Thus, finally, if we must reject Wilson’s maximal extension of consilience as the proper strategy for “the greatest enterprise of the mind . . . the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities” (Wilson, Consilience, 1998, page 8), what alternative might better fit the logic of our various intellectual pursuits, also winning thereby a greater opportunity for practical success? Wilson revived Whewell’s forgotten word, and extended its meaning far beyond the original authorial intention into a scheme that Whewell himself had strongly rejected—for Wilson wishes to incorporate the humanities into the topmost sciences of a single reductionist chain, thereby achieving a “unification of knowledge” (page 7) under an empirical rubric, whereas Whewell regarded the humanities (particularly moral and religious reasoning) as a set of logically and inherently separate ways of knowing. Serious attention to all members of the set may well unify our mental lives by forging a consensus on values and results. However, such a consensus could only emerge from independent contributions, knitted together by serious and generous dialogue among truly different, and equally valid, ways of knowing, each responsible for a swatch on wisdom’s quilt, with the swatches abutting and interfingering in gorgeously complex patterns of interaction. The unification cannot occur (as a logical debarment, not just a practical difficulty) by Wilson’s strategy of establishing a single efficacious way of knowing for all disciplines, based on the methods and successes of science, and ultimately valuing the “humanities” not for any intrinsic difference from other factual domains, but for a status as the most complex empirical study of all.
So if Wilson’s extension of consilience must fail, and if we still favor the word as a potential description of proper joining for science and the humanities (see my confession of long affection and utilization on page 203), why not try a maximally different strategy? Wilson took Whewell’s term for a particular method of validating theories in the inductive sciences, and then generalized consilience to the ne plus ultra of possible application by suggesting that all intellectual disciplines, including the humanities, might be unified into a single chain of reductionist explanation rooted in the empirical procedures of science. I would suggest, instead, an opposite scheme of generalization that applies the barest bones of the minimal logic for Whewell’s concept to both the sciences and humanities, rather than attempting to unite the two professions into one grand sequence, featuring a single mode of explanation.
This last statement, I realize, may sound cryptic, so let me be more explicit: Whewell defined (and confined) the term “consilience of inductions” to sciences of a particular kind for a definite and very interesting reason. Remember that consilience literally means the “jumping together” of disparate observations under the only common explanation that could, in principle, render them all as results of a single process or theory—a good indication, though not a proof, Whewell admits, of the theory’s probable validity.
But why and where would one want to employ such a cumbersome method of empirical validation? Why look around for gobs of complex and uncoordinated bits, whose factuality we do not doubt, but whose interrelationship has either never occurred to anyone or has been actively denied because the facts themselves seem so miscellaneous? After all, didn’t we learn in high school that science proceeds in the much simpler and far more sensible manner of deducing novel consequences from a hypothesis, and then testing those predictions either to affirm the hypothesis or to throw it out (the far more usual outcome)? As with many idealizations, such a method would, as they say, “be loverly”—if and when we can use it, which, in our real and messy world out there, means “rarely.” Whewell did not invent consilience in a book on the philosophy of the inductive sciences for capricious reasons, but rather for a wonderfully appropriate motive based on the style of science discussed in his particular treatise.
In sciences that treat relatively simple objects of the physical world, where contingency rarely becomes a crucial component of explanations, where issues of emergence surface infrequently, and where prediction based on the mathematics of invariant natural law often serves as a major device for expanding the compass of a theory—in other words, to continue the stereotyping, for conventionally favored sciences at the base of the reductionist chain—this rational and orderly procedure of prediction and test often works splendidly, and in the advertised manner.
But how do scientists usually proceed in disciplines of maximally complex phenomena, where emergent principles may predominate and contingency often reigns? In such cases—and I used the plethora of facts that Darwin explained by consilience in devising his theory of evolution by natural selection as my primary example (see page 211)—scientists often amass volumes of well-documented, complex, apparently unconnected facts in fields of study boasting few general principles or quantified laws to aid our ordering or explanation. Whewell devised his principle of consilience—again invoking the stereotype of the reductionist chain—primarily for such sciences of maximal complexity at the disfavored top of the standard sequence, where fascinating and intricate phenomenology pervades our observational base, and few general principles impose order or grant clear understanding.
In such cases, featuring a plethora of disparate facts and a dearth of established principles, what shall a scientist in search of a theory do? Whewell did not propose his principle of consilience of inductions as a general guide for simplification and unification of knowledge by subsumption down reductionistic chains (as Wilson suggests). Rather, Whewell developed his concept of consilience as a strategy for devising general theories in difficult sciences of complex systems, which tend to be data-rich and theory-poor. (Such theories, if successful, would then indeed impart highly salutary simplicity of explanation to a previously chaotic system of unconnected facts.)
