2 Seeking a ‘Big Picture’
Chapter 2
Seeking a ‘Big Picture’
Human beings need Big Pictures of reality to anchor their lives, allowing them to live meaningfully in a complex society. Worldviews, implicit or explicit, serve as anchor points for our understanding of what is good and meaningful in times of crisis, providing stability as the cultural landscape undergoes significant shifts. The problem, however, is that we often find ourselves trapped in webs of beliefs that are ultimately oppressive and inadequate, making it difficult to break free from their toxic thrall.
The novelist and poet Hermann Hesse (1877–1962) had an ‘uncanny ability to give expression to the emotional and intellectual problems of his time’, offering penetrating reflections on the cultural disturbances of his age. In 1926, Hesse published an article in UHU magazine, a modernist journal established in 1924, aimed at an urban bourgeois liberal readership in Weimar Germany. Weimar Germany was an intellectual and creative hothouse, the home of Dada, Bauhaus, New Objectivity, and new institutes for sexuality. But frequent economic shocks, millions of war wounded and escalating political violence left Germans anxious, unable to anchor themselves in the present. Hesse set out to explain why so many Germans yearned for a coherent worldview and why it was so difficult to find one.
Traditional answers to this craving for a secure basis for human existence were being cast aside, discredited by the devastation of the war. But the latest intellectual fashions were simply a synthesis of the values au courant at that moment, lacking in depth, substance and stability, all things that emerge from having been subjected to critical evaluation over an extended period.
Hesse also argued that the trend of privileging novelty has resulted in a precipitate dismissal of the wisdom of the past and the unquestioning adoption of new and untested ideologies in a ‘frenzied search for new interpretations of human life’. It’s an important point. The Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty later offered an insightful critique of such a dangerous preoccupation with the transient truths of the present moment. The wise person, he suggests, is not someone who walks ahead of humanity, but behind it, ‘picking up the wonderful things it leaves behind it in its flight into a future’ that might well prove to be yet another costly failure.
It is not difficult to work out which ideologies Hesse had in mind. Marxism and Nazism were in open competition for the spiritual and intellectual soul of Germany at that time, a struggle that grew increasingly bitter and culminated in the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Germany had undergone a transformation. An untested new ideology was in the ascendancy. UHU did not survive this development and published its last issue in September 1934.
Human beings, according to Hesse, experience a ‘primal need to know that there is meaning to their lives’ that is ‘as old and as important as the need for food, love and shelter.’ Many commentators have failed to grasp the importance of this yearning for meaning and significance. George Orwell, for example, complained that ‘all “progressive” thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain.’ The rise of Nazism in Germany, he remarked, showed the falsity of this view. People seemed to want a deeper vision of life that speaks of meaning, significance and purpose, that might require sacrifice on their part, rather than merely meeting their physical needs.
Hesse’s reflections frame the core themes of this chapter – the human longing for a secure and stable big picture, capable of creating and sustaining the good life; and the precariousness of the quest for such a worldview, which can easily go badly wrong. Some might be tempted to suggest that the risks involved are so great that the best strategy is to avoid any such commitment. Yet other options are available. The writer E. M. Forster, best known for A Room with a View (1908), was also alarmed by the rise of ideologies such as Nazism during the 1930s. What could be done to challenge them? His response was this: ‘There are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one’s own.’
Forster’s argument is that the best way of dealing with a bad creed is not to have no creed, but to develop a better creed – in Forster’s case, ‘belief in good taste, and belief in the human race.’ Our search for truth may begin by identifying what is wrong – but that does not in itself help us determine what is right. We all believe something and need to be clear on what this is, why we believe it is right, and the difference that it makes to the quality and character of our lives. Believing nothing is not a serious option.
