I trouble the dust of poor Phineas Gage only to make the point that in these recountings of his afflictions there is no sense at all that he was a human being who thought and felt, a man with a singular and terrible fate. In the absence of an acknowledgment of his subjectivity, his reaction to this disaster is treated as indicating damage to the cerebral machinery, not to his prospects, or his faith, or his self-love. It is as if in telling the tale the writers participate in the absence of compassionate imagination, of benevolence, that they posit for their kind. And there is another point as well. This anecdote is far too important to these statements about the mind, and about human nature. It ought not to be the center of any argument about so important a question as the basis of human nature. It is too remote in time, too phrenological in its initial descriptions, too likely to be contaminated by sensationalism, to have any weight as evidence. Are we really to believe that Gage was not in pain during those thirteen years until his death? How did that terrible exit wound in his skull resolve? No conclusion can be drawn, except that in 1848 a man reacted to severe physical trauma more or less as a man living in 2009 might be expected to do. The stereotyped appearance of this anecdote, the particulars it includes and those whose absence it passes over, and the conclusion that is drawn from it are a perfect demonstration of the difference between parascientific thinking and actual science.
So complete a triumph of one mode of thought as the neo-Darwinists envision has the look of desolation to some writers in the field, the same desolation that Comte foresaw. He feared that a wholly rational and scientifical understanding would exclude from the world much that is best in it, and much that is essential to a humane understanding of it. As Comte did before him, E. O. Wilson, a well-respected exemplar of this genre, has proposed a new “consilience” that will enrich both science and the arts and humanities by integrating them, a treaty he proposes in the course of asserting a theory of the human mind that is notably unfriendly to his project. He says, “All that has been learned empirically about evolution in general and mental process in particular suggests that the brain is a machine assembled not to understand itself, but to survive. Because these two ends are basically different, the mind unaided by factual knowledge from science sees the world only in little pieces. It throws a spotlight on those portions of the world it must know in order to live to the next day, and surrenders the rest to darkness. For thousands of generations people lived and reproduced with no need to know how the machinery of the brain works. Myth and self-deception, tribal identity and ritual, more than objective truth, gave them the adaptive edge.”8
When exactly did the mind begin to be aided by “factual knowledge from science”? Where is the evidence that prescientific people see the world “only in little pieces”? Is he speaking of Herodotus? Dante? Michelangelo? Shakespeare? Does knowing “how the machinery of the brain works”—and, in fact, we still do not know how it works — have any implication for the effective use of the mind? Unlike science, the arts and humanities have a deep, strong root in human culture, and have had for millennia. Granting the brilliance of science, there are no grounds for the notion that in its brief history it has transformed human consciousness in the way Wilson describes. The narrowness of Wilson’s view of human history seems rather to suggest a parochialism that follows from a belief in science as a kind of magic, as if it existed apart from history and culture, rather than being, in objective truth and inevitably, their product.
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For this reason there is in his proposal the implicit assumption that science in its present state is less deeply under unacknowledged cultural influences than it has been historically, as if there were not a history behind his own world view, one that deeply informs his writing. Granting that Wilson’s qualifications vastly exceed Spencer’s and those of many writers in this genre, the stretch from entomology to human nature is long enough, and his faithfulness to parascientific conventions is close enough, that I feel no hesitation in placing On Human Nature and Consilience in the same company with The Data of Ethics and The Descent of Man, rather than with, say, Discourse on Method or The Origin of Species. The cultural contamination to which science is most vulnerable is the kind that seems to the writer not to be cultural at all, to be instead commonsensical, for instance the very Western, very modern exclusion of subjectivity from the account to be made of human nature.
William James proposed an open epistemology, using the kind of language available to psychology before the positivist purge, appealing to experience, to subjectivity. He said,
Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another’s personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of space and time? … Things cohere, but the act of cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of their qualifications indeterminate…. The parts actually known of the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of one is not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
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This is consilient language, too, and aware that it is. Explicitly religious and political language of a kind that would be familiar to a nineteenth-century American audience is a weight-bearing element in the architecture of experience he proposes. He says we know anything in the way and to the degree that we encounter it, and not otherwise. To claim more is to trench upon a deeper identity that is unknowable by us, a system of contingencies that inheres in the object of encounter and cannot be excluded from its reality, and which will not be reached by extrapolation from what we know about it through our experience. Nor may the observer himself be absorbed into this universe, as if in accepting definition it must necessarily define him. This is language that accords uncannily well with the idea of indeterminacy in modern physics, in integrating what we know about reality with the awareness that unknowability is the first thing about reality that must be acknowledged. James published the essay in which it appears in 1882.
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In his book On Human Nature, published in 1978, E. O. Wilson does at one point acknowledge the great complexit of human behavior. He says, “Only techniques beyond our present imagining could hope to achieve even the short-term prediction of the detailed behavior of an individual human being, and such an accomplishment might be beyond the capacity of any conceivable intelligence.”10 Fair enough. These comments on complexity have the smack of actual science about them because they acknowledge the impact of strategies of measurement and of the interests as well as the mere presence of an observer. He is in error when he associates these things with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but for one paragraph he does acknowledge the world of scientific awareness we have lived in for the last century.