Yes, the origin of ethics would then be within our objective grasp. But such questions about historical beginnings lie in the realm of potential empirics by their very formulation. That is, they reside, in my terminology, within the anthropology of morals, not the morality of morals. Moreover, as stated above, a correct empirical understanding of origins can’t reveal the nature of current utility in any case, even if our study were confined entirely within the empirical realm. In other words, I agree with Wilson on the evolutionary origin of ethics, but this issue sits on an irrelevant periphery of the great moral debates in the history of scholarship and human life—non-empirical questions about the meaning of existence and the definition of goodness that science can help us to illuminate and usefully constrain, but that must also, and primarily, be addressed within the logics and methods of the magisterium of the humanities.
WHEWELL’S CONCEPT OF DISCIPLINES, AND A BRIEF ON THE CONSILIENCE OF EQUAL REGARD FOR INTRINSIC BUT COMPLEMENTARY DIFFERENCES
In writing his book on the proper relationship between science and the humanities, Wilson brilliantly chose as his title a single word, alluring through the mystery of its unfamiliarity yet sufficiently comforting in an evident intention implicit in the pleasing aural ring, aided by some etymological hints apparent to most of us in segments of the full term: consilience. As explained in the preceding section, Wilson resurrected Whewell’s term to express the nub of his proposal for full unification by extending the familiar reductionistic model of the physical sciences “all the way up”: breaking through a neurological barrier, into the complexities of social structure and finally into the center of the humanities in arts, ethics, and even religion. This form of unification by reduction joins the humanities to the sciences by granting them topmost positions as empirical studies of maximally complex and various systems, but then asking them, as it were, to “trade” the virtues of the penthouse for what many people and institutions have long and fiercely regarded as the most inalienable of respectful attributes: independence. For, to gain the geometric summit, the humanities must submit their distinctive phenomenologies to explanation by reduction to scientific principles regulating the component parts of their maximal complexity.
Wilson designates this process of unification by successive subsumption into more-tractable principles of “lower” sciences with Whewell’s long-lost term consilience, or the “jumping together” of disparate facts through their coordinated explanation by simpler and more-abstract laws of correct scientific theories. As discussed previously, reductionism and consilience are not synonymous terms, but Whewell did select classically successful cases of reduction (to the general theory of a “lower” science) as his defining examples of consilience, and he did emphasize his hope and expectation that the “messy” phenomenology of the most complex natural systems would eventually be simplified by consilience under fewer, simpler, and more general laws of the basic physical and natural sciences.
But did Whewell share Wilson’s most controversial claim and sine qua non of his program for the unification of knowledge: the extension of basically empirical, or scientific, forms of explanation beyond the complex systems that all scholars situate within the domain of science into realms of the humanities as traditionally defined? For the forms of inquiry and the character of defining questions in the humanities would seem to debar explanation in empirical terms—a kind of resolution, moreover, that seems precluded by basic logic, not merely unavailable at present because we lack data that, when discovered, might reduce the cares of the humanities into modes of explanation in the sciences? In fact, and with explicit force in all his major writings, Whewell declared the impossibility of such hegemony for the sciences and their empirical methods.
When one understands Whewell’s basic intellectual autobiography, and the general beliefs of his time (particularly of conservative Oxbridge divines like Whewell), one can hardly imagine how a scholar of his import and position could have condoned the extension of his own verbal invention to cover a form of putative unification utterly foreign, indeed dangerous, to his central concept of the nature of the universe, and to his religious beliefs as an ordained Anglican priest with traditional theological commitments. (As I’ve said, Wilson certainly holds the right to extend Whewell’s term into an area not only beyond the intentions of the inventor, but directly contrary to his central view about the nature of knowledge. After all, hardly anyone has used the word at all for more than a century, so any conceivable statute of limitations expired long ago!) Still, the irony of this overturning by apparent extension should be recorded and examined—particularly for my narrower purposes (as I must admit), because Whewell’s actual concept of consilience, and of the relationship between science and the humanities, closely matches the position advocated in this book.18
Latin proverbs about caution extend well beyond dogs (cave canem) to certain kinds of people: cave ab homine unius libri—beware the man of only one book. One may read this warning in two quite different ways, each keenly appropriate in a distinct manner. One should beware the man who can only write one volume because he never had more than one idea. (The hedgehog, at least, developed a terrific concept for his one great thing; the man of one book usually tries to subsume the entire universe into his cranky and idiosyncratic obsession.) But the other meaning cites the perils of scholarship or posthumous renown, not the limitation of authors. Sometimes we remember a person only for one book, or one achievement, and then, falsely equating the surviving icon with the totality of the actual person, miss the larger and different measure of the man. Goethe was a pretty fair biologist and geologist, and Mickey Mantle was the greatest drag bunter (and fastest runner) in baseball.
