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 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 (link 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 about Edmund Wilson’s stance on 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
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 collected 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 has a decisive effect on Wilson’s intellectual development and breadth.
That said, I must state my conclusion that 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 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 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 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. And by the same token, his admirers and critics can be aligned along these dimensions.
In an appendix at the end of 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 highly 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.
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 at 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 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.
References
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 The Uncollected Edmund Wilson, Ohio University Press, 1995, pp. 56-72.
Appendix
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 describe 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 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