H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RAYNERI

 G.: Della unità delle scienze, prolusione recitata nella grande aula della Regia Università di Torino ai V. novembre MDCCCLVI — one could almost forgive the philosophy for the title alone. S.: You care only for the aula. G.: Naturally. A grande aula ought to be very grand indeed, especially in Turin, where even pedagogy wishes to sound constitutional. S.: And the title is grander still because it has managed singular and plural in one breath. G.: Exactly. Unità in the singular, scienze in the plural, and that splendidly intermediate delle doing all the diplomatic work. S.: A world of difference from Mach’s Einheit der Wissenschaft. G.: Or the New Worlders and their Unified Science, yes. Those sound like schemes for flattening the intellectual map with hygienic machinery. S.: Whereas Rayneri sounds almost architectonic. G.: More than architectonic. Ecclesiastically architectonic. Della unità delle scienze says not “one science,” not “the sciences unified,” but “the unity of the sciences,” as though the sciences had multiplied properly and were now to be shown, with decorum, to belong together under one higher order. S.: Which is precisely what the Viennese disliked. G.: Because they preferred the customs office to the crown. Einheit der Wissenschaft means: one cleaned language, one discipline of statements, one reductional fantasy in a laboratory coat. S.: You are hard on Vienna. G.: Only because it made logic smell of disinfectant. S.: And Rayneri? G.: Rayneri smells of aula, hierarchy, robe, and perhaps a little incense. Which is civilisation. S.: Let us be precise. Why does the singular-plural matter so much to you? G.: Because “unity” in the singular keeps the principle one, while “the sciences” in the plural refuses to erase the branches. It is not one science replacing the others, but one unifying order embracing many sciences. S.: So unlike a reductive programme. G.: Entirely. He is not saying palaeontology is only zoology, nor zoology only chemistry, nor chemistry only physics, nor physics only protocol sentences. He is saying that palaeontology, ichthyology, entomology, sociology, psychiatry, medicine, virus research, and whatever monstrous modern science you please remain sciences in the plural while belonging to one intelligible whole. S.: That already sounds almost anti-modern. G.: Good. Modernity is usually improved by a little resistance. S.: Yet the title is not exactly anti-scientific. G.: Heaven forbid. It is anti-scientism, which is the more decent fight. Rayneri’s point, if I hear him properly, is not to diminish the sciences, but to prevent them from becoming little sovereign republics each with its own bad anthem. S.: So unity is not a flattening but a superior coherence. G.: Exactly. And because it is Turin in 1856, the superior coherence is not hidden. God is in the centre, even if one must call him, for exegetical purposes, the Genitor. S.: Genitor is a wonderfully evasive way of being orthodox. G.: It has the advantage of sounding biological, theological, and faintly Roman at once. S.: Then Rayneri is not deviant at all. G.: Not in the least. He is pious in the proper Piedmontese register: ordered, educational, architectonic, and only incidentally sublime. S.: Which makes the grande aula all the more plausible. G.: Exactly. A prolusione in a grande aula in Turin on the fifth of November 1856 is not the setting for scientific sanitation. It is the setting for the old idea that knowledge belongs together because truth itself is ordered. S.: So “science” there means scienza in the broad old sense. G.: Yes. Ordered knowledge, not merely white coats and galvanometers. The word has not yet shrunk into laboratory specialism. S.: Yet the sciences are plural. G.: As they must be, once the world has become too interesting for one faculty. That is the beauty of it. He allows multiplicity without surrendering architectonic aspiration. S.: Which is more than Unified Science usually managed. G.: Unified Science usually managed to sound managerial. “Unified” is what one does to timetables and railway companies. “Unità delle scienze” sounds like a metaphysical polity. S.: You prefer the polity to the railway. G.: Deeply. One can live in a polity. One is carried by a railway. S.: Then perhaps Rayneri’s title is pedagogical too. G.: Very much so. A prolusione is a threshold speech. One inaugurates not merely a course but a conception of study. The sciences are plural because the curriculum is plural; the unity is singular because the mind must not fracture under the curriculum. S.: That is almost beautiful. G.: It is beautiful. Turin occasionally managed it. S.: Better than Bologna? G.: Ah, Bologna is another matter. Bologna is older, yes, and prouder, and more proper to the very spirit of the university. But Bologna above all resists any one