Modern Mind

the creation of ‘fresh modes of perception.’ A third scientist of like mind was Paul Feyerabend. He too had once taught at Berkeley but by the mid-nineties was living in retirement in Switzerland and Italy. In two books,
Against Method
(London: Verso, 1975) and
Farewell to Reason
(London: Verso, 1987), he argued that there is no logic to science and to scientific progress and that the ‘human compulsion to find absolute truths, however noble, too often culminates in tyranny’ (page 48). He conceived of science as a boring, homogenising influence on thought, stampeding other forms out of the way. So firmly did he hold this view that in his later book he went so far as to refuse to condemn fascism, his argument being that such an attitude had led to fascism in the first place. (For his critics it didn’t help that he had fought in the German army in World War II.)
    18. Maddox, Op.
cit.
    19.
Ibid.,
page 122.
    20.
Ibid.,
pages 56–57.
    21.
Ibid.,
page 59.
    22.
Ibid.,
page 88.
    23. In
Darwin Machines and the Nature of Knowledge
(Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, Penguin paperback, 1995),. Henry Plotkin, professor of psychology at University College, London, advanced the view that adaptations are themselves a form of knowledge, part of the history of an organism which determines how it is born and what it knows and is able to know. On this reasoning, the intelligence displayed by the ‘higher’ animals is clearly an evolved adaptation which is itself designed to help us adapt. According to Plotkin, there are several functions of intelligence, one of which is to aid social cohesion: man is a social animal who benefits from the cooperation of others. Language and culture may therefore be understood in that light.
    24. Claude Bonnefoy,
Conversations with Ioescu, Op. cit.,
pages 167–168. There is also, for example, the one-off (but not necessarily trivial) case of Oxford University Press which, in November 1998, discontinued its Poetry List, giving as its reason that poetry no longer earned its keep – there was in other words no longer a market for verse. This shocked the literary world in the anglophone countries, especially as Oxford’s list was the second biggest in Britain, dating back to 1918 when it published Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the wake of the fuss that followed it was revealed that only four London firms published poetry on a regular basis, releasing barely twenty-five new tides a year, each of which sells two- to three-thousand copies. This is scarcely a picture of robust health. In Peter Conrad’s book,
Modem Times, Modem Places
(Thames & Hudson, 1998), which was an examination of the arts in the last century, he says that he found far more of interest and importance to write about in the first fifty years than in the last and that, of the nearly thirty themes he identifies as important to the arts, well over half are responses to science (the next most important was a sense of place: Vienna, Berlin, Paris, America, Japan). Conrad’s view of the arts is not dissimilar from Lionel Trilling’s, updated. Music, literature, painting and theatre should help us keep our spirits up, help us ‘keep going’, in his words. An unexceptional view, perhaps, but a much-reduced aim compared, say, with a hundred years ago, when the likes of Wagner, Hofmannsthal and Bergson were alive. Even by Peter Conrad’s exacting standards, the role of the arts has contracted.
    25. Alvin Kernan,
The Death of Literature,
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990, page 134.
    26.
Ibid.,
page 135.
    27.
Ibid.,
page 151.
    28.
Ibid.,
page 210.
    29. John Barrow,
Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits,
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; Vintage paperback, 1999, page 94.
    30.
Ibid.,
pages 94–95.
    31.
Ibid.,
page 95.
    32.
Robin Wright, The Moral Animal, Op. cit., page 325.
    33. P. B. Medawar,
The Hope of Progress,
London: Methuen, 1972, page 68.
    34.
Judith Rich Harris: The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, London: Bloomsbury, 1998.
    35. Wright,
Op. cit.,
page 315.
    36. Published as: Michael S. Roth (editor),
Freud: Conflict and Culture,
New York: Knopf, 1998.
    37. Paul Robinson, ‘Symbols at an Exhibition’,
New York Times,
12 November 1998, page 12.
    38.
Ibid.,
page 12.
    39.
Richard Noll, The Jung Cult, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; and The Aryan Christ: The Seaet Life of Carl Gustav Jung, Op. cit.
    40.
Russell Jacoby, The