The Intellectual Republic
“Happy, then, if a few unrighteous ones contribute an initiative which sets things moving again!” - William James
This is analogy, a magazine about the convergence of science and poetics. We hope to inspire readers with our audacity to question society’s most basic assumptions: for instance, the idea that science is a purely objective pursuit of facts while literature remains a consideration of the largely inconsequential stuff of make believe. Since all knowledge is relational, the artist and scientist alike depend on analogy for making sense of the world; both serve the essential function of drawing together relations between disparate phenomena into a unified vision. Life can be truly exciting if only we remain open to new ideas like the recognition of this fundamental convergence between analogical thinking and science. Too many walk around maintaining the depressing belief that science has it all figured out. Nothing could be more untrue, and nothing could be more enervating to the human spirit, which seeks always new horizons. That popular science suggests as much to the public is as criminal as the religious notion that God stopped communicating with humanity after the apostles (or whenever any religion decides to lock in its doctrines). William James expressed this problem as follows:
I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.
from William James “The Will to Believe”
It wasn’t only teachers who were making this claim back in James’s day. Horace Freeland Judson, considers the same perspective in his monumental The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (2004):
In 1894, the physicist Albert Michelson [yes, the Michelson-Morley Michelson] said, in a speech that has achieved an ambiguous celebrity, “While it is never safe to say that the future of Physical Science has no marvels even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” But predicting the end of science is a fool’s conceit. Mind you, some even then were less satisfied than Michelson. But nobody could have predicted the miraculous decade that began just a year later. In 1895 in Wurzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovered x rays. In 1896 in Paris, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. In 1897 in Cambridge, Joseph John Thomson discovered the electron. In 1900 in Berlin, Max Planck laid the foundation of quantum theory. In 1905 in Bern, Albert Einstein promulgated the special theory of relativity. Physics was not done.
from Horace Freeland Judson The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (404-5)
Consequently we hope to temper our audacity with humility even as we veer dangerously out of our lane (the editors are certified in the humanities, not in the sciences). We encourage the same in our readership, so that more among us will tend to keep their sense of what we know in suspension without closure, such that more and more start to feel that perhaps science is more about what we think we know, or what we believe we might know, thereby defusing the mounting factionalism overrunning our society. In short, we hope with William James to establish a true Intellectual Republic:
If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may wait if we will, — I hope you do not think that I am denying that, — but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical things.
from William James “The Will to Believe”