p142

28 Providence and progress

So, by the latter half of the nineteenth century, the idea that species evolved in a progressive manner was firmly established. The idea of progress could be applied to the natural world, and a scientific mechanism, natural selection working on individual variations present in a population was established. But was it a law of nature? And could that idea of progress be applied to social institu­ tions and political economy? Following the French revolution, during the first decade or so of the nineteenth century saw the Napoleonic wars envelope Europe, and the phrase that Britain “was a nation of shopkeepers” was incorrectly attributed to Napoleon but became a catchphrase used by the British press. However, as already discussed, there is certainly a sense that during this period there is this shift in the nature of the economy, articulated by Adam Smith, that rather than wealth being static, it was dynamic; and indeed, it was also Smith who had first used the phrase “a nation of shopkeepers”, in his Wealth of Nations,15, p428 and not in a pejorative sense back in 1776. The fact that two Englishmen had independently, and at roughly the same time in the nine­ teenth century, conceived that species were not static but changed over time through the process of speciation has led many to speculate that it was the political and economic climate at the time that was the driving force. Be that as it may, there is certainly a transformation in the intellectual mood, in the zeitgeist, from one that is static to one that is dynamic and stresses that things change over time: landscapes change, species change, manufacturers change, techniques change, economics change and politics change. This interaction across many disciples all helped to consolidate our idea of progress.

White man’s burden Whether these changes were evolutionary or revolutionary, the ideas around change were out and about throughout the whole of Europe. Lamarck and St  Hilaire were evolutionary in their thought, and Hegel (1770–1831), newly appointed to the University at Jena, was putting his finishing touches to his book on the dialectical approach to history and the nature of pro­ gress, when Napoleon fought the Prussians just outside the city. These ideas of Hegel were formalised in his philosophical system, also seen in Blake’s contraries, would go on to leave its legacy through Karl Marx (1818–1883) and thereby affect political thinking down to and throughout the twenti­ eth century. Europe was boldly increasing its footprint, expanding across the Atlantic to the Americas, both North and South; expanding across the Mediterranean to Africa and south beyond the Sahara; and expanding East across Mesopotamia to India and on to the Far East. This is the period of Eurocentric dominance, imperialistic conquest underpinned by a faith in progress that is so eloquently expressed in Rudyard Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden. Kipling (1865–1936), journalist, novelist and poet born in India, would be awarded that most prestigious of global accolades, the Nobel Prize, for literature in 1907 by the Swedish Academy. But let’s step back and get some perspective.

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Darwin who had sailed on HMS Beagle (1831–1836) as Captain Fitz­ roy’s companion, the previous Captain Pringle Stokes through loneliness and isolation had shot himself, was a witness to the British government’s strategy. The remit of the voyage was to survey and collect hydrographical and marine data of the South American coast for exploitation by maritime organisations. Indeed, Fitzroy had briefed him in detail as to the reasons to the Admiralty’s assignment: The continent was an open house for trade, a vast market for manu­ factured goods and a storehouse for raw materials. Rich Britons and their bankers had invested millions of pounds in the emerging national governments; companies had capitalised up to the hilt to exploit its resources. . . . If merchants were to beat the competitors from Spain and the United States, their vessels needed easy access to South American ports.17, pp105–106 This was a piecemeal and pragmatic approach building on the fact that Brit­ ain had won against the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar (1805). This victory had prevented the French from invading Britain and had consoli­ dated its supremacy at sea. Over the next decade and beyond, Britain used this dominance of the oceans as a steppingstone for its imperialistic overseas aspirations while France, under Napoleon, turned to the rest of Europe. Notwithstanding, the political power of nation states, the power of ideas is much more fluid and as Kant (1724–1804) had argued: [A] Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilisation. Several Frenchman now undertook to solve the problem. They did not solve it; but the new science of sociology was founded; and the idea of Progress, which presided at its birth, has been its princi­ pal problem ever since.1, p278 According to Bury,1 two of the Frenchmen, Henri de Saint-Simon (1760– 1825) and August Comte (1798–1857), followed on the trajectory initiated by Condorcet, already mentioned, building on his concept of the progress of human thought. Comte postulated that human social development went through three different stages: the first started with imaginary deities and was then followed by abstraction, before developing into the scientific meth­ odology including experimentation. These three developmental stages fol­ lowed laws not dissimilar to the developments we talked about in poetry in the previous chapter. However, the third Frenchman, Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1768–1830) claimed to have discovered a much more radical principle, “the law of Passional Attraction”.1, p279 This was a law that would be as predictive of moral decisions, as Newton’s laws were predictive of the movement of the planets, and this social development was progressed through industrial cooperation. You can see here that the incipient science of sociology, what has more recently been referred to as “a soft science” was seeking the status

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of physics and contrastingly referred to as “a hard science”. Interestingly, this hierarchical approach to the sciences was turned on its head by this group of Frenchmen, and they saw social science as the highest rank among the sci­ ences as it brought together man’s physical, moral, political and intellectual life coherently aligned to a directional social development synonymous with material progress. Remember, this was a time of exploration, and the travellers who were returning to Europe from all over the globe from their search for material resources and markets were coming across human communities with very different belief systems to those that prevailed in Europe. Primarily, follow­ ing the work of Comte, these belief systems were characterised and mapped, In accordance with the law of the three stages . . . in which Fetishism, Pol­ ytheism, and Monotheism successively prevail. . . . [and] His analysis of this period is the most interesting part of his survey. The chief feature of the political system corresponding to monotheism is the separation of the spiritual and temporal powers.1, pp291–295 Prior to monotheism, polytheism had confused spiritual and tempo­ ral powers thereby condoning human commonalities and permitting the institutionalisation of slavery. Fetishism, which predated polytheism had lasted longer, but the idea of progress clearly rested with monotheism and the hegemony of Eurocentric Christian thought. Leaving aside, for the moment, the fissures that were apparent within the European Christian context, it was the accumulation of global natural resources that were fun­ nelled back to Europe that created its wealth and power. It is perhaps understandable that this material wealth consolidated Europe’s unquestion­ able self-confidence and with it led to the export of Christianity as a pros­ elytising religion. Kipling’s poem The White Man’s Burden was published in 1899 some 40 years after Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species, and the impulse behind these two writers could not be more different. They are in temperament antagonistic, and this is reflected in their choice of house. The two houses are less than 40 miles apart, both are historically recognised as Grade I  listed buildings, but the visitor to Down House, the Darwin residence, gets a feeling of its openness and optimism, it feels lighter and more homely, whereas Bateman’s, Kipling’s house, is much darker, more brooding, more pessimistic. Both Darwin and Kipling had tragically lost children, but Kipling had lost his only son Jack (John) whom he had managed to organise a commission in the British army. Born two years before the publication of The White Man’s Burden, Jack was reported missing in action during the Battle of Loos (1915) in the First World War; at the time his body was never recovered, and this haunted his father there­ after. Kipling had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907, and his faith in the imperialistic enterprise have become increasingly contro­ versial. Born in India, he was a product of Queen Victoria’s empire and,

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although he had also been exposed to the polytheistic traits of Hinduism, fundamentally his values were based on a Christianity that articulated the idea of progress to the recipient cultures. However, these cultures based on Christianity, perhaps the idea of providence was less appreciated than the utilitarian benefits that it brought along with it, not least of course this including its military technology, that is, weaponry. A person of this proselytising Christian faith that epitomises the impulse of The White Man’s Burden like no other is David Livingstone (1813–1883). Livingstone was a physician, an explorer and Christian missionary born and brought up in Blantyre on the banks of the River Clyde. He came from an aspirational working-class background living in a tenement block that housed the families of the nearby factory workers. Bookish during his youth he combined work, he was sent to work in the local factory at the age of ten, with voracious curiosity and reading broadly from the works of Virgil and Horace to the homespun philosophy of Thomas Dick (1774–1857). Dick, who had attended the University of Edinburgh, popularised the work of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and influenced many scientists, engineers and thinkers of the day, including David Livingstone. Dick was a church minister and writer, proselytising the abiding message that “the God of Nature and the God of the Scriptures were one and the same.”19, p10 The factory where David worked was run along cooperative lines and likely influenced by the socialism of Robert Owen (1771–1858), who was the son-in-law to the mill owner David Dale (1739–1806). During his teen­ agerhood he was therefore under the influences of Scottish Presbyterian­ ism and the idea of social reform, and with these foundations he slowly developed a sense of his own mission in which, “ ‘In the glow of love which Christianity inspires’, he was to explain, ‘I soon resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of human misery.’”19, p10 This would take him on to study in Glasgow, where the legacy of Adam Smith still hung in the air, and then he sought admission into the London Missionary Society (LMS) which took him south to Ongar in Essex for missionary training and medical training at the Charing Cross Hospital in London. It was during this period of training in 1839 that he met Robert Moffatt (1795–1883), a larger-than-life fellow Scot from a similar background, who was back in London on leave from his missionary work in South Africa. Moffatt had been based at Kuruman in Bechuanaland working with the LMS and enthused Livingstone’s imagination and aspirations to make South Africa his field. It was after the completion of his studies at the beginning of 1841 that Livingstone undertook the three-month journey to Cape Town to initiate a life devoted “to the alleviation of human misery.” And fired by the ideas, on religious, social and political matters . . . moulded by a Calvinistic upbringing, the tenets of Congregationalism, the philosophy of Adam Smith and the Owenite sentiment of the Blantyre factory workers.19, p19

32 Providence and progress

But in true British fashion Livingstone was a pragmatist, although thinkers on the continent had high-flown ideas regarding the nature of progress, Livingstone was under no illusions when it came to his experiences as a mis­ sionary in the field. On his arrival in Bechuanaland, he found tribes living in physical fear and writing back to the Directors of the LMS, he said that the tribes welcomed missionaries, not only for the protection . . . afforded, but also for their ability to pro­ vide and mend muskets. . . . the respect shown to him was not due to his character or teaching, but to “a less lovely influence”, the Europeans’ superior arms.19, p25 When Livingstone wrote to his Directors in 1841, Queen Victoria (1819– 1901) had been on the throne of England for just four years, the Great Exhi­ bition held in Hyde Park – that celebration of the works of industry – was only ten years away, 1851. The optimism of the enlightenment and the age of reason was undermined by the experience that it could never quite live up to its ideals; it was always shot through with a sense of pessimism. For although the idea of progress was everywhere and for all to see, it was always haunted by a ghost of unreality. This leaves us with a question. Is there a law of progress equivalent to a law of nature?

References 1) Bury, J.B. (1932) The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Growth and Origin. Dover Publication Inc. 2) Pollard, S. (1971) The Idea of Progress: History and Society. Penguin Books Ltd. 3) Campbell, J. (1949) The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Paladine, Harper Collins. 4) Lucretius. (1977) The Nature of Things (Translated Frank O. Copley). W.W. Nor­ ton & Company. 5) Tolkien, J.R.R. (2006) Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Harper Collins. 6) Hume, D. (1977) An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Ed. Charles W. Hen­ del). Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. 7) Mazlish, B. (1993) The Fourth Discontinuity: The Co-evolution of Humans and Machines. Yale University Press. 8) Bronowski, J. (1977) Human and Animal Languages. In A Sense of the Future. The MIT Press. 9) Uglow, J. (2010) The Lunar Men (E-book Edition). Faber and Faber, p. 43. 10) Sobel, D. (1995) Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. Penguin. 11) von Herder, J.G. (1772) Treatise on the Origin of Language. In Philosophical Writings (Ed. and Translated MN Forster). Cambridge University Press. 12) Cupitt, D. (1984) The Sea of Faith: Christianity in Change. BBC Publishing. 13) King-Hele, D. (1999) Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement. Giles de la Mare.

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14) Wrigley, E.A. and Schofield, R. (1981) The Population History of England, 1541– 1871. A Reconstruction. Harvard University Press, pp. 208–209. 15) Smith, A (1776) The Wealth of Nations (eText). A Public Domain Book. 16) Bronowski, J. and Mazlish, B. (1960) The Western Intellectual Tradition From Leonardo to Hegel. Harper Torchbooks. 17) Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991) Darwin. Michael Joseph. 18) Wallace, A.R. (1898) The Wonderful Century: Its Successes and Failures. Cosimo Classics. 19) Randsford, O. (1978) David Livingstone: The Dark Interior. John Murry.

3

Hegemony of science

Newton the magician It was originally reported that Newton began his experiments on the nature of light in 1665 having bought a prism at Stourbridge fair, but plague had shut the fair that year and therefore he most likely bought it the previous year in 1664.1, p58 Prisms can still be bought at county fairs today, that is, if they are not shut by our current COVID-19 pandemic, and the pursuit of science on which these and other technologies are built has continued to revolutionise our view of the universe, and our place within it has had to be totally revised. Today, we are running an empirical experiment to see if our world can sustain a population of nearly eight billion people, and today, although the growth rate continues to decline, this number is just over 1  percent. As I  revise this chapter, I  have just received my booster injection against COVID-19; so can my vaccina­ tion be viewed as a measure of scientific progress as vaccination was not around at the time of Newton? Edward Jenner (1749–1823), the inventor of the use of the cowpox-based vaccination, would not be born for some 20 years following Newton’s death. Therefore, following my reasoning in the last chapter, is there a law of progress similar in kind to what scientists would define as a law of nature. This begs the question, as to what exactly is a law of nature? Returning to Newton, anyone studying science at school today is likely to be asked to learn Newton’s laws of motion, so let us use this as a starting point. Stated simply, the first law says that any object will remain at rest or continue to move in a straight line unless acted upon by an external force. The second law states that a force (usually F) is equal to the weight (m or mass) multiplied by the acceleration (a or change in speed per unit time): F = ma And the third law states that when an object interacts with another object, the second object produces a force of equal magnitude but opposite in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-3

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direction to the first body at the same time. These laws are the founda­ tion of classical mechanics and would lead to other mathematical equations by which the movements of heavenly spheres could be predicted. Indeed, when the first Apollo missions to the moon took place in the 1960s it was Newton’s laws of motion, amongst other things of course, which got the astronauts there and back again. Newton is usually regarded as the first man of the Enlightenment, a rationalist and man of science. Although this view has been contested. Indeed, John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946), who had a collection of New­ ton’s papers and writings, saw him more as a “magician” as he was steeped in alchemy and esoteric thinking.2 Remember, the reason that Newton left Cambridge and give up his academic career was that he was a Unitarian and rejected the Trinity, a belief of which was a requirement for membership and subsequent promotion within the University at that time.1, p150 However, it was Newton’s predisposition to Unitarianism of which William Blake was so highly critical when he wrote in his letter to Thomas Butts, “May God us keep/From Single Vision and Newtons sleep.”3, pK818 Blake was naturally a great admirer of Newton, he saw him as another searcher for eternal truths, and some have suggested that the face of Newton, in the painting by that same name, is a self-portrait of his own youthful face.4, p193 But I  digress, Newton’s book Principia (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), is one of the most influential books in the history and philosophy of science to which we now need to turn, for it is in Newton’s Principia that the power of the idea of natural law resides. Descartes (1596–1650) had split the world into mind and matter, but this is where Newton (1642–1727) brings the power of quantification and measurement of the physical world together in a predictive manner through mathematics. This is where modern science is born and where materialism reigns supreme. It reigns supreme because of the power that mathematics brings, it makes predictions of the physi­ cal world possible. To the people of the day that was the act of a magician! There is a story recounted by Keynes’s about the prediction of the return of Halley’s comet and: how he [Newton] informed Halley of one of his most fundamental discoveries of planetary motion. “Yes”, replied Halley, “but how do you know that? Have you proved it?” Newton was taken aback –“Why, I’ve known it for years”, he replied. “If you’ll give me a few days, I’ll certainly find you a proof of it” – as in due course he did.2 The idea of course was based on something Newton had been ruminating on for some time, the idea of gravitation. Kepler (1571–1630) had sug­ gested that gravity would not stop at the summit of a mountain but would go on as far as the moon and had said that, like light, gravitational force

36 Hegemony of science

would reduce as the square of the distance. Newton, building on this, sug­ gested that: The gravitational attraction between two massive bodies is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between some point in each mass.5, p45 This is the law of inverse squares, where gravitational attraction (G) is pro­ portional to the product of the weight of object one (m) multiplied by the weight of a second object (m′ ) divided by distance (r) squared; or more usu­ ally formulated as gravitational attraction (G) is equal to mm′ divided by square of the distance (r2) and multiplied by a constant (k) usually written: G = k (mm'/r 2) Therefore, Newton following Kepler’s logic, if gravitational attraction goes to the moon it can be applied anywhere, and it is therefore a universal truth. It is a Law of Nature. And this is where Newton’s leap of imagination came in, because from this he felt it would be possible to calculate the periodic­ ity of the moon, which naturally he did, and found it to be 28 days show­ ing r2 to be correct. Or, as the story goes, he reported to his housekeeper, “I found it to answer pretty nearly.”5, p61 Newton’s work was pivotal in changing the way in which people looked at the world, pivotal in the sense articulated by Alexander Pope (1688–1744) in his epitaph for Newton when he said, “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in the night; God said “Let Newton be” and all was light.”6 Newton’s comments to his housekeeper are instructive as his calculations gave the moon a periodicity of “pretty nearly” 28 days but not exactly 28 days. Using Euclidian Geometry we can prove that in any triangle all three internal angles add up to 180o, this is exactly 180o and not “pretty nearly” 180o. Surely, if this was a law of nature, “pretty nearly”, is not good enough? Surely, this opens up a debate around the role of mathematics and its application to our knowledge of the world? Surely, this opens up a debate around the role of logic and reason? These are indeed interesting questions because they are the foundation upon which our knowledge of the world rests, or, in other words, the nature of reality.

Beyond metaphysics I want to now turn to a man born three years before Newton died, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), a man to whom these types of questions became an obses­ sion. Kant’s early interests were in astronomy, and he made several contribu­ tions looking at the interactions between the earth and the moon and its effect on the earth’s rotation and tides. But he has come to be more well known as a philosopher, and his major work Critique of Pure Reason (1781), amongst others, addresses this obsession. Let me explain; earlier the argument is made that laws of nature are generalisations that rest on mathematics and thereby,

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using mathematics we can predict, for example, the periodicity of the moon. This naturally leads to the question of the relationship of the outside world as it is, in contrast to our internal model of the world in our mind as we describe it. This was the problem Kant’s philosophy addresses and which, according to Bronowski, he aborts in 1678, and Bronowski addresses in his Silliman Lec­ tures The Origin of Knowledge and Imagination where he states: He [Kant] wrote a number of books and papers whose basic message was this: our knowledge of the outside world depends on our modes of perception, and I am going to write philosophy as a description of the structure of the world as seen by man.5, p5 A second edition to the Critique of Pure Reason was published six years after the first containing various revisions that Kant had thought neces­ sary because of a review which suggested to Kant that his book had been misunderstood. But in between these two editions he published an article titled, “Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Pre­ sent Itself as Science”.7 In Prolegomena, Kant addresses the misunderstand­ ings conveyed in the review and clarifies his broad approach which will ultimately be integrated into his second edition of Critique. Prolegomena is therefore a condensed enunciation of the overall project about the possibil­ ity of a scientific metaphysics which address four specific questions: 1. 2. 3. 4.

How is pure mathematics possible? How is pure natural science possible? How is metaphysics in general possible? How is metaphysics as science possible?7

The starting point for Kant is David Hume’s (1711–1776) arguments against theism and the formalisation of the connections between cause and effects. Hume in effect states, that if any argument has no abstract reasoning con­ taining measurement of the physical world or experimental component, “Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”8 Whereas Hume wants to remove the possibility of metaphysics, Kant wants to turn it into a science. In the preface to Prolegomena Kant precis Hume’s position, and I will quote what he says extensively: Hume started in the main from a single but important concept in meta­ physics, namely that of the connection of cause and effect (together with its consequential concepts of force and action). He challenged Reason, who pretends to have conceived this concept in her womb, to give an account of herself and say with what right she thinks: that any­ thing can be of such a nature, that if it is posited, something else must thereby also be posited necessarily; for that is what the concept of cause says. He proved irrefutably: that it is wholly impossible for reason to think such a conjunction a priori from concepts. . . . The imagination

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[my bold emphasis], having by experience brought certain representa­ tions under the law of association, passes off a subjective necessity aris­ ing out of this, namely custom, for an objective necessity from insight. From this he inferred: that reason had no power to think of such connections [my bold emphasis], not even only to think them in gen­ eral, because its concepts would then be mere fictions, and that all its ostensibly a priori cognitions were nothing but falsely stamped ordinary experiences; which is as much as to say that there is no metaphysics at all, and cannot be any.7, p65 This is the gauntlet thrown down by Hume that Kant picks up and addresses it through the four specific questions listed earlier by which to provide insights into his book Critique of Pure Reason. Kant analyses the situation in a highly technical manner, but what is interesting is that we are back at the issue I raised at the end of Chapter 1, the relationship between reason and imagination and the notion of the objective verses the subjective. Up until this time it had been proposed that the empirical sciences had advanced through a process of induction. Simply stated, this is a process by which par­ ticular observations or the results of particular experiments are generalised into universal truths or universal theories. This is the method by which Newton was thought to have come to his laws of motion at the end of the seventeenth century. But Hume, using a billiard ball analogy, challenges this view say­ ing that it is not reasonable to generalise from a singular event to a universal truth: [T]here is nothing in a number of instances, different from every single instance, which is supposed to be exactly similar, except only that after a repetition of similar instances the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant and to believe it will exist. This connection, therefore, which we feel in the mind, this customary transition of the imagination [my italics] from one object to its usual attendant, is the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connection. Nothing further is the case.8, p86 Hume’s text is dotted with similarly articulated sentiments, and yes! How­ ever, many times one billiard ball strikes another we expect the motion of the first ball to be passed onto the second, or to use Newton’s phrase, “pretty nearly”. But I want to step back from this and run a thought experiment, an experiment rooted in the work of Karl Popper’s (1904–1994) response to inductive reasoning, where we imagine a situation in which a conjunction may or may not always occur. The thought experiment proceeds by asking us to imagine a naturalist taking a survey of swans, let’s say in England. The naturalist tramps up and down the rivers and waterways of England, and

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every swan they find is white, and they make a record. So, from this survey they can make a universal claim that all swans are white. We have gone from a particular set of instances to the universal through the process of so-called induction. However, not being satisfied, the naturalist continues to survey the waterways and eventually comes across one of the very rarer black swans. Therefore, this refutes the universal claim that all swans are white. It is out­ side the scope of this discussion to start arguing about probability and issues concerning biological taxonomy, but Popper’s view would be that induction is not the manner by which empirical science is progressed; it is progressed through a process of guesses and conjectures, or if you like, leaps of faith, followed by refutation; rigorous attempts to falsify those initial guesses. If indeed induction is not what distinguishes science by the generation of universal laws, what separates science from non-science? Following Popper: The problem of finding a criterion which would enable us to distin­ guish between the empirical sciences on the one hand, and mathemat­ ics and logic as well as “metaphysical” systems on the other, I call the problem of demarcation. This problem was known to Hume who attempted to solve it. With Kant it became the central problem of the theory of knowledge. If, fol­ lowing Kant, we call the problem of induction “Hume’s problem”, we might call the problem of demarcation “Kant’s problem”. Of these two problems – the source of nearly all other problems of the theory of knowledge – the problem of demarcation is, I think, the more fundamental.9, p34

Demarcation and Darwin The problem of demarcation is particularly interesting to me as a biolo­ gist because, in 1974, Popper published his autobiography, later popularised under the title Unended Quest, in which he claims that the theory of evolu­ tion by natural selection is not a scientific theory but a useful “Metaphysical Research Programme”,10 which is incapable of predicting anything, he says: Darwinism does not really predict the evolution of variety. It therefore cannot really explain it. At best, it can predict the evolution of variety under “favourable conditions”. But it is hardly possible to describe in general terms what favourable conditions are – except that, in their presence, a variety of forms will emerge. However, “explanation in principle” is something very different from the type of explanation we demand in physics. While we can explain a particular eclipse by predicting it, we cannot predict or explain any particular evolutionary change (except perhaps certain changes in the gene population within one species).10, pp171–172

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It is here that I would take issue with Popper and ask him how the predic­ tion of an eclipse is fundamentally different to the prediction that a popula­ tion of a bacterium exposed to an antibiotic or toxin, let’s say penicillin, will become resistant to that antibiotic and that researchers will be able to predict the molecular changes that have gone on to make that population of bacteria resistant. It is interesting to note that in Unended Quest Popper has nearly accepted such a situation by mentioning a similar possibility within parentheses. However, notably, by 1977, when Popper was invited to deliver the first Darwin Lecture at Darwin College, Cambridge, he retracted his position saying that although he still thought it was a metaphysical research programme, “I have changed my mind about the testability and the logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have the opportu­ nity to make a recantation.”11 Nevertheless, he still sees it as a metaphysical research programme without the robustness of explanation demanded in physics; indeed, he would regard it as a historical science in a manner in which the movement of heavenly bodies is not, and Popper is clearly not a fan of historicism. Historicism holds the view that historical events, social and political, are governed by natural law. A  view that Popper clearly does not hold as he made the case first in his book The Open Society and its Enemies published in 1943 and then developed in The Poverty of Historicism in 1959. The timing of The Open Society is interesting as it comes in the middle of the Second World War and is his “war effort”, a period where he “thought that freedom might become a central problem again”,10, p115 under the growing influences of totalitarianism during the war and then Marxism afterwards. These books therefore: were meant as a defence of freedom against totalitarian and authori­ tarian ideas, and a warning against the dangers of historicist supersti­ tions. Both [books] grew out of the theory of knowledge of Logik der Forschung [The Logic of Scientific Discovery] and out of my convic­ tion that our often unconscious views on the theory of knowledge . . . are decisive for our attitude towards ourselves and towards politics.10, p115 Popper therefore thought that the scientific method of conjecture, critical tests followed by refutation, in other words the process of trial and error, should also be applied to our social and political culture as an antidote to authoritarianism in general, and Marxism in particular. He readily acknowl­ edged that no society is perfect, indeed within the social and political realm, he recognises that there will be “irresolvable clashes of values . . . because moral principles may conflict.” But this application of the scientific method to social and political problems requires an accountable society which is open and transparent. Although Popper admits there will be, “irresolvable clashes of values”, and laudable though this scientific approach sounds, we are back at Kant’s issue of demarcation.

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In The Open Society, Popper stresses the critical method of science as being the foundation of reason to address societal issues. However, following Kant, reason is not without its critics and in Prolegomena we find four con­ tradictory categories which are indispensable to any system of reason. They are starting points from which all reasonable thought develops. This system, developed by Kant and which can arguably be traced back to Socrates and is also reminiscent of Blake’s necessary contraries for progress, relies on a dialectical approach made up of each of the four categories which consists of a Thesis to which there is an Anti-thesis, and where each category is based on a transcendent cosmological idea in which the world can be described as either a) finite or infinite, b) simple or complex, c) determined or free, d) initiated by a causal being or contingent.7 Having developed this system, Kant goes on: Here we have the strangest phenomenon of human reason, no other example of which can be shown in any other use of reason. If, as usually happens, we think of the appearances of the world of the senses as things in themselves, if we take the principles of their conjunction as principles universally valid of things in themselves and not merely valid of experi­ ence, as is equally usual, indeed without our critique unavoidable, an unsuspected conflict appears, which can never be removed in the usual dogmatic way, because both thesis and antithesis can be established by equally evident, clear and irresistible proofs – for I  pledge myself for the correctness of all these proofs – and reason thus sees itself divided against itself, a state at which the sceptic rejoices but which must cause the critical philosopher reflection and disquiet.7, p143 Kant recognised the split Hume had created in the universe, a split between what is out there in the universe as objects in themselves, and what we perceive through our world of senses, that is, how the moving objects I per­ ceive interact; the objects in my mind’s eye so to speak, and he was driven to understand how it is that the human mind can model and make sense of the nature of that outside world. A sceptic like Hume may well rejoice, but this does not help the natural philosopher trying to identify what is and what is not a law of nature. Kant had brought the inner world of the mind closer to the outer world; the knower and the known were no longer separated. But my reading of Popper is that he required their separation to demarcate science from historicism; this was his antidote to certain political ideologies. Here lies a grave problem, biology is a historical science, and we are back again at that divergence between science as physics, with clearly defined laws of nature, against biological, social and political laws of nature. Although Popper did not regard himself a social or political scientist, “for I was not primarily a political philosopher”, his wife thought differently, “but she was satisfied neither by this disclaimer, nor by my subsequent return to my old interests, to the theory of scientific knowledge.”10, p148 The Open Society, remember, was a project based on applying the scientific method to social

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problems and thereby assigning historicism to the waste bin. But, speaking as a biologist, are we not here about to throw the baby out with the bath­ water? Popper would like to apply his method of conjecture and refutation to a world of theories starting from a position of determinism in which he acknowledges: that full knowledge of our psychological and physiological conditions and of our environment would make it possible to predict our future behaviour with the same certainty with which we can predict an eclipse of the sun or of the moon.11, p261 Here the ambition is for laws of nature, à la Newton, to be applied critically not only to scientific theories but also to social and political philosophies, some similarities of which can be seen in the elements of Kant’s cosmo­ logical theories described earlier, together with some more modern, postKantian philosophic fashions he regards as anti-rational usually associated with the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche: First, determinism: the future is contained in the present, in as much as it is fully determined by the present. [e.g. Kant] Second, idealism, the world is my dream. [e.g. Hume] Third, irrationalism: we have irrational or supra-rational experiences in which we experience ourselves as things-in-themselves; and so have some kind of knowledge of things-in-themselves. [e.g. Theistic; see ourselves as objects] Fourth, voluntarism: in our own volitions we know ourselves as wills. The thing-in-itself is the will. [e.g. Schopenhauer] Fifth, nihilism: in our boredom we know ourselves as nothings. The thing-in-itself is Nothingness. [e.g. Nietzsche]11, p263 And here lies Popper’s problem, quoting him verbatim, “Although I con­ sider each of these five theories to be false, I  am nevertheless convinced that each of them is irrefutable.”11, p263 We have reached an impasse with regard to upholding laws of nature as universal, predictive and open to refutability. Accordingly, my reading of Popper suggests, refutability here can be through either a failure of logic or an empirical failure. Logical, or analytical, failure would be not because it is inconsistent, which would immediately show it is refutable, but more notably, just because a theory is consistent it does not mean it is true, for example, the assumptions under­ pinning it are untestable. Likewise, empirical failure would mean not ame­ nable to empirical testing.11, pp264–265 Regarding the first theory, determinism, we can return to Kant’s categories and say that its antithesis, indeterminism, is also equally possible, and as two contrary theories cannot be equally true, they become irrefutable. Similar arguments can be applied to idealism and its antithesis realism, irrationalism

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and its antithesis rationalism. Interestingly, although Popper highlights both voluntarism and nihilism in his list of five mentioned earlier, he summarily dismisses them as forms of irrationalism in which the nihilism of Nietzsche is just a variant of Schopenhauer’s existential philosophy which he disparag­ ingly declares: What he [Schopenhauer] discovered in himself was will, activity, ten­ sion and excitement – roughly the opposite what some existentialists discovered: the utter boredom of the bore-in-himself bored by himself. [but] . . . the great fashion of our post-Kantian, post-rationalist era is what Nietzsche . . . rightly called “European nihilism”.11, p262 Popper’s joking aside, he is, by declaration, first of all an indeterminist, secondly a realist, thirdly a rationalist. As regards my fourth and fifth examples, I  gladly admit – with Kant and other critical rationalists – that we cannot possess anything like full knowledge of the real world with its infinite richness and beauty. Neither physics nor any other science can help us to this end. . . . And as to our nihilists and existentialists who bore themselves (and perhaps others), I can only pity them.11, p263 Let us articulate each of these in turn in the antithetical form. First, he is not a determinist, this would on the face of it suggest that laws of nature cannot be predictive; second, he is not an idealist, so here the mindful aspect of the world is removed; and third, he is not irrational, so the world is analysable and thereby understandable, but by what? In other words, by taking this approach he removes all the subjective elements. But this begs the question, where do our theories come from? Irrationalism, according to Popper, came from Hume’s contention, that we do in fact learn by Baconian induction coupled with Hume’s logical proof that it is impossible to justify induction rationally. . . . Habit or custom does not play the role in the process of learning which Hume assigned to it.12, pp339–355 Although Popper argues that habit and custom have no role and that this removes “irrationalism”, can this really hold true? It would appear that “irrationalism” is equated with the “subjective”, and almost apologetically he has to admit, “In this way, theories are seen to be free creations of our own minds, the result of an almost poetic intuition [my italics] of our attempt to understand intuitively the laws of nature.”11, p260 In other words, at some level subjectivism is unavoidable; and we are back at the juxtaposition of reason and imagination in which imagination without reason is madness, and reason without imagination is death, we have returned to our position

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at the end of Chapter 1. Imagination is responsible for our notion that habit and custom do indeed have a significant role in the scientific process.

Biology and language Stepping back as a biologist who accepts that history is important, it is as if the scientific method, as outlined earlier by way of Hume, Kant and Popper, was trying to justify itself from within itself as an objective, self-consistent system without recourse to subjectivism. However, all sentient animals are in con­ tinual communication with the world around them, and this communication governs their behaviour; indeed, the environmental stimuli which through sense perception govern their actions, let us ignore for the time being how this happens, acknowledges the fact that the nervous system has co-evolved to be highly selective and automatically carries with it an interpretation of the external world from which these stimuli arrive. This selectivity of sense perception and subsequent behavioural response has come about through Darwinian natural selection and is historic. Is it any wonder, therefore, that habit and custom have been so influential in shaping our knowledge of the world? But as human beings we have developed a consciousness in which lan­ guage can be used to analyse the world into objects and actions and through language the world can be reconstituted in our mind’s eye. Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974), in his Silliman Lectures, in comparison with Popper, takes a different view and emphasises human consciousness and the role of language: Consciousness, then, is our mode of analysis of the outside world into objects and actions. And . . . it at once posed a problem; namely, that we think of ourselves as objects and we can therefore also apply language to ourselves. We treat ourselves both as objects of language and as speakers of language, both as objects of the symbolism and as symbols in it. And all the difficult paradoxes which go right back to Greek times and reap­ pear in modern mathematics depend essentially on this.5, p44 Subjectivism is therefore written into the world by the very nature of what we are as communicating human animals. I cannot just say, “When I become dictator, I will ban dogma”, without an ironic smile crossing the face of my audience; we cannot just remove the subject from our analysis of the world. And as Popper says above, “we cannot possess anything like full knowledge of the real world with its infinite richness and beauty”, so what is a law of nature? And how does science get around the issues I have outlined here? My starting point for this chapter was Newton’s laws of motion and their universal nature for predicting the motions of heavenly bodies together with some ideas around the method of induction by which we can generalise from particular observations to the universal. David Hume showed us the flaw in this method for the first time but with the help of Kant, and more recently, Popper disenfranchised ourselves from the subject.

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Building on the scholarship of Bronowski in his Silliman Lectures he has a chapter titled, “The Laws of Nature and the Nature of Laws”5; he too discusses Newton’s laws of motion and in particular Newton’s law of inverse squares from which it is possible to predict “pretty nearly” the periodicity of the moon. Here we have an example of a mathematical expression which Bronowski argues is not dissimilar to another expression but this time a linguistic expression taken from William Blake’s The Auguries of Innocence: A Robin Red Breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage.3, pK431 Now this couplet has none of the formality of Newton’s inverse square law, and yet it is in a certain sense highly particular and simultaneously has universal content. We all know that, by restricting the freedom of a creature this action in some way violates nature. Although here we have two statements, one scientific and the other poetic, what links them is that they are both human languages with understandable content. In science, as in the arts, we are looking for content that: mimics or mirrors the structure of reality. . . . [and] it does it in exactly the same way in which human language evolved from animal language, by analysing the sentence into constituents which represent separable entities in the outside world – things or actions. So science constantly seeks in the descriptive sentences for separable entities which can either be perceived in the outside world or, more often, have to be inferred speculatively in the outside world.5, p47 Now ask anyone up until the end of the nineteenth century about the nature of Newton’s law of inverse squares and they would have said that it “mimic or mirrors the structure of reality”. But then in 1899 when Max Planck was investigating black body radiation he could not get the mathematical equations to fit the experimental observations of his colleagues, and he was forced to the conclusion that the radiation was not continuous but came in discontinuous lumps. From that moment the law of inverse squares was no longer mimicking or mirroring the structure of reality, and it required Einstein’s work on special (1905) and general (1915–1916) relativity to be published that replaced the law of inverse squares with a model based on a geometrical universe of space–time. This changed the whole scientific view as to how the world worked at the physical level, tell anyone before that, that two watches, one at the North Pole and another at the equator would not keep the same time, they would have thought you mad. But as I said at the beginning, it was Newton’s equations that were used to fly the Apollo spacecraft to the moon and back in the 1960s. But here is the remarkable thing, Einstein’s universe of space–time subsumed Newton’s laws within it. This therefore begs some questions. Was Newton’s theory of gravitation a

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fiction? Was Einstein’s theory of relativity also a fiction that will be replaced? Bronowski’s position is that: [T]he world is totally connected: that is to say, that there are no events anywhere in the universe which are not tied to every other event in the universe. I  regard this as a metaphysical statement.  .  .  . But you cannot carry on science on the supposition that you are going to be able to connect every event with every other event. . . . therefore, an essential part of the methodology of science to divide the world for any experiment into what we regard as relevant and what we regard, for the purposes of that experiment, as irrelevant.5, p58

Cryptogrammic expansion Therefore, linguistically speaking, although all subjects and all objects, and you and I are all connected in reality, for the purposes of science we have to objectify the world and, “put a fence around the law of nature that we are trying to tease out.”3 And returning to Blake’s metaphor: A Robin Red Breast in a Cage Puts all Heaven in a Rage. The word “Cage” is important here, because he too has restricted his uni­ verse, and he too has violated nature by cutting the world into the relevant and the irrelevant; but that does not mean that his poetic metaphor in the first instance or scientific laws of nature is the second instance are useless. If our judgements about what is and what is not relevant are good judge­ ments, they will lead to good laws of nature that can be instrumental, but as Bronowski points out, “it does not follow that they will give you the conceptual picture of what is in the world at all”,5, p59 and the continual progress of science over the last century, or so, is because we have expanded the boundaries of our “cage” by incorporating more and more of what is relevant. Both Newton’s laws of inverse squares and Blake’s Robin Red Breast in a Cage are cryptograms we must decipher, and we “have to do it in the same way that we invent any word in the human language – by an act of pure imagination.”5, p60 The philosophy of science up until the middle of the last century was primarily dominated by the philosophy of physics, but over the last 50 years or so this has gradually begun to change, and Bronowski’s approach as treat­ ing science as a cryptogram, acknowledging the subjective, and taking a fundamentally linguistic approach is striking. Let me stress, he says we “have to do it in the same way that we invent any word [my italics] in the human lan­ guage”. I want to dwell on that phrase, “we invent any word”, because over the last 200 or so years the world of biology has blossomed with words, and

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with it these words have expanded not just our scientific lexicon but even our everyday lexicon. What I propose to do is therefore to apply Bronow­ ski’s cryptogrammic approach to the revolution that took place following the Second World War in molecular biology and show how disparate ideas and concepts became subsumed by expanding and incorporating more and more relevant content. Starting at the time of Dmitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) and his characteri­ sation of elements to form the periodic table through to Emil Fischer (1852– 1919) and his work on molecular structure of protein and the peptide bond, we can see how elements can be built up into simple molecules and then on to increasingly complicated macro-molecular structures. Another physicist, originally interested in thermodynamics, who turned his eye to biological problems and the nature of the gene was Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961), and during the Second World War he delivered a series of lectures (1943) at Trinity College, Dublin, later published as What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell.13 In these lectures he proposed that “We believe a gene – or perhaps the whole chromosome fibre – to be an aperiodic crystal.” In England several physicists, who had become disillusioned with the applica­ tions that science had been put to during the war, moved into biology and brought with them a reductionist approach which was highly influential. But there were basically two groups, those studying protein structure like Max Perutz (1914–2002) and Francis Crick (1916–2004) based in Cambridge and those investigating the structure of DNA like Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004) and Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) at King’s College, London. This was a period when the methods of X-ray crystallography were being improved, and all sorts of structures were being examined including proteins and DNA. But when James Watson (b. 1928), having been inspired by Schrödinger’s book and his ideas behind aperiodic crystals, joined Crick in Cambridge in 1951, most biologists thought that the message for inheritance was most likely to be proteinaceous, because they were a much more biologically diverse group of molecules. But according to Perutz, who had been working on the structure of haemoglobin and speaking several years later, DNA was the much easier molecule structure to solve than any protein: A protein – an enzyme molecule for example – is a thousand times more difficult than DNA.  .  .  . DNA was comparatively simple and could be solved by a method of trial. You have a little information from an X-ray-diffraction photograph; what Crick and Watson had from that was three limiting measurements . . . From these, they knew that an essential feature of DNA is its repetitiveness . . . Solving the structure of a crystalline protein by this method is impossible because it does not repeat.14, pp22–23 But the remarkable thing about the structure of DNA were the dual aspects of its function that became obvious once its structure was known. One

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function was to be able to make more DNA and to replicate itself identi­ cally; the other function was to construct proteins very different from itself. As Judson reports in his book The Eighth Day of Creation14 [D]eoxyribonucleic acid turned out to be a substance of elegance, even beauty. Structure and those dual functions are united in DNA with such ingenious parsimony that one smiles with delight of perceiving it. Extreme elegance is almost more convincing to scientists than it should be. Nobody would claim that the first paper Watson and Crick published, “A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid,” 128 lines in Nature on 25 April 1953, had the vast power to reorder men’s think­ ing that marked The Origin of Species, in 1859 or the announcement, in 1905, of the special theory of relativity. Yet the discovery of the structure – after a pause for its implications to be absorbed – was bril­ liantly stimulating.14, pp23–24 It is interesting here that Perutz immediately made the connection with Darwin’s evolutionary theory and Einstein’s special relativity, both of which I  have referred to earlier in relationship to the philosophy of science. In Bronowski’s terms of decoding the cryptogram of nature, Watson and Crick had arrived at a language of true sentences in which “inferred entities, or units”, genes, were held together with a “grammar”, self-replication of DNA and the construction of proteins, by which “sentences translate into the real world by a dictionary of translation which tells us how we actually test, confirm, perceive the fact”, and from which, some action of one sort or another takes place. This is science at its most imaginative and creative. I cannot think of a more compelling example, especially now at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, where the technologies that have been spawned from that Watson and Crick’s 1953 paper, and applied to medicine and agriculture, are bearing fruit. Arguably, Watson and Crick’s paper is as much a demonstration of a law of nature as Newton’s Law of Inverse Squares, but whether or not it aligns with Popper’s view that Dar­ winian theory is a metaphysical research programme I will return to in the next chapter.

References 1) White, M. (1998) Isaac Newton, The Last Sorcerer. Fourth Estate.

2) Keynes, J.M. (1942) Newton, the Man. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/

Extras/Keynes_Newton/ 3) Keynes, G. (1966) Blake Complete Writings. Oxford University Press. 4) Ackroyd, P. (1995) Blake. Sinclair-Stevenson. 5) Bronowski, J. (1978) The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. Yale University Press. 6) Pope, A. (1730) Epitaph Intended for Isaac Newton. Westminster Abbey. 7) Kant, I. (2004 [1783]) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Ed. Günter Zöller). Oxford University Press.

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8) Hume, D. (1955 [1748]) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Ed. Charles W. Hendel). Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. 9) Popper, K. (1959) The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson. 10) Popper, K. (1992 [1974]) Autobiography of Karl Popper. In The Library of Living Philosophers (Ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp). Open Court Publishing, Routledge. 11) Popper, K. (2002) Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge Classics. 12) Popper, K. (1977) Natural Selection and the Emergence of Mind. The First Darwin Lecture delivered at Darwin College, Cambridge (8th November 1977) published in Dialectica 22, 3 (1978) pp 339–355 dedicated to Paul Bernays. 13) Schrödinger, E. (1967) What Is Life?  & Mind and Matter. Cambridge University Press. 14) Judson, H.F. (1995) The Eighth Day of Creation. Penguin Books.

