Introduction

The question “if reality is one, why do we divide it into disciplines?” contains a trap: it presupposes that the unity of reality should translate into a unity of knowledge. Showing why that inference does not hold requires separating what is united from what is divided.

1. Three senses of “unity”

The word “unity” designates here three different things that are usually confused: ontological unity (asserting that reality is one), epistemological unity (asserting that there is a single method for everything) and organizational unity (asserting that there is a single discipline encompassing everything). The first is a working metaphysical thesis; the second is false; the third, besides being false, is undesirable.

The logical point is that from ontological unity neither the epistemological nor the organizational follows. Reality can be one and yet be known by different methods and from different aspects. The reason is the finitude of the intellect: the real is known successively and by aspects, not all at once. Therefore, disciplines do not divide reality — which remains one — but the mode of access of a finite intellect to that reality. Disciplinary plurality is a fact of the knowing subject, not a fracture of the known object.

2. Historical genesis of the disciplines

Disciplinary organization has a history and is not a natural given.

Aristotle (Metaphysics E.1, 1025b–1026a) distinguished theoretical, practical and productive sciences, hierarchized and crowned by first philosophy — theology — as the science of the first causes; unity functioned as an architectonic ideal, for the sciences differed by object and method, but all were ordered to a supreme science. The trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) made up the seven liberal arts; the term quadrivium is attributed to Saint Boethius (“a sort of fourfold way”), and they were not loose subjects but paths ordered to a common end. The medieval university articulated four faculties — Arts, at the lower level, and Theology, Law and Medicine, at the higher level — and guaranteed the unity of knowledge through the primacy of theology: Saint Bonaventure, in De reductione artium ad theologiam (“The Reduction of the Arts to Theology”, c. 1255), shows how all the arts are “led back” to theology as to their principle. The scientific revolution (16th–17th centuries) made physics autonomous with its own method; the research university (Humboldt model, 19th century) institutionalized specialization; and the fracture between sciences and humanities was described by C. P. Snow in The Two Cultures (1959). Finally, transdisciplinarity (Piaget, 1970; Nicolescu, Charter of 1994) proposes what lies “between, across and beyond” the disciplines, while warning — as Nicolescu does — against turning it into a “hyperdiscipline” that replaces them: “there is no transdisciplinarity without disciplinarity”.

3. What justifies the division

The disciplinary division responds to two facts: the plurality of objects — or of aspects of an object — and the plurality of methods that those objects demand. Neither of these facts contradicts the unity of the real; rather they presuppose it, for the convergence of different methods upon the same world is a sign that there is one world approached from different sides.

It is therefore advisable to distinguish three unities that do not imply one another: the unity of the object (the real, legitimate), the unity of method (illegitimate) and the unity of organization (instrumental, not ontological). Only the first is a given. The other two are decisions that are not derived from the first.

4. Limits of the idea of “unity of knowledge”

The unity of knowledge is a regulative ideal, not a state possessed by a finite intellect. Two risks lie in wait for whoever absolutizes it.

The first is the hyperdiscipline: to claim a “science of sciences” encompassing everything would flatten the diversity of methods and objects and could become a new dogmatism. The second has a historical root: medieval unity was sustained by subordination to a supreme science, theology, and a modern unity cannot assume that form without deciding on a foundation that is today a matter of dispute.

Specialization is not, then, a defect to be abolished, but a condition of finite access to the real. What is indeed a defect consists in turning the instrumental division into an ontological frontier: in treating disciplines as sealed territories that forget they study the same reality.

Conclusion

The division into disciplines does not contradict the unity of reality; it expresses it under the condition of finitude. Distinguishing ontological, epistemological and organizational unity makes it possible to affirm the unity of the real without denying the legitimate plurality of methods. The way this distinction operates in the metaphysics of human making is studied in Creating, making, and imitating nature; a concrete case of integration between domains can be seen in Leonardo da Vinci and polymathy.

References

Primary sources

  • Aristotle, Metaphysica E.1 (Bekker ed.), 1025b–1026a.
  • Saint Boethius, on the quadrivium (attribution of the term).
  • Saint Bonaventure, De reductione artium ad theologiam (c. 1255).
  • Comte, A., Cours de philosophie positive; Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).

Secondary sources

  • Nicolescu, B., Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity (1985) and Charter of Transdisciplinarity (1994).
  • Bernstein, J. H., “Transdisciplinarity: A Review of Its Origins, Development, and Current Issues” (2015).