The Wilson Series (All blogs)
The Two Wilsons and The Two Cultures (1/6)
A Tale of Two Wilsons…. and the Limits of Synthesis
In a series of six blogs—combined here—I describe the impressive achievements of two master synthesizers: the biologist E. O. Wilson (1929-2021) and the literary critic Edmund Wilson (1895-1972). In comparing their works and the trajectories of their careers, I distinguish between ‘routine” syntheses of excellence and syntheses that are far more ambitious, even grandiose. In the concluding blogs, I consider the merits and risks of an education that focuses explicitly on the training of synthesizing skills.
I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues with whom I have engaged over the years in ‘Wilson talk.” Special thanks to Mark Moffett,who shared his wisdom about E.O. Wilson, and to my wife Ellen Winner, who edited for both content and context.
Introducing the Two Wilsons
In 1959, C. P. Snow, a British scientist, novelist, and public intellectual, published a book that was soon to become well known and highly controversial. In “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Snow argued that among the intelligentsia in the UK, as well as in other contemporary societies, a sharp division had emerged. On the one hand, there were the traditional humanists: dating back (in Britain) to the time of John Locke, David Hume, and Samuel Johnson. Their ranks included philosophers, philologists, historians, art critics; these individuals (and their respective fields) had hegemonic status for centuries in British intellectual, scholarly, and cultural circles. Aligned on the other side were the scientists: physicists, chemists, biologists. Especially in view of theoretical breakthroughs and practical discoveries (key for victory in World War II), the scientists were gaining steadily in influence and power.
With standing in each set of disciplines (he was after all both a physicist and a creative writer), Snow lamented this state of affairs. Scientists and humanists should study one another’s ideas and works and learn from one another. Then, in the most memorable statement in his book (which had originally been a set of Rede lectures delivered on radio BBC), Snow threw down the gauntlet:
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold; it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” In short, humanists criticized scientists when they themselves did not try to learn the basic elements and discoveries of the sciences.”
Spanning the two cultures, Snow implicitly held himself as a model for the kinds of minds that should become—and indeed should constitute—the standard in our time. And many of us do look to those as versatile as Snow to display and to help nurture a synthesizing mind.
Recently we mourned the death of E. O. Wilson, considered by many (including himself!) to be an inveterate synthesizer. (His major volume Sociobiology is subtitled “The New Synthesis”). Well versed in the biological sciences, over the course of a long life, Wilson’s research encompassed the modeling of evolutionary processes as well as documenting thousands of insect species on the planet. In addition, he also engaged in what he termed consilience: an explicit effort to span the arts, sciences, and humanities. Not only did E. O. Wilson believe that these realms of knowledge could be connected; he also thought that he could provide the links, the glue—via his version of ‘consilience’.
Though I did not agree with all of his claims, I was an admirer and, to a modest extent, a colleague and friend of E.O. Wilson’s. Certainly, I would have wanted any student (or, indeed, any reflective person) to be exposed to his ideas and the often elegant and sometime witty ways in which he presented them.
Yet, upon learning of his death, I made an association that I had never consciously made before—to another E. Wilson—in his case Edmund Wilson (called by his friends “Bunny”, even as E.O. Wilson’s friends called him “Ed”.) Dating back over sixty years, to my high school and college years, Edmund Wilson was one of the two writers whom I most admired (and, at least, unconsciously, sought to emulate). American historian Richard Hofstadter—incidentally (or perhaps not so incidentally) also an admirer of Edmund Wilson—was the other role model.
I am not certain of the reasons that I so admired Edmund Wilson—but clearly they included his breadth of interests, his wide and deep knowledge of so many topics, his seemingly effortless ability to link persons, ideas, periods, fields, and his elegant yet accessible writings—which I first encountered in The New Yorker, and then in a series of his books, on subjects ranging from the history of the idea of socialism to the distinctive features of literary breakthroughs in the early decades of the 20th century. No reason whatsoever to assume that Edmund Wilson had any animus against science—but I cannot recall any writings that dealt with contemporary science in more than a cursory way; and his friends were overwhelmingly writers, artists, literary scholars. If he had ever heard of E. O. Wilson, I suspect that he would have admired his namesake’s work with ants but shaken his head about Wilson’s attempt to integrate scientific and humanistic capacities and works.
Two giants, two masterful synthesizers. If we look more closely at their works and at their lives, what can we learn?
In a series of blogs, I review, briefly, the lives and works of these two master synthesizers (here after Ed (for E. O. Wilson) and “Edmund” (for all except his close associates, who continued to call him “Bunny”); I will also describe their respective synthesizing efforts. I will then focus on an enigma—how broad are their respective remits for synthesizing, and what, if any, are the limits? On my analysis, Ed Wilson believes that he is able to bring together various areas of knowledge, in a way that C P Snow might well have endorsed. Edmund has no objection (in principle) to this goal, but it is not of significance for him.
With regret, I conclude that, however admirable, Ed’s efforts at the broadest synthesis are not convincing—and indeed, I am not certain that they actually help to bring the two cultures together. From this conclusion I draw a few implications, for what one teaches, how one teaches, and what a well-rounded higher education might be like.
References
Snow, C. P. (1959) The two cultures and the scientific revolution. London: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, E. O. (1975) Sociobiology: The New Synthesis Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
The Two Wilsons: A Slightly Deeper Introduction (2/6)
In the first blog in this series, I briefly introduced the literary critic Edmund Wilson (hereafter Edmund) and the biologist E.O. Wilson (hereafter Ed). Here, I provide a brief biographical sketch of each person (they are very different!) and describe their principal lines of work.
Both Wilsons came from families that lived in the United States for generations, but in many respects their childhoods could not have been more different. Edmund was born in New Jersey (within commuting distance from New York City) in 1895; his family—dating back to colonial times—was financially comfortable and well connected. His father (Edmund Sr.) was a successful lawyer, who became attorney general of New Jersey and was widely respected throughout the region. His mother was well-educated, well connected, well read. An only child, Edmund was the center of their attention, anxieties, aspirations.
