Why I Enjoy Working for the Vorpel Foundation: Another Reply
Submitted to the Fellows’ Circular by a third academic denizen, in response to both preceding internal papers, and filed—at the author’s request—under “ecology of thought” if such a heading exists, or under “miscellaneous” if it does not, which will itself prove a point this paper intends to make.
Two papers have now arrived in the Fellows’ Circular asking why we enjoy working here, and both have answered well: the first by describing the Foundation’s methods, the second by locating those methods within a philosophical tradition that runs from Aristotle through Hardy to the Viscountess’s preface.
This paper intends to go somewhere neither of them went, which is further back—or perhaps further sideways, in the spirit of Harbord-Finch’s “serious pursuit of the adjacent”—to the question underneath the question about knowledge. Not what is knowledge for, but what kind of place must exist before knowledge of that particular, wandering, adjacent-pursuing kind can occur at all. A civilisation, this paper proposes, should preserve places where people are allowed to notice things before anyone asks whether those things are useful. The Vorpel Foundation is such a place. The argument for such places is not merely an argument about scholarship. It is an argument about ecology.
The word ecology requires clarification, because this paper does not use it in the environmental sense, though the environmental sense will prove relevant. This paper uses ecology to mean the study of how complex systems sustain themselves through the maintenance of relationships between components that do not, viewed in isolation or viewed narrowly, appear to be doing anything necessary. Every complex ecosystem—the meadow, the estuary, the old-growth forest, the reef—contains an overwhelming majority of organisms and processes that cannot be justified by reference to a single external objective. The wildflower does not justify its existence by feeding a particular insect. The fungus does not justify its existence by decomposing a particular log. The meandering stream does not justify its existence by eventually irrigating a field. Their value—and the value is real and demonstrable, though the demonstration requires a perspective broad enough to see the system rather than just the component—lies partly in the very fact that they are not arranged around a single external purpose. They are doing whatever they do, at whatever scale and in whatever direction they do it, and the system’s health depends on the aggregate of all those activities that look, from the outside, like distributed inattention to any single goal.
Dr Nneka Obi-Marchetti, whose work on littoral accumulation this series has already encountered, extended her argument about sediment and persistence in a 2022 paper, “Ecological Thinking and the Organisation of Knowledge” (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, vol. 47), that arrived on this desk through the Foundation’s associative library system at a point when this paper was already forming. She argued that intellectual institutions chronically misapply a production model—input, process, output, repeat—to activities that are actually ecological in their structure, and that the misapplication produces what she calls “the monoculture problem”: the systematic elimination of the apparently purposeless in the name of efficiency, followed by the catastrophic discovery that the apparently purposeless was load-bearing. “The agricultural monoculture,” she writes, “is extraordinarily productive in the short term and extraordinarily fragile across time. The intellectual monoculture—the institution that funds only what it can already identify as useful—displays identical properties. It produces efficiently until it doesn’t, and then it has nothing to draw on, because it has eliminated everything that was not immediately justifiable.” The Foundation, in this account, is not an eccentric backwater. It is a seed bank.
The historical evidence for this position is not difficult to assemble, though assembling it requires a willingness to follow a causal chain that runs across considerably longer time periods than most funding bodies’ planning horizons. Michael Faraday investigated the relationship between electricity and magnetism because it interested him, in a period when the practical applications of electromagnetism were entirely unspecifiable, because they depended on technologies that did not yet exist. He kept notebooks. He conducted experiments. He followed the adjacent thing. The applications came later, and they came precisely because Faraday’s interest had not been constrained by the requirement to produce them. Gregor Mendel bred peas in a monastery garden with no genetics in mind because there was no genetics yet; what he had was a question about inheritance that the peas seemed able to answer, and the patience to let them answer it across many generations of plants, and an institution—a monastic one, but one that recognised contemplative inquiry as a legitimate form of human activity—that did not demand he justify the peas before he counted them. Charles Darwin spent what looks, from the outside, like an extraordinary amount of time on barnacles. The barnacle work is not what Darwin is remembered for, but the barnacle work is what trained the observational habits that the theory required.
The inventors of number theory had no computers in mind. The builders of formal logic had no digital circuits in mind. The mathematicians who developed the calculus of variations were not thinking about trajectory optimisation for aerospace engineering. The purpose came afterwards. In many cases, it came centuries afterwards, when someone working on a specific problem discovered that the tools for solving it had already been developed by someone who was not thinking about that problem at all, but about something that seemed, at the time, entirely self-contained. This is not a fortunate accident of intellectual history. It is a pattern so consistent and so well-documented that treating it as accidental requires more credulity than treating it as structural. Fundamental inquiry precedes application, not because fundamental inquirers are better at prediction than applied researchers, but because fundamental inquiry is not constrained to search only in places where useful things are expected to be found. It searches everywhere, and therefore finds things in unexpected places, and some of those things turn out to be what applied researchers were looking for, and some do not, and the ones that do not are still part of the system and still load-bearing in ways that may not become apparent for another century.
Professor Adeyemi-Clarke, whose argument about persistence without teleology runs through this series like a thread through fractals—present at every scale, the same shape regardless of magnification—made a relevant observation in a seminar she gave here two years ago that has not yet appeared in print and which she has given permission to cite in this form. Speaking about the Foundation’s relationship to the wider world of scholarship, she said: “The institution that demands purpose in advance has made a very large assumption. It has assumed that it already knows what kinds of futures are worth having. That is an extraordinary position to occupy. It means the institution believes it can specify, before the research is conducted, the shape of the world the research should help produce. No institution has ever been right about this for more than a generation. The futures that matter always contain elements that no prior institution specified, because those elements were discovered rather than planned, and they were discovered by people who were free to look where they looked rather than where they were directed to look.”
