CFI

Inquiries
Volume 1 Number 1

Free and Responsible Inquiry by Jeffrey Brautigam
Other Faces of Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck

Free and Responsible Inquiry
by Jeffrey Brautigam

As we launch this inaugural volume of Inquiries, what better set of issues to consider than those raised by Roger Shattuck? The Center for Free Inquiry, and its quarterly publication, Inquiries, are dedicated to exploring fundamental and enduring issues through the lens of the liberal arts. No set of issues is more fundamental and more enduring than those that deal with the question of the moral and ethical boundaries to human inquiry.

In late August of 1945, a young airman named Roger Shattuck flew a B-25 bomber over the smoldering ruins of Hiroshima. He was witness to the consequences of a shattering advance of human knowledge. In 1996, Shattuck produced a provocative and profound study of the moral and ethical boundaries of human inquiry entitled Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. In that book, Shattuck provided an analysis that ranged from the impassioned debates about moral relativism in literature and scholarship to recent advances in science and medicine, in order to make a case for the need for reasoned restraint in the quest for knowledge.

In this essay, excerpted from his talk at the Center for Free Inquiry in March of 1999, Shattuck traces a line of thought from ancient cautionary myths through the life's work of Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and the philosophical program of Isaiah Berlin, to argue that western civilization's most rigorous thinkers have always understood the necessity of caution and restraint.

Jeffrey Brautigam is the Director of the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College, where he also teaches modern European history and the history of science.

Other Faces of Forbidden Knowledge
by Roger Shattuck

To know too much is never wise. Whoever tries to fly high above all other men will die. Whoever seeks to know what humans cannot know will lose all light and laughter, lose all light and love. A wise man keeps his distance from those who want to know too much. I'd rather trust the simple sense of people in the street.

Bacchae, Euripides
(Translated by Paul Schmidt)

Ancient cautionary myths and parables often present not one, but a pair of characters, with one character confounding the other. Just think of them all: Prometheus and Pandora, Daedalus and Icarus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Cupid and Psyche, the Sorcerer and his Apprentice, Faust and Mephisto, Dr. Frankenstein and his creature. What could be more commonplace than this kind of pair?

One rash person oversteps the bounds and gets the other person (that is, all the rest of us) in trouble. It must be the oldest story ever told. Can you think of a flatter stereotype? Who would ever conceive of writing a book on so trite a subject? What publisher would be so foolish as to market such a tired bill of goods?

A different parable provides an answer to those questions. It is a parable about how exceedingly important objects or ideas can escape our attention, especially when they lie right under our eyes. The story was written by the great paradoxalist and secret agent, Edgar Allan Poe. He called it, "The Purloined Letter." The best way to hide the letter in Poe's story was to place it in plain sight, lightly camouflaged as something ordinary. We are blind to the obvious. The ruse in Poe's story is totally successful.

No one had to plan a ruse like that to conceal the notion of forbidden knowledge. It has lain there, half-hidden, for so long that it simply forms part of the landscape. It is like light and air and gravity, which constitute the essential media in which we live, but each of which nevertheless had to be noticed and identified. We had to discover forbidden knowledge as a separate, identifiable entity in our psychological and moral environment.

For centuries, except in theological debates, we did not talk much about forbidden knowledge. We didn't need to; its time had not come. There's no way I could have called my book The Invention of Forbidden Knowledge, a trendy title. The reality of that taboo was always present as a factor in human history, and it leads us back over the horizon of prehistory. A verse from the Old Testament, one which Francis Bacon loved to quote, encompasses the whole narrative situation, including Poe's insight. Proverbs 25.2 reads, "The glory of God is to conceal a thing. The glory of the king is to search it out."

Today, forbidden knowledge can no longer remain an invisible element of the surrounding landscape. We feel its timeliness and its urgency. And we have ancient myths to give it force. When mortal Phaethon obtained from his divine father, Helios, the privilege of driving the chariot of the sun across the heavens for just one day, he nearly incinerated the universe. Zeus was obliged, literally, to save the day with thunderbolts, and then life went on.