Whewell frequently falls into this second category of our misreading because his reputation now rests largely upon his great work—albeit two books rather than one, and each of several volumes—in the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences. So we view him as the first modernist with joint command of both history and philosophy in the analysis of science. And since his scientific analyses of modes in reasoning, and progress in accomplishment, were so masterful and unprecedented, Whewell descends to us only in this role of his enduring academic success. But the man fried many other fish in his lifetime, some quite skillfully (although I don’t intend to push his versatility to the literal and ludicrous image evoked by my last sentence—a picture of a robed Oxbridge don sweating behind the counter at the local fish-and-chips shop, the quintessential place for an Englishman, now usually a Greek or Pakistani, of different social class and accomplishment).
In particular, although Whewell did not serve as an active parish minister, he was an ordained Anglican clergyman, and he took these commitments seriously, writing several books on religious subjects, beyond the one (or two) of modern memory. This simple statement, all by itself and with nothing added in specific analysis, virtually guarantees that Whewell (unless he expunged some radically dissenting religious views from all his conversations, letters, and writings) could not have advocated the extension of his term consilience into the humanities (and particularly into ethics and religion) as a description of their forthcoming union by reduction into the natural sciences. Whewell was a masterful analyst of science. But he never imagined, as he invented and explicated such lovely terms as “colligation of facts” and “consilience of inductions,” that he had formulated a universal basis for the logic and explanation of all human intellectual endeavors, particularly ethics and religion, the different subject of his other day job. If anything, Whewell stated clearly, again and again, that he had carefully analyzed the ways of science largely to show why this enterprise had been so stunningly successful in its own domain of factual nature, and why such an apparatus of explanation could not, in principle, regulate the defining subjects of different logical standing in other magisteria.
In the most notable popular example, Whewell authored, in 1833, the first volume of the famous Bridgewater Treatises, a set of (eventually) eight
books “on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation.” This authorial bonanza and last gasp for conventional British natural theology originated in a large legacy in the last will and testament of the Right Honorable and Reverend Francis Henry, Earl of Bridgewater, who died in February 1829. And how could any of the eminent people invited to compose these volumes possibly refuse, for the bequest underwrote the printing of 1,000 copies for each book and directed that any profits he paid directly to the authors—a wonderfully effective mixture of Christ and Mammon. The authors, including England’s most devout geologist, the Reverend William Buckland, and Mr. Roget of thesaurus fame, did their work quickly and, for the most part, as derivative boilerplate in support of an approach to the natural world that had truly enjoyed its powerful day, but had declined rapidly in public approbation—the so-called “argument from design,” or the claim that God’s nature and attributes may be inferred from the material character of the cosmos. Most of the volumes did not meet with conspicuous critical success, both because the authors could raise little personal enthusiasm for repeating old concepts expressed so many times before, and because the ideas themselves seemed so dated to many intellectuals, including most theologians. (Darwin and members of his circle generally referred to the series, at least in private letters, as the “Bilgewater Treatises.”)
Whewell’s contribution, published in 1833 as Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, should, one might suppose at first consideration, support Wilson’s notion of consilience. After all, if a noted Anglican priest and prominent scholar in the history and philosophy of science chose to participate in a project dedicated to demonstrating the existence and attributes of God from the products of the material world, then mustn’t he accept the central premise of consilience in Wilson’s extended form—that is, the direct validation of key subjects in the “highest” nonscientific realm (including the very existence of God) by reduction to the scientific study of nature?
But Whewell takes precisely the opposite course, arguing that whereas God’s works (the material cosmos, fully subject to scientific analysis and understanding) cannot conflict with God’s words (as revealed in scripture or made known in some other manner), the methods of inquiry and the criteria of explanation differ so profoundly between the two enterprises that meaningful union cannot be achieved by subsuming one domain under the other. Rather, we utilize the two domains to our maximal benefit when we recognize the different light that each can shine upon a common quest for deeper understanding of our lives and surroundings in all their complexity and variety. Whewell felt that he had developed such a long, subtle, and complex analysis of scientific methods and procedures, including his naming and explication of such principles as consilience of inductions, not only to codify and explain the extraordinary efficacy of this conceptual apparatus, but also to demonstrate why these procedures could only work for empirical questions in the factual realm of science and the material world, and could not, in principle, regulate scholarly inquiry in the domain of his other day job as minister, and throughout the grand panoply of subjects rooted in ethical or aesthetic issues, and situated in the humanities.
Whewell summarizes this general argument against consilience (in Wilson’s extension) beyond the empirical realm of science in the discussion of morality in his Bridgewater Treatise. He begins by stating that moral rules can neither flow from nor contradict the mechanics of empirical nature because ethical discourse rests upon another foundation altogether, with validation achieved by different criteria. Whewell would have equated the distinct foundation of moral rules with a fairly conventional form of Christian testimony; I, along with a majority of Western intellectuals in our times, would seek another source, but would fully embrace Whewell’s general point that the basis of morality cannot be established by scientific study of how different ethical standards operate in the empirical world of human cultures. (To grasp Whewell’s point in the following quotation, one must also recognize that he uses the term science in the old sense of “any legitimate form or body of knowledge,” from the literal Latin scientia, and not in the restricted modern meaning of factual inquiry about material nature):The world of reason and of morality is a part of the same creation, as the world of matter and of sense. The will of man is swayed by rational motives; its workings are inevitably compared with a rule of action; he has a conscience which speaks of right and wrong. These are laws of man’s nature no less than the laws of his material existence, or his animal impulses. Yet what entirely new conceptions do they involve? How incapable of being resolved into, or assimilated to, the results of mere matter, or mere sense! Moral good and evil, merit and demerit, virtue and depravity, if ever they are the subjects of strict science, must belong to a science which views these things, not with reference to time or space, or mechanical causation, not with reference to fluid or ether, nervous irritability or corporeal feeling, but to their own proper modes of conception; with reference to the relations with which it is possible that these notions may be connected, and not to relations suggested by other subjects of a completely extraneous and heterogeneous nature. . . . There can be no wider interval in philosophy than the separation which must exist between the laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws of free moral action.
