SCIENCE AND ENLIGHTENMENT – Two great problems of learning

Nicholas Maxwell's book From Knowledge to Wisdom was first published in 1984, 35 years ago, and he has continued to propagate its basic argument with respect to science, rationality and the humanities ever since. In this short but densely argued work in nine chapters, he systematically sets out his core arguments and the reasons why it is important to shift our university system from knowledge-inquiry to wisdom-inquiry, as he also elaborates in his article above. His argument is very different from that of Steven Pinker set out in his book Enlightenment Now: the Case for Reason, Science, Humanism and Progress based on unreconstructed and unself-aware philosophical foundations with a conventional rhetorical use of the terms reason and science as if these can only be attributed to the position characterised by scientism.

The need for a New Enlightenment stems from the failure of the 18th-century formulation not in terms of the scientific method (although Nicholas is highly critical of what he calls standard empiricism), but rather in the second great problem of learning, how to make progress towards a more civilised world. The great blunder for Nicholas is that the philosophes and indeed the current university system is trying to make progress in knowledge about the social world rather than improving the social world itself, which would come about if universities pursued wisdom-inquiry instead. Given that science has enormously increased the power and scope of our action on the natural world in terms of population growth, environmental degradation, species extinction, the lethal character of modern war, pollution and climate instability, this has created a new crisis of knowledge without wisdom on an unprecedented scale. This is not to to criticise science as such, but rather to point out that its technological capacity has put a great deal more power into our hands and has created what the historian Toynbee and others have called a morality or wisdom gap - as Schumacher observed, humanity is now too clever to live without wisdom.

An important part of the argument is the one-sidedness of the Enlightenment project in attending to logic and evidence while disregarding feelings and values. Nicholas explains how the Romantic opposition compensated for this exclusion and created a counter-enlightenment and a need for 'a kind of organised enquiry rationally devoted to the growth of wisdom'. He explains the basis of his approach in terms of Aim-Oriented Empiricism with its hierarchy of metaphysical assumptions and his related and equally rigorous Aim-Oriented Rationality that can be applied to making progress towards a more civilised world. In this respect, he encourages universities to hold regular interdisciplinary seminars to address human and planetary challenges in cooperatively rational ways. These are fundamentally problems of living rather than problems of knowledge (p. 44) and include better ways of solving conflicts.

The message is both urgent and timely as we witness continuing war, inequality, injustice and avoidable suffering based on competing factions and nationalities, and we face the prospect of further resource wars with burgeoning populations and climate-related shortages unless we move towards a vision of interdependence and interconnectedness prioritising the planet over nation states. Nicholas spells out the revolutionary changes required to academic enquiry so as to promote cooperative rationality and social wisdom, which includes the proper vocation of philosophy. He analyses 26 points of disagreement between knowledge-inquiry and wisdom-inquiry so that academic education becomes more about learning how to live and realising what is of value. He then reflects on the current domination of knowledge-inquiry in universities, while noting some positive developments, including his own University College London in initiating the Global Challenges Programme. He explains how wisdom-inquiry could help put into practice with very considerable global implications (p. 91), and responds coherently to objections levelled against his approach.

There is no doubt about the importance of the case Nicholas makes as we struggle to create a more civilised world through a more integrated approach to world challenges. Implementation of his proposals requires a radical shift in attitude and a corresponding re-prioritisation of our educational and political systems that will only come about through further raising of awareness and corresponding campaigns. It is therefore all the more regrettable that his publishers have priced the book out of the range of the ordinary reader, even in electronic form.