4

Myopic evolutionists

Fearful symmetry In the previous chapter I have shown that laws of nature are fundamental to the pursuit of science, but what constitutes a law of nature was problematic with respect to the importance of the role of the imagination. In my read­ ing, Popper downplays the role of the imagination and wants science based on a method using guesswork, conjecture, followed by carefully designed tests that have the capability of refuting the conjectures. Thereby, science, which in Popper’s opinion needs a special status, is demarcated from other human activities. This contrasts greatly with Bronowski’s view in which imagination and its relationship to language is key, and where laws of nature are formulated as cryptogrammic statements which need to judge what is to be included and then to be imaginatively deciphered. Where both of these philosophical views are in agreement is that at no point do we ever reach a position which is a true picture of reality. Reality is always provisional; but in Bronowski’s view, science, no less than art, is a human pursuit which needs no special status. Popper, on the other hand, requires it to have demarcated status as it is the method by which to remove historicism from political regimes, the roots of which he traced back through Marx and Hegel to Plato1 and which he saw as dangerously authoritarian. The effects of his­ toricism to Popper were pernicious as he sees “belief in historical destiny is sheer superstition,”2, pV and a legacy that contributed substantially to the Second World War. Therefore, sciences that were in themselves historical, such as biology and sociology to name but two, got relegated to be no more than metaphysical research programmes because in Popper’s view historicism was incompatible with science. This result of downgrading the status of biology that would be an anathema to most biologists and sociologists. However, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, resting now on an everincreasing knowledge of molecular biology, to many people in the twentyfirst century still awakens controversy, a controversy that requires unpicking. When Charles Darwin (1809–1882) entered the University of Cam­ bridge in January 1828, having given up pursuing a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh, it was to qualify and follow a career as a clergyman DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-4

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in the Church of England. In his second year, Darwin knew he would be examined on Paley’s Evidences of Christianity, a text the premises of which every high-minded ordained Englishman accepted.3, p85 Darwin studied Paley (1743–1805) and took examination with due seriousness and says: In order to pass the B.A. examination it was, also, necessary to get up Paley’s Evidences of his of Christianity [sic] and his Moral Philosophy. This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book, and as I may add of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. . . . I did not at the time trouble myself about Paley’s prem­ ises; and taking these on trust I was charmed and convinced by the long line of argumentation.4, pp32–33 However, it was Paley’s text “Natural Theology – Or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected From the Appearances of Nature” that was to be key to Darwin’s subsequent revolutionary thinking as he began to question Paley’s premises. Paley’s Natural Theology is a tour de force utilising the scientific knowledge of his day, and his argument rests on the contrast between finding a stone on the ground with finding a watch on the ground. Compared to the stone, a watch must clearly have a pur­ pose and therefore a designer and maker, whereas that is not the case with a stone. By analogy, Paley makes the same case for the human eye, something so exquisite and fit for purpose must have had a designer, and that designer is attributable to God. In Richard Dawkins’s book The Blind Watchmaker, the title of which I stole for this current chapter, Dawkins (b. 1941) disputes Paley’s watchmaker case by turning it on its head, saying: Paley’s argument is made with passionate sincerity and is informed with the best biological scholarship of his day, but it is wrong, gloriously and utterly wrong. The analogy between telescope and eye, between watch and living organism, is false. All appearances to the contrary, the only watchmaker in nature is the blind forces of physics, albeit deployed in a very special way. A true watchmaker has foresight: he designs his cogs and springs, and plans their interconnections, with a future purpose in his mind’s eye. Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence apparently purposeful form of life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.5, p5 Following this quotation from The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins recounts a conversation he had at dinner with a “distinguished modern philosopher”

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to whom he posed the question as to whether it was possible to be an atheist before the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. The philosopher thought that David Hume, who we have discussed in a previous chapter, would call himself an atheist prior to 1859, because Hume dismissed the argument from design a century before Darwin. But there is an issue, and Dawkins goes on: [W]hat Hume did was to criticize the logic of using apparent design in nature as positive evidence for the apparent existence of God. He did not offer any alternative explanation for apparent design but left the ques­ tion open. An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: “I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn’t a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.”5, p6 Dawkins probably should have asked the question, that before 1 July 1858 would it have been possible to be an atheist? Because that was the date that two Englishmen, Darwin together with Alfred Wallace (1823–1913) had their joint paper read at the Linnaean Society of London titled, “On the tendency of Species to Form Varieties”. But it would be a further year before Darwin’s revolutionary tome would be published by John Murray and the argument broadcast to the population at large. But the major point is that, through a process of individual variation in populations of organisms followed by the preservation of those best adapted to their environment, complexity developed, and there was no longer the need to invoke a super­ natural deity, or designer, to explain it. The controversy referring back to Hume regarding the argument of design is apposite, because, although Hume did not judge the word God as an inappropriate expression, as in Part II of the Dialogues, through the character of Philo he says, “Nothing exists without a cause; and the original cause of this universe (whatever it may be) we call God; and piously ascribe to him every species of perfection.”6, p44 But Hume is clear to point that we should not imagine this perfection to be human in nature; his primary concern was that he did not want to associate it with any irrational thought that might legitimise miracles as supernatural phenomenon. Indeed, Hume wanted the foundation of the Deity, “whatever it may be”, to be based on reason, saying through Demea’s response: What! No demonstration of the being of a God! No abstract arguments! No proofs a priori! Are these, which have hitherto been so much insisted on by philosophers, all fallacy, all sophism? Can we reach no farther in this subject than experience and probability? [my italics] I will not say, that this is betraying the cause of a Deity: But surely, by this affected candour, you give advantage to atheists, which they never could obtain, by the mere dint of argument and reasoning.6, pp45–46

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I think it is quite clear that Hume and Dawkins’s sympathies lie with Demea, although Hume recognises the fact that I think Dawkins would deny that there is no argument that can be traced back to Aristotle that gets around the concept of an “unmoved mover” or an “uncaused causer”, which to him might as well be labelled God. However, both Hume and Dawkins are not happy, and they are both highly critical of anything not based on reason. This particularly includes sense experience, for in the previous quotation, Hume plainly is unsatisfied with demonstrating that our only foundation of the Deity’s existence rests on “experience and probability”, and he has stated further, “All inferences from experience . . . are effects of custom and not reasoning [my italics].” Hume had said earlier: Having found, in many instances, that any two kinds of objects – flame and heat, snow and cold – have always been conjoined together; if flame or snow be presented anew to the senses, the mind is carried by custom to expect heat or cold, and to believe that such a quality does exist. . . . This belief is the necessary result of placing the mind in such circum­ stances. It is an operation of the soul . . . as unavoidable as to feel the passion of love, when we receive benefits; or hatred when we meet with injuries. All these operations are a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or prevent.7, p60 We are back at our mismatch of our naturalist undertaking a survey of swans and finding them to be white, until eventually they observe a black one. There are two classic examples that frequent the statistical literature that occur and reoccur up until the present day. The first, returning to Newton’s world of the movement of heavenly bodies, is the example of sunrise; just because we have experienced sunrise everyday of our life, does it necessar­ ily mean that it will rise again tomorrow? Here we have a situation where all our day-to-day experience suggests that it will. The second example is whether or not a dead person can be brought back to life. Here, all everyday common-sense experience, leaving aside for the moment modern medical advances and resuscitation technologies, suggests that they cannot. But let us for a moment return to the eighteenth century and Hume and his con­ temporaries; to Hume, “Nothing is more free than the imagination of man” with “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing these ideas in all varieties of fiction and vision,”7, p61 and therefore it must not to be trusted like reason. So, does experience and probability have nothing to say on the subject?

Uncertainty The year following David Hume’s death, a mathematically precocious boy by the name of Karl Fredrich Gauss (1777–1855) was born in what is now

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Lower Saxony, Germany, to humble parents who did not even know his date of birth save that it was Wednesday eight days before Ascension Day, which is determined by Easter. The date of Easter is determined by the phases of the moon, and the movement of heavenly bodies was a subject that fasci­ nated the scientific world at the time; optical instruments were improving, and around 1807 Gauss had access to the newly built Göttingen Observatory and was interested in astronomical studies.8, pp358–360 To the majority of scien­ tists at the time, the state of the art Göttingen Observatory was going to pro­ vide the God’s eye view of the heavens but to a penetrative mind like Gauss he was well aware that pinpointing a star or planet was fraught with problems and that statistical approaches would be required, as Bronowski describes: When an observer looks at a star, he knows that there is a multitude of causes for error. So he takes several readings, and he hopes, naturally, that the best estimate of the star’s position is the average – the centre of the scatter. So far so obvious. But Gauss pushed on to ask what the scatter of the errors tells us. He devised the Gaussian curve in which the scatter is summarised by the deviation, or spread, of the curve. And from this came a far-reaching idea: the scatter marks an area of uncer­ tainty. We are not sure that the true position is the centre. All we can say is that it lies in the area of uncertainty, and the area is calculable from the observed scatter of individual observations.8, p358 In other words, it’s a statistical problem of probability. The beauty of this approach is that it can be applied across the disciplines, from stars in the andromeda constellation to populations of zebra; from astrophysics to zoospores – the approach has universal application. Let us see how it might work. Let us pick a trivial example and work our way through applying a Gaussian approach by suggesting that people in Wales are taller than people in England. If our Gaussian curves overlap each other perfectly there is no difference. So, we can take a sub-sample of the Welsh population and measure their height and then determine the average. Once we have the average we can calculate the deviation of each individual from that average. Then we repeat that same procedure for the English population. Now neither our averages nor our deviations from the averages are without error; so we have an “area of uncertainty” and if these areas of uncertainty overlap let’s say by 100 percent, then we can say there is no difference. However, let’s say they overlap by 99 percent, then we can say there is a one percent difference; if by 95 percent, then there is a five percent difference; 90 percent, ten percent difference and so on and so forth. Using this approach, we can get a measure of the probability of the Welsh being taller than the English, and the more people we include in the investigation the more robust these figures become and the “area of uncertainty” reduces; but whatever the measure of uncertainty is, it is always provisional; there is no Gods-eye truth. This frequency-dependent approach, promulgated by

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statisticians like R. A. Fisher and colleagues, came to dominate scientific investigations throughout much of the twentieth century and is based on the assumption, known technically as the null hypothesis, that there is no prior knowledge and no difference between two sets of data, but this was not, and is not, the only game in town. Let’s return to Hume’s criticism of induction, he mentions both “experi­ ence and probability”. We have unpacked a method of comparing Gaussian curves based on the null hypothesis, what about experience? The notion that our imagination may connect cause and effect through repeated experience. As we have discussed in the previous chapter, we have to judge as to what is relevant and irrelevant and, so to speak, design our experimental theatre. Once designed, we can address Hume’s problem of induction, that is, the problem of being able to make universal claims (laws of nature) from singular or at least a limited number of observations. This problem can be translated into statistical terms as being able to calculate the probability of a future event based on limited observations, and the classic examples of sunrise and human resurrection have exercised the minds of many people including Hume’s to the present day.

Miracles Hume, as I have stressed, was by nature a man who continually celebrated reason, and he used reason as a foil against religious superstition, but he was not mathematically as technically adept as some of his contemporaries. We have just mentioned Gauss in relationship to pinpointing stars, but there were others working on related statistical problems such as Thomas Bayes (1702–1761), a Presbyterian philosopher statistician born at the beginning of the decade before, and Richard Price (1723–1791), another religious philosopher/mathematician born in the following decade. Both Hume and Bayes knew Price, but whether or not Hume knew Bayes directly is unclear,9 but in the middle of the eighteenth century a debate was occurring around miracles, in particular the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth follow­ ing his crucifixion and the credibility of witnesses and what they reported to have observed. In his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,7, pp117–141 Hume had criticised both miracles and the argument from design saying: A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalter­ able experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is – just because it is a miracle – as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.7, p122 Remove all religious connection and sentiment, and we are again back at the role of “experience and probability” and the extent to which repeated observations by one or more witnesses at one or more times, can equate to a truth about the universe. According to Richard Price, Hume’s position is

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clear, “It must be remembered, that the greatest uniformity and frequency of experience will not [my italics] offer a proper proof, that an event will happen in a future trial.”10, p128 However, not all in the eighteenth century agreed with Hume’s position and indeed Price who was sympathetic to reli­ gious sentiments, he was a nonconformist preacher, was also mathematically able and “an expert in actuarial science and population statistics”,11 and it was Price, who presented Thomas Bayes’s approach to The Royal Society in 1763, just after Bayes’s death, on a method of calculating the probability based on prior observations, that is, founded on induction, that confronted Hume’s position. Whereas Hume denied the interaction between causes and their subsequent effects, Bayes wanted to connect effects to their prior causes. This method accounted for repetitive observations, in other words it allowed for historic experience through exploiting Bayes’s approach. Price was not just an advocate for Bayes as he was the first person to actually apply the theory and the relevance of which has implications to some of the most vexing issues in statistical applications today. The example that Price adds as an appendix to his presentation of Bayes’s approach to The Royal Society addresses the probability of sunrise. As a non-mathematician myself, let me try and convey Price’s reasoning as follows: 1. With no prior knowledge the sun will either rise (p=1) or not rise (q=0) tomorrow; the probability is therefore 50 percent or 1/2. 2. Any future sunrise (M) will have a probability of x (i.e., between 0, unrisen, or 1, risen). 3. As the days pass and the sun continues to rise, our observations increase one at a time. 4. Therefore, day two, the probability will increase from ½ to (½)2 = ¼ or odds of three to one. 5. Day three, adding another day becomes; ⅛, or odds of seven to one: then. 6. Day four, one-sixteenth, or odds of 15 to one, and so on. 7. Generalising this into an equation we get 2p+1–1; where p=number of sunrises. Thus for Price the question of the Sun rising was a data determined hypothesis, impossible to think about when even the existence of the Sun was unknown. Yet after that hypothesis was established, Price was comfortable with proceeding. It was a direct analog to the modern question of how you can properly analyze data to judge the support for a hypothesis that would not have occurred to you before the data were at hand. Price’s situation was simple and he would take the first observa­ tion as establishing the hypothesis and so he took as the data all risings of the Sun after the first; that is, all returns of the Sun. Ten risings of the Sun would give p = 9 and q = 0, not p = 10 and q = 0. One data point was sacrificed so a principled analysis could proceed.11

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We therefore have the ability to calculate a probability based on the induc­ tive method so criticised by Hume. And indeed, it has been argued that Price’s motivation to apply and develop these Bayesian approaches was in turn motivated by a desire to refute Hume’s enmity of religious sentiments, specifically his arguments against miracles.7 However, be that as it may, the role of induction as a scientific method fell out of favour especially in the twentieth century under the development of statistical approaches domi­ nated by people like R. A. Fisher (1890–1962) where the use of the word “Bayesian” had negative associations and was used pejoratively, but their strength lies in the fact that prior knowledge through methodological induc­ tion can be included. I am therefore arguing that there is a legitimate place for imaginative connections between cause and effect, contra Hume, gener­ alised into laws of nature that can be calculated using Bayesian approaches. These methods, therefore, do not have to rely on miracles, the supernatural, or any form of vitalism and sincerely connect our external perceptions with our internal imagination. Religious and supernatural scruples aside, another problem of Bayes’s approach was that the mathematical computations required were herculean and that probability theory based around the means of frequency distribu­ tions was less time-consuming and therefore easier to undertake. With the development of modern powerful computers Bayesian approaches are on the increase, but before we move on there are further lessons to be had from frequency-dependent statistics. It is a commonly held opinion that as our technologies improve we will get a better and increasingly improved view of the world, a more God-like view of the external world around us. Now, in the previous chapter I suggested that science does not work like that and that any laws of nature, or views of the world, are always provi­ sional. With the work of Gauss, we came to a view of the world in which there is “an area of uncertainty” that can be measured, but the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment project, articulated by the Deists to develop a human knowledge that is a “Gods-eye” view of the world, continued into the twentieth century and beyond to the present day. But there have always been dissenters to this Enlightenment view, an example of which was the London born-and-bred poet, William Blake (1757–1827), who in Jerusalem wages war on the Deists Bacon, Newton and Locke and the educational institutes they inform: O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings! That I may awake Albion from His long & cold repose. For Bacon & Newton sheath’d in dismal steel, their terrors hang Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities of Europe And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton. black the cloth

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In heavy wreathes folds over every Nation; cruel Works Of many Wheels I View, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other.10, pp635–636 Blake was therefore well aware of the split in people’s psyche that Descartes’s thinking, together with the materialism and scientific methodology it helped to bring, and he would rage against what he saw as this atheistic, deterministic and arrogant world view. His view was that this split between mind and matter was a false view of reality. But let’s turn back to Gauss, the mathematician and this notion of uncertainty; does this not bring in another, less arrogant, impulse into the scientific method?

Is God a mathematician? Clearly, from the time of Newton, mathematics has been a defining method of our scientific enterprise and has been unbelievably successful. Indeed the question, “Is God a mathematician?” that gets attributed to Eugene Wigner (1902–1995) who got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1963, must have occurred to numerous people before that, but the more probing ques­ tion might be, what is the relationship between mathematics and the world real? I have said the Enlightenment project was to get a “Gods-eye” view of the world, therefore as scientists applying mathematics continually to the world as part of the scientific method, surely there must be some congru­ ence between the mathematics and reality; does our Gaussian curve model reality? But perhaps before we ask whether mathematics is congruent with the world, we can ask the smaller, simpler question as to whether math­ ematics is logically consistent, because if it is inconsistent the relationship between mathematics and the world falls apart. As a demonstration of this fact, Bronowski tells a fable about Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in which at dinner Russell is reputed to have said, “Oh, it is useless talking about inconsistent things, from an inconsistent proposition you can prove anything you like.” Somebody at the dinner table said, “Oh, come on! . . . name an incon­ sistent proposition,” and the man said, “Well, what shall we say, 2 = 1.” “All right, “said Russell, “what do you want me to prove?” The man said, “I want you to prove that you are the pope.” “Why,” said Russell, “the pope and I are two, but two equals one, therefore the pope and I are one.”12, pp78–79 Funny as this story is, it makes the point that if mathematics is incon­ sistent its use in science as a way of modelling the world also falls apart. And in 1910 following in Newton’s footsteps, Russell together with Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) published their version of Principia Math­ ematica a work designed to show that all mathematics can be analysed as

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logical operations. Ultimately, this project failed and was unable to show this unequivocally. However, as is common in science failure can gener­ ate new and productive insights, and it stimulated other mathematicians to clarify the situation. Two names that took up the mathematical baton were David Hilbert (1862–1943) and Kurt Gödel (1906–1978). Hilbert articu­ lated the question, “Is it or is it not the case that any sensible mathematical proposition that I can write down can or cannot be proved to be true from the mathematical axioms?”, and Gödel answered the question at The Second Conference on the Epistemology of the Exact Sciences in 1930 at which he gave a talk where he presented his two Incompleteness Theorems, which state very simply that in any mathematical proposition a) “if it is consistent, then there are statements that it cannot prove.” And b) “there are also true statements that it cannot prove.”11, p77 So David Hume’s proposition I mentioned earlier, to “Commit” all metaphysics “to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion”,7, p173 is totally untenable. Self-referential statements like the one I used in the previous chapter, “When I become dictator, I will ban dogma” are totally untenable because they are paradoxical. Indeed, if Gödel is correct, and I have no evidence to the contrary, this classifies the whole scientific enterprise as a metaphysical enterprise and the whole issue of demarcation, so highly sought after by Popper and colleagues and the religious cynicism trumpeted by people such as Dawkins, therefore also become untenable. So what about the scientific enterprise? Where do we go from here? I am passionate about the scientific enterprise as much as Popper or Dawkins, but it must not be built on a rhetoric of half-truths, it must be built on truths which hold up to scrutiny and not on some other second-hand agenda like “demarcation”, or some other quasi “anti-religious” sentiment, delivered in an overbearing manner (both of which are a form of bullying). Metaphysics is here to stay, and we had just better get on and accept it. But remember, that does not mean we allow our imaginations run away with us; remember, imagination without reason is lunacy, reason without imagina­ tion is dead. We need to bring these two aspects together and strike a bal­ ance, and Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker provides a wonderful metaphor, and I select the word metaphor with care, from which we can learn. In Chapter  3, “Accumulating small change”,5, pp43–74 Dawkins addresses the issue that the products of evolution, an eye for example, although highly improbable does not require Paley’s notion of an intelligent designer, but that with certain circumstances involving just physics, very improbable things can evolve through random change and cumulative selection. But he contrasts very specifically the probability of “single step” selection with “cumulative” selection. To begin he sets the scene, and he starts with the old chestnut about, “a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare” and the amount of time it would take. He has prefaced his metaphor with a discussion in the play Hamlet, about random cloud formations and the objects they can sometimes remind us

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of, and, not wanting to overwhelm his reader too much, Dawkins picks a phrase from this discussion about cloud formations in the sky that look, to Hamlet, like weasels, “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL”. The alpha­ bet has 26 letters, let’s keep to upper case for the time being, and a space making a total of 27 possibilities. The probability of typing out the “M” for the first character is 1 chance in 27 attempts, and therefore the probability to type “ME” at the first instance is 1/27 of 1/27 and “MET” becomes 1/27 of 1/27 of 1/27 and so on and so forth. To calculate the probability for the whole phrase with its 28 characters is 1/27 multiplied by itself 28 times, that is, (1/27)28. This phrase with its spaces represents 28 bashes at the typewriter and has a probability of, “about 1 in 10,000 million million million million million million.”3, p47 Or, if you could randomly bash the typewriter twice a second continually with no breaks it would take over one month. Now if I understand Dawkins correctly that’s all based on upper-case letters, hav­ ing upper and lower case doubles the time frame. The time frame for the whole works of Shakespeare would be extraordinary, but it is calculable, and it would be finite! Dawkins then goes on to ask what about cumulative selection. The calculation for cumulative selection is slightly different, it starts with exactly the same process with 28 random bashes of the typewriter, but at the end of each 28 bashes the characters are surveyed and if one of the characters is correct, we don’t start at the beginning again but retain that character, it would be a bit like a 28-character slot machine where we can “hold” a particular character. Let us say on our first attempt the only character that is correct is the “W” of weasel, so we put that one “hold” and then repeat. But this time the calculation is different because we don’t have to calculate the “W”, so we remove it from the calculation and therefore only each remaining position requires to be calculated and that has been reduced by one, so the calculation becomes 1 in (1/27)26; so each time we get a correct letter at a correct position these get removed from the calculation and this shortens the overall time for the correct phrase to emerge. By putting the characters on hold as they emerge we are acting as a selective agent and this speeds up the whole process considerably. Indeed, Dawkins designed a com­ puter programme which was based on this approach and depending on the starting sequence could generate, “METHINKS ITS LIKE A WEASEL” in between 40 and 65 iterations of the process which took in the region of a lunchtime. Dawkins uses this example to demonstrate that a random process combined with cumulative selection can demonstrate emergent evolution saying: that Darwinian evolution is “random”, is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially non-random.5, p49

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So far so good, and it is convincing as to Shakespeare being able to produce his body of work within a lifetime. But Dawkins, now in the language of biology, also thinks this model is misleading as it gives the impression that evolution has a long-term goal; a view he unequivocally wants to dispel: [E]ach generation of selective “breeding”, the mutant “progeny” phrases were judged according to the criterion of resemblance to a distant ideal target, the phrase METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL. Life isn’t like that. Evolution has no long-term goal. . . . In real life, the criterion for selection is always short-term, either simple survival or, more gener­ ally, reproductive success. If, after the aeons, what looks like progress towards some distant goals seems with hindsight, to have been achieved, this is always an incidental consequence of many generations of shortterm selection. The “watchmaker” that is cumulative natural selection is blind to the future and has no long-term goal.5, p50 Although as a biologist I  have great sympathy with this position, I  don’t think it is wholly correct, the organisms of the world are not totally random arrangements being pushed from the pressure of mutation and cumulatively selected in the short term as Dawkins implies, but they are also subject to some undeniable long-term constraints which favour some stratified and complex possibilities that are more stable than others.

Stratified stability To unpack the concept of stratified stability, I want to start with a similar metaphor to the one Dawkins uses earlier but this time expand around the ideas by the writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) in his short story titled The Library of Babel.13 In several ways, these writers are undertaking essen­ tially a similar thought experiment, or at least taking similar approaches, but in Borges’s case, I think we’ll be able to see how evolution may be drawn down certain pre-established paths but not others, like a river following the valley floor. Borges starts by introducing the reader to the library stating, “The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.”13, p78 He goes on giving details of this Library, but the description is ambiguous, for example, “The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.”13, p79 But then the contents of the hexagonal galleries are highly prescribed: There are five shelves for each of the hexagon’s walls; each shelf con­ tains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is four hundred and ten pages; each page of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in colour.13, p79

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Each page therefore has provision for 3,200 characters or 1,312,000 for a complete book. But compared with our usual methods of writing, Borges, like Dawkins, uses a restricted alphabet of twenty-two letters (all of which are lowercase), and the space, together with the comma and the period for punctuation. Another interesting facet to this Library is that, “In the vast Library there are no two identical books”, . . . but (since the Library is total) there are always several hundred thousand imperfect facsimiles. But it con­ tains everything, from nothing, that is, a total empty book, each of the 410 pages devoid of any character or punctuation mark, to another entirely filled with 1,312,000 “a”s and another with 1,312,000 commas “,” and another with, “the true story of your death” together with the same story but with your name misspelt. The majority of this Library is of course total gibberish or nonsense, containing no information content whatsoever, but within it there will be sense, including of course the phrase methinks it is like a weasel, and biographies of people and animals long extinct, as there will be biogra­ phies of people and of animals that have not as yet existed; all sitting there waiting as latent potentialities to become manifest. Borges’s thought experi­ ment is predicated on a set of axioms not substantially different in kind to those of Dawkins, those latent potentialities are there in both systems, in the words of William Blake, “What is now proved was once only imagin’d.” The axioms of both Dawkins’s and Borges’s systems define latent potentiali­ ties, in Dawkins we get pushed there from random mutational pressure, in Borges’s case they are written into the nature of his universe. We are back again to Alexander Pope, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in the night: God said, Let Newton be and all was light.” But all the axioms, whether from of Dawkins or Borges, are obliged to conform to Gödel’s Incomplete­ ness Theorems because that is the nature of the prescribed world of axioms and, following Bronowski’s terminology, it will require a cryptographer to imaginatively decipher it into a meaningful meta-language and separate the sense from the nonsense. The discussion in this chapter has focused on Dawkins’s concept of The Blind Watchmaker and whether Hume could legitimately be called an atheist well before Darwin. The answer to this is yes, but the argument from design was problematic to Hume and required an answer. Dawkins sees The Blind Watchmaker as the answer operating by natural selection on random muta­ tion through a series of cumulative steps leading to the production of com­ plex organisms. I am with Dawkins all the way on this, but I suggest that it is not the full answer, and I suggest that there are latent potentialities that have nothing to do with random mutation or natural selection which lie hidden un-manifested as consequence of the physics and chemistry. Going back to natural law, the second law of thermodynamics states that in any individual system the total energy of the configurations of the system will move towards thermodynamic equilibrium, or in the words of physics, move towards the state with maximal entropy, that is, maximal disorder. Now one of the most amazing things about evolution is that it flies in the face of this second law

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of thermodynamics. Electrons, neutrons and protons come together and form elements; elements join together and form molecules; molecules join together and form polymers; polymers come together and form prokaryotes, prokaryotes to eukaryotes, eukaryotes to multicellular organisms and so on until we get the beautiful ecological communities and their local adaptations that form our whole biosphere. The equivalent in Borges’s library, each book containing to a greater or lesser extent the 22 characters, the space, commas and full stops, these contents would be distributed randomly across all volumes in all galleries and would be nonsense, that is, maximal disorder. Why in life on earth do things not distribute themselves with maximal dis­ order? In one sense, we can answer this simply by saying that on planet earth the sun, our closest star, is pumping in energy and this allows, at least for the time being, a transgression for this hierarchical organisation of life in the face of the second law. But why is it that in the earth’s four-billion-year history there appears to have a direction, from the simple to the more complex, why has evolution not run backwards? Bronowski articulated this question in his essay, “Toward a Philosophy of Biology”: Why does evolution not run at random hither and thither in time? What is the screw that moves it forward – or at least, what is the ratchet that keeps it from slipping back? What is the relation that ties evolution to the arrow of time, and makes it a barbed arrow?14, p170 Now this is a good question, and it is one that Dawkins to my mind has swept under the carpet. But the answer is also one that does not require vitalism or the supernatural. We know that evolution works by the fact that as organisms reproduce, like begets like, but that mistakes in this process get made, the machin­ ery of reproduction is not perfect, otherwise there would be no differences between parents and offspring on which natural selection could operate. This selection is cumulative, but what stops it from running backwards? This is our question and Bronowski’s answer is that it operates through a process of what he calls stratified stability. Just as in the same way the simplest ele­ ment hydrogen, atomic number one, with one proton and one electron, is stable and can combine with another element of hydrogen to make helium, with atomic number two, with two protons and two electrons, which is also stable. And up we can go through the periodic table, where under the right conditions usually in the formation of stars, elements can combine with other elements and make new heavier elements some of which are stable, and others which are not stable, like uranium with atomic num­ ber 92 and is unstable and decays to thorium with an atomic number of 90. But around these protons are electrons which can be shared between elements; so elements of different types can make molecules, for example, oxygen with eight protons and eight electrons can link up with two hydro­ gen protons and their combined two electrons and make water (H2O). At

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each stage of this building process that takes great temperature and pressure, once thermodynamically things have cooled down, we have elements and molecules that are stably stratified and follow the laws of nature. Returning to Bronowski: Time in the large, open time, only has a direction when we mark and scale it by the evolutionary processes that climb from simple to more and more complex by steps. It is evolutionary processes that give time its direction; and no mystical explanation is required where there is nothing to explain. The progression from simple to complex, the build­ ing up of stratified stability, is the necessary character of evolution from which time takes its direction. And it is not a forward direction in the sense of a thrust towards the future, a headed arrow. What evolution does is to give the arrow of time a barb which stops it from running backwards; and once it has this barb, the chance play of errors will take it forward of itself.14, p173 So the structure of evolution is a stepwise process that relies on levels of stratified stability and has a coherence from the inanimate, physics and chemistry, to the animate, biology, and this continues up the evolutionary tree and therefore naturally begs the question that I will address in the next chapter, how we get mind from matter.

References 1) Popper, K.R. (1962 [1945]) The Open Society and Its Enemies (Vols 1, 4th Edition). Routledge & Kegan Paul. 2) Popper, K.R. (1986 [1957]) The Poverty of Historicism (ARK Edition). Routledge. 3) Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1991) Darwin. Michael Joseph. 4) Darwin, C. (1983 [1838]) An Autobiographical Fragment. In Charles Darwin – Thomas Henry Huxley: Autobiographies (Ed. Gavin de Beer). Oxford University Press. 5) Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Longman Scientific and Technical. 6) Hume, D. (1993 [1779]) Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Ed. J.C.A. Gaskin). Oxford World Classics. 7) Hume, D. (1955 [1748]) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Ed. Charles W. Hendel). Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. 8) Bronowski, J. (1973) Ascent of Man. BBC Publications. 9) Earman, J. (2002) Bayes, Hume, Price and Miracles. Proceeding of the British Academy, 113: 91–109. https://sites.pitt.edu/~jearman/Earman2002a.pdf 10) Price, R. (2005) The Importance of Christianity, the Nature of Historical Evidence, and Miracles. In Early Responses to Hume’s Writings on Religion (2nd Edition). James Fieser, Thoemmes Continuum. 11) Stigler, S.M. (2018) Richard Price, the First Bayesian. Statistical Science, 33: 117–125.

12) Bronowski, J. (1978) The Origin of Knowledge and Imagination. Yale University Press.

13) Borges, J.L. (1970) Labyrinths. Penguin Books.

14) Bronowski, J. (1977) The Sense of the Future (Chapter 12). MIT Press.

5

Mind from matter

Dollo’s law Dollo’s law is about the fact that evolution is irreversible, and the previous chapter finished with two fundamental ideas in mind. One is articulated by Dawkins in which random mutations lead to changes in an individual’s fitness, but all of which are reversible. Hence, evolution would be direc­ tionless and wander around hither and thither and not be seen as progres­ sive. The other, articulated by Bronowski, is his idea of stratified stability in which energetically stable states are developed and build on one another. Bronowski’s view is that this is a progressive process where evolution has put a “barb” in the arrow of time so that it cannot run backwards. Dawkins’s view focuses on the individual genes and sees mutations resulting in three possibilities, they can be beneficial to the organism and improve fitness; they can be detrimental to the organism and reduce fitness; and lastly, they can be neutral and neither improve nor reduce fitness. These three alternatives which determine an organism’s survival and reproductive success in my view can operate at different levels, ranging from an organ, for example, an eye, down to a particular protein but ultimately, it’s a whole individual organism on which natural selection operates. Dawkins would likely not agree with me, saying that an individual organism, the phenotype, is an arbitrary unit of selection and that it is change in individual gene frequencies that is what is important.1 We are here entering a debate on the nature of natural selection and the level at which it operates that has dominated much of the latter part of the twentieth century and is epitomised by the writings of Dawkins, at Oxford on the one hand, and Stephen J. Gould (1941–2002), at Harvard on the other. There is much that these two agree on regarding the nature of Dar­ winian evolution, but their emphasis is different, as the philosopher Kim Sterelny has pointed out: I think Dawkins is right about microevolution: about evolution­ ary change within local populations. But macroevolution is not just microevolution scaled up. Gould’s palaeontological perspective offers DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-5

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real insights into mass extinction and its consequences, and, perhaps, the nature of species and speciation. Moreover, I think he is right to expand the explanatory agenda of evolutionary biology. While we do want explanations of adaptive complexity, there are also puzzling largescale patterns in the history of life.2, p178 I do not want at this point to get sidetracked into a discussion on the nature of natural selection and the organisational level at which it occurs; but I  think Bronowski’s point about layers of stratified stability is an important one and merits consideration. Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker confronts the argument about evolution as progressive and its irreversibility regarding Dollo’s law and states: This [the irreversibility of evolution] is often confused with a lot of idealistic nonsense about the inevitability of progress, often coupled with ignorant nonsense about evolution ‘violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics’ (those that belong to the half of the population that, according to the novelist C.P. Snow, know what the Second Law is, will realise that it is no more violated by evolution than it is violated by the growth of a baby). There is no reason why general trends in evolution shouldn’t be reversed. . . . Dollo’s Law is really just a statement about the statistical improbability of following exactly the same evolutionary trajec­ tory twice (or, indeed, any particular trajectory), in either direction.3, p94 I think Dawkins is being somewhat disingenuous here, because clearly, Bronowski with his idea of stratified stability4 sees things very differently. He would agree with Dawkins that biology does not fly in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but he would also stress that there are hid­ den stabilities in nature that are stratified across different layers of hierarchy. Evolution over time, through a process of random trial and error, finds these hidden stabilities and builds them up from atoms to molecules, from mole­ cules to cells, from cells to organs and groups of organs producing organisms. This hierarchy over time produces increases in complexity, for example, the development of different body plans (e.g., diploblastic to triploblastic) and the question that Bronowski addresses in a way that Dawkins does not is, why does life appear to progress? Why does it not just randomly run down? The Second Law of Thermodynamics simply states that in any closed system entropy will be maximised or, in other words, will find the state of maximum disorder. Hence, the view that life flies in the face of the Second Law because life clearly has an undeniable order. The Bronowski view is that: [T]he second law merely enumerates all the configurations which a sys­ tem could take up, and it remarks that the largest number in this count are average or featureless. Therefore, if there are no preferred configurations (that is, no hidden stabilities in the system on the way to equilibrium),

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we must expect that any special feature that we find is exceptional and temporary, and we will revert to the average in the long run. This is a true theorem of combinatorial arithmetic and (like other statistical laws) a fair guess at the behaviour of long runs. But it tells us little about the natural world, which, in the years since the second law seemed exciting, has turned out to be full of preferred configurations and hidden stabilities, even at the most basic and inanimate level of atomic structure.4, pp193–194 Just in the same way that the periodic table is built up of elements where hidden stabilities centre around the numbers of protons and electrons, and where the simpler elements, for example, hydrogen, which can under cer­ tain circumstances such as a star undergo nuclear fusion, combine with itself to form a larger and the more complex element helium. This process can be repeated forming increasingly larger and more complex elements each with their distinct properties. These hidden elemental stabilities that build up the table of elements can start recombining amongst themselves, producing mol­ ecules that also have hidden stabilities. And so, this process of building mol­ ecules out of elements, that are brought together serendipitously over time, continue producing the complexities of life we see as chemistry and ulti­ mately the exquisite structures we see as life on earth and classify as biology. Dawkins’s interpretation of Dollo’s law of evolution’s irreversibility is, I would claim, only true up to a certain point. The view that evolution can be depicted as a branching tree is misleading. Darwin’s diagram of evolution as the tree of life,5 incidentally the only diagram in the whole of Origin, is that of evolution through time as being a process of diversification. But careful reading of the text states evolutionary trajectories can be the opposite to this, and indeed, in chapter 3 of Origin, Darwin argues that it should be stressed that evolutionary developments can also be convergent. We therefore have divergent and convergent processes going on together, together with the trade-offs that they imply. Evolution on the grand scale can be seen as a step­ wise progression, and, although we do not know precisely how it all began, it can be seen as layer upon layer of stratified levels of stability, each layer build­ ing up over time and increasing in complexity. Around 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, molecules came together and wrapped themselves round with phospho­ rylated lipid membranes to form the complex organisations that today we call prokaryotic cells that were capable of replicating themselves.

Prokaryotes and eukaryotes Although it is by no means certain how the first prokaryotic cells developed, following Dawkins’s reasoning,3 they certainly did not jump into existence in one step. Prokaryotes tend to form biofilms which are complex highly structured bacterial communities.6 Biofilms are initiated when surfaces become conditioned by organic molecules to which bacterial cells adhere and slowly over time they build up into differentiated communities. It seems

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reasonable to suggest that given sufficient time, given a sufficient diversity of organic molecules and given the right environmental conditions, natural selection would operate on those populations of molecules that mutually cohered producing layers of stratified stability at a molecular scale. Over time, and possibly through repeated cycles of environmental fluctuations, these molecularly diverse populations of stratified molecular stability lead to the first prokaryotes through a process of diversification followed by conver­ gent selection and mutually beneficial survival. In other words, convergent selection led to the preservation of favoured combinations of layers of sta­ bility. It is not difficult to imagine that these processes repeated over time would lead to increasingly complex levels of molecular organisation and ultimately populations of prokaryotic cells. However, my description of how prokaryotic cells developed is cur­ rently still conjecture, but it seems most likely that the first prokaryotic cells were heterotrophs (gaining energy directly from their environment) living in extreme environments, possibly in deep marine vents, but certainly environments without oxygen. The oxygenation of the world’s oceans and atmosphere is an active area of investigation, especially the timings at which various key processes take place, but prior to 2.5 billion years ago the earth’s atmospheric oxygen was practically none existent, and it took about another billion years before autotrophs (making their own energy from sunlight), what we now call the blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), were capable of photosynthesis and produce oxygen.7 The ability to photosynthesise, that is produce energy in the form of sugar by combining carbon dioxide with water and releasing oxygen using sunlight, is one of those biochemical pro­ cesses in our evolutionary history that is not obvious, but once done changes the face of the globe, quite literally. Up until that time all life was made up of unicellular prokaryotic life forms, many of them extremophiles producing large amounts of methane, which is a highly efficient greenhouse gas; therefore, the climate was a hot one.8 But it would not stay hot for much longer. The release of oxygen by the cyanobacteria had little effect at first as it reacted with minerals like iron and was adsorbed. However, eventually this sink became saturated, and the oxygen began to build up in water and the atmosphere, both of which were high in methane. Remember, oxygen is highly reactive and as it became increasingly concentrated it started to react with methane to produce carbon dioxide, a less efficient greenhouse gas. The photosynthesising prokaryotes were producing a toxin, oxygen, and thereby reducing the greenhouse effect of methane. This threw the planet into an ice age, the Huronian glaciation colloquially called snowball earth, and there was a mass extinction of uni­ cellular prokaryotes.8 However, among the consortia of prokaryotes at that time there were some that by chance were capable of using oxygen in their own metabolism and these were naturally selected to survive. The age of aerobic prokaryotes had arrived.

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But this would not have been uniform; there would certainly have been individual niches differing in size and scale each with a range of different temperatures, a range of different salinities and a range of different acidi­ ties/alkalinities and so on and so forth. The conditions within these niches would have not been stable, there would have been concentration gradients of all kinds, and in turn they would be exposed to the fluctuating diurnal and seasonal variations as the earth rotated on its axis and again around the sun. It is to these locally diverse consortia of unicellular prokaryotes, con­ sisting of heterotrophs and the more recently evolved autotrophs producing oxygen, that natural selection, the processes of diversification and conver­ gence, would have acted upon. Around the time of this oxygenation event, at around 2.5 billion years ago, there was another transformation in life on earth. Prokaryotes are small (0.2–2 µm) and with only simple internal organisation; they are basically bags of complex molecules that interact within a protected cell wall and reproduce by a simple budding process called binary fission. The fact that they can autonomously reproduce is a huge evolutionary step and belies that they are just simple bags of molecules; there is clearly well-orchestrated and complex chemistry at play here. Although, as I stated earlier, no one can be sure of how the genesis of prokaryotes came about; they form a group of organisms that persisted for several billion years, but the invention of photo­ synthesis was a stepwise change that was to affect everything; it arguably led to the first mass extinction and likely brought about a new level of stratified stability; it brought about the birth of the eukaryotes. According to Ernst Mayr in his book on the nature of biology: Around 1.8  billion years ago the first one-cellular eukaryotes origi­ nated, characterised by a membrane-enclosed nucleus with discrete chromosomes and by the possession of various cellular organelles. The latter evidently evolved through the inclusion of symbiotic prokary­ otes. The exact details of the origin of this symbiosis, in particular how the nucleus came into existence, are still controversial. The first fossil records of multicellular organisms appeared as recently as about 670 million years ago.9, p149 Now, if Mayr is correct, and I  have no reason to doubt that, within our range of fossil-dating capabilities it is roughly as he suggests, this is inter­ esting. It is interesting because according to recent research by geologists there have been at least two snowball events, the last one finishing around 635 million years ago,10 and this roughly coincides, give or take 0.5 million years, with the first evidence of multicellular organisms. It is these organisms that evolved into the other four kingdoms: the single-celled eukaryotes, the Protista, and the multicellular eukaryotes; the Fungi, the Planta and the Animalia that we all know today.

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So, let’s try and piece together how this might have occurred. Eukaryotes were larger than prokaryotes with a more highly developed internal struc­ ture based on a nucleus and cytoplasm with internally specialised structures that allowed the compartmentalisation of specific biochemical processes. For example, mitochondria are the compartments for the biochemical path­ ways of respiration, and similarly, chloroplasts the compartments in plants responsible for the biochemistry of photosynthesis. Whereas the prokary­ otes were bags of chemicals with no subcellular organelles and their DNA was not packaged up in any formal sense, the eukaryotes had DNA that was packaged with histones within a nucleus, they had membrane-bound organelles and large ribosomes outside the nucleus. Ribosomes are the machinery where amino acids are built into proteins. There was within the eukaryotic cell a division of labour with specialised organelles perform­ ing specific biochemical functions. I would therefore suggest, in all likeli­ hood, it is probably that there was some form of eukaryotic-like group of organisms present before the mass extinction caused by the snowball events, but whether they had sufficient competitive advantage over the prokaryotes at this stage, I  would suggest not. However, this new eukaryotic-type of cell with its compartmentalised subcellular structure, I would suggest, was brought about through a process in which different types of prokaryotes, with slightly different biochemistries, came together through a process of mutualism and, or, symbiosis.11 We are again back at the notion of layer, building upon layer, of stratified stability; this time not at the molecular level but at the cellular level. Now, through the oxygenation of the environment and the mass extinction of most of the anaerobic and aerobic prokaryotic forms of life, these eukaryotic-like prototypes that had an efficient subcellular organisation could now expand in numbers and diversify. It is a well-known fact, thoroughly documented, that the earth is geologi­ cally unstable and continually fluctuating. We are all affected to a greater or lesser extent by volcanos that erupt regularly, tectonic plate shifts that lead to earthquakes and are therefore, willing intellectually at least to admit the possibility of climate change with periodic changes between glacial periods when the climate is colder followed by warmer interglacial periods. This is the environment in which all organisms find themselves. In summary, I have explained how eukaryotic cells have become built from prokaryotic cells, which in turn were made from molecules which in their turn were made from the elements through a layering process in which there are hidden configurations of stratified stability. If you have followed my argument so far it is not difficult to imagine that this process of diversification followed by convergent selection within a fluctuating environment will now continue to occur among these new populations of eukaryotic cells, such that mutu­ ally cooperating groups of cells will form colonies. A good example of this are the slime moulds which when nutrients are plentiful exist as individual cells, but when nutrients are limited they aggregate and move as a single organism, but when living in aggregated form there is no evidence of tissue differentiation that is usually associated with multicellular organisms.

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There are several theories pertaining to the evolution of multicellular organisms and how they developed distinct tissues of functionally differen­ tiated cells, and it appears to have arisen on several occasions amongst the eukaryotes.12 There are various forms of symbiotic theory on the develop­ ment of multicellular organisms of which some are not dissimilar to the one regarding the formation of eukaryotic cells. In one theory, single-cell organ­ isms of different species, or types with different roles, come together to their mutual benefit, and over time they become totally dependent on each other and lose the ability to survive alone. Each of the individual cell types develops its own cell lineage of tissues within the newly created species. Conversely, in a second symbiotic theory a group of cells of the same species comes together and certain groups of cells then differentiate to fulfil different roles. For example, some of the cells may arrange themselves as a sphere with their flagella on the outside for locomotion while others internally lose their ability to produce flagella but become specialised reproductive cells. Third, through the process of syncytial formation, a single cell may become multinucleate and then develop the ability to partition the different nuclei with membranes followed by subsequent specialisation of the different cell lineages. In each of these examples as the number of cells increases the multicellular organism confronts different problems. For example, the surface area-to-volume ratio changes producing problems of nutrient and gaseous exchange which leads to evolution of increasing complex body plans and tissue differentiation.

Bronowski’s “barb” Let us now return for a moment to Dollo’s law of evolutionary irrevers­ ibility, in terms of animal evolution and development. In relation to body plans, a developmental progression can be seen from monoblastic animals (e.g., sponges) with a single primary germ line, to diploblastic animals (e.g., jellyfish and sea anemones) with an ectoderm and an endoderm and on to triploblastic animals (e.g., molluscs, arthropods and starfish) that have developed an extra layer called the mesoderm. In triploblastic animals this is taken to extremes including the rest of the animal kingdom from worms and insects through to reptiles, birds and mammals including ourselves. Each of these developments can be seen as solving a particular problem to a given set of particular circumstances, and indeed the whole of evolutionary devel­ opment can be seen as layer upon layer of trial-and-error attempts to solve particular problems of living. “All life is problem solving”, to pinch a book title from Karl Popper,13 who in Chapter 5 applies a Darwinian evolution­ ary perspective to the problem of epistemology. But I’m rushing too far ahead of myself. From a biological perspective, those happy conjunctions that solve a particular problem then become locked into the development of each organism as a layer of stratified stability. But this begs the question, at what point is a barb placed into the arrow of time’s forward trajectory so that it cannot run backwards? At what point does Dollo’s Law become operative? Or is it ever thus?