Lest one suspect that Whewell took a less nuanced or more extreme position in his popular writing for the Bridgewater Treatise than in his technical monographs on inductive science in 1837 and 1840, his insistence on strict separation between scientific and non-empirical (in this case, religious) forms of knowledge and modes of validation achieves special force and clarity at the very end of the last volume of his 1837 treatise on History of the Inductive Sciences, where he treats the emerging study of geology. (Whewell also insists that he has stressed this argument of separation for the benefit of both disciplines, an especially important task when the two magisteria reach the same basic conclusion on a particular matter by following their different routes.) Whewell reserves his strongest statements on the irreducibly different character of science and other sources of knowledge for this closing discussion because the profession of geology, then so young, had been enjoying enormous success, in no small part because its leading practitioners (including such divines as Whewell himself) had abjured an earlier speculative tradition that often blurred the boundaries by seeking explicit theological support for geological assertions (see my discussion of a particular late-seventeenth-century case on pages 77–78).
In no other field of science did the temptation appear so strong, and the tradition remain so well established, to jumble together the immiscible observations of an empirical geological record with the supposedly providential proclamations of scripture. Even if those two sources yielded similar conclusions about the history of the earth, Whewell asserts, we must still keep the inquiries rigidly separate—a principle requiring even more forceful assertion when a supposed agreement in results threatens to encourage a false assumption that distinct ways of knowing might represent different aspects of a single right way after all. Whewell even begins his argument by branding his own ecclesiastical subject matter as “extraneous” to genuine scientific inquiry in geology (1837, volume 3, page 584): Extraneous considerations and extraneous evidence respecting the nature of the beginning of things, must never be allowed to influence our physics or our geology. Our geological dynamics, like our astronomical dynamics, may be inadequate to carry us back to the origin of that state of things, of which it explains the progress: but this deficiency must be supplied, not by adding supernatural to natural geological dynamics, but by accepting, in their proper place, the views supplied by a portion of knowledge of a different character and order. If we include in theology the speculations to which we have recourse for this purpose, we must exclude them from geology.
Then, on the next page, Whewell forcefully rebuts the same argument for unification of all knowledge along a single chain of rising complexity, with all phenomena s
ubject to one style of explanation, that Wilson, 160 years later, would designate by applying Whewell’s own word consilience to a theory of knowledge explicitly rejected by Whewell. He begins by acknowledging that all forms of truth must be consistent, while continuing to stress his major claim that consistency of results does not imply a unitary path for ways of knowing (page 586): “It may be urged, that all truths must be consistent with all other truths, and that therefore the results of true geology and astronomy cannot be irreconcilable with the statements of true theology. And this universal consistency of truth with itself must be assented to.”
But Whewell immediately follows this statement with his attack upon a single consilient chain (in Wilson’s sense), and his defense of irreducibly different ways of knowing, as he ridicules the notion that one might smoothly ascend (or descend) from God’s government of his universe to the empirical records of geologic change. (Again we must recognize some key differences between Whewell’s definitions and our current understanding of the same words in order to grasp his argument. By “government of the world,” for example, Whewell refers to the non-empirical domain of God’s ways, not to any putatively factual study of economics or human social organization. We must also remember, as noted before, that “science” refers to any body of knowledge, not only to the empirical realm now employing this term.) Although I do not share Whewell’s theology, and would therefore have selected a different example, I have never read a better argument against Wilsonian consilience for the unification of knowledge—all the more striking for expressing the central conviction of the man who invented the word consilience (intending thereby only to characterize science more accurately, and all the better to emphasize its inherent logical separation from forms of argument and validation in other magisteria of our intellect):To expect that we should see clearly how the providential government of the world is consistent with the unvarying laws by which its motions and developments are regulated . . . is to expect that we may ascend from geology and astronomy to the creative and legislative centre, from which proceed earth and stars; and then descend again into the moral and spiritual world, because its source and centre are the same as those of the material creation. . . . One of the advantages of the study of the history and nature of science in which we are now engaged is, that it warns us of the hopeless and presumptuous character of such attempts to understand the government of the world by the aid of science, without throwing any discredit upon the reality of our knowledge. . . . The error of persons who should seek a geological narrative in theological records, would be rather in the search itself than in their interpretations of what they might find.
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox Page 28