In a previous post, I talked about Emanuele Coccia’s critique of philosophy in the prologue of his book entitled The Life of Plants. A Metaphysics of Mixture.
In this post, I would like to comment on his criticism of the sciences as it appears in the epilogue of his book. Without wasting your time, let’s get to the heart of his argument.
Scientific Fragmentation and Definition of What Is Considered Scientific
According to Emanuele Coccia, the problem facing the sciences is what constitutes an “unwritten golden rule” among scientists. Only one discipline is suited to approach a precise object of knowledge and research fields have a definite and limited object of knowledge. He explains:
“For some time now, a rather severe protocol reigns supreme in the republic of the sciences: this unwritten golden rule stipulates that one and only one discipline be appropriate for any object of knowledge and asserts, on the other hand, that all disciplines have a definite and limited number of objects and matters that it is suitable for them to know.”
The number of intellectuals who denounce “scientific fragmentation or excessive specialization” could be understood here as the result of such an “unwritten golden rule” that is considered to permeate all scientific research.
However, even if we may consider such a rule to be useful to some extent for scientific inquiry, he considers it to be motivated not by scientific necessity but by a moral obligation aimed at limiting one’s will.
“Like all forms of discipline, this protocol, too, has a nature and especially an end, which are typically moraland not gnoseological: the protocol serves to limit the will to know, to hold back its excesses, to bridle it not from the outside, but from within. What we call specialization involves a work on oneself, a cognitive and sentimental education that is hidden or, in most cases, forgotten and suppressed.”
Thus, for Coccia, this rule does not really aim to describe or explain the studied natural phenomenon, but to push scientists to delimitate and restrict their own inquiries. Moreover, such a rule is embodied through education. Coccia’s words go even stronger:
“This cognitive asceticism has nothing natural about it — it is, on the contrary, the unstable and uncertain result of long and lamentable efforts, the poisoned fruit of a spiritual exercise practiced on oneself, of a prolonged castration of one’s own curiosity.”
In other words, such “castration” frees one from curiosity. In such a formulation, “specialization” and “abandonment of curiosity” seem to be the two sides of the same coin. Specialization means “a conscious and voluntary renunciation of the knowledge of “others.”