Is there anyone up there now to rescue us from another intrepid Phaethon? For there is a whole crowd of modern Phaethons lined up to try out for the job of driving the chariot of the sun. In case of disaster, can we still rely on divine intervention? I strongly doubt it. We should not dismiss the wisdom expressed in my epigraph from Euripides.

Ovid's beautifully told Phaethon myth concerning the encounter of an apprehensive god and a reckless mortal has become a moral parable so pertinent to our present state that it has lost its quaintness. Phaethon, and all associated stories of overreaching and presumptuousness and curiosity, now define the human condition as emphatically as the traditional human attributes of being mortal, social, spiritual, and moral. Phaethon could not and would not steer the horses of the sun on a middle course, as his father tried to instruct him. Phaethon's example reminds us that the principle of deregulation may not save us from all our problems, for deregulation may be the problem.

On the other hand, forbidden knowledge as a theme defining humanity leads not so much to imposing stark prohibitions as to finding and following a middle course, and to a set of sensible limits for our yearnings and our experiments. Yes, we are talking about an enormous commonplace--the most boring of all advice, "Be cautious." It flies in the face of a whole organized and commercialized and advertised culture that scorns restraint and moderation. Is this a struggle worth entering? If so, how does one defend the middle course against not one, but two opponents: excessive freedom and excessive constraints?

A book, any book, Milton argued in Areopagitica, is a living creature. I have come to respect that metaphor. Fifteen years after starting my book, Forbidden Knowledge, and more than three years after its publication, I cannot overlook the fact that the book has grown and changed in unexpected ways while remaining, materially, exactly the same. It has revealed weaknesses and strengths that ask either for repair or for further elaboration. Those revelations have come from reviews, from letters appearing out of nowhere from readers, and from my own rereadings in attempting to check myself.

For instance, although I gave considerable attention to Francis Bacon in the opening chapter of the book, I now believe I should have recognized even more fully his crucial relation to my subject and his importance as a historical figure. It is difficult not to respect the man who invented and practiced the Initiative method, as opposed to the Majesterial method. "The Majesterial method requires that what is told should be believed. The Initiative method requires that it should be examined."⁽¹⁾

A series of quotations from Bacon's great treatises on natural philosophy or, as we would say today, natural science, will reveal his position with regard to forbidden knowledge. In addition to his many public responsibilities, Bacon found time and energy for a 20-year project to rely not on authority, but on experiment, observation, and induction. In setting down his argument for this vision of the future, which culminated in the unfinished utopian narrative, The New Atlantis, Bacon saw fit to retain one Biblical reference point: the fall of Adam and Eve.

In his earliest treatise in 1605, The Advancement of Learning, as soon as he has dispatched three pages of ritual dedication to King James I, Bacon states that his purpose is to reveal "the ignorance and error of the opinion that the aspiring to over much knowledge was the original temptation and sin, whereupon ensued the fall of man."⁽²⁾ He covers himself immediately, within in the same lengthy sentence, by distinguishing between two distinct categories of knowledge: pure knowledge and proud knowledge. Pure knowledge of the names and characteristics and workings of all natural objects and creatures in the world is proper for man and encouraged by our Creator. It is proud knowledge of good and evil with an intent in man to give law unto himself and depend no more on God's Commandments that constitutes temptation and sin. In this opening statement about the true nature of the fall of man, Bacon is carefully protecting "natural philosophy," the sciences and technology, from the theological charges of vanity and presumption. On the contrary, he claims, man's greatest achievements will come from natural philosophy.

Fifteen years later in the same project, in the "Proemium" to The Great Instauration (1620), Bacon takes a bold step in the same direction. He mentions neither God nor the fall, but the first sentence raises this question: "Whether the commerce between the mind of man and the nature of things [which was destroyed by the fall] might by any means be restored to its perfect and original condition?"⁽³⁾ Here is an even more ambitious and potentially heretical opening move. By a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, humankind, Bacon suggests, may redeem itself from the fall and attain, if not felicity and innocence, at least an improved condition. No mention is made here of the sacrifice of Christ the Redeemer; knowledge, not the Savior, will exalt the power and greatness and stature of man. We will redeem ourselves, and we will do so by science. On the last two pages of this opening, Bacon, still a Christian, says a prayer for his project. The prayer ends by imploring that since knowledge has now been "discharged of that venom which the serpent infused into it, we may cultivate the trust in charity."⁽⁴⁾ By charity, he means the welfare of mankind.