An only child as well, Ed Wilson was born in Birmingham Alabama in 1929. His family was not well off; they moved from one place to another; his parents divorced when he was young. His father (also named Edward Osborne) wandered from one job to another, became an alcoholic, and eventually died by suicide—leaving a note in which he implied that he did not wish to become a burden to his son.
Not surprisingly, as children, both Wilsons were precocious and largely loners. At an early age, Ed became fascinated by nature and particularly by ants, for whom he had a passion; he spent countless hours exploring the landscape around his many homes. His loss of sight in one eye (due to an accident) and his diminished hearing did not reduce his ardor, though it may have nudged him toward studying small organisms. Edmund was a bibliophile (as were his parents) and readily devoured varieties of literature. In short, “ant lover” and “book worm”.
Because of his family’s status and resources, Edmund was able to attend the Hill School, a well-regarded private secondary school, and then Princeton University. He considered his experiences at the Hill School especially formative because he was introduced there to foreign languages (years of Greek, Latin, French) and to the panorama of American and European literature and history. He also was a dedicated student at Princeton but lamented the lack of intellectual interests on the part of most of his classmates. At both Hill and Princeton, he had knowledgeable and supportive mentors who quickly noted his dauntingly wide knowledge and his gifts as a reader and critic of literature. His writing talents were also recognized, as he ran the gamut from non-fiction, to stories, poems, and plays. Though he was in the military for a year in WWI and travelled a bit in Europe thereafter, it was clear to all—including Edmund—that he would become a writer and seek to make his living exclusively through that craft.
Ed Wilson’s interest in the biological world, nature, and especially ants was as deep seated and all-consuming as Edmund’s literary flair. But he was necessarily more of an autodidact, and, accordingly, his educational deepening and expanding took place gradually, over a longer period of time. He attended the University of Alabama (by no means the intellectual equivalent of Princeton a century ago); recognizing his unusual knowledge of insects and of biology more broadly, his teachers allowed him to pursue his own studies. But only when admitted as a graduate student to Harvard’s Department of Biology did, he encounter teachers and peers in whose company he could unabashedly exhibit his knowledge and skills and enhance both.
Though his principal biographer Richard Rhodes does not make much of it, I suspect that Ed’s stint as a “Junior Fellow” at Harvard in the early 1950s was crucial for his intellectual development and breadth. This unique three-year fellowship has long enabled a small group of exceptionally promising scholars to pursue whatever interests they have. Talented young persons (at the time, only men) have regular opportunities to mix with outstanding senior scholars as well as extraordinary peers. It seems clear to me that the Fellowship exposed Ed to realms of knowledge, skills, issues, and questions of which he had been barely aware before.
Also, and possibly relevant to this series of blogs, Ed Wilson recounts how the intellectual historian Crane Brinton, then the designated Senior Fellow (and thereby a guide for the Junior Fellows), helped him to understand his own specific slant on the life of the mind. Ed Wilson came to believe that he fit Brinton’s informal definition of an anti-intellectual—a person who does not believe that human nature can easily be changed. Ed Wilson, an intellectual in all the traditional connotations of that label, was a political conservative who had no sympathy for socialist or communist ideas—the very ideas that fascinated and animated his namesake Edmund Wilson (Rhodes, p.23).
No rising intellectual star has a completely easy run—the bumps of life intrude. Yet, compared to most of their peers, by the age of thirty, both Wilsons were marked for success and, indeed, for leading roles in their respective spheres. When 30, Ed Wilson had become a tenured professor of biology at Harvard—a status rarely achieved so early in life. He never wanted for research support, status, or conventional success thereafter. Similarly, by the age of 30, Edmund was already a leading writing and editor for American periodicals…this at a time when a skilled author could make a decent living simply by doing one’s job competently at Vanity Fair, The New Republic, or later The New Yorker.
Nonetheless, each of the Wilsons had his struggles. For Ed Wilson, it was the disdainful downgrading—and even dismissal as ‘stamp collecting’—of his traditional approach to the field of biology. The chief critic was his age peer James (Jim) Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) who argued fervently that the entire discipline of biology should focus sharply on molecules and genes. A struggle between their respective visions occurred at Harvard as well as on the national and international biology scenes—and the field moved sharply in the molecular direction. One can speculate that Ed Wilson’s later stretch to encompass all of biology—and, indeed, the full spectrum of knowledge—was in no small part a retort, a response, a reaction to Jim Watson’s hyper-focused conception of biological science.
Edmund Wilson’s struggles were more personal. He had the ambition to be a writer of fiction (plays, novels, stories,) as well as a poet, but it became clear that his special talent—indeed, his genius—lay in criticism, broadly construed. He displayed admiration for—but also jealousy of—his peers who succeeded in penning well-regarded serious literature—his Princeton friend Scott Fitzgerald, as well as novelist John Dos Passos and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. After a very late initiation into sexual relations, Edmund had a multitude of partners—women from the most diverse social and cultural backgrounds, including four wives, quite different from one another. (He documented in unexpurgated fashion several dozen liaisons in multiple journals kept over the decades.) His relation to his three children (by three wives) was vexed. He drank to excess. And he also suffered what was then termed a nervous breakdown in his early 30s. But with all that, Edmund Wilson was still able to read quickly (though with exemplary care and remarkable memory) and write deftly for much of each day. Like Ed Wilson, Edmund ended up with a remarkable array of publications on a wide set of topics.
(It’s worth noting that from all reports, Ed Wilson had a single successful marriage—and that he kept his personal and professional lives completely separate).
Both men have been the subject of biographical studies—both article and book length—as well as ample summaries in encyclopedias and Wikipedia. I will not attempt to describe their research and writing in any detail. (See References below.) In Ed Wilson’ case, he was widely recognized as the world’s expert on ants, as well as impressively knowledgeable about other species of insects. With well-chosen colleagues, he carried out pioneering work on insect communication (via pheromones) and on the distribution of diverse species across different ecological settings. In mid-life he wrote a major work on sociobiology (a term that he may not have coined but over which he eventually was awarded ownership). In this mammoth volume, he sought to apply the lessons learned about ant (and insect) societies to invertebrates and vertebrates, including, in a highly controversial final chapter, human beings. His research and writing on ants continued unabated; he changed his views dramatically about the causes of altruistic behavior; and in his later years, sought to reconcile or even merge the various forms and facets of human knowledge. This attempt at synthesis takes front stage in the succeeding blogs.