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Dawkins has argued that Dollo’s law is simply about the statistical improb­ ability for evolution to trace a particular trajectory in either direction, either forward or backward, and he places all his eggs in the basket of divergent and convergent natural selection. To Dawkins, using his explanatory model of Biomorph Land: A single mutational step can easily be reversed. But for larger numbers of mutational steps, even in the case of biomorphs with their nine little genes, the mathematical space of all possible trajectories is so vast that the chance two trajectories ever arriving at the same point becomes vanishingly small. This is even more true of real animals with their vastly larger number of genes.3, p94 There is no evidence here of Bronowski’s barb that stops evolution from running backwards and allows progress. However, in his inimitable style Stephen J. Gould enters a discussion on the physiologist W. H. Gaskell’s (1847–1914) theory on the origin of vertebrates that leads to a conclusion that even Gould himself finds uncomfortable.14, pp319–335 From what Gould tells us, Gaskell is a good Victorian and firm believer in the linear idea of progress ever upwards to the human summit and develops a highly idi­ osyncratic theory about the evolution of vertebrates from arthropods. In its simple form the issue is the positioning of the central nerve system in relationship to the alimentary canal. In arthropods, the nerve chord is on the ventral side of the alimentary canal (i.e., bottom), whereas in vertebrates it is on the dorsal side of the alimentary canal (i.e., top). As an evolutionist Gaskell proposes that an inversion has taken place and suggests the develop­ ment of “the vertebrate brain and spinal cord from an arthropod digestive tube, while forming a completely new gut below.”14, p327 Needless to say, this caused more problems than it solved, but in Gaskell’s view the inversion of gut and nerve cord in the two groups did maintain his Victorian idea of progress. But, more interestingly, Gould does not end his discussion here as a piece of misplaced evolutionary madness, technologically science does move on and old questions can be looked at with new eyes. With new eyes come new insights, and for Gould when respected sci­ entists, as Gaskell clearly was, argue themselves up the wrong garden path, there must be new insights to be gained. So, let’s turn to the eye, an organ that is present in vertebrates, present in arthropods and present in molluscs, and following Dollo’s law of irreversibility, it is usually looked at as having evolved more than once through a process of convergent evolution. Taking the arthropods and vertebrates they are usually thought to be separated by about half a billion years, so now with the new technology of molecular biology of the late twentieth century, what was originally investigated using comparative anatomy and Mendelian genetics can now be scrutinised anew. Remember natural selection is the prima facie evolutionary mechanism of organ development working through divergent and convergent processes,

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and the doyen of evolutionary biology Ernst Mayr wrote in his book Animal Species and Evolution: In the early days of Mendelism there was much search for homolo­ gous genes that would account for such similarities. Much that has been learnt about gene physiology makes it evident that the search for homologous genes is quite futile except in very close relatives.15, p609 In other words, genes that encode for organs such as the eye will undoubt­ edly have no homology in groups of organisms whose common ancestor is separated by half a billion years. The idea of stratified stability combined with a Bronowski’s barb that maintained the genetical coherence in evolution­ ary progress and stopped evolution from unwinding was published in 1974, more than a decade after Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution, appears to be just intellectually untenable. But is it? Is there some hidden coherence that allows evolutionary developments not to unwind and to retain some notion of progress? The answer Gould suggests was surprising, even to Gould. The eye can be considered as part of the central visual system, which in turn is part of the nervous system. According to Gould, Gaskell had devel­ oped an ad hoc mechanism that explained the switching of the positions of the central nervous system from one of being dorsally positioned in verte­ brates but was ventrally positioned in earlier arthropods in order to fit in with Gaskell’s Victorian values of linear progress culminating in man. Mayr, writing in the 1960s, clearly thought searching for homologous genes for the eye in disparate phyla was a waste of time and therefore followed the tra­ ditional evolutionary thinking that it was a product of convergent evolution. However, technological developments in molecular biology have allowed some of these issues to be revisited. In Gould’s own words: Many similarities of basic design among animal phyla, once so confi­ dently attributed to convergence, and viewed as testimony to the power of natural selection to craft exquisite adaptation, demand the opposite interpretation that Mayr labelled as inconceivable: the similar features are homologies, or products of the same genes, inherited from a com­ mon ancestor and never altered enough by subsequent evolution to erase their comparable structure and function. The similarities record the constraining power of conserved history, not the architectural skills of natural selection independently pursuing an optimal design in sepa­ rate lineages.14, pp330–331 Perhaps, the idea of Bronowski’s barb that stops evolution from unwinding is more real than we had supposed. Gould takes the eye as an example, so let’s see what the example demonstrates. As has been stated earlier, traditional evolutionary theory suggests the paired eyes of vertebrates, arthropods and molluscs had evolved independently

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by convergent evolution as they are anatomically very different. Bronow­ ski’s barb with his suggestion of inherited layers of stratified stability would suggest that there are genetically determined constraints on natural selec­ tion. And, indeed, Gould has said elsewhere in a discussion of Dollo’s law of irreversibility that “once you adopt the ordinary body plan of a reptile, hundreds of options are forever closed, and future possibilities must unfold within the limits of inherited design.”16, p92 What new evidence against de novo convergent evolution has therefore come to light? Well, it turns out that a gene in vertebrates called Pax-6 and its homolog eyeless in Drosoph­ ila are regulator genes that work equally well and interchangeably with its homolog in squid (Loligo opalescens), which is a mollusc. As Gould says: The end results vary substantially (the multifaceted fly eye is not homol­ ogous with our single lens eye), but the embryological blueprints share a common ancestry, and the eyes of different phyla can no longer be viewed as an example of pure convergence.14, p332 And he goes on to discuss the switching of the nerve cord between verte­ brates, where it is on the dorsal side of the alimentary canal, and arthro­ pods where it’s on the ventral side of the alimentary canal. The vertebrate gene that expresses a protein called chordin is important in the development of the dorsal nerve cord, and the gene responsible for the development of the ventral nerve cord in Drosophila is called sog. In comparative stud­ ies of sequence similarity between these two proteins, researchers were astonished to find that both had enough resemblance to suggest a common ancestry, and so argues Gould, “the same gene by evolutionary ancestry builds both dorsal nerve tubes in vertebrates and the ventral nerve cords of Drosophila”.14, p333 Genetic homology, that from Mayr’s position in Ani­ mal Species and Evolution appeared to be untenable across widely separated phyla, has been shown to be not only possible but also probable, and we are again back at organisms being made up from developmental layers of stratified stability and Bronowski’s barb, genes indeed do still bear the stamp of their earlier origin. The recent discussion about Dollo’s law of irreversibility in evolution in relationship to body plans, stratified stability and convergent evolution has focused on the eye. The eye of course was the organ of choice by the rev­ erend Paley in his argument for the existence of God through design, and I hope I have described a developmental pathway by which the eye evolved from elemental matter through an evolutionary process involving stratified stability that retains a sense of progress. However, this sense of progress is not the linear progress advocated by Gaskell, it is more subtle. What I have called Bronowski’s barb that stops the layers of stability from unwinding can be seen in the regulatory genes governing the development of the eye14 and similarly in the genes governing the body plans of evolutionarily widely separated species giving a progression that is real. However, Bronowski barbs

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that stop evolution running backwards are likely to be infrequent, and in cryptic or closely related lineages Dawkins’s view is likely to be correct, and development in a particular direction is quite likely to be reversible. But once Bronowski’s barb has been invoked developments become locked in and irrevocable.

Nerves, brains and images Now, the eye is an organ of perception that clearly has adapted to various body plans from squids and octopus, which are molluscs, to arthropods and vertebrates, which include ourselves as hominids. The eye is an organ of perception and therefore a part of the nervous system that has also under­ gone evolutionary development over time; it is the visual part of the nervous system integrated through the visual cortex with other parts of the brain, which govern an animal’s behaviour. The brain, which in many organisms is very simple and basically a ring of nerves around the oesophagus, becomes increasingly complex through evolutionary development. The complexity of the brain reflects the intricacy of the behaviours that it governs, and it is made up of many distinct areas that are defined by different cell types, which relate to function. The method by which early studies determined the dif­ ferent functions of the parts of the brain was by investigating patients with brain injuries that affected behaviour, and this has provided a good descrip­ tion of the gross anatomy of the brain. But today the organisation of neural anatomy can reveal its complex subtleties by modern developments in brain scanning17 that builds up precise three-dimensional pictures of the brain and how they interrelate. The early studies provided a good overall picture of the gross anatomy of the brain.18 For example, such early studies quickly identified which part of the brain related to vision, and it was labelled the visual cortex. Similarly, parts of the brain were identified that related to taste and smell and this area identified as the olfactory lobe. Both areas are contained within the part of the brain called the midbrain, but in vertebrates the brain has zones labelled as the hindbrain, thought to be evolutionarily older and therefore more primitive, and the forebrain that is evolutionarily younger and adding increased complexity. The hindbrain, considered the oldest part of the brain and connected through the brainstem the nerve chord, was associated with physical survival including respiration and general movement; the midbrain, the next oldest part of the brain is also involved in motor movement, par­ ticularly the eye as mentioned earlier and with auditory processing. Whilst the forebrain, the most recently evolved part, is involved in regulatory deci­ sions that require complicated behavioural choices. It is this part of the brain that’s most highly developed in mammals and particularly in social animals like apes and dolphins. Since the time of Darwin there has been an acknowledgement of a hier­ archical structure in the evolutionary development of consciousness in

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animals; indeed, in his comparison on the mental capacities of man in rela­ tionship to lower animals, Darwin concludes: The difference in the mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is certainly is one of degree and not of kind. We have seen that the senses and intuitions, the various emotions and faculties such as love; memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, &C., of which man boasts, may be found incipient, or even sometimes in a well-developed condition, in the lower animals. If . . . the formation of general con­ cepts, self-consciousness &C., were absolutely peculiar to man, which seems extremely doubtful, it is not improbable that these qualities are merely the incidental results of other highly advanced intellectual quali­ ties; and these again mainly the result of a continued use of a perfect language.19 So, looking back at our development, from inanimate molecules to our­ selves, begs the question as to the progression of perception that clearly can be observed in lower animals, to the development of self-awareness and the growth of our imaginations, in other words, how does matter become imaginative? It is clear to every person on this planet that they have thoughts, and they can also think about the nature of the thoughts that they have, and this displays a self-awareness that separates the lower animals from ourselves. It represents a conundrum that brings together biological science with phi­ losophy in an existential manner that dates back to the emergence of people and probably rests with the development of language when human beings could start asking the sorts of self-referential questions I discussed in rela­ tionship to David Hilbert in the previous chapter. At one level the issue can be dismissed as a non-issue as René Descartes suggests in his cogito ergo sum, “I  am conscious, therefore I  exist” and matter, whatever that is, is immaterial. This is the position of a solipsist, mind is divorced from mat­ ter, and mind is all there is. The converse of this argument is the position assumed by the materialists, that although they believe mental events occur, consciousness is no more than an ineffectual by-product, “the froth on the waves of reality” as John Searle would describe it in his 1984 Reith Lec­ tures.20 So we are back to the problem of consciousness and how we marry the external objective world that’s out there, with the mental world of what is in our mind. What does it mean to perceive a red apple, or to imagine a purple apple with yellow spots? Immanuel Kant understood the issue per­ fectly when he said: The schematism by which our understanding deals with the phenom­ enal world . . . is a skill so deeply hidden in the human soul that we shall hardly guess the secret trick that Nature here employs.21

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This is the epistemological question of the relationship between the objec­ tive world and the subjective world and how they manage to model each other with such exactness that, for example, Rodger Federer can return the service of Andy Murry during a game of tennis at Wimbledon. How does a human brain process the speed and direction of the ball, the image of which is projected onto the retina of each eye which is changing continually as it approaches, and process all this incoming sensory information which then needs to activate a motor response of his body, including his positioning of his legs and arms in a coordinated manner to hit the ball with his racket and return it. When analysed and dissected in this manner the problem of return­ ing a serve seems impossible, and even more impossible would be to design a robot to undertake this process successfully. But in essence this problem is not that different from a cheetah on the Serengeti capturing an impala antelope for its lunch, it’s taken some four billion years, the time over which evolution has occurred. But as we look out over the Serengeti and see a cheetah, we do not look and see what a cheetah sees. Most mammals’ vision is dichromatic and so the cheetah’s view is black and white while the human vision is tri­ chromatic and therefore in colour. It’s been known since the days of Karl von Frisch that bees can see ultraviolet light, which we do not, but like humans they have a trichromatic system of vision, but they see a slightly different electromagnetic spectrum to us.22 So an African bee flying over the Serengeti will again get a different world view to either ourselves or the cheetah. Kant, as quoted earlier, exposes the problem of British empirical philoso­ phy that maintained there is no such thing as innate prior knowledge and that all knowledge rests on experience. The fact that brains have evolved over time to solve certain problems demonstrates that world views are par­ ticular to the organism doing the viewing. Indeed, the issue has been dis­ armingly articulated by Max Delbrück saying: But once we also take into account the phylogenetic development of the human brain through evolutionary history, it becomes clear that persons can know something of the world innately, prior to and inde­ pendent of their own experience.23 He goes suggesting that there are two types of learning: One is phylogenetic learning, in the sense that during evolution we have evolved very sophisticated machinery for perceiving and mak­ ing inferences about the real world . . . The second kind of learning involved in dealing with the world is ontogenetic learning, namely the lifelong acquisition of cultural, linguistic, and scientific knowledge. Thus we see the world through multiple pairs of glasses: some of them are inherited as part of our physiological apparatus, others acquired from direct experiences as we proceed through life. . . . As Konrad Lorenz has

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put it, every step of knowledge means taking off a pair of glasses – but we could never dispense with all of them.23 So what we see is not what in a totalitarian vision is there but a combination of that which evolution has phylogenetically provisioned us to see, together with what our past experience has taught us to see. So in the words taken from William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.K154 The brain, therefore, is an organ that, through a process of Darwinian natu­ ral selection, provides us with a view of a reduced reality that is essential to our survival, but this begs the further question as to the nature of imagi­ nation. How do we take off our metaphorical pair of glasses and see an expanded reality? Even before I  was born, Aldous Huxley had written a book about his experiences with the drug mescaline, which could lead a person to either heaven or hell.24 And drugs can clearly affect brain function and change consciousness, therefore we know that the mind is manipulat­ able. But we also know that the human mind is highly visual, and it is dif­ ficult for us not to think that our mind’s eye gives us an accurate picture of the external objective world, so, how does it do it? The simple answer is that we don’t know, but it is an active area of scientific research, and here I am going to relay some of the work of Gerald Edelman and colleagues as it seems to me, as a layman, to be on the right track and steers a path between Descartes’s view that all is mind and the materialistic position that mind is purely an epiphenomenon that has no reality. Edelman and colleagues disagree with the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose that consciousness cannot be explained in terms of our cur­ rent understanding25 and that some undiscovered phenomenon is needed; they ask, Why should the simple differentiation between light and dark per­ formed by a human being be associated with conscious experience, while that performed by a photodiode is not?26, p32 They suggest that any explanation of consciousness cannot focus on some localised area of neural correlate of activity, but consciousness resides in neu­ ral processes that involve many different areas of the brain together. So is it therefore a computer? Essentially, Penrose thinks that computers operating through repetitive algorithms could never be conscious,25, p581 but Edelman and Tononi,26 disagree, claiming that they have designed a device which has some degree of primary consciousness based on their theory of neural group selection. This takes a Darwinian approach of neuronal selection involving millions of neurons during brain development. Neurons that fire together

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get wired together, and therefore this activity strengthens or weakens their connections according to their individual patterns of electrical activity. Throughout life this process of neuronal selection and degeneration results in behavioural experience with different sensory inputs being mapped to different neuronal groups producing highly individualised brains. According to Edelman and colleagues doing experiments using magnetoen­ cephalography, which measures synchronous activity of millions of neurons, this revealed that different individuals showed remarkably different responses to standardised stimuli. But they emphasise that there is one key factor that gen­ erates consciousness that they call re-entry. Re-entry allows the brain to partition an unlabelled world into objects and events by synchronisation of the activity of different neuronal groupings on the different brain maps and integrating them into circuits of temporally coherent output. But this then begs the ques­ tion, how does this lead to a sense of a conscious self as a unified whole while maintaining the ability to be discriminative? They suggest each brain contains a dynamic core of functional clusters of neurons that manifests through a con­ tinuous activity of re-entrant interactions. Consciousness emerges through the changes and fluctuations in time of the functional clusters as they become integrated within the dynamic core. This may result in a sense of being con­ sciously aware of an external world but what about discrimination? What does it mean to perceive a red apple? The neural clusters responsible for redness need to be activated, but these must also associate with other clusters defining where the apple is in time and space. Edelman and Tononi believe: Only if the activity of these other neuronal groups is effectively part of the same neural reference space can a discrimination be made among and within submodalities, such as colour, motion and form.26, p166 This is how, they claim, “primary consciousness” is manifested and gener­ ates mental images of a reptile, bird or mammal. But it is with the devel­ opment of language and memory that leads to the higher consciousness capable of perceiving a self and enables phenomenological experiences that tie thoughts and feelings together with culture and beliefs and allows indi­ viduals to escape the confines of only the remembered present. It is here that imagination is born opening the way to symbolism and metaphor and where art and science arise. In the next chapter, I will develop this theme and attempt to show that from our conscious minds and through imagina­ tion we can manifest new material objects.

References 1) 2) 3) 4)

Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Oxford University Press. Sterelny, K. (2007) Dawkins vs. Gould Survival of the Fittest. Icon Books Limited. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Longman Scientific and Technical, p. 94. Bronowski, J. (1977) New Concepts in the Evolution of Complexity. In A Sense of the Future. MIT Press.

80 Mind from matter 5) Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of Species (Chapter IV). Natural Selection. 6) Stoodley, P., Sauer, K., Davies, D.G. and Costerton, J.W. (2002) Biofilms as Differ­ entiated Complex Communities. Annual Review Microbiology, 56: 187–209. 7) Biello, D. (2009) The Origin of Oxygen in the Earth’s Atmosphere. Scientific Ameri­ can. August. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/origin-of-oxygen-in-atmosphere/ 8) Kopp, R. et al. (2005) Paleoproterozoic Snowball Earth: A Climate Disaster Trig­ gered by the Evolution of Oxygenic Photosynthesis. PNAS, 102: 11131–11136. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0504878102 9) Mayr, E. (1997) This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World. Belknap/Harvard, p. 149. 10) Joel, L. (2019) Ancient ‘Snowball Earth” Thawed Out in a Flash. Science, 2 April. doi: 10.1126/science.aax5539 11) Margulis, L. (1981) Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Life and Its Environment on the Early Earth. Freeman. 12) Parfrey, L.W. and Lahr, D.J.G. (2013) Multicellularity Arose Several Times in the Evolution of Eukaryotes. BioEssays, 35(4): 339–347. doi: 10.1002/bies.201200143 13) Popper, K. (1999) All Life Is Problem Solving. Routledge. 14) Gould, S.J. (1999) Brotherhood of Inversion (Chapter 17). In Leonardo’s Mountains of Clams and the Diet of Worms. Vintage, pp. 319–335. 15) Mayr, E. (1963) Animal Species and Evolution. Belknap/Harvard Press. 16) Gould, S.J. (1993) Bent Out of Shape (Ch 5). Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natu­ ral History. Vintage. 17) Ramachandran, V. (2003) The Emerging Mind BBC Reith Lectures. Profile Books. 18) Popper, K.R. and Eccles, J.C. (1977) The Self and Its Brain. Springer International. 19) Darwin, C. (1871) Comparison of the Mental Powers of Man and the Lower Ani­ mals (Ch 3). In The Descent of Man. John Murry. 20) Searle, J. (1984) Minds, Brains and Science. British Broadcasting Corporation. 21) Kant, I. (1977) Critique of Pure Reason Quoted in E.H. Gombrich Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (5th Edition). Phaidon Press Ltd. 22) Riddle, S. (2016) How Bees See and Why It Matters. Bee Culture, 20 May. https:// www.beeculture.com/bees-see-matters/ 23) Delbrück, M. (1986) Mind From Matter. Blackwell Scientific Publications. 24) Huxley, A. (1954) The Doors of Perception. Chatto & Windus Ltd. 25) Penrose, R. (1989) The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics. Oxford University Press. 26) Edelman, G.M. and Tononi, G. (2000) The Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination. Basic Books.

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Matter from mind

Mind and the material world According to some researchers, you can only embark on investigations of consciousness if you have white hair and a Nobel Prize,1 and as I have nei­ ther, I  therefore openly declare my lack of qualifications. However, I  do declare myself an interested party in the subject, and if my scribbling throws a little light to entice readers forward, I  feel I  will have played my part. I completed the previous chapter reviewing Edelman and Tononi’s view of consciousness, and I  purposefully did not explicitly mention the conten­ tious debate around qualia. They are the subjective experience each of us is conscious of when we experience either a colour, a temperature, a pain or a musical note and so on. Roger Penrose believes such subjective experiences are beyond physics to explain. But that does not mean it is beyond biology to explain, and Edelman and Tononi’s explanation2 seems entirely plausible and a good starting point. To experience qualia an organism needs both a body and a brain and neither a theory nor a description is sufficient, and these must coincide with distinguishable conscious experiences representing different quale. Also, according to Edelman and Tononi’s view, each quale links to different states of the dynamic core which becomes manifest through the integrative effects of re-entrant interactions with billions of other states within a multidimensional neural space; my interpretation. Finally, for this to manifest a primitive self, these “multimodal body-centred discrimina­ tions carried out by the proprioceptive, kinesthetic and autonomic systems that are present in the embryo and infants brain, particularly in the brain stem”2, p157 need to be of sufficient size and intact. Therefore, at what point in metazoan evolutionary history this occurred is clearly interesting, but, certainly open to question. I have so far focused on Edelman and Tononi’s view of qualia, but one philosopher of biology, Daniel Dennett, is unimpressed and having reviewed the literature suggesting that we seem to have qualia, he then goes on to disqualify them claiming “we don’t have qualia either.”1, p375 However, he has replaced them with his own “Multiple drafts model of consciousness”, which he subsequently developed into a model of what he calls, “fame in DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-6

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the brain”.3 If I  am understanding him correctly, his objection to qualia is that he associates qualia with a view that everything comes together in some central place in the brain, Edelman and Tononi’s “dynamic core” per­ haps, which he calls the Cartesian Theater. The Cartesian Theater is Dennett’s starting point, and the problem is that we have a common place notion of the fact that the “stuff out there” in the material world, Descartes’s “res extensa”, is very different from the “stuff in our head” the mental world of “res cogitans”. Therefore, the place where this all comes together is Den­ nett’s Cartesian Theater: where “conscious thought” and “experience” take place. This tends to have the effect of leaving too much of the mind’s work to be done “in the center”, and this leads theorists to underestimate the “amount of understanding” that must be accomplished by the relatively peripheral systems of the brain.1, p39 Dennett’s view is that there is no central perceptive observer, nobody is at home and there is a Ghost in the Machine; a phrase popularised by the album of the same name by The Police and the book by Arthur Koestler. The idea of a Ghost in the Machine originates with Gilbert Ryle’s book The Concept of Mind,4, pp15–16 where he too starts by taking on what he calls “Descartes’ Myth”. Everyday experience tells me that I have a self, and knowledge of that self comes from what is going on in my head. This dualistic common place notion of mind and matter that we all have has been dissected in a book written in two distinct halves by Karl Popper, the philosopher, and John Eccles, the neurophysiologist. The first part of the book5 deals with the body mind problem from a philosopher’s stance, and the second part deals with the same body mind problem but from a neurobiologist’s point of view and the authors explore the interaction. If Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, or I think therefore I am, is taken to its logical conclusion the result is a men­ tal monism based around thinking “substance”, but according to Popper’s discussion of Ryle: He [Ryle] certainly wishes to deny that there is a Cartesian thinking “substance”; something I [Popper] also wish to deny, because I suggest that the very idea of substance is based on a mistake. However, he also wishes to no doubt to deny the (Socratic and Platonic) idea of the mind as the pilot of a ship – the body; a simile which I regard as in many ways excellent and adequate; so much so that I could say to myself “I believe in the ghost in the machine”.5, p105 Dennett’s Cartesian Theater might arguably be reminiscent of Plato’s Cave in which the human and conscious self, this central place I’ve speculated as possibly being associated with the dynamic core, looks onto the stage to see only shadows and has nothing to do with reality that is, the ghost in the

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machine. So how does the conscious mind, the ghost in the machine, manifest itself? Descartes’s position clearly follows in the footsteps of Plato’s idealism, the idea of the mind as the pilot of a ship – the body, to use Popper’s words, but acknowledging the scholarship of Ernst Mayr we have come to understand that Darwinian population thinking overturns the idealism of Plato and Aristotle as these essentialist philosophies have little to do with reality.6, pp45–47 This, I will argue, is why Dennett, a quintessential Darwinian philosopher and therefore an advocate of Darwin’s population thinking,7, p193 dismisses qualia so fervently and develops his own model. So, what is the Multiple Drafts Model and where does the notion of fame come in? Having read Dennett’s explanation of his Multiple Drafts Model in his book Consciousness Explained,1 I  cannot see why his view is incompatible with Edelman and Tononi’s view which accepts qualia as real. This is a bit like David Hume’s position (see Chapter 3) where he does not accept that however often two events are conjoined, as in the motion of one billiard ball striking another, as real. Indeed, Dennett turns to a phenomenon called phi in some detail.1, p114 Phi is a term first described by the psychologist Max Wertheimer8 and subsequently used by other psychologists to investigate human perception. Dennett uses this experimental phenomenon to probe our notion of consciousness and uses this as a starting point to develop his idea of Multi Draft Model. He describes an experiment in which an illusion of motion is perceived when two stationary dots are placed next to each other and are lit alternatively in rapid succession. But what happens if the two dots are of different colour, one red and the other green, for example? Quoting Dennett’s in full: Unless there is “precognition” in the brain (an extravagant hypothesis we will postpone indefinitely), the illusory content, red-switching-to­ green-in-midcourse, cannot be created until after some identification of the second, green spot occurs in the brain. But if the second spot is already “in conscious experience”, wouldn’t it be too late to interpose the illusory content between the conscious experience of the red spot and the conscious experience of the green spot? How does the brain accomplish this sleight of hand? The principle that causes must precede effects applies to the multiple distributed processes that accomplish the editorial work of the brain. Any particular process that requires information from some source must indeed wait for that information; it cannot get there till it gets there. This is what rules out “magical” or precognitive explanations of the color-switching phi phenomenon. The content green spot cannot be attributed to any event, conscious or unconscious, until the light from the green spot has reached the eye and triggered the normal neural activity in the visual system up to the level at which the discrimina­ tion of green is accomplished. So the (illusory) discrimination of red­ turning-to-green has to be accomplished after the discrimination of the

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green spot. But then since what you consciously experience is first red, then red-turning-to green, and finally green, it (“surely”) follows that your consciousness of the whole event must be delayed until after the green spot is (unconsciously?) perceived. If you find this conclusion compel­ ling, you are still locked in the Cartesian Theater.1, p115

Qualia, multiple drafts and fame I do not believe that the idea of qualia is incompatible with Dennett’s Multi Drafts Model, and they do not have to be mutually exclusive. The Multi Drafts Model is aimed at dispelling the Cartesian Theater which I would sug­ gest is his bête noire because of its similarities to Plato’s allegory of the cave and its association of mind with idealism. Indeed, the relationships between perception, imagination, consciousness and action are fundamental. We all recognise that what we perceive does not always reach our consciousness, but what we perceive can result in action without our being conscious, for example, driving a car. When learning to drive all the actions we undertake are conscious but when we are experienced they become unconscious. And we have all been conscious of something that we do not perceive; for exam­ ple, when glancing at a wristwatch the second hand can appear to our con­ sciousness as stationary for a limited period, and yet at another level we are aware that time is still ongoing. Bringing together driving and reaction time, we are taught about the difference between thinking time and breaking time in the avoidance of an imminent collision. So when does a perception of a future collision become conscious? Dennett is aware of this change in status between a perception being unconscious to being conscious as any of us and comes up with his notion of “fame in the brain”. Dennett’s “fame in the brain” sees the brain as a massive parallel array, minimally billions, of non-hierarchical registers, similar in kind to a laptop or desktop computer but which are themselves significantly not conscious. The nature of these registers is conceptually unimportant for his theory, but they do need to be capable of registering changes in magnitude and are probably related to the firing of neural networks which are open to changes in neurologically active chemicals or similar. He sees most of these interactions as unconscious and only sees awareness developing as a histori­ cal property of some neuronal computational configuration, representing a form of information that has won out in a temporal Darwinian competition, that can linger around for a period of time. What starts as unconscious and becomes conscious is historically determined by how it is later consumed and used. Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame is not fame at all, fame builds over time and has historical impact. Consciousness is a stream of neuronal configurational status that over time is an ongoing process that has a bodily impact.9 In a sense this is not a long way from Edelman and Tononi’s model with re-entrant modalities, but Dennett’s starting point of the Cartesian Theater and a homunculus observer prejudices him against the notion of a

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dynamic core and qualia. Dennett’s view is non-hierarchical and he stresses the need for consciousness to be distributed throughout the brain in time and space.9 To my mind, as a trespasser into consciousness studies, with a view that neurons that fire together wire together, I cannot see why certain neural configurations are not given greater consciousness status than others. Surely, it must be this sort of anomalous status, much beloved by experi­ mental psychologists, that leads an observer confronted with the phi phe­ nomenon to interpret them as moving when we know intellectually that they are not. Presumably, there has in the past been some form of natural selection that has been in operation, and the phi phenomenon is just a coin­ cidence that offers no fitness cost, or even alternatively, perhaps a fitness advantage, we just have not, as yet, found it. Indeed, illusion has long been the preserve of the artist, and there are lots of mind bogglingly baffling examples that appear in the pages of psychology textbooks10 some of which date back to at least the nineteenth century.

Two cultures In 1892, an image appeared in the German magazine Fliegende Bläter titled “Kaninchen und Ente” (Figure 6.1 Rabbit and Duck). This image, I think everyone would agree, does not look like any rabbit or duck they will have ever seen in the “real” world. In the first place it is just an abstracted head with no body. If the artist had drawn in a body there would be no ambiguity. But, if we just concentrate on the artist’s drawing, it can be interpreted in one of two distinct ways: it’s either a rabbit facing to the right or it’s a duck fac­ ing to the left, where the ears of the rabbit become the beak of the duck. To philosophers it was simplified and made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations as a picture-object.11, p194 As we would not think that it’s a “real” rabbit or a “real” duck, we are happy for it to represent the “real” world as a figment of our imagination. An artistic picto-cryptogram. The romantic poets debated the nature of Poetic Genius and the role of the imagination, and one source of this discussion was between Coleridge and Wordsworth and is developed in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria,12 where he informs his reader: The IMAGINATION then I  consider either as primary, or second­ ary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The second­ ary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dis­ solves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible; yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.12, p175

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Figure 6.1 Kaninchen und Ente Source: (Image open access from Wikipedia).

Returning to Figure 6.1, it is easy for our imagination to switch back and forth between rabbit and duck, even though the image before us does not resemble either animal very well, and indeed, I will defy anyone to experi­ ence the rabbit and the duck at the same time. Can we therefore analyse this situation and suggest what might be happening in the brain with respect to our switch in consciousness from a neurobiological Darwinian perspective? First, let’s start from the trivial proposition that the brain has the capability to abstract certain essential features from sensory stimuli and disregard oth­ ers. If the brain did not have this capability for recognition, having looked at ourselves in the mirror before going to bed in the evening, and looking at ourselves in the morning with dishevelled hair, we would not recog­ nise ourselves in the mirror. Indeed, in an example of the African savannah where predator and prey co-evolve, it is easy to understand how natural selection would select those predators capable of recognising prey by a pro­ cess of abstracting those essential features of the prey against a background

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in which the prey remained camouflaged. Therefore, due to such an arms race, the brain evolves an imagination that takes on board what it perceives through the senses, and in Coleridge’s words, “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create” in “it[s] struggles to idealize and to unify”12, p175 an image of a prey that is presented to the predator’s mind’s eye. The image of the Rabbit and Duck illusion has been carefully constructed by the art­ ist to purposely create an ambiguous image that can be seen by the mind’s eye either as a rabbit or as a duck. Natural selection, I argue therefore, has favoured those predators, be they humans, dogs, cats, bats or killer whales, which have the ability to abstract essential features and with it is born the concept of essentialism that Darwin turned on its head. The “real” world is but a figment of our imagination, a ghost in the machine, a phantom, but I think the Rabbit and Duck illusion is more than just amusing, it’s instructive. Can we, therefore, explain it by bringing together Dennett’s Multiple Drafts Model, fame and qualia? Dennett denies the existence of qualia,1, p375 so let’s start with Dennett. I don’t now want to get bogged down in the details of brain anatomy at the moment, let’s just take Dennett’s starting point that neurologically the brain has “registers” that respond to sensory inputs such as light, sound, touch, taste and smell, and that these neurons are not in themselves individually conscious, they just conduct signals. Now, before looking at the “Rabbit and Duck” illusion, I want to turn briefly to Niko Tinbergen’s studies on the three-spined stickleback.13 Tinbergen had kept sticklebacks as a boy and developed them as a model to study animal behaviour. During the breeding season male sticklebacks are highly territorial, develop a red patch beneath and posture towards each other. Tinbergen wanted to know what stimulated their posturing behaviour. In a series of experiments with different model sticklebacks ranging in size, shape and colour the more naturalistic models did not elicit a response unless it was red below. And indeed, the posturing behaviour was even elicited when a red post office mail van passed by the aquarium where he kept his fish.10, p87 Because, as Gombrich states in his dis­ cussions on illusion, “to their [male stickleback] brains red stands for danger and rivalry”, clearly shape and form were really of no or little consequence. As a biologist with a firm evolutionary perspective, I think qualia are the result of evolutionary development of brains.

Art meets philosophy So, let’s return to our “Rabbit and Duck” illusion in the context of a preda­ tor, let’s say for simplicity a middle-aged, one-eyed human hunter, and see what light it may throw on consciousness. The photons of radiation from the “Rabbit and Duck” image enter the eye and trigger cells, rods and cones, in the retina which subsequently are conducted through the optic nerve to the part of the brain dealing with vision. In this particular example no colour is involved, so it is all to do with shape and form. Our middle-aged one-eyed

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human hunter just after birth would not have been able to name anything, but during their development they were taught to distinguish rabbits from ducks so that when a particular series of objects triggered certain patterns of cells on the retina, this led to a configuration of registers being triggered in the brain. If we now accept that neurons that fire together wire together, and we take Dennett’s concepts of multiple drafts and fame, together with Edelman and Tononi’s idea of re-entry we can perhaps get a sense of how an object like a rabbit, with all its subtleties of shape and form stimulating various registries in the brain, are subjectively integrated into a coherent abstracted whole of qualia to which we give the name rabbit. Likewise, with the duck; but this time the registers stimulated in the brain will be subtly different and to which we give the name duck. When confronted with the illusion of the “Rabbit and Duck”, we may for a time see only the rabbit, for example, but when someone points out that the ears of the rabbit can become a beak of a duck our brains can shift its register of subjective qualia. Don’t forget the stimulation of the rods and cones on the retina have not changed, neither have the registers in the brain, it is a subjective change of the qualia that have been historically hardwired and programmed through development and education that leads to the change in consciousness of whether we see the rabbit or the duck. The image is ambiguous because the artist has purposefully removed a number of reference points that in “reality” would have been associated with the head, is the head covered with feathers or fur for example, not to mention the rest of the body. Wittgenstein, who by some was the inventor of the emoji, was interested in the Rabbit and Duck illusion because he thought it threw light on the nature of language. On describing the image, he says: I say “it’s a rabbit”. Not “Now it’s a rabbit”. I am reporting my percep­ tion. . . . I may say “It’s a duck-rabbit”. – The answer that it is a duckrabbit is again the report of a perception; the answer “Now it’s a rabbit” is not. Had I replied “It’s a rabbit”, the ambiguity would have escaped me, and I should have been reporting my perception. The change of aspect [i.e. from rabbit to duck]. “But surely you would say that the picture is altogether different now!” But what is different: my impression? My point of view? – Can I say? I described the alteration like a perception; quite as if the object had altered before my eyes.  .  .  . This has the form of a report of a new perception. The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new per­ ception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged . . . My visual impression has changed; – what and now I recognise that it has not only shape and colour but also a quite particular “organisa­ tion” . . . If you put the “organization” of a visual impression on a level with colours and shapes, you are proceeding from the idea of the visual impression as an inner object.11, pp196–197

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For Wittgenstein, this is all to do with the nature of human language which evolutionarily is a late development (around 150,000  years ago according to Dennett1); but I think, with its reference to “organisation” it’s as good a description of qualia as you are likely to get. But Dennett, quoting Wittgen­ stein saying, “If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”11, p223 – disagrees making the point that if a lion could talk and had language it would be easy to understand, but the lion would no longer be a lion.1, p447 We are caught in a paradox, but where does this leave us with respect to lion’s consciousness, according to Dennett railing against the Cartesian Theater, does this mean that lions without language are not conscious as Descartes claimed? I think that Dennett’s position regarding Descartes Theater is a bit of a straw man as we would all acknowledge that lions have a consciousness. So, let’s take our thought experiment a stage further and see how particular qualia are likely to get reinforced as neuronal configurations within the brain and render lions, as members of the cat family, conscious. Lions are top predators that prey on antelope, wildebeest, zebra and so on but generally not on rabbits and ducks. So, let’s turn our lion into a domestic cat and ask the question would our domestic cat be aware of the Rabbit and Duck illusion? Most certainly not! I  think everyone would agree that the image just would not have enough detail and context to elicit the cat’s pred­ atory behaviour. But the majority of us would agree that the domestic cat is surely conscious. Surely, the cat would be able to be conscious of whether there was a rabbit or a duck sitting in front of it? The answer to this question is most certainly, yes, even though a cat does not have human language. Puz­ zle box experiments by Edward Thorndike,14 as early as the turn of the last century, would suggest they can learn and cleverly differentiate components of their environment, initially through trial and error, but given a reward the “correct solutions” become stamped into the cat’s mind in such a way as to govern their behaviour. Remember, neurons that fire together get wired together, and neural pathways get established that integrate the senses of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell into complex configurations that criss­ cross the brain. But that does not mean a cat’s consciousness is similar to our consciousness or indeed any other animal’s consciousness, it certainly will not be similar, and I will now attempt to explain why. Cats, like us and lions, are mammals, and mammals prior to the extinc­ tion of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago were living a nocturnal existence and as a group expanded only after the dinosaurs had disappeared.15 I don’t want to get drawn into the details of the current debate around the evolu­ tion of vision; suffice it to say that the majority of cats which are adapted to hunt at night are dichromatic, which compromises their daytime vision making them red–green colour blind, in a similar way that the minority of humans who are red–green colour blind.16 Therefore, if we take Wittgen­ stein’s Rabbit and Duck illusion (Figure 6.2A) and redraw it in the style of Ishihara’s colour-blind test17 (Figure  6.2B) cats and colour-blind humans would see something comparable to the image in Figure  6.2C, where, if I had not included the outline, it would be very difficult if not impossible

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to discern the “Rabbit and Duck”. The evolution of colour vision has long been associated with primates and with their efficiency at recognising ripe fruit in the canopy of trees, and recent research seems to corroborate this theory.16 But what about consciousness? What this aptly demonstrates is that even within our own species, although the “real” external world is consist­ ent, we are conscious of different aspects and that the “red” that you see may very well not be the same as the “red” I see and vice versa. Humans have a trichromatic visual system which has evolved to operate in bright light dur­ ing the day, whereas cats have a visual system adapted for nocturnal hunting. Even though we have admitted that Figure 6.2A is unlikely to get any behavioural response from a cat, it is quite easy to experimentally test the hypothesis, by doing reward-type experiments, that an animal with trichro­ matic vision (e.g., a bird or a reptile) would be conscious of the Ishihara style Rabbit and Duck image, Figure 6.2B, whereas an animal with dichro­ matic vision would not. It is a question of discrimination, and although the trichromatic animal would not flip back and forth between conscious states of “Rabbit” and “Duck”, which is a level of abstraction likely to be acces­ sible only through a well-developed language, it begs the question regarding the nature of this discrimination. For example, returning to our cat, can it distinguish between a vole, a shew and a mouse? Or are these all just prey? And, what about a bird? Prey again, or has natural selection equipped our cat to differentiate all these types of prey because they require slightly dif­ ferent hunting strategies, or perhaps they are likely to carry slightly differ­ ent parasite burdens and to be capable of distinguishing them has an effect on overall fitness and fecundity. The point I want to make as a biologist is that natural selection will reward reproductive success, and that if a cer­ tain capacity, such as consciousness, adds to this success it will be selected and improved upon and hardwired into evolving neurological configura­ tions, both over evolutionary time and over an individual’s lifetime. The fact our cat is conscious is not just an epiphenomenon, a ghost in the machine,

Figure 6.2 A) Wittgenstein’s Rabbit Duck drawn and adapted from Philosophical Investi­ gations 1953; B) Rabbit Duck drawn in the style of Ishihara’s colour-blind test semi-adapted to greyscale; C) same image converted to greyscale Source: (Images drawn by author).

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a zombie, it is integral to the cat’s identity. A “ghost in the machine” is to my mind an emotionally loaded and derogatory phrase relegating my mind to a “ghost”, an unreality, and my body to a “machine”, an appliance. My subjective conscious experience is me, my mind and my body, my qualia are me. They are my individual identity that can think and act, reflect and have agency. So why do so many people out of the Dennett School of Un­ consciousness want to deny them?

Neither ghost nor machine Dennett’s School of Un-consciousness is based on his method of study that he calls “Heterophenomenology” which Dennett claims is neutral regarding discussion about subjective and objective phenomena. In Dennett’s view we have to treat, “heterophenomenology as analogous to the interpretation of fiction”, and addressing our Ghost in the machine – Zombie problem he says: Very simply, heterophenomenology by itself cannot distinguish between zombies and real, conscious people, and hence does not claim to solve the zombie problem or dismiss it. Ex hypothesi, zombies behave just like real people, and since heterophenomenology is a way of interpret­ ing behaviour (including the internal behaviour of brains, etc.), it will arrive at exactly the same heterophenomenological world for Zoe and for Zombie-Zoe, her unconscious twin.1, p95 However, I  don’t believe that Dennett’s method of heterophenomenol­ ogy is quite as neutral about subjective and objective phenomena as he would like us to believe, and in the final chapter of his book Consciousness Explained he suggests that perhaps he has not explained consciousness but just explained it away.1, pp454–455 So is the phenomenon of consciousness real? In a sense, we are back at Descartes’s cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am; and as subjective as this statement may be, from it we cannot escape. But Dennett, I think, would clearly like to escape and I believe the reason is historical. Dennett’s starting point is the Cartesian Theater and his criticism of a homuncular observer. With today’s technology and our ability to scan the brain while it is in action, I certainly agree with Dennett, and I think most people today would also say that Descartes’s view is totally untenable. How­ ever, I don’t think you can just explain away subjectivity; it is throwing the baby out with the bath water. During the eighteenth century the growth of a philosophy based on empiricism and objectivity is most notably seen in Hume, with his unequivocal emphasis on reason, the physical world and its measurement (Chapter 3); here, he condemns subjectivity and metaphysics to the incinerator when he writes, “Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”18 Kant of course disagrees and

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makes an apology for metaphysics as argued in his Prolegomena and Critic of Pure Reason (see Chapter 3), indeed, as has been observed by A. N. Wilson: He [Kant] was attempting the North Face of the Eiger: hardly surpris­ ing, then, that all the alpinists who followed him slithered down one side of the mountain or the other without reaching the peak. For Kant had been attempting to describe the process of knowledge itself. He was trying to marry the twin truths: namely, that by the very process of perceiving and knowing, we invent our world; and also that this world has a reality of its own.19, pp44–45 In other words, subjectivity is real. So, has Dennett “slithered” down the North Face of the Eiger with the others? I believe he has, by eliminating subjectivity, Dennett’s School of Unconsciousness removes one of the twin truths that Wilson refers to in the earlier quotation. Let’s revisit Dennett’s Cartesian Theater with its homuncular observer, which neither of us agree with, from the perspective of modern brain science. Where is our common ground and where do we differ? I think we would agree that neuromag­ netic brain responses can be monitored when subjects become conscious of various stimuli, and it is apparent that patterns of neural activity are highly differentiated, and experiments looking at memory require sustained neu­ ral activity maintained by re-entrant (Multi Draft) interactions in different regions of the brain.2 Therefore, it is clear that what we are consciously aware of, and I am happy to call a subjective reality, is a physical manifesta­ tion of neural activities and our conscious awareness that we perceive is an emergent property that integrates these neural activities. Where Dennett and I part company is that I am happy to call these sub­ jective phenomena qualia, while he is not. Our inner subjective awareness of which we are conscious (res cogitans) is an emergent property that mani­ fests itself through neural activity created through sensory perception of the outside world (res extensa) and integrates this into a useful model by which we can go about our daily lives. Although the visual world of which a cat is conscious will be significantly different from our own, natural selection will have adapted it to the cat’s life history strategy as our life history strategy has been selected and adapted to us. This evolutionary increasing development of consciousness runs throughout the animal kingdom from simple nema­ todes that possess only a nerve ring and have around 300 neurons, to us with a highly developed brain with around 86 billion neurons.20 The nematode’s consciousness is obviously rudimentary even in comparison to a cat’s (that has around 250 million neurons21), but it is suited to the nematode’s life his­ tory strategy, and they have been found in amber dating back to 400 million years ago but are likely to be at least twice that age.22 As I’ve mentioned earlier, to Descartes language-less animals were uncon­ scious, a position few people would agree with today, but Descartes’s myth is Dennett’s starting point as it was also Gilbert Ryle’s in his book pub­ lished in 1949, The Concept of Mind.4 Ryle was the Waynflete Professor of

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Metaphysical Philosophy in Oxford and interestingly Dennett’s Doctoral advisor. He is highly critical of Cartesian dualism and introduces the con­ cepts of a ghost in the machine, which I  have mentioned numerous times already, and category mistakes. Category mistakes are products of mind that confuse their “logical type or category”. One of the several examples that Ryle gives is a discussion about a foreigner who is shown round Oxford University. They are: shown a number of collages, libraries, playing fields, museums, scientific departments and administrative offices. He then asks “But where is the University? I have seen where the members of the Colleges live, where the Registrar works, where the scientists experiment and the rest. But I have not yet seen the University in which reside and work the mem­ bers of your University.” .  .  . the University is not another collateral institution. . . . The University is just the way in which all that he has already seen is organized. . . . He was mistakenly allocating the Univer­ sity to the same category as to which the other institutions belong.4, p16 According to Ryle, this is the error into which Cartesian dualism falls, and he sees this mistake as a product of the zeitgeist of Descartes’s time. Descartes lived between 1596 and 1650, and the year 1642 is interesting; it’s eight years before the year of Galileo’s death and Newton’s birth and those three lives arguably solidify a triumphant view of the world based on mechanics. Later, Newton who was a uniformitarian would have ultimately to leave the University of Cambridge because he did not subscribe to the ideas of the Trinity and take holy orders which was a university requirement for a formal position. The religious certainties of the past were being held up to scrutiny by the increasingly scientific outlook; objectivity was in the ascend­ ant and subjectivity was out à la David Hume. It would therefore appear to me that Dennett could be accused of making a categorical error, for Ryle’s “University” substitute Dennett’s “homunculus” or his “Cartesian thea­ tre”, and this is the position that Dennett’s School of Unconsciousness would endorse, explaining away any subjective emergent property, such as qualia, as unnecessary. We are back at a position of reducing everything to phys­ ics and chemistry without recourse to the types of emergent properties for which biology can account.

