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operating over a sufficient length of time, would
have been sufficient to sculpt the landscape as
we find it today.
It used to be believed that living and nonliving matter occupied separate realms; that living things were constituted out of some
quivering gel called protoplasm, which is utterly unlike nonliving matter. Then Friedrich
Wohler showed that one could synthesize urea
out of chemical compounds and, therefore, that
the stuff of life was ordinary chemicals obeying
the laws of chemistry.
Consciousness, the mind/body problem, imagery,
private language, and epistemology cannot be carried
out in a hermetically sealed philosophical discourse;
rather, they must incorporate what we know about the
incarnation of all these processes in living brains.
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The integration of the nonliving and living
worlds was further advanced by Darwin, who
showed that the ubiquitous presence of adaptation in the living world could be explained by
the natural selection of replicators. And later, it
was shown that replication itself could be understood as a physical process.
The last remaining chasm in our ontology is
between the biological and the cultural, with
the sciences on the one hand and the humanities and social sciences on the other. The
ground for optimism about the humanities is
that the process of consilience will continue.
We’re beginning to see the glimmerings of the
unifications of the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. There are two
realms in which this is being carried out.
One is the study of deep history — the use of
genetics, linguistics, and archaeology to bridge
the end of human biological evolution and the
beginning of history, civilization, and culture.
Those familiar with Jared Diamond’s Guns,
Germs, and Steel, for example, have some exposure to this new science, which bridges biological evolution with the beginning of recorded
history. Another approach lies in the sciences of
human nature, the bridging of the biological and
the cultural not in terms of time but in terms of
causation. Cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary
psychology, and behavioral genetics can play a
role in illuminating our culture and society.
The key idea is that our culture and society
are products of the human mind. They are products of the activity of the brain, which itself is a
product of evolution. It is the human faculties of
perception, imagination, social cognition, and
emotion that artists exploit in order to achieve
their effects. What we call culture is not a separate realm from the biological or the psychological. These realms emerge in an epidemiological
process in which ideas, inventions, and social
contracts are shared to the point that they become epidemic in a community, at which point
we call them cultures.
The humanities and sciences are already
drawing together. For example, the philosophy of
mind nowadays blends into the sciences of cognition and neurobiology. Topics such as consciousness, innate ideas, the mind/body
problem, imagery, private language, and epistemology cannot be carried out in a hermetically
sealed philosophical discourse; rather, they must
incorporate what we know about the incarnation
of all these processes in living brains. The visual
arts and the study of visual perception could mutually inform one another. An example is evolutionary aesthetics and the analysis of why certain
colors, forms, faces, and landscapes elicit certain
affective and cognitive responses. Or consider the
cross-fertilization between jurisprudence and
moral philosophy on the one hand and moral
psychology on the other. Some of our debates in
ethics might be colored by basic intuitions about
right and wrong that we may have inherited from
our evolutionary background.
In my own research on language (for example, in my book Words and Rules), I have never
even noticed a boundary where science leaves
off and the humanities begin. Take the phenomenon of irregularity — the fact that the past tense
of come is came, not comed. A straightforward
explanation is that irregular forms are memorized
words that tap human rote memory, whereas regular forms like walked require the use of a mental operation, “add a suffix.” On the one hand,
the theory is informed by philology and history,
such as the effects of the Norman invasion in
1066 on the composition of English vocabulary,
and authors’ use of irregular forms in poetry and
fiction. On the other, it is informed by studies of
neurological disease and neuro-imaging that tie
irregular forms to the memory system of the
brain, and regular forms to the planning system.
It just never occurs to me that these are different
kinds of understanding. I believe that similar opportunities present themselves in every other
area of the humanities. Far from being in a
malaise, scholars in the humanities should be exhilarated at the unexplored avenues for insight in
our understanding of arts, ideas, and culture.