These singing passages sweep aside the Incarnation, the Resurrection, the Redemption, and all associated miracles of the Christian story, and reveal Bacon's faith in the "contemplation" of nature's marvels. Bacon never got into trouble with the church, and his writing never turned against the Christian story, but in expressing what appears to be a genuine religious belief in a transcendent God, he in effect sets aside the Christian God for nature's God. He prepares the way for the most ambitious claim of all, made by utopian political thinkers, by Romantic artists, and by modernday scientists, that when we emerge from the long night of ignorance and false belief, we shall redeem ourselves through our own powers of invention and creation. We shall undo the fall. Bacon's convictions about human salvation are embraced by the Freemasons in their curious blend of engineering and occult religions, by French encyclopedists in their celebration of secular knowledge, and by a core of natural scientists which has been growing steadily since the 17th century.

Bacon's bold assertion of redemption through science and technology reappears today in the strikingly spiritual metaphors used by contemporary scientists, particularly molecular biologists and geneticists, to describe their millenary vision of the future. You've heard the terms: ultimate knowledge, miracle, holy grail. These metaphors for our genetic material are not used ironically or unthinkingly. I believe that many scientists today are being thrust into dilemmas that Bacon foresaw. The phenomena of nature, whose workings they have pursued into their most intimate recesses or out to their furthest cosmological limits, lead them not always to atheism, but often to a tranquil agnosticism like Darwin's, or to a rough theism like Einstein's. And religious imagery endures. One of the bestinformed and most optimistic books recently published about genetic modification and genetic engineering bears the significant title Remaking Eden (1998). The author, Lee Silver, believes the title is descriptive, not hyperbolic.

If you have had time to follow even popular journalism covering the march of science, you know that there is serious contemplation not only of human cloning, but also of modifying the encoded limits on human cell division, so as to extend the human life span toward the goal of immortality. My initial reaction to that prospect is expressed in a book title from the 1960s on nuclear weapons, Thinking About the Unthinkable. It amounts to fulfilling Bacon's prophecy that through knowledge and inquiry, we shall redeem ourselves from the fall, take control of our destiny, and find everlasting life. We shall remove ourselves from divine providence and even from the reign of evolutionary chance. Are we ready then to play the role of Phaethon and take control of the cosmos? No question could be more serious.

In his writings generally, Bacon does not often use the terms "reason" and "freedom." He devotes himself most intently to legitimizing all forms of investigation into natural phenomena while, as a firm royalist and nominal Christian, he leaves politics and theology undisturbed. Nevertheless, he and his French counterpart, Descartes, launched the great chariot of Enlightenment reason that organized itself into the institution of science and that has grown unstoppably for the past 300 years. Vaulting over those 300 years, I want to look now at 14 pages of expository prose which, like "The Purloined Letter," are both momentous and unremarked. Bacon liberated the sciences from the domain of forbidden knowledge; the author we are coming to raises serious doubts about the wisdom of that liberation.

In October 1958, Isaiah Berlin, at age 48, delivered his inaugural address as a chaired professor at Oxford University. Exactly in the middle of that widely discussed talk, titled "Two Concepts of Liberty,"⁽⁵⁾ Berlin composed a segment that examines the history of reason and of rational inquiry in the West. The opening 20 pages prepare us for the immense power of ideas. The following section deals with how insistently Hegel and Marx refurbished the Epicurean doctrine that knowledge and reason liberate us by eliminating irrational fears and errors.