The biology of metaphysics In Chapter 3, I quote Bronowski in which he makes the metaphysical state­ ment that in reality “the world is totally connected”, but his position is subtle, to practice science, you need to make what Kant would call a metaphysical judgement. You have to divide the world into two, into the relevant and the irrelevant. In other words, science demands practitioners to make a moral judgement and objectify the world by removing themselves from it; there­ fore, scientists who subscribe to Hume’s doctrine that there is no reason to

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conjoin a cause with an effect removes the role of the human imagination. Consequently, when Bertrand Russell claims, “that knowledge concerning the universe as a whole is not to be obtained through metaphysics”,23, pp46–51 that statement turns out in practice to be metaphysical, as he is referring to, “the universe as a whole”, must include ourselves. We are caught in a paradox. And that is the reason C. P. Snow’s two cultures debate24 rumbles on down to the present day. If there is a difference between art and science it is that scientists make a metaphysical judgement and remove themselves from the world as a whole to remain objective while artists maintain their connection to the world as a whole and remain within it and are therefore subjective. How does this work? Let’s return to the artist that originally drew the Rabbit and Duck image in Figure 6.1 by again developing Bronowski’s discussion in Chapter 3 fur­ ther. Comparing the similarities between Newton’s laws of inverse squares with Blake’s couplet “A Robin Red Breast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a Rage”, we observe that both are cryptograms that require us to decipher them through an act of imagination. Fascinatingly, Sir Winston Churchill, a gifted amateur artist applies the same language to painting when he says: We look at the object with an intent regard, then at the palette, and thirdly at the canvas. The canvas receives a message dispatched usually a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code. It has been turned from light into paint. It reaches the canvas a cryptogram. Not until it has been placed in its correct relation to everything else that is on the canvas can it be deciphered, is its meaning apparent, is it translated once again from mere pigment into light.10, p34 And to both the artist who codifies the painting and the audience that deciphers it, both do so through acts of the imagination. It is often said that artists see the world more clearly, but this is not necessarily true, an artist will sometimes look at their subject through half-closed eyes and so reduce sen­ sory input and thereby abstract key shapes and forms. Our “Rabbit Duck” image has no colour and minimal texture, it is all shape and form and as Gombrich writes: In thus looking for possible alternatives the artist does not necessarily see more than the layman. In a certain sense he sees even less (as he shows when he half closes his eyes). And yet he enriches our experience because he offers us an equivalence within his medium that may also “work” for us.10, p276 And here in the “Rabbit Duck” image, although the artist is making a conscious selection, his choice is knowingly ambiguous to the extent that

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Wittgenstein can abstract it even further to concoct his equally ambiguous pictogram. But what is happening in the brain, at Churchill’s “post office en route”, when our awareness flips from “Rabbit” to “Duck” and vice versa. The truth is we don’t really know, but my guess would be that the configura­ tion of qualia (colour, shape, texture, size etc.), the ones that are re-entrantly active, changes, and with this change comes a change in consciousness, a consciousness codified in the organisation of the brain. In the same way that Ryle cannot show his foreign visitor the “University” as an object, physically there is no place in the brain for “Rabbit Duck”, but there are a different configurations of neuronal activity producing qualia of which we are aware and to which we have associated the word “Rabbit” with one pat­ tern and the word “Duck” with another. And in our imagination, because of the highly selected ambiguity that the artist placed in the work, we can flip our consciousness between them back and forth. If we move away from the visual and enter the auditory for a second, we can turn to Wittgenstein’s Investigations in which he says, “Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.”11, p4 To paraphrase we can say, “Awareness of the Rabbit flipping to the Duck is like a change of chord on the piano of the mind”; there is a shift in the resonant qualities of the neurons. To do this, the brain must have evolved some system of neuronally nested hierarchies that integrate sensory inputs into a coherent system that pro­ duces behaviour, only a subset of which reach our conscious awareness. But the conscious part is crucial because this is the seat of our creative imagi­ nation where emergent properties arise and bring together the objective world with the subjective word as one and through which with the power of language we can imagine an object like a flying pig that is purple. The purple flying pig is an emergent property of neuronal activity that although could not happen without physics and chemistry, goes beyond physics and chemistry. Our imagination has been selected through Darwinian processes to produce subjective models in our mind’s eye, of un-manifested objects or cryptograms (“Rabbit Duck”), that we can mentally manipulate in our mind’s eye with intent. Thereby, following the history of manufacturing through an incremental series of processes starting with the first stone axes and up to the computer on which I am typing this chapter, we can see that mind has produced matter. Or, in the words of William Blake that I quote at the beginning of the chapter, what is now proved was once only imagin’d.K151

References 1) Dennett, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained. Penguin Books.

2) Edelman, G.M. and Tononi, G. (2000) The Universe of Consciousness: How Matter

Becomes Imagination. Basic Books. 3) Dennett, D.C. (2005) Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Theory of Conscious­ ness. MIT Press.

96 Matter from mind 4) Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Hutchinson of London.

5) Popper, K.R. and Eccles, J.C. (1977) The Self and Its Brain. Springer International.

6) Mayr, E. (1982) The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance.

Belknap Harvard. 7) Dennett, D.C. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Penguin Books. 8) Wertheimer, M. (1912) Experimentelle Studien Über das Sehen von Bewegung. Zeitshrift für Psychologie, 61: 161–265. 9) Dennett, D.C. (2013) Consciousness as Fame in the Brain and the Cartesian Theater. www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-079YIasck 10) Gombrich, E.H. (1977) Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Repre­ sentation. Phaidon. 11) Wittgenstein, L. (1967) Philosophical Investigations (Translated G.E.M. Anscombe). Blackwell. 12) Coleridge, S.T. (1997) Biographia Literaria (Ch. 13, J.M. Everyman). Dent. 13) Hagen, J.B. and Singer, F. Niko Tinbergen and the Mating Behaviour of Sticklebacks. http://shipseducation.net/db/tinbergen.pdf 14) Thorndike, E.L. (1911) Animal Intelligence, Experimental Studies. The Macmillan Company. 15) Maor, R., Dayan, T., Ferguson-Gow, H. et al. (2017) Temporal Niche Expansion in Mammals From a Nocturnal Ancestor After Dinosaur Extinction. Nature Ecology and Evolution, 1: 1889–1895. doi: 10.1038/s41559-017-0366-5 16) Jacobs, G.H. (2009) Evolution of Colour Vision in Mammals. Philosophical Transac­ tions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, 364(1531): 2957–2967. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0039 17) Ishihara, S. (1917) Tests for Color-Blindness. Hongo Harukicho. 18) Hume, D. (1748) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding sect 12, pt.3 (Ed. Charles W. Hendel (1977)). The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 19) Wilson, A.N. (1999) God’s Funeral. Abacus, p. 44. 20) The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a hermaphrodite and has 302 neurones while the male has 385. Wormatlas www.wormatlas.org. 21) Azevedo, F.A., Carvalho, L.R., Grinberg, L.T., Farfel, J.M., Ferretti, R.E., Leite, R.E., Jacob Filho, W., Lent, R. and Herculano-Houzel, S. (2009) Equal Num­ bers of Neuronal and Nonneuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-up Primate Brain. The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 513(5): 532–541. doi: 10.1002/cne.21974. PMID: 19226510. 22) Poinar Jr., G.O. (2011) The Evolutionary History of Nematodes. Nematology Monographs and Perspectives (Eds. D.J. Hunt and R.N. Perry). Brill. 23) Russell, B. (1912) The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford University Press. 24) Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge Univer­ sity Press.

7

City of imagination

The call to fancy In Chapters 5 and 6, I have broadly summarised how, through a process of Darwinian evolution, the human mind has evolved and how consciousness has grown from simple nematodes that possess only a nerve ring and have approximately 300 neurons to the human brain with 86 billion. The human brain with its large numbers of interconnected neurons is capable of forming subjective pictograms and cryptograms from sensory inputs which through mental manipulation can in turn be manufactured and made manifest in the world. Hence, within the mind’s eye imaginative new and novel configura­ tions of matter can then, by the hand of the toolmaker, be produced. Now it could be argued that this production of new and novel objects could be done purely by non-imaginative reiterative processes of trial and error, using Den­ nett’s School of Unconsciousness argument for example. But I would argue that the subjective ability of the mind to mentally and creatively manipulate is the crucial activity that speeds up the process and produces an evolution­ ary advantage to those adept at this mental agility. This degree of subjective consciousness is not just unreal or an epiphenomenon; it’s been specifi­ cally selected for through evolution and is real because it increases fitness by modelling the environment with increased definition. Hence, the better the imagination the better the model and the greater the increase in biological fitness. But that property of the mind called imagination, which the poet William Blake (1757–1827) venerated, was to Enlightenment thinkers such as David Hume and his subsequent followers down to the present day an anathema. It is easy to dismiss Blake as an unworldly crank, and we will return to that theme, but he was far from unworldly; he was an engraver and etcher in the toolmaking tradition and invented his own processes. He was therefore a skilled metalworker plying his trade at the height of the Industrial Revolu­ tion. As David Erdman has pointed out: His [Blake] casting himself in the role of a blacksmith wielding “the hammer of Urthona” is an apt heroic symbol of his own position among DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-7

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the skilled trades, for an engraver is, in literal fact, a worker in metal. . . . There is also in the symbol an emotional identification with the actual man of energy rather than with the more isolated professional worker, and a vision of the working class as the class capable of building the future.1, p330 And in a footnote Erdman goes on: A deal of smithery was required in the preparation of copper engraver’s plates, which Blake used both for conventional engraving and for the etching of his prophecies. Cakes of copper from smelters were remelted in the copper mills and rolled into rude sheets or plates. In London these plates were cut to size and prepared in small open forges notorious for their din.1, pp330–331 So, although Blake is bracketed together with other romantic poets such as Coleridge, Keats and Wordsworth, whose values were a total antithesis to the Industrial Revolution and the thinkers such as Hume, Locke, Smith and other empiricists, his background and life circumstances were very different. His was the life of a metalworking artisan spent in the main living amongst a rapidly swelling urban population which, by the time of his death in 1827, was to become the largest trading capital of the world. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that he incorporated London into his own imagined ideal world view, calling it Golgonooza: Here, on the banks of the Thames, Los builded Golgonooza, Outside of the Gates of the Human Heart beneath Beulah In the midst of the rocks of the Alters of Albion. In fears He builded it, in rage & in fury. It is the Spirited Fourfold London, continually building & continually decaying desolate. In eternal labours loud the Furnaces & loud the Anvils Of Death thunder incessant around the flaming Couches of The Twenty-four Friends of Albion.2, p685 This quotation from Chapter 3 in Jerusalem uses images of the foundry noted earlier by Erdman, but to Blake, Golgonooza is a symbol, or what today we might call a model, that resides in the heads of Londoners representing the heavenly ideal of Jerusalem that can never be realised.3, p103 Los represents inspiration and is the conduit by which the creative imagination becomes manifest in this world,3, pp246–247 where Blake uses the word Beulah, origi­ nally from the Book of Isaiah, to represent not only “married” and a state of “Earthly Paradise”, but, according to Foster Damon,3, p42 it also represents “the realm of the Subconscious” and “the source of poetic inspiration and of dreams”. The Twenty-four Friends of Albion are the English Cathedral Cities,3,

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with London being seen as the head and Fourfold referring to the Gates of the Human Heart where North, South, East and West are the points of the compass; here Urthrona (North; imagination)3, p426 is paired contrary to Urizen (South; reason)3, p419 and Luvah (East; love and hate)2 paired contrary to Tharmas (West; bodily senses)3, p399 and make up the Four Zoas, or the four beasts, epitomising the human condition. This is a state in which progress is established by the contraries that were discussed in the first and second chapters and here are at war. This Fourfold scheme, which is fundamental to all of Blake’s thinking, is again reflected in the second book of his poem Milton, an account to correct Milton’s poem Paradise Lost, the story “To Jus­ tify the ways of God to Man”, and where the material world, Ulro, is viewed from Milton’s journey through “Chaos”: pp71–74

To where the contraries of Beulah War beneath Negation’s Banner. Then view’d from Milton’s Track they see Ulro a vast Polypus Of living fibres down into the Sea of Time & Space growing A self-devouring monstrous Human Death Twenty seven fold . . . Around this Polypus of Los continual builds the Mundane Shell. Four Universes round the Universe of Los remain Chaotic, Four intersecting Globes, & the Egg form’d World of Los . . . Here in these Chaoses the Sons of Ololon took their abode, In Chasms of the Mundane Shell which open on all sides around . . . And Ololon looked down into the Heavens of Ulro in fear. They said: “How are the Wars of man, which in Great Eternity “Appear around in the External Spheres of Visionary Life, “Here render’d Deadly within the Life & Interior Vision? “How are the Beasts & Birds & Fishes & Plants & Minerals “Here fix’d into frozen bulk subject to decay & death? “Those Visions of Human Life & Shadows of Wisdom & Knowledge2, pp524–525 Urthrona, Urizen, Luvah and Tharmas, which have been referred to before, make up the Four Universes or Zoas, and Ololon, according to Damon, is a female that appears in the poem and is a spiritual form of Milton’s Sixfold Emanation, his three wives and three daughters of this corporeal world. She is the spiritual truth underlying his mistaken views about woman.3, p307 Starting with the story of Genesis in The Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve cooperate and live harmoniously until they eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge, an act that produces the Fall of Man and at which point para­ dise is lost. Ololon then descends into the world of generation, becomes

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manifest and separated from the spiritual world of eternity and which is corruptible: In Great Eternity every particular Form gives forth or Emanates Its own peculiar Light, & the Form is the Divine Vision And the Light is his Garment. This is Jerusalem in every Man, A Tent & Tabernacle of Mutual Forgiveness, Male & Female Clothings. And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of Albion. But Albion fell down a Rocky fragment from Eternity hurl’d By his own Spectre, who is the Reasoning Power in every Man, Into his own Chaos, which is the memory between Man & Man.2, pp684–685 Here, Blake is assuming a Neoplatonic world view in which the manifest world, of which we are bodily aware through our senses, pre-exist in Great Eternity. According to this view, the “real” world is constructed of imagined ideal forms or qualities that are incorruptible, eternal and from which the world of generation emanates. But this emanated world in its manifest state is corruptible and open to degeneration, in other words “Chaos”: “Whatever can be created can be Annihilated: Forms cannot: “The Oak is cut down by the Ax, the Lamb falls by the Knife, “But their Forms Eternal Exist For-ever. Amen Hallelujah!”2, p522 Therefore, behind our chaotic corporeal world there is the Universe of Imagi­ nation which sits in the minds of people and collectively represents a human model of that Eternal and archetypal city Jerusalem which is in heaven; this is where London the manifested form in the corporeal changing world of “Chaos”, and Blake’s Golgonooza is the City of Imagination in his mind’s eye. To Blake Golgonooza represents a city of imagined possibilities that exist in waiting in the minds of people which through human thought can emanate and become a part of the manifest world. Blake’s schema makes compre­ hensible statements in which “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”,2, p151 can be seen where love acts as the catalyst in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”, un-manifest Eternity and manifest Chaos. Or, in other words, where Eternity which is a part of Blake’s Neoplatonic world of the imagination with its ideal forms becomes manifested, through love, into the corporeal world of “Chaos” and where Blake sees individual humans as the continual descent of souls into the chaotic world followed by their return to Eternity as he depicted in his illustration (Figure 7.1) of Porphyry’s De Antro Nympharum.4, p112 Are we therefore not back again at a dualistic view of the universe, a universe of mind and matter? And, what is this Universe of the Imagination

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Figure 7.1 De Antro Nympharum by William Blake describes a Neoplatonic vision of the manifest world in which human souls, which pre-exist as unmanifest beings in eternity, become manifest as mortal embodied beings before dying and ascending back into eternity. Hence Blake’s quotation “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Source: (Image open access from Wikipedia).

and where does it reside? Dennett in his School of Unconsciousness would clearly just want us to dismiss it and adopt what Mary Midgley has labelled the anti-self-doctrine, where each of us becomes our own illusion.5, pp23–24 Blake’s position is clearly more complex; whereas Newton rejected the Trinity, the Christian Dogma of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, as a part of one overarching Godhead, he, the nonconformist Christian, added a further realm to make up his Fourfold version of his Universe that he devel­ ops in his poem The Four Zoas, also known as The Book of Vala. This Four­ fold Universe, the schema I talked of earlier, represents Nature as a goddess. This is a universe in which he ties together two contrary components of mind, comprising imagination and reason, and the two components of the body, comprising the physical and the sensory. Some might argue that this is still dualism, but as discussed in Chapter 1, the nature of imagination is very different from the nature of reason with very different consequences, and likewise, the nature of the physical world is very different from the nature of sensory world. Indeed, Blake integrates all these four components and ties

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them together within each of our individual manifestations. So, rather than a dualistic universe, we are in a Fourfold vision and certainly nowhere near the anti-self-doctrine of Dennett’s School of Unconsciousness.

Science, the Single Vision and two cultures However sophisticated as Blake’s view is, he still has an essentialist view which can be traced back to Plato in which “every particular Form” emanates from a “Divine Vision”, which is both eternal and heavenly. The vision that Blake calls “Jerusalem” is the heavenly city that represents Liberty, Peace and Holi­ ness and forms a part of “The Emanation of the Great Albion”, his poetic name for England. This is where he follows Saint Matthew’s Gospel (Ch 6, vs 10) which teaches “Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”, the section of the Lord’s Prayer in which his divine ideal “Jerusalem” needs to incarnate on earth. Even though he is clearly taking an essentialist position based on Plato, in his preface to Milton he invites, “The Young Men of the New Age” to rebel against Greek and Roman thought, saying: We do not want either Greek or Roman Models if we are but just & true to our own Imaginations, those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.2, p480 What follows are the words of Blake that in 1916, during the First World War, were put to music by Hubert Parry (1848–1918) and by many are considered England’s unofficial national anthem. Blake finishes the poem with a call to arms: I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till we have built Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant Land.2, p481 It is quite clear that he has not moved away from the “Greek or Roman Models” as he would like to think. The question is, can some form of reconciliation be reached in which Blake’s Divine Fourfold Vision explicitly expressed and dissected in his letter to Thomas Butts: Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!2, p818 be integrated with the Unitarian position of the early scientist like New­ ton and its more contemporary form espoused by scientists like Dennett,

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or are they totally irreconcilable? Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), poet and Blake Scholar, sees Blake’s theme as the clash between “science and imagi­ nation”,4, p9 and that what is required is a change in our consciousness, our secular world only acknowledges the existence of the outer physical world (res extensa), and the inner world of mind and consciousness (res cogitans) is dismissed as non-existent. And she is not the only writer who is concerned, Midgley too also articulates similar concerns from a philosopher’s standpoint,5 and from my perspective, it is as if C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture given in 1959,6 which argues for the gap between arts and the sciences to be closed and where he suggested he need to reform the educational system, is still going on some 60 years later. Snow’s solution was that by teaching arts and humanities to scientists and by teaching some science to arts and humanities students this would help reconcile the Two Cultures whilst simultaneously also help heal the rift between capitalism and communism and reduce the gap between rich and poor. This was quite an agenda and aimed at solving some big questions, but the issues are clearly much deeper and more ingrained, because if it was that easily resolved, it would have been done years ago. Midgley, writing 50 years later, has a slightly different take on the situation, although similar in suggesting that it is due to an increasing specialisation which has become overly focused and belonging to different thought-worlds, her solution is more radical: [I]n an age when all intellectual disciplines are shrinking. . . .  it is not possible for any single department of thought to expect to handle large questions on its own. If we are to deal with large questions at all we shall have to do it by combining several kinds of tool: several different methods belonging to different disciplines.5, p34 If I  am correct and can trace this problem back to Hume, and I  choose Hume specifically because he was the one who proclaimed imagination was insufficient to link a cause to its effect and with it condemned all metaphys­ ics. Perhaps, by a re-examination of the role of imagination, cause and effect and category errors, we can resurrect the status of both imagination and metaphysics whilst helping restore the common-sense notion that our minds are real and not some illusion or epiphenomenon. Perhaps it’s not surpris­ ing, given the title of this book, that I think we may have something that we can learn from William Blake. Blake’s ideas of course were not all given to him wholesale like Moses received the ten commandments on the summit of Mount Sinai, he picked up his ideas from the careful reading of texts which he would readily anno­ tate, an occupation he continued throughout his life. These began with Johann Kaspar Lavater’s (1741–1801) Aphorisms on Man, which he anno­ tated around 1788 and finished with William Wordsworth’s The Excursion around 1826. One writer who had a major influence on him was Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) a Neoplatonist, scientist and mystic. Raine4, pp49–52

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conjectures that the Blake’s family were Swedenborgians and they may have even met Swedenborg as he died in London; however, Erdman dismisses this as a legend but clearly by 1789, his written work was being translated into English. Nevertheless, much of Blake’s writing is informed by Sweden­ borg’s teachings, and: challenge the externalised consciousness of post-Cartesian science; “the Divine is not in Space” Swedenborg affirmed, “although the Divine is omnipresent with every man in the world, and with every angel in heaven.” . . . Swedenborg strove to remove the identification of reality with an external material order. Space is a function of the natural body but human spirit is capable of the omnipresence of the non-spatial.4, p81 In Blake’s own words, this non-spatial human spirit is where the imaginative world comes together with Eternity: This world of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite & Temporal. There Exists in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this Vegetable Glass of Nature. [my bold] All Things comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination.2, p605 And he goes on: Many suppose that before the Creation All was Solitude & Chaos. This is the most pernicious Idea that can enter the Mind, as it takes away all sublimity from the Bible & Limits All Existence to Creation & to Chaos, To the Time & Space fixed by the Corporeal Vegetative Eye & leaves the Man who entertains such an Idea the habitation of Unbeliev­ ing demons. Eternity Exists, and All things in Eternity, Independent of Creation.2, p614 Post-Cartesian science has come to be dominated by the external material order in which mind is an illusion, à la Dennett, and to Blake this is per­ nicious; the subjective mind of which each of us is everyday aware is the source of our inspiration, and according to Blake, an intimately connected mirror of the Eternally Divine or in Swedenborg’s vocabulary, “every one in his own heaven”.4, p86 Prior to Descartes, many thought mind was pri­ mary as can be demonstrated on close inspection of the painting Creation of Adam by Michelangelo (1475–1564). Michelangelo died some 30 years before Descartes’s birth and in this painting, God is pictured in a design that arguably is a cross section of the human brain, clearly implying that God, or in Blake’s terminology the “World of the Imagination that is Infinite and Eternal”, is an internal human creation of the mind.7

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The nineteenth century saw the philosophical development of a view of an externalised material universe gain hegemonically, and in so doing it became increasingly rigid around classical physics with its notions of space, time and causality. This was a reality based on our sense perception or that which we could investigate by the increasingly refined tools of technical science and where, “The progress of science was pictured as a crusade of conquest into the material world” and “Utility was the watchword of the time.”8, p137 Its success of course was enormous, but even when mind itself became the focus of scientific investigation by psychologists and the like the concepts of classical physics and causality were the paradigms that were applied establishing “an open hostility between science and religion.” This was the Single Vision of which Blake was so critical, and it was only during the first half of the twentieth century that this rigidity softened and a new scientific paradigm established by the likes of Einstein, Bohr and Heisen­ berg,8 a paradigm that still has not really featured in the biological sciences, which although intellectually accepts the New Physics, still holds to the older more classical approaches in its everyday methods. This naturally begs the question as to why and what are the consequences. The revolution that occurred in industrial processes was a twofold devel­ opment. On the one hand, it was based around the philosophical ideas of progress, wrapped up in the ideas of Adam Smith and taken forward by the industrialists in the likes of the Lunar Society (Chapter 2). This was then reenforced by social reformers like Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), who promulgated the ideas of utilitarianism argu­ ing for increased well-being to the greatest number of people. The other, no less driven by ideas, was highly technical and required hands on know­ how. Without this practical know-how the purely philosophical could not develop on its own because the two are mutually inseparable. If you doubt this statement, just reflect on the science of microbiology and our under­ standing of human health and infectious diseases without the invention of the microscope. The New Physics, meanwhile, has progressively looked at increasingly smaller and smaller scales by developing increasingly complex and sophisticated experimental tools to undertake such studies. Following Heisenberg’s view,8 he thought that classical physics expressed concepts that could be articulated through what he calls “natural language”, an every­ day language in which the reality of matter maintained its connection to nineteenth-century concepts. However, the scientific extrapolation of these concepts into the smallest parts of matter could not be done in the simple way suggested by classical phys­ ics, . . . These new results had first of all to be considered as a serious warning against the somewhat forced application of scientific concepts in domains where they did not belong. The application of the con­ cepts of classical physics, e.g., in chemistry, had been a mistake. There­ fore, one will nowadays be less inclined to assume that the concepts of

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physics, even those of quantum theory, can certainly be applied every­ where in biology or other sciences.8, pp138–139 In other words, we have made what Ryle (see Chapter 6) called a category mistake. In the final chapter of his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins recounts an anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein that he retells to his stu­ dents.9, pp367–369 According to Dawkins, Wittgenstein once asked a friend, “why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?” “Well,” replied his friend, “it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.” “Well,” Wittgenstein retorts, “what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” As we all know, it would have looked exactly the same! Is this then not yet another version of a category mistake? And if so, why do we make them? Let’s stay with physics for the time being and do a thought experiment. Let’s consider two people sitting across an aisle on a stationary bus, say a metre apart. And one person opens a packet of sweets and asks their friend if they would like one. The friend agrees and signals for the friend to throw one across the aisle, which the friend duly does. So as far as the two friends are concerned the sweet has travelled one metre. But now let’s change the situation to one where the two friends exchange a sweet in exactly the same way but this time the bus is moving at 30 miles per hour. As far as the two friends are concerned and everyone on the bus that witnesses the exchange the sweet has travelled the same one metre, but for someone outside the bus the sweet has travelled the one metre, but in the same time, the bus has moved forward so the sweet has travelled the diagonal (Figure 7.2), the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. So here we have a simplified dem­ onstration of Einstein’s theory of relativity that the distance the sweet has travelled is relative to the distance the bus has travelled in relationship to the observer and the speed of that observer in relationship to the bus.

Heidegger, technology and poiēsis Reflecting on Figure 7.2 a rectangle has been placed around Scenario 4A in which both observers are present within the rectangle and both see the sweet travel the one metre between P1 and P2. Everything has been enframed within a context; however, in Scenario 4B the context has changed, Observer O1 is in exactly the same contextual situation as Scenario 4A, that is, if we accept that O1 is not receiving any other sensory input like movement, or references to objects outside the bus as far as Observer O1 is concerned, the reality of the situation is that the sweet has moved just one metre. But, as for Observer O2 the enframed situation is different, and the sweet has clearly moved farther than one metre. This situation is very similar to the Wittgenstein anecdote Dawkins uses about the notion of whether the

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Figure 7.2 Relativity scenario A) Represents two people sitting on a stationary bus 1 metre apart, P1 and P2; P1 throws a sweet (orange ball) to P2 which takes a certain length of time represented by T1 and T2. There are two observers involved; Observer 1 (O1) is on the bus while Observer 2 (O2) is not on the bus; both observers see the same thing – the sweet travels one metre between P1 and P2. Scenario B) is exactly the same, but the bus is moving from a to b in a time the sweet travels from P1 to P2; in this scenario Observer 1 (O1), still on the bus, witnesses the sweet travel 1 metre from P1 to P2, but because Observer 2 is not on the bus the sweet has travelled from P1 to P2, but in relationship to Observer 2 everything has moved in the direction of bus travel, so the sweet has moved along the hypotenuse of the right-angled triangle (P1a–P2a–P2b) which is clearly further Source: (Images drawn by the author).

sun goes around the earth or the earth goes around the sun. Notionally they are the same, but when enframed differently, let’s say from someone stand­ ing on the moon, they can be diametrically opposed. Ryle’s solution to the problem relating to Descartes’s dualism of separating mind and matter, or subject from object, was that it represented a category mistake. And, indeed, the throwing of a sweet in the bus scenario demonstrates that the enframing of the situation alters our notion around the “truth” of the situation. The importance of enframing and the role it plays in relationship to modern technology and how we interact with the world was an issue that com­ manded the attention of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). He too, like Ryle, had an issue regarding the split between mind and mat­ ter that Cartesian thought has established, and in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” he unpacks its contents.10 To Heidegger the major question was to determine the essence of technol­ ogy. In our modern era it is everything to do with the applications of science, the techniques, the materials, the methods and the processes concerned with the production of goods and services that we use in our everyday lives,

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everything from the toothbrush to the mobile phone. But to Heidegger, his view is much more ambiguous because he acknowledges it’s a doubleedged sword. I  am not going to go into his existential philosophy of his view on the nature of being in detail, although it cannot go without men­ tion because it places his ideas in context. Since Descartes’s division of the scientific universe, as has been previously discussed, is split between mind and matter, but this is very much a Western philosophic tradition that Hei­ degger rejected. In his rejection of this dualism he starts from the everyday and ordinary premise of “being in the world”. Whereas much of Western philosophy for the last 400  years has been concerned with the nature of knowledge, epistemology and what it is to know, Heidegger’s concern is what it is to be. To Heidegger, before we can address our preoccupation with those Western epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge, we have to acknowledge that we already have to be in the world, and this is his starting point, we are thrown into the world and are part of that world (Dasein). To him, and indeed Bronowski, there is no separation, everything is connected; and he traces this back to those early Greek philosophers and their ideas of causation and creation. Heidegger starts by saying, “The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.”10, p312 But his view is not the modern view, and he digs deep into the beginnings of Western philosophy to reveal its original meaning, a meaning connected to causation and creation. Let us start with the idea of causation, something Hume denied because his scepticism ruled out the role of imagination and its connection to induction. In the consideration of, for example, a sil­ ver chalice early Greek thought maintained that there were four forms of causation: the causa materialis, the material from which it was made; the causa formalis, the form or shape into which the material was fashioned; the causa finalis, the role to which the chalice would be put; and finally, the causa efficiens, the silversmith who brings the chalice into existence as an artisan. Heidegger then makes the point that each of these causes is “co­ responsible” for the chalice, and in return the chalice is “indebted” to its essence or “chaliceness” which relates to, in Platonic/Aristotelian parlance, its “ideal form” or its “eidos” which Heidegger refers to as “aspect”. This is a teleological argument but not in the usual sense of “aim” or “purpose”, because to Heidegger, “The telos is responsible for what as matter and what as aspect are together co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel. ”10, p315 The chalice is therefore co-created from matter and aspect at a moment in time,

and quoting Plato, “Every occasion for whatever passes beyond the non-

present and goes forward into presencing is poiēsis, bringing-forth [Her-vor­ bringen].” Heidegger summaries:

The modes of occasioning, the four causes, are at play, then, within bringing-forth. Through bringing-forth the growing things of nature

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as well as whatever is completed through crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance.  .  .  . Bringing-forth brings out of concealment into un-concealment. This coming rests and moves freely within what we call revealing [das Entbergen]. The Greeks have the word alētheia for revealing. The Romans translate this with veritas. We say “truth” and usually understand it as correctness of representation.10, p317 If we follow Heidegger’s argument thus far, technology is no less than a way to reveal, it is a matter of revealing the truth: technē is the name not only for activities and skills of the craftsman but also of the mind and the fine arts. Technē belongs to bringing-forth, to poiēsis; it is something poetic. 10, p318 And further on: From earliest times until Plato the word technē is linked with the word epistēmē. Both words are terms for knowing in the widest sense.10, p318 This is an older traditional world where human imagination is fundamental and encompasses a view to which Blake would have readily ascribed. How­ ever, the Industrial Revolution brings with it other values which focus on his Single Vision that he most certainly would have found intolerable. Inter­ estingly, in Blake’s Song of Los, where jealousy erupts between Los and Eni­ tharmon, they take their son, Orc, who represents revolution in the material world, to Mount Atlas and chain him down for punishment.2, p246 To Blake, Mount Atlas represents the mountain to which Prometheus was bound and disembowelled by an eagle for stealing fire from the Gods. So we have here a change in the nature of technology, it simply becomes a means to an end, “a machine without a will, the conjured spirit to do the chores.”11, p153 Does Heidegger have anything to say about this? According to Heidegger there is a change in the nature of technology, from a gesture of bringing-forth and revealing, it becomes one of challengingforth and standing-reserve. What does he mean by this? If I understand him correctly, it is the difference between being “a means to an end” and being “an end in itself ”. It is to do with the relationship between ends and means: [T]he revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into bringing-forth in the sense of poiēsis. The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.10, p320 Nature is not as before, brought forth and revealed, as an end in itself, it is challenged-forth and stored, “directed from the beginning towards

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furthering something else, i.e. toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense.”10, p321 Seen from a mechanical perspective, when engaged standing-reserve demonstrates a lack of autonomous action; it becomes mere automation. This is why the instrumental aspect of technol­ ogy is so important, because it defines the relationship between us and the technologies we engage, hence: because man is challenged more originally than the energies of nature, i.e. into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never human handiwork, any more than is the realm man traverses every time he as a subject relates to an object.10, pp323–324

Therefore, modern technology through challenging-forth maintains within the creative act an element of unconcealment that retains a sense of the poetic, and thereby it can never be just standing-reserve. It becomes a creative act of imaginative ordering and unification of the subject and the object in the mind’s eye that is then put into practice. But, as we discussed earlier in relation to Figure 7.2, the truth of a given situation is dependent on the rela­ tionship between subjects and objects. This too is important to Heidegger because he also discusses enframing (Ge-stell) in relationship to the role of people in relationship to standing-reserve. To many of us technology is simply instrumental and utilitarian in nature, a means to an end, but to Heidegger this was not the case, for he stresses, “The merely instrumental, merely anthropological definition of technology is . . . in principle untenable”, to Heidegger this is because of its relationship to alētheia, its unconcealment, or truth. Here we need to return to Plato’s concept of eidos in which everything in an ideal form persists eternally, and for Heidegger this meant not only the outward aspect of an object that was perceptible to the physical eye but also, “extraordinarily, that it name what precisely is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes,”10, p325 that is, its unmanifest eidos, to use Plato’s terminology, which is concealed. All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps itself eve­ rywhere concealed to the last. Nevertheless, it remains, with respect to its holding sway, that which precedes all: the earliest. The Greek think­ ers already knew of this when they said: That which is earlier with the rise to dominance becomes manifest to us men only later.10, p327 Therefore, what we as scientists and technologists dis-cover (unconceal) as a part of the modern technological enterprise are, if you like going back to Plato, essences contained within the universe from its inception. So, what is the essence of technology, which is not in itself technological? Following

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Heidegger, it is in fact a revealing of ideal forms, their ordering and enfram­ ing as an act of poiēsis, and it is fundamentally very different in nature from the claim by Shelley for poets to be useful and the legislators of the world that we discussed in Chapter 1. But before going forward to address the double-edged nature of technol­ ogy, which I believe will become increasingly important as the twenty-first century progresses, I can imagine that many scientists reading this discus­ sion of Ideal forms, imagination, enframing and poiēsis, will think it very esoteric, and therefore of no or little importance to the pragmatic realist. David Hume’s empiricism and his dismissal of human imagination helped to herald in the Industrial Revolution and was influential because, following Heidegger, he helped to disconnect technology from its essential character­ istic of revealing and setting it forth upon a path of standing-reserve and utility. The poetic action of bringing into being by unconcealment is ejected from the process, and, here again, we return to the issues of poets having to be useful, when in fact, from a Heideggerian perspective, they are irreplaceable. But first I would like to explore these ideas of the differences between the possible and the actual a little further and bring in a contemporary biolo­ gist Richard Dawkins and philosopher of biology Daniel Dennett, who may be much closer to a Platonic world of ideal forms and Neoplatonist thinking than many may realise. Although I see both these two writers as scientific realists and atheistic in outlook, arguably in line with Newton’s Single Vision, I hope to show their views are not necessarily incompatible with a Blakean world view and his Fourfold nature of human beings, which mischievously I will call a religious view. In Chapter 4 I discuss Borges Library of Babel which can be interpreted as a metaphor that represents a finite and circumscribed universe that con­ tains a set of all comprehensible and meaningful possibilities (see Chapter 4). Borges was not the first to use a library as a metaphor for the universe, and indeed, David Hume thought similarly in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion when he suggests: [T]here is a natural, universal, invariable language, common to every indi­ vidual of human race; and that books are natural productions, that per­ petuate themselves in the same manner with animals and vegetables . . . Suppose, therefore, that you enter your library, thus peopled by nat­ ural volumes, containing the most refined reason and most exquisite beauty . . . could you persist in asserting, that all this, at the bottom, had really no meaning. 12, p55 Naturally, Hume, always the sceptic, maintains that there is no logical reason to make the connection between the library metaphor and the organisation of the universe; however, both Dawkins and Dennett find it a viscerally compelling metaphor. Dawkins gives us Biomorph Land13, pp51–61 and Dennett The Library of Mendel.14 pp111–126

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In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins introduces his reader to a small com­ puter program that draws a simple “Y” shaped “tree” that mimics evolution through a process of development and reproduction over time. The basis of the program can be followed in chapter 3,13 but the details are not required for our understanding here. One aspect of the program which is important is that it was possible for him to introduce “mutations”, or small errors, into the program so that the next generation of “trees” consisted of a population of morphological shapes that contained slight differences. Thereby, it was possible to mimic selection by actively visually preferring one morphologi­ cal form over another and then selectively using it from which to “breed”. The selection process that was performed intuitively by the human eye, resulted in this recursive computer program, produced a wide range of dif­ ferent “Biomorphs” that astounded even Dawkins, and like many computer games that people play, “it gave the illusion that he [the player/observer] is wandering about in an underground labyrinth” all designed by a human programmer. He goes on: But the number of possible pathways is all but infinite, and the monsters that one encounters are undersigned and unpredictable. On my wan­ derings through the backwaters of Biomorph Land, I have encountered fairy shrimps, Aztec temples, Gothic church windows, aboriginal draw­ ings of kangaroos, and, on one memorable but unrecapturable occasion, a passable caricature of the Wykeham Professor of Logic.13, p60 Contained within the program “all but an infinite” number of Biomorphs exist similar to Borges Library of Babel in which “all but an infinite” number of biographies exist. For Dawkins, this was a demonstration of the power behind the accumulation of small amounts of change and how this vast diversity of forms existed as possibilities within the programme and through the process of natural selection led to life on our planet as we know it. These of course are not ideal forms in any Platonic sense, they are forms distrib­ uted like the perfect biographies of you or me within Borges Library of Babel, around each of the biographies would be a range of imperfect biographies with everything from one typographical error, which of course would be totally understandable, to ones where the first sentence was perfect and the rest of the book pure gibberish and everything in between. Similarly, Dennett makes the same point biologically applying it to what he calls, The Library of Mendel14, p111 where the genome is equivalent to the book and could be true for organisms. Although there could be mutations (typos) which would not affect the fitness of an organism living in its own habitat to which it was adapted, other mutations would range from those produc­ ing altered fitness to ones that could be lethal, and other books (genomes) in the Library of Mendel that would be the equivalent of gibberish, by far the vast majority. Returning to Dawkins, “however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or

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rather not alive.” This is where Dawkins’s ways of being alive and the many more ways of being dead mesh with Heidegger’s notions of being, not being and poetic revealing, and can, as Dennett so ably discusses14 be help­ fully conceptualised though Borges’s Library of Babel.15, pp78–86 13, p9

References 1) Erdman, D.V. (1991 [1954]) Blake Prophet Against Empire. Dover.

2) Keynes, G. (1972) Blake Complete Writings. Oxford University Press.

3) Damon, S.F. (1988) A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake.

Brown University Press. 4) Raine, K. (1991) Golgonooza: City of Imagination. Golgonooza Press. 5) Midgley, M. (2014) Are You an Illusion? Acumen Publishing Limited. 6) Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge Univer­ sity Press. 7) Meshberger, F.L. (1990) An Interpretation of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy. Journal of the American Medical Association, 264: 1837–1841.

8) Heisenberg, W. (1958) Physics and Philosophy. Penguin Books.

9) Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion. Bantam Press.

10) Heidegger, M. (1993) The Question Concerning Technology. In Martin Heidegger Basic Writings (Revised and Expanded Edition). Routledge. 11) Bronowski, J. (1978) The Common Sense of Science. Heinemann. 12) Hume, D. (1993) Dialogues Concerning Natural History of Religion Part III. Oxford University Press. 13) Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Longman Scientific & Technical. 14) Dennett, D. (1996) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Penguin. 15) Borges, J.L. (2000) Labyrinths. Penguin Classics.

8

Homo faber

Rights and fabrication Blake’s London, Golgonooza, his city of imagination as he called it, is where “Los’s Anvils stand  & his Furnaces rage”,1, p509 and it was the headquar­ ters of what was the British Empire with all its pomp, circumstance and military might. As described previously, this was a revolutionary time and a period of great change, both materially and philosophically, where science and technology underpinned by Deism and the Church backed imperiously were in the ascendant; where Blake, as prophet, spoke truth to power and questioned it all: “With what sense does the parson claim the labour of the farmer? “What are his nets & gins & traps, & how does he surround him “With cold floods of abstraction, and with forests of solitude, “To build him castles and high spires, where kings & priests may dwell;1, p193 This was also the London of Mary Wollstonecraft who wrote one of the early feminist essays calling for sexual equality titled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791/1792), and social ferment was all around. By the time Blake wrote his letter ten years later to Thomas Butts in November  1802 requesting that “God us keep From Single vision  & Newton’s sleep!”,1, p818 the dust from the American War of Independence (1775–1783) and the French Revolution (1789–1799) had not yet settled, and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) had not yet begun. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Blake turned his attention around this time (1795–1804) to the fall of man and where imagination in the form of Urthrona plays a key role in the Four Zoas and is paired with Urizen (reason) while Luvah (feeling and emotion) is paired with Tharmas (the body); it is these four Universes or Zoas which build his Mundane Shell.1, p524 The Four Zoas is Blake’s attempt to integrate his Fourfold vision of man into a single mythological story, but it was never completed sufficiently to DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-8

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Blake’s satisfaction to be formally published. It presents to the reader in a series of nine nights, or dreams, where the tensions between the human body, human feelings, human inspirations and human reason are at war and reflects the political and religious pressures of his day. It interestingly finishes on a note of harmony where: Urthrona is arisen in his strength, no longer now Divided from Enitharmon, no longer the Spectre of Los. Where is the Spectre of prophecy? where the delusive Phantom? Departed: & Urthrona rises from the ruinous Walls In all his ancient strength to form the golden armour of science For intellectual War. The war of swords departed now, The dark Religions are departed & sweet Science reigns.1, p379 Enitharmon is the consort of Los, the builder of Golgonooza where imagi­ nation in the form of inspiration calms the warring factions and the result of which is “sweet Science”, or knowledge, in its most embracing sense and not its “Single vision”. Whilst this may be an inspirational conclusion, Blake was perhaps not satisfied with it, either with the conclusion itself or with the route by which he took. There is therefore a sense of ambiguity and perhaps it is this ambiguity that Kathleen Raine senses when she says, “William Blake is the only English poet whose central theme is the confrontation of science and imagination.”2, p9 David Erdman whose biography3 of Blake stresses his sympathy with the oppressed against the established rulers; in particular George III in Eng­ land, the Republicans in France and the slaves in America, when he says, “Enslave’d the Daughters of Albion weep; a trembling lamentation.1, p189 . . . The voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money”,1, p190 appears to be unequivocal, but it is the application of science in terms of technology that is ambiguous: Horrible hooks & nets he form’d twisting the cords of iron And brass & molten metals cast in hollow globes & bor’d Tubes in petrific steel & rammed combustables & wheels And chains & pullies fabricated all around the heavens of Los . . . 1, p343 And Urizen gave life & sense by his immortal power To all his Engines of deceit that linked chains might run Thro ranks of war spontaneous & that hooks & boring screws Might act according to their forms by innate cruelty.1, p344 These lines, Erdman stress, represent a munitions list made not by ancient crafts but by the modern techniques of the day and in the manner and moti­ vation Heidegger would have referred to as standing-reserve (see Chapter 7). This is fabrication not as an end in itself but as a means to an end, in this case

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war. The frame of reference has shifted, the Fourfold nature of human being has shed all but Urizen (reason), and this has cast a shadow: Urizen heard the Voice & saw the shadow underneath

His woven darkness; & laws & deceitful religions,

Beginning at the tree of Mystery, circling its root

She spread herself thro’ all the branches in the power of Orc:

. . .

Gathering the fruit of that Mysterious tree, till Urizen,

Sitting within his temple, furious, felt the mumming stupor,

Himself tangled in his own net, in sorrow, lust, repentance.1, p345

Orc, as we have seen is the first born of Los and Enitharmon, represents a Pro­ methean character that brings technology; it embodies revolution and thereby invokes the tree of Mystery, which is the opposite to the tree of Life, and produces the forbidden fruit in Genesis that leads to the fall of man. Blake who had been so optimistic regarding the effects of the American War of Independ­ ence and the French Revolution in overturning Royalty who he saw as the oppressors of the poor. In England it was George III and in France Louis XVI who had to be deposed, whilst simultaneously attacking religious superstition, that was to lead to a better livelihood. As he expressed in The Grey Monk: “I die, I die!” the Mother said,

“My Children die for lack of Bread.

“What more has the merciless Tyrant said?”

The Monk sat down on the Stoney Bed.

But Blake’s desired outcome was not to be: “But vain the Sword & vain the Bow,

“They never can work War’s overthrow,

“The Hermit’s Prayer & the Widow’s tear

“Alone can free the World from fear.

“For a Tear is an Intellectual Thing,

“And a Sigh is the Sword of an Angel King,

“And the bitter groan of the Martyr’s woe

“Is an Arrow from the Almightie’s Bow.

“The hand of Vengeance found the Bed

“To which the Purple Tyrant fled;

“The iron hand crushed the Tyrant’s head

“And became a Tyrant in his stead.”1, pp430–431

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The heartfelt sympathy Blake had in England, and no less Beethoven on the continent when he removed the dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte from his third symphony, for the Enlightenment’s grand project for revolu­ tion and to give rights to the oppressed all symbolically came to nought when Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in December  1804. Voltaire’s Candide had been published in 1758 the year following Blake’s birth, Rous­ seau published The Social Contract in 1762 and Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1791/1792. So all these publications had appeared before Blake was 25 years old and all heralded an optimism for social progress, but in Blake’s notebook of 1800–1803, he writes: Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau: Mock on, Mock on: ‘tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again.1, p418 Voltaire’s Candide had contained an engraving of a maimed slave sitting beneath a palm tree with the caption, “C’est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre” (It is at this price that you eat sugar) and according to Erdman, it was Blake’s contention that these Enlightenment thinkers, although they had confronted religious superstition, had not been critical enough of Royalty and indeed, “Adoration of George [III] and Louis [XVI] has been replaced by adoration of Washington and Napoleon.”3, p418 Notwithstanding their attack on religious superstition, disillusionment with the Enlightenment project and its advocates became increasingly under Blake’s scrutiny, and he attacks the Deists and their Natural Religion head on: You, O Deists, profess yourselves the Enemies of Christianity, and you are so: you are also the Enemies of the Human Race & of Universal Nature. Your Religion, O Deists! Deism, is the Worship of the God of this World by the means of what you call Natural Religion and Natural Philosophy, and of Natural Morality or Self-Righteousness, the Selfish Virtues of the Natural Heart. This was the Religion of the Pharisees who murder’d Jesus. Deism is the same & ends the same. Voltaire, Rousseau, Gibbon, Hume, charge the Spiritually Religious with Hypocrisy. 1, p682 But, who are these “Spiritually Religious” that Voltaire and fellow Deists accuse of hypocrisy? This is a complex argument and Blake, whose perspicacious criticisms always fell on those he most admired, is subtle and not always straightfor­ ward. For example, Blake’s understanding of Voltaire was that in Candide Voltaire had mocked a pair of compasses in reference to their mention in Milton’s Paradise Lost,4, p91 which then subsequently became a symbol in his

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Figure 8.1 The Ancient of Days by William Blake was his frontispiece to Europe, a Proph­ ecy; it depicts Urizen surrounded by a globe amongst brooding clouds circum­ scribing the universe with a pair of compasses that can be interpreted to be symbolic of scientific reasoning and its sovereignty Source: (Image open access from Wikipedia).

famous frontispiece to Europe, The Ancient of Days (Figure 8.1). In this image Urizen is kneeling on one knee, with long hair and beard flowing in the wind and he is surrounded by a globe amongst dark brooding clouds and uses a pair of compasses, in geometrical fashion, to circumscribe the uni­ verse. A version of the same symbolic use of smaller compasses is used in his

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image of Newton (see frontispiece), where they are used to depict on a scroll a geometric universe. Blake continually confronted the Deists who he saw as teaching the sovereignty of reason4, p101 and therefore one interpretation of The Ancient of Days is it is his Prophecy for a Fallen Europe caused by their Single Vision.