Meaning and Big Pictures
Psychologists have highlighted the importance of human intellectual and emotional wellbeing. We seem to cope better with our complex and messy world if we feel that we can create a sense of order. It’s as if we have some inbuilt desire to find a big picture which helps us feel that we are part of something greater than ourselves, enabling us to position ourselves within this larger map of reality and live accordingly. As the American philosopher Michael Sandel points out, while ‘we may resist such ultimate questions as the meaning of justice and the nature of the good life, what we cannot escape is that we live some answer to these questions – we live some theory – all the time.’ This theory may be implicitly assumed rather than explicitly articulated – but it is there, informing and determining our attitudes and outlook.
Human beings have an extraordinary instinct and ability to join up the dots, to weave threads together to construct a pattern, going beyond what can be seen to what we believe lies behind it. This process can – and often does – go wrong: we connect the dots improperly, or fail to realise how much our reasoning is subservient to our desires. We want to trust our closest friends and so deny their failures that others see all too clearly. We want humanity to be good and so blind ourselves to its many defects and wilfully ignore our darker side. We find ourselves drawn to the ‘necessary illusions’ and ‘emotionally potent oversimplifications’ that Noam Chomsky believed were constructed by governmental agencies to control public opinion. We too easily allow ourselves to be cushioned against harsh truths by constructing worldviews that protect us from thoughts that we might find unbearable – such as the pointlessness of life, or the utter indifference of the cosmos to our presence. Yet the process of making connections is essential to the construction of beliefs, even if it can misfire.
The French mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré helps us grasp this distinction: ‘Science is made with facts, like a house is made with stones, but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a pile of stones is a house.’ Each stone is significant; yet we need to be able to see the grander structure of which it is part if we are to appreciate the wholeness of our world, without losing sight of its many individual aspects.
Yet even here, there are uncertainties about the significance of this process. In the natural sciences, the debate between ‘instrumentalism’ and ‘realism’ continues. Is this ‘conceptual framework’ simply a construction of the human mind, which is read into or superimposed upon the real world? Or do we discern something that is there in the world? Have we invented something, or discovered it?
Perhaps more worryingly, we often assume we must find a single master picture or narrative which makes all others redundant, exposing them as inadequate or even fraudulent. Yet while some worldviews demand exclusive control over our readings and interpretations of life, most are permissive, illuminating or interpreting aspects of life, and allowing supplementation from other perspectives. One of the reasons why I moved away from Marxism as a teenager was my sense that it imprisoned me within a controlling narrative and left me unwilling to acknowledge insights from other ways of thinking.
The evidence clearly indicates that human beings are deeply pragmatic, working and living with a variety of big pictures, seeing them as helpful informing guides to some aspects of their lives (but not to others). The sociologist Christian Smith has noted how modern Americans draw selectively on about a dozen competing metanarratives – such as a Progressive Socialism narrative, a Scientific Enlightenment narrative, and a Christian narrative – to make sense of their world. As Smith points out, these narratives are quite different, have different concerns and lie beyond empirical verification. Given that a person may have a diversity of ‘social identities’, these different narratives or frameworks can seem contradictory, thus creating tension and uncertainty within the individual.
Sean McCloud, an American academic who specialises in the mass media representations of religion, similarly notes that ‘Americans live by picking, mixing and combining a variety of religious and cultural idioms (within a sphere of materials constrained by their social locations) to find what works for them in everyday life.’ This is not, however, a new or specifically American phenomenon. In late classical antiquity, Roman imperial culture showed a remarkable ability to accommodate multiple narratives and cultural perspectives, despite the intellectual tensions that this often created. The solution to this problem is not to integrate these narratives, but rather to respect their specific domains of application and validity. If our experience of life is disordered, perhaps we have to expect the same from our attempts to represent it.
This ability to switch interpretative frames when moving from one area of social interaction to another (for example, from a laboratory to a synagogue to a local political committee) has its parallel in multicultural contexts, in which individuals feel that they ‘belong’ to multiple communities, each with its own identity and norms. Cross-cultural studies, however, have tended to focus on groups of individuals drawn from different contexts and failed to take account of single individuals who have internalised more than one culture. Studies of the dynamics of ‘multiple cultures in the same mind’ suggests that people use a mechanism of ‘frame switching’, in which such an individual shifts between interpretive frames rooted in different cultures in response to cues originating within their social environment.
