Consilience

...They cannot explain those activities...

...For instance, the aristocratic way of life that appears in both War and Peace and The Marriage of Figaro was indeed, historically speaking, one "cause" of both the French and Russian Revolutions...

...It follows that even the greatest works of art might be understood fundamentally with knowledge of the biologically evolved epigenetic rules that guided them [emphasis mine...

...There is much fascinating discussion of the arts and much lively speculation about human nature---a much misunderstood notion which Wilson quite rightly def e n d s - - a l l fueled by a real wish for intellectual harmony...

...Naturally, some grasp of facts does come in here as well, especially over literature...

...All explanations, then, are causal explanations and all causes are material causes, so all questions are, at the deepest level, questions for physics...

...Their plurality does not mean that we have a fragmented world...

...Of course, normal causal processes are going on in people's bodies all the time...

...Wilson is a scientist who really likes and respects the arts, so he is not just destructive...

...He writes: There is intrinsically only one class of explanation...

...How will this work...

...The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics [emphasis mine...

...If the various provinces of our intellectual world are to work together usefully today--and by God they had better--they must do it by cooperating harmoniously, respecting each other's differences as separate enterprises...

...Works of enduring value are those truest to these origins...

...In the years before his death, Kazin was honored as "our last great man of letters" (as he calls Edmund Wilson here), but in writing about God and American literature and the "shining points" where they intersect, he was refreshingly free of a great man's pomp and cant...

...They also look inward, reshaping our own ideas in response to that shift...

...They cannot evade this by the kind of one-way assimilation which Wilson himself once rightly described as cannibalism...

...But, again, most of the relevant questions about that background are not causal questions in the sense used in the physical sciences...

...The frankly cannibalistic academic imperialism of Sociobiology is gone...

...The painful truth is that there are lots of kinds of explanation...

...But those processes are just the relatively fixed background against which exceptional and complex social activities, such as works of art and revolutions, occur...

...This point about multiple explanations is not (as Wilson seems to think) some vitalist fantasy, adding bogus extraphysical forces to the ordinary causal scene...

...Similarly, no doubt our capacity for producing art did indeed develop according to the "biologically evolved epigenetic rules" that Wilson mentions...

...When we try to understand, say, War and Peace, or The Marriage of Figaro, our efforts at understanding are not questions about causes at all...

...Really, Kazin is interested in the American writer and God, not the other way round...

...Of the many recent books that touch on the subject, Kazin's is the least conclusive, and the best...

...But historical causes like this are highly complex general influences, not standard entities linked to their effects by universal laws like the causes invoked in physics...

...Can we do anything to stop this fragmentation...

...Those efforts set out in quite a different direction, inquiring directly about the meaning of the work itself...

...Since this kind of mistake is still widespread, it is very much to be hoped that Wilson overcomes it and writes us another vigorous book which will make real reconciliation possible...

...It is simply their common context, the fact that life itself is a whole...

...But it becomes less and less clear who actually knows any part of it...

...And the system he chooses just happens to be the one now employed by modern science...

...Yet there still remains a strange, unnecessary commitment to devices for unification which cannot work and which threaten that harmony...

...Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibnitz all worked on it with intense dedication and between them they exhausted its possibilities...

...Alfred Kazin, who died last month, understood this, and his last book serves to remind us that our greatest writers are found slightly off center in American history, as bystanders and observers rather than representatives...

...Thus, for instance: Artistic inspiration common to everyone in varying degree rises from the artesian wells of human nature....Creativity is therefore humanistic in its fullest sense...

...The "understanding" that results is therefore not a causal story...

...People who cannot respond personally in this way to works of art notoriously do not understand them, whatever rules they may claim to have discovered...

...And what holds the various aspects together is not any imposed formal structure...

...But these rules were general ones, facilitating every kind of art...

...Not religion, but God--whom Emily Dickinson, the heroine of the book, called the maker of "these strange minds that enamor us against thee...

...Kazin's object of concern is the writer as a whole person: the masterpieces and the lesser works, the journals and biographies, the recollections of others, and the impressions the writer left on later writers...