The question of whose purpose follows directly, and it requires direct attention because it has not been adequately addressed in the preceding papers of this series, both of which treated “purpose” as a relatively neutral category whose main problem was being applied prematurely. The problem with purpose is not only that it arrives before the inquiry; it is that it always arrives from somewhere, and the somewhere is an institution with its own interests. The state defines as purposeful what advances state objectives. The corporation defines as purposeful what improves the bottom line. The church defines as purposeful what advances the theological programme. The university, increasingly, defines as purposeful what produces impact measurable by bodies whose own purposes are defined by governments and market indicators. Purpose is never free-floating. It always belongs to someone who benefits from having inquiry directed toward their concerns rather than anyone else’s. The Foundation’s claim—that interest itself is sufficient, that inquiry needs no external warrant—is not merely epistemological. It is political. It removes the question of whose purposes scholarship should serve by refusing to make scholarship’s legitimacy contingent on serving anyone’s purposes. This is, on reflection, a more radical position than either of the preceding papers in this series has quite named it as being.
And then there is play. The preceding papers circled it without quite landing; this paper intends to land. Play is not, as it is most commonly described, preparation. Children play to learn, the developmental literature tells us, and this is true and well-attested. But the developmental literature commits a characteristic error: it identifies what play produces and mistakes that production for play’s purpose. Play does not occur in order to produce learning; learning is a by-product of play that occurs because play is what young organisms—young human organisms, young wolves, young ravens, young otters—do when the environment permits them to do something that is not immediately necessary. The preparation is fortunate. The play is prior. One plays because one is an organism in a sufficiently safe environment with sufficient energy, and the playing is not a means to an end but an expression of that condition. That animals play is one of the more philosophically interesting facts about the natural world: it suggests that the impulse to engage with the world without immediate instrumental purpose is not a human cultural achievement but a biological given, present before civilisation arrived to assign purposes to everything and subsequently confused about why assigning purposes to everything has not made things straightforwardly better.
The Foundation, this paper proposes, is an institution for the protection of play in its deepest intellectual sense. Not frivolity—the papers produced here are careful, argued, documented, and serious by any standard—but play in the sense of free engagement with whatever presents itself as interesting, without the requirement that the engagement justify itself before it has discovered what it is engaging with. The freedom to notice. The freedom to compare. The freedom to follow a bent spoon through the epistemological literature of littoral accumulation and material culture studies and end up at a question about whether the environment has intentions. That is play. Disciplined, documented, argued play, but play nonetheless, and the discipline and the documentation are in the service of the play rather than the other way around.
The Viscountess’s refusal of the moral parabola, which the previous papers have read as an epistemological position and a philosophical one, reveals itself here as something additional: a refusal of the geometry of purpose. A parabola has a destination built into its mathematics. It knows, from the moment of its definition, where it will arrive. The archive the Viscountess assembled and described refuses that geometry and prefers something more like a watershed—the system of tributaries that runs wherever the ground permits, finding its own level, taking whatever route presents itself as lower, and arriving eventually at the sea by a path that no one would have specified in advance but that, once travelled, seems in retrospect entirely natural. The wanderer through that watershed notices what the traveller with a destination cannot afford to notice: the bent spoon, the duck in the keyhole, the full stop after mischief, the seventeen words that will not translate, the box that remains locked not because it must but because the Fellows cannot agree on what they are entitled to find. These observations may connect to nothing. Or they may quietly become the foundation of something that no one could have written into a grant application, because the grant application did not know this thing existed until the wandering found it.
The Foundation’s answer to the question of purpose is not that purpose is wrong. It is that purpose is a poor guide to where interesting things are likely to be found. Interest, curiosity, and play have a better record. They are untidy, difficult to measure, impossible to schedule, and resistant to the metrics that contemporary institutions use to demonstrate that they are doing what they claim to be doing. But civilisation has discovered, repeatedly and at intervals long enough that each generation has to rediscover it, that a remarkable number of its most enduring ideas first appeared in places very like this one: where people were allowed to notice things before anyone asked whether the noticing was useful, and where the noticing, accumulating across time and documentation and the associative logic of a well-maintained index, eventually became something that the purposes of a later age could recognise as exactly what they needed, and could not have specified in advance, and did not deserve the credit for commissioning.
The Viscountess knew this. She did not say it in quite these terms. She said: wine, power, and hope. By which she may have meant: the generative thing, the structural thing, and the thing that makes continuation seem worthwhile even when the parabola does not resolve. This paper adds one further element to her triad. Curiosity. It belongs in the list. It has always been there, between the lines of the preface, in the archive that the preface describes, in every paper this Foundation has produced about things that had no obvious reason to need a paper written about them and that turned out, as objects in littoral environments do, to persist.
Notes:
The author invites responses, particularly from Fellows with views on whether play is prior to purpose or merely prior to conscious awareness of purpose, which is a different question and one that may require its own paper. The box outside Room 14 is available. The archivist has confirmed it remains unlocked.
Addendum: The author notes that in compiling this paper, three books were removed from the library and one was found already on the desk from a previous visit, which says something about either the associative indexing system or the author’s reading habits, and the author is genuinely uncertain which.
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