Post-modern Interdisciplinarity: Kant, Diderot and the Encyclopedic Project

In the second part of the Critique of Judgment, Kant offers the following definition of how a science or discipline is established: "The principles of a science are either internal to it, and are then called indigenous (principia domestica), or they are based on principles that can only find their place outside of it, and are foreign principles (peregrina). Sciences that contain the latter base their doctrines on auxiliary propositions (lemmata), i.e., they borrow some concept, and along with it a basis for order, from another science" (Kant, Judgment 252). The second of these two cases, the borrowing of a concept from another science or discipline, is a practice that is easily discernible in recent critical history. One need only think of the borrowing from Saussurean linguistics that enabled the development of structuralism. Yet, as the history and the intentions of structuralism already show, such borrowing does not lead to the formation of a science or even a discipline we could call interdisciplinarity but rather, remains firmly within the practice of either a critical method or the idiosyncrasy of a particular critical interpretation. ² Indeed, in such cases, the claim to interdisciplinarity has more to do with affirming the ability to borrow from one discipline or another as a central principle of modern humanistic study if not the history of the humanities in general.

This principle is also central to the passage just cited from Kant's Critique of Judgment. However, for Kant, the principle of one science, once borrowed, may be easily forgotten as another science or discipline emerges, a new science that quickly takes on all the trappings of a science in its own right. Clearly, modern interdisciplinary study would resist, both strategically and ideologically, the transformation Kant describes: the reproduction of itself as a discipline. Yet, to the extent that modern interdisciplinarity defines itself through a critical relation to the ideology of disciplines (to do otherwise is to define itself according to the limitations it sets out to avoid), it poses the question of its own existence—not in the sense that such a question denies existence to interdisciplinarity but in the sense that it questions how interdisciplinarity currently exists as a recognizable form of inquiry. In other words, interdisciplinarity raises the question of the place it now occupies as a guiding concept for the production of knowledge within the modern university. Having taken up this role, has interdisciplinarity become, in effect, indistinguishable from the science whose principle remains internal to it? Does its borrowing lead back to what has long been the preserve of individual disciplines: the production of guiding concepts?

There lies a more fundamental question embedded within these questions: whether anything such as interdisciplinarity is conceivable as a form of knowledge—or, indeed, whether it is only as a form that it is conceivable. The answers to this question already seem predictably unavoidable whether it be an empirically driven declaration that "you can't do interdisciplinarity" or, on the other hand, a defense that emphasizes a kind of hybridity, an in-betweenness that always asserts its difference to the way in which a discipline guarantees its knowledge by focusing on the questions that authenticate its guiding concept. ³ By pursuing this question and the kinds of answers it so regularly elicits, the question of interdisciplinarity and its role within our modernity—not to mention the evolution of the university in the late 20th century—cannot be posed, and precisely because, these answers are not answers. Rather, they are the two opposed terms of a dialectically determined history in which interdisciplinarity and disciplinarity engage in what Kant could have called a play of representations, each one agreeably assuring the survival of the other. For, without the disciplines, there is no hope of designating, however vaguely or figuratively, a space between that would be the space of interdisciplinarity. Within such a history, discipline always remains a point of reference and...