Then comes the central section with the alluring title, "The Temple of Sarastro," in reference to Mozart's The Magic Flute. It provides an even closer history of rationalist ideas from Locke and Rousseau to Kant and Schiller. Berlin concludes that from liberal beginnings, the rationalist argument seeking a single true solution for our individual and social dilemmas leads often to "an authoritarian state obedient to the directives of elite Platonic guardians." He calls this "a strange reversal," which has transformed individualism into totalitarianism by the exercise of an initially benevolent paternalism. Someone else who knows better than we do has to explain to us our own wants and interests and impose them on us.

Here, then, is the world of Sarastro, the wise magician and high priest under whose teachings vengeance has disappeared and all becomes love and joy. Based on Freemasonry, Sarastro's utopia in The Magic Flute does not recognize an invisible margin of private life where we guard our essential freedom. Under Sarastro's rule, one becomes free by discipline and obedience. Berlin, recapitulating this development of freedom into despotism, concludes that something must be amiss in our basic assumptions.

Here is the crucial passage. First, Berlin restates the basic assumptions of positive liberty, which seeks an ideal society at the expense of individual negative liberty. Then he asks a series of questions that make us shudder:

Let me state the basic assumptions of the rationalist argument once more: first, that all men have one true purpose, and one only, that of rational self-direction; second, that the ends of all rational beings must necessarily fit into a single universal, harmonious pattern, which some will be able to discern more clearly than others; third, that all conflict, and consequently all tragedy, is due solely to the clash of reason with the irrational or insufficiently rational--the immature and the underdeveloped elements in life--whether individual or communal, and that such clashes are, in principle, avoidable, and for wholly rational beings impossible; finally, that when all men have been made rational, they will obey the rational laws of their own natures, which are one and the same in them all, and so be at once wholly law-abiding and wholly free. Can it be that Socrates and the creators of the central Western tradition in ethics and politics who followed him have been mistaken, for more than two millennia, that virtue is not knowledge, nor freedom identical with either? That despite the fact that it rules the lives of more men than ever before in its long history, not one of basic assumptions of this famous view is demonstrable, or, perhaps, even true?⁽⁶⁾

Until he died in 1997, Isaiah Berlin occupied a well-deserved position as one of the most wide-ranging, historically-based, and judicious intellectuals working in what he called "the central Western tradition in ethics and politics." He resisted calls to revolution and maintained a liberal and tolerant attitude, often labeled pluralism. How can this eminent representative of the Western tradition have come to turn on that tradition, to call it witheringly "this famous view"? You can almost hear the sneer in his voice as he challenges its truth. Berlin reacted this way because he had been, in his life as a Jewish émigré from Russia to England, a particularly intimate witness to European history, primarily Hitler and Stalin. He had seen negative liberty attacked and defended, and finally survive, yet precariously.

One small change in wording would, I believe, clarify Berlin's thought. "Can it be," he asks, "that virtue is not knowledge?" Knowledge here comes from Socrates. For Berlin's analysis of post-Enlightenment thinking and of the rationalist doctrine, it would be more consistent to ask, "Can it be that virtue is not reason?" Reason is really what he is questioning. What Berlin's tolerant intelligence resists is the fanatical appeal to reason alone to solve our problems. Yes, we need reason, but reason kept in its place, tempered by history and literature and the wisdom of experience.

After this remarkable challenge to his own birthright as a political philosopher in the Western tradition, Berlin goes on for 20 pages in "Two Concepts of Liberty" to plead that not all good things in life are compatible, that conflicts and tragedy characterize human life more fully than the imagined harmony of Sarastro's temple or than the totalitarian experiment of Lenin's and Stalin's Soviet Union. While restraining reason, Berlin quietly affirms that "we must fall back on the ordinary resources of empirical observation and ordinary human knowledge."⁽⁷⁾ He has left in place a clumsy repetition of the word "ordinary" in one short sentence. This unrepentant intellectual knew exactly what he was doing.

