“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
Two Ways to History.—We arrive at knowledge through discipline or through love, though each also has its characteristic perversion that betrays the epistemic impulse. Discipline yields knowledge without sympathy, remaining blind to the motive behind it all. Love yields understanding without distance, and so it can distort its object to conform to our desires. In the attempt to study our own history and our own civilization, we have grasped them through love and imagined that our understanding was a function of rationality, when it was, in fact, an expression of affinity. Because it is ours, we cannot be dispassionate in its presence, any more than we can be indifferent about our own identity. But other histories and other civilizations, alien to us as not being our own, we can study with the same disciplined rigor we bring to studying an exotic microorganism, or even a fascinating pathology. We can be repulsed, and yet pursue dispassionate scientific inquiry; we could even count the revulsion as a valuable ally in science, as it allows us to maintain our distance from an object of knowledge, the better to remain disinterested in the constitution of the knowledge so occasioned. This, however, is a later achievement of science, which must first develop its methods in the absence of any such revulsion. Discipline must be won through effort, increasing its capacity through repeated engagement. Once the method and the discipline have been developed, they can be directed to any object, but first they must be won through love. The dialectic within science is to study a beloved object and an indifferent or repulsive object with precisely the same methodology, so that what we learn from the one can be applied to the other. In this way, love can supplement discipline, and discipline love. Thus the beloved and the indifferent object of knowledge, both grasped through the same effort of the mind, become mutually intelligible if the methodology of love is mirrored in the methodology of discipline and vice versa.