Wissenschaft und Wissenskunst
Since B. W. Powe has asked us in this conference to think about the meaning of literacy in an electronic age, let me take a moment to address myself to this, the central question of our gathering. In my own writings of the time when I was here at York – in works such as At the Edge of History and Passages about Earth – I tried to use the structure of Romantic “Poems of Description and Meditation,” as the internal structure for non-fiction essays.² In this work, I was also trying to respond to the challenge of Marshall McLuhan’s work. I first met McLuhan at a faculty seminar at MIT in the sixties, and then when I moved to Toronto, I attended one of those legendary meetings at the Coach House at the U. of T. McLuhan had challenged scholars to be more sensitive to the implications of the new electronic era in which we were living and not simply hide out in academic reservations of literacy. I responded to this challenge by seeking to turn non-fiction into a work of art on its own terms. Rather than trying to be a scholar or a journalist writing on the political and cultural news of the day, I worked to become a poetic reporter on the evolutionary news of the epoch. Of course, I was not alone in this impatience with novel and newspaper, as other writers then also felt the lift of the zeitgeist and were not content to write more realistic novels or more confessional poems – writers such as Lewis Thomas, Carlos Castaneda, Stanislaw Lem, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. McLuhan pointed out to us that a new technology obsolesces a present technology and retrieves a previously obsolesced technology, and I instinctively felt that the new electronic technology was not simply obsolescing print and melting down the alphabetic mentality but was retrieving animism in all its variants – from Yaqui shamanism with Carlos Castaneda to Celtic animism at Findhorn in Scotland. The traditional academic lecture also became for me an occasion to transform the genre, to present not an academic reading of a paper, but a form of Bardic performance – not stories of battles but of the new ideas that were emerging around the world. So I would run off to Cape Kennedy to talk to the astronaut Rusty Schweickart, and then rush back to Toronto to write a lyrical essay of description and meditation on Apollo 17 for the entire op-ed page of The New York Times for New Year’s Day, 1972. Then I would riff on this material in a talk for my freshman humanities class here at York. In this same New Year’s break, I also went to talk to Werner Heisenberg, C. F. von Weizsäcker, and Gopi Krishna in Munich, and then came back to talk to my students about yoga and quantum physics. In Germany, after my conversation with Heisenberg, I felt I needed a new word for this essay-narrative that was not simply “non-fiction,” but something more artistic for a culture that was no longer simply orally bardic or academically literate. Since I was in Germany and could find no word for it in English, I coined the term Wissenskunst – as opposed to Wissenschaft – and I am happy to report that the Germans have taken the word into their language, as you will see if you type the word with the Web search engine Google and see what comes up on your screen.