The empirical study of how human beings construct their systems of meaning suggests that we have a remarkable capacity to hold together multiple narratives or pictures, even when these might seem to be disconnected, if not mutually exclusive. Individuals often develop accounts of life that are more complex, fragmentary and situational than the terms ‘religion’ or ‘worldview’ might suggest. This does not mean that these personal (and idiosyncratic) constructions are perceived as incoherent; in fact, individuals often find them remarkably helpful in making sense of life and coping with its challenges.
While some limit themselves to a single coherent master narrative, most people seem prepared to apply a range of narratives or frames selectively to different aspects of life, without a full resolution of their tensions and divergences, perhaps reflecting a realisation that no single big picture or grand story can address every aspect of the complexities of modern human existence. That’s why some Christians are capitalists, some socialists and others politically disengaged. Worldviews are often selectively appropriated, with certain themes foregrounded and others marginalised. Individuals tend to construct their own personalised versions of Big Pictures, adapting them to their circumstances and correlating them in different manners.
Yet Big Pictures lead to different outcomes. Some provide an explanation and others an interpretation of our world. To explore this important distinction, so easily overlooked, we will reflect on scientific and philosophical Big Pictures and the significantly different outcomes that these generate. We begin by thinking about the natural sciences.
Explaining Our World: A Scientific Big Picture
A scientific theory offers a way of imagining or beholding the world, which enables its fundamental ordering and coherence to be discerned. Without this theoretical lens, this order cannot be discerned. Earlier, I mentioned Dmitri Mendeleev’s ‘Periodic Table of the Elements,’ developed in 1869. The novelist C. P. Snow gives a fictionalised account of how using this table as an interpretative lens enabled him to see past the apparent chaos of a seemingly disconnected accumulation of chemical observations and discern the fundamental principles that lay behind them.
I saw a medley of haphazard facts fall into line and order. All the jumbles and recipes and hotchpotch of the inorganic chemistry of my boyhood seemed to fit into the scheme before my eyes – as though one were standing beside a jungle and it suddenly transformed itself into a Dutch garden.
One of the greatest achievements of science is the ‘mathematisation’ of nature – the representation of its relationships and structures using mathematical equations. One of the best examples of this mathematical mastering of nature is Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. This was widely seen as an intellectual wonder of the early modern age, a stunning demonstration of the power of human reason to make the mysteries of the universe rationally transparent and intelligible. On being asked how he came up with the notion of gravity, Newton told his friends that the idea came to him in the summer of 1666 when an outbreak of the plague at Cambridge University forced him to hastily leave his rooms at Trinity College and retreat to the safety of his mother’s house in rural Lincolnshire.
The story of what followed is well known, even if it likely involves a significant degree of poetic licence. While sitting in his mother’s garden, Newton tells us, he observed an apple fall from a tree – and thereby made a connection with the way in which planets orbited the sun. If there was some fundamental force of attraction between physical bodies – which we now know as ‘gravity’ – this would explain the orbits of planets round the sun, the moon around the earth and the falling of apples to the ground.
Some fifty years earlier, Johannes Kepler had shown that – for reasons he did not understand – the square of the orbital period of any planet was proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit. Kepler had found this out by trial and error, superimposing all kinds of mathematical constructions on detailed observational data of the movement of the planet Mars provided by Tycho Brahe. Eventually, Kepler found a mathematical formula that seemed to work. Newton was able to show that the principles of universal gravitation and inertia explained Kepler’s pragmatically reliable yet theoretically puzzling rules of planetary motion. Newton was able to set out a comprehensive Big Picture of how our universe functions which enfolded and explained these seemingly disconnected observations.
