I recently read an interview with Sir Paul Nurse, President of The Rockefeller University (RU), in which he is challenged to defend Charles Darwin and the process of natural selection. As I took in the text of the discussion, I was intrigued and quite pleased that Sir Paul stated in the conversation that “Kant was the first person I came across talking about systems, etc. over 200 years ago.” It just so happens that I am currently reading Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and was happy to hear that Dr. Nurse had at one time experienced the pleasure, or in my case, the struggle, of diving into the pool (or abyss) of that philosopher’s oeuvre.

Cartoon by Rossana Henriques

A few weeks after coming across the Darwinian debate with Dr. Nurse, I read a passage in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant appears to be, from what I can decipher, making a rather modern argument against the theory of Intelligent Design and Creationism. For example, he writes, that “…we do not convert nature into an intelligent being, for that would be absurd; but neither do we dare to think of placing another being, one that is intelligent, above nature as its architect, for that would be presumptuous.” Of course I am taking the passage out of context, and perhaps twisting it to suit my purpose, much like statisticians who manipulate data. I was led to Kant through reading French philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault and especially Jacques Rancier (Hannah Arendt, a German philosopher, was much indebted to him as well). I have read some modern French philosophy on and off over the years, and returned to it after joining an architecture Web group that posts chapters from philosophical writings that view architecture as a possible source of helping mankind get out of its modern treacherous condition. This concept, the discussants almost take as a given, is not utopian rhetoric, but a concrete plan towards learning how mankind got into this global mess and then taking that knowledge to make an ordered blue print on how to alleviate suffering.

One of the books I decided to read as a consequence of the selections posted by this group was Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. This book by Foucault was of interest to me since I am an employee at RU, where I am not a scientist, but work as support staff. I do have a degree in biology however, and am able to catch the drift of a technical treatise or journal article. I have read a lot of Dr. Nurse’s secular writings as well as his fascinating Nobel lecture. As I read Foucault, I wondered if Dr. Nurse or any other RU scientists had dabbled in the area of French philosophy and if this area of study was of any consequence to the field of medical research. For if architecture, which exhibits this symbiosis with philosophy, offers a step towards corrective planetary measures, surely so does science, and perhaps all of these disciplines might find common ground and a certain kind of kinship.

Foucault’s point in The Order of Things is that there is no flat, one-dimensional time line in scientific discovery. Over thirty years ago, I read Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I seem to recall that his theory took a more linear approach. As a counterpoint, Foucault writes in the Forward to the English Edition of The Order of Things: “For, on the one hand, the history of science traces the progress of discovery, the formulation of problems, and the clash of controversy; it also analyzes theories in their internal economy; in short, it describes the processes and products of scientific consciousness. But on the other hand, it tries to restore what eluded that consciousness: the influences that affected it, the implicit philosophies that were subjacent to it, the unformulated thematics, the unseen obstacles; it describes the unconscious nature of science.”

While I was reading Foucault, I pondered sending Dr. Nurse a copy, as I had once thought of sending him, upon his accession to the Rockefeller throne, an imitation ivory panel of a small Medieval carving of God’s act of the creation of the animals, Genesis. This, in my imagination, would have adorned his new office. I decided against the gift, and was amused when a couple of months ago I stumbled upon a speech he gave at Christ’s College comparing Milton’s vision of “the” creation to Darwin’s. Truth be told, I am very fond of Renaissance and Medieval art and have read a tremendous amount on the subject. In fact, Foucault’s approach to the history of science to mirror Professor Erwin Panofsky’s system of deciphering the meaning in the visual arts by intensive study of all areas—social, political, and religious—of the era from which a work is produced. French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his book, Truth in Painting takes a nearly Panofskian look at this medium through deconstructionism. It was this book that made me decide to read Kant’s Judgment rather than the more famous Critique of Pure Reason since the Critique of Judgment delves into art as well as the systems referred to by Dr. Nurse in the interview on Darwin. Perhaps we have come full circle.

I was recently walking on our campus with a colleague (who is not a scientist) and we were taking in the beauty of the surroundings. I told him that I am not a traditionally religious person, but that I believed that on some level, “God” had given us this beautiful world with trees and clouds eons ago, and then, like Elvis, had “left the building,” that is, departed for good to leave us to our own devices to enjoy it. I hope that science, art, and architecture will help us return to peace, so that we may enjoy our stay here in this world again. Somehow, it’s not Intelligent Design, and not purely Darwinism one ponders, but in the words of the film character Forrest Gump when discussing whether or not there is an ordained fate, maybe it’s both. But it is only science that can give a rational account of the structure of everyday biology and matter through systems, physics, mathematics, etc., while thoughts on how and why it all began (Creation) are left to the poet.