Ed Wilson’s daily life consisted of making field trips to various sites and studying insects in his laboratory. Edmund Wilson’s diurnal pattern consisted of reading widely on all manner of topics and publications, mixing with scholars and artists of all sorts on a very regular basis; and, while continuing to write stories, novels, plays and ditties, he is best known and most valued for his works of criticism, broadly construed. He wrote hundreds of book reviews (as well as reviews of plays, and other artistic productions) as well as critical essays about creative individuals, chiefly writers.
Most of Edmund Wilson’s fans (including me) know him best and value him most for his books. For the most part, his books were simply collections of his reviews (perhaps better described as review essays), with some loosely connecting materials. But the most important books stood on their own: Axel’s Castle, an introduction to key innovative “symbolist” writers in the early 20th century; The Wound and the Bow, making the case that literary giants suffer a major handicap or injury which paradoxically leads them to their greatest work (one ponders to what extent this was autobiographical); To the Finland Station, a study of the rise of socialism and communism from the early 19th century, to the crucial writings of Marx and Engels, culminating in Lenin’s arrival in April 2017 at the train station in St Petersburg—in effect launching the Russian Revolution; and Patriotic Gore, a remarkable survey of the leading literary, political, and military leaders in the US at the time of the Civil War—an era much closer to those of Wilson’s vintage than to those of us alive in the 21st century.
Others may well and justifiably focus on other strands of Ed Wilson’s scientific work or of Edmund Wilson’s literary output, but this sketch—and the sources cited below—should provide highlights.
In the next blogs, I attempt to describe the synthesizing methods and ambitions of these two master synthesizers.
References
Dabney, Lewis. Edmund Wilson: A life in literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Edmund Wilson: A Biography. New York: Cooper Square Publishing, 2003.
Rhodes, T. Scientist: E O Wilson: A Life in Nature. New York; Doubleday, 2021.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s 1931.
Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1940
Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978.
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the literature of the American Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962.
Wilson, E.O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Wilson, E.O. Naturalist. Washington D C: Island Press, 2006.
Two Wilsons, Two Modes of Synthesizing (3/6)
Edmund Wilson’s approach to synthesizing is a classical one—indeed, he did not change the traditional mode of literary and historical synthesizing in any significant way. As a youth, he discovered in his father’s copious library various well-regarded literary (and historical) accounts emanating from the 18th and 19th century—among them, the evocative writings of Charles Sainte-Beuve, Edward Gibbon, Samuel Johnson, and Hippolyte Taine. These writers illuminated the major themes of literary and historical texts; provided the contexts in which they were written, published, and critiqued; and related them (often with pointed evaluations) to comparable works in that era and perhaps others as well. At their most modest level, these were simply reviews of books: at the most ambitious level, they included such masterworks of the 18th century as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.
In my view, and in the view of many critics, Edmund Wilson did this kind of text summary, analysis, and contextualization, better—more consistently better- -than any of his peers in the Anglo-American world. And it is the hundreds of reviews and essays that constitute the contents of most of his major collections of writings. A considerable proportion of each essay was descriptive and text-focused, as well as formidably knowledgeable about history, language, and the ambient cultural context; but in the end, Edmund Wilson did not mince words. He made judgments of value—in an almost ex cathedra fashion; and then he defended these judgments vigorously, and, in a good many ways, convincingly.
In the second blog in this series (click here), I mentioned the most ambitious and—to my mind—the most successful of his collections of essays. Two of them are, simply put, compendia of discrete essays that are well contextualized and loosely linked. Published in 1931, Axel’s Castle lays out the features that exemplify and connect the “symbolist” writings of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Paul Valery, and William Butler Yeats. Published in 1962, Patriotic Gore surveys the literary output of the Civil War era, including such historical figures as Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, literary giants Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Kate Chopin, eminent personages of the era like Frederic Law Olmsted and Oliver Wendell Holmes, along with a score of other intriguing (and less known) figures of the period.
I consider To the Finland Station to be the most ambitious of Edmund Wilson’s dozen collections—and it’s as well my personal favorite. This 1940 publication is a detailed probing of the ideas that—and the persons who—laid the groundwork for the ultimately successful Russian (Bolshevik) revolution at the end of the second decade of the 20th century. Not only does Wilson review the thinking, speaking, and writing of sundry historians, philosophers, sociologists, politicians, and activists. He also makes a persuasive case that their cumulative effect enabled the formation of political movements in the late 19th and early 20th century, and ultimately, paved the way for V.I Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg in April of 1917.
Still, whatever its originality and excellence, Wilson was not breaking expository ground in this book. The genre would have been well recognized by the authors of the books that aligned the shelves of the family library.
The one possible exception to this characterization of Edmund Wilson’s literary output is his 1941 collection The Wound and the Bow. At one level, this is yet another collection of biographical and literary material about an intriguing set of writers: Jacques Casanova (yes, that one) Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, Sophocles, and Edith Wharton. Surprisingly, it was published just a year after To the Finland Station, the historical study on which Wilson had (uncharacteristically) labored for at least a decade.
Arguably, The Wound and the Bow is the only of Wilson’s books that puts forth an empirical thesis, one that could in some way be tested. Playing off of the Greek legend of Philoctetes—an injured Greek warrior whose magic bow helped his fellow citizens win the Trojan War. Edmund Wilson suggests—and provides evidence for—an intriguing thesis: Psychological and/or physical injuries early in the lives of these individuals clearly take their toll. But at the same time, these injuries may lay the groundwork, provided the motivation, and—occasionally—even the themes for the subsequent literary output of these individuals. In the closing pages of his book, alluding to psychiatric and medical literature, Wilson puts forth “a more general and fundamental idea: the conception of superior strength as inseparable from disability.” And, importantly, for my undertaking in the succeeding blogs, it’s an argument that could be subjected to empirical testing.
As I’ve emphasized, describing Edmund Wilson’s life project is pretty straightforward. The life project of Ed Wilson is far broader, and, in my view, a good deal more controversial.
