Jürgen Renn. The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. 584 pp. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-17198-2.
Reviewed by Caitlin Kossmann (Yale University)
Published on H-Sci-Med-Tech (September, 2022)
Commissioned by Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
In The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science co-director Jürgen Renn takes a high-level, synthetic, longue durée look at the history of knowledge and its relevance for the challenges of climate change. This is a highly ambitious project, aiming to organize and narrate the history of human thought as it relates to what might be broadly termed science or technical knowledge, with all but comprehensive coverage.
With such a wide-angle lens and encyclopedic aims, the book feels somewhat sprawling and diffuse, despite its author’s highly systematic and typological approach to each time period, concept, and example. The longue durée approach makes it difficult to feel one has learned much of substance about any particular topic. Despite the disorientation and omissions that can come from such broad coverage, however, Renn makes a concerted effort to complicate notions of progress and a purely Western history of knowledge. He is rather more successful at the first than the second, and his vision of a catalogued and managed, yet simultaneously utopian and democratic, internet as a solution to problems of both knowledge and social order is not quite convincing. Nonetheless, Renn has synthesized a staggering amount of history and theory relating to knowledge and cultural change into a commendably organized work.
Renn introduces his book as the product of decades of research and multiple collaborations at the Max Planck Institutes, whose approach to the history of science he describes as grounded in an emphasis on historical continuity, cross-cultural comparison, and the integration of the history of science with the larger history of knowledge. Such attention to the collective efforts that led to this work nicely mirrors his approach to studying the transformation of knowledge structures over time, which focuses much more on collectives and the social processes of change than it does on individual actors or contributions. It also means that the book is almost entirely based on secondary literature. Renn draws on a wide array of monographs and articles in the history of science and allied disciplines, including many projects in which he himself was involved. Renn identifies his motivation for the work in his desire to see the history of science more engaged with practice, arguing for the importance of interdisciplinary work, a return to a focus on experiment and material culture, and more explicit engagement with questions of politics and morality.
The book is composed of seventeen chapters divided among five sections, beginning with definitions of science and knowledge; followed by a section on abstract questions of theory change, thought processes, and the development of science; two sections investigating in more detail the development of knowledge economies and the dynamics of globalization and politics; and a final section on his vision of “science for the Anthropocene.”
Renn argues throughout the book that humanity has moved from evolving primarily through biological means (including the development of cognitive and physical capacities for language) to a form of evolution in which culture (material culture in a Marxian sense) was the dominating driver , and finally to “epistemic evolution.” This last form is one in which science and technology come to play the central role, through a “feedback loop” between capitalism and what Renn calls “knowledge economies” (all social elements pertaining to the making and sharing of knowledge) (p. 31). After a preliminary section defining terms and the arc of the book, the second through fourth sections march through historical time, touching on the biological and then social evolution of human language and symbolic practices, including logic and philosophy; classical mechanics and the development of European architectural feats such as medieval cathedrals; colonialism, globalization, translation, and the impact of Japanese isolationism in the mid-nineteenth century on Japanese scientific knowledge once the country reopened to global trade; and many other topics besides. In these sections Renn describes a long history of global connectedness and the exchange and transformation of local knowledges, accelerated by colonialism. He emphasizes that the hegemonic form of knowledge today, namely Western science, is the product of these interactions with multiple local knowledges across the globe at multiple points throughout history.
The fifth and final section presents Renn’s program for thinking about science and the history of science in the Anthropocene. There is a plethora of new terms raised in this section, and indeed throughout the book. Among these are the concept of the “ergosphere,” the planetary-scale network of effects that come from human work, and a proposed discipline Renn calls “geoanthropology,” which he defines as drawing together natural science, social science, and the humanities to study “human-Earth interactions within an Earth system perspective”—an interesting interdisciplinary proposal that nonetheless unfortunately reifies the nature/culture divide by putting humans and nature on opposite sides of this interaction (p. 375). He ends with two unusual proposals: one, for the development of a form of the internet in which all of its corners are catalogued, hyperlinked, and managed, although they remain open to editing by all users; and two, for science to embrace a role as a moral guide, which he analogizes to the role of religion.
My primary critique of this book, which is perhaps more a function of genre than anything else, is the level of flattening and universalization that comes with both focusing on such a long time span and taking to heart the concept of the Anthropocene. Renn seems fairly unconcerned by questions that have been raised about the Anthropocene’s overrepresentation of humanity as a singular agent. He glosses over such questions obliquely through a reference to contemporary global connectedness and the overarching importance of human survival (p. 10). The “we” of humanity is constantly in the background, and, as Sylvia Wynter would put it, generally in the form of the overrepresentation of human by the European man.[1] There is remarkably, one might even say glaringly, little on race or gender here. And although colonialism is covered as a process, its violence cannot come through when treated at this level of abstraction. For a book titled The Evolution of Knowledge, it is clearly focused on an understanding of Western scientific knowledge as the most important kind of knowledge today (which Renn admits in the context of his suggestions regarding the Anthropocene)—but this therefore means that the long history he tells is ultimately in service of telling the history from the perspective of Western science. This is not necessarily bad, and Renn makes a case for why he understands this particular kind of globally and historically constituted knowledge to be so central to addressing the climate crisis. But it does mean that the title’s gestures to comprehensiveness feel unfulfilled.
The book’s scope and tone render it in the realm of a reference work or synthesis, which is why I can most easily imagine this book being assigned to first- or second-year graduate students in the history of science, in order to spur an examination of our field and methods. Renn’s aim is certainly to reach a wider audience than this, and I could see assigning the last few chapters somewhat more broadly in order to spark debate about the role of science and history in the contemporary moment. Its length and approach, however, would deter me from recommending it widely to those unfamiliar with such topics already.
Note
[1]. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.
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Citation:
Caitlin Kossmann. Review of Renn, Jürgen, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=57674
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