The intellectual beauty of such Whewellian consilience lies largely in the thrill, even the eeriness, of what current fashion calls an “aha!” experience—the sudden conversion of confusion into order, not by systematic, stepwise, deductive sequences of logical extensions from existing hypotheses, followed by predictions and tests, but rather by an immediate insight that we usually cannot reconstruct in our own psyches because the consilience hits us all at once as from the blue, leading us to emote: “Omigod! All those uncoordinated facts that have tortured me for years in their miscellany do cohere after all”—the “jumping together” that Whewell called consilience because one, and only one, theoretical explanation will array the lot into a sensible order (and, in the best cases, also yield a fascinating and iconoclastic theory as well).
If we focus upon the most general features of this true Whewellian consilience, perhaps we can formulate, admittedly by extension of Whewell’s more restricted intention,19 a more adequate statement for the proper relationship between science and the humanities. Consider the components of a Whewellian jumping together: masses of independent items, each separate but equal, and each formerly isolated but now united by a theory or concept recording our desire to bring them together into a coherent and mutually reinforcing system. In such a crafting of unity by consilience, we cannot specify a higher or lower, a chain of command, or a sequence of reduction or subsumption. In contrast to Wilson’s hierarchical order of unification by assigned status in a logical and vertical series, we have a true “consilience of equal regard,” if you will—a group of formerly independent items, each interesting in itself, each representing something different and enlightening, each perhaps even (for the maximal disparity of disciplines in science and the humanities) immiscible in the logical sense that a satisfactory explanation of one cannot be achieved by modes of resolution favored for the other. The sciences and humanities have everything to gain (and nothing to lose) from a consilience that respects the rich, inevitable, and worthy differences, but that also seeks to define the broader properties shared by any creative intellectual activity, but so discouraged and so often forced into invisibility by our senseless (or at least highly contingent) parsing of academic disciplines. These prof
essional divisions, perhaps established for good reasons in some initial time and place, became inadaptive long ago as meaningless separations became hardened by claims for superiority, jargon, incomprehension, ordinary pettiness, fights over university parking spaces, and simple lack of adventurous spirit, combined with the greatest natural impediment to any serious intellectual effort: God’s unfortunate limitation of the day to a mere twenty-four hours, and our active professional careers to fewer years than threescore and ten.
I too seek a consilience, a “jumping together” of science and the humanities into far greater and more fruitful contact and coherence—but a consilience of equal regard that respects the inherent differences, acknowledges the comparable but distinct worthiness,20 understands the absolute necessity of both domains to any life deemed intellectually and spiritually “full,” and seeks to emphasize and nurture the numerous regions of actual overlap and common concern. Thus I borrowed our national motto for an epigram and chose the oldest story of the fox and hedgehog for an icon. For our richest form of unification emerges when we can agree on a common set of principles and then derive our major strength for their realization from the different excellences of all cooperating components: e pluribus unum, or one from many. Let love of learning be the hedgehog’s one great activity, with wisdom as the one great goal. And let us compile a list of necessary components even longer than the effective and inherently different strategems of the fox, with science and the humanities as the two great poles of support to raise the common tent of wisdom.
As I thought about the jumping and leaping of joyful consilience, I remembered one of Isaiah’s great prophecies (chapter 35) about coming home (as my mind replayed Handel’s setting of the words in Messiah)—an appropriate symbol for the realization of our highest mental and moral possibilities through a consilience of equal regard. We shall all be so much better for the release of impediments: “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped: Then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing.” Isaiah then describes the external benefits of our liberation in a consilience of ethical and intellectual aspects of our being: “In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.”
The way of consilience will open to gather the just, but also to redeem the unwise: “And a highway shall be there . . . and it shall be called The way of holiness . . . the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.” Finally, I read the closing verse of this Chapter 35, and heard Brahms’s brilliant setting of the words in his Requiem: “. . . songs and everlasting joy upon their heads: they shall obtain joy and gladness and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.” Job, of course, will not allow us to forget the idealized and unattainable nature of this reverie, but may we not honor our occasionally and transiently obtainable best by praising the intellect and understanding behind any successful attempt—the fox’s many paths to the hedgehog’s great place, with science and the humanities linked in a consilience of equal regard? So make a joyful noise all ye lands. Didn’t the greatest of Enlightenment documents include the “pursuit of happiness” among those few rights that we cannot choose to sell for a mess of pottage, for the search remains as unalienable as intellect itself.