Like many budding scientists, Ed Wilson began with a passion for probing the world of physical entities—in his case, ants and, more broadly, insects. Indeed, his early success as a scholar was based on his detailed knowledge of the world of insects… mastery so impressive that by the time he reached the age of 30, major universities were competing for his talents.
Like many scientists, and earlier than most, Wilson both deepened and broadened his purview. Building on his detailed knowledge of the anatomy and the physiology of the ant world, he became a pioneering expert on how insects communicate with one another through chemicals called pheromones (so named to contrast with hormones). And then, he took an important step toward broader theorizing in the spirit of Charles Darwin; in collaboration with his mathematically talented colleague Robert MacArthur, Ed Wilson carried out seminal innovative studies. Through chemical intervention, entire islands were depopulated and then repopulated, in order to illuminate the composition and balance of plant and ant life under various ecological conditions.
So far, until his late 30s, Wilson’s career trajectory did not differ markedly from that of most other highly ambitious and highly successful peers in science. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, Wilson never activated the ‘stop button.’ First, he sought parallels in social organization and communication among other insects; then among other invertebrates; then across the spectrum of non-human animals; and then, most famously and most contentiously, extended to encompass homo sapiens.
In his famous—and (for many) notorious—book Sociobiology (1975), Ed Wilson argued that the behavior of humans--like that of the rest of the animal world-- could be explained entirely in terms of evolutionary pressures; and he laid out an ambitious plan for testing this contentious claim. With vehemence, his critics argued that this was a bridge too far—historical, cultural, and individual psychological factors render the sociobiological claims inappropriate and perhaps harmful.
Other scientists and science writers might have been cautioned by the widespread challenge to his sociobiology agenda—including public denunciation by some of his colleagues in science at Harvard. (Whether the critiques were entirely on scientific grounds or also had a political dimension is itself a controversial matter).
Ed Wilson remained undeterred—and perhaps even stimulated, aroused, prodded, prompted. As he once put it, “I am a congenital synthesizer” (Rhodes, p. 132). Extending beyond the largely “Social organization and social life” arguments of his early work, Wilson put forth the notion of “Consilience.” Borrowing a word and concept from the 19th century English scientist and philosopher William Whewell, Ed Wilson argued that the major challenge—and the major opportunity—for contemporary scholars was to bridge the entire gamut of learning. No more separate huts for physics, biology, psychology, the arts, the humanities. Progress and understanding lay in the confluence, the linking together (and some would say the absorption of) the softer areas of knowledge with the rigorous definitions, tests, arguments of “The Scientists.”
Ed Wilson did not mince words:
“There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as a broad and mostly unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entry from both sides.” (Consilience, p. 126)
And with equal strength, he described the importance of what he (leading a small group of daring warriors) sought to achieve:
“The answer is clear: Synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers—people who are able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make choices wisely.” (Consilience, p. 236)
And, quite provocatively for my endeavor, Edward O. Wilson even cites Edmund Wilson as a potential ally in this endeavor:
“I like to think that Edmund Wilson would have been favorable to the idea of consilience”. (Consilience, p. 216)
The gauntlet has indeed been thrown down. In the next blog, I retrieve it.
References
Rhodes, R. Scientist: E O Wilson: A Life in Nature. New York; Doubleday, 2021.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s 1,931.
Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1940.
Wilson Edmund, The Wound, and the Bow. Cambridge: 1941.
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the literature of the American Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962.
Wilson, E. O.: Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Wilson, E. O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: Knopf, 1998.
The Reach and the Limitations of Synthesis: A Personal View (4/6)
I begin with a summary and then move on to a stock-taking.
On any reasonable conceptualization, both Edmund Wilson and E. O. (Ed) Wilson can be considered master synthesizers. Edmund cast his vision across nations, languages, topics, artists, and writers, and sought to illuminate the nature of, and the relationships among individuals and works; he was a master of this humanistic form of synthesizing. Ed cast his vision across the gamut of animal species and the range of activities of living creatures; he sought both to encourage this kind of synthesizing and to provide a compelling model for how it could be achieved.
Edmund Wilson carried on a centuries-long tradition, as exemplified by the authors of the books that, as a youth, he had perused in his father’s library. Ed Wilson could also claim a lineage—dating back to the time of Aristotle and brought to a peak in the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Yet, the particular kind of scientifically enabled consilience that he explicitly embraced in the 1970s (and thereafter) was seen as quite innovative, perhaps overly ambitious, and premature, and, in the view of his sternest critics (which included fellow Harvard professors in the biological sciences) fundamentally misguided.
In launching this set of blogs (click here), I cited C. P. Snow’s famous lecture “The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution.” Ed Wilson had no hesitation in invoking this source and portraying himself (and his close colleagues) as foot soldiers (one could even quip an ‘army of ants’) in this needed and bold endeavor.
One might wonder what Edmund Wilson thought of C. P. Snow clarion call.
In an interview (where he assumed roles of both interviewer and interviewee) Edmund Wilson pondered the notoriously bitter exchange between the scientist-novelist C. P. Snow, and F. R. Leavis, the leading defender of the autonomy of literary culture. Leavis had challenged Snow’s credentials as either a top-flight scientist or a credible novelist; and then, having dismissed Snow, Leavis had foregrounded the importance and irreplaceability of distinctly human qualities such as love, courage, passion as conveyed most stirringly in the literary arts. (British novelist D.H. Lawrence was his particular favorite).
Edmund Wilson reflected:
“Well, I believe I’m rather on Snow’s side. I don’t actually know much about Leavis…He’s the kind of dogmatic person who inevitably antagonizes me…I think that Leavis has one real point—one that I had raised in my own mind: that Snow seems to take it for granted that technical education and technical advances are desirable in themselves. This naturally gets Leavis’ back up, because his interest in literature is passionate and moral—almost, I suppose, religious. For Leavis, Snow I suppose, is committing the sin against the Holy Ghost.” (E. Wilson, 1965, p.535-536)
Although Edmund Wilson had taken science courses in high school and college, he did not like them—he casually dismissed a required course in physics at Princeton. Nonetheless, he was conversant with the broad scientific movements of the preceding century; he could certainly discuss and draw on the broad concepts associated with Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. He was also an admirer of mathematician and philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead, the original Senior Fellow at Harvard, and cited his key ideas and ambitions comfortably. Indeed, in an only recently available essay on Whitehead’s writings, Wilson described him as “perhaps one of the great creative minds of our day” (Wilson, 1995, p.56).