Yet understanding how our universe works does not necessarily tell us what it means. Scientific explanations are not interpretations of the world, which aim to discern its value or meaning; they are attempts to work out how it functions. Despite its great explanatory successes, scientific analysis does not lead to existentially or intellectually compelling interpretations of our universe or human existence. For Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘the meaning of the world must lie beyond it’.
This interpretative pluralism helps us understand the grand diversity of metaphysical and religious beliefs evident within the scientific community. Consider, for example, three theoretical physicists, each with a shared commitment to scientific explanation yet holding divergent accounts of what a scientific interpretation of the universe might look like. For the atheist Steven Weinberg, human beings seem pointless, devoid of meaning and significance in a universe that is indifferent to our presence. The more we know about the universe, the more pointless it seems. Sean Carroll develops a ‘poetic naturalism’ which respects the immense grandeur of the universe, while pointing to the emergence of humanity as bringing ‘meaning and mattering into the world’. John Polkinghorne, however, sees the ‘rational transparency and beauty of the universe’ as pointing to God as its ultimate ground.
While Weinberg, Carroll and Polkinghorne adopt comparable scientific explanations of the universe, they offer quite distinct interpretations of our universe, which science can neither confirm nor deny. Though all three thinkers are distinguished scientists, their interpretations of what the universe means lie beyond the horizon of the scientific method. All three can argue that their worldview is consistent with what is observed. (A more sceptical neutral observer might suggest that all three are thus equally absurd, in that none is demanded by the evidence.) This suggests we need to look further at this idea of ‘interpreting’ the universe.
Interpreting Our World: A Philosophical Big Picture
Susan Wolf notes that we feel a need to get involved in something ‘larger than oneself’ to secure meaningfulness. While affirming the philosophical importance of these yearnings to live meaningfully and purposefully, Wolf concedes that academic philosophers now seem to have lost interest in the question of finding meaning in life. Yet this philosophical disengagement with meaning is a recent development. As Pierre Hadot has pointed out, classical philosophy – both Greek and Roman – was intensely concerned about questions of meaning and value.
In making this point, Hadot draws a distinction between philosophy itself and philosophical discourse. Philosophy sets out a vision of reality; philosophical discourse articulates this in words. Perhaps we need to rediscover this vision of philosophy as enabling practical wisdom, and draw a distinction between empowering and informing vision on the one hand, and its formal expression in human words on the other. Hadot argues that we need to retrieve the classical vision of philosophy as a discipline of human flourishing, which emphasises the capacity of its beliefs to inform and sustain a meaningful and fulfilling ‘way of life’.
For example, Hadot notes that the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius was ‘trying to do what, in the last analysis, we are all trying to do: to live in complete consciousness and lucidity, to give to each of our instants its full intensity, and to give meaning to our entire life.’ This account helps us to understand why early Christianity was widely regarded, by both its practitioners and its critics, as a ‘philosophy’, as this term was understood in late classical antiquity. While philosophy can be enacted, philosophical discourse often becomes trapped within arcane technocratic echo chambers, which may be cognitively interesting, yet are generally existentially barren. But it doesn’t need to be like this. Søren Kierkegaard held that truth was not primarily something objective that we apprehend, but something that apprehends us, and so changes us inwardly.
Currently, as Wolf rightly notes, religion is one of the most important sources of meaning and value in our culture. We will reflect further on the nature of religion and religious belief in the next chapter, but now it is enough to note that many consider one of the distinct characteristics of religion to be its integration of theory and practice. The philosopher Keith Yandell brings this point out clearly: a religion, he suggests, is a ‘conceptual system’ that provides an interpretation of the world and our place within it, leading to an account of ‘how life should be lived given that interpretation’, which is expressed or enacted in ‘a set of rituals, institutions and practices.’
