There’s a pervasive belief in the ineluctable triumph of expertise and specialisation. We dissect knowledge into areas, crafts into specialties, nature into labels. At their best, they are a valuable way of reducing reality and making it apprehensible to our minds. At their worst, they hinder understanding by filtering everything through a preconceived structure, forcing things to fall into dogmatic places, naturally excluding what doesn’t fit into its parsing of the world. Our civilisations run the risk of fragmenting themselves and their individuals when it relentlessly pushes towards utilitarian benefits. We seem to stare at a reluctant and blurry distance to Terence, the great latin poet who stated for posterity: “I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me.”
Haven’t we trapped our mind’s inquisitiveness under the guise of utility? Trapped by our own very reluctance to let it push itself. In a way, the structure of our contemporary learning instead of expanding scope and curiosity tends to narrow it. The necessity to foster interdisciplinary and inclusive efforts is often a sign that our spirit has become tragically fragmented. All in the name of a self acquired notion of depth, value, and mercantile utility. Unfortunately, it’s also a false sense of depth—yet a very dangerous one.
It’s not hard to see that we may lack any sort of cohesive view, that we struggle at the gaps our grid of instrumental utility conceals. If the splitting of knowledge into areas was a necessity to allow room for diverse and improved practices, now it may be close to lose the thing that bonded them, and relinquish any sense of inclusiveness. The sciences look down upon philosophy as mere poetic ramblings; all the while philosophy looks down on the sciences as being lost in arbitrary calculations. Both forget that our greatest minds were naturally inclined to pursue both. There’s so many ways in which you can cut an entity until it no longer resembles any entity. Pursuing specialisation for too long will only yield fragmentation of knowledge — something that ails every corner of our understanding. Most often, the hardest problems cannot be deciphered within the confines of just one discipline. Sometimes, they cannot even be formulated at all from their wells.
The promise of specialisation operates on the assumption that a sort of collective geist should arise to achieve what its individuals sacrificed. But who speaks for it? The landscape of our knowledge seems like a field of separate holes where we dig in isolation. The irony is that nobody can tell how close those holes are anymore with regard to each other, or even whether they are close at all, so absorbed we are in their verticality. Could there be a distinct fear that they may forever be isolated islands? What are we to do with this cognitive scenery of moon-like craters? Who is there to dig horizontally so that those holes can reach each other?
It has been said that this overspecialisation is the only way to avoid superficial thoughts in a vast world that is impossible to grasp and comprehend. As everything, the depth achieved is but a matter of perception. Just turn the head sideways and we’ll see what is reverenced as a tunnel of illustrious depth becomes a superficial line of sameness. We are so attached to the holes we are digging that we can’t prevent being shallow—that is, horizontally speaking.
But even then it seems as if we are in a more dangerous situation. More precarious. We assume that focusing on a specialisation path is a necessity for deepness on a time of too much things to learn and explore. But then we lose all sense of curiosity, the very will to explore. We suspend the desire to know whatever lies beyond our field. What can imagination do if you only feed it from the same source? By its very nature it perpetuates a status quo, because there’s no thinking allowed outside of the holes we have chosen. Depth without breadth becomes the epitome of a particular kind of shallowness.
Great individuals have shown to have maybe one thing in common — they never deprived their curiosity of its natural state to move in all directions. Categories and disciplines are mental tools we use to superimpose a sense of continuity on a world which is essentially constantly transforming itself into existence. Creating, learning, and teaching are fundamental acts of discovery and development, intuition and inspiration, trust and openness; reaching out to the potential we have come to exist with.
Written for a profile in design.blog.