Ed Wilson was an unabashed admirer of Whitehead’s—the first Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows—an experience which in my view had a decisive effect on Wilson’s intellectual development and breadth.
That said, I must assert my conclusion that essentially nothing in Edmund Wilson’s writings depended directly on the scientific findings of the recent centuries: by and large, his collected works could easily and comfortably sit aside the collections contained in his father’s library. And while he might well have given a positive nod to Ed Wilson’s highly ambitious endeavors, the details would not likely have interested him. And it’s equally possible that he would simply have dismissed ‘consilience’ as anachronistic or wrong-headed.
My previous sentence encapsulates the enigma around E. O. Wilson’s consilience…. and, more broadly, the half dozen more general books that—after the bombshell publication of Sociobiology—he penned in the last decades of his long and productive literary life.
It would take a convinced lover-of-literature-and- skeptic-about science—like F.R Leavis--- to dismiss summarily the program of thinking and research proposed by Ed Wilson. But having reviewed his writings in some detail, I discern at least three kinds of positions that Ed Wilson (and his admirers) might take:
l. The converser
All of us who are interested in thought, scholarship, learning should read and observe widely, learn how others think, and draw on diverse forms of knowledge as appropriate.
And so, if ideas about relativity or evolution or black holes from science (or ideas and practices from the literary realm—say, post-modernism, deconstructionism, close text analysis, or probing of metaphoric language) prove useful to those working in other areas-- feel free to invoke them.
2. The Connector
We should be on the lookout for gritty ideas, concepts, findings across the range of disciplines and show explicitly how they may connect to and illuminate one another..
And so, if information about how species evolve over the millennia prove relevant to how a literary genre changes over time, or how a character develops in the course of a novel, can illuminate our understanding of literature or film—adopt it, make use of it. Or, alternatively, if the way an opera is created and staged can illuminate how species (or particles) over time populate an unpopulated area, biologists (or astronomers) should take note and put it to work.
One more example: Let me cycle back to the hypothesis undergirding Edmund Wilson’s The Wound the Bow. A psychologist or geneticist interested in the possible relation between some kind of pathology in early life and a subsequent form of creativity, could subject that claim to a test. As a psychologist with interest in this hypothesis, I can state that such a study would be difficult to mount successfully; and in the end, Ed Wilson’s methods would be unlikely to add much to Edmund Wilson’s speculation—but I could be wrong!
I pursue this challenge in the final blogs in this series
3. The Conqueror
Science works for bottom up. First, we understand subatomic particles, then atoms and genes, then the earth and the cosmos, then the variety of plant and animal species, then the early times and lineages of homo sapiens, then current and future forms of the species. The answers invariably come from science. Eventually the full expanse of art, literature, music, dance, and criticism will be illuminated by the powerful ideas and demonstrations of science, as practiced now and in the future by trained scientists with “a synthesizing frame of mind.”
In this formulation, science is the driver of understanding—the arts and humanities have the option of going along for the ride, or, less happily, ignoring the science and, accordingly, being left alone and bereft of understanding.
As a careful student of the Bible throughout his life, (and, as well, a reader of Shakespeare) Ed Wilson was quite aware that the ‘the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” And as a reader of Ed Wilson, I can confirm that he can be read as the moderate and reasonable converser or connector, as well as the aggressive conqueror. By the same token, his admirers and critics can be aligned along these dimensions.
In an appendix to this blog, drawing on Wilson’s writings, I cite examples of each of these three stances.
My own view
For reasons of education, enjoyment, and enlightenment, I endorse the mild and moderate versions of consilience. Indeed, as a researcher in psychology and neurology who originally focused on the arts (when that was a lonely pursuit in the academy), I believe that scientific studies of the arts can be illuminating. By the same token, great works of art can be enabled or enlightened by scientific findings—even when they are only partially understood or (even productively) misunderstood. (Note my allusion above to The Wound and the Bow.)
Yet I am skeptical that deep insights into the arts and humanities are likely to be obtained by mastery of science—even the whole gamut of science, from particle physics to astrophysics. (Few would argue the reverse: that insights into humanistic thought would yield significant scientific knowledge. It’s simply—and clearly—a bridge too far.)
To expand on this idea, I need to put forth my own perspective on the endeavor in which Edmund Wilson—and legions of literary critics, writers, historians—have been engaged since classical times and which reached impressive heights once publication (and posting) became possible.
Put sharply but succinctly: we are concerned here with how human beings assimilate, think about, react to, and convey to others their reactions to creations and achievements by other members of our species. Of course, these creations can be mathematical or scientific ones – such as those discussed and exemplified in the essays of Alfred North Whitehead (admired by both Wilsons). But in the main, the bulk of writings and musings in the Samuel Johnson-Edmund Wilson tradition (and today, we should gladly add the critical writings of Hilton Als, James Baldwin, Mary Beard, Henry Louis Gates, Elizabeth Hardwick, among many others) are about plays, novels, poems, paintings, dances, improvisations. What we glean from these critical entries, efforts, essays are how one human being (or, rarely, a duo, as with the early English essayists Joseph Addison and Richard) Steele) thinks about and reacts to what another human being (or, rarely, a duo, like the English duo W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan) has accomplished; how that accomplishment came about; how the sympathetic or critical humanist has reacted to this creation, and what effects it might have on other members of the species.
On occasion, a scientific concept or finding may prove helpful. But in general, dragging in—or enticing—something from science to illuminate something from the humanities is a bridge too far, possibly misleading, more likely irrelevant.
That said, I am all in favor of an education that cuts across the range of scholarly, disciplinary, and expressive pursuits—it’s called an education in the liberal arts and sciences. In the final entry to the blog, I put forth some ideas about how such an education might be fashioned—at a time when the sciences are in the ascendancy and the arts and humanities find themselves embattled, beleaguered, or worse—completely ignored.