It is, of course, obvious that such systems of meaning are found beyond the traditional category of ‘religion’ – for example, in Marxism or Darwinism. This partly reflects the problematic category of ‘religion’, which is a false universal, something that is regularly presented as a ‘natural kind’ when it is really a social construction. Yet my point here is that while this propensity is characteristic of religion, it is not limited to religion. As Mary Midgley pointed out, this helps us understand why Marxism and Darwinism – the ‘two great secular faiths of our day’ – display ‘religious-looking features’.
The point we have been considering in this section is that ‘framing beliefs’ are of critical importance to a meaningful human inhabitation of this world, yet cannot be proved to be true. This does not mean that they are arbitrary, delusional, or deliberately constructed falsehoods. Belief is an entirely reasonable option as we try to interpret the messy and mysterious world into which we are thrown, which fails to disclose its significance – or ours – in an unambiguous way.
In his late poem The Ancient Sage (1885), Alfred Lord Tennyson reflected extensively on his own struggles with faith and doubt, and the predicament of being immersed in a world of uncertainty in which many things were important but nothing was clear. ‘It is hard,’ he once declared, ‘to believe in God; but it is harder not to believe.’ Yet Tennyson was at least clear about one matter: if a belief was important, if it genuinely mattered, then it could not be proved:
For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven.
Some will argue that, since the essence of human identity is our freedom to make choices, we are free to create such beliefs as we please in the absence of compelling, or even suggestive, evidence. Jean-Paul Sartre asserted that our beliefs, commitments and purposes are simply principles that we ourselves determine. We are what we choose to be. Richard Rorty similarly insisted that ‘there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.’
Others, however, are disturbed by the absence of any transcendent grounding for our beliefs which might challenge what are often self-serving ideologies, privileging the views of certain individuals or social groups. Surely our beliefs need to be grounded in and accountable to something greater? The idea of ‘natural law’ is important here. It suggests that our beliefs, commitments and purposes are to be judged against a transcendent norm, which lies beyond human manipulation and control. Morality and meaning rest on some transcendent ground that is not our creation, but which we progressively discern and gradually enact.
The difficulties of these debates lead some to suggest that we ought to disengage from trying to interpret the world, in that questions of meaning and value lie beyond rational or scientific verification. Yet as Albert Camus pointed out, that amounts to a denial of an essential feature of the human condition – an inbuilt longing to seek meaning. Camus’ Sisyphus had to live in the ‘absurd’ situation of having to believe in a world that is silent when questioned, declining to tell us what it means. There is an existential tension between our desire for meaning and the inherent meaninglessness of our existence, leading Sisyphus to push this boulder up a hill time and time again, determined to find the meaning that had eluded him up to this point.
We can, Camus suggests, only eliminate our distinctively human urge to find meaning through suppressing our exploration of the world on the one hand, or by ending our lives on the other. We have to work with human nature as we find it, rather than eliminate its distinctively human elements – such as the capacity and inclination to believe, often (though not invariably) expressed in religious faith. As Philip Pullman points out, ‘the religious impulse is part of what we are and it always has been’.
Human beings thus seem to be ‘metaphysical animals’, to borrow a phrase from the Cambridge philosopher Donald MacKinnon. We are hardwired to supplement our biological instinct for survival with an existential instinct to find and enact meaning and value. Some seek to suppress this instinct, fearing its consequences; others dismiss it as a hangover from our evolutionary past which deludes us into believing in some greater account of reality that transcends mere functionality. Yet, clearly, meaning and values matter to human beings. We need beliefs to help us to navigate the complexities and cope with the ambiguities of life.
Weaving Beliefs Together:
Towards a Big Picture of Reality
Countless philosophical, spiritual and religious writers have commended an integrative account of human wisdom, bringing together the multiple dispersed elements of knowledge to yield a greater whole. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer spoke of our ability to acquire ‘a new dimension of reality’, reflecting humanity’s apparently unique capacity to construct ‘symbolic systems’ which extend our vision of the social world, and make its inhabitation meaningful. This means going beyond a mere accumulation of facts and observations, and finding a way of integrating them to see the ‘big picture’ that lies behind them. So how can we do this? How can we, for example, achieve a workable synthesis of ethics and physics?