Now there is something historically provincial about jumping to the 20th century to illustrate the flaws of the rationalist project launched by Bacon and Descartes in the 17th century. Anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of post-Renaissance writings can point to at least two celebrated and much earlier satires of the consequences of reductive rationalist thinking. The obtusely benign character of Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide caricatures the mechanical use of reason to prove that, no matter how disastrous the events that afflict mankind, this must be the best of all possible worlds. Pangloss's preposterous syllogisms hoodwink the innocent Candide into passive acceptance of injustice and misfortune. Then, in the last chapter, Candide finally shakes free and thinks for himself in ordinary, common-sense terms. He decides firmly that he and his friends should cultivate their own garden, rather than resign themselves helplessly to circumstances and to exploitation by others.

An even more thoroughgoing criticism of unfettered reason cut off from other human faculties occurs in one of the best-known works of English-Irish literature in the 18th century, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. Gulliver makes four principal voyages. On the last voyage, Swift casts Gulliver ashore on an island where human nature has been passed, as it were, through a prism, which separates the rational faculties from all the other, presumably baser faculties. A society of horse-like creatures, the Houyhnhnms, has received reason and lives accordingly. Bands of humanoid Yahoos have received the remainder of our characteristics and live accordingly.

Swift relates Gulliver's gradual conversion to unstinting admiration for the detached, viceless, eminently peaceful Houyhnhnms. Meanwhile, so obviously that many readers never notice, Gulliver goes mad and loses his humanity in the presence of these two sets of deprived and monstrous creatures. As clearly as one of Aesop's fables, this fourth book of Gulliver's travels has a powerful, though undeclared moral. It is also the moral of Berlin's despairing pages on the temple of Sarastro. Never, Swift implies with all his narrative and moral force, should we try to manipulate our natures in such a way as permanently to separate reason from emotion, to divide detachment and logic from compassion and fellow feeling.

Swift's lesson reaches very deep. He declares his true loyalties in the figure of the Portuguese sea captain who rescues Gulliver from his insane misanthropy, protects him from harm, and nurses him back to an approximation of health. The sea captain does so not out of a reasoned morality, but out of spontaneous charity and sympathy, that is, from "ordinary" motives. Gulliver's heavy burden, which he proves unable to bear, the burden of maintaining his sanity between the haughty rationality of the Houyhnhnms and the bestiality of the Yahoos, is not so imaginary or so dated a dilemma as we might think. That condition of divided loyalties and of ambivalence spreads very wide. The most dramatic example lies surprisingly close to us.

The training of medical doctors has reached the point where medical students have become aware of the conflict between, on the one hand, exploding scientific knowledge promising extended life span, miraculous enhancements, and new forms of reproduction, and, on the other hand, a slowly growing body of practical knowledge about how to help individual patients deal with disease, death, extended life, and the daunting prospect of major medical interventions. I say this on the basis of informal conversations with medical students I've encountered recently. I say it also after reading a book published in 1999 by a clinical physician who is also a laboratory scientist in molecular biology and an active scholar in the philosophy and history of science.

Dr. Alfred Tauber's short, highly personal, yet fully professional study carries the title, Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy.⁽⁸⁾ In the opening historical chapter, Tauber traces the successful effort of French and German scientists in the 19th century to reduce biology and medicine to the inorganic sciences of physics and chemistry as "the ultimate bases of their explanations." In the United States, the powerful Flexner Report of 1910 imposed these new thoughts on medical schools and brought about "a new scientific model ruthlessly and unnecessarily sacrificing a humanist element."⁽⁹⁾ Two very distinguished and articulate physicians, William Osler and Francis Peabody, opposed "the challenge of laboratory-based medicine to bedside-oriented clinical practice. Osler was not at all opposed to science applied to medicine, but he vigorously resisted a scientific ethos imposing itself between the physician and the patient."⁽¹⁰⁾ Osler and Peabody lost.

Today, medical students and experienced physicians like Tauber feel the strain of opposing claims between scientific designations of disease and their knowledge that disease "cannot be defined solely by physical and chemical measurements of bodily functions."⁽¹¹⁾ The current growth of alternative medicine at a time of huge advances in scientific medicine underscores our groping reaction to a conflicted situation.

