THE CRISIS OF HUMANISM

The essential character of the present intellectual crisis is not one of lack, but one of abundance. We are not in one of those empty or sterile moments of history, when the power of invention withers and men are satisfied with a dull repetition of ideas and forms. On contrary, we invent, create, and know much and the question is that we did not find yet a way to harmonize our new knowledge with the old one. We feel sure we are entering upon a new historical era, upon a new phase of human thought. A new kind of human existence is in the labour of birth. The fact that all the principles, without exception, of our civilization became questionable, is not a pang of agony but, on the contrary, is a sign that a new civilization is near to spring. Our civilization suffers deeply from doubt. And this fortunately, because no civilization has died on account of doubting, on the contrary, civilizations have died for becoming over-sure of themselves, petrified in their traditional faith, died of a sclerosis of their beliefs. (1)

Pessimists see the substance of everything threatened. Some see the crux of the crisis in that doubt and incertitude. Others fear the threat of becoming submerged under an ocean of knowledge which increases, in the words of Robert Oppenheimer, “at a terrifyingly, inhumanly rapid rate”; they fear the hopeless task of setting to explore a nature “inexhaustibly knowable”. Science is doubling about every twelve years. Despite the vertiginous advance of the natural sciences and the expansion of the field of the abstract sciences, our confidence on science in general does not increase, much on the contrary.

The natural sciences lack a comprehensive vue. The abstract sciences lack the sentiment of a humanist culture. But the crisis in which the sciences have become involved writes Karl Jaspers, does not relate so much to the limits of scientific capacity as to our sense of the significance of science in general. “With the decay of a feeling for the whole and in view of the immeasurable extent of the knowable, the question has arisen whether the knowable is worth knowing”.

We tend to consider knowledge not according to the philosophical insight it may give us, but to its technical utility. Thus the vastness of the scientific field does not hinder anybody from mastering a special group of fundamental principles.

Jaspers and others think that the historic-sociological cause of this crisis is to be found in the mass-life; there has arisen a sort of scientific plebeianism, resulting from the transformation of the free, individual research into a working enterprise of science. (2)

Whatever the consequences of this mass-production of science may be, it is an unavoidable feature of modern life, and we have to learn to live with it if we don’t want to be forever in a crisis. It seems that scientists themselves regard group work, team publication, multiple authorship and the rise of New Invisible Colleges, that dominate so many important areas of modern scientific research, as a “new and exciting phenomenon”. (3)

The fact that science is today too vast to be embraced by one man, is only new in a degree, because since the first civilization no man has been able to embrace all the extent of knowledge.

The danger according to others, could come from outside the realm of knowledge, from the fact that the productive apparatus has grown into an apparatus of ubiquitous controls, decreasing thus the chances of humanistic reconstruction. And this seems more to be feared. But even here we must ponder that we are in a period of transition and adaptation to completely new social and economic conditions.

When we look at the fundamental disciplines of knowledge, there is in all of them an apparent crisis.

Philosophy can no more pretend to be the “science of sciences”, to be beyond the knowledge created by instrumental sciences and techniques, because the final and wholly vision pursued by philosophical knowledge can not be attainable without embracing the knowledge of all sciences, and this has become an impossible goal. That is why philosophers today entertain their thought at so abstract level or concentrate on so microscopic minutiae that they lose all contact with reality. “Philosophy seems to have withdrawn into an arid desert of linguistic conundrums, as remote from life as the absurder forms of scholasticism”. (4)

During one century philosophy has been divorced from real life and also from science, closed in university schools more occupied with epistemological doctrines and history than with real problems of the individual within a new society fashioned by industrial progress and mass organization.

Now the towering increase of all branches of science should inspire philosophical thought to find the unity of the various sciences and the new meaning of knowledge. The vast material available in the scientific field repeals the wanderings of abstract speculation and invites substantial reflection. The decline of religious faith should invite the philosophers to create new bases for human understanding and lucid consciousness of existence. There is a fertile field for modern philosophers: to find out the solutions for the momentous ethic problems of our age, to create on the basis of the vast, advancing scientific discoveries a new concept of man and a new philosophy of life valid in the new conditions of today’s world. Having lost the traditional role of “science of sciences”, maybe philosophy can find still a nobler role to play, that of a general assessment of culture and a real course of wisdom.

History has brought, with the extension of its research into remoter ages and the new assessments and organization of historical events, a more extensive and clearer picture of man’s adventure, but has not advanced the explanation of the problems of the meaning of historical experience, of the value of human capacities, or of the substantial quality of manhood, not to mention the problem of man’s destiny. This incapacity explains perhaps why a number of important philosophers resort to the ancient answers of religion.

But even if it had done nothing more, history got away from the danger of falling into an exhaustive, research of sources into mere poetic, evocative description, or into dull, repetitive historicism, without any aim of scientific creation. Toynbee has certainly expanded the horizons of history and has found new bases for the assessment of the genesis of civilizations, their growth, their interrelations and their decay, having brought Spengler’s pioneer tentative into new wide fields and with firmer, pragmatic methods. For the first time man is able to make a fair judgement about most of the dead civilization. The role of history is no more to resuscitate a lively and colourful past, but - to use the words of Teilhard de Chardin - “to put in terms of science the laws underlying the apparent caprice of human vicissitudes”. Human history and natural history tend to draw nearer, to give us an integrated picture of the universe. Historical knowledge hardly counts 6 millennium, we are not near a disintegrating end but rather in the luxuriant, creative confusion of the beginnings.