EPILOG
A Closing Tale of Addition to Adagia by Erasure of Erasmus
AS AN ESSAYIST AT HEART, I HAVE LONG BELIEVED THAT THE BEST, indeed the only effective, discussions of deep generalities begin with intriguing little tidbits that catch a person’s interest and then lead naturally to a broad issue exemplified thereby. One simply cannot attack “the nature of truth” head-on, in full and abstract generality, without evoking either boredom or anger at authorial arrogance. But I just disobeyed my own precept by ending the main body of this book with an abstract defense for my version of consilience (versus Wilson’s opposite account) as a basic model of proper relationships between science and the humanities. Oh yes, I did bring in the tidbits, circulating throughout the text of this book, of our national motto and the tale of the fox and hedgehog—but only as window dressing, not as the essayist’s focal source for a good and expanding story.
So let me try again—one parting shot toward the right track. Let’s return to the fox and hedgehog, but this time to specific as specific can be—that is, not just to the old proverb, not just to Erasmus’s exegesis thereof, not just to Gesner’s epitome of Erasmus’s exegesis and to his wonderfully naive woodblock illustrations of the two animals, but to the treatment of Erasmus’s exegesis of the fox and the hedgehog in one particular copy of Gesner’s book. We also, as promised, now reengage the titular villain of this book, the anonymous censor who followed the dictates of Magister Lelio Medice, under orders from the Holy Roman Catholic Inquisition of the Diocese of Pisa.
Professional intellectuals form a tiny group in proportion to people who commit their professional lives to a variety of contrary efforts. But “in the beginning was the word,” and I wouldn’t be pessimistic about the power (or at least the stubborn persistence) of our little fraternity and sorority. They can get us if we fall into a variety of obvious traps, but we usually prevail—or at least we don’t go away—if we follow the path of e pluribus unum, the conjunction of the fox and the hedgehog, the strategy advocated in this book for proper joining in mutual respect and constant conversation, of the sciences and humanities.
What can be more powerful than combining the virtue of a clear goal pursued relentlessly and without compromise (the way of the hedgehog), and the flexibility of a wide range of clever and distinct strategies for getting to the appointed place, so that someone or something manages to get through, whatever the vigilance and resourcefulness of an enemy (the way of the fox). I regard the consilience of equal regard between science and the humanities as a combination of great power for our small world of scholars because such a joining of truly independent entities, always in close and mutually reinforcing contact, and always pursuing a common goal of fostering the ways and means of human intellect, so deftly combines the different strengths of the fox and the hedgehog that we must win (or at least prevail), so long as we don’t allow the detractors to break our common resolve and bond. (Wilson’s model of consilience by reductionist unification into a single hierarchy not only misconstrues the inherent nature of similarities and differences in these two intellectual ways, but will also preclude the flexibility of joint expertise in fruitful union by glossing the differences in pursuing the chimera of false unification.)
So I end with a little tale of victory for a particular fox and hedgehog, achieved by combining the contrasting strategies of these exemplary creatures—both for the pleasure of a telling a tiny story with a happy ending, and to restate, in closing, the symbol that I chose, in this book, to carry my central argument for proper relationships of difference, and equal regard in close contact, between the sciences and humanities.
If I may start with an analogy, truth holds many undoubted virtues, from making one free to winning admission, in some systems of belief, to snazzy posthumous places. But among the more abstract benefits, truth certainly shows its greatest practical worth—as Richard Nixon and many others found out to their detriment, as they tried to get by on the opposite path—in allowing a person to keep a complex story straight. After all, if you just tell the truth by your honest recall, you may well be wrong by the vagaries and foibles of memory, but at least you will be calling consistent shots directly, whereas lying and fabrication require that you keep all tiny aspects of an increasingly complex fib constantly in mind, lest you flub and fall into inconsistency by simple failure to remember the details of your past whoppers. Censorship runs into the same practical dilemma as lying. So long as the task remains relatively easy and conceptually clear, an expurgator may perform his odious task quite effectively. But as the kinds and forms of expurgation become more numerous and complex, and especially as the rationale for excision becomes l
ess clear and coherent, even the most anal watchdog will eventually slip, and some dreaded light will sneak through into open rebellion.
Well, Magister Lelio Medice’s protégé did pretty well, but Gesner’s book, at 1,104 pages, could keep a censor very busy for a long time. Remember that he (see page 56) had been charged with the basically silly and indubitably boring task of expunging all the names of Protestants (including the author Gesner himself) and Catholics of less than fully orthodox bent. (Not really enough to keep the fires of interest burning. Now, a book full of explicit guidelines for witches or pictures of the Bishop of Chichester in the pose of his famous limerick . . . now, that would be something else.)
The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox Page 29