Several chapters later, Tauber declares his conviction that medical schools need to pay greater attention to medical ethics, not only to the practical decisions of applied ethics, but also to the foundational philosophical considerations that will make explicit the unique moral, as opposed to scientific, character of the healer. I should add that Tauber, who is a close friend and colleague, is in no fashion an enemy of science. Having mastered extensive areas of biological and medical science, he sees beyond and around them to the whole human person, and refuses to tolerate a professional separation of patients into parts, any more than Swift did. Tauber's scientific holism also corresponds to Berlin's philosophic holism about human nature. In this context, Wordsworth's poetic maxim on the subject is still unbeatable: "We murder to dissect."

* * * * *

Have we now lost our way? What do Bacon's great instauration of science and Berlin's shocking loss of faith in the Western tradition and Swift's and Tauber's fears of losing the humanistic outlook have to do with a book called Forbidden Knowledge?

I have spoken at length about our urge to divide knowledge into parts. Bacon, Berlin, Swift, and Tauber all scrutinize this ancient temptation. They all warn us about the dangers of such a division in the mind if carried too far and applied systematically to our lives.

To conclude, I want to comment on a passage from the end of my book. This passage is called "Knowledge Double-Bound," which is the fifth of six categories of forbidden knowledge.

The fifth category differs considerably from the others and will be harder to define. Both common sense and the history of philosophy recognize two kinds, two tendencies of knowledge. We may approach, enter into, sympathize with, and unite with a thing known in order to attain subjective knowledge. Or we may stand outside, observe, anatomize, analyze, and ponder the thing known in order to attain objective knowledge.

Subjective, or empathetic, knowledge causes us to lose a judicious perspective on the object. Objective knowledge, in seeking to maintain that perspective, loses the bond of sympathy. We cannot know something by both means at the same time. The attempt to reconcile the two or to alternate between them leads to great mental stress. Orestes recoiled from his objective duty to avenge his father, Agamemnon, because of his subjective revulsion to killing his mother, Clytemnestra. In explaining how best to comprehend the sublime magnitude of the Great Pyramids in Egypt, Kant wrote with startling simplicity, "We must avoid coming too near just as much as remaining too far away." Flaubert was less judicious. "The less one feels a thing the more apt one is to express it as it is."⁽¹²⁾

Distinctions between the two modes of knowledge appear to reach even deeper within us. Schiller devoted his sixth letter on the aesthetic education of man to the dissociation of reason from feeling or imagination, or as Eliot called it, "the dissociation of sensibility." Schiller wrote, "It was civilization itself which inflicted this wound on modern man"⁽¹³⁾ Wordsworth discovered a similar division in the mind. "The groundwork, therefore, of all true philosophy is the full apprehension of the difference between...that intuition of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole...and that which presents itself when...we think of ourselves as separated beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind. As object to subject."⁽¹⁴⁾

Do we have two kinds of thinking, subjective and objective? Emotional and rational? Can we separate them? In his parable of the Houyhuhums and the Yahoos, Swift says emphatically, "No, that way, we go mad. That way, we lose our humanity." A century earlier, in his unbeatably laconic style, Blaise Pascal gave Swift his full support. "Two errors: to exclude reason, and to admit only reason."⁽¹⁵⁾

In this cascade of second thoughts, issuing from Forbidden Knowledge, I have not solved the great question: How do we think? I have only demonstrated that we cannot stop thinking about it. And that somehow it all connects.

Roger Shattuck is an eminent literary critic. His new book is Candor and Perversion: Literature, Education, and the Arts (Norton, 1999).

Endnotes

1. Francis Bacon, A Selection of His Works, edited by Sidney Warhoft (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1965), p.4.

2. Works, p. 201

3. Works, p. 298

4. Works, p. 309

5. Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

6. "Two Concepts," p. 154

7. "Two Concepts," p. 168

8. Alfred Tauber, Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy (Boston: MIT Press 1999).

9. Confessions, pp.11-12.

10. Confessions, p.12.

11. Confessions, p. 14.

12. Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996). p. 332.

13. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man [1793-95], Sixth Letter.

14. Wordsworth, from The Friend.

15. Pascal, Pensees, Brunschvicg #253.

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