Swedenborg’s Church The Industrial Revolution was a natural development built on the ideas of the Enlightenment, and it was to sweep away religious superstitions and pave the way for a scientific approach that was, in essence, based on materi­ alism and rational thought. Blake’s response was one of abhorrence because he maintained a Fourfold vision of the human being in which reason was only one aspect. Europe, a Prophecy was printed in 1794, but in the previ­ ous decade or so he had been developing his thinking on religion and this had included his reading of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772), who was a capable scientist and had risen to a prominent position at the Board of Mines in Sweden. But Swedenborg was not only a scientist and rational­ ist, but he also had a deep Christian faith and wrote widely on theologi­ cal subjects with titles such as: Heaven and Hell, Divine Love and Wisdom, True Christianity and Divine Providence and Secrets of Heaven. These writings, which were in Latin and prohibited from publication in Sweden, were influential across many parts of Europe, particularly the publishing cen­ tres such as London and Amsterdam, where they subliminally permeated Christian teaching and have done so down to the present day. Indeed, these works initiated a movement which became labelled as the “new church” or the “new Jerusalem”.5, ppix–xviii The “New Church” was founded in London in 1788 some 15 years after Swedenborg’s death and responsible for translations of Swedenborg’s works into English.4, p392 Swedenborg’s writings were clearly having an effect and would later, through people including Madame Blavatsky, lead to the estab­ lishment of The Theosophical Society in 1875. Meanwhile, Swedenborg’s ideas were making their mark on Blake as some of his own work was clearly influenced by him; for example, his Marriage of Heaven and Hell is a parody of Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, and Blake takes him to task. But around the same time, 1788, his thoughts are focused, partially I suspect through the reading of Swedenborg, on the negation of Natural Religion, or Deism, in a series of etchings titled, “There is no Natural Religion”. This antipathy to Deism would remain throughout his life, and in these etchings, he stresses the nature of the human body, without which he thought there could be no perception. Indeed, without sense perception there can be no desire, because you cannot desire anything you haven’t perceived. Therefore, he concludes: If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophical & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things,  & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.1, p97

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In another etching of the same period titled “All Religions are One”, Blake again stresses the role of poetry in relationship to the human condition in a list of seven “Principles”, and in each of which the term “Poetic Genius” is central. This is where human creativity and imagination reside: Principle 7th. As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various), So all Reli­ gions &, as all similar, have one source. The true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.1, p98 This is a co-created Universe of One; not a material universe out there (Res extensa), or a mental universe of mind in the brain (Res cogitans). In Blake’s view, it is a metaphysical universe which is Fourfold in nature and brought into being through “Poetic Genius”. Just as from a Heideggerian perspective the essence of technology is poiēsis, the essence of the Universe is likewise brought forth and manifested through poiēsis. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that it can only be spoken about and comprehended metaphori­ cally by crucially using our imagination together with reason to tie our sense perceptions into a coherent whole. To quote Blake, “For everything that lives is holy”.1, p289 If, therefore, as Blake would suggest, this is a co-created universe which is a whole and of which everything is interconnected, it begs the ques­ tion as to the consequence of a unitarian view, or Single Vision, in which imagination has been removed. At the conclusion of the first chapter, I make the point that imagination without reason is lunacy, coupled with its contrary, that reason without imagination is death. Here, developing an argument from a Blakean position, I would suggest that Hume’s philo­ sophical removal of imagination from the conjunction of cause and effect and his advocacy for pure reason6, p44 has had important consequences for the Enlightenment project some of which have been hugely negative. These negative consequences, climate change for example, have become increasingly apparent over the last 60 or so years. As Blake saw Deism as a human developmental stage4, p102 which he valiantly fought against, I too would maintain that the unitarian view of the scientific enterprise needs to be re-evaluated from a perspective of Blake’s Fourfold nature of the uni­ verse. The method would reinstate imagination as a key component. Of course, many people around today quite naturally maintain a view which is compatible with Blake’s Fourfold position, but there are aspects of the scientific and technological enterprise that clearly need further scrutiny, especially if we are to move away from the more satanic aspects of Blake’s Milton.4, pp175–176 As we have seen in Heidegger’s writing on technology, the notion of bringing-forth and unrevealing through poiēsis is fundamental, but he does not think that technology is necessarily inimical or dangerous in itself: What is dangerous is not technology . . .

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The threat to man does not come in the first instance from poten­ tially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth. Thus where enframing reigns, there is danger in the highest sense.7, p333 Technologically, Homo faber in essence a toolmaker, has a long history. But I would suggest that the Enlightenment project and the increased focus on reason at the expense of imagination has, in Heidegger’s terms, transformed the enframed coordinates such that the relationship between human beings and their environment, both physical and social, has changed. From being, prior to the Industrial Revolution, ends in themselves, to having become, after the Industrial Revolution, a means to an end, and they have become mere standing-reserves, or as Blake would refer to them, “Hirelings”.1, p480 But it is here an ambiguity regarding the essence of technology arises, on the one hand there is the enframing that brings-forth and unreveals through poiēsis, but there is the enframing that challenges-forth, conceals and blocks poiēsis.7 Returning to Heidegger’s own words: The essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standingreserve. Human activity can never directly counter this danger.7, p339 This is the plight in which we find ourselves today as means to ends, as standing-reserve, which dates back to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolu­ tion and was so well-documented in the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and his theory around social alienation (Entfremdung). Marx of course saw this as an issue of ownership of the means of production, but Heidegger’s work might suggest that it goes deeper, is more profound and requires fur­ ther analysis. Indeed, Heidegger believes there is a solution to the danger of Homo faber being merely standing-reserve and it to be found in the nature of art. Returning to the early Greek philosophers of Plato and Aristotle, Heidegger says: There was a time when it was not technology alone that bore the name technē. Once the revealing that brings forth truth into the splendor of radiant appearence was also called technē. There was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beaiti­ ful was called technē. The poiēsis of the fine arts was also called technē. . . . Why did art bear the modest name technē? Because it was reveal­ ing that brought forth and made present, and therefore belonged within poiēsis.7, p339

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Through the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), a key figure in the German romantic movement and for a period a contemporary of Blake, Heidegger suggests that art alerts us to truthful possibilities, that is, beyond standing-reserve, by quoting lines from the poem Patmos, “But where danger is, grows The saving power also.” and “poetically man dwells on this earth.” 7, p340 But he has a caveat, the avoidance of the dangers of technology through the realm of art is only possible if we do “not shut its eyes to the constella­ tion of truth” and remain questioning. I would maintain that the Enlighten­ ment project which led to the Industrial Revolution through the application of science and technology, and unquestioningly has heaped rewards onto much of humanity, is a double-edged sword and therefore also has nega­ tive consequences which are becoming all too apparent today in the form of climate change and its associated issues. If as a scientific civilisation our progress has rested on a science borne of a Single Vision, its negative aspects are coming home to roost, and this is because reason without imagination is deadly. We have fallen asleep and shut our eyes. I would therefore urge for imagination, or if you prefer Poetic Genius or poiēsis, to be appropriately reinstated into the scientific endeavour and thoroughly acknowledged and suggest, as Blake wrote in his call to arms: Rouze up, O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they could, for ever depress Mental  & Corporeal War.1, p480 For are we not in danger of losing all that we have gained?

Enlightenment and the new religion Hume’s scepticism led him to accept experience, or custom, to link a cause to an effect and to deny any other processes. This was at a time when the prevailing intellectual climate was becoming increasingly evidence based, and undermining the old superstitions of the church was fundamental to the Enlightenment project. From Blake’s perspective, undermining superstitions was clearly positive, but Hume’s scepticism disregarding the role of human imagination in human thought processes was an anathema to Blake and to which he took strongly exception. Adam Smith was ten years Hume’s junior, and they were friends as well as professional colleagues who taught. Hume’s death and the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations occurred in the same year, 1776, but not before he had read Smith’s book on which he heaped praise. It is interesting that Smith’s uses of the word “imagination” at the end of the book quite pejoratively: The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on

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the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire. 8, p641 In the whole book the word “imagination” is used only three times, each time with a negative association with falsehood. However, comparing this with Smith’s earlier work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments published in 1759, the word is used throughout the whole book (74 times in all) even occurring as a chapter title, for example, in the subtitle to chapter 2, “Habit of the Imagination”9 (conversely, the word “progress” occurs five times in TMS compared to 104 times in WoN). The habit of following Hume’s lead, and denigrating the role of the imagination, has fostered a science that is unbalanced and arguably has had some adverse effects which require further exploration. Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations has had a huge impact on economic thought arguably right down to the Thatcherism of the 1980s and left a legacy which is still very much with us today. I have already mentioned Adam Smith in Chapter 2 in our discussion on the nature of progress, but here I would like to dig a little deeper into his economic theory. As I have acknowledged already his friendship to Hume was a key component of his thinking, but I  would suggest that this was more profound than many acknowledge due to his demotion of the role of imagination. Although Smith never fully accepted Hume’s sceptical position on the necessity of dissociating effects from causes, he realised economically that an effect could be the result of several different causes, for example, in discussing the change in the value of silver he says: The change has evidently been too sudden to be ascribed to any change in the value of silver, which is always slow and gradual. The suddenness of the effect can be accounted for only by a cause which can operate suddenly, the accidental variations of the seasons.8, p140 Here we can see that Smith happily accepts that changes can be the result of different causes, and it is clearly his imagination at work. Notwithstand­ ing his acknowledgement of his own position, I find it intriguing that he downplays the use of the word “imagination” in his book The Wealth of Nations compared to his earlier work on which the latter builds. However, it is the later book that receives commendation from Hume10, pp342–343 and in the mind of economists takes precedent over his earlier work. Unfortu­ nately, this approach denigrates the role of labour to a mere commodity and indeed, Smith is very aware of what he had done: It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men, quickens it when it goes on too slowly, stops it when it advances too fast.8, p55

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We are witnessing here a change in the status of man, Homo faber, rather than a person being an end in themselves become a mere means to an end, “like that for any other commodity”, and in Heideggerian terms they have become a “standing-reserve”. This then begs a question as to the ends to which that labour should be put. Smith is quite clear here, it should be based on self-interest and directed at producing: the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.8, p313 By removing imagination and focusing on self-interest rather than any pub­ lic good, I would suggest, led to a law of unintended consequences which may or may not in turn be wholly beneficial depending on the time scales involved. Nevertheless, these ideas can be seen as very much alive and well today and they have resonated down the centuries as we can see when Tony Blair talks of the “invisible hand of history”. Agriculture was no stranger to Smith’s knowledge, and indeed it features regularly throughout his Wealth of Nations, where he saw it as an essential aspect of production, in which not only the labour that turned wool into fabric and clothes to wear was part of the value added but also the shep­ herd, the sheep and the land was all a part of a process that added value. During the eighteenth century there had been a continual growth in the rural population of Britain and with more mouths to feed agriculture had to become more productive. Although it did not occur all at once, several Acts of Parliament led to what had been common land being taken into ownership to improve the efficiency of food production. Importation from Holland of Sainfoin, a legume that could fix nitrogen, improve soil fertil­ ity and be fed to livestock, was a game changer to the rural economy and the issues around human population growth and subsistence were there­ fore substantial (Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population first being published in 1798, see Chapter  2). These matters concerning common land and livestock production which started back in the eighteenth century again entered the collective consciousness of the twentieth century in the 1960s and 1970s when Garrett Hardin published his essay The Tragedy of the Commons11 in 1968. As a starting point Hardin’s essay builds on the work of William Lloyd (1794–1852) published in 1833 dealing with constraints to human popula­ tion increase and to the notion of the invisible hand leading irrevocably to the Malthusian and pessimistic view that the subsistence possible from a given piece of common pasture is limited. The nature of the argument rests on the assumption that every herdsman will maximise their gain by trying to max­ imise their individually owned livestock by each adding animal to the land held in common. Eventually, the necessary outcome is overgrazing to the detriment of all, or as Hardin puts it, “Freedom in the commons brings ruin

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to all.” But surely it can be seen that by negotiating with fellow herdsman with this in mind, it is to everyone’s advantage to restrict their own desire to increase their stock and follow the utilitarian principle of “the greatest good for the greatest number”. This would arguably be the case, but referencing von Neuman and Morgenstern’s work on game theory, economics and the differences between Hawks and Doves, it becomes apparent that each herds­ man is caught in a double bind; either their conscience tells them their best long-term strategy is to act responsibly (Dove) and limit their livestock or the other herdsman (Hawks) will label you as a “simpleton” and condemn you for “standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons”.11 In the end, short-term thinking prevails, and ultimately this is a failure of imagination, which, I would suggest, can be traced back through Adam Smith, David Hume and the Enlightenment project that started with Isaac Newton, and what Blake referred to and condemned, as the Single Vision. 11

Ghost acres In the 1750s, the decade of Blake’s birth, the population of London was around 650,000 and by the time he died in 1827, it had more than dou­ bled to over 1.6 million, and this was possible only through the changes in agricultural practices. The Malthusian forecast had largely been kept at bay through innovations in plant and animal husbandry, and this scientific and technological method, expanded globally, continues down to the present day with a global human population approaching eight billion. In our presentday mega-cities human population densities can be in excess of 20,000 per square kilometre, but is that really the case? Garrett Hardin12 used the con­ cept of Ghost acres when looking at the population density of New York. To sustain these high mega-city population densities, resources are required that have been produced elsewhere and Hardin estimates that the average American requires input of land resources of 1.9 acres of cropland, 2.4 acres of pastureland, 2.6 acres of woodland and another 2.2 acres of miscellane­ ous types of land. And this all needs to be brought in from outside the city, it should be remembered that all the waste from these inputs also requires disposal. As human populations grow and urbanise this becomes a huge logistic and organisational problem that is continually growing and con­ tinually requiring solution using all the technological ingenuity that can be mustered. I  introduce the idea of waste disposal deliberately, because the construction of these highly organised urban environments requires energy and from the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, in the form of coal and more recently now oil, we are haunted by Blake’s spectre of his Dark Satanic Mills. Although coal has been used since the Romans as a source of heat, it is only from the end of the nineteenth century that it was used to generate electricity for domestic and industrial uses;13 but since the Second World War there has been a gradual decline in the use of coal, as oil, gas and nuclear energy have replaced them.

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The issue of population size that has exercised the human mind since the eighteenth century can be seen mathematically as a consequence of two processes, the first, births, and the second, deaths. When births outnumber deaths, the population rises and by necessity rises exponentially if the rate of reproduction remains constant. However, as Hardin explains in his livestock example, if the area of production remains constant this exponential increase cannot be infinite, and constraints will reduce the rate of population growth, initially by reducing the size or condition of the livestock but which would ultimately lead to increased deaths. Hardin claims the solution to this Mal­ thusian problem had usually been seen as technological, for example, using sainfoin to increase soil fertility and thereby increase livestock production. However, Hardin thought that the “population problem” was of a type that belonged to a class called, “no technical solution problems” similar to “tick­ tack-toe”,11 which if played by skilled players always ends in a draw. The idea of technical solutions to the productivity of land can be seen as far back as Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), who wrote: Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve bet­ ter of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.14 But Swift was of course a satirist, and he was no natural advocate of scien­ tific progress, indeed, he made fun of a “scientist” working on a project to capture sunlight from cucumbers and store it for later use: He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the gov­ ernor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers”.14 Smile as I might, it is interesting to see how this ties up with our earlier dis­ cussion around Heidegger’s concept of challenging-forth and standing-reserve; the capturing of sunlight project is a means to an end and certainly not an end in itself. However, additionally, the use of the word “ingenuity” is also etymologically interesting. The word comes from ingenious in which the archaic Latin has a sense of “within” and “begetting”, or “begetting” from “within”, and this notion is not that far away from Heidegger’s poiēsis and his idea of bringing-forth. Are we therefore not back again, like a moth drawn to a flame, playing with the ideas around the concepts of imagination and revealing?

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Returning to the technological issues that followed the Second World War and the productivity of land, one of the major constraints reducing crop yield was plant pests and diseases, and in response to these global issues the chemists developed a whole armoury of synthetic pesticides and fungicides that did not affect the crops but did respectively kill insects and fungi, and with this the applied science of the agrochemical industry was born. These chemicals were indeed very successful at protecting crop plants, but they were also highly environmentally toxic causing a whole host of detrimental effects to non-target organisms that were part of the farmland ecology. Six years before Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons in 1968, another book had been published by a biologically educated journalist called Rachel Cason (1907–1964) just before her death titled Silent Spring.15 This well-informed book turned out to be highly controversial as it argu­ ably could be credited with initiating the environmental movement. In researching her book Carson found there were two scientific camps, those that supported the use of synthetic chemicals, such as DDT, and those that preferred alternative approaches, such as biological control or what today would be embraced by the term ecosystem services. The title of the book makes the emotional point that synthetic pesticides will damage the environ­ ment to the extent that springs will be lifeless or, as Carson says metaphori­ cally, silent. In my own copy of her book, published in the United Kingdom in 1964, there is a preface written by the biologist Julien Huxley (1887– 1975) in which he says, “as my brother Aldous said after reading Rachel Carson’s book, we are losing half the subject-matter of English poetry.” Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a man of letters with broad interests but probably most famous for his book Brave New World in which he outlines his view of a dystopian future based on mass production and behavioural conditioning. However, in 1959, he was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara on what he called his “mod­ est theme”, titled The Human Situation.16 In these lectures, which covered subjects from art, science and religion to man, his planet and the population explosion, his aim was to pontificate, in alignment with what he saw, not­ withstanding the confused nature of the word pontificate, but as ultimately to build bridges. He says: If the effects of science are to be incorporated into art they must in some way become something more than mere facts, and scientific theo­ ries must become something more than mere abstractions and gener­ alizations: they must become facts of direct experience, facts that mean something, facts which have emotional content.16, p3 Rachel Carson had been hugely successful in giving the dry and abstract science around crop protection emotional content, she made the connec­ tions between feeding people, their populations and the planet, she made it personal and in a manner that engaged the reader.

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Modernity’s two cultures But there was a schism, both the Huxley brothers acknowledge it, as did C. P. Snow in his 1959 “Two Cultures” lecture in Cambridge, England, that stressed the importance of education, but that was over 60  years ago and not much has changed. Hardin in his Tragedy of the Commons was hugely critical of the United Nation’s position in its declaration of human rights putting “the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society” in which family size should be decided only by the family itself. He saw this in the context of a welfare state as pernicious as it took away family and individual responsibility. Notwithstanding the debates around human population that were going on 50 or 60 years ago, the current debate has changed its points of reference. In 1950, the global population was around 2.5 billion which today has nearly reached eight billion and is estimated to grow to ten billion by 2064,17 but although the rate of population growth is slowing, the debate has shifted to sustainability and resilience, the consequences of planetary boundaries and climate change.18 It should be remembered that most of this population growth is likely to occur in urban area and allow for the fact that the ghost acres required to sustain this projected human population are finite. In the light of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons argument, although it has been reframed in terms of resilience and climate change, it is clear that the multidisciplinary nature of these issues is fundamental and the schism between the arts and sciences is unlikely to go away and perhaps become even become more crucial. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is a political scientist whose book The Human Condition19 divides human life into three realms, Labour, Work and Action, and she traces these realms back into antiquity and the natality of Western civilisation. Each of these three realms is “intimately connected with the most general condition of human existence: birth and death, natality and mortality” in which work and its product, “the human artifact, bestow a measure of human permanence”.18, p8 Growing up in a Jewish family in an increasingly totalitarian Germany informs her political writings, and she eventually escaped the Nazi regime to arrive in the United States in 1941. Arendt had much to say about the human condition as a toolmaker, Homo faber, whereby through vita activa (action) and fabrication, this production separated humankind from nature, but she also sees the scientific revolution as a key disjunction with the past, especially in relationship to Hume’s view of causality on which she says: Hume’s radical criticism of the causality principle, which prepared the way for the later adoption of evolution, has often been considered one of the origins of modern philosophy. The causality principle with its twofold central axiom – that everything that is must have a cause and that the cause must be more perfect than its most perfect effect – obviously relies entirely on experiences in the realm of fabrication,

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where the maker is superior to his products. Seen in this context, the turning point in the intellectual history of the modern age came when the image of organic life development – where the evolution of a lower being, for instance the ape, can cause the appearance of a higher being, for instance man – appeared in the place of the image of the watch­ maker who must be superior to all watches whose cause he is.18, p312 This passage should be read with great care, “that a cause must be more perfect than its most perfect effect”, aligns to the Platonic allegory of the cave where our sense perception of what we witness on the cave wall is not real but a projection from what is “real”, that is, fabricated, from Plato’s ideal forms. To my mind, it was Darwin who overturned the Platonic ideal form when he took sense perception data as real and substituted his population thinking around abstracted ideas that were not real. We must stop thinking in terms of Plato’s ideal forms and substitute something more akin to Borges’s Library of Babel or Dennett’s Library of Mendel (Chapter 4), and we have to stop think­ ing in terms of superior and inferior but think more in terms of Bronowski’s layers of stratified stability and Rockström’s planetary boundaries. Nev­ ertheless, this does not relegate Hume’s treatment of cause and effect as unimportant, indeed it has been most fruitful, but Hume’s denigration of imagination that led to the substitution of a Single Vision is at the heart of the schism between art and science. Our ability to creatively imagine from the particular instance to the general rule is no less useful a tool as logically deducing from the general rule to the particular instance, both are a part of the Homo faber’s toolbox. Hume makes the assertion that it is by “custom alone” that we can make generalisations about the nature of the universe, and as scientists we can repeat experiments and build up that experience. But today we are running an experiment to sustain a projected ten billion people on a finite planet. Today’s challenge is to address the newly enframed Tragedy of the Commons in concepts such as global sustainability, resilience and the nature of “Nature”, for which the re-instalment of imagination as a component of the toolbox of our collective consciousness will be indispen­ sable. Indeed, we will need all of what Blake called our Poetic genius, which he claimed to be infinite, to bring-forth ecological configurations of strati­ fied stability within which we can flourish. Therefore, in the next chapter I will explore the nature of “Nature” and what these ecological configurations of stratified stability may look like in relationship to the organisations and institutions necessary to address such a challenge.

References 1) Keynes, G. (1972) Blake Complete Writings. Oxford University Press.

2) Raine, K. (1991) Golgonooza City of Imagination. Golgonooza Press, p. 9.

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3) Erdman, D.V. (1977) Blake: Profit Against Empire. Dover Publications.

4) Damon, S.F. (1988) A Blake Dictionary. University Press New England, p. 91.

5) Dole, G.F., Cooper, L.H. and Rose, J.S. (2011) A Swedenborg Sampler: Selections From

Heaven and Hell, Divine Love and Wisdom, Divine Providence, True Christianity, Secrets of Heaven. Swedenborg Foundation. 6) Hume, D. (1977) An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Section IV. BobbsMerrill Publishing. 7) Heidegger, M. (1978) Basic Writings. Routledge. 8) Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Public Domain Book. 9) Smith, A. (2006 [1759]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Dover Publications Inc. 10) Bronowski, J. and Mazlish, B. (1960) The Western Intellectual Tradition. Harper Torchbooks. 11) Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162: 1243–1248. 12) Hardin, G. (1993) Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics and Population Taboos. Oxford University Press. 13) Freese, B. (2004) Coal: A Human History. Penguin. 14) Swift, J. (1726) Gulliver’s Travels. Everyman Edition. 15) Carson, R. (1964) Silent Spring. Hamish Hamilton. 16) Huxley, A. (1978) The Human Situation. Chatto & Windus. 17) Vollset, S.E., Goren, E., Yuan, C.-W., Cao, J., Smith, A.E., Hsiao, T., Bisignano, C., Azhar, G.S., Castro, E., Chalek, J., Dolgert, A.J., Frank, T., Fukutaki, K., Lozano, R., Mokdad, A.H., Nandakumar, V., Pierce, M., Pletcher, M., Robalik, T., Steu­ ben, K.M., Wunrow, H.Y., Zlavog, B.S. and Murray, C.J.L. (2020) Fertility, mortal­ ity, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: A forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study. The Lancet, 396: P1285–P1306. http://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2 18) Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F.S., Lambin, E.F., Lenton, T.M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H.J., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C.A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P.K., Cos­ tanza, R., Svedin, U., Falkenmark, M., Karlberg, L., Corell, R.W., Fabry, V.J., Hansen, J., Walker, B., Liverman, D., Richardson, K., Crutzen, P. and Foley, J.A. (2009) A  safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461: 472–475. https://doi. org/10.1038/461472a 19) Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition. The University of Chicago Press.

9

Science and public affairs

Anthropocene In the piazza of the British Library at St Pancras, in London, there stands a sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) based on the portrait of New­ ton by William Blake painted around 1800. In Blake’s original portrait (see frontispiece) a naked Newton sits on what might be described as a multicol­ oured naturalistic rockface of coral. He sits hunched over and in his left hand he holds a pair of compasses which have inscribed some geometrical forms on a scroll which is receiving Newton’s undivided attention. It is as if New­ ton is contemplating Plato’s ideal forms with such singular concentration that he is oblivious, may I suggest asleep, to the rest of the world? In Paolozzi’s sculpture the body of Newton is held together with nuts and bolts through his joints suggesting a mechanistic being (Figure 9.1), but to Paolozzi the

Figure 9.1 Eduardo Paolozzi’s sculpture at the British Library, St Pancras, London, based on William Blake’s portrait of Newton Source: (Image open access from Wikipedia).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-9

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sculpture was a symbol that brought together Newton the scientist with Blake the artist and poet, thereby uniting C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures. But like many works of art its meanings are various as it can equally be interpreted as a critique of Newton’s Single vision. In 1800, around the time Blake was painting Newton, the global human population was less than one billion, and it had taken the whole of human evolution to reach that number; some 200 years later, when the new British Library was opened in 1998, it was very nearly six billion people, and the seventh billion person was born just 13 years later in 2011. In the light of our current COVID-19 outbreak, could this be described as a global epi­ demic of humankind? The great acceleration of human population growth, the moment when the Holocene changes into the Anthropocene is a matter of contention, but clearly by 1973 when the television series The Ascent of Man is first broadcast Bronowski opens the series stating: Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not the figure in the landscape – he is the shaper of the landscape.1, p19 In the TV series Bronowski traces human scientific development as a suc­ cession of highlights with each scientific discovery building on the previous. The programmes were Bronowski’s antidote to the race for military domi­ nation that had ended with the hydrogen bombs that obliterated the Japa­ nese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, the previous decade had seen a more benign technological race between the Russians and Americans to put a man on the moon, but it was the photograph by William Anders on Apollo 8 titled “Earthrise” that in 1968 was to become iconic. This colour photograph of the Earth as a blue planet with the cratered surface of the moon in the foreground changed our emotional landscape. If Hardin in the Tragedy of the Commons2 had intellectualised the relationship between human population and the planet, Ander’s photograph had visualised the finiteness of the planet on which our survival depended, and emotionally the conse­ quences were inescapable. The environmental movement had been born, and it would only take time for the Holocene to become the Anthropocene. But when did the Anthropocene begin? I would argue that it could be traced back to a moment in time, an intellectual moment, when Hume denigrates the imagination in favour of unrestricted reason in 1748.3 This is a moment in human evolution when Homo faber is born and humankind’s status changes from being an end in itself to becoming a means to an end, in Heideggerian terms a standingreserve. Remember, my argument is that reason without imagination is death while imagination without reason is madness (Chapter 1). Blake understood the negative consequences of what he called the Single Vision, possibly not in population terms because in Blake’s day the global population was around one billion and, although it was growing, much of the globe was

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still unmapped. The Geographical Society of London would not be founded until 1830, three years after Blake’s death, and the great age of Victorian exploration and cartography was yet to be born. However, over the next century and a half the rate of human population increase continued to grow, and by 1968, the year of Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons was published, and Anders’s Earthrise photograph was taken, the rate of population growth had reached its maximum and although global population was rising, the rate of growth has continued to decline. The stabilisation of the human population, that is, when the number of people born will be equal to the number of people that die, in other words what epidemiologists would call, “when the human population reaches its stationary phase”, is also a matter of dispute depending on the mathematical models used, but the United Nations Population Division suggested, before the COVID-19 pandemic, it would stabilise somewhere between 10 and 11 billion in the twenty-second century.4 We are therefore inextricably caught within a global experiment that hitherto has never been done before, and we therefore cannot rely on Hume’s idea of CUSTOM (experience) to inform our behaviour. As statisticians would say, “we have zero degrees of freedom”, that is, there are no replicates and therefore the possibility of CUSTOM, Hume’s view of repeated observations by which our actions can be guided, is an impossibility. We, therefore, using REASON, have only IMAGINA­ TION and our FEELINGS to inform our behaviour. If we return to Blake’s view that without contraries there is no progress, we have to rely on our combined use of IMAGINATION and REASON working together as one. So, together, the intellectual content of the writings of people like Hardin in his Tragedy of the Commons, and Ander’s photograph of Earthrise that packed an emotional punch the end of the 1960s, the environmental movement was brought into being in the form of the politicisation of ecology with maga­ zines such as The Ecologist.5 Indeed, during the early parts of the 1970s there was a call for a vision of a post-industrial age in which issues concerning eco­ nomics, people and environmental were brought into perspective in a series of landmark publications like Small is Beautiful6 and The Limits to Growth.7 These issues were somewhat swept under the carpet in Bronowski’s Ascent of Man as many such thoughts were, if not dismissed, downgraded as: falsely profound questions. . . . They do not lie along the line of what we are now able to know if we devote ourselves to it: an understanding of man himself. We are nature’s unique experiment to make rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex. Knowledge is our des­ tiny. Self-knowledge, at last bringing together the experience of the arts and the explanations of science, waits ahead of us.1, p437 “rational intelligence prove itself sounder than the reflex” – this is an inter­ esting turn of phrase, immensely powerful and yet is Bronowski ascribing to Blake’s Single Vision and dismissal of IMAGINATION? I personally think

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not, he was, remember, a Blake scholar and a poet himself, and there is plenty of evidence of him seeing both art and science as expressions of the human mind’s plasticity, where “the experience of the arts and the explanations of science” are brought together. This therefore begs the question about the nature of art and science and are they indeed separate realms of knowledge? Contrary to Hume, I have argued that Blake’s view that brings together reason and imagination as indispensable to each other is fundamental. This is because we are continually having to guide our actions in situations in which we find ourselves for the first time, and therefore there is no prior knowledge by which custom can guide our behaviour. If there is a differ­ ence between art and science it does not lie in the mind’s eye, our imagination is fundamental and common to both, and neither does it lie in the choice of subject area, nothing is excluded from being a subject of enquiry in either art or science. It lies somewhere in the nature of poiēsis where both art and science are involved in bringing-forth. So, where does the difference lie? If the universe is a whole and is totally interconnected the nature of art is that it acknowledges this totality in which there is no separation or, in Blake’s words from Auguries of Innocence. To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.8, p431 Here, viewed objects, everything from a sand grain to a wild flower, time and space are all inseparable; there is no division, all is ultimately intercon­ nected, and there is no separation between either subject and object or causes and effects. Nature is a connected whole. If that is true of art, what about science? It would seem to me that the demarcation of science lies in its methodology that does not see the world in that way; it compartmentalises the world and separates subjects from objects, causes from effects. To do sci­ ence we have to make an intellectual cut in the world of Nature and make a judgement between the relevant and the irrelevant (see Chapter 3). In art nothing is irrelevant, but science is a modest form of knowledge because it restricts the universe and moves our knowledge forward one step at a time. It is a laborious process involving repetition and our knowledge is built up incrementally through a process of revealing, which discloses to us the lay­ ers of stratified stability within Nature. It is with this knowledge, knowledge that is an end in itself, that Homo faber has subsequently discovered new layers of stratified stability that go forward as new technologies, everything from the digging stick of yesterday to the computer and the city of today. But this does not mean that Homo faber, as represented by Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, comes with a clean bill of health, all technology is doubleedged and try as we might, we do not always step progressively forward. Certainly, Bronowski was well aware of these issues having worked as a mathematician on the effects of bombing strategies during the Second

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World War and been on a British delegation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the dropping of the H-bombs. He knew that the application of science in technology was double-edged. Nevertheless, reading Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations9 together with The Ascent of Man gives the general impres­ sion that science is a single enterprise based on reason. But earlier, we drew attention to the fact that Popper, at a loss for any rational basis for scien­ tific ideas talks of “poetic intuition” (Chapter 3) and earlier, we mentioned Bronowski’s plasticity of mind in his reach of the “imagination” (see above). Leaving aside poiēsis for a moment, these accounts fit neatly into Western culture’s modus operandi, and indeed, there is not a research scientist alive who has written a grant proposal without clearly stating the hypotheses, conjectures, to be tested and the method by which they will be refuted. It has become standard practice. But it is not without its critics.

Return to demarcation One of the problems facing the philosophy of science, as we have discussed, is that of demarcation (Chapter  3), and Hume’s disconnection of reason from imagination has created a blind spot. It gives an impression that sci­ ence is objective, theories based from facts and overarchingly governed by reason. However, Paul Feyerabend (1924–1994) in his provocatively titled book Against Method10 confronts Popper head on by saying: According to Hume, theories cannot be derived from facts. The demand to admit only those theories which follow from facts leaves us without any theory. Hence, science as we know it can exist only if we drop the demand and revise our methodology.10, p65 but, arguing from a Blakean position, reason cannot be divorced from the imagination at the heart of which poiēsis resides. We undoubtedly all live in a scientific civilisation, that is, a civilisation that respects knowledge, but as with all human activity it is also a politi­ cal activity. This can be exemplified in the realm of science that has been engaged in the climate change debate over the last several decades. As we have seen earlier, the discipline of ecology has over the last half century or so become increasingly politicised and in particular in the context of climate change, increasingly polarised between those who accept it and those who do not. These two camps have been arguing facts and figures ad nauseam, and it is only relatively recently that climate change supporters have won out. As Huxley has correctly pointed out: It is not necessarily true that, because a particular doctrine at a par­ ticular moment is orthodox, it is correct. There have been too many examples in the past of orthodoxies proved to be profoundly incorrect, for anybody to feel it necessary to accept everything in the orthodox view.11, p253

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And herein lies a grave problem, a new scientific truth that may well be hereti­ cal at first sight and even following peer review may eventually establish itself and become the scientific orthodoxy, but this does not necessarily mean it will be accepted by the public at large, or even practising scientists, as inevitable conflicts of interest come into play. It is not a coincidence that the expansion of the environmental movement throughout the 1970s coincided with declin­ ing oil production in the United States and their necessary need for its impor­ tation. Although the data are, within certain boundaries, indisputable, not all reactions were congruent and indeed tended to polarise. The types of pessi­ mistic scenarios envisaged by Hardin in Tragedy of the Commons2 and Meadows and Meadows’ Limits to Growth7 can be contrasted with other alternative more optimistic ones. For example, there is a whole series of books written by the statistician Bjørn Lomborg, whose first book The Skeptical Environmentalist12 had been provoked after reading an article in Wired Magazine in which they had interviewed the American economist Julian Simon, who had questioned the growing orthodoxy of environmental pessimism. In Lomborg’s words: In the fall of 1997 I held a study group with ten of my sharpest students, where we tried to examine Simon thoroughly. Honestly, we expected to show that most of Simon’s talk was simple, American right-wing propaganda. And yes, not everything he said was correct, but – contrary to our expectations – it turned out that a surprisingly large amount of his points stood up to scrutiny and conflicted with what we believed ourselves to know. The air in the developed world is becoming less, no more, polluted; people in the developing countries are not starving more, but less, and so on.12, pxix Now my point is not whether Lomborg or Hardin is correct, but more to do with the pursuit of scientific truth and whether or not there is such a thing. The disinterested pursuit of scientific truth, following Hume’s, and more recently Popper’s, objective and reasoned world view, ends up falling short, and the public’s view turns to cynicism, and this is especially true when it comes to environmental concerns and especially when it comes to the issues around climate change. In 2002, the American Secretary of State of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld (1932–2021) in a press briefing regarding the weapons of mass destruction allegedly present in Iraq stated: Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones.13

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These are, of course, the words of a politician briefing the public of a demo­ cratic society, but let there be no mistake, they can quite easily be as just as applicable to scientific statements and the manner in which scientific truths are established. Now, how our knowledge progresses from a position of unknown unknowns through known unknowns to known knowns is an interest­ ing question, and Popper and his like would suggest it all rests on a perfectly uncontested process that relies on the scientific method based on conjecture and refutation. However that might be, there are some who would clearly disagree. Feyerabend, to be sure, would whole heartedly disagree, indeed, he was a strong advocate of anarchy in which, “The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.”10 His book Against Method is in the tradi­ tion of the philosophy of science in that it is about the philosophy of phys­ ics ranging from Galileo through Newton and on to Einstein (1879–1955) and Bohr (1885–1962). The mechanism of epistemological progress and the growth of knowledge therefore lay with philosophers of physics with the likes of Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996), Imre Lakatos (1922–1974) and of course Popper, amongst others.14 These discussions generally related to a “mechanistic” universe that had become “relative” and then “quantum”. There was a philosophical job to be done to separate revolutionary sci­ ence, from incremental progress within well-defined paradigms or research domains.15 It is noteworthy that in the mid-1970s biology was not worthy of philosophical consideration. Biology was historical, and Popper had dis­ missed it as a metaphysical research programme (see Chapter 3). Therefore, philosophers of science tended to leave biology alone in spite of its suc­ cessful advances in molecular biology. This revolutionary history has been brilliantly documented by Horace Judson in his book The Eighth Day of Cre­ ation.16 However, in 1986, the journal Biology and Philosophy was established under the editorship of Michael Ruse to rectify this gap focusing not only on the nature of biology but also on its social implications. Clearly, these molecular advances in biology were as socially revolutionary as anything in physics which would have repercussions in the life and medical sciences we are still exploring today. Interestingly, and as might be expected, Feyerabend is highly critical of this monochromatic approach (Single vision) to the theory of science and although there is much discussion around the nature of the growth of sci­ entific knowledge, he does not see it as rational as they like to think it is: Thus science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicu­ ous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits.10, p295

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I cannot help but think that Blake would be cheered by this sort of state­ ment, and indeed, it is interesting that the relationship of science to myth has a thought-provoking history. The expansion of British Imperialism throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had brought the colo­ nists into contact with many different traditional societies throughout the world, and the subject of social anthropology became a legitimate area of study. Even though this study may at first sight appear to be disinterested, this was a thin veil to act as a lubricative to aid the economic exploitation of these distant lands. One of the most comprehensive outputs of this period was James Frazer’s The Golden Bough first published as a single volume of a 12-part series in 1922 to address the relationship between Magic and Reli­ gion.17 In this book, Frazer traces human social development from early forms of magic that are subsequently replaced by more formal religions, and then ultimately religion becomes replaced by science. Frazer was often regarded as an atheist due to the book’s critical analysis of Christianity, but it was through tracing this human social development that human beings can be seen as taking increasing control over their environment. We have come full circle to Bronowski’s statement that the human being, “is the shaper of the landscape”,1 and it is a truly modern endeavour. Returning to Feyerabend, however, he leaves us in no doubt, he sees the education of the modern scientist as a form of “brainwashing” into a rigid set of ideologies that, because they are open to manipulation by the state, should be rejected and in which: the separation of state and church must be complimented by the separa­ tion of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution. Such a separation may be our only chance to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realised.10, p295 He clearly sees the modern methodology of science as a state-governed religion and that its monochromatic approach is inhibitory to scientific pro­ gress, he is an anarchist and advocate of an approach in which “anything goes” and that there should be “the separation of state and science”.

Scientific disestablishment But Feyerabend does not see modern science as an end in itself, he sees sci­ ence functioning within a context of broadening humanitarian principles, and this begs the question as to whether, irrespective of following a Pop­ perian or Feyerabendian methodology, science can be disconnected from the state. So although I  suggest Blake may be supportive of Feyerabend’s anarchical approach, and that is all very well, but is the disestablishment of science a practical proposition? It is clear that Feyerabend’s emphasis is on humanitarian and social progress, and it is not an end in itself but a means to

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an end, and therefore falls within Heidegger’s technological purview; it is a standing-reserve. Feyerabend does not see science as a disinterested pursuit of truth, he does not see it as the bringing-forth through poiēsis of discoveries of new layers of stratified stability which are ends in themselves. It is a means to his notion of humanitarian progress. This presents scientists with a huge dilemma, science has always been costly, and therefore the disinterested pursuit of truth is caught entangled in a web of conflicts of interest. In an essay titled The Disestablishment of Science published in 1971, Bronowski addresses the issues from the perspec­ tive of a physicist developing weapons of mass destruction. He was in a unique position to observe these matters at first hand as he was involved in mathematically modelling the effects of bombing during the Second World War. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, he was seconded as an official delegate of the British government to make a report on the aftermath of the nuclear explosions. The mathematics he applied to bombing can be looked at as generic knowledge, either to ameliorate defence strategies to protect the national interest, or equally, it could be used to increase the effectiveness of bombs on an enemy. The generic science is morally neutral, but it is certainly double-edged when it comes to its appli­ cation. As Bronowski says: Scientists can no longer confine their qualms to the uses and abuses to which their discoveries are put – to the development of weapons, or even larger implications of an irresponsible technology which distorts our civilization. Instead they are face to face with a choice of con­ science between two moralities: the morality of science, and the moral­ ity of national and government power.18, p241 Bronowski thinks “these two moralities are not compatible”, and that sci­ ence is a global endeavour without borders that makes up a large successful interconnected community. Bronowski therefore calls for the disestablish­ ment of science in which the scientists themselves through their own rep­ resentatives “will have to judge and balance the importance of the different branches of science at any time”18, p241 and govern. In other words, some form of peer review is required; a subject I’ll return to later. Allegedly, it was Francis Bacon (1561–1626) who declared many years ago that “Knowledge is Power”, and certainly Nicollò Machiavelli (1469– 1527) would have related to the sentiment and, indeed, maintained that to rule well, private and public morality needed to be kept separate. This is of course the antithesis of Bronowski’s view; although he fully understood what Machiavelli had to say on the subject. But, therefore, however much sympathy I have with Bronowski’s moral sentiments, I do not believe the disestablishment of science is likely. Indeed, Winston Churchill (1874–1965) allegedly said that “Scientists should be on tap, and not on top.” And, there­ fore from a Machiavellian perspective I do not see governments suddenly

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wanting to relinquish their power. However, although they may want to reduce their expenditure, they certainly want to maintain their ability to write the agenda in an increasingly competitive world. Hence, from the mid-1970s and the gradual waning of the post-Second World War consen­ sus, there has been a change in the relationship between national govern­ ments and scientific research. But I’m rushing too far ahead. At the end of the Second World War a book was published called The Great Transformation by a Hungarian–Jewish refugee called Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) which traced the history of England during its transition to a market-based economy. In Chapter 3 titled “Habita­ tion versus Improvement” Polanyi talks of this transition as having a degrad­ ing effect on the rural communities as they moved into industrial towns to disappear and be “vomited forth from” Blake’s “ ‘satanic mills’ . . . as a verita­ ble abyss of human degradation.”19, p41 The book documents this change and highlights the fact that self-regulating free markets are neither self-regulating nor free. It contains a trajectory of thought that flies in the face of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and his free market capitalism; Polanyi writes: The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled intervention­ ism. To make Adam Smith’s “simple and natural liberty” compatible with the needs of a human society was a most complicated affair. . . . Just as, contrary to expectation, the invention of labour-saving machin­ ery had not diminished but actually increased the uses of human labour, the introduction of free markets far from doing away with the need for control, regulation and intervention, enormously increased their range. Administrators had to be constantly on the watch to ensure the free working of the system.19, p147 Polanyi saw people living in England in a market society based on an economy born out of liberal traditions, and he observed that it continued to function in a way that fascist and socialist systems did not. It managed to balance two realms within a market-based economy, one which is formally associated with the classical thinking of supply and demand and its rational optimisa­ tion. This is the realm aligned to the writings of Smith and his legacy. The other, what Polanyi refers to as “substantivism”, is not based on rational thinking of supply and demand but on a communal livelihood embedded within a natural agrarian environment and based on mutual reciprocity. He saw the Industrial Revolution as the great transformation from the sub­ stantive agrarian system into a formal industrial and commercial one, and these realms are in tension. In a sense it is this tension between formal and substantive realms that is being played out all over the globe to this day and creates the rural and urban divide. Polanyi’s book The Great Transformation was published around same time as another book on economics by Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992), The Road

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to Serfdom. This book, The Road to Serfdom, argued against centralised gov­ ernment and planning as it saw any form of centralisation as a route to totalitarianism, which ultimately led to a tyranny of a minority against the majority. The book became increasingly influential in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Interestingly, Hayek and Popper were con­ temporaries in many ways; both had appointments at the London School of Economics, where they crossed between 1946 and 1950 after which Hayek left for the University of Chicago; both had escaped the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany; both had an abhorrence of centrally controlled governance systems and both advocated democratic systems that were open and based on reason. In the way that Hayek and Popper were uniformly advocates for reason as an antidote against totalitarianism, Polanyi and Feyerabend were more plu­ ralistic; neither would have denied the role of reason, but their view of the world was more complicated and nuanced. Polanyi certainly did not see the economic world as only formalised in terms of reason applied to supply and demand, he also advocated a role for communal reciprocity. However, Fey­ erabend, although more narrowly focused, is even more strident; he wants the role of Popper’s “critical rationalism” in scientific methodology to be totally usurped and replaced by a more imaginative, irrational and anarchic approach, where “anything goes”. Therefore, in the way that Hayek and Popper are monochromatic in their view focusing on reason, Polanyi and Feyerabend are more expansive and imaginative allowing a pluralism more aligned to Blake in that they condemn the “Single vision”. It is no coincidence that the Second World War had seen national gov­ ernments centralising their scientific research efforts into military endeav­ ours and this approach applied to a whole economy was of concern to Hayek, and in his book The Road to Serfdom he discusses these issues, where he is critical of “bigness” which did not leave room for “organic growth”20; indeed, his antipathy towards “bigness”, like Popper in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, is clearly motivated by his stance against totalitarian­ ism, but whereas Popper’s focus becomes clearly aimed at scientific method, Hayek’s is applied to the whole economy. The hegemony of Hayek’s views was ultimately consolidated in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but there is an interesting anecdote recounted by Yuval N. Harari (b. 1976)21 that expresses the issues between large centrally planned economies, like Russia, compared to liberal small governmental light-touch economies, like the United Kingdom. Although this story is likely to be more mythical than factual, it demon­ strates the contrast between the two systems. The story refers to a time when Mikhail Gorbachev (1931–2022) was President of the Soviet Union, when the Russian economy was in poor health, and he sent an aid to visit the United Kingdom to learn about decentralised capitalistic economies pre­ sided over by Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013). Thatcher had been a great fan of Smith’s Wealth of Nations and its legacy can be traced down through

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Hayek. Gorbachev’s aid was given a tour of London visiting The London School of Economics, Hayek’s old stomping ground, and various other bank­ ing and business institutions around London, he allegedly asked why he had not seen any queues outside any bakeries or grocery stores and wanted to meet the person in charge of bread supply. “Back in Moscow” he reported, “our finest minds are working on the bread supply system, and yet there are such long queues in every bakery and grocery store.” The hosts were at a loss because they couldn’t identify anybody in charge of supplying bread to London. As Harari says: That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply. The informa­ tion flows freely between millions of consumers and producers, bakers and tycoons, farmers and scientists. Market forces determine the price of bread, the number of loaves baked each day and the research-and­ development priorities. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves, or so capitalists believe.21, p373 This is a beguiling scenario, but is it really the case? And from the perspec­ tive of this chapter, where and in what manner do the scientists have a role to play?