Reference
Edmund Wilson on C. P. Snow. The Bit Between My Teeth. London: W. H. Allen, 1965.
Edmund Wilson on Whitehead. “A.N. Whitehead: Physicist and Prophet” in From The Uncollected Edmund Wilson, Ohio University Press, 1995, pp. 56-72
Appendix to Blog #4
I’ve grouped quotations from E. O. Wilson’s writings—my personal criteria and judgments are reflected in the three headers:
Reasonable
“Science and the humanities, it is true, are fundamentally different from each other in what they say and do. But they are complementary to each other in origin, and they arise from the same processes in the human brain. If the heuristic and analytic powers of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.” The Meaning of Human Experience, 185.
Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relationship between science and the humanities, and how it is important for human welfare. Consilience, 12.
The common property of science and the arts is the transmission of information and in one sense the respective modes of transmission in science and art can be logically equivalent. Consilience, 117.
There is only one way to unite the great branches of learning and end the culture wars. It is to view the boundary between the scientific and literary cultures not as a territorial line but as broad and most unexplored terrain awaiting cooperative entries from both sides. Consilience, 117.
Toward the Grandiose and Hegemonic
“It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis” Rhodes, 145.
“The humanities address in fine detail all the ways human beings relate to one another and to the environment. The self-contained world view of the humanities describes the human condition… the scientific view of vastly larger. It encompasses the meaning of human existence, where the species fits in the universe and why it exists in the first place” Rhodes, 174.
“This task of understanding humanity is too important and too daunting to leave exclusively to the humanities… they have not explained why we possess our special nature and not some others” The Meaning of Human Experience, 17.
“The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkages of the sciences and the humanities. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences. Consilience is the key to unification…the only way to establish or to refute consilience is by methods developed in the natural sciences” Consilience, 8-9.
“(Goethe) failed in his synthesis through lack of what is today called the scientist’s instincts” Consilience, 36.
Grandiose
“A species is not like a molecule…the terminus of a lineage that split off thousands or even millions of years ago… richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Bach fugue, or any other greater work of art” Rhodes, 191.
“Science and technology reveal with increasing precision the place of humanity, here on earth and beyond the cosmos as a whole. the humanities by themselves cannot explain why we are a very special species” Meaning of Human Experience, 43.
“Let us now consider man in the free spirit of natural history, as though we were zoologists from another planet completing a catalog of social species on earth. In this macroscopic view the humanities and social sciences shrink to specialized branches of biology; history, biography, and fiction are the research protocols of human ethology; and anthropology and sociology constitute the sociobiology of a single primate species” Naturalist, beginning of final chapter.
“Consilience is the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts” Consilience, 12.
“I will now attempt to trace a magicians’ dream all the way down to an atom” Consilience, 75.
“Even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic results that guided them.” Consilience, 213.
“What is human nature? It is the epigenetic rules, the hereditaries of mental development that bias cultural evolution in one direction as opposed to another and connect the genes to culture.” Consilience, 143.
Grandiose and Possibly Misleading
“Social science does not have a web of causal explanation starting with mind and brain—instead it is hermeneutic, the close analysis and interpretation of texts…it includes little effort to explain phenomena by webs of causation across adjacent levels of organization” Consilience, 190.
References:
For complete references, please see the preceding blogs
The Limits of Synthesis (5/6)
An Education in the Spirit of Synthesizing
Background
When a scholar in early middle age, I learned about a new course being offered to students at Harvard College. Sporting the provocative title “Thinking about Thinking,” the course featured weekly discussions among three outstanding scholars: philosopher Robert Nozick, evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, and constitutional law professor Alan Dershowitz. Each week the scholars probed a topic—for example, justice, causality, free will—from the perspectives of their scholarly backgrounds; and then they engaged in free-wheeling discussions. Though twice the age of most of the class, I eagerly audited the course. And I came to appreciate that each of these scholars was himself an excellent synthesizer—and that the several hundred students were accordingly challenged to arrive at their own syntheses, across topics, disciplines, and sentiments.
At the time, I had already come to realize that most of the rewards in the contemporary academy are bestowed on individuals who are specialists—scholars who have done the most important work in a defined area in a defined discipline and published widely in the most respected journals (Except for certain humanistic disciplines, books are largely to be avoided….at least, until after the awarding of tenure). I did not fit comfortably into the groups that achieved early recognition for their targeted scholarship. And so, I was especially appreciative when scholars acknowledged in their respective disciplines were willing to speculate more broadly and more publicly and attempt—as seemed appropriate—to arrive at broader syntheses.
Initially, this set of blogs was stimulated by my chance realization that two men whom I admired were both named Wilson—E.O. (hereafter Ed) and Edmund (Bunny to his friends). Both men were excellent synthesizers. Ed frequently used the phrase, Edmund rarely so; but each had the capacity to survey vast bodies of knowledge and connect them in ways that many of us found illuminating.
I am left to wrestle with two sets of questions:
Are all syntheses worth undertaking, fruitful, valid? Or are some off-key, misleading, or invalid?
What implications might follow for higher education? These are my foci in the final pair of blogs.
Life is finite, and the lives of gifted synthesizers are no exception to the ticking clock. There are opportunities to synthesize from early life, and some show synthesizing talents in youth; that said, in general the impetus for—and the opportunities to—synthesize expand over the course of an active life. And so, as a generalization, one finds the broadest works—whether by scientists, historians, or ‘generalists’—emerging in the later decades of life. Some might quip that these individuals have lost the knack for careful analytic work and so slide down the slope to synthesis; others might retort that these individuals have accumulated the wisdom necessary for powerful and apt syntheses.
Edmund Wilson was destined to be a synthesizer. While he sought to write imaginative literature, and indeed made multiple efforts across several genres, he lacked the literary genius; something in his psyche, his experiences prevented him from creating ‘from scratch’ works of imaginative power. (Perhaps it could be linked to the aloofness of his father, the deafness of his mother, his inability to interact with peers on an equal plane, his overly privileged background—we could speculate endlessly.) His gift—his ‘bow’—lay in discerning the broad contexts and contributions of individual works and artists and then illuminating them for the rest of us—describing, analyzing, judging ‘at critic’s a distance.’
