UNIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE

Joe Davis

Cambridge, MA

May 2018

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, namesake of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, was a Roman polymath who lived in the world of Caesar Augustus. His great work, De Architectura was lost in antiquity, but resurfaced in the Italian Renaissance. The first illustrated version was republished in 1511. In the first chapter, Vitruvius wrote that artists and architects should have knowledge based in both practice and theory. The Vitruvian motto, “Mens et Manus” appears on the MIT seal, likewise suggesting that craft must be accompanied by rigorous scholarship.

In the first century BCE, Vitruvius wrote that artists must both be creative and have the ability to listen, to learn new things, and that an artist deficient in either of these qualities could never become a master of his practice. Vitruvius went on to outline a list of things he thought that an artist should know:

“He should be a good writer, a skillful draftsman, versed in geometry and optics, expert at figures, acquainted with history, informed on the principles of natural and moral philosophy, somewhat of a musician, not ignorant of the sciences both of law and physic, nor of the motions, laws, and relations to each other, of the heavenly bodies... Since, therefore, this art is founded upon and adorned with so many different sciences, I am of opinion that those who have not, from their early youth, gradually climbed up to the summit, cannot, without presumption, call themselves masters of it.”

(Marcus Vitruvius Pollio: de Architectura, Book I, Chapter 1)

Vitruvius advised that artists should know something about the science of medicine and the motions and proportions of the human body, a conviction that inspired Da Vinci more that 1,500 years later. While he remains largely unknown to modern readers, Vitruvius is known to have influenced the multi-talented Renaissance figures presented to us as schoolchildren. We were told that these people were the flowers of the human intellect and led to believe that this is what we may all become.

Yet over time, secular structures embedded in higher education and business would ultimately sweep away this Renaissance ideal. The dream of Renaissance would come to be replaced with the idea that the arts and sciences have become far too specialized and complicated and that in our own era, no individual can make significant contributions to multiple fields.

Somehow, more than two thousand years ago, Vitruvius seems to have anticipated this reaction. He wrote that since everything is connected to everything else, all that is needed is natural curiosity and an ability to pay attention:

“Perhaps, to the uninformed, it may appear unaccountable that a man should be able to retain in his memory such a variety of learning; but the close alliance with each other, of the different branches of science, will explain the difficulty. For as a body is composed of various concordant members, so does the whole circle of learning consist in one harmonious system. Wherefore those, who from an early age are initiated in the different branches of learning, have a facility in acquiring some knowledge of all, from their common connection with each other.”

What is the common thread in this heterogeneous opus? Vitruvius seems to think that unity of knowledge is in fact, intrinsic: that everything already exists as a kind of synchronized whole, and it is only the way we link things together that newly transform them into opportunity and innovation.

Yet in our own time, artists are not given to understand physics or chemistry, law, philosophy, medicine, or astronomy. The deep connections of art and mathematics are all but forgotten and in many cases, even music and history have been dropped from the list. While we continue to call upon artists to describe the whole world, whatever artists choose to remain clueless about simply cannot be described.

Until relatively recently, technological advancement seems to have come hand-in-hand with the grand fragmentation of knowledge into arbitrarily concise subjects and specialized categories. Scholars of the humanities now acknowledge that the separation of arts and sciences was an artificial one perpetuated by centuries of history that turned metaphysics into the foundation of all things artistic. The machinery of this historical artificiality and its categories can be traced to 18th century Romanticism, an artifact of the “Counter-Enlightenment” that has now assumed a kind of de facto reality.

Times have changed in ways that could not have been foreseen by Marcus Vitruvius Polio. In the majority of cultural contexts, artistic thought and practice have been relegated to the fringes of society as frivolous, trivial or ornamental where art is most often thought of as a means to decorate rather than to innovate. But, these notions call for some pretense or disregard of history. Students of art in our own era generally have no idea that this is a constructed separation of art and science and that artists contributed to the invention of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, physics and biology. The idea that great advances in art and science can be part of the same pursuit has become increasingly difficult to reconcile.

There is a surviving impression that artists have unique abilities to draw together ideas from all quarters to represent our collective dreams and aspirations. Art is still expected to summon the human spirit. We depend on artists to predict the future and to answer deep and profound questions about the mysteries of life. Artists are still expected to interpret the world for us.

