TWO WAYS OF THINKING IN TECTONICS: GEO-JURISTS AND GEO-ARTISTS

The appellations geo-jurist and geo-artist is W. E. Petraschek’s as applied to Hans Stille and Hans Cloos respectively. I shall here use them to characterise two trends in thinking concerning tectonics that I previously called the Kober-Stille and Wegener-Argand schools. The designation school has been criticised because neither Wegener nor Argand had many formal disciples. Yet the way they thought about the earth has become extremely influential. I argue that their way of thinking was very different from that represented by Stille’s and Kober’s thinking which were very similar. One can find two common denominators to the thoughts of Wegener and Argand: both thought that Nature behaved uniformly in time and yet ‘evolved’ in a uniformly chaotic way. They could discern no order in the world of tectonics to enable them to formulate ‘laws of behaviour’ of our planet. By contrast Both Stille and Kober thought that nature changed its behaviour at intervals and it ‘spiralled’ in an historically irreversible way towards a definite goal. Wegener and Argand regarded nature almost as if they were beholding an art work with a view to understanding its message. That is why I call them geo-artists. By contrast Stille and Kober were keen in formulating laws so as to reduce our knowledge of the behaviour of our planet to a code. Thus, they were geo-jurists. How that code had come to be did not concern them although towards the end of his life Kober developed some extremely unlikely theories of the behaviour of matter. When one views the history of geology one sees with some astonishment that all its dialectic (in its original Greek sense, not the illogical Marxist sense) can be reduced to arguments between the protagonists of these two fundamental ways of thinking. So Leonardo da Vinci was a geo-artist, Agricola a geo-jurist; Werner a geo-jurist, Hutton a geo-artist; Lyell a geo-artist, Élie de Beaumont a geo-jurist; Cuvier a geo-jurist, Lamarck a geo-artist; Alexander von Humboldt a geo-artist, Leopold von Buch was a geo-jurist; Suess a geo-artist, Dana a geo-jurist; Gilbert a geo-artist, Davis a geo-jurist; Bucher a geo-jurist, Franz E. Suess a geo-artist. The geo-artists were critical rationalists whereas geo-jurists were positivists.