Ed Wilson’s wounds were far more evident. He came from an impoverished family, his parents divorced when he was young, he attended over a dozen schools in his youth, his father died by suicide. Moreover, his limited eyesight and hearing pushed him toward an exploration of small organisms that he could easily handle and probe. It was evident from early on that he would become some kind of a scientist or naturalist. Yet, on his own analysis, he lacked the mathematical skills and the bold analytic moves that characterized scientists of genius. (Naturalist) Instead, in his own words, he moved increasingly toward syntheses, and over time, to ever more grand/grandiose syntheses (Wilson, 2006).
But ambition does not necessarily equate with success. Drawing on the distinctions introduced in the previous blog, Ed Wilson succeeded as a converser and a connector (and I would say the same about his namesake). But when he sought to be a conqueror, he revealed his own ambivalence; note his varying statements on the scope and ambition of the enterprise. See the appendix to Blog #4.)
Of course, one cannot fail at conquering unless one tries. And for this attempt we cannot and certainly should not dismiss Wilson. On the contrary, respectful attention is merited. But one needs as well to have criteria for success, and for lack of success. And here where I discern tangles in Ed Wilson’s bow.
On my analysis, one cannot claim to have ‘conciled’ or ‘reconciled’ the sciences and the humanities without a clear and convincing notion of each enterprise. Briefly sketched, let me present my notions of the respective enterprises—the ‘two cultures’ of C. P. Snow, if you will.
The sciences represent efforts to arrive at truth. One identifies a phenomenon, tries to understand it, and then, crucially, seeks to test one’s efforts at understanding. One can be proved right—in which case, one has added a brick to the edifice of science; one can be proved wrong—in which case, one possible truth has been eliminated; or, as is almost always the case, one learns something from the test and henceforth is able to think about the phenomenon-in-question in a more refined, and possibly more differentiated way. The great triumph of the Enlightenment of the 18th century—as opposed to that achieved by the brilliant minds of Athens in the fourth century before the Common Era—is to have created a way to construct a scientific enterprise and to make connections across them—as exemplified by the genius of Ed Wilson.
The humanities are efforts to deepen our understanding of works fashioned by human beings—particularly creative works in language, visual arts, music, architecture, dance and other media of expression and communication. Assertions about the arts are not subject to test and verification in the same way as are assertions about the physical and biological worlds. One cannot test Mozart or Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf—one can only add to our understanding and appreciation of their respective enterprises.
What makes this discussion interesting, and informative, is that there are intermediate cases. And here, Edmund Wilson’s invocation of Philoctetes’s “Wound and the Bow” provides a provocative case.
Without attempting or purporting to be a scientist, Edmund Wilson makes an intriguing claim: that one possible reward of a wound in early life—of one sort of another—is that it causes pain but may also stimulate great creations—of the sort we associate with Sophocles (who originally wrote about Philoctetes), Charles Dickens, and other creative artists.
In principle, this assertion could be tested. And in fact, a number of neurological, psychiatric, and psychological experts have probed the putative associations of wounds—physical, psychological, financial, whatever—with consequent or subsequent creative output. And in the writings of such analysts as Nancy Andreasen, Kay Jamison, Dean Keith Simonton, we can find evidence for a modest relation between wounds—most famously, manic-depressive disorders—and the quantity and quality of artistic productions. In recent times, the American poet Robert Lowell is perhaps the best-known example of this conjunction of disease and generativity.
So far, a point for Ed Wilson: an assertation about creativity can be tested empirically, and modest evidence in support of it can be accumulated.
And yet, how much have we actually learned, and of what significance is it? Millions more individuals have wounds than there are individuals those who produce works of lasting significance. Moreover, if we look hard enough, any of us can find wounds in our own background and can cite those as the causes of why we are creative—or, less happily, why we are not. The mere statement of a possible connection between wound and bow may be of interest—but it is momentary, fleeting.
We can learn something by a deeper examination of individual cases—even the cases of the two Wilsons. (Consider, for example, Ed Wilson’s injury to his eyesight in childhood and his focus on tiny creatures). We can seek to ascertain whether the kinds of facilitating and wounding experiences that they apparently underwent early in life had discernible effects on what they did later, how they did it, how it was apprehended by others, in their own time and in the future.
And this is clearly a project for humanistic scholarship—whether it be historical, biographical, literary, or philosophical—and not for testing in the laboratory or via powerful tools of magnification or minification.
Caution: I want to be careful here not to invalidate Ed Wilson’s claim in advance. It is possible that he could come up with scientific findings that genuinely illuminate the province of the arts in ways that the Edmund Wilsons or the F.R. Leavis’ (or the Edward Gibbons or the Mary Beards) could not. And if so, that would be a point for the Conquering Concept of Consilience.
Accordingly, while I am skeptical that consilience in the strong sense is what is needed in the work of scholars and artists, it is certainly a welcome addition to the arsenal of educators. I turn to this possibility in my final blog.
References
Andreasen, Nancy. The creating brain: The neuroscience of Genius. New York: Dana Press, 2005.
Jamison, Kay Redfield. An unquiet mind: A memoir of moods and madness. New York: Knopf 1995.
Jamison, Kayfield. Robert Lowell: Setting the river on fire. New York: Knopf 2017.
Simonton, Dean Keith. Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Wilson, E. O. Naturalist. Washington D.C.: Island Press, 2006
Higher Education: Curricula in the Wilsonian Tradition (6/6)
In 1945, as the Second World War was drawing to a close, Harvard University issued a book that was destined to become influential in both secondary and college education. With the provocative and promissory title “General Education in a Free Society” the Red Book (as it came to be called), made the case for a broad education in the liberal arts (and sciences).