...The idea of supplementing this moderate, realistic kind of unity by finding a single basic formal pattern was, of course, a cherished project of seventeenth-century rationalists in the early days of modern science...

...We try, in fact, to see what this particular work is saying--indeed, despite the postmodernists, most of us try to see what this particular author is saying...

...The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, rightly horrified by this situation, is making a proposal...

...That is about right for the book, and for its author...

...There are those, like the Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco, who read American literature as "a kind of national spiritual biography" and like to think of the great writers as our unelected representatives...

...A WELL-MEANING CANNIBAL Mary Midgley ike the body of Osiris in the myth, our corporate store of knowledge is now being torn into a thousand pieces which are distributed among ever-growing crowds of specialists...

...It is like the plurality which we find at the front of Commonweal 2 3 July 17, 1998 our atlases where many maps of the world--political, physiographic, climatological, and the rest--confront us without implying that we live in many worlds...

...Instead, they are appropriate devices evolved for dealing with many quite different kinds of human situation, only one of which confronts science...

...It traverses the scales of space, time, complexity to unite the disparate facts of the disciplines by consilience, the perception of a seamless web of causes and effects....Consilient explanations are congenial to the entirety of the great branches of learning...

...Religiously, however, there is no "we the people...

...Mathematicians are a different kind of expert from evolutionists...

...Mary Midgley is the author of many books on philosophy, including Science and Salvation (Routledge, I992...

...Communally, we know more and more...

...He sees this kind of unification as an absolute demand of reason...

...How does this require us actually to relate the arts with the sciences...

...Consilience is, on the whole, a much more charitable book and much better adapted to promote intellectual cooperation than Wilson's early work...

...The thought patterns which we use in understanding language, or in doing mathematics, or in trying to grasp each other's motives, or in historical research, or in responding to works of art, are not just superficial layers of folk psychology laid over a single basic pattern prescribed by physical science...

...Like much other understanding, it is essentially the imaginative grasp of a new pattern--a distinctive pattern of thought and feeling...

...DIVINITY ON THE PAGE Paul Elie ~ hen it comes to God and literature, every critic is a cultural critic...

...The religious habits of the American people are "extremely fluid," as Flannery O'Connor once said of religion in the South, and so are the religious habits of American writers...

...Each map, each pattern, selects from the great welter of our experience the details needed for a certain aspect of our life...

...We need some knowledge of the historical and social background of these works...

...Not American literature but American writers-the great American writers, such as Hawthorne and Melville, whom the latter called "God's spies...

...So is the distorted language of "selfishness...

...And there are those, like Gregory Wolfe, the editor of a magazine called Image and a miscellany called The New Religious Humanists (Free Press), who are desperate to find the "religious humanists" of today and who see "religious humanism" as the cure for what ails us...

...There are those, like the gay Episcopalian Bruce Bawer, who have gotten religion and in the same moment have become convinced that the rest of America has gotten religion all wrong...

...They supplement each other, lying in quite different directions...

...But in his quest for unity he is determined to combine arts and sciences inside a single formal system...

...The title of the book has the air of a working title, a couple of three-by-five cards stuck together with a piece of scotch tape...

...Wilson's answer is always that we must bring the arts within the range of scientific methods...

...the writers who take care to distinguish between life as it is lived in the East Village and in the West Village, between eastern and western South Dakota, between the Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish Publication Society edition of the Tanakh--those very writers will generalize blithely about the religious habits of the American people from olden times up to the present...

...It is not easy to see...

...Knowledge about them might answer general questions on how art as a whole evolved but could not help us to understand a particular artwork, any more than knowing how our mathematical faculties evolved could help us understand the calculus...

...Thereby they showed once and for all that this kind of formal unification is not workable and cannot, therefore, be demanded by reason...

...They ask how it shifts our general picture of life...

...Kazin called his previous book Writing Was Everything, meaning that he and Commonweal 2 4 July 17, 1998...

...These two kinds of explanation do not compete...