Social sciences have been trying to build a bridge between humanities and sciences. But some of them are still too imprecise in their fields and scope and already accused of having “taken refuge in a pompous jargon at once sententious and obscure”. It was inevitable that the rapid expansion of social sciences, impelled by the accelerated evolution of the society, especially in the United States, had to provoke a certain confusion. The vast elaboration and speculation made in these fields calls for the rise of a thinker gifted with great power of synthesis and strong sense of realism, capable of putting together and giving unity to the enormous amount of materials available in the most varied fields.

Literature has given us a few great works of inspired humanism, but it suffers from two main weaknesses: in modern poetry and in some dominant trends of the novel, it has become cut off from the contact and strengthening breath of the mass of the public - a puzzling and handicapping feature in the age of the masses -; in a general way it breaks away from traditional culture and learning, and few writers are able to profit from the richness of classic literature. On the other hand, literary studies restrict their scope to purely literary views, become isolated and close to the interest of the mere specialist. This may explain why, as it has frequently been noticed, the most satisfactory literary studies have been written more often by gifted amateurs than by professionals.

Literature, none the less, is still essentially a humanist discipline, the most humanist of all. Only literature can transmit the deep human joys and anxieties, can through images and symbols define in the instant the breath of the eternal. Only Poetry can descent into deep, immense areas of the soul which otherwise would remain unknown. “Poetry is a means of penetration and exploration, a manifestation, not of the objective realities, which are of the domain of science, but of concrete essences which were already obscurely in us”. (5) It is as a poet that man inhabits this earth, said Rilke. And Saint Teresa of Avila wrote that without poetry this world would be unbearable.

Not only in modern literature, but also in the study of Classics, since the Greek and Roman writers, can we discover unknown values: the human situations are surprisingly applicable to the present ones, and there are insights into human character which are deepened and illuminated by the passing of time and the accumulation of maturing experience.

The traditional classification of the disciplines of knowledge in natural sciences and humanities has been altered and became tripartite with the addition of the social sciences. Hence the two cultures of which C. P. Snow has made so popular a speculation are being joined by a third one, drawn from social sciences.

This complex panorama, is prone to provoke great confusion; such confusion has been increased by those who have enhanced and explored the division, which is easy, instead of endeavouring to find unity, which is the difficult and only sane task. (8) This trend towards unity, though, is progressing gradually. Science has infiltrated into psychology, economics, history, archaeology, anthropology and linguistics, and probably will penetrate into many more branches of knowledge. The quantitative study of language has given rise to a new science, the mathematical linguistics. For the interpretation of the astronomical inscriptions found in Babylonian tablets, or the Islamic variants of Ptolemaic and Hindu astronomy, for example, astronomical science is not enough and the cooperation of mathematical, linguistic, philosophical, historical sciences is indispensable. (3)

This trend seems to point again towards the unity of knowledge, without which a coherent idea of the world is impossible.

The Western World has been suffering since four centuries of an increasing discordance between science and religion which left marks of anxiety and revolt in many writers. Now, after the impressive development of science and all the other disciplines of knowledge. Science cannot be translated in terms of common sense; thus the world can only be understood peace-meal, through the parcelled vision of the specialist. Besides, the new fields of knowledge open a wholly new vision of man and the universe, new perspectives of human destiny.

The traditional concept of culture was shattered into pieces: every cultured man, today, must have, besides what has usually been called general culture, the specialized culture of his professional activity; and this specialized culture is still divided in smaller fields, nearly incommunicable between each other, summing an amount of knowledge so vast that no man can embrace them all. Man’s ingenuity has out-sailed his intelligence.

At the same time it is true that the level of knowledge in the developed societies increased considerably. The monopoly of literary knowledge has disappeared, everybody has access to general culture, anybody is a clark. That is why the literate man lost his prestige in favour of the scientific specialist. The old disciplines of knowledge have lost much of their ancient appeal and prestige.

We need to build up again the unity of culture, the harmony of all the disciplines of knowledge. We have to look for the fundamental values. “Only with the united effort of science and humanities can we hope to succeed in discovering a community of thought which can lead us out of the darkness and the confusion which oppress all mankind”, writes an atomic physicist, I. I. Rabi. We cannot attain wisdom while the two great branches of knowledge, the sciences and the humanities, remain separate. (6) A great number of scientists has emphasized the inner relationship between science and art, as a way to discover the pure harmonies of nature. There is an “innermost circle in which science and art can hardly be separated, in which the personification of pure truth is no longer disguised by human ideologies and desires”, writes Werner Karl Heisenberg, a nuclear physicist. (7).

Sciences alone can only give us the knowledge of causes and effects, and the use of this knowledge can give us power. But power for what? Power is a means to certain ends. We have to find out the ends, for which man works and lives, in a scale of values. And, these values, we can only find them in the study of humanities - which are the only sources of values, excepting the religious ones. The well known scientist Niels Bohr affirmed that art can remind us of harmonies which are beyond the grasp of systematic analysis. “Literary, pictural and musical art may be said to form a sequence of modes of expression, where the ever more extensive renunciation of definition, characteristic of scientific communication, leaves fantasy a freer display. In particular, in poetry this purpose is achieved by the juxtaposition of words related to shifting observational situations, thereby emotionally uniting manifold aspects of human knowledge.”

We have to face the actual state of the world of knowledge we have created: it is the source of our confusion, doubt and mental agony: but it can be the spring of a new happiness, unknown harmony, unforeseen discovery, joy and adventure. Our ingenuity will have gone beyond our intelligence only if we are not wise enough to command the new energies created by science. Science will destroy us if we do not put something above science - and that is wisdom. It is no use to try to put a limit to the powers of man, he will never stop the irresistible impulse to overpass his own achievements, to try to go beyond his own possibilities. This temptation as old as man could never be contained by religious. Its healthy impetus can only be guided and tempered by wisdom.