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a seminal paper concerning the interchangeability of mass and energy, memorably expressed in the famous scientific equation, E = mc2. Forty years later, this scientific principle was put to destructive use in the two atom bombs that devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although Einstein played no role in this technological development, he was alarmed at the way in which science was being used to develop new and more deadly weapons of mass destruction, such as napalm (developed in the Harvard laboratories of Professor Louis Fieser in 1942) or nuclear weapons.
Yet for Einstein, science by itself could not provide scientists with a viable moral framework: ‘science can only ascertain what is, not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.’ David Hume, one of Einstein’s two favourite philosophers (the other being Baruch Spinoza), had exposed the intellectual problems of moving from an account of the way things are and the way things should be, and Einstein could see no way round this disjunction of fact and value. In their quest to be moral, scientists would have to draw on ethical values that originated from beyond their own specialist field of studies.
Mary Midgley, perhaps the most significant public philosopher to deal with this question, highlighted the need to use all our ‘philosophical tools to bring these distinct kinds of thought together.’ For Midgley, it was clear that ‘all explanation, and particularly the explanation of human action, quite properly uses many non-competing but convergent methods.’ Difference in method does not entail incompatibility.
Neither does difference in outcome, in that each could be seen as a particular perspective on a complex reality – such as the nature of universe or the meaning of human existence – which resists reduction to simplistic categories or single levels of explanation. We have to try and use our tools of knowing as best we can to align our ‘knowledge’ with something that we encounter but cannot control, and that demands progressing beyond monochrome surface readings of reality.
Yet some insist that such a multidisciplinary approach is unnecessary and improper, in that the natural sciences can answer every significant question with a unique rational and cultural authority. This position is often known as ‘scientism’, which can be described as ‘a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions.’ I used to think this myself, so I can easily understand its appeal to anyone longing for certainty.
For the philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg, science offers ‘irrefutably correct answers’ (hence eliminating any need for belief or any anxiety about uncertainty) to ‘persistent questions’ such as ‘What is the nature of reality?’ (his answer: what physics says it is), or ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ (his answer: there is none). Rosenberg graciously concedes that ‘knowing the truth makes it hard not to sound patronizing of the benighted souls still under religion’s spell.’ But if you have discovered what you believe to be ‘irrefutably correct answers’, I suppose it’s irritating when others suggest you may have got things wrong.
In the light of his unassailable certainties about life, Rosenberg declares that it is pointless to try and find ‘a good reason to go on living, because there isn’t any.’ Happily, Rosenberg has a therapeutic solution for those who might be troubled by the absence of morality or meaning from their worlds: if this ‘makes it impossible to get out of bed in the morning,’ you should try Prozac (other neuro-pharmacological fixes are, of course, available).
Rosenberg presents himself as a lofty, rational observer of other people’s madness. Yet I am unpersuaded by his line of argument. Let me invite you to join me in a mental experiment that might be helpful in exploring this question. During the COVID lockdown of 2020–21, I regularly used a thermometer to determine my temperature. A raised temperature would not necessarily mean that I had COVID, but it was certainly an indication that I needed to check things out. Suppose I were to argue like this. My thermometer proved to be a reliable tool for checking my temperature. Since it worked so well in that role, why not use it for everything? Like working out what is right or wrong? Or whether I have free will? Or determining the meaning of life?
Now this will strike most of my readers as a ridiculous argument. I suspect (and hope) many will respond to my suggestion like this: a thermometer has been designed to check temperatures! It doesn’t do anything else! It’s not meant to be used for ethical or existential issues! But that’s my point. Intellectual disciplines devise their own research methods to engage specific aspects of reality. A research method that works for one domain will be useless or misleading if used in another. Rosenberg is simply universalising a tool that was designed with other specific (and limited) purposes in mind.