principle trying to behave as superintendent of the whole. S.: Because alma mater is already the principle. G.: Precisely. Bologna thinks of the university itself as the living unity, not of a philosophically declared “unity of the sciences” as something needing inaugural proclamation in a royal aula. S.: And Oxford? G.: Boum Vadum has an equal distrust, though from the opposite side. Oxford prefers the sciences, and even the arts, to remain decently collegiate, badly heated, and mutually suspicious. S.: So Rayneri’s title offends both. G.: In opposite directions. Bologna finds it too architectonic, Oxford too public. Which is why I admire it. S.: You admire anything that annoys two old universities at once. G.: It is one of the few reliable tests of seriousness. S.: Then what does he mean by unity, if not reduction and not mere institutional coexistence? G.: I think he means an order of intelligibility under which the several disciplines do not fall apart into unrelated specialisms. An order of truth, perhaps, but also of formation. The sciences differ in object and method, but they are not metaphysically homeless. S.: Because the Genitor still governs. G.: Exactly. The very possibility that many sciences are sciences at all presupposes some one ordered world, one created intelligibility, one ultimate reason why there is a whole rather than a heap. S.: A very un-Viennese tree, as you said. G.: Entirely. The Viennese would analyse “tree,” classify the observation-statements, and then quarrel over whether trunks reduce to protocol. Rayneri says, more civilly, that the trunk already exists and the branches had better remember it. S.: Then “della” matters too. G.: Ah yes, the little aristocrat in the middle. Della binds unity to the sciences without allowing unity to collapse into them. It is not unità scientifica, nor unificazione delle scienze in the activist sense. It is of the sciences, belonging to them and yet governing them. S.: A genitive theology. G.: Exactly. The sort of relation English philosophers usually try to solve by pretending it does not exist. S.: Or by inventing “levels.” G.: Levels are what one says when one has lost the old confidence but wants to keep the staircase. S.: Then the plural sciences remain irreducibly distinct. G.: Yes. That is the great advantage. Entomology is not medicine, medicine not sociology, sociology not mathematics, mathematics not theology — though all, for him, stand within one more general order of knowing. S.: Which order is philosophical? G.: Philosophical and more than philosophical. Philosophy crowns; it does not merely coordinate. There lies the difference with Vienna. For Rayneri, philosophy remains regina scientiarum in some usable sense. For the unity-of-science men, philosophy becomes customs officer, or at best under-labourer with a broom. S.: Locke with a permit book. G.: Yes. Rayneri crowns philosophy; Vienna gives it sanitation duties. S.: That is rather unkind to Vienna. G.: It is exactly kind enough. They were superb cleaners. Civilization occasionally needs dust. S.: Then your own seminar on Unified Science? G.: My seminar was on the phrase’s confusions as much as its ambitions. I have always thought that “unified science” sounds plausible only because “unity” is one of those words people are too well brought up to refuse. S.: And because “science” has already been narrowed in English. G.: Precisely. Once “science” means mostly the laboratory and its satellites, “unified science” sounds like a programme of coordination. But in Rayneri’s scienza the word is broad enough to make the phrase metaphysically alive. S.: So we must not read him backward through Carnap. G.: No more than one should read Aristotle as a badly typeset logician. Rayneri’s unity is not syntactic or reductional. It is architectonic, pedagogical, and theistic. S.: And royal. G.: Indeed. One must not neglect the Regia Università. The royal university is itself a symbol of ordered public knowledge. The grande aula does part of the argument before the man has opened his mouth. S.: You really do care about the hall. G.: A hall tells you what sort of truth is expected to echo there. S.: Then perhaps the title is also political in the best nineteenth-century way. G.: Yes. Piedmont in 1856 is the civilised part of Italy, or so it understandably thought. To speak there of the unity of the sciences is to say something about the unity of culture, state, education, and truth against fragmentation. S.: That sounds almost Risorgimental. G.: It probably is, though in a sober university key. One does not need tricolours on the cover to hear the background music. S.: Then why not simply “sulle scienze” or “sul sapere”? G.: Because that would forfeit the very claim. “Della unità delle scienze” says that the many are intelligible only through the one. It is a title of relation, not enumeration. S.: And relation is what Bologna distrusts? G.: Bologna distrusts overt architectonic relation because it has for centuries embodied relation institutionally. It does not need to proclaim it in quite the same style. S.: Whereas Turin, younger and royal, can enjoy the inaugural majesty. G.: Exactly. Turin likes to say in a hall what Bologna prefers to imply in a tradition. S.: And Oxford? G.: Oxford prefers to imply everything and then deny having implied it. S.: Even unity? G.: Especially unity. Oxford is committed to the fiction that truth emerges from local exactness without anyone needing to say “whole.” S.: Yet Greats itself once almost presupposed a whole. G.: Of course. But only by leaving it to the candidate to suffer privately. Rayneri suffers publicly and grandly, which is much more Italian. S.: Then what would he say to Mach and his sort? G.: Probably that they mistake method for measure and syntax for order. One does not get the unity of the sciences by sweeping metaphysics out of the room; one gets only a tidier room. S.: And what would Mach reply? G.: Something about economy of thought, no doubt, and the suspicion that your Genitor is a rather expensive explanatory convenience. S.: Which would only delight Rayneri further. G.: Very likely. Nothing strengthens a nineteenth-century architectonic quite like a later empiricist sneer. S.: Then let us catalogue the differences. Rayneri has one unity and many sciences; Vienna one science-language and many departments; the New Worlders one programme and a conference hotel. G.: Excellent. S.: Thank you. G.: Keep it, though the conference hotel may need trimming. S.: Never. It is the best bit. G.: Then perhaps the truest contrast is that Rayneri’s unity preserves the dignity of plurality, while unified science tends to justify plurality only on the way to abolishing it. S.: A splendid sentence. G.: Use it carefully. The sciences in Rayneri remain sciences; they are not mere provinces awaiting annexation by a single language. S.: And because they remain plural, the unity cannot be merely lexical. G.: Exactly. The title itself performs this. Unità singular, scienze plural. The grammar refuses the flattening. S.: So singularity governs without destroying plurality. G.: A very Catholic ambition, and therefore perfectly suitable for Piedmont at its most serious. S.: There is your Genitor again. G.: He deserves repeated mention. Without some central principle of order, the title collapses into educational optimism. S.: Then the divine centre is not an ornament but the condition. G.: Precisely. He is not saying the sciences happen to fit together by academic convenience. He is saying they belong together because reality itself belongs together under one originating intelligibility. S.: Which sounds almost medieval. G.: The best nineteenth-century things often do. S.: Then would you say that scientism is the devil? G.: In this register, yes. Scientism is what happens when one of the sciences mistakes itself for the unity of the sciences, or when method mistakes itself for wisdom. S.: A useful devil. G.: Devils usually are. S.: And Rayneri’s prolusione is therefore an exorcism? G.: That is too theatrical, but not wholly wrong. It is certainly a prophylactic against fragmentation and self-importance among the branches. S.: So entomology is reminded that it is not God. G.: Exactly. Nor is sociology, nor psychiatry, nor virology, nor whatever future discipline wishes to write manifestos in place of footnotes. S.: Computer science too, then. G.: Especially computer science. The sciences are to remain sciences, not cults. S.: Then perhaps the title is not only grand but humane. G.: Very much so. It says to the student: do not let your discipline make you stupid by isolation. S.: Which is more than one can say for some modern curricula. G.: Much more. The unity of the sciences is pedagogical before it is conference rhetoric. It keeps the mind from becoming departmental. S.: That is another sentence worth keeping. G.: Keep it and pretend Rayneri whispered it in the grande aula. S.: I shall. Then what would you call the exact metaphysical content of his unity? G.: Ordered plurality under a common source and end. There, that is dry enough. S.: And source is the Genitor. G.: Yes, though one must not put him on every page or the undergraduates will think we have changed faculties. S.: They already suspect theology in any serious philosophy. G.: Quite rightly. Serious philosophy has always had theology in the basement, whether it admits it or not. S.: Then your admiration for the title is partly nostalgia. G.: For grandeur, yes. Not for doctrine exactly, but for a time when one could still say “the unity of the sciences” in a royal aula without sounding like a committee. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Turinese, with one eye on Bologna and the other on Boum Vadum.