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. With 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—justice, causality, free will—from the perspectives of their scholarly background and then 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 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 (Books are largely to be avoided…. 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 own discipline 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.
There remain 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 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 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.
I maintain that Edmund Wilson was destined to be a synthesizer. While he sought to write imaginative literature, and made multiple efforts across the 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 was 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 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 eye-sight 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 conquerer, he revealed his own ambivalence by his varying statements on the enterprise across time and sources. (Click here for the appendix to Blog #4.)
Of course, one cannot fail at conquering unless one tries. And for this attempt we cannot and should not dismiss Wilson. But one needs as well to have criteria for success, and for lack of success. And here where I discern a wound 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 are 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 one 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—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, and other elements and media. 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 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 promising case.
Without attempting or purporting to be a scientist, in this work Edmund Wilson claims that one possible reward of a wound in earl 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 how significant is it? Millions more individuals have wounds than those who produce works of any 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. 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 which 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.