Mary Midgley makes this point in a highly critical assessment of those who, like Rosenberg, demand that every intellectual domain should be subordinated to the methods of physicists. ‘No one pattern of thought – not even in physics – is so “fundamental” that all others will eventually be reduced to it. Instead, for most important questions in human life, a number of different conceptual tool-boxes always have to be used together.’
But I have a second problem with Rosenberg’s approach, which he himself recognises: his argument for the exclusive authority of science is viciously circular, presupposing (indeed, relying upon) its conclusions. Imagine someone who makes the following assertion: ‘science is the only reliable arbitrator of reliable knowledge, offering “irrefutably correct answers” to any meaningful questions.’ Here’s my point: if science is the only secure foundation and reliable arbitrator of human knowledge, it necessarily follows that we must use science to reliably evaluate every belief or proposal – including the belief that ‘science is the only reliable arbitrator of reliable knowledge’. What experiment might show that science is the sole source of reliable knowledge? How could Rosenberg’s claim be validated from outside a scientific perspective? Rosenberg’s whole process of validation is ultimately self-referential and self-validating, allowing us to affirm the internal consistency but not the truth of this belief – and it is a belief, in that it cannot be proved to be true.
Furthermore, how can we know that there is no more to reality than the laws of nature that science discovers? Declaring that science is the ‘ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions’ is making a second-order philosophical claim about science, which cannot be verified empirically. As the philosopher Edward Feser points out, Rosenberg is trapped in a circular argument. To break out of this circle, he suggests, ‘requires “getting outside” science altogether’ and verifying from an ‘extra-scientific vantage point’ that science alone offers a reliable picture of reality. Yet making this entirely reasonable intellectual move simply pulls the rug out from Rosenberg’s argument. ‘The very existence of that extra-scientific vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality.’
Over the years, I have come to the view that there is a spectrum of human knowledge, which rests on the application of a range of different ‘conceptual tool-boxes’ (Midgley), each developed and adapted with specific research questions in mind. Some examples may help illustrate the rich diversity of questions that people consider significant, and which they hope may be answered.
What is the universe expanding into?
Why can’t I be the good person that I know I ought to be?
How can I help deal with the world’s environmental crisis? These are all real questions; yet they cannot be answered by a single disciplinary approach. For example, the expansion of the universe can be explained and justified through contemporary cosmology; yet the real issue lying behind this question requires a different toolbox, in that it concerns the psychological question of how human beings can visualise four-dimensional space-time, when they have been habituated into three-dimensional modes of thinking.
Like the biologist Steven Rose, I consider that we live in a world that is an ‘ontological unity’, while recognising that we must adopt ‘an epistemological pluralism’ if we are to investigate it responsibly and coherently. We use different research methods for each of its many aspects. The resulting forms of knowledge will have different characteristics and epistemic values – some capable of being proved (logic and mathematics), some well-evidenced yet open to revision over time through evidential accumulation and theoretical development (the natural sciences), and others taking the form of beliefs that may be trusted yet cannot be proved (ethics, politics and religion).
Knowledge of the world thus takes different forms; each of these has a different evidence base and form of reasoning, and consequently permits a different degree of epistemic confidence. But I can’t force every aspect of human knowledge into the same epistemic container. I can’t insist that ethics should be subject to the same methods and norms as physics. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to explore how these different forms of knowledge might be woven together, or at least be held together alongside each other.
The human quest for wisdom involves an interdisciplinary correlation of these insights. Yet the mood of our ‘debauched culture invites us to simplify reality, to despise wisdom’ (Susan Sontag). Achieving wisdom, for Sontag, demands a full and attentive engagement with the complexity of reality. But how can this be done in practice, when in theory it seems to be impossible, given the issues that we have just noted? In what follows, we will consider how the British public philosopher Mary Midgley approaches this important question.
