Fighting Monism, continued

The penumbras between practice and theory, the elusive shade that is not shade, the border regions, clear and unclear, the fringes, are the richest places to be. This truth holds for biology, ecology, and geography just as it does for music, painting and on down the line. The crossroads and borders are amped and synergistic, creating work effects that are much more than the sum of all the moving parts. In this way, the borders in science between application and reflection are richest. At its best, science constantly evolves in its description of adaptability and dialectical change. The changing metaphors of science tell not so much of an ever-improved understanding as of an evolution of the truth itself. The truth is not in the data; it's in the reflection on the data. Science, then, can be nothing but religion.

More Recent Thoughts and a Closer Reading of Livingstone

In retrospect, I felt the above earlier words of mine were entirely relevant to my reflection on David Livingstone's The Geographical Tradition. I will admit right off that while every part of Livingstone's book tells a fascinating story, for me the real juice was in the Bigger-Picture questions. I am someone who does not consider himself a Geographer in any narrow sense. For this reason, there were sections in Livingstone's discourse which fell a little dead on my generalist ears. Still, even with the book's painstaking attention to historical and geography-discipline details, I took a great deal from it concerning human epistemology as a whole and the overall quest for understanding of (the fundamental spatial configurations of) our place on earth.

The primary thrust of The Geographical Tradition is, in addition to cataloging the figures in geographical history, to look closely at what Livingstone thinks of as the foundational project of geography: the conflation of nature and culture. It is from this formative perspective that comes another, less-overt thread: with the advance of Enlightenment science, the church sought to secure its relevance; indeed scientists themselves sought to maintain the immutability of religious thought by adapting the implications of science to fit the old worldviews. Natural Theology, the idea that all natural laws reflect the teleology in nature, that all physical, biological, and chemical processes are manifestations of God's design, is evidence of the effort to prevent obsolescence of the sacred in its older formulations. After a couple of hundred years of this attempt, it seems that academicians everywhere finally gave up; Enlightenment emphasis on the arithmomorphic reemerged in the twentieth century. Logical Positivism and the Quantitative Revolution are exemplary results. These in turn yielded counter-revolutions, radical (structuralist) and humanist critiques of the geographical legacy.

Throughout the book Livingstone emphasizes that the traditions and notions he aims to shed light on are pluralist; in his view, monism is a four-letter word. For example, he says in discussing the connections between Puritanism and the development of science in the 17th century, he says, "Once again my claims for the relation between religion and science...are not exclusivist....While it would be myopic to present the history of the emergence of English science as the result of any one particular group, it would be equally mistaken to rule out vital religious factors in the explanatory network" (Livingstone 1992, p. 73). This refusal to adopt a singular analytical view of any set of events continues, with, as another example, his insistence that geography did not serve simply as the science of imperialism (p. 220).