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Academic Boundary and Humanity without Boundary

Ynhui Park 1

1Simmons College

ABSTRACT

We divide the world into almost infinite numbers of the ontological categories of things such as mind and body, mountain and ocean, the solid and the liquid, the animate and the inanimate, frog and toad, male and female, and so on, as if these divisions were metaphysically fixed and eternal just like the Platonic Ideas. But as the Hindus have already known all along, the Brahman refers to the single indivisible totality of all things in the universe and is identical with the infinite numbers of individual realities referred to as Atman, and since the beginning of the 20th century, quantum mechanics has shown that reality is more like a chaotic Rorschach’s inkblot in constant motion, indivisible and fluid, one single realty only open to be divided into the kinds of things that we humans like according to our particular needs and our convenience at a particular occasion. Although ontologically the reality of the universe is one, conceptually and thus artificially, it is disposed to be divided into an infinite number. So it is with the nature of the academic division itself as well as with its origins. The academic division between the humanities and the sciences, between philosophy and literature, for instance, is not ontologically founded, not really real, but only conceptual, i.e., artificially and thus temporarily invented by humans for epistemological reasons, i.e., practical reasons in order to cope better with our daily world. The more the world becomes developed and thus complicated, the more the numbers of academic divisions grow. And as the numbers are increasing, knowledge about the world has become fragmented, partial, myopic, and confused. This is what explains for recent fashionable call for academic unity, “consilience,” “fusion,” epistemological holism, and warnings about the crisis of the human sciences. But these warnings and calls for the fusion of different academic divisions remain empty unless we first clearly understand the semantic meaning of the unity, fusion, and consilience of the academic disciplinary divisions and its practical as well as its logical feasibility. Most people seem to believe that the best candidate for such as possibility rests with science. My views are (a) that the academic fusion as usually understood is either nonsensical or very hard, and (b) that it is the humanities, philosophy in particular rather than science, that can be the final candidate for such a task. For the scientific view of the world, which considers itself to be the only objective view, is one of many other human, hence, subjective conceptual construction.

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