The known and the unknown Scientists are professionals whose job it is to provide knowledge and, per­ haps for a moment, it might be worth seeing this from the perspective of Donald Rumsfeld, as discussed earlier, in terms of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. In the case of known knowns, this might be envisaged in terms of a situation where it is known that there is a demand for a commodity, for example, bread, and we know roughly both the demand and the required supply from the field through to the fork. In such instances, capitalist economics work reasonably well and are self-corrective. However, what about the situation of known unknowns? This, I  would claim, is the bread and butter of everyday strategic science, from the Popperian per­ spective it is the everyday science of problem-solving, working within a Kuhnian prescribed paradigm, an area of research and development, from human health to environmental health, from microphones and speakers to communication satellites and from automobiles to airplanes. It is research within prescribed boundaries. It is the sort of research for which scientists compete for funding and attracts institutional funding. But lastly, what about the science of unknown unknowns? This is the most challenging and most dif­ ficult and falls into the methodological category of Feyerabend’s “anything goes”. It is difficult here to give an example, but it is the sort of science that is associated with unpredictable configurations of Bronowski’s stratified stabil­ ity that underpin the un-manifested universe that needs to be discovered and

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brought-forth; it results in the equivalent of finding a new meaningful book in Borges’s Library of Babel; or, in mathematical terms, it is like discovering a new prime number. For simplicity, I  have divided these into three dis­ crete Rumsfeldian groups, but, in actuality, they form a natural continuum between the known and the unknown universe and the institutional funding for its pursuit of approximates to some form of Poisson distribution, that is, a bell-shaped curve, with little or no funding at the extremes. In line with the sentiment behind Bronowski’s disestablishment of sci­ ence, research funding, at least in the United Kingdom, was enshrined in a British Governmental Report the terms of reference of which was, “To enquire into the various Departments of the central executive Government, and to advise in what manner the exercise and distribution of the Govern­ ment of its functions should be improved.” The chairman of the commit­ tee of this report was R. B. Haldane, and it became known as the Haldane Report; it was published in 1918 as an overall reassessment of the mecha­ nisms of government that had changed dramatically as a result of the First World War. One of the guiding values that came out of the report was that scientific research should be administered by the research councils and that they should remain autonomous, so that they remained free from politici­ sation which might discourage research into certain areas. This principle became known as the “Haldane Principle” and would remain intact until Lord (Victor) Rothchild’s report in 1971 when the criticism it had had over the years for separating basic from applied research took hold and resulted in around a quarter of the research councils’ funding was taken back into gov­ ernmental control on a “customer – contractor” basis.22 Although some of these funds would be returned to the research councils during the Thatcher reign of government, 1979–1990, the legacy of Adam Smith, Hayek and the fall of the Berlin Wall all conspired to establish firmly in the collective con­ sciousness of administrators the “customer – contractor” relationship that permeates our institutions, including our teaching institutions, down to the present day. If we return to the hypothetical bell-shaped curve plotted along an axis of known to unknown knowledge against funding from both public and private sources over time, there are various possible models available none of which are cast in tablets of stone, and various scenarios can be envisaged (Fig­ ure 9.2). First, for example, if we model it from a perspective that 50 percent of the knowledge is known, and that the research to increase our knowledge is provided by a mixture of public and private sources in which it can be vis­ ualised as two curves where, in our first diagram, public funding is reduced to 25 percent with an expectation that private funding would increase to 75  percent (Figure  9.2A). Second, we can imagine other models where only 30 percent of all possible knowledge within the discipline is known and in which all funding is public or indeed 70 percent of knowledge has been acquired and all funding is from private sources (Figure 9.2B). In the last example, we again have a mixed economy of public (30%) and private

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(70%) funding depicting a scenario in which 70  percent of knowledge is known (Figure 9.2C). Theoretically, any mixture of funding scenarios is perfectly possible, but in reality, there is diminishing levels of funding support the closer to where our knowledge is zero and progressing from left to right there is a change in the proportion of public to private funding. Indeed, on the far right this area is primarily where scientific knowledge is well understood, and the knowl­ edge gets applied in various forms of technological developments. Over the last decade the British Government has continued to apply the “Hal­ dane Principle” by maintaining the process of peer review, whereby research proposals are reviewed by similarly qualified researchers and funding given to the worthy. Previously, peer review was a process whereby experienced scientists in a particular discipline are co-opted by publishers through the journal editors and reviewers to ensure that manuscripts are of sufficient quality and originality to merit publication. The “gatekeepers of knowl­ edge” were therefore the journal editors and reviewers, but the application of this process to research proposals changes the emphasis and the funders become the new “gatekeepers of knowledge”. This change in emphasis thereby maintains and strengthens the customer–contractor relationship in that the government as customer can focus research on areas which they want to pursue. Indeed, government grant-awarding committees often contain peo­ ple directly linked with industrial and commercial interests and as a conse­ quence, the research moves away from the more speculative areas of unknown unknowns and be maintained within the bounds of known unknowns using the euphemistic rational that taxpayers’ money should not be wasted. There has therefore been a shift in emphasis, whereas previously the “gatekeepers of knowledge” lay with the journal editors and reviewers, the “gatekeepers” have become the grant-awarding bodies and the funders. The “Haldane principle” has been replaced by the “customer – contractor” relationship and therefore the underlying expansion of knowledge in the area of unknown unknowns has drifted inexorably towards the right of Fig­ ure 9.2 with increasing politicisation and developments of impact in areas the government deems worthwhile and open to the interests of various lob­ bies. Scientists therefore spend increasing amounts of time writing research proposals in response to government calls, at the expense of doing research which has inevitably led to increasing inefficiencies such that the cost of writing the proposal outweighs the income, indeed writing a proposal is as likely to be aimed at the development of the proposer’s career, as it is to develop new knowledge.23 Not that they are mutually exclusive, but within the current research environment the strategy becomes one of proposing research that makes the next logical step sound revolutionary rather than be revolutionary; success depends on grantsmanship and selling the idea rather than proving, to quote Blake, “what was once only imagin’d”. This may sound very pessimistic, and funding research in line with the Rothschild report is not of course always negative. However, the debate

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Figure 9.2 Funding models: A) 50% of what can be known is known, with public fund­ ing of 25% and private funding at 75%; B) 30% of what is known is known and research funding is 100% public; C) 70% of what can be known is known and research funding is 70% private funding and 30% is publicly funded Source: (Drawn by author).

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around the balance of funding is fundamental, and if the disestablishment of science is politically untenable, as I have argued elsewhere, the Haldane Principle needs to be revived.24 A fundamental legacy of Mrs Thatcher’s administration in the 1980s was to model everything on business, and this legacy built on the economic philosophies of Hayek and Milton Fried­ man (1912–2006) has had a detrimental effect on our institutions, indeed I have said: Society can be seen to be made up of businesses as a wall is made up of bricks. But modern walls are held together by mortar which is the con­ nective tissue between the bricks. I would therefore like to suggest that our educations system, its art and its science are in part the connective tissue that holds the wall together. Turning science into purely another outmoded business or brick will weaken the wall.24, p21 Following the economic philosophies of Hayek and Friedman, businesses are in the first instance answerable to shareholders, but their outputs affect stakeholders beyond the shareholders and may be inherently full of conflicts of interest. First, new knowledge may threaten old knowledge in a way that undermines the technologies of the status quo, and second, the business models which produce the returns to shareholders form part of a business ecology, including pensions and pension funds, that prohibits new knowl­ edge from development. For example, if the application of new knowledge cannot produce a return that at least equals the current returns, investors may want to maintain their current returns rather than change the busi­ ness model because of commitments elsewhere. In short, quick returns take precedence over long-term benefits. However, society has interests beyond short-term profits, and indeed this has huge implications in the way societies function. In the next chapter, I will pick up these issues and further explore these problems in relation to the pressing concerns of climate change and beyond.

References 1) Bronowski, J. (1973) The Ascent of Man. BBC Publications.

2) Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162: 1243–1248.

3) Hume, D. (1977) An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Ed. Charles W. Hen­ del). Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. 4) United Nations Population Division (2019) www.population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/ Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900 5) Goldsmith, E., Allen, R., Allaby, M., Davoll, J. and Lawrence, S. (1972) A Blueprint for Survival. The Ecologist, 2: 2–35. 6) Schumacher, E. (1973) Small Is Beautiful. Blond and Briggs. 7) Meadows, D. and Meadows, D. (1972) The Limits to Growth. Potomac Associates. 8) Keynes, G. (1962) Blake Complete Writings. Oxford University Press. 9) Popper, K. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Science and public affairs 10) 11) 12) 13)

14) 15) 16) 17) 18) 19) 20) 21) 22)

23)

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Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against Method. Verso Edition. Huxley, A. (1978) The Human Situation. Chatto & Windus. Lomborg, B. (1998) The Skeptical Environmentalist. Cambridge University Press. Rumsfeld, D. (2002) Defense.gov News Transcript: DoD News Briefing – Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers, United States Department of Defense (defense.gov). http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636 Lakatos, I. and Musgrove, A. (Eds.) (1970) Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press. Kuhn, T. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press. Judson, H.F. (1979) The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. Penguin Books. Frazer, J. (1996 [1922]) The Golden Bough. Penguin Books. Bronowski, J. (1977) The Disestablishment of Science. In A Sense of the Future. The MIT Press. Polanyi, K. (1945) The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Victor Gollancz. Hayek, F. (1944) The Road to Serfdom. Routledge Press. Harari, Y.N. (2015) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harvill Secker. Parker, M. (2016) The Rothschild Report (1971) and the Purpose of Govern­ ment-Funded R&D – A Personal Account. Palgrave Communications, 2: 16053. doi: 10.1057/palcomms.2016.53 Gross, K. and Bergstrom, C.T. (2019) Contest Models Highlight Inefficiencies of Scientific Funding Competitions. PLoS Biology, 17(1): e3000065. doi: 10.1371/ journal.pbio.3000065 Davies, K.G. (2007) Bring Back Haldane. Science and Public Affairs: 21. Royal Soci­ ety Publishing.

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Economics and climate change To summarise my argument thus far, by the promotion of reason at the expense of imagination as a fundamental instrument in the process of knowledge acquisition, David Hume paved the way to a philosophy of sci­ ence built on Popperian principles of Conjecture and Refutation. In this con­ text, imagination had no role whatsoever, and our knowledge is built on CUSTOM (experience) alone. To William Blake, this view of knowledge was an anathema because reason and imagination in his view are paired con­ traries indispensable to the progress of knowledge. A philosophy of science that extolls the virtues of reason at the expense of imagination, and where its demarcation as a discipline lies fundamentally in the role that refutation plays, has an inbuilt inherent problem. According to Hume CUSTOM, or our knowledge born of repeated instances, in statistical parlance, probability, becomes the watchword. Indeed, as Lord Kelvin, who developed the scale named after him for measuring temperature, has said: I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowl­ edge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.1, p432 So, from where does Kelvin’s “beginning of knowledge” come? I, following Blake, would say from our IMAGINATION! Imagination is the seed from which all else follows, it is the catalyst upon which reason then operates and from which the methodology of science can be based. It is my contention that the downplaying of the role of imagination from Hume onwards has led to a particular series of problems, especially when it has had to address long-term environmental problems and the issues around climate change. The inherent problem of building scientific knowledge on pure reason is “meagre and unsatisfactory” knowledge, and we are here in the area of DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-10

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“unknown unknowns”, remains unacceptable and therefore clearly open to denial. In the cases of environmental issues and anthropological climate change, where we are running an experiment of whether or not the planet earth can support in excess of ten billion people with a “Western” quality of life, it becomes easier to sweep the problems under the carpet and not confront the issues because CUSTOM (experience) cannot exist, and what we can imagine does not count. Indeed, the case I will attempt to make in this chapter is that the issues that are confronting us today lie in our denial of the role of imagination in our scientific method, and we have been slowly sleepwalking into a series of problems, environmental, social and economic, from the commencement of the Enlightenment and the times of David Hume and Adam Smith. The initiation of the Scottish Enlightenment epitomised by the friend­ ship between Hume and Smith is profound and produced a long-lasting legacy that comes on down through the centuries to today. The legacy that manifested itself through the Industrial Revolution remade the world and continues to benefit humanity as it has rippled out across the globe. But as I have tied to show this was not without its problems as it has had its blind spots; blind spots of which Blake was clearly aware back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and these are still with us today. Scientifically, Hume’s renunciation of imagination has had profound effects on the con­ ception of scientific methodology through Karl Popper and economically the unbalanced reliance on Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations. The legacy of The Wealth of Nations eclipsed his first book on moral sentiments through influencing the writings of first Friedrich Hayek and more recently Milton Friedman. Neither of these twentieth-century economists acknowledged the role imagination can play in moral sentiments in relationship to natural capital. I believe David Hume and his dismissal of imagination was key in developing this blind spot in the Enlightenment’s mind set. As I argued in the previous chapter, part of the reason for this legacy was that the Vienna Circle and its influence of people like Popper and Hayek was because they were both reacting to the events in Nazi Germany and to its annexation of Austria. They were both quite rightly appalled by these events in Europe and the rise of totalitarianism, but fundamentally their motivation was pri­ marily sociological and political, not epistemological. But what has this got to do with climate change? At the end of the previous chapter, I  presented a scenario in which a hegemony had been created in which the all-important bottom line was based on an economic sustainability where short termism dominated and can be linked to Garrett Hardin’s essay The Tragedy of the Commons.2 This thinking can be linked back down to Malthus and his essay on population and back to the Scottish Enlightenment mentioned earlier. In other words, there is a predominance of unimaginative, or let me be less dogmatic and say less imaginative, short-term view over the more imaginative longer-term vision, and it has a singular focus on economics. The fact that Hardin’s essay

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is conceived in an agrarian context is more than interesting to me as a biolo­ gist, it should be important to all of us whether we are living in an urban or rural setting because, “there is no such thing as a post-agricultural society”,3 and in this sense, we are all connected to the land. But just as Malthus’s essay did not imagine the technical developments that came along and staved off his pessimistic predictions of population growth, today the fundamental issue of population growth on a finite planet has not gone away. Indeed, the technological developments have become increasingly pressing and increas­ ingly complex. Equally, their solution will require, in addition to economic sustainability, to bring environmental sustainability and social sustainability into the equation. Let us stop pretending, you cannot live by using all the coal, oil and gas resources that have accumulated over geological time, burn them and not expect environmental consequences. To live sustainably on a finite planet will therefore not only need all the scientific and technological imagination that can be mustered, but it will also require all our economic and political imagination, working together as one. As I have discussed earlier, the Cartesian split between mind and matter in Western civilisation that led to produce the Enlightenment and emanci­ pated it from the constraints of religion was inevitable. Inevitable, because a scientific view of the world was incompatible with the religious view that was common in Europe at that time. Nevertheless, remember the word reli­ gion means to rebind, to bring the outward manifest world (res extensa) into alignment with our inner world of cognition (res cogitans), both at the per­ sonal level of each individual and at the communal level of society. What­ ever Richard Dawkins and his ilk may say, there is no getting away from this fundamental fact of human life, and Blake understood this fact when in his letter to Thomas Butt he wrote, “May God us keep from Single vision & Newtons sleep”. The point I  cannot emphasise enough is that we need to fully reengage our creative imaginations, environmentally, socially and economically. If COVID-19 has taught us anything over the last 12 months or so, it is that nothing is cast or can be cast in a tablet of stone. Ultimately, everything is ephemeral, and I am reminded of the final words to Shelley’s poem Ozymandias about some remains of a stone statue in a desert that memorialised a long dead King: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, Ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. And our civilisation can be as ephemeral as that of Ozymandias. As discussed in Chapter 1, Shelley’s response, to what to some would be this depressing sentiment, was that of utility and that as legislators of society, poets were to paint pictures in verse that would be socially beneficial by bringing together

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reason and imagination. Although to both Shelley and Blake imagination and reason are fundamental, to Blake imagination has the edge and we have returned to a theme that runs through this book expressed by Kathleen Raine4, p9 about the confrontation between science and the imagination. My own position is that both are equally important; for imagination without reason is madness, and reason without imagination is blind, and it is within this context that Hume’s single vision, lauded by many scientists, becomes pernicious and leads to the Tragedy of the Commons in that it is through imagination that I would suggest the Tragedy of the Commons can be avoided. Falsification versus verification

Let us develop this argument further, a philosophy of science based on the Popperian approach whereby we can learn from our mistakes and sum­ marised in the phrase “Conjecture and Refutation” can be traced back to Hume and the problem of induction. It may be logically coherent and help to demarcate it from other sources of knowledge by his principle of falsifi­ cation, but it too has its blind spots. Popper’s philosophy of science, I sug­ gested in Chapter  3 and on his own admission in his autobiography, was just the starting point on which he built his political philosophy; he felt that both Marxism and fascism were enemies of the open society through their use of “Historicism” which he in turn used to refute them as legitimate political pholosophies.5, p113 To Popper, the obvious success of the scien­ tific method as an approach to knowledge was to be applied to society as an antidote to totalitarianism. To the philosophically inclined scientist his work was a breath of fresh air as they could relate to it as the backdrop to their day-to-day laboratory experience and as an intellectual approach it helped the scientist to develop and articulate clarity of thought about their research. However, it is a little disingenuous of Popper to claim “falsifica­ tion” as the crux of the criterion for demarcation that separated science from non-science. Let me explain, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which was not printed in English until 1959, builds its argument from Hume’s premise that CUS­ TOM, or repetition, and the simultaneous recurrence of cause and effect is the method by which we build our knowledge. Therefore, the argument is a statistical argument that rests on probability, indeed, the whole of Chapter 8 in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery is devoted to probability. So let us return to our Gaussian curves discussed in Chapter 4 and to our Welsh population and their height. Let us make a conjecture and from our null hypothesis state that there is no difference in height between the English and Welsh popula­ tions. We then go out and repeatedly measure some people in Wales and then the same number of people in England and calculate the mean and the variance around that mean. Our null hypothesis would say that for a perfect match the mean and the variance around that mean should have a probabil­ ity of one. In other words, there is no difference between the populations.

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But, in all likelihood, there would be a difference between the English and the Welsh, a slightly different mean or a slightly different variance around the mean. By repeatedly measuring the height of our English and Welsh populations we can improve the robustness of our statements and assign our judgements a probability. For example, in repeating these measurements 100 times in 95 cases, these data would have a mean of x and a variance of y, and in five cases they would not have a mean of x and a variance of y. In other words, the data fall within an area of uncertainty that we judge to state that the null hypoth­ esis is upheld and happy that it has not been falsified. However, there is no reason under the sun, that we could change our original conjecture from one of falsification to one of verification, that is, that there is a difference in the height of English and Welsh populations. We would repeat exactly the same measurements and alter our criteria accordingly; this time to uphold our conjecture 95 percent would not have a mean of x and a variance of y, and in five percent of cases they would have a mean of x and a variance of y. Falsifiability is not the only criterion that demarcates science; verifiability can equally be used without any loss of rigour. As Bronowski observed: [I]t invites the same privilege for the test of verification that we have just allowed to the test by falsification. We can hardly make a scheme of approximate falsification, and elevate it (in effect) to a principle of sufficient falsification, without granting the same liberty to verification. Of course verification is only provisional; but the point is that in this scheme, falsification is also only provisional.6, p87 But as practising scientists the strength of Popper’s approach is not whether or not falsification or verification is chosen as the desired criterion but the method of articulating conjectures to establish clear thinking, and this makes us better practising scientists. But, having pursued Popper thus far, it still begs the question as to the source of our conjectures. Clearly, from Popper right back to Hume, those who do not want to admit imagination into the process of science and see it as built solely on reason, presents them with several difficulties. Difficulties, I would claim, that create issues when it comes to thinking about complex problems of society, the environment and climate change. Do not forget, Popper’s development of his philosophy of science was to address larger political issues around totalitarianism, and he thought something could be learnt from science when he saw scientists working together as successful communities and solving problems. But how is it that climate change pro­ duces so much controversy?

Does anything go? If following Popper, we turn to science as a basis for a political philosophy, this begs the question as to how to address situations where CUSTOM

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cannot be applied because they reflect situations which have never before been addressed. Climate change is one such example where we are in the realm of unknown unknowns that cannot be repeated in time. Here I think we need to return to Lord Kelvin’s quotation, and his “meagre and unsatisfac­ tory kind” of knowledge and let us return to the demographic example of the height of English and Welsh populations, and for argument’s sake, let’s say there is a difference in height between them which, as we have discussed earlier, is statistically significant. I  am not going to say who is taller than who, but let’s just say there is a difference. Surely then, we have to use our imagination as to the cause of this effect of differences in height. Using our imagination is our only way forward, and although our knowledge at this stage may be of a kind that is “meagre and unsatisfactory” we have to fol­ low Feyerabend and his philosophy that “anything goes”7 together with a leap of uncompromising faith. The differences may be due to weather, due to diet, due to genetics or even due to sampling error; perhaps to the fact that the measuring of height was done rather haphazardly and the sampling in England was done in London while the sampling in Wales was done in Bangor. All these we can conjecture may play a role in this workaday example. I picked London and Bangor deliberately, because it becomes pretty obvi­ ous that London in South Eastern England with a population of some eight million is obviously not comparable to a city of 16,000 on the North Welsh coast. But, we can now follow Popper’s approach through conjecture followed by either falsification or verification depending on our wont. But whatever the result, we can still certainly learn from our mistakes and through the reiterative process of experimentation build a conceptual model of the real­ ity under investigation. It is here that the discovery, or the unveiling of realities, is taken progressively forward by the process of re-imagining and then readjusting the technical details which builds our understanding. This relates directly back to Chapter 7 and the discussion of the key role of poiēsis as envisioned in Heidegger’s essay on technology.8, pp307–341 This imaginative and creative act is universal in producing concepts, and bridges both the arts and the sciences. It is my contention that Hume’s disavowal of imagination has had a per­ nicious effect on the process of science such that illegitimate arguments that extol reason at the expense of imagination for reasons of political phi­ losophy have led to problems of legitimacy in structuring complex argu­ ments around social, environmental and economic issues. William Blake understood the consequence of such denial as a poet, as a painter and as a printer who experimented and developed his own methods. But I am rush­ ing ahead of my argument. Returning to Hume and coming forward in time, there is a tradition in British empirical philosophy that runs through to Bertrand Russell and his succinct book first published in 1912 titled The Problems of Philosophy.9 His book focused on the problems of induction, and which then led directly to the young Ludwig Wittgenstein and his book Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus10 originally published in German in 1921 and the following year in English.

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We have already discussed the later Wittgenstein, to which I will return, but his early work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was in the positivist tradi­ tion looking at the relationship between our concepts as articulated in lan­ guage and how they relate to the physical world. This is the bread and butter of science, and it is not surprising that Wittgenstein was a trained engineer, but his interests were elsewhere, and he was drawn to the foundation of mathematics. So, following a period of doing aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester, Wittgenstein made his way to Cambridge and paired up with Russell, the year before the publication of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy, where his work turned to the relationship between symbolic languages and reality which led directly to his Tractatus that con­ tained an introduction by Russell summarising the nature of the issues: He [Wittgenstein] is concerned with the conditions for accurate Sym­ bolism, i.e. for Symbolism in which a sentence “means” something quite definite. In practice, language is always more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise. Thus, logic has two problems to deal with in regard to Symbolism: (1) the conditions of sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols; (2) the conditions of uniqueness of meaning or reference in symbols or combinations of symbols. A logi­ cally perfect language has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and has single symbols which always have a definite and unique meaning. Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language.10, pX which as communicating scientists we want to symbolically map onto the physical world and articulate their interactive realities to others. The Trac­ tatus is therefore in the tradition of logical positivism, which subsequently falls into decline. In his autobiography Popper asserts that it was his Logic of Scientific Discov­ ery that “killed” the positivist approach,5, pp87–90 but, as we have seen earlier, others have been critical, not least the later Wittgenstein11, p194 when he discusses the role imagination plays, for example, in the Rabbit and Duck illusion (see Chapter 6). We have here an illustration of the individual work of our brains as we switch between our conception of rabbit and our con­ ception of duck, and those that cannot visualise one form can be taught to do so. Likewise, any new scientific discovery or conception of the world, in its first instance, is confined to the individual who makes the discovery, or following Heidegger, the revealing. At the point of discovery, the concep­ tion is personal and not public, and as science is a communal activity and any new conception needs to become socially accepted to the community of scientists at large. As Popper acknowledges (perhaps because this closely relates to Popper’s own motivation), when he states, “Even Hume, . . . who wrote the Treatise in the hope of revolutionising the social sciences”; indi­ vidual knowledge is not knowledge until it becomes human knowledge and

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that requires social acceptance and therefore necessarily a social context. Interestingly, much of Popper’s discussion in his autobiography at this point reflects his interaction with a community of philosophers called “the Vienne Circle and its spiritual father Bertrand Russell”.5, p89

Popper’s three worlds At this point, I should state that I am a realist in the sense that I believe there is a real world out there and that although my mental perceptions, or anyone else’s perceptions, cannot ever know it in its “God-like” perfection, through our individual experiences and the experience of others we can progress towards a better understanding of the nature of reality. Popper is also a real­ ist, and he divides the world into three. The physical world of objects, he calls World I; the mental world, he calls World II and lastly, a meta-physical world of human creation, World III: world 3”, the world of theories, of books, of ideas, of problems; a world which, ever since Plato – who saw it as a world of concepts – has been studied mainly by essentialist. . . . because a realist who believes in an “external world” necessarily believes in the existence of a cosmos rather than a chaos; that is, in regularities.5, p21 Science as a process leads to the growth of knowledge and as our under­ standing of the “external world” grows; so too does our understanding of the evolution of matter and its organisation through the layers of stratified stability; it is the layers of stability that create the barb in the arrow of time which prevent it from dissembling into chaos (see Chapter 4). This meta­ physical knowledge from which we build our world of concepts is not built from “ideal forms”, in any Platonic sense, but from a sense of concealed stabilities which we discover through the processes of not only the sciences but also the arts. This meta-World III also has its objective manifestation in the form of not only scientific manuscripts and books but also paintings, sculptures, musical scores and of course poetry, and here we are again back to the Heideggerian concept of poiēsis that is at the heart of the creative pro­ cess. It is in this context where the battle of ideas resides, where Dawkins’s idea of a meme,12, p202 a cultural unit upon which Darwinian selection can operate, and where new memes organised into layers of cultural stability can be imagined, evolve and are the basis upon which technology can develop. Therefore, the process by which a concept becomes accepted and useful is fundamental. Wittgenstein’s early work in the Tractatus is very Western in that it is focused on an individual Great Man of History idea of progress and is expressed vividly in Popper’s autobiography5 that he [Popper] “Killed Logical Positivism”. He undoubtedly played his part, but as I have suggested earlier, the reality is more nuanced. Indeed, the later Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations

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moves away from the essentialist relationship between symbolic language and the external world that is inherent in positivism, to one where the context is fundamental and that necessarily involves a community of interlocutors. One of Wittgenstein’s students Maurice Cornforth (1909–1980) picked up this baton and ran with it, embracing communism and Marxist thinking; eventually becoming a publisher of socialist literature for the Community Party of Great Britain. Cornforth was swept along with a Marxist idealism of how the world ought to be. Just as Blake saw a split in the human psyche between reason and imagination, there is another split in the human psyche. This later psychological split is between each human being as both a social and a solitary animal, and it creates the tension that Bronowski was drawn to as a scientist for much of his adult life; as Sandefur has observed: This question – of moral responsibilities of scientists toward society – long preoccupied Bronowski. He believed scientists were bound to exercise their own moral judgment about participation in military research and those who developed weapons or helped plan bombing raids, as he had, could not absolve themselves of the responsibility for the resulting deaths by saying that the final decisions had been those of political or military leaders. The choice to participate was ultimately the scientist’s own. Yet exactly how scientists could follow their consciences was never very clear.13, p162 The fact that Bronowski, “was never very clear”, I  believe can again be traced back to the sceptical position of David Hume and creates a type of scientific amnesia. So let’s follow Bronowski’s argument step by step, because although his thinking was in the context of military research, today’s scien­ tists, no less than he, bear moral responsibilities towards the communities in which they live.

Is does not mean ought In an essay titled “The Human Values”14 Bronowski begins with a descrip­ tion of the positivist position of the early Wittgenstein and his transformation into his later work which was analytical and more socially conscious. The relationship between the two positions can be seen as an expression of the Naturalistic fallacy in which moral distinctions cannot be derived from factual observations. In other words, factual statements about how the world is can­ not be used to determine how people ought to behave. As Bronowski says: [I]f the only criterion of true or false which we accept is one man’s, then we have no base for social agreement. The question how I “ought” to behave is a social question, which always involves several people; and if I accept no evidence and no judgement except my own, then I have no tools with which to frame an answer.

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And equally a purely communal philosophy leaves no room to discuss conduct. The community lays down what we must do, and the indi­ vidual has no other values on which to argue whether he as a person “ought” to do it.14, p207 The tension as articulated here is palpable and there is no obvious escape. So Bronowski takes the argument forward with an example from astronomy regarding the rate of expansion of the Crab nebula. The details need not concern us here, but Bronowski’s point is that to undertake such an investi­ gation requires a community of scientists, for example, instrument-makers, astronomers, nuclear physicists and a whole group of specialists, all of whom must be trusted and believed. It is a communal activity at the bottom of which lies trust that binds the community together. For Bronowski, there is an unwritten scientific social contract that: is held together by the obligation to tell the truth. Thus it follows that there is a social injunction . . . that we ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so.14, p209 From this, other human values such as independence in observation, thought and dissent must follow: Dissent in turn is a mark of freedom. That is, originality and independ­ ence are private needs of a truthful man, and dissent and freedom are public means to protect them. This is why society ought to offer the safeguard of free thought, free speech, free inquiry and tolerance; for these are needs which follow logically when men are committed to explore the truth.14, p209 It is often said that science is morally neutral, and indeed the findings of sci­ ence frequently are, or at least double-edged as discussed previously. But the process of science certainly cannot be conducted without an ethical stance, and why science as a process is evidence based and totally incompatible with what today may be classified as fake news. We are back again at Adam Smith and his concern for the role of imagination in moral sentiments. If society through science is to explore the nature of the universe and discover the layers of stratified stability that created mind out of matter, and progress in a manner whereby matter can be created out of mind, it has to have some notion of the truth and that necessarily requires values that are culturally coherent and tolerant to the fact that what I am saying, although I currently believe it to be true, may or may not turn out to be “true”. The debate must be civil or otherwise, without a certain sense of humility, everything will fall apart in cynicism, and progress is an impossibility. In the opening paragraph of this chapter, I returned to Hume’s discus­ sion on the relationship of cause and effect and his sceptical position that

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REASON was not the basis of conjoining causes to effects, but it is CUS­ TOM, or repeated observation, that is the basis of our knowledge and the guide to our actions. Interestingly, Hume uses a very similar argument per­ taining to moral arguments in which in a discussion of the role of reason he says: I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of proposi­ tions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new rela­ tion can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it.15, p481 It is in this passage that Hume articulates what becomes known as the Natu­ ralist fallacy and blames it on a slight of language in which REASON has been neglected. Happily, Bronowski’s thinking is clearly reasoned and con­ textualised when he states, “that we ought to act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so”,14, p209 and that requires a coherent system of values as outlined previously. But as I have continually stressed, Hume’s position is that only CUSTOM, or experience, can conjoin effects to causes and all else is denied. So what would Hume say about the anthropic cause of climate change? It is clear that CUSTOM, or experience, is of no help; we cannot run another experi­ ment in which the planet earth without human intervention is compared to our current planet. Nevertheless, the truth is that anthropomorphic climate change has increasingly gained social recognition, but this certainly begs the question as to the scientific status of this evidence. Clearly, as the environ­ mental climate experiment is an impossibility, it becomes a philosophical question and leads us down the timeline from Hume to the present, and Popper’s criteria of whether or not Conjecture and Refutation can be applied to anthropic climate change scenario that deserves scientific recognition. Adhering strictly to Hume and Popper’s criteria regarding climate change is problematic and adopting Feyerabend’s anything goes7 approach invites a subjectivism which is also problematic. It is my contention that, as Blake clearly understood by his critical concern of the Single Vision, the imagina­ tion is fundamental to science and to human progress. It is therefore a cru­ cial ingredient of the scientific method. Indeed, David Hume throughout his Treatise continually relies on imagination, the word crops up continually! A science solely based on reason is empty and perishes, it requires the life blood of imagination. Imagination is fundamental to the human condition and therefore fundamental to science. There is no confrontation between science and the imagination they are intimately entwined, it was Hume’s

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philosophical scepticism that sacrificed it on the altar of reason which was problematic. But equally, nor would I want to sacrifice reason on the altar of imagination either, for that would produce lunacy. As Blake well under­ stood, they are two sides of the same coin and indispensable to each other. So where does this leave the scientific status of anthropic climate change? As I have argued so far, Popper’s philosophy of science can be traced back to Hume’s scepticism, but his motivation was social in that his philosophy of science was the basis of his antidote to totalitarianism. Reading Bronowski’s essay14 on human social values it is understandable, because for science to thrive requires a set of freedoms that Popper would have applauded and sup­ ported. The democratic process with tolerance and humility are indispensa­ ble. But Hume’s scepticism regarding cause and effect also reached beyond to moral arguments where he accused moralists of irrationally affirming how we ought to behave from how we actually behave; a position he believed untenable. I suggest here that Hume’s scepticism and his disavowal of imagi­ nation has had consequences for our understanding of complex scientific issues like climate change and economics.

Economists’ blind spot Hume’s friendship with Adam Smith is key, for although it is difficult to say how much each of their intellectual work affected the other, Hume’s belief in reason, of which Blake was so critical, is more than likely to have rubbed off on Smith. Therefore, as the philosophy of Hume has affected the phi­ losophy of science with a denial of imagination through Popper, likewise, the philosophy of Smith has come down to us, amongst others, through Hayek without its moral sentiments. Smith lived at a time during which the common land was slowly but systematically being enclosed through a series of acts of Parliament, but at no point in his book on The Wealth of Nations is there any reference to the nature’s capital, he does make a reference to “natu­ ral produce”, but this is only equated to the price of labour to harvest it: As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them, and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, . . . constitutes the rent of land.16, p32 In other words, there is no concept of natural capital, value is equated purely in terms of the cost of labour. The imaginative leap that connects the rela­ tionship between natural resources and production would not be made for

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another 200 years. Human population pressure and poverty was well known in the eighteenth century, and Malthus’s Essay on Population,17 published in 1798, discusses omissions made by Smith in his enquiry into his Wealth of Nations, but natural capital was just not on the agenda. Indeed, even Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which is all about agricul­ tural sustainability (see Chapter 8), also makes no mention of it. Interest­ ingly, it was the imagination of a statistician and an advisor to the British Coal Board E. F. Schumacher (1911–1977) who first came up with the concept of “natural capital”.18 Whether or not you share Schumacher’s view that Small is Beautiful, his argument that we are deluded if we believe that we have solved the problems of production are as real today as they were when he published Small is Beau­ tiful. As a statistician working as an economist and advising the Coal Board, he was well placed to observe the developing energy crisis of the 1970s, and it was clear to him that coal represented a finite resource and as such should be regarded as capital by making the point: Far larger is the capital provided by nature and not by man – and we do not even recognise it as such. This larger part is now being used up at an alarming rate, and that is why it is absurd and suicidal error to believe, and act on the belief, that the problem of production has been solved. Let us take a closer look at this “natural capital”. . . . If we treat them as capital items, we should be concerned with their conservation.18, pp11–12 This turns Smith’s argument on its head, and although in today’s context of fossil fuels and climate change this may seem a little out of place, he was addressing issues relating to sustainability. Schumacher’s insight has ulti­ mately led to John Elkington’s concept of the triple bottom line; an approach that integrates economic, social and natural capital with sustainability and articulated in the catchphrase “Profit, People and Planet”.19 Now the point I want to make is that from the time of the Enlighten­ ment and the Industrial Revolution, Hume’s hegemony of thought and his reliance on reason and custom there has been little room for imagination, and this is at total odds with Blake’s view, which is that the imagination is a fundamental property of the universe. In August  1799, Blake writes to the Reverend Dr Trusler, who had not liked Blake’s paintings that he had commissioned, and in a letter, Blake explains how his world view informs his painting: I know that this World Is a World of imagination & Vision. I see Every thing I paint In This World, but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature

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all Ridicule and Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my propor­ tions; & Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly Mistake, when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination, & I feel Flattr’d when told so. . . . Consider what Lord Bacon says: “Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.” See Advancemt of Learning, Part 2 P. 47 of first Edition.20, pp793–794 The reference to Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) book Advancement of Learning is interesting as it was published the year following the first act of enclosure in 1605; it heralded a change in agriculture, and Bacon was seen by many as issuing forth the scientific revolution. Clearly, Bacon, as quoted by Blake, sees an interplay between imagination and reason as fundamental. It would be well into the latter part of the eighteenth century before Hume, and then Smith’s labour theory of value, would devalue imagination and promote reason as a key contributor to the revolution in science. It is my contention that the combination of Hume and Smith’s thinking contributes to the dislocation of the connection between people and their environment through a change in our relationship to knowledge. Between them they brought forth the Industrial Revolution, but they omitted the change in context from one in which, in Heideggerian terms, discovery was a thing in itself, to one in which standing-reserve takes precedence and discov­ ery is a means to an end. Paraphrasing Bacon; for Hume, “reason had judged sense over imagination”, and for Smith, “private property had judged labour over natural capital”. The logic was impeccable, but like all logic it was based on a set of assumptions and there was no leap of the imagination to see the connection between capital and nature. It would take a further 200 years before Schumacher would make that connection and understand the fact that no business would see itself as a viable enterprise, “if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital”,18 Schumacher made the imaginative connec­ tion between capital and nature. Of course, Schumacher as advisor to the Coal Board was working in the context of the 1970s energy crisis, and he changes the context of coal as a fossil fuel; it changes from being a natural resource to being natural capi­ tal, and as natural capital it was not renewable. Indeed, the whole environ­ mental movement and the debate around environmental sustainability and renewable versus non-renewable resources is kick-started during this period when the human population reaches around four billion. It was during this period that Wallace Broecker (1931–2019) of Columbia University pub­ lished a paper in the magazine Science raising the possibility that the thencurrent period of global cooling would be followed by global warming due to increase in carbon dioxide caused by burning fossil fuels.21 The Western

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world was developing rapidly and this was becoming an increasingly global phenomenon, in effect Broecker’s paper was saying you cannot extract all that sequestered carbon in the form of coal, gas and oil, burn it and not expect global warming. My point is that to address these environmental concerns around climate change we need to re-imagine and re-integrate the role played by the imagination into the scientific process. C. P. Snow had drawn attention to the problem in his Rede lecture titled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,22 and there is clearly a need to return to the Baconian integrated view of science as quoted by Blake where, “Sense sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, & Reason sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted”, and this will be the challenge the next chapter will address.

References 1) Lord Kelvin (1999 [1889]) Electrical Units and Measurement. Popular Lectures and Addresses Vol. 1. In The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Ed. Elizabeth Knowles). Oxford University Press. 2) Hardin, G. (1968) The Tragedy of the Commons. Science, 162: 1243–1248. 3) Weiskal, T. (1988) The Anthropology of Environmental Decline. Summary Statement for hearings of the Committee on Environment and Public Works. U.S. Senate. 4) Raine, K. (1991) Golgonooza City of Imagination. Golgonooza Press. 5) Popper, K. (1974) Unended Quest. Routledge. 6) Bronowski, J. (1977) Humanism and the Growth of Knowledge. In A Sense of the Future (Eds. Piero E. Ariotti and Rita Bronowski). MIT Press. 7) Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against Method. Verso. 8) Heidegger, M. (1993) The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings Martin Heidegger (Ed. David Farrell Krell). Routledge. 9) Russell, B. (1912) The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford University Press. 10) Wittgenstein, L. (2001 [1922]) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Routledge Classics. 11) Wittgenstein, L. (1995 [1953]) Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell. 12) Dawkins, R. (1976) The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press. 13) Sandefur, T. (2019) The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski. Prometheus Books, p. 162. 14) Bronowski, J. (1977) The Human Values. In A Sense of the Future (Eds. Piero E. Ariotti and Rita Bronowski). MIT Press, pp. 206–210. 15) Hume, D. (2016 [1739–40]) Book III Section I: Moral Distinctions Not deriv’d From Reason. Treatise of Human Nature. Anboco Kindle Edition. 16) Smith, A. (1776) An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. A Public Domain Book. 17) Malthus, R. (1798) Population: The First Essay. The University of Michigan Press. 18) Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small Is Beautiful. Blond & Briggs Ltd. 19) Elkington, J. (2009) Triple Bottom Line. The Economist, 17 November. https:// www.economist.com/news/2009/11/17/triple-bottom-line 20) Keynes, G. (1972) Blake Complete Writings. Oxford University Press. 21) Broecker, W.S. (1975) Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of Pronounced Global Warming? Science, 189: 460–463. 22) Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge Univer­ sity Press.

11 Reawakening Newton

Re-imagining reason If you have followed my argument this far you will understand my line of thought regarding the relationship between reason and imagination. Now, I want to reassert the role of imagination in contradiction to Hume’s posi­ tion that there is no logic to conjoining a particular cause with a particular effect other than by CUSTOM. I want to address the problem in regard to anthropomorphic climate change, which cannot be informed by experi­ ment using Conjecture and Refutation à la Popper. However, much as we may wish to be led by the scientific method the issue of the planet sustaining nine or ten billion people there is no way in which CUSTOM can play a formal scientific role. Or at least have a role in which climate change deniers never have a get out clause. Due to Hume’s scepticism, any scientist can argue that just because there is a correlation between human population and carbon dioxide does not imply that one causes the other. The credo that correlation does not mean causation stands at the heart of the matter as a logical scientific truth, and therefore for arguments concerning anthropic climate change, this truth that correlation does not imply causation becomes logically impos­ sible to deny. In the previous chapter I advocated the reintroduction of human imagi­ nation as a possible antidote to the problem of induction, but it was not only Hume who denigrated imagination, Hume’s friend and academic col­ league Adam Smith had also equally castigated imagination. In his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments there is a whole section subtitled “Habit of the Imagination” in which the overall sentiment is to denigrate imagina­ tion, stating: Even of the passions derived from the imagination, . . . though they may be acknowledged to be perfectly natural, are, however, but little sympathised with. The imaginations of mankind, not having acquired that particular turn, cannot enter into them; and such passions, though they may be allowed to be almost unavoidable in some part of life, are always in some measure ridiculous.1, p28 DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-11

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Statements like this gave imagination a bad name. It is on the narrow Single Vision in which imagination is disenfranchised that led Kenneth Clark, in his essay “Smile of Reason”,2, p171 to proclaim that Enlightenment philosophy, at the heart of which stands the sovereignty of reason, produced the revolution in France, independence in America and the Industrial Revolution across the Channel in Britain. This Enlightenment philosophy has been regarded posi­ tively ever since. And although politically Blake was a supporter of the revo­ lution in both France and America with their republican overtones, he was supercritical of the Single Vision and indeed, in his letter to Thomas Butts dated 22 November 1802, he appends a poem which finishes with the famous lines: Now I a fourfold vision see, And a fourfold vision is given to me; ‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight And threefold in soft Beulah’s night And twofold Always. May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!3, p818 But let me not get too carried away; there are many aspects of the scientific enterprise which have been totally positive, that I could not and would not want to deny. But that is not to say, like every human endeavour, it does not have its blind spots, and the sovereignty of reason is one of them. As Bronowski unsurprisingly pointed out: We are still in the middle of the Industrial Revolution; we had better be, for we have many things to put right. But it has made our world richer, smaller, and for the first time ours. And I mean that literally: our world, everybody’s world.4, p286 The Anthropocene is here. And metaphorically speaking, Blake is pointing out that although monochromatic vision is useful, multichromatic vision is better. We must not remove the lens of reason, but we do need a multichro­ matic view if we are to deal with important subjects like the environment. One of the strengths of the Enlightenment was that it spoke truth to power, and the intellectual power at that time was the Church. The Enlightenment exposed the Church’s superstitious nonsense and replaced the idea of provi­ dence with the idea of progress (see Chapter 2). But the fact that it took until the second half of the twentieth century, over 200 years, before the writings by the likes of Garrett Hardin and E. F. Schumacher brought forth the concepts of an area of land being viewed as natural capital, and of that of a finite area as having a carrying capacity, or a maximal population of people that it can support in a sustainable manner, suggests that progress too is not without its blind spots. If we are to retain some notional idea of progress in which there is a barb in the arrow of time that stops it running backwards again (see Chapter 4),

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there cannot be any progress without intellectual progress which, following Blake’s idea of contraries, rests on imagination and reason working together as one. It thereby identifies through discovery, or Heideggerian revealing, new configurations of stratified stability, not as means to an end but as ends in themselves. Here lie the new layers of stratified stability in which the human mind brings into being a new manifest world of human creation (see Chapter 6) and to quote Bronowski at the beginning of the Ascent of Man: Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them. He is not a figure in the landscape – he is a shaper of the landscape. In body and in mind he is an explorer of nature, the ubiquitous animal, who did not find but has made his home in every continent.4, p19 If ever there was a time to mark the birth of the Anthropocene, arguably, it could be traced back to the beginning of the Enlightenment and associated with the idea of progress replacing the idea of providence; the time when mind starts creating matter, Homo faber is born and the means of production is industrialised. Here we must proceed with caution because we are discussing new layers of stratified stability as creations of the human mind and must distinguish the hard sciences, such physics, chemistry and biology where objectivity is relatively easy to determine, from the soft sciences, sociology, economics and politics, where the boundaries between subject and object can become increasingly blurred. As discussed earlier in Chapter 3, the role of judgement in science is key, and that science, as an activity, is always having to judge the relevant from the irrelevant. This is particularly imperative when it comes to environmental science where biology, ecology, sociology, economics all col­ lide, making a political maelstrom. Take for example the period around the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the release of genetically modi­ fied crops caused a political furore initially highlighted by the HRH the Prince of Wales and then broadcast by the media it came down to the man and woman in the high street, it set organic farmers against the seed com­ panies and agribusinesses and the religious against the irreligious.5 Here was a new scientific technology in which the number of stakeholders increased dramatically and where the issues became increasingly complex,6 where “the figure in the landscape” has become the “shaper of the landscape”,4, p19 and from Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in the 1960s, amongst others as I have discussed, the political ideology of the green movement was born. Around the time of the initiation of the green movement, John Passmore (1914–2004) in his book Man’s Responsibility for Nature7 tries to make sense of this new political impulse and makes the distinction between ecological problems and the problems of ecology by philosophically dissecting the histori­ cal context of the Western tradition towards nature. He traces this back to Genesis where he sees its message as despotic and exploitative. But he sees

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another vein of thought in Western thinking related to nature-mysticism that would naturally include the poets Blake and Wordsworth in Britain but also writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) in the United States. These writers convey the mes­ sage that sees people as stewards of nature where they play the role of, “a farm manager,” and “can be called to account if he wilfully or carelessly degrades the earth’s resources.”7, p30 This view Passmore can trace back to the time of Plato, but in modern times he sees it as sympathetic to the increas­ ing concerns over the environment. He sees these issues as fundamentally philosophical and metaphysical that require a change in scientific attitude from one: for which man is the sole finite agent and nature a vast system of machines for man to use and modify as he pleases. That is the meta­ physics the ecologists are particularly, and rightly, rejecting. But this metaphysics by no means constitutes the entire Western tradition. Nor, as we shall see, does its rejection entail the rejection of the science with which it has so often been associated.7, p27 Passmore as a philosopher was also an expert on David Hume, and I have been previously stressing Hume’s disconcerting scepticism and his view of our logical inability to connect cause to effects. In a question posed by the philosopher Brian Magee (1930–2019) in a television interview about Hume, Passmore’s response is interesting, and I quote the passage almost in its entirety: He [Hume] is particularly disconcerting to those very many people, whether they are scientists or humanists, who are firmly convinced that there is no room for imagination in science – a view often encouraged rather than discouraged by school science courses. Such people believe that while it takes a great deal of imagination to write a novel or paint a picture or direct a film, science is just a matter of looking to see what happens when you conduct an experiment, making calculations on the basis of these controlled observations, and then churning out a scientific generalisation. This, of course, is nonsense. . . . Any of the great discov­ eries, or even relatively minor discoveries of principles, needs not only careful experimenting and careful reasoning but flights of the imagi­ nation. As Hume’s thinking develops in his Treatise the imagination, which is at first defined as nothing more than the capacity to have rela­ tively faint images of complexes we have not actually perceived – rela­ tively faint, that is, when contrasted with memory – comes to assume an ever more central and creative role. Even our most ordinary obser­ vations of the world around us turn out, on Hume’s view, to involve an exercise of the imagination. We do not just passively perceive the world around us. If we did, we should be confined to a mere sequence of

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sensations. We perceive things as distinct from sensations only because our imagination is constantly active.8, p167 These views of Passmore’s regarding Hume are somewhat heterodox when compared to the more usual Enlightenment position in which reason is portrayed as sovereign. However, to Blake they would be entirely familiar as he saw imagination and reason conjoined together as contraries that are fundamental to progress.