Honoring a distinction that was becoming standard in the educational world, the Red Book labelled and described three areas of knowledge: Humanities, Social Studies, and Science and Mathematics. The sciences were seen as efforts at description, analysis, testing, and explanation, particularly in the areas of physics, chemistry and biology; the humanities (studies in philosophy, history, language, art and music) were characterized as efforts to appraise, judge, and critique—essential components of evaluation. And the social studies—then (and now, I would add with a tad of skepticism) as efforts to apply the approach and the methods of the sciences to human beings and their affairs. Social studies included anthropology, economics, government, psychology and sociology—fields that I myself studied at Harvard some years later.
Of course, this was just a list of departments and courses. How these fields of study were approached, joined, or made distinctive remained to be determined. One could, for example, have survey courses; courses that looked in depth at one or two topics; that featured a single instructor or a team, working together or seriatim; that focused more on content (name the Chinese imperial dynasties…in order); or on approaches (how would you investigate a historical period or figure…); on history, methods, or trends, and so on. And indeed, one could write a history of curricula (and of the notorious ‘curricular wars’) that would reflect the more general history of institutions of higher education in America. In all likelihood, one generalization likely to emerge is that (needed or not) faculty feel the need to re-do the curriculum of their institution at least once per generation.
Our own study of higher education (click here) documents that much of this ‘curricular talk’ is invisible to most students, and, indeed, to most constituencies, except for faculty. And perhaps that’s fine for some purposes. But in a series of blogs on synthesis (on which the Wilson duo have been center-stage for five installments), it seems apt to comment briefly on the place of synthesis in higher education.
One promising way to approach synthesis is to feature experts who can illustrate bodies of knowledge and methods that address issues in one or way another. This was the tack taken in the aforementioned course on “Thinking about Thinking” where expert scholars from three distinct disciplines tackled broad topics—like ‘justice’ or ‘evidence’—from a variety of scholarly perspectives. (Click here to see the introduction to blog five.)
Another promising way is to sculpt courses that look explicitly at the approaches to scholarship, learning, understanding favored in different disciplines—that’s the idea underlying the course on “Theories of Knowledge” (TOK) that has long been featured in the secondary school International Baccalaureate (IB) Curriculum; it’s is also used in other secondary school networks, such as the United World Colleges.
To this conventional list, I propose to add three approaches that are particularly congruent with the development of synthesizing skills:
1. Begin the college experience with an introduction to tools that can be used across the disciplinary terrain. I have recommended that, at the onset of college, all students are introduced to two fields of study: 1) philosophy (what are ‘big questions’ that human beings have pondered over the millennia?) and 2) semiotics (what are the ways in which human beings have thought and discoursed about these big questions—through a study of various signs and means of recording and communicating?)
Not only would all students be able to draw on these tools throughout the college experience; but their instructors would presumably remain cognizant of this ‘intellectual toolkit’ and would draw on itas appropriate across the curriculum. Perhaps, indeed, in this vision, the president or provost of the college would preside over a cumulative course in the senior year—as allegedly happened in the 19th century. (Click here to read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
2. Present a course on what synthesis is, how it plays out in different areas of life and different disciplines, and how it can be enhanced. In a sense, the few dozen blogs on this site could serve as a prolegomenon to such a course.
Of course, nothing would be drier and more off-putting than a course that simply mouths the virtues (and the perils) of synthesizing. Instead, students would learn to critique various syntheses, to improve them, and to undertake them in areas where they have a curiosity, want to learn more, are ready to share what they’ve learned—much as I have sought to do in these blogs about the Wilson duo.
3. Present a series of puzzles and see how various efforts at synthesize illuminate—or fail to illuminate –each puzzle. With slight malice aforethought, I have here introduced such a puzzle: Is extraordinary talent and accomplishment more likely to occur if creator(s) of extraordinary achievement have earlier in life suffered some kind of profound wound, injury, loss, or injustice—the question raised by Edmund Wilson’s parable of “the Wound and the Bow.”
Presumably students would have some interest in this puzzle—either based on their own lives or on the lives of individuals whom they value or whose accomplishments they treasure (or, more rarely, on figures whom they loathe). And in tackling this puzzle, they could be exposed to the kinds of syntheses that were carried out, respectively, by E. O. Wilson and Edmund Wilson, as well as by others relevant to this task, such as the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (on Leonardo da Vinci) or the historian Thomas Carlyle (on Napoleon), not to mention the literary creations of William Shakespeare—among them, the notorious Richard III.
I’d be delighted if my grandchildren, and their peers, could take such a course.
To sum up: In this series of Wilsonian blogs, I’ve covered a lot of ground—more, admittedly, than I had initially anticipated. I began by signaling my admiration for two masterful synthesizers: (1) the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who—inspired by his childhood reading—synthesized the work of others as a matter of course; and (2) the biologist E.O. Wilson, who long had a penchant for synthesizing, and who soon ventured beyond the world of his beloved ants, to all of the natural world, to the intellectual, scientific and artistic accomplishments of his fellow human beings.
While admiring the ambit of both Wilsons, I sought to delineate the distinction between Edmund, whose syntheses followed a long-established pattern among Western humanists; and E. O. Wilson, whose synthesizing ambitions grew over the course of time to envelop the full range of existing and future knowledge. And while praising the conversational and cooperative facets of such synthesizing, I challenged the concept of modern science as the site and the conqueror of all knowledge.
It is possible, of course, that E. O. Wilson is more correct than I had anticipated. Perhaps many of the themes reflected upon by Edmund Wilson (and his numerous peers across the ages) could be significantly illuminated by the tools and methods of contemporary (and future) science—including the tools of artificial intelligence. Perhaps there will be no issues left in limbo with respect to Richard III (the historical or the Shakespearean version) or the murals on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. That’s the reason for undertaking the sort of empirical investigations that might—or that might not—provide deeper insight into the relation between the wound and the bow.
To conclude: there’s little question that synthesizing is an important human capacity; indeed. that it is likely to remain important—and perhaps even more important—in the period ahead. Here, E. O. Wilson was right! Some individuals can become deft synthesizers, without any formal training; and others, no matter how keen their analytic powers, are unlikely to produce syntheses of interest and power. But for the rest, beginning no later than the first year in college, and perhaps much earlier, a formal introduction to the methods and powers of synthesizing seems a worthwhile—and perhaps overdue—investment.