(This post is a continuation of an earlier post, “Thinking Towards a New World Order.”)
My purpose in this post is to describe the fragmentary pattern of thought, yet before I can do so I must examine what I call abstractive thinking, as fragmentary thinking is one of many kinds of abstractive thinking. Abstractive thinking can be defined as the tendency to reduce the full complexity of a situation to only one or some of its aspects. When one uses the term “abstract” today, it more often than not carries the negative connotation of denying important concrete aspects of a situation. We must recognize, though, that every mode of thought utilizes abstractive thinking in a certain manner. The question is simply the way in which we treat the resulting abstractions. For example, for the sake of economic analysis I may consider marriage a kind of calculative contract between two self-interested consumers. There is certainly a measure of this kind of thinking that takes place in any couples decision to get married – Will my spouse be able to find work to help support our family? – and thus this abstractive movement of thought provides meaningful insight. Yet, if I then try to argue that marriage is only an economic contract, I have ignored much that is essential. I have taken a partial abstraction to represent the whole situation, and have thus become involved in reductive thinking.
There is a certain kind of abstractive thinking called “analysis” that is absolutely essential for advancing our understanding of any situation. When I analyze a phenomenon, I must break apart its general structure in order to examine more closely its supporting elements. Imagine a pre-game sports commentator who, when asked to assess both teams, describes the strengths and weaknesses of individual players. Ultimately, the game will be decided by the teams’ performance, but we can gain insight into the teams’ functioning by analyzing their individual parts. From the very beginning of philosophy in Greece it was known that analysis is followed by synthesis, utilizing our new knowledge of the parts to gain deeper insight into the structure and context of the whole. Nevertheless, a certain strand of thought has developed in contemporary society that holds the parts of things to be more real than the whole, thereby considering analysis to be the only path of knowledge and rejecting the importance of holistic understanding. It is this negative kind of abstractive thinking that the Universal House of Justice calls fragmentary, and it is intimately associated with the rise of modern science in the 17th century.
One of modern science’s most novel qualities is its dedication to analysis, breaking things down in order to understand better how they functioned. In Ancient Greece and the Middle Ages, philosophers and scientists were almost exclusively interested in the divine end towards which things move – synthesis without sufficient analysis – having therefore little patience for minute observation of the way things work. Certainly, modern science’s dedication to analysis provided a necessary corrective to the Ancients and Medievals’ rationalistic excess, though unfortunately we went to the opposite extreme. Inspired by the breathtaking string of triumphs achieved by modern science, we claimed analysis alone as the path to truth, taking as reality itself the material bits disclosed through its lens, leading us today to associate fragmentary materialistic thinking with “being scientific.” Accordingly, while the negative affects of this fragmentary habit of thought have shown themselves in many spheres of human civilization – the divorce of spirit from matter, the rise of an unrelenting relativism, the emergence of materialism as the de facto worldview – its aura of science makes it difficult to transcend.
Though contemporary science has in many ways moved beyond hard reductionism and the ideal of pure analysis – I am thinking here of advances in the scientific understanding of emergence in systems theory in particular, along with the more familiar challenges posed by quantum physics and relativity theory – our habits of thought still tend in this direction. As thinkers as distinct as Niels Bohr and Arthur Schopenhauer have argued, while we may know reality to be structured differently than is disclosed to us by classical physics, we seem unable in our current epoch to make practical sense of things through any other than this fragmentary lens. The great challenge, then, is to develop a mode of thought that, while remaining fully adequate to the patterns discovered by science, unfolds within a non-fragmentary conceptual framework, thereby enabling us to see things otherwise unobservable with a fragmentary gaze – a new world, so to speak.
The Universal House of Justice describes how the Bahá’í community runs into problems when it attempts to study the Writings and Guidance according to fragmentary habits of thought. As they explain, “difficulties often arise when phrases and sentences are taken out of context and viewed as isolated fragments,” and “achievements tend to be more enduring in those regions where the friends strive to understand the totality of the vision conveyed in the message.” Though we have not yet explored what it means to think in terms of wholeness, it is an important step to understand how fragmentary thought arises, why it is so encouraged by contemporary society, and what limitations it imposes upon our minds. In upcoming posts I will explore the link between fragmentary thinking and the formation of false dichotomies, then moving on to a discussion of thinking in terms of wholeness and process.
I think you paint a strangely dismissive and unfair picture of the methods of my ancient and medieval brethren. To say that we were not interested in analysis, breaking things down, or the minute details just seems plainly mistaken. In this sense, modern science’s commitment to “intense analysis,” if you want to call it that, doesn’t seem novel at all. Read Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, and Logic, or Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. Sure, both thinkers are theologically oriented, but they only arrive at a grand synthesis in their systematics through detailed, painstaking (these are hefty works) descriptions of the material and spiritual functioning of the universe.
Dear Distraught Ancient,
I am experimenting in writing here in a “lighter” fashion than I would in an academic setting. Perhaps at times it works better than others. My statements on Ancient and medieval philosophy are measured, though, and while certainly oversimplifying the complexity of those schools of thought, I do believe there to have been a kind of rationalistic excess which has been tempered in modern times by the patient attention to brute fact. In this regard, I follow Alfred North Whitehead’s analysis in “Science and the Modern World.”
Your point on analysis is well taken. I may not have given enough explicit credit to the analytic energy of medieval and ancient thought, but I do not think this ultimately undermines the point concerning a lack of patience for observation of the way things work. Rational analysis is not the same as experimental analysis, and rational analysis I believe to be insufficient, which is the word I used in the post. Certainly, we can find individual thinkers who break the mold, but I am speaking of the intellectual ethos of an epoch.
In a different setting, I would have engaged these ideas more precisely, but, as I mentioned, I am experimenting, for better or for worse, with writing in a different manner on this blog.
I’m intrigued by your conception of modern science as a primarily analytic, as opposed to synthetic, mode of thinking. You say
“One of modern science’s most novel qualities is its dedication to analysis, breaking things down in order to understand better how they functioned.”
I’m not sure this is quite a whole picture. I think one could easily make the following statement with as much justification:
“One of modern science’s most novel qualities is its dedication to synthesis, linking things together in order to understand better how they function.”
Modern science is often caricatured as fragmentary and reductive, but it is very frequently expansive and synthetic. Consider: many of the greatest scientific breakthroughs have been the discovery of underlying physical laws which can be said to govern processes which were once seen to be highly disparate. Newton’s theory of gravity brought together numerous seemingly unrelated physical phenomena under one scheme, then Einstein’s theory of relativity broadened our understanding further, yoking even more concepts to a set of equations, demonstrating the links between them.
Indeed, s further difficulty with your position is your seeming belief that reductionism is necessarily fragmentary. This is not the case. The theory of evolution is highly reductionistic (in the sense that it successfully reduces a hugely complex process to a set of simple principles), and it is also profoundly synthetic (in the sense that it unites the disparate elements of this complex process under a set of simple principles).
This is often the way of science. We must be careful not to be tripped up by common stereotypes of this rich and inviting area of human experience.