Enlightenment’s blind spot It is my contention that the Enlightenment philosophy that has disenfran­ chised imagination and therefore allowed experience to be the sole arbitra­ tor of knowledge creates a blind spot when it comes to evidence-based scientific research where experience is not possible. This is the case of environmental concerns due to their long-term irreplicable nature. As has been previously argued,9, p30 ecological problems, which primarily are scientific issues, become increasingly complicated by their social and political natures. This, I have suggested elsewhere, creates tensions5,6 that necessarily will rely on the conjoined application of imagination and reason to address. Let us bring the discussion right up to date; Greta Thunberg, the young climate change activist, has urged us to unite behind the science, but that may not necessarily be as easy as it may sound, as she says: To solve this problem, we first need to understand it – and to under­ stand the fact that the problem itself is by definition a series of inter­ connected problems. We need to lay out the facts and tell it like it is. Science is a tool, and we all need to learn how to use it.10, p2 As the roll-out of policy dealing with the pandemic virus COVID-19 has aptly demonstrated, are you talking about medical science, social science, economic science or ecological science where political decisions are all based on “the science”, but which are not necessarily always aligned, and some form of social and political compromise becomes inevitable? This begs the question, is it possible to re-enfranchise imagination while retaining objective realism without falling into either idealism or relativism? The growth of science is a communal activity and intimately connected, as has been highlighted in our discussion of Heidegger, with technology, which in turn combines fabrication with poiēsis, standing-reserve and how these are enframed (see Chapter 7). But, as the decision processes of dealing with COVID-19 has shown, this is where objective science meets the social and economic sciences, and their interaction becomes poignantly politi­ cal and confusingly complex. Therefore, on the one side, we have Science aligned to nature, objective realism and wedded to reason, and on the other, the human sciences which are subjective, compromised by relativism and

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are therefore a social construction. There are similarities here that can be traced back to Plato’s allegory of the cave which was discussed in relation­ ship to Dennett’s Cartesian Theatre (see Chapter 6). Here Dennett’s multiple drafts model of consciousness posits subjective experience to be no more than an epiphenomenon, or a Ghost in the Machine to use Ryle’s termi­ nology, aligned to material Science, objective realism and reason. This was Blake’s “single vision” that put Newton to sleep and to which he took issue. It is my hypothesis that the disenfranchisement of imagination is partly to blame for the current environmental crisis to which we have only recently awoken, and it is therefore of increasing importance to see if the dichotomy can be avoided. Here, I am going to build on the work of the French phi­ losopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (b. 1947) and his studies in science and technology. In his book Politics of Nature Latour, while acknowledging the growing environmental concerns of the last half century or so, notes the “stagnation” of the environmental movements that have advocated a novel politics based around ecology or what he calls, “political ecology”. However, his argu­ ment hinges on some technical definitions which are carefully constructed in which human society must sever the link to the natural world and “let go of nature”. To Latour, “political ecology” is no different from “scientific ecology”; “it is built on the model of (but in opposition to) political econ­ omy”, and he builds on democratic principles by which he attempts to steer a path between, on the one side, objective Science aligned to Nature whilst maintaining the sovereignty of reason, and on the other, subjective human sciences aligned to relativism and is socially constructed. Indeed, Latour maintains that each of these, “organizes public life into two houses” similar to Plato’s cave allegory where: The first is the obscure room depicted by Plato, in which ignorant peo­ ple find themselves in chains, unable to look directly at one another, communicating only via fictions projected on a sort of movie screen; the second is located outside, in a world made up not of humans but of nonhumans, indifferent to our quarrels, our ignorances, and the limits of our representations and fictions. The genius of the model stems from the role played by a small number of persons, the only ones capable of going back and forth between the two assemblies and converting the authority of the one into that of the other. Despite the fascination exercised by Ideas . . . it is not at all a question of opposing the shadow world to the real world, but of redistributing powers by inventing both a certain definition of Science and a certain definition of politics. . . . The myth of the Cave makes it possible to render all democracy impossible by neutralizing it.11, pp13–14 In this model, power is given to those few who can move backwards and forwards between the two houses and can operate as the grey eminence, the

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brokers behind the throne. They are of course the scientists who in one house can explore the world of non-human objects as things in themselves, and call it “NATURE” in the singular, by doing “Science” also in the sin­ gular. These privileged few can then return to the other house, “politics” and become oracles. This undemocratic state of affairs, where Latour sees NATURE, NONHUMAN and SCIENCE are aligned but divorced from SOCIETY, HUMANS and POLITICS which encompasses plurality, he finds unacceptable and wants to reconfigure these assemblages and redis­ tribute the political power by removing the idea of NATURE and what is natural. It is Latour’s opinion that “the two conjoined powers of nature and politics” need to be “secularized”, indeed he claims: The philosophy of ecology. . . . Even when it challenges nature, it never calls the unity of nature into question. . . . As long as (political) episte­ mology is taken seriously, that is, as long as the practice of sciences and the practice of politics are not treated with equal interest, nature appears precisely not as a power of assembling equal or superior to that of poli­ tics. . . . How can it justify the use of the singular “nature in general”? Why does it not present itself as a multiplicity?11, p30 Latour’s solution is simple. He secularises it by merely substituting the plural for the singular, “nature” becomes “natures”. He claims it becomes “impos­ sible to make natures [my italics] play any political role whatsoever.” However, there is a problem here that Latour openly recognises in that once natures, in the plural, is legitimised it is open to the criticism of being a “social con­ struction” and thereby undermining its own epistemological truth. We are back in Plato’s cave together with the thorny issues around dualism between realism and idealism, between nature and society. Having returned to that schism between mind and matter that Latour traces back to Plato and was further inflicted on us by Descartes and devel­ oped through time by Hume, Kant and on down to Popper, Latour’s answer to this dilemma is to subdivide epistemological concerns into two. One, he calls “(political) epistemology” [with parentheses] that refers to, “engaging in politics in a way that is protected from all politics”, and two, “political epistemology” [no parentheses] referring to, “the analysis of the explicit distribution of powers between sciences and politics in the framework of the Constitution”, where the term Constitution is new in that it “refers to the division of beings into humans and nonhumans, objects and subjects, and to the type of power and ability to speak, man­ date, and will that they receive.”11, pp54–56 We have basically returned to the issues discussed in Chapter 9 in respect to the Haldane Principle and the Rothschild report in which the former maintained an explicit arm’s­ length distance between the scientist and the application of their work, in contrast to the Rothschild report where there is an unequivocal link made between scientists working to fulfil the “customers” requirements. In the

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former the scientist is autonomous, independent and can speak truth to power while in the latter the power rests with the customer who is paying the bill. But has this solved the accusation of reality being no more than a social construction? I think not! Latour’s solution is based on pluralising the universe, nature becomes “natures” and science becomes “sciences”. Here, Latour distin­ guishes between the “social world as prison”, that is, Plato’s cave, and what he calls the “social world as association”, and while this may be all very well when we look at the diversity of the sciences, each with its own coherent view of the world and each with its own professional bodies and associa­ tions, it negates the fact that in a pluralistic universe where there is no one correct logic you can prove anything and that makes it next to useless. As we saw in Chapter 4, where Bronowski recounts the story about Bertrand Rus­ sell regarding axiomatic mathematical propositions, that in summary says, “if a system is inconsistent, it can prove anything” that is what is at issue with pluralising the universe; the whole edifice falls apart. Latour would accuse me of (political) epistemology, or less politely, I  have become the “epistemology police” (i.e., a bully), espousing views that link directly to the realism based on the principles of the Scottish Enlightenment and David Hume. We are caught in an impasse between realism, idealism and politics. Is there a way out?

A physicist’s view First, let’s explore further the dualistic relationship between realism and ide­ alism. In his essay titled “Physics and Reality”, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) addresses this very problem12, pp290–323 and starts from the proposition that sci­ ence is no more than a formalised version of everyday thinking where the “real external world” (res extensa) is made from our sense impressions by the formation of mental concepts of bodily objects (res cogitans) but which are “not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to” but each is “a free creation of the human (or animal) mind.” Indeed: These notions and relations, although free mental creations, appear to us as stronger and more unalterable than the individual sense experience itself, the character of which as anything other than the result of an illusion or hallucination is never completely guaranteed. . . . [but] have justification only so far as they are connected with sense impressions between which they form a mental connection. This very fact that the totality of our sense experiences . . . can be put in order, .  .  . is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.” It is one of the great realisations of Immanuel Kant that the postulation of a real external world would be senseless without this comprehensibility.

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The connection of the elementary concepts of everyday thinking with complexes of sense experiences can only be comprehended intui­ tively and it is unadaptable to scientifically logical fixation.12, pp291–292 Einstein readily acknowledges in the statement above that our conception of the world can only be “comprehended intuitively” and that a priori reason cannot be applied. But that certainly does not mean that a priori reason, our ability to construct axiomatic propositions, is not also a property of mind. Have we here not returned to Blake’s position in which without contraries there is no progress, whereby “intuition” or in Blake’s view “imagination” works together in tandem with reason in which our ability to reason is also a property of imagination? Can I demonstrate this simply by a thought experiment? Let’s take the simplest and most powerful of all propositions, one plus one equals two. No one would contest this proposition, but let’s return to the reasoning of Lord Kelvin at the beginning of our previous chapter and his sentiment that you can only know something about something if you can measure it and express it in numbers. So, one apple plus one apple equals two apples! Simple no problem here, or is there? If I  visit my laboratory and get my most accurate electronic scales for measuring weight, I would nearly most certainly show that those two apples are not of equal weight. Only in the mind that makes abstractions, res cogitans, does one plus one equal two. In the “real world” out there, res extensa, it almost certainly will not be the case. We are back to the Gaussian curve we discussed in Chapter 4 where in the “real world” each measurement can be mapped onto areas of uncertainty which described the spread of readings around a mean. But as social beings we understand each other when we talk about apples even though some of us may not be able to distinguish between red apples and green apples (see the discussion of consciousness and colour blindness Chapters 5 and 6). It is interesting that Einstein, as quoted earlier, did not distinguish between the human or the animal mind, and indeed, although we recognise that not all of us in our mind’s eye (res cogitans) experience the same thing, and a cat will recognise a “mouse” as well as I recognise a “mouse” even though the cat’s experience will be different from my experience, and your experience as the reader. Second, these issues between res extensa and res cogitans and how as people we can comprehend, as both individuals and socially, and lay bare the politi­ cal problems outlined by Latour around science as the exploration of things as themselves, and as science as a social construction. Science is unquestion­ ably an exploration of nature, but I would maintain it has an agenda, or at least a rule of engagement, in which science is the exploration of the unity of nature in the diversity of nature by which we, as a part of nature and not separate from nature, seek new layers of stratified stability. We are back again at Blake’s view of the world by which progress is taken forward by contraries; this time, unity and diversity, and Latour’s solution of simply pluralising the

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singular is unacceptable. However, as social animals we are political crea­ tures and Latour suggests that secularisation is essential for this process and we need to abandon “the impossible dream of a higher transcendence that would miraculously simplify the problems of common life.”11, p89 I  would agree with Latour that we need to abandon miracles, but this does not mean that we should abandon intuition or imagination and condemn them to the sovereignty of reason or to social construction. They need to be reinstated at the heart of the scientific process, aligned to Einstein the scientist and Blake the poet alike, and reconnecting through the process of poiēsis out­ lined by the philosophy of Heidegger.

Res publica Returning to Latour. He suggests an interesting idea in his Politics of Nature that may help in our thinking. He develops the notion of “the collective” which he sees as an association between humans and non-humans and brings these two together by the co-option of the word “Republic”.11, p54 Just as I have been referring throughout these essays to res extensa and res cogitans, he sees a realm of “res publica”, the “public thing”. It is therefore interesting to integrate these realms and develop a Fourfold image that inte­ grates res cogitans, res extensa and res publica through the addition of imagina­ tion as the fourth realm (Figure 11.1). In other words, we have developed a modern disestablished model of Blake’s Fourfold vision which sits within an unmanifested universe of potential layers of as yet unmanifest layers of strati­ fied stability in which imagination sits as the source of creativity and reason and through which new developmental forms of manifest progression are possible. Latour’s concept of res publica is important as it is a collection of human and non-human entities and, if I have understood him correctly, this col­ lective runs from the simplest procaryotic bacterium, through to the most complex of organisms, including ourselves, all of which occupy very differ­ ent ecological niches and make up very different ecological communities. Whereas in Figure 11.1 I refer to res extensa and res cogitans Latour uses the terms primary qualities and secondary qualities, but his agenda is to harness ecology and apply it to the institutions of public life. I am not saying that this is not an interesting experiment; indeed, Latour’s view is inescapable, and he emphasises this formally by calling it “experimental metaphysics”, but with its focus on the collective and the importance of institutions and their requirement of “closure” it cannot avoid social construction. Latour’s reality, or the truth, is socially constructed in respect to utility and the common good within the realm of res publica. It is interesting here to reflect on a phrase from Blake’s Proverbs of Hell in which he says, “Where man is not nature is barren”, which suggests an egotistical or anthropocentric view, which Latour would presumably applaud, as he wants to “Let go of Nature” and domesticate it.

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Figure 11.1 Fourfold model of the universe consisting of the realms of RES EXTENSA, the physical world; RES COGITANS, the world of mind; RES PUBLICA, the collective world of humans and non-humans; all brought together and integrated by IMAGINATION occupying the central core (this Fourfold model can be rotated with any of the four realms occupying the central core); the Fourfold model is manifest within an unmanifest universe of potential layers of stratified stability Source: (Drawn by author).

Although this domestication of nature is at the heart of humans being the shaper of the landscape and not just the figure within it, our understanding of the laws of nature (see Chapter 3) is to do with our understanding of the world as if we are not there as observers, and although this is an impossibility as we are also part of nature, it is nonetheless something as scientists we aim by making judgements about the relevant and the irrelevant (see Chapter 3). Epistemologically, we are back at the crux of the issue thrown into tur­ moil by Hume, whose “single vision” Kant had criticised but has remained unresolved to the present day, in how to integrate mind and matter. If we

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accept Blake’s Fourfold approach and reinstate “imagination” as a source of inspiration and creativity tempered by reason, that is, a scientific approach of establishing unity in diversity, then we are in a position not only to describe the world as we know it but also to reveal through poiēsis new layers of stratified stability that establishes a barb in the arrow of time and through which “progress” can be enabled. To this model I have incorporated Latour’s notion of “res publica” (Figure 11.1) as a way by which an individual’s crea­ tive idea, through the method of science and starts as heresy, can become an approach as outlined by Latour, end in acceptance as institutional closure. Through the process of science and technology we begin with a creative idea, act and finish with knowledge, or, as Blake articulated more simply and more profoundly, “What is now proved was once only imagin’d”. By put­ ting imagination at the heart of our model it integrates and binds together mind and matter in each individual and through them to their community. This is not a closed system; it is open and creative because imagination is an emergent neuronal phenomenon, in consciousness continually active, which from the most tentative neuronal associations can become hardwired, “neurones that fire together get wired together” and strengthened through neuronal Darwinian selection (see Chapter 5). Both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett have been proponents of Darwin’s evolutionary thinking for over half the last century or so combined with being ardent critics of religion. In Dawkins’s most fierce attack The God Delusion,13 a cornerstone to his argument rests on Paley’s argument for God from design, the role of miracles and the mathematics of probability in religious belief, a subject that was also close to the heart of David Hume, who wrote: A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalter­ able experience has established these laws, the case against a miracle is – just because it is a miracle – as complete as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.14, p122 Both Dawkins and Dennett follow the same trajectory of thought denying God the possibility to jump-start the evolutionary process: an un-rebuttable refutation, as devastating today as when Philo used it to trounce Cleanthes in Hume’s Dialogues two centuries earlier. A sky­ hook would at best simply postpone the solution to the problem, but Hume couldn’t think of any cranes, so he caved in.15, p155 It is noteworthy here to draw attention to Hume’s use of the word “imag­ ined” and Dennett’s use of the word “skyhook” as these are central to our discussion. Hume’s Single Vision rested on reason and he had disenfran­ chised imagination, however in his statement about “a miracle” being “a violation of the laws of nature” he immediately appeals to the one thing

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he illegitimated, imagination. The “skyhook” was there all the way from the start, Hume removed it and materialised the universe. And Blake knew it! In modern parlance, we have returned to Dennett’s Cartesian Theatre and his School of Unconsciousness (see Chapter 6). Despite Dennett’s materialism let’s return briefly to Dawkins’s God Delu­ sion and his onslaught against religion. In this book, he discusses the percep­ tions of animals, revisiting a theme in his book The Blind Watchmaker, where he compares the world perceived by a bat through echolocation to those of other animals such as a dog or rhinoceros the perceptions of which are dominated by smell and ourselves whose perception is highly sight depend­ ent. Let’s follow Dawkins’s own words: [T]he perceptions we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues – what phi­ losophers call qualia – have no intrinsic connection with lights of par­ ticular wavelengths. They are internal labels that are available to the brain, when it constructs its model of external reality, to make distinc­ tions that are especially salient to the animal concerned. In our case, or that of a bird, that means light of different wavelengths. In a bat’s case, I have speculated, it might be surfaces of different echoic properties or textures, perhaps red for shiny, blue for velvety, green for abrasive. And in a dog’s or rhino’s case, why should it not be smells? The power to imagine the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle, is one of the privileges science grants.13, p373 Now the discussion of qualia surfaces in Chapter 6 and, although Dennett is suspicious of them, they are clearly important in perception, but does “sci­ ence” do the granting? Or does the ability “to imagine” do the granting? Looking at the above statement I fully concur with Dawkins’s view outlined earlier, but picking out some key phrases in the previous paragraph we can map Dawkins’s model onto Figure  11.1; hence, “internal labels that are available to the brain”, represents res cogitans; “external reality”, represents res extensa; “the alien world of a bat or a rhino, a pond skater, or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle” are represented by res publica, and they are all brought together by “the power to imagine”. Dawkins’s statement is totally coherent with the core components of Figure 11.1, at the centre of which stands imagination. If we trace the Latin root of the word religion, it comes from religare “to bind” and at the heart of Figure  11.1 stands imagination which is doing all the heavy lifting and binding the different realms together. From this perspective, I can only conclude that Dawkins the scientist is reli­ gious. It was when Hume disenfranchised imagination did the whole thing fall apart, and I am reminded of W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming: Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? I will not analyse the poem in detail but suffice it to say Yeats takes us back 2,000 years to Mesopotamia, the birth of Christianity and to the sentiments expressed by the loss of faith that followed the end of the First World War. But the poem also speaks to the modern reader whose apocalyptic views express a concern around the environment and climate change that similarly call for a change of values. I have made the case that Enlightenment think­ ing, based on the sovereignty of reason and the removal of imagination, has created a blind spot because Hume’s dictum that causes cannot be con­ joined to effects without the necessary experience (i.e., repetition), creates a problem when it comes to situations like anthropomorphic climate change because the repetitive element of the scientific process is impossible to do (see Chapter 10). It therefore requires arguments that can be carried forward only on the back of imagination that embraces the realm of res publica with all its different stakeholders which include not only humankind and their different communities and cultures but also, using Dawkins’s list, “a bat or a rhino, a pond skater or a mole, a bacterium or a bark beetle” and their associated ecologies. The exposition of res publica by Latour with all its different stakehold­ ers that encompass both humans and non-humans is problematic for him because he does not accept that appeal to Nature in the singular, whereby the “practice of science” takes precedence over the “practice of politics”.11, p30 But as we discussed earlier, the minute you allow Nature in its plural form undermines the coherence of scientific propositions because it becomes

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merely a social construction through which anything can be proved. So, let’s return to Dawkins’s statement and his view that “the perceptions we call colours are tools used by our brains to label important distinctions in the outside world. Perceived hues – what philosophers call qualia – have no intrinsic connection with lights of particular wavelengths”, and as discussed in Chapter 6, although each perception, or quale (the singular of qualia), will be different between different people and animals, as their brains have experienced the ecology of different external environments and are there­ fore wired differently. But in these experiences, they are perceiving a prod­ uct of the stratified layers of the manifest universe, which is real, that is, part of res extensa. For example, water collectively made up of two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule that an animal, or you or I might drink, has a set of properties that form ice crystals at sea level at zero degrees cen­ tigrade and boils into gas at 100 degrees centigrade. These properties are constants that remain as a property of nature whether an animal, or you, or I, or even a plant is present or not. It is not a social construction; it is a stratified layer of stability governed by the laws of nature. The reason why our perceptions of external reality appear to all intents and purposes so immediate and “real”, as “things in themselves” to use Kant’s phrase, is that our brains through natural selection have focused the brain’s development in this particular way because it has been necessary for survival and in which imagination is an emergent and central property of mind and matter that integrates our perceptions. However, returning to Figure 11.1 and my disestablished Fourfold model, it is apparent that res cogitans, res extensa and res publica are each a realm of being codependent on each other and at the centre of which lies imagina­ tion, engendered through the contrary impulses of inspirational creativity and reason. The new realm brought to this model by Latour needs unpack­ ing in a manner that retains the human and the non-human as governed by the laws of nature on the one hand but also retains the human social and political elements within res publica. Focusing on the purely human elements of this from an epistemic position, any new knowledge that is revealed, or that an individual has brought forth through poiēsis following Heidegger’s terminology, if it is to be built upon and used by others it needs to enter the public domain. The knowledge needs to pass from the solitary indi­ vidual to the social community, and it is quite clear that different human communities will have their own Fourfold models. Speaking as a scientist educated through an evolutionary approach to agriculture16 it seems clear to me that a hunter-gatherer will have a very different Fourfold model to a nomadic pastoralist, who again will have a very different Fourfold model to a farmer who practices intensive agriculture and so on. As agricultural prac­ tices have evolved the number of people that a finite area of land can sus­ tain has increased. Indeed, modernity today rests on maintaining our huge megacities and the Fourfold model, built as it is on fossil fuels, has passed its sell-by-date, and we need a new model if all is not to fall apart. Yeats’s

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poem I quoted earlier suggests “The Second Coming”, but I do not believe in Second Comings; we are going to have to rely on our own imaginations to work this one out. This challenge will be addressed in the final chapter.

References 1) Smith, A. (2006 [1790]) The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Dover Philosophical Classics.

2) Clark, K. (1969) Civilization. BBC Publishing.

3) Keynes, G. (1966) Blake Complete Writings (Ed. Geoffrey Keynes). Oxford Univer­ sity Press. 4) Bronowski, J. (1973) The Ascent of Man. BBC Publications, p. 19. 5) Davies, K.G. (2001) What Makes Genetically Modified Organisms So Distasteful. Trends in Biotechnology, 19: 424–427. doi: 10.1016/S0167–7799(01)01767-X 6) Davies, K.G. and Wolf-Phillips, J. (2006) Scientific Citizenship and Good Gov­ ernance: Implications for Biotechnology. Trends in Biotechnology, 24: 57–61. doi: 10.1016/j.tibtech.2005.12.007. 7) Passmore, J. (1974) Man’s Responsibility for Nature. Duckworth. 8) Magee, B. (1988) Hume: Dialogue with John Passmore. In The Great Philosophers: An Introduction to Western Philosophy. Oxford University Press, p. 167. 9) Ashby, E. (1977) Reconciling Man With the Environment. Oxford University Press, p. 30. 10) Thunberg, G. (2022) The Climate Book. Penguin. 11) Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy. Harvard University Press. 12) Einstein, A. (1954 [1936]) Physics and Reality. In Ideas and Opinions. New transla­ tions Sonja Bargmann. Bonanza Books. 13) Dawkins, R. (2006) The God Delusion. Bantam Press. 14) Hume, D. (1977) An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Ed. Charles W. Hen­ del). Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. 15) Dennett, D.C. (1995) Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. Penguin Books. 16) Grigg, D.B. (1974) The Agricultural Systems of the World: An Evolutionary Approach. Cambridge University Press.

12 Where do we go from here?

Politics of nature In Chapter 1, I began this series of essays discussing Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Godwin’s European tour that took them to the Chamonix Valley in the summer of 1816 and was published the following year as a travelogue. On 25 July, they report visiting the Mere de Glace, one of the Alps’ largest glaciers, and I cannot help but think how different it would look to them today. They travelled to the glacier by mule, but today’s tourist can take a lift and in 1988, three steps down from the lift, and they would have been on the glacier. Such is the glacier’s retreat that in 2019 the visitor would have needed to descend some 580 steps before it was reached. In Shelley’s day travel was for the few, but today it is a huge industry, or it was before the COVID-19 pandemic had had its effects. Recently, UNESCO reported that several glaciers that had been given World Heritage status are retreating due to climate change and would disappear by 2050.1 The Berlin Wall was built during the early 1960s and 28 years later, 1989, it fell when the iron curtain gates were opened which marked the beginning of the fall of communism in Eastern and Central Europe. Projecting three decades forward brings one up to the present and during this intervening period we have witnessed an increase in economic “deregulation” allied to “globalisation” all of which has been sustained by a global economy built on fossil fuel that has concomitantly fuelled anthropogenic climate change. The war in Ukraine has shone a light on Europe’s dependence on the importa­ tion of gas from Russia, and this has been felt to a greater or lesser extent on everyone’s pocket. Consequently, this has made us all acutely aware of our major dependency on fossil energy. For a minority from the mid-1960s onwards this has also been the period of environmental concern which has been the backdrop throughout this series of chapter but which today has become an increasingly daily news item. In the previous chapter I discussed the work of Bruno Latour, who wrote a book addressing the Politics of Nature in which he developed a view that the “green” movements had stag­ nated and not managed to deliver solutions to the environmental concerns they espoused. Most recently, Latour has engaged further with his concerns DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-12

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and argued that both “deregulation” and “globalisation”, as phenomena, have produced increases in inequalities that are linked to the denial of cli­ mate change in which: The obscurantist elites, . . . have concluded that their dominance was threatened and have decided to dismantle the ideology of a planet shared by all; they have understood that such an abandonment could under no circumstances be made public, and consequently that scientific knowl­ edge that underlay their whole movement would have to be obliterated under the conditions of the greatest secrecy – all this in the course of the last 30–40 years.2, p21 Admittedly, he thinks this quotation sounds like a conspiracy theory, and he draws attention to the fact that since the election of Donald Trump (b. 1946) in 2016, he believes that “epistemological delirium” has taken hold. I would be the first to admit that the daily trading of fake news across the social media is evidence to this effect, and we are living through a crisis in our understanding of knowledge of which this book is testament. With reference to Blake’s view that imagination is central to all understanding, I  hope I  have not given the impression that understanding knowledge of the world through imagination is easy, and I have traced the contemporary issues of today back through Kant to Hume. Indeed, Blake has written, “the true method of knowledge is experiment” and “the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences”3, p98 a statement a research scientist like myself can hardly deny, but it’s a warning that imagination can be flawed and needs experimentation; but paraphrasing Kant in his introduction to the philosopher Spinoza, Stuart Hampshire (1914–2004) reminds us that, “if ideas without experiment are empty, so experiment without ideas is blind”,4, p15 a sentiment of the contraries that perhaps unsurprisingly con­ tinually keep arising throughout this book in relationship to some notion of the truth that is necessary and undeniably relevant if progress is to be at all possible. Latour stresses the importance of democratic institutions as an important antidote to “epistemological delirium”, and certainly political institutions which function around the articulation and debate of a diversity of views is key, but care must be taken to protect the minority view against what can become a tyranny of the majority. Remember, Darwin’s bulldog Thomas Huxley’s (1825–1895) views, which reminded us that “It is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and end as superstitions.”5 It is there­ fore important for an individual’s truth to be heard by the majority, and this is where scientific evidence, which usually begins life as a minority view, needs to be openly discussed and where cultural values are foundational to the facts presented. It is interesting that this debate regarding knowledge goes back to the beginnings of the Western civilisation and that Socrates’s (c. 470–399 bce) wisdom came from the fact that he made a virtue of

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acknowledging that he knew he did not know anything. This is an impor­ tant starting point as it makes any discussion of the search for truth an ethical one, and one in which three key principles have been identified by Popper in the form: 1. The principle of fallibility. Perhaps I am wrong and perhaps you are right; but, of course, we may both be wrong. 2. The principle of rational discussion. We need to test critically and, of course, as impersonally as possible the various (criticisable) theories that are in dispute. 3. The principle of approximation to truth. We can nearly always come closer to the truth with the help of such critical discussions; and we can nearly always improve our understanding, even in cases where we do not reach an agreement.6, pp52–53 If progress is to be taken forward and new layers of stratified stability discov­ ered these principles imply that the search for truth, in the epistemological sense, is built upon ethical foundations that require a certain level of tolera­ tion and demonstrate that science at its core is an ethical pursuit. We have returned to the subject of the Naturalistic fallacy as discussed in Chapter 10 and from which Bronowski developed the social axiom for the process by which the pursuit of science can be undertaken and we can add this as a fourth principle: 4. The principle of process. We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so.7, p58 By accepting these four principles science can maintain its integrity, but this begs the question as to how it is policed. How is it maintained? And finally, how does new knowledge enter the public arena? These are clearly political questions, but if as I  have argued that Latour’s response of “let[ting] go of Nature” and pluralising the singular (see Chapter 11) is unacceptable; a coherence needs to be developed to maintain its legiti­ macy. The answer is nuanced and needs to preserve an idea of progress towards an approximation of truth, that is, acknowledging the idea that there are laws of nature that are not socially constructed and requires com­ bining aspects of Popper’s scientific epistemology with aspects of Latour’s thinking, res publica. As we have discussed earlier, Popper had long believed that the scientific method had something to teach the social sciences as an antidote against moral relativism.8, pp113–120 He thought that his particular philosophy of science paved the way to open societies and inhibited the expansion of totalitarianism in Europe by undermining the philosophies starting with Plato and coming down to us in the twentieth century through the historicism of Hegel and Marx.9 Nonetheless, Latour’s democratic and anti-totalitarian credentials

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suggest he too stands against totalitarianism and its inhuman consequences, but he sees Popper’s stance as insincere because: People had always wanted, up to now, to save themselves from the inhu­ man by appealing to Science, and to save themselves from Science by appealing to the human. But another solution remains to be explored: to save oneself from Science and from the inhuman by appealing to the sciences and to the propositions of humans and nonhumans finally assembled according to due process.10, p219 Popper’s views and Latour’s views can be regarded as incompatible because Latour sees Popper as an advocate of what he (Latour) would call the “epis­ temological police” in which due process has been short-circuited, and Popper would see Latour’s view as “social construction”. By bringing in the principle of process that “We OUGHT to act in such a way that what IS true can be verified to be so”, as advocated by Bronowski, I suggest is an approach that can remove, or at least lessen, the incompatibility. But before this can be done a distinction is required between the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, “idle curiosity” as Popper calls it9, p55 and the pursuit of knowledge for its social utility which interestingly reflects the sentiments made by Shelley in his defence of poetry (Chapter 1).

Nature of science The disinterested pursuit of knowledge for its own sake has a pedigree going back to the beginnings of the Western civilisation in Greece, but for Popper to label it as “idle curiosity” is a little disingenuous. Indeed, the story of Thales, the pre-Socratic mathematical wizard, who died by falling down a well whilst contemplating an abstract mathematical problem of the heavens in preference to making money out of an olive press is certainly apocryphal, but it says much about the different status we ascribe to abstract versus practical knowledge. This theme was picked up by the literary critic George Steiner (1929–2020) in his Bronowski Memorial Lecture in which he asks, “Has Truth a Future?” Stein­ er’s attitude is resolute and believes it to be ingrained in the Western psyche: The obsession with objective and abstract truth is imprinted on the west­ ern mind. . . . the daemon is there, and very close, I suspect, to the core of our identity and culture. We shall continue to ask wherever the ques­ tion may lead, however dangerous the answer may prove to be. . . . the search will go on. Somewhere, at some moment, a man alone, a group of men addicted to the drug of absolute thought, will be seeking. . . . Not for renown, not for the benefit of the human species, not in the name of social justice or profit, but because of a drive stronger than love, stronger even than hatred, which is to be interested in something. For its own enigmatic sake. Because it is there.11, p16

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He finishes the lecture with even greater stridency saying the quest for truth matters more than our very own survival: says to us that truth matters more than man. That it is more interesting than he, even when, perhaps especially when, it puts in question his own survival. I [Steiner] believe that truth has a future. Whether we do is less certain. But man alone can suppose this. And it is this supposition, first put forward in the Mediterranean world some three thousand years ago, which is the mark of his glory.11, p18 Here Professor Steiner’s position is clearly articulating a purest view that is extreme, and the phrase, “Because it is there”, can be used to describe human activities other than science. Climbing mountains springs imme­ diately to mind. But the Nobel Laureate Sir Peter Medawar in his book The Art of the Soluble believes this purest view is the result of nineteenthcentury social snobbery that separates the sciences from the humanities and the pure sciences from the applied sciences that has been passed down from the romantic movement.12, p127 In a chapter titled “Two Conceptions of Sci­ ence” Medawar traces this snobbery back to the attitudes between science and poetry that stem from the response of Shelley to Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry I discussed in Chapter 1. Medawar sees the split between pure and applied science as a typically English consequence of the split between sci­ ence and the humanities, the origins of which stem from a romantic tradition where truth is brought to consciousness through a leap of the imagination of an individual observer. This contrasts with the view that truth resides out there in “Nature” and obtained through evidence and documented accord­ ing to strict practice through the scientific method. As Medawar reflects, it seems near impossible that both can be true, but Medawar adheres to this two cultures position and attempts to reconcile them saying, “there is poetry in science, but also a lot of book-keeping”.12, p133 “Obviously”, he writes: “having an idea” or framing a hypothesis is an imaginative exploit of some kind, the work of a single mind; obviously “trying it out” must be a ruthlessly critical process to which many skills and many hands may contribute.12, p134 But where does this leave Professor Steiner’s rarefied view of researchers being “addicted to the drug of absolute thought”. Medawar is of the opin­ ion that if the ideal of pure knowledge is rejected together with the search for knowledge for its own sake and merely replaced by utility, research into the humane arts “is doomed”12, p141; we are back with Shelley and the issues of legitimacy in his A Defence of Poetry. But, as discussed in Chapter 7, Hei­ degger’s approach of bringing-forth and revealing, or discovering, through poiēsis does not distinguish between whether or not the thing brought forth is a product of science, for example, an aspirin tablet, or a product of art, for

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example, the Mona Lisa; both are primarily products of the human imagina­ tion, and the arts are no more doomed than science and there is no need of being “addicted to the drug of absolute thought”. All that you need to be addicted to is discovery. Indeed, backtracking and returning to the epistemological antagonism between Popper and Latour, and accepting that not all men, and they up to the present day have mostly been men, are solely motivated by the disinterested pursuit of pure knowledge, many scientists may be more aligned to the view, paraphrasing Marx, that the task is not just to understand the world but to change it for the better, and herein lies the issue. Who’s better, is better? We are back into the politics of science and the organisations that can institutionalise division by being tolerant and upholding a range of diverse views and positions. As might be expected, both Popper and Latour have something to say about institutions. I quoted Marx deliberately, because Popper is highly critical of his his­ toricism, which he sees as responsible for the expansion of European totali­ tarianism and the anthropological views of progress espoused by Comte, amongst others, that aligned human social development with the material progress of the Industrial Revolution (see Chapter 2). And Popper is hugely critical of this view in which he sees Comte’s idea of progress as a trend, “which is reducible to the laws of human nature.” in which, “In princi­ ple, the whole course of history should be thus deducible.” In other words, human destiny is predetermined and therefore part of a deterministic uni­ verse, a view that flies in the face of Popper’s Open Universe and his case for indeterminism.13, pp41–85 However, Popper does have a view of progress which he sees as institutional, and he outlines this at the end of his book The Poverty of Historicism.9 Therefore, the challenge is to see whether or not it is pos­ sible to reconcile Popper’s approach whereby laws of nature are maintained through conjecture and refutation, with Latour’s Politics of Nature built on democratising the collective (comprising humans and non-humans) through the organisation of scientific institutions. All scientific communities have their professional associations, peer reviewing processes and publishing pipeline, that in the first stage take evidence-based new knowledge from the individual, or small group of sci­ entists, into the broader scientific peer community. There is then a second stage in which this knowledge is taken and developed by the broader com­ munity and ultimately taken out into the general community; the adven­ ture of today’s science is then taught in the schoolbooks of tomorrow to the next generation. At one level there is a sense in which Popper and Latour’s approaches are totally irreconcilable, but both give due credence to institutions and, returning to the model in Figure 11.1, this is the point at which peer-reviewed research enters the public arena, res publica. Here the approaches are diametrically opposed; Popper is mainly concerned with the first stage, the logic of scientific discovery, and applying this scientific methodol­ ogy to the broader society while Latour is more focused on the second stage, the politics of nature, and applying democracy to science, the first stage. In the

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modern world where pragmatism must reign these two stages, or in Latour’s parlance these two houses, need to be brought together and integrated. As discussed in the previous chapter, Latour’s point of departure is Plato’s “Cave”, where, in one of the houses, “ignorant people” are unable to com­ municate between each other directly and find themselves chained looking at the proverbial “movie screen”; while in the other house is the external world of “real objects”, res extensa, which “lacks the gift of speech”; com­ munication between these two houses is through “a small group of hand­ picked experts”, the scientists, in which: these few elect, as they themselves see it, are endowed with the most fabulous political capacity ever invented: They can make the mute world speak, tell the truth without being challenged, put an end to the interminable arguments through an incontestable form of authority that would stem from things themselves.10, p14 It is this “fabulous political capacity” to be able to “tell the truth without being challenged” which Latour finds unacceptable, and he wants it democ­ ratised. But, sticking with Plato for the moment, Latour dismisses the whole question of ideas and where they come from, having previously stated: Despite the fascination exercised by Ideas (even upon those who claim to be denouncing the idealism of the Platonic solution), it is not at all a question of opposing the shadow world for the real world, but of redis­ tributing powers by inventing both a certain definition of Science and a certain definition of politics.10, p14 But the issue of where ideas come from cannot be dismissed because ideas are not democratically controlled, they are solely a product of an individual imagination, and, as I have suggested before, they may well be flawed, but that is where reason and imagination interact creatively in search of external realities the layers of which need to be organised in a stable manner and into a stratified hierarchy. It might be argued that this Blakean approach, where imagination is at the centre, is a naïve method in which the individual scientist with their training and objective detachment is given undue prominence, indeed this would certainly be Latour’s view. But new knowledge needs to be legitimatised and to take its place first in the context of the scientist’s peer community and then second in wider society as a whole. This is a political process and Popper, clearly a paid-up member of Latour’s epistemological police, readily acknowledges the role of institutions in his theory of scientific progress in which he states the so-called sociology of knowledge: entirely overlooks the social, or institutional character of scientific knowledge, because it is based on the naïve view that objectivity

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depends on the psychology of the individual scientist. It overlooks the fact that neither the dryness nor the remoteness of a topic of natu­ ral science prevent partiality and self-interest from interfering with the individual scientist’s beliefs, and that if we had to depend on his detach­ ment, science, even natural science, would be quite impossible.9, p155 And it therefore becomes apparent that these two are not quite so far apart as what at first thought might appear to be the case. Latour sees society as collective associations of humans and non-humans that are united by the fact that they can form a common world and have the political power to “take into account”, “put in order” and “follow up”; all of which are ongoing experimental processes and are a foundation of democracy. Popper I don’t think would disagree with this; where he would likely pick issue is with Latour’s notion of institutional closure as this is an anathema to his view of his nature of indeterminism and an open universe.13 Interestingly, where in Figure 11.1 sits what I have labelled res publica, after Latour, Popper who would readily acknowledge the physical world that he calls World One, and the mental world he calls World Two, he also adds World Three the world of artefacts as created by humans: By “World 3” I mean the world of products of the human mind. And although I include works of art in World 3 and also ethical values and social institutions .  .  . I  shall confine myself largely to the world of scientific libraries, to books, to scientific problems, and to theories, including mistaken theories. Books, journals, and libraries belong to both World 1 and World 3. They are physical objects, and as such belong to World 1. . . . But they also belong to World 3. Two very similar copies of the same book are different as World 1 objects; but if the contents of the two . . . physically similar books are the same, then as World 3 objects, . . . they are differ­ ent copies of one World 3 object. The content of a book, or a theory, is something abstract. . . . and all psychological states, whether conscious or unconscious, belong to World 2. But abstract things, such as problems, theories and arguments, including mistaken ones, belong to World 3. . . . Moreover, unless we choose to introduce for works of art, say, a new term such as “World 4”, a play like Hamlet and a symphony like Schubert’s “Unfinished” also belongs to World 3. . . . They belong to World 1 in so far they are complex physical events; but they belong to World 3 in so far as they have a content, a message, or a meaning.13, pp114–115 It is noteworthy that Popper at this point discusses the possibility of a “World 4” which he rejects. Presumably, because they are works of imagination? To the world of artefacts as created by humans, that is, World 3, which includes books, libraries, buildings, and institutions, he acknowledges the fact that

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all these human products have a history and contain “content, a message, or a meaning”. His World 3 appears to be bringing together two facets, the social res publica, together with content, message and meaning. World 3 is in fact two worlds, and Blake, I think, would claim, he has disenfranchised imagination as an essential cornerstone of content, message and meaning. We are at the confluence of Heidegger’s poiēsis, where the combination of bringing-forth and discovery of new layers of stratified stability is a Fourfold interaction that is essential to all forms of scientific progress, including both technological progress and its concomitant inescapable institutional progress.

Science and institutions Both Latour and Popper acknowledge the key role that institutions play in scientific progress, but in Chapter 9 we discussed Bronowski’s view writing in the aftermath of the Second World War and calling for a disestablishment of science.14, p235 He saw the destruction of human lives by the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a political failure, and as a scientist he became its apologist seeing the disestablishment of science as the way of maintaining its integrity. But, as I previously suggested, I think this is unrealistic and that there needs to be a return to the Haldane Principle. However, as Popper emphasises there also need to be safeguards to “prevent partiality and self-interest”.9, p155 Here I think that social institutions, that can broadly hold the diversity of the human collective imagination (which is unconscious), have a key role to play, especially when it comes to environmental concerns which are com­ plex, global and contain many different stakeholders. As I  write this in August  2021, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just made a press release which is the first instalment of its sixth assessment report due in 2022. In the press release Valerie Masson-Delmotte states unequiv­ ocally for the first time that human activities are responsible for a 1.1oC warming since 1850–1900 stating that, “It has been clear for decades that the Earth’s climate is changing, and the role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed”.15 So why has it taken so long to come to this unmis­ takable conclusion? Part of the answer I believe lies in the political processes of science, in which its method has been built on the sovereignty of reason based on Hume’s abandonment of imagination and his delegitimisation of effects from their causes. This is not to say that imagination is always sound; indeed Adam Smith (Chapter  11) was unsympathetic towards it, seeing it associated with the driving force behind human passions and therefore “ridiculous”. Although Blake related it to energy and life itself, he clearly saw that it had to be reasoned with and therefore from a scientific standpoint the source of con­ jecture, not something to be accepted at face value but something to be experienced, for example, “The true method of knowledge is experiment.” However, from the Enlightenment onwards and down to the present day,

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imagination has remained suspect and even if acknowledged has always played second fiddle to the reign of reason, especially when it came to sci­ ence. But in respect to the science of climate change Latour takes up this challenge and, as we have seen, is highly critical of classical scientific episte­ mology in that he believes it subverts the democratic process: These “rational” folk continue to believe that facts stand up all by them­ selves, without a shared world, without institutions, without public life, and that it would suffice to put the ignorant folk back in an old-style classroom with a blackboard and in-class exercises, for reason to tri­ umph at last. . . . Here we find the habitual vice of epistemology, which consists in attributing to intellectual deficits something that is quite simply a deficit in shared practice. . . . If the key to the current situation cannot be found in a lack of cognitive abilities, it has to be sought in the form of the world to which those very abilities are applied.2, p25 Latour’s solution is to reconfigure the democratic processes, from one in which there were two polarisations, one between the left and right and another between the global and local, in which they are embraced and reori­ entated, between the terrestrial and the out-of-this-world.2, pp108–109 In this new scenario, Latour suggests that “obscurantist elites” feel their way of life is threatened and see fit to remove all ideas of a shared planet and with it insti­ gate protectionist strategies epitomised by the policies advocated by Donald Trump and exemplified by his policy of pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord saying, “We Americans don’t belong to the same earth as you. Yours may be threatened; ours won’t be!”2, p3 The attitude of these “obscurantist elites” who follow this out-of-this-world approach is clearly that of the proverbial ostrich, and of simply burying their heads in the sand, but for Latour who is equally critical of the classical epistemological approach this is not an option; he does not see the current situation as “a lack of cognitive abilities” but as “simply a deficit in shared practice” (see quo­ tation 2, p188 above), and the solution is following Latour’s democratic pro­ cesses and drawing in multiple viewpoints. However, although shifting from a local to a more global perspective should help in increasing the number of viewpoints, Latour is unconvinced and echoes Blake’s criticism of a Single Vision saying, “On balance, it seems that the more one is globalized, the more one has the impression of having a limited view!”2, p13 Remember, the expansion of Europe and the colonisation of the world by European powers dates back to before the time of Hume and Smith, and to the beginnings of globalisation with its European project of conquest and “civilizing” the world at large in the search for natural resources for exploitation. The European project is a picture of Western modernity that Latour wants to reorientate away from and towards what he calls the Terrestrial, in which

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everything has its own “ecological dimension”. This is a world in which the non-humans have agency; collectively aligned perhaps with James Love­ lock’s concept of Gaia, where the planet that is home to nine billion or ten billion humans responds to their presence. This Latour argues would require a reorientation from a view of modernity with its paucity of vision and its polarised axis between Local and Global towards the Terrestrial; but to date, he sees the politicised ecology movement as having failed, saying: Numerous parties, movements, and interest groups have claimed to have discovered “a third way” between liberalism and localism, open and closed borders, cultural liberation and market economics. If they have failed, up to now, it is for want of imagining [my bold] a system of coordinates other than the one that reduced them to impotence in advance.2, pp47–48 It is interesting that he uses the phrase, “for want of imagining a system”. Are we not yet again back to Hume’s argument regarding the disenfranchise­ ment of the IMAGINATION in favour of the sovereignty of reason as when it comes to dealing with EFFECTS and their CAUSES? It is my contention that Blake’s critic of the Single Vision resulting in Newton’s sleep is what is key here, and that IMAGINATION is fundamental to the scientific process no less than REASON and that both imagination and reason working together as one are essential to the scientific enterprise. As Bronowski asserted: It is not the business of science to inherit the earth, but to inherit the moral imagination; because without that, man and beliefs and science will perish together.16, p323 Notwithstanding the sense of possession Latour might assume regarding sci­ entific epistemology and its “deficit in shared practice”, Bronowski clearly does not view science in such a manner, and as might be expected of a scholar of Blake, his emphasis is on imagination. The protracted time it has taken for environmental science to recognise anthropic climate change is, I believe, a failure of science to recognise imagination as an essential com­ ponent in the scientific process, and the source of this failure sits firmly with the analysis of cause and effect by David Hume back in the seventeenth cen­ tury in which experience, or CUSTOM, is the sole origin of knowledge. This has allowed a lot of the accruing evidence regarding climate change to be delegitimised on the grounds that the experiments could not be repeated in time and just because it could be imagined did not necessarily mean it was true. So where do we go from here? First, we must legitimise imagination as a part of the scientific process. Second, because it can be flawed, it must be robustly examined in line with the process of Popperian conjecture and refutation; acknowledging that this may not always be practical because experimental repetition is impossible.