It is no secret that in the modern world, artists are mostly unemployed. Yet, it would be a grave mistake to extrapolate from the privileged and insular art markets of say, London or New York to gauge potential impacts that the arts can have on society at large. Just as in many cases, the dry, empirical operations of scientific research might lead us to believe that they cannot become importantly poetic, or aesthetically relevant. The scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence, interpretation of dreams in Freudian psychoanalysis and mind-bending aspects of quantum physics might be counted as several contrary examples.

So, what kind of background do artists need now to make significant contributions to society? Artists still require broad knowledge.

Ideas about the grand synthesis of knowledge inspired the first universities and centers of learning in medieval Europe and in medieval China and Japan and likewise, the founding of the Royal Societies and great academies of the European “Enlightenment,” the so-called, “Age of Reason.” These same aspirations have resonated with every historic movement of mind, every intellectual elite, every perestroika of the exact sciences and the liberal arts. In fact, the idea that artists have special abilities to reach out across domains may stand as evidence that some kind of unification among them all already exists.

Artists don’t have to devote themselves entirely to science and technology, but the mandate of Romanticism to disregard all rules but your own has become untenable as well. Perhaps “Renaissance” is inevitable whenever civilization reaches a point where legacies of war and brutal religious intolerance have been overturned and people find time for scholarship and access to sufficient concentrations of knowledge. Perhaps pursuit of the great unification of knowledge has always been an intrinsic part of human nature.

Many prerequisite elements are already in place. Dizzying findings in physics and biology have exponentially expanded the landscape onto which humanity can project its activities. Breathtaking profusions of knowledge are now bursting into existence with the potential to accelerate worldwide intellectual, social, scientific and technological development. We have the cognitive apparatus and we have the technological means.

So, what’s missing?

The culture we reside in must have the capacity to sustain Renaissance. Now, just as in the Italian Quattrocento, social and institutional structures cannot cope with the consequences of such sweeping changes. In many cases, powerful religious communities and conservative political forces control or completely block universal access to education and to comprehensive education in many of the sciences. In some of the most technologically advanced societies universal education is available only in principle to individuals of low or moderate income. Even if they are admitted into the classroom or laboratory, it is unlikely they will be able to afford the large financial investment that attending a university will increasingly require.

Previous generations have left us with a deteriorating environment, destabilized international political situations, stumbling top-heavy economies, and dwindling public support for science, art, the humanities and many social services, including education. As universities turn to sources of private support, many have converted their endowments to become fully diversified international super-corporations with operations and capital investments that reach far beyond traditional mandates to carry on scholarship and research. Businesses work toward profits and university administrators fail to reconcile those interests with the primary mission of creating new knowledge. Relationships of sponsored research with unrestricted enterprise and entrepreneurship are flawed at the expense of innovation and creativity.

Advancement of knowledge is all too often subsidiary to technology licensing, profits, market strategies and military and political initiatives. The ways in which research enterprises are supported restrict the nature of scientific investigation, determine the nature of projects undertaken and the realm of possibilities that will be considered for future research. Problems that cannot be solved profitably are likely to be ignored. In Star Trek lingo, we have compromised our university systems with something like “Ferengi economics” and “Rules of Acquisition.”

Tragically, no society has ever been more technologically advanced and yet the average person has never been more indifferent to technological developments and scientific principles that make “quality of life” possible. If the Romantic era saw the humanities disengaging from the sciences, the Modern era all but erased hope for the reunion of science and art.

But signs of change are appearing. In the past decade, many scientific laboratories and whole fields of research have become increasingly interdisciplinary. International conferences and conclaves resonate with these changes and new university programs have been established to coordinate these developments. So far, such initiatives do not formally integrate art and science, but these disciplines too are quietly disengaging from their historic separation.

Keeping in mind that Vitruvius wrote down his artistic curriculum in the first century BCE, it seems obvious that he might now feel the need to update his list of prerequisites for

artists in the 21rst century. Art can have little relevance or immediacy unless it is constantly rebuilt with increasingly sophisticated sets of actions, forms, and symbols. There are absolutely no reasons why artistic practice should not be just as precise and just as rigorous as the practice of physics, chemistry, philosophy or mathematics. More than ever before, the future of innovation in both art and science depends on fluency in multiple fields and strong, multidisciplinary mindsets.

Some artists may be too impatient to wait for art to fully recover its former scope and instead opt to explore a role that still remains unknown to us: neither as an artist nor as a scientist, but rather as an artist-scientist, both free enough to tackle absurd questions and disciplined enough to be scientifically rigorous about the way the work is carried out. There is a chance, where it is possible to both dream and act, that the centuries of opposition between art and science can finally be resolved.