The Hedgehog, The Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities by Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Stephen Jay Gould [Gould, Stephen Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674063402
Amazon: 0674063406
Goodreads: 23047345
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2012-01-13T23:00:00+00:00

7

Sweetness and Light as Tough and Healing Truth

TO CLOSE THIS PART OF THE BOOK WITH A STORY FROM ITS BEGINNING, I wish to return to the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century debate between Ancients and Moderns, and give a last word to the “other” side. I discussed the best argument and healing hand of the scientific Moderns in presenting Bacon’s paradox about the old age (and consequent wisdom) of our present; and Newton’s aphorism, admitting the puny status of an infant called science by arguing that we can now see farther only because we stand upon the shoulders of Ancient giants. But I cannot cash out my argument for mending the ancient breach between science and the humanities both by stressing the commonalities and by merging the different strengths of both sides, unless I also give a fair hearing to the best polemic from the Ancient side—if only to show that the cogency of a good case can prevail even in pugnacity, and that even such a vigorous defense leaves abundant space for the joining and healing here proposed.

My choice of a closing tale also emerges from another motive, at the same time both highly specific and entirely general. The phrase “sweetness and light” resides in my earliest memories, because my mother loved the image, and frequently cited the verbal conjunction. But I confess that, while approving the sentiments, I always viewed the epigram as wimpish and rather meaningless, however warm the feelings so invoked for purely personal reasons. What, after all, could be more vague and less than a favoring of something so obviously virtuous as good taste and bright vision?

But then, as an adult pondering the issue of disciplinary divisions, I discovered the source of this apparently innocuous and universal phrase. (I hadn’t even supposed, I confess, that the phrase had a specific origin—for something so evidently virtuous need only “be,” and need not claim a specific point of invention.) But then I discovered that “sweetness and light” not only boasted an interesting inception, but had also been devised as a motto to represent something quite partisan and specific, not merely to express a bland and obvious eternal verity. For the phrase explicitly cited the best human uses of two substances manufactured by bees—honey and wax, yielding sweetness (still in vigorous supply) and light (at least before Mr. Edison). And the bee responsible for the phrase emerged from the decidedly bitter pen of a master satirist and champion of the Ancients: Jonathan Swift, who invented this particular creature as a metaphor to carry the case of the Ancients against the Moderns, the latter epitomized in the same fable by a spider. So sweetness and light summarizes the brief of classical humanism against the new world of science in its pugnacious infancy. And if Mr. Swift’s posthumous (and undoubtedly still pugnacious) self will excuse the metaphysical expropriation, I would also like to apply his famous phrase to describe the summum bonum that would arise from the careful (see the last line

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