Mary Midgley and the Correlation
of Human Knowledge
The realisation that our world is too vast and complex to be fully grasped by any single individual can be traced back to Plato. No single method of investigation can provide us with a comprehensive understanding of our world. Mary Midgley was a champion of an intellectually respectful engagement with our universe, arguing that it requires the use of many approaches and perspectives to do justice to its many aspects, and avoid a distorting reductionism. She insisted that the quality of our thinking ought to be as deep and complex as the world itself, demanding an expansion of our intellectual vision to enfold our complex world, rather than reducing it to the intellectually manageable.
Midgley suggests that it is helpful to compare the world to a ‘huge aquarium’, with multiple viewing windows to allow us not simply to consider its many aspects, but to realise that these are elements of a greater interconnected whole. ‘We cannot see it as a whole from above, so we peer in at it through a number of small windows. … We can eventually make quite a lot of sense of this habitat if we patiently put together the data from different angles. But if we insist that our own window is the only one worth looking through, we shall not get very far.’ Our world demands using a wide range of windows and viewpoints if we are to fully capture its depth and complexity.
Midgley’s anti-reductionist strategy of ‘multiple maps’ allows us to capture, represent and, ultimately, safeguard the complexity of our world. We need a collection of maps, each incomplete, to view alongside each other. These maps complement, rather than contradict; they each offer distinct accounts of the same territory, providing their own specific information and insights. A political map of Europe is not the same as a physical map of Europe; neither makes the other redundant. The first discloses the political boundaries of its regions, where one nation-state ends and other begins – matters that would be appreciated by refugees seeking safety. The second discloses the location of rivers, mountains and lakes – matters that would be appreciated by tourists and nature lovers. Both serve their own distinct purpose, disclosing only certain aspects of the landscape of reality which can be more fully grasped and comprehended by superimposing these individual maps. Yet when taken together, these maps unfold an extended vision of our world and human existence, allowing us to locate ourselves within its existential landscape.
Much the same point was made by Iris Murdoch, noted for her emphasis on the ‘calming’ and ‘whole-making’ effect of beliefs, which help us to see the world as coherent and capable of sustaining meaningful human existence. Like Midgley, Murdoch recognised the importance of finding a unifying picture which coordinates the metaphysical (what reality is) with the existential (what reality means). Where Alex Rosenberg believes that the universe is meaningless, recommending judicious use of antidepressants such as Prozac to cope with this unsettling insight, Midgley and Murdoch argue that we can achieve mental stability by discerning the richer vision of the universe that results from interdisciplinary reflection and allows us insights into how we can live more authentically in this complex world.
Moving On
In this chapter, we have explored the idea of a ‘big picture’, a way of understanding this world and our place within it that is attentive to its particularities, while still attuned to the grander vision of reality that lies behind or beyond them. It creates specifically an imaginative space within which beliefs can be interconnected and enriched, enabling not simply an explanation of how our world works, but an interpretation of that world that enables its meaningful habitation.
For Wittgenstein, authentic meaning and happiness arise when we think and live in accordance with something deeper and greater than ourselves – something to which we are accountable for our beliefs. ‘In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world.’ Similar views can be instanced from Chinese or Japanese philosophies of life and spiritual traditions. Confucianism, for example, stresses the importance of enacting a way of life that is in harmony with the way of the world.
To believe is not to be religious (though that is certainly one possible outcome); it is rather to have discerned ‘an unseen order of some kind’ or grasped an intuited scheme of things, that enables us to understand our world and live a meaningful life. The case for faith or belief in sustaining meaningful human existence does not need to be made on religious grounds, nor is religion the sole example – or even the best example – of a way of thinking that requires faith. Yet since many consider that religion is the most obvious instance of something that is characterised by beliefs, we will explore the question of specifically religious belief in the next chapter, before moving on to consider how we might assess the reliability of our beliefs.