From Scrolls to Screens: The Changing Shape of Knowledge

Scientific knowledge is in perpetual evolution; it finds itself changed from one day to the next. As a result, we cannot say that on the one hand there is the history of knowledge, and on the other its current state today, as if its current state were somehow definitive or even stable. The current state of knowledge is a moment in history, changing just as rapidly as the state of knowledge in the past has ever changed and, in many instances, more rapidly. Scientific thought, then, is not momentary; it is not a static instance; it is a process. More specifically, it is a process of continual construction and reorganisation. This is true in almost every branch of scientific investigation.

In today’s disorienting and pluralistic climate of ideas, grand theorizing is a bold, sometimes even noble, intellectual endeavor. But the world is not a particularly hospitable place for such efforts. At a time when the scope of our knowledge about the world constantly undermines those certainties to which the more provincial past was much kinder, grand theories are intellectual Titanics, unwieldy things that are difficult to keep afloat, so to speak. We don’t need Jacques Derrida and his deconstructionist Horsemen of the Apocalypse to point out the failings of Marxism, pychoanalysis, church doctrine, and other total systems. They deconstruct right before our eyes. The problem is not that we don’t long for or need a unifying vision. We do. The problem is that they keep sinking.