The Barbarism of Specialization

Jose Ortega Y Gasset's Condemnation of Learned Ignorance

It would be of great interest, and of greater utility than at first sight appears, to draw up the history of physical and biological sciences, indicating the process of increasing specialization in the work of the investigators. It would then be seen how, generation after generation, the scientist has been gradually restricted and confined into narrower fields of mental occupation... how in each generation the scientist, through having to reduce the sphere of his labour, was progressively losing contact with other branches of science, with [the] integral interpretation of the universe....

Specialization commences precisely at a period [the beginning of the 19th century] that gives to civilized man the title "encyclopedic" ... In the following generation, the balance is upset, and specialization begins to dislodge integral culture from the individual scientist. When by 1890 a third generation assumes intellectual command in Europe, we meet with a type of scientist unparalleled in history. He is ... only acquainted with one science, and even of that one only knows the small corner in which he is an active investigator. He even proclaims that it is a virtue that he takes no cognizance of what lies outside the narrow territory specially cultivated by himself, and gives the name of "dilettantism" to any curiosity for the general scheme of knowledge.

What happens is that, enclosed within the narrow limits of his visual field, he does actually succeed in discovering new facts and advancing the progress of the science that he hardly knows, and incidentally the encyclopedia of thought of which he is conscientiously ignorant. ... For the purpose of innumerable investigations it is possible to divide science into small sections, to enclose oneself in one of these, and to leave out of consideration all of the rest. The solidity and exactitude of the methods allow for this temporary but quite real disarticulation of knowledge. ...

But this creates an extraordinarily strange type of man. The investigator who has discovered a new fact of nature must necessarily experience a feeling of power and self-assurance. With a certain apparent justice he will look upon himself as "a man who knows." ... The specialist "knows" very well his own tiny corner of the universe; he is radically ignorant of all the rest.

... He is not learned, for he is formally ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is a "scientist," and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man [i.e., not ignorant in the way that the ordinary man can be seen as ignorant of this or that], but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line.

And such in fact is the behavior of the specialist. In politics, in art, in social usages, in the other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of—and this is the paradox—specialists in those matters.... [T]his very inner feeling of dominance and worth will induce him to wish to predominate outside his specialty.

RECOMMENDED READING: Jose Ortega y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses (1930; Norton, 1957).

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From "The Barbarism of 'Specialization,'" The Revolt of the Masses (1930), pp. 107-14. These remarks of Ortega no longer apply solely to the "scientific" disciplines, but to all disciplines, all of which have adopted the "scientific" model. What makes the "learned ignoramus" especially objectionable to scholars who have tried to broaden their horizons is his irritable and caviling disposition towards students less inclined to pigeon-hole themselves, whether this petulance comes about out of laziness or ignorance it is hard to say.

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