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And third, it must be institutionally embraced, initially by a process of pro­ fessional peer review, again possibly flawed but it’s currently the best system we’ve got and then through to wider public institutions approximating to a Latourian approach. This is not reinventing the proverbial wheel from scratch, it is merely acknowledging Blake’s criticism and placing imagina­ tion, operating in concert with reason, at the heart of the process. These processes bring together res extensa, res cogitans and res publica as one (Fig­ ure 11.1) and form the basis of our scientific knowledge. This knowledge may not be without error, but it is knowledge on which we can act and base our future without fear. When Greta Thunberg implores us to “unite behind the science” (Chapter 11), this is surely correct, but the process is subtle and complex; it must acknowledge the many stakeholders with their legitimate conflicts of interest. For Latour, he sees the need for a new politi­ cal institution that encompasses his Terrestrial, the purpose of which is to democratise and acknowledge the conflicts: Conflict between modern humans who believe they are alone in the Holocene, in flight toward the Global or in exodus towards the Local, and the terrestrials who know they are in the Anthropocene and who seek to cohabit with other terrestrials under the authority of a power that as yet lacks any political institution.2, p90

Institutions and knowledge The lack of a political institution is problematic to Latour. He sees this as a result of a cultural war, where we are each part of a community “at once civil and moral”, but we are also solitary and this individuality “divides each of us from within.” Such a division that was explicitly explored in my undergradu­ ate days in the writing of Robert Pirsig (1928–2017) in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.17 At the beginning of the book there is a note which makes clear that the contents are neither about Zen Buddhism nor motorcycle maintenance, but the book is an enquiry into human values based on a motorcycle trip he took with his son and follows a series of rhetorical dialogues in the spirit of the Chautauqua. The Chautauqua was an institution that provided informative adult education and entertainment at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries across the United States prior to the development of radio. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig’s writing style is in the style of a Platonic dialogue and in an intellectual pursuit of “the ghost of rationality itself.”17, p78 Here, through the third per­ son narrator Phaedrus, we are treated to the life of the mind, Zen, which is contrasted with the life of the body, Motorcycle, and the issues surrounding our relationship with technology and metaphysics as can be seen in the quotation: This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but this

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is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.17, p78 Phaedrus’s pursuit of his ghost of rationality is a dead end and leads to mean­ inglessness. But following the quotation of Arendt at the end of Chap­ ter 8 and the status of Homo faber in relationship to the products they create through her concept of vita active, I would argue to associate this process of the fabrication of new novel products through vita activa with the notion of progress. Where Arendt talks of “organic life development” we can apply this to the discovery of new products where layers of stability are identi­ fied in which their stratification, the barb in the arrow of time, stops them from degenerating. If we accept Pirsig’s contention that just living longer is not in itself a solution, where do we go from here? If we retain the notion of progress, meaningfulness must hinge around identifying the hitherto undiscovered layers of stratified stability. This is the outermost sphere that is labelled “Unmanifest universe of potential layers of stratified stability”, in Figure 11.1, where imagination and poiēsis are at its core. Now, returning to the increasingly pressing issue of the politics of nature and climate change, it is quite clear that the Anthropocene is the current period in which humans have irrevocably changed the world through their exploitation of fossil fuels. This access to energy has built the technologies of today, whereby Homo faber has created the tools, from the microscope to the motorcycle, and by which modern life is manifest. Each product represents a useful layer of stratified stability together with and through its complex net­ work of institutions. However, over the last several decades, it has become increasingly obvious that this is not an ecologically stable strategy, or from the perspective of the former Chairman of the Bank of England Mark Car­ ney (b. 1965) it is not a financially stable strategy either, and our values need to change especially in relationship to dealing with the climate cri­ sis.18, pp262–299 I need not reiterate, but from the time of Adam Smith and the expansion of the British Empire, imagination was downplayed, if not totally disenfranchised, at the expense of natural capital, and the proverbial chickens are currently flying home to roost. We need to re-engage our imaginations, not only at the personal level but also through the whole realm of res publica and the institutions that govern our environment. Latour believes that cur­ rently such political institutions do not exist,2, p90 but I do not think that that is quite right and think that our educational institutions have a key role to play in this process, especially if the C. P. Snow two cultures’ debate19 can be brought into some form of mutual understanding and coherent harmony. Some of humanities most enduring institutions are educational and indeed according to Popper, books and libraries, on which all our educa­ tion systems are built, are World 3 objects13 which harbour our institutional memories to the beginnings of civilisation. But certainly, in many areas

192 Where do we go from here?

of European tradition, the life of mind has taken precedence over that of active practice and indeed, the ghost of rationality that haunted Pirsig has also haunted other earlier writers such as Herman Hesse (1877–1962) amongst others. Hesse,20 who in his book The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, in German), follows the career of Joseph Knecht from a youth who enters a scholastic institution to study the game and becomes its Magister Ludi, the master of the order. The Glass Bead Game is a mind game, hugely esoteric and equally intoxicating but has no relevance to any other community so it is ultimately inconsequential for the rest of society. Within the British context and elsewhere within the Western tradition, I believe this can be traced back through Hume and Descartes to Plato’s cave allegory, where we can see it expressed in Steiner’s lecture11 above, and now again in both Pir­ sig17 and Hesse20; this is what Snow is talking about within what he calls the two cultures, we are haunted by the propositional nature of mind and it has undermined our educational institutions for many years, particularly in England where, according to David Willetts (b 1956), the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, collectively Oxbridge, have dominated.21, pp353–354 Willetts sees this as a predominantly English phenomenon born out of an early specialisation where pupils are forced to follow either a fundamentally artistic or scientific curriculum. But I would suggest that it has more to do with the scientific revolution where since the time of Descartes dualism forced the split between mind and matter and was then subsequently built upon by Hume where reason reigned and became sovereign. The contem­ plative and active broke from each other and they became institutionally separate. Oxbridge fought hard before professional subjects like law and medicine were allowed to be taught:21, p229 They saw a sharp distinction between such propositional knowledge and practical knowledge. This is not of course the same as our earlier distinction between liberal and vocational; it is more the distinction between intellect and craft. If, however, you superimpose these two distinctions on each other and envisage the university as only for liberal not vocational learning and only for propositional and not practical knowledge then you do end up with a particular and narrow concep­ tion of a university. And if you think that is what a university must be like then you want to keep a lot of people away from it because its clearly not for them. But the university need not be so restricted. Rous­ seau’s Emile is a different picture of learning, integrating physical and mental, which can be both intellectual and practical.21, p230 As was pointed out by Bronowski, “the hand is the cutting edge of the mind”,16, p116 and therefore, following the human example, there is abso­ lutely no reason why liberal, propositional knowledge should remain distinct and institutionally separated from vocational practical knowledge. Indeed, applying the realms as described in Figure 11.1, there are good reasons that

Where do we go from here?

193

they should be institutionally combined in the same way that an individual’s hand and mind are combined, they can engage imagination together with reason to be creative. And if ever there was a time to be creative, both indi­ vidually and institutionally, the solutions needed to address climate change must be one of them.

References 1) UNESCO (2022) UNESCO Finds That Some Iconic World Heritage Glaciers Will Disappear by 2050. Press Release. www.unesco.org/en/articles/unesco-finds-some­ iconic-world-heritage-glaciers-will-disappear-2050. 2) Latour, B. (2018) Down to Earth Politics in the New Climatic Regime. Polity Press. 3) Blake, W. (1966) All Religions Are One. In Blake Complete Writings. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Oxford University Press. 4) Hampshire, S. (1951) Spinoza. Penguin Books Ltd. 5) Huxley, T.H. (1880) The Coming of Age of the Origin of Species and Culture XII. Collected Essays II. https://mathcs.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/CaOS.html 6) Popper, K. (1998) The World of Parmenides Essays on the Presocratic Enlightenment. Routledge. 7) Bronowski, J. (1965) Science and Human Values (Revised Edition). Harper Row. 8) Popper, K. (1992 [1974]) Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. Routledge. 9) Popper, K. (1999) The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge. 10) Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature How to Bring Sciences Into Democracy. Harvard University Press. 11) Steiner, G. (1978) Has Truth a Future? British Broadcasting Corporation. 12) Medawar, P. (1969) The Art of the Soluble. Pelican. 13) Popper, K. (1988) The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism. Routledge. 14) Bronowski, J. (1977) The Disestablishment of Science. In A Sense of the Future. The MIT Press. 15) Masson-Delmotte, V. (2021) IPCC Press Release. www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/ uploads/2021/08/IPCC_WGI-AR6-Press-Release_en.pdf 16) Bronowski, J. (1973) The Ascent of Man. BBC Publications. 17) Pirsig, R.M. (1976) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Corgi Books. 18) Carney, M. (2021) Value(s). William Collins. 19) Snow, C.P. (1959) The Two Cultures and a Revolution. 20) Hesse, H. (1979) The Glass Bread Game. Penguin Modern Classics. 21) Willetts, D. (2017) A University Education. Oxford University Press.

13 Epilogue

Climate change is currently one, if not the most, important issue confront­ ing human civilisation. It hangs over us like the sword of Damocles. Over the last several centuries, the hegemony of reason has dominated the West­ ern traditions that underpinned the Enlightenment, and this has in turn delivered unimaginable prosperity to many people. This prosperity is built on a means of production based on science and technology that takes no account of natural capital. Indeed, earthly resources are consumed as if they are infinite. This may well have seemed true when there were only a few hundred million people on the planet; but today, with the number of people beyond eight billion, most of whom aspire to a Western lifestyle, this is no longer the case and there is a sense of increasing pessimism. This pessimism first articulated by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on Population was during the life of William Blake for they were near contemporaries. For Malthus, any technological advance would be outstripped by population growth, and he argued this mathematically through number and the abiding use of reason. For Blake, of course, reason is only part of the story, and as discussed in the first chapter reason without imagination is dead, but the corollary, imagination without reason is madness should also be born in mind. Our imaginations and the use of technology have protected us from the consequences of Malthu­ sian pessimism. But, today, this optimism manifests itself at conferences on climate change, such as COP, which is seen by some as mere greenwashing. How do we balance these contraries in a way that balances reason with imagi­ nation and thereby avoid madness? Blake was ever the critic of institutions, but in the previous chapter I sug­ gest they may have a key role to play. If you follow Latour’s thinking, he clearly believes there are no political institutions currently capable of facing the challenges of climate change, where the instability of the current climate is the most pressing long-term problem facing humanity. And in response, I would suggest that educational institutions may be a way forward; etymo­ logically, the word education comes from the word educe, which means to bring forth latent potential, and therefore I would suggest the time is ripe to engage educational institutions as a part of the process to deal with climate change. I, therefore, want to make a compelling case in which imagination DOI: 10.4324/9781003379263-13

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and reason are deployed to integrate res extensa, res cogitans and res publica. In this way, an intergenerational perspective is obtained as a component of res publica, whose aim is to identify new environmentally stable solutions to a global human population of around ten billion or possibly more. From Adam Smith we inherited a view based on the agricultural production of his day in which natural capital had been left out of the equation, and during the 1960s and 1970s this led directly to Hardin’s concept of The Tragedy of the Commons and Schumacher’s concept of natural capital. Recently, a similar gesture of thought has been applied to climate change and what Carney sees as an impending intergenerational tragedy. Indeed, when, in 2015 Mark Carney addressed a group of insurers at Lloyds Bank with his eye on the financial consequences that climate change would have for the insurance industry,1 he introduced them to the con­ cept he called, “The Tragedy of the Horizon”. This is based on his view that there is an asymmetrical imbalance between generations regarding the financial risks due to climate change. He argues that the current younger generation will be subjected to the financial effects of climate change dis­ proportionately more than the older generation.1, pp300–339 Clearly, although he was addressing bankers regarding its financial consequences, its physical effects will also have implications for all of us as members of res publica, humans and non-humans alike. Therefore, although Latour sees no politi­ cal institutions capable of facing these challenges, I  would question this, suggesting what better place than a university for such an intergenerational process to begin. For, throughout the whole of this book I  have been an advocate of the role of imagination, and the purpose of a university, according to A. N. Whitehead, is to bring together the imagination of youth with that of individuals with experience. Discussing the role of a university, he says: The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imagi­ nations. Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination. The task of a university is to weld together imagination and experience.2, p140 Blake of course was a critic of the university, but I can think of no better way forward to address the all-pervading effects of climate change where new stratified layers of stability need to be brought forth and identified in that sphere of as yet unmanifested world of possibility (Figure 11.1). In an article published in 2009, Johan Rockström and colleagues attempted to identify a “safe operating space for humanity”,3 where they make clear that many of the earth’s systems that are involved in biosphere regulation are nonlinear. There are many possible stable configurations that could manifest themselves regarding the future of the earth’s biosphere, but, clearly, all of them will require humanity to change as the current status quo

196 Epilogue

is increasingly unstable and unsustainable. This will require every human neuron available as we transition away from a fossil fuel-based economy towards zero carbon and stable sustainability. Universities in particular, and education in general, have key roles to play in this transition, and although there are now many institutions that call themselves universities and operate as autonomous degree-awarding institutions, the legacy of Hayek through the policies of the likes of Margret Thatcher led them to a marketplace where students are in danger of becoming mere commodities. Shelley defended poetry on the grounds it was useful (Chapter 1), but education is not just the production of high-class hirelings to be on tap as standing-reserves; it plays an important cultural role which is fundamental to technology and discovery (Chapter 8). As I have pointed out previously, our art, science and educa­ tional systems have a role as the connective tissue tying our global society together (Chapter 9), and universities are not simply businesses producing widgets. They are the institutions at the heart of our future, culturally bind­ ing res extensa, res cogitans and res publica together through imagination with a purpose of identifying new layers of stratified stability that are sustainable. When Blake wrote to Thomas Butts in November 1802 and said, “May God us keep From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!” Charles Darwin had not yet been born, and it would be some four years after Blake’s death that Darwin would set sail on the Beagle (27 December 1831), and where, using his imagination and reason, he and his collector compatriot, Alfred Rus­ sell Wallace, would eventually change the view of how we see ourselves on planet earth. However, although the spectre of David Hume through Adam Smith has haunted economic science since the seventeenth century, I can think of no other fitting end to my reinstatement of the role of imagination in science than Darwin’s vision at the end of Origin: There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, hav­ ing been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone on cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.4, pp459–460 We are now living in the Anthropocene, which is clearly the product of the Industrial Revolution by which we as a species are still transforming and developing. However, our scientific society and its institutions on which the Industrial Revolution is built has not been given any guarantee to the future more than any other pervious civilisation. Just like the dinosaurs, we can become relics too. We are being weighed in the balance as I write. Our future rests on a moral integrity that can speak truth to power, and this is as true in the sciences as it is true in the humanities. Our future therefore lies in our own hands, and we need to act as responsible creatures. Although the rate of growth in our population is reducing, as I write in November 2022, there are now over eight billion of us on planet earth. We are not going to

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abolish the Industrial Revolution and our technological society; they are an expression of our humanity as much as any of the arts. Technology is an integral part of our history that goes back to our beginnings in Africa. But future progress, if we are to avoid madness and an apocalypse, must now surely rest on our ability to tread softly; to imagine new layers of stratified sta­ bility which are environmentally, socially and economically sustainable on a global scale. That is our immediate and ongoing challenge for the remainder of the twenty-first century.

References 1) Carney, M. (2015) www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5c-eqNxeSQ 2) Whitehead, A.N. (1950) Universities and Their Function. In The Aims of Education. Williams and Norgate. 3) Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F.S., Lambin, E.F., Lenton, T.M., Scheffer, M., Folke, C., Schellnhuber, H.J., Nykvist, B., de Wit, C.A., Hughes, T., van der Leeuw, S., Rodhe, H., Sörlin, S., Snyder, P.K., Cos­ tanza, R., Svedin, U., Falkenmark, M., Karlberg, L., Corell, R.W., Fabry, V.J., Hansen, J., Walker, B., Liverman, D., Richardson, K., Crutzen, P. and Foley, J.A. (2009) A  safe operating space for humanity. Nature, 461: 472–475. https://doi. org/10.1038/461472a 4) Darwin, C. (1968) The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Penguin Books.

Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation and I have been ruminating of the nature of progress ever since my first appointment after graduating and working as a crop protection scientist in Africa. That was where I edited a newsletter called the Bush Telegraph and where the subject emerged from time to time. Indeed, it was also my first experience of censorship where what had been written in the newsletter had to be removed. What right had I to inculcate Western scientific values to the people of the Shire Valley? Was I  simply following in the footsteps of that missionary David Livingston and follow­ ing his vision of ending slavery by increasing cotton production for export to the U.K.? Since those days in the early 1980s over forty years has passed and it would be impossible to acknowledge all the friends and colleagues with whom I’ve discussed these issues. However, I  should on reflection acknowledge the small virus Covid-19, because without it, and the various lockdowns that ensued, I would almost certainly still be ruminating! There are several specific people that I should thank for their support and vote of confidence about my book. These are Ian Denholm, John Hart and Hugh Loxdale who saw some early drafts of the first few chapters, drew my atten­ tion to works which I was not aware of and in doing so, they made some valuable comments. Another was Geoff Bateman. He read the whole manu­ script from start to finish and gave me the confidence that the book was both readable and would have an audience. Lastly but by no means least to Routledge the publishers who accepted it in their History of Science, Tech­ nology and Medicine Series. Many thanks to all.

Name index

Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975) 128, 130, 191 Aristotle (c. 348–c. 322) 18, 21, 53, 83, 121 Augustine, Aurelius (354–430) 19 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) 10, 21, 57, 139, 161 Bayes, Thomas (1702–1761) 55, 56, 64 Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770–1827) 117 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832) 105 Blair, Anthony Charles Lynton (1953–) 124 Blake, William (1757–1827) 8–16, 35, 48, 57–62, 95–146 Bohr, Niels (1885–1962) 105, 137 Bonaparte, Napoleon (1769–1821) 117 Borges, Jorge Luis (1899–1986) 61–62, 64, 111–113 Butts, Thomas (1757–1845) 13, 35, 102, 114, 164, 196 Broecker, Wallace (1931–2019) 161, 162 Bronowski, Jacob (1908–1974) 7–12, 15–16, 32–33, 37, 44–48, 50, 54, 58, 62–66, 71–75, 79, 93–94, 108, 113, 129–130, 132–135, 138–139, 142–143, 146–147, 152, 156–159, 162, 164–165, 170, 178, 181–182, 187, 189, 192, 193 Bronowski, Rita (Née Coblentz) (1917–2010) 8, 162 Campbell, Joseph (1904–1987) 18, 32 Carney, Mark Joseph (1965–) 191, 193, 195, 197 Carson, Rachel Louise (1907–1964) 127, 130 Churchill, Winston (1874–1955) 94–95, 139

Clairmont, Claire (1798–1879) 1 Clark, Kenneth Mackenzie (1903–1983) 164, 178, 193 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1875–1912) 2, 5, 8, 13, 16, 85, 87, 96, 98 Crick, Frances (1916–2004) 46–48 Comte, August (1798–1857) 29–30, 184 Condorcet, Nicolas de (1743–1794) 26, 29 Cornforth, Maurice (1909–1980) 156 Dale, David (1739–1806) 31 Damon, S. Foster (1893–1971) 10, 16, 98–99, 113, 130 Darwin, Charles Robert (1809–1882) 2, 25, 27, 29–30, 33, 39, 44,48, 50–52, 60, 62, 64–65, 67, 71, 76, 80, 87, 129, 196–197 Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802) 25, 32 Dawkins, Richard (1941–) 51–53, 59–67, 72, 75, 79, 106, 111–113, 150, 155, 162, 174–178 Dennett, Daniel (1942–) 81–85, 87–89, 91–93, 95–97, 101–102, 104, 111, 113, 129, 168, 174–175, 178 Descartes, René (1596–1650) 22, 35, 76, 82, 89, 92–93, 104, 169, 192 Dick, Thomas (1774–1857) 31 Delbrück, Max (1906–1981) 77, 80 Dryden, John (1631–1700) 8–9 Eccles, John Carew (1903–1997) 80, 82, 96 Edelman, Gerald (1929–2014) 78–84, 88, 95 Einstein, Albert (1879–1955) 45–46, 48, 105–106, 137, 170–172 Elkington, John (1949–) 160, 162 Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803–1882) 166

200 Name index Empson, William (1906–1984) 7

Erdman, David V. (1911–2011) 97–98,

104, 113, 115, 117, 130

Federer, Rodger (1981–) 77

Feyerabend, Paul (1924–1994) 135,

137–139, 141, 147, 153, 162

Fisher, Ronald Aylmer (1890–1962)

55, 57

Fitzroy, Robert (1805–1865) 29

Fischer, Emil (1852–1919) 47

Franklin, Rosalind (1920–1958) 47

Frazer, James George (1854–1941) 138, 147

Frisch, Karl Ritter von (1886–1982), 77

Friedman, Milton (1912–2006) 146, 149

Fourier, Jean-Baptiste (1768–1830) 29

Galileo, Galilei (1564–1642) 93, 137

Gaskell, Walter Holbrook (1847–1914) 72–74 Gauss, Karl Fredrich (1777–1855) 53–55,

57, 58, 151, 171

George III, William Fredrick (1738– 1820) 11–13, 26, 115–117 Gödel, Kurt (1906–1978) 59, 62

Godwin, William (1756–1836) 1, 12–13,

26, 179

Gombrich, Ernst Hans Joseph (1909–2001) Gorbachev, Mikhail (1931–2022) 80, 87,

94, 96

Gould, Stephen J. (1941–2002) 65,

72–74, 79–80

Grant, Robert Edmund (1793–1874)

27, 135

Halley, Edmund (1656–1742) 35

Hampshire, Stuart Newton (1914–2004)

180, 193

Harari, Yuval Noah (1976–) 141–142, 147

Hardin, Garrett James (1915–2003)

124–126, 128, 130–133, 136, 146,

162, 164

Harrison, John (1693–1776) 23

Hayek, Friedrich (1899–1992) 140–143,

146–147, 149, 159, 196

Hayley, William (1745–1802) 13

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–

1831) 28, 33, 50, 181

Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976)

107–111, 113, 115, 121–122, 130,

154, 162, 167, 172

Heisenberg, Werner Karl (1901–1976)

105, 113

Heraclitus (c.550–c.480) 17

Herder, Johann Gottfried (1744–1803)

23, 32

Hesse, Herman Karl (1877–1962)

192–193

Hilbert, David (1862–1943) 59, 76

Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843) 122

Hume, David (1711–1776) 22, 26, 32,

37–39, 41–44, 49, 52–53, 55–57,

62, 64, 91, 93, 96–98, 103, 108, 111,

113, 117, 123, 125, 129–130, 132,

134–135, 146, 148–149, 151–154,

156, 158–159, 161–163, 166–167,

169–170, 173–175, 178, 180,

188–189, 192, 196

Hutton, James (1726–1797) 24

Huxley, Aldous (1894–1963) 78, 80,

127–128, 130, 135, 147

Huxley, Julien (1887–1975) 127–128

Huxley, Thomas (1825–1895) 64, 193

Ishihara, Shinobu (1879–1963) 90, 96

Jenner, Edward (1749–1823) 34

Johnson, Joseph (1738–1809) 12–13

Jonson, Ben (1572–1637) 9

Judson, Horace Freeland (1931–) 48–49,

137, 147

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

(1709–1751) 22

Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) 29,

36–39, 41–44, 48, 76–77, 80, 91–93,

169–170, 173, 180

Keats, John (1795–1821) 98

Kelvin, William Thompson 1st Baron

(1824–1907) 148, 162, 171

Kepler, Johannes (1571–1630) 29, 35

Keynes, Geoffrey (1887–1982) 16, 48,

113, 129, 146, 162, 178, 193

Keynes, John Maynard (1883–1946) 35, 48

Kipling, Rudyard (1865–1936) 28, 30

Koestler, Arthur (1905–1983) 82

Kuhn, Thomas (1922–1996) 137, 147

Lakatos, Imre (1922–1974) 137, 147

Latour, Bruno (1947–2022) 168–172,

174, 176–180, 182, 184–191,

193, 195

Lavater, Johann Kaspar (1741–1801) 103

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) 22

Livingstone, David (1813–1883) 8, 31–33

Lloyd, William (1794–1852) 124

Locke, John (1632–704) 10, 57, 98

Lomborg, Bjørn (1965–) 136, 147

Name index Louis XVI, (1754–1793) 116–117

Lucretius (c. 97–c. 55) 18–19, 32

Lyell, Charles (1797–1875) 2, 25

Machiavelli, Nicollò (1469–1527) 139

Magee, Brian Edgar (1930–2019) 166, 178

Malthus, Thomas (1766–1834) 26–27,

149, 162, 194

Marx, Karl (1818–1883) 28, 50, 121,

181, 184

Masson-Delmotte, Valerie (1971–)

187, 193

Mayr, Ernst (1904–2005) 69, 73, 80, 83, 96

Mazlish, Bruce (1923–2016) 22, 32, 33, 130

Meadows, Donella Hager (1941–2001)

136, 146

Meadows, Dennis Lynn (1942–) 136, 146

Medawar, Peter Brian (1915–1987) 183, 193

Mendeleev, Demitri (1834–1907) 47

Michelangelo, Buonarroti (1475–1564)

22, 104,

Midgley, Mary (née Scrutton)

(1919–2018) 101, 103, 113

Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873) 105

Milton, John (1608–1674) 99

Moffatt, Robert (1795–1883) 31

Murry, Andrew (1987–) 77

201

Popper, Karl Raimund (1904–1994)

39–44, 49–50, 59, 64, 71, 80, 82, 96,

135, 137, 141, 146, 149, 151–152,

154–155, 159, 162–163, 169,

181–182, 184–187, 191, 193

Price, Richard (1723–1791) 55–56, 64

Raine, Kathleen (1908–2003) 8, 16, 103,

113, 115, 129, 162

Rockström, Johan (1965–) 130, 195, 197

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1712–1778) 2,

26, 117, 192

Rumsfeld, Donald (1932–2021) 136,

142, 147

Ruse, Michael (1940–) 137

Russell, Bertrand (1872–1970) 58, 94,

96, 153–155, 162, 170

Ryle, Gilbert (1900–1976) 82, 92–93,

95, 96, 106–107

Saint-Simon, Henri de (1760–1825) 29

Schopenhauer, Arthur (1788–1860) 42–43 Schrödinger, Erwin (1887–1961) 47, 49

Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich (1911–

1977) 146, 160–162, 164

Searle, John Rogers (1932–) 76, 80

Shakespeare, William (1564–1616) 21,

59–61

Shelley, Mary (Née Godwin)

Newton, Isaac (1642–1727) 10–11, 23,

(1797–1851) 1–2, 179

29, 34–36, 38, 42, 48, 57–58, 62, 93,

Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822) 1–3,

101–102, 119, 125, 131–132, 137,

6, 8, 15–16, 111, 151, 179, 182–183,

163–178

196

Neuman, John von (1903–1957) 125

Sidney, Philip (1554–1586) 8

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900) 42–43

Smith, Adam (1723–1790) 11–12, 25–26,

28, 31, 33, 98, 105, 122–125, 130,

Owen, Robert (1771–1858) 31

140, 143, 149, 157, 159–163, 178,

187–188, 191, 195

Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) 12–13

Smith, William (1769–1839) 24

Paley, William (1743–1805) 51, 74

Snow, Charles Percy (1905–1980) 66, 96,

Paolozzi, Eduardo (1924–2005) 131

113, 128, 162, 191–193

Passmore, John (1914–2004) 165–166, 178

Peacock, Thomas Love (1785–1866) 4–6, Steiner, George (1929–2020) 182–183, 192–193 16, 21

Sterelny, Kim (1950–) 65, 79

Penrose, Roger (1931–) 78, 80–81

Stokes, Pringle (1793–1828) 29

Perutz, Max (1914–2002) 47–48

Swedenborg, Emanuel (1688–1772)

Pickering, B.M. (1836–1878) 14

103–104, 119, 130

Pirsig, Robert Maynard (1928–2017)

Swift, Jonathan (1667–1745) 126, 130

190, 192–193

Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Plank, Max (1858–1947) 45

(1837–1909) 8

Plato (c. 427–c. 348) 18, 21, 83, 102,

108–110, 121, 155, 166, 168–169,

Thatcher, Margret Hilda (1925–2013)

181, 185

141, 143, 196

Polanyi, Karl (1886–1964) 140–141, 147

Pope Alexander (1688–1744) 23, 36, 48, 62 Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862) 166,

202 Name index Thunberg, Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman (2003–) 167, 178, 190

Tinbergen, Nikolaas (1907–1988) 87, 96

Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1892–1973)

19, 32

Tononi, Giulio (1960–) 78–80, 95

Trump, Donald John (1946–) 180, 188

Usher, James (1581–1656) 2

Victoria, Queen Alexandrina

(1819–1901) 32

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet

(1694–1778) 117

Wallace, Alfred Russell (1823–1913) 27,

33, 52, 196

Warhol, Andrew (1928–1987) 84

Watson, James (1928–) 47–48

Wedgewood, Josiah (1730–1795) 25

Westbrook, Harriet (1795–1816) 1

Whitehead, Alfred North (1861–1947)

58, 195, 197

Wigner, Eugene (1902–1995) 58

Wilkins, Maurice (1916–2004) 47

Willetts, David Linsay (1956–) 192–193

Wilson, Andrew Norman (1950–) 92, 96

Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann

(1889–1951) 85, 88–89, 95–96, 106,

153–154, 156, 162

Wollstonecraft, Mary (1959–1797)

1, 114s

Wordsworth, William (1770–1850) 1, 5,

8–9, 13, 85, 98, 166

Yeats, William Butler (1865–1939) 8–9, 176

Zeno (c. 490–c. 430) 17

Subject index

agriculture 12, 125, 150, 160, 177, 178, 195 Albion 10, 57, 98, 100, 102, 115 America 115, 164 anarchy 137, 176 Ancient of Days, The 118–119 Anglican 2 Anthropocene 131–132, 164–165, 190–191 Apollo missions 35, 45, 132 Arrow of time 17, 63–65, 71, 155, 164, 174, 191 art 20, 22, 50, 79, 87, 94, 121–122, 127, 129, 132, 134, 146, 183, 186, 190, 196 atheism 2, 52, 62, 138 Auguries of Innocence, The 14–15, 45 Babel, The Library of 61, 111–113, 129, 143 Beagle, HMS 27, 29, 196 Beowulf 19–20, 32 Berlin wall 141, 143, 179 Beulah 98–99 Binary fission 69 biofilm 67 biology, history of 41 and language 44–46, 61 metaphysics 93–95 molecular 47, 50, 72–73 philosophy of 63, 69, 81, 111, 137 Biomorph Land 72, 111–112 body plan 74 bomb, atomic 132, 134–135, 139, 156, 187 brain 72, 75–79, 81–95 Brass age 5–6 bringing forth (discovery) 129, 155, 157, 194 British Library, St Pancreas 131–132

Cambridge 7–8, 25, 35, 40, 47, 50, 93, 128, 154, 192 canals 24–25 capital, natural 149, 159–164, 191, 194–195 capitalism 10, 103, 140 Cartesian, Theater 82, 84, 89, 91–92 category mistake (error) 93, 103, 106–107, 136 causation 108, 163 Chamonix 1, 179 Chichester 13 chloroplasts 70 Church New 119 Christianity 20, 30–31, 51, 117, 119, 138, 176 climate change 70, 120, 122, 128, 135–136, 146, 148–153, 158–163, 167, 176, 179–180, 187–189, 191, 193 Coal Board, The British 160–161 cogito ergo sum 22, 76, 82, 91 Comet, Halley’s 35 Commons, Tragedy of the127–129, 133, 149, 151, 160, 195 consciousness 10, 44, 75–76, 78–79, 81, 83, 86–87, 88–92, 95, 97, 103–104, 124, 143, 171, 174, 183 multiple drafts model 83–85, 168 Concept of Mind, The 82, 92, 96 Conjectures and Refutations 42, 137, 148, 151, 158, 163, 184, 189 COVID-19 34, 132, 133, 150, 167, 179, 198 Creation of Adam 104, 113 cryptogram 46, 48, 85, 94–95, 97 crystallography, X-ray, 47 cultures, the two 85–87, 94, 96, 102–103, 113, 128, 132, 162, 183, 191–193

204 Subject index custom 43–44, 53, 122, 129, 133, 134, 143, 148–152, 158, 160, 163, 169–170, 180, 189 cyanobacteria 68 Dasein 108 De Antro Nympharum 100–101 Deism 114, 117, 119–120 Deity 51–52 demarcation of science 39–40, 59, 134–135, 148, 151 deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA) 47, 48, 70 determinism 42 discovery 40, 48–49, 132, 151, 153–154, 161, 165, 184, 187, 191, 196 Dollo’s Law 65–67, 71–74 drosophila 74 dynamic core, role in conciousness 79, 81–82, 85 dualism 93, 101, 107–108, 169, 192 earth 2–3, 16, 19–20, 24, 26, 36, 63, 67–70, 80, 102, 106–107, 122, 149, 158–159, 188–189, 196 ecology 127, 133, 135, 146, 165, 177 political and scientific 168–169, 172, 189 Economy of famine 12 of profit 12 Edinburgh, The University of 27, 31, 50 Enlightenment 2, 8, 11, 26, 31–32, 35, 57 58, 97, 117, 119–122, 125, 149–150, 106, 164–165, 167, 170, 176, 187, 193–194 emergent 60, 92–93, 95, 174, 177 empiricism 91, 111 enframing 106–107, 110–111, 121, 129, 167 Enitharmon 109, 115–116 epiphenomenon 78, 90, 97, 103, 168 epistemology 59, 71, 108–109, 169–170, 181, 188–189 essentialism 87 eternity 10, 14–15, 99–102, 104, 134 eukaryote 63, 67–71, 80 evolution 23, 27, 32, 39, 50, 59–67, 71–75, 77–80, 89–90, 96, 97, 112, 128–129, 132, 155 Experiment, magazine 7 extinction 4, 66, 68–70, 89 extremophile 68 eye, evolution of 51, 59, 65, 72–75, 77, 83, 87, 112

fabrication 114–115, 128, 167, 191 fake news 157, 180 falsification 151–153 fame in the brain and consciousness 81–84, 87–88, 96 Felpham 13 fitness 65, 85, 90, 97, 112 fossil record 69 fuels 160–161, 177, 179, 191, 196 Fourfold model (see Vision) France 1, 12–13, 29, 115–116, 164 French Revolution 2, 11–13, 26, 28, 114, 116 Gagging Acts 12, 14 Genesis 19–20, 99, 116, 165 Geological Society of London, The 24 genetics 72, 153 Germany 1, 7, 54, 128, 141, 149 ghost acres 125, 128 ghost in the machine 82–83, 87, 90–91, 93, 168 glaciation 68 globalisation 179–180, 188 God 2, 23, 31, 35–36, 51–53, 57, 62, 74, 99, 102, 104, 114, 117, 150, 155, 146, 196 Delusion, The God 106, 113, 174–175, 178 mathematician 58 Golden Age 4 Golgonooza 16, 98, 100, 113–115, 129, 162 Göttingen Observatory 54 gravity 35, 196 Great Exhibition 32 greenhouse gas 68 Grey Monk, The 14, 116 Haldane principle 143–144, 146–147, 169, 187 Heaven and Hell, The Marriage of 14–15, 78, 100, 119, 130 Heterophenomenology 91 Hiroshima 132, 135, 139, 187 historicism 40–42, 50, 64, 151, 181, 184, 193 Homo faber 114–130, 132, 134, 165, 191 homunculus 84, 93 idealism 42, 83, 84, 156, 167, 169–170, 185 illusion 22, 37, 59, 80, 83, 85, 91, 96, 101, 103–104, 112, 113, 170 Duck–rabbit 87–89, 154

Subject index imagination 1, 3, 5–11, 15–17, 36–38, 43–44, 46, 48, 50, 53, 55, 57, 59, 64, 78–80, 84–87, 94–95, 97–115, 120–129, 132–135, 148–154, 157–168, 171–177, 180, 183–191, 193–196 incompleteness theorem 59, 62 indeterminism 42, 184, 186, 193 induction 38–39, 43–44, 55–57, 108, 151, 153, 163 Industrial Revolution 2, 8, 11–12, 97–98, 109, 111, 119, 121–122, 125, 140, 149, 160–161, 164, 184, 196–197 institutions 4, 10, 27–28, 93, 129, 142–143, 146, 172, 180, 184–188, 190–192, 194–196 instruments, scientific 23, 54 International Committee on Climate Change (IPCC) 187, 193 intuition 43, 135, 171–172 irrationalism 42–43 Jerusalem 10–11, 57, 98, 100, 102, 119 knowledge 4–5, 7, 9, 15, 19–21, 24, 36–37, 39–44, 48, 50–51, 55–57, 64, 77–78, 82, 92, 94, 99, 108, 115, 124, 133–135, 137, 139, 142–144, 146–148, 151, 153–155, 158, 161–162, 167, 174, 177, 180–185, 187, 189–190, 192, 195 labour theory of value 25, 161 language 4, 6, 8, 21, 23, 32, 44–46, 48, 50 0 51, 61–62, 76, 79, 88–90, 92, 94–95, 105, 111, 154, 156, 158 law of inverse squares 36, 45, 48 law of motion 34, 196 law of nature 18, 28, 32, 34, 35–36, 40–41, 44, 46, 48, 50, 62, 65 law of progress 32, 34 law of thermodynamics 62–63, 66–67 Life history strategy 92, 125 London Missionary Society (LMS) 31–32 London School of Economics 141–142 Lord of the Rings, The 18 Los 98–99, 109, 115–116 lunacy and imagination 10, 15, 59, 120, 159 Lunar Society, The 25, 32, 105 Luvah (love and emotion) 10, 99, 114 machine, the 12, 22, 91, 109 magic 138

205

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The 14–15, 78, 100, 119, 130 materialism 10, 35, 58, 119, 175 mathematics 7, 20, 35–39, 44, 58, 139, 154, 174 Marxism 40, 151 Mendel, Library of 111–112, 129 Mental Traveller, The 14 Mere de Glace 179 mescaline 78 metaphysics 22, 36–38, 48, 59, 91, 93–94, 103, 166, 172, 190 method, scientific 21, 38, 40–42, 44, 47, 50, 55–58, 75, 120, 125, 135, 137, 141, 147, 149, 151–152, 158, 162–163, 174, 180–181, 183, 185, 187 Milton 99, 102, 120 mind 3, 5–7, 9, 12, 15–16, 18, 22, 26, 35, 37–38, 41, 43, 49, 51, 53, 58, 65–97, 100–101, 103–105, 107–110, 120, 134–135, 165, 169–171, 173–174, 177, 183, 186, 192–193 miracles 52, 55–57, 64, 172, 174 mitochondria 70 Monk, The Grey 14, 116 monotheism 30 Mont Blanc 1–3, 15 Moon 25, 35–37, 42, 45, 54, 107, 132 Mundane Egg (Shell), The 10, n16, 99, 114 myth 137–138, 168 Descartes Myth 82, 92 Nagasaki 132, 135, 139, 187 Napoleonic Wars 1, 28, 114 Natural theology 51 Nematode 92, 96–97 Neoplatonism 100–101, 103, 111 New Age 102, 122 New Atlantis 22 Nobel Prize 28, 30, 58, 81, 183 null hypothesis 55, 151–152 objectivity 91, 93, 165, 185 Orc 12, 109, 116 Original sin 19–20 Origin of species, The 2, 27, 30, 48, 52, 80, 193, 197 Oxford University 2–3, 65, 93, 192 oxygen 63, 68–69, 80, 177 paradigm 105, 142 pessimism 19, 26, 32, 136, 194

206 Subject index perception 6, 37, 44, 75–76, 78, 80, 83–85, 88, 92, 105, 119, 129, 175, 177 periodic table 47, 63, 67, 70 phenomenon 41, 52, 78, 83–85, 91, 162, 174 Phi 83–85 Photosynthesis 68–70, 80 physics 30, 39–41, 46, 51, 58–59, 62, 64, 80–81, 95, 105–106, 113, 137, 165, 170, 178 Plato’s Cave 82, 84, 129, 168–170, 185, 192 Poetic Genius 85, 120, 122, 129 poetry 4–9, 11, 14–21, 29, 120, 122, 127, 155, 182–183, 196 Poet’s Defence 7–8, 16 poiēsis 106–111, 120–122, 126, 134–135, 139, 153, 155, 167, 172, 174, 177, 183, 187, 191 Population, Essay on 26–27, 124, 149–150, 162, 194 Porphyry 100 Principia Mathematica 23, 35, 58 probability 39, 52–60, 148, 151–152, 174 progress 4–6, 11, 15, 17–33, 34, 39, 41, 46, 61, 64–67, 71–74, 76, 99, 105, 117, 122–123, 126, 133–134, 137–139, 144, 148, 153, 155, 157–158, 164–165, 167, 171–172, 174, 180–181, 184–185, 187, 191, 197–198 prokaryote 63, 67–70 Prometheus 18, 109 Protein 47, 65, 74 Protista 69 Providence 17–33, 119, 130, 164–165 purpose (utility) 21, 26, 51, 108, 147, 190–191, 195–196 qualia 81–95, 175, 177 radiation, black body 45 rationalism 43, 141 realism 42, 167–170 reason, the nature of 4–6, 10–11, 15–17, 20, 22–23, 32, 36–38, 41–43, 52–53, 55, 59, 80, 91–94, 99, 101, 111, 114–116, 119–122, 132–135, 141, 148–149, 151–153, 156, 158–162 relativity 45–46, 48, 106, 162 refutation (see also Conjecture and Refutation) 39–42, 137, 148, 174

religion 2, 7, 17, 30, 64, 105, 111, 113, 117, 119, 122, 127, 138, 150, 174–175 Renaissance 19–22 Republic, The 2 resilience 128–129 res cogitans 82, 92, 103, 120, 150, 170–173, 175–177, 190, 195–196 res extensa 92, 103, 120, 150, 170–173, 175–177, 185, 190, 195–196 res publica 172–177, 181, 184, 186–187, 190–191, 195–196 revealing 109–113, 121, 126, 134, 154, 165, 183 revolution, the scientific (see also French Revolution and Industrial Revolution) 20, 23, 96, 128, 161–162, 192 ribosome 70 Rights of Man 12–13, 114, 117 Rights of Woman 13, 114 Rothschild Report 114, 147, 169 Sedition, Acts of 9–13, 26 selection, cumulative 59–63 natural 27–28, 39–40, 44, 49–51, 59–65 Silent Spring 127, 130, 165 silver age 4–6 Single Vision 35, 102–119 slave trade 23 Soviet Union 141 standing-reserve 109–111, 115, 121–122, 124, 126, 139, 161, 167 statistics 56–57 stratified stability 61–64, 65–74, 129, 134, 139, 142, 155, 157, 165, 171–174, 181, 187, 191, 196–197 subjectivism 43–44, 158 substantivism 140 sustainability, economic, environmental and social 128–129, 149–150, 160–161, 196 symbiosis 69–70, 80 symbolism 10, 44, 79, 154 technology 4, 23, 31, 72, 91, 106–113, 114–116, 120–122, 134–135, 139, 153, 155, 162, 165, 167–168, 174, 190, 194, 196–197 tectonic plate 70 Tharmas (the body and senses) 10, 99, 114 Theism 37 Theology, Natural 51

Subject index thermodynamics (Second Law) 62–64, 66 totalitarianism 40, 141, 149, 151–152, 159, 181–182, 184 Trinity 35, 93, 101 truth 4–6, 9, 13–15, 21–22, 35–36, 38, 54–55, 59–60, 92, 95, 99, 107, 109–110, 114, 121–122, 136–137, 139, 157–158, 163–164, 169–170, 172, 180–183, 185, 193, 196 Two Cultures 85, 94, 96, 102–103, 113, 128, 132, 162, 183, 191–193 Ulro (material world) 99 uncertainty, area of 53–54, 57–58, 152, 171 UNESCO 179, 193 United Nations 133, 146 United States of America, USA 29, 115, 128, 136, 164, 166, 188, 190 utilitarianism 105 universe 3, 15, 19, 34, 41, 45–46, 52, 55, 61, 62, 80, 94–95, 99–102, 105, 108, 110–111, 118–120, 129, 134, 137, 142, 157, 160, 170, 172–173, 175, 177, 184, 186, 191, 193

207

university, as an institution 11, 35, 93, 95, 122, 192, 195 Urizen (reason) 10–11, 99, 114–116, 118 Urthona (imagination) 10, 97 vaccination 34 Vala, The Book of 101 verification 151–153 Vienna Circle 149 Vision (Fourfold model) 10–11, 98–99, 101, 102, 111, 114, 116, 119–120, 164, 172–174 vitalism 57, 63 Watchmaker, The Blind 51, 61–62, 64, 66, 79, 112–113, 129, 175 Wealth of Nations 12, 14, 25, 20, 33, 122–124, 130, 140–141, 149, 159–160, 162 White Man’s Burden, The 28–31 Worlds I, II and III (after Karl Popper) 155–156 Zoas, Four (see also Vala) 99, 101, 114 Zombie problem 91