Epistemology and Love: Wendell Berry and "Science"

I've been reading Wendell Berry's fiction as of late, reading a few essays, and have listened to one of his interviews. I am really fascinated by his phrase "the way of ignorance." He and Wes Jackson use this phrase to indicated a certain epistemological humility, on the one hand, and a certain affection for their localities on the other. Berry thinks that one of the major problems with modern techno-science (and this almost always goes together) is that it has no respect for localities, prefers to distance itself from what it studies, generalizes and abstracts to a damaging effect, and loves to reduce and dissect everything it comes in contact with. The effect, Berry thinks, is the destruction of land through the use of methods not suitable to that locality, the destruction of community through the mechinizing labor and conglomerating land, and ultimately the destruction of knowledge through the over-specialization of the scientists themselves, and through the loss of a knowledge-base in farming communities.

Clearly, Berry is against a mainstream understanding of "knowledge" if he thinks science destroys it. But what does he think knowledge is? From reading his short stories and novels so far, I can only say that he believes knowledge to be connected intimately with love. Love is attachment. Love is a focused care, a watching and waiting, a giving of space and a giving of time. Love is when you see yourself in that thing you're studying, you see every consequence of your knowledge as a consequence for your person. I think Berry's epistemology, and indeed an epistemology using love, is best seen in Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet:

That time of year thou mayest in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those bows which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such a day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by the black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This though perceive'st, that makes they love more strong:
To love well that which thou must leave ere long.

I think this sonnet typifies Berry's approach, and I must say I'm starting to think of knowledge in this way. The poem, in three quatrains and a couplet, moves like this: first, we hear the poet is in decline. The phrase "bare ruined choirs" is one of the most beautiful in the language for speaking in particular of decline, because we are speaking of seasons, of fall, where soon winter will take over, a sort of death. Next, we meet another sort of death, the death of a day - "death's second self," i.e. night, which gives rest, as much as it "seals up" in a tomb. Yet third we find the most interesting aspect of this: the "glowing" of the poet is actually that thing which leads to his decline, as he is "consumed with that which [he] was nourished by." This has always reminded me of the life cycle: the agent of our growth is the agent of out decline, since on the one hand, as we replace our cells (which takes 7 years for our entire body to be replaced with new cells), and grow, we area also being undone, because cell replication gets worse each time they replicate. This is merely the process of growing old.

But when we get to the couplet, we realize that even as we see this in the world, we still love the world.