The Pansophic Principle: Seeking common ground between the Arts, Sciences and Humanities.

The forefront of human endeavour is extraordinarily diverse. At one time we have physicists building the CERN particle accelerator to search for the Higgs Boson, philosophers arguing whether mental properties lie inside the brain our outside it, and artists cutting rotating discs in the sides of buildings. Seemingly incompatible as they are, all these activities must somehow be connected: they are all attempts to probe, investigate, understand, and convey the peculiar nature of reality and human experience; they are all aspects of a single world.

Pansophy was defined in the seventeenth century by Comenius as ‘universal knowledge’. At a time when it was theoretically possible for one person to read all the books in circulation the ambition of synthesizing all human knowledge must have seemed attainable. In our own age, with the exponential growth in disciplinary specialism, it is unlikely that one person could absorb all the information relating to their own named discipline, let alone a fraction of the all information in print.

The advent of moveable type in mid-fifteenth century Europe contributed enormously to the spread of ideas during the Renaissance and the consequent emergence of novel ideas and technologies. Access to printed information generated not just new knowledge but combinations of knowledge that had hitherto existed in disconnected planes. Libraries and compendia allowed scholars to cross-reference and even stumble unexpectedly on remote ideas that they were then able to piece together into new systems of thought.

The internet, arguably the most significant development in knowledge distribution since moveable type, offers our own age much the same opportunity to access diverse ideas and find the underlying connections between them, but on a far grander scale. Searching for a term like ‘indeterminacy’ will yield references in areas as disparate as philosophy, mathematics, quantum physics, spiritualism, medical science, art theory, and music. Inevitably the term has a unique history and meaning in each case, yet there is also a sense in which it refers to the same phenomena across all.

An immense task now faces humankind. Knowledge continues to be generated at an ever-expanding rate. New specialisms and hybrid disciplines emerge with increasing frequency. But if we accept the pansophic principle that all this knowledge is, in the end, about the same thing — the nature of reality and human experience — then who is doing the work of reconciling this enormous diversity in order to find within it the patterns and connections that would allow a broader rather than narrower understanding of our condition? This is possibly one of the most important challenges facing human inquiry at this time, and the internet can facilitate this in a way that has few historical precedents.

The pansophic principle, however, is not aimed at the simple unification of all knowledge into an all-encompassing truth. It is not a means of homogenizing human ideas or beliefs into a unitary system — an ambition with unfortunately sinister historical precedents. The diversity and incompatibility of human ideas is part of what gives intellectual life its richness and capacity for innovation. Rather, the challenge is an essentially contradictory one: to appreciate and respect the differences between strands of thought, with their disparate histories and contexts, yet at the same time actively locate the productive resonances between them

Drawing people

CEP Conference, Oxford, 2010

Mind and reality (Thich Nhat Hanh)

‘Recall a simple and ancient truth: the subject of knowledge cannot exist independently from the object of knowledge. To see is to see something. To hear is to hear something. To be angry is to be angry over something. Hope is hope for something. Thinking is thinking about something. When the object of knowledge (the something) is not present, there can be no subject of knowledge’ (1991:45-46).

‘Consider the example of a table. The table’s existence is possible due to the existence of things which we might call “the non-table world”: the forest where the wood grew and was cut, the carpenter, the iron ore which became the nails and screws, and countless other things which have relation to the table, the parents and ancestors of the carpenter, the sun and rain which made it possible for the trees to grow’ (1991:47).

Hanh, Thich Nhat (1991) The Miracle of Mindfulness. London: Rider.

‘When we have a concept about something, its image appears within that concept. For example, when we have a concept of a table, we see an image of that table, but we must remember that our concept is not the thing itself. It is just our perception, which might in fact be very different from the table. A termite, for example, may perceive a table as a feast, and a physicist may perceive it as a mass of rapidly moving particles’ (1992: 54).

‘The notion that things can exist independently of one another comes from the perception that they have a beginning and an end. But it is impossible to find the beginning or end of anything’ (1992:60).

Hanh, Thich Nhat (1992) The Diamond That Cuts Through Illusion. Berkley: Parallax Press.

(with thanks to Melanie Chan for the quotes)