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Title: Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge
Prentice Hall
Item Number: 9780786216079
Number: 1
Product Description: Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge
Universal Product Code (UPC): 9780786216079
WonderClub Stock Keeping Unit (WSKU): 9780786216079
Rating: 4/5 based on 2 Reviews
Image Location: https://wonderclub.com/images/covers/60/79/9780786216079.jpg
Weight: 0.200 kg (0.44 lbs)
Width: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Heigh : 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Depth: 0.000 cm (0.00 inches)
Date Added: August 25, 2020, Added By: Ross
Date Last Edited: August 25, 2020, Edited By: Ross
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$99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub (9296 total ratings) |
Murphy White
reviewed Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge on March 07, 2009I was shelving in western philosophy the other week (I don't really have a choice against eavesdropping on bookstore conversations, and they're pretty much all inane to the point of inflicting brain atrophy on the listener, i.e. me). As I walked down the aisle with a handful of Wittgenstein, a customer approached. Sure enough he had a lame excuse for a beard, and deliberately mussed-up hair atop his excessively squinty facial constitution; fucking college kids. As I looked down I saw, of all things, a pristine Black Flag sweatshirt (as in, like, not a hoodie). I sigh; one that seems to have echoed in my head for the past month or so as a sort of mechanical reaction to the rich tapestry of assholes and contrived eccentrics that color my retail-working existence. He says that he's looking for a sort-of-general-introduction to philosophy. I don't want to be a complete asshole myself, but I hate this sort of question. I'm not really big on giving book recommendations in general, only because I've had nothing but miserable experiences with customers and the act of offering my own intellectual honesty regarding what they should read. So, I tell him that they would be shelved in philosophy anthologies. Of course, he attempts to sound somewhat snarky - the part which basically makes no sense to me - telling me that he is looking for an introduction. I sigh again, explaining why that would be shelved in anthologies. Then I make a passive attempt to placate him by recommending Bertrand Russel's History of Western Philosophy in the most sincere way possible, explaining that it's really funny and informative. Anyway, that's what I read, back when I gave a shit. Now he's changing his story though because he proceeds to ask me if there is any political philosophy in it. I feel inclined to say yes, and explain how and why, but my brain is seriously upset at this point and I just point him in the direction of general politics in the next aisle. He disappointedly intones, "OK thanks". I'm happy to clean my hands of the entire interaction though. I ask myself, "Who the fuck wears a Black Flag sweatshirt anyway, Neal Pollack?".
My days are full of interactions like this. It's not annoying that he was asking for help, and because I'm too hep to want to help a clueless tool like that. It's because, about eight years from now, that kid will probably be polluting a lecture hall with a bunch of made up bullshit about dialectical materialism and Gramscian hegemony. He'll do it effortlessly too because he isn't very bright, but he's confusing an artistic temperament with a desire to exercise serious critical thinking in order to solve incredibly ornate social issues, so he'll probably do just fine in the philosophy department. I'm assuming all of this because, as I mentioned, I was eavesdropping, and I was hearing a lot of not-so-confidently stated gibberish about Heidegger's methodology of phenomenology and something supposedly profound that his professor said about it. In other words, his professor said something profound about Heidegger basically saying something profound about perception that Heidegger stole from Husserl, or some bullshit. And believe me folks, it's bullshit. It just sounds profound, but profundity should never really cost that much. Most academic profundity is a complicated version of a street proverb dipped in gold. Fucking Black Flag sweatshirt?
I'm making sweeping generalizations about continental philosophy here. Feel free to call me out, but I've no delusions about what I'm doing. In fact, I feel entitled to make them because I can empirically explain some popular motives for getting into seriously complicated philosophical doctrines. I suffered from this same desire to alienate and condescend every person I came across, even if I knew for a fact that they were considerably smarter than myself. Reading philosophy, more specifically philosophy in the convoluted tradition of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, etc, is sort of a notoriously popular shortcut to sounding intelligent. Not only is a majority of philosophy concerned with mental abstractions, metaphysical paradox, and unsolvable ethical dilemmas, which sounds like enough of a waste of time. There is also no way of scientifically testing a majority of the theoretical propositions that most heavy philosophy puts forth. Add to that, the fact that a lot of it - most specifically the tradition that I'm attacking here - is couched in such a dense, made-up vernacular, that the interpretations of "what so and so really said" are basically as endless as that of what Jackson Pollock's paintings were really trying to say. This should all seem fairly obvious, but I've come across far too many mentalities that are as serious about some of these ideas as some people are about the law of gravity. It just doesn't add up.
It does, however, sound appealing if you fashion yourself an intellectual, but have a bad memory and even poorer critical thinking skills. When I started working at the ole' bookstore, I was more than ready to become this self-styled, autodidactic intellectual. I wanted to be a leftist, spouting everything I knew about Lukacs that he knew about Marx. I attempted to pontificate on Kant's categorical imperative, on Derrida's notion of difference, and Nietzsche's call for philosophers to philosophize with a hammer. I thought I came close to understanding Zizek. Shit, I thought that had come such a long way from digging Plato's cave allegory. I thought that all of these ideas and tidbits of information were practical and useful knowledge that I would eventually be payed to write about. I alienated people, I talked about James Joyce a lot. I drank too much, and slept surrounded by partially read books. I also felt terribly scatterbrained half of the time, and luckily I never came across anyone (such as my older self, or any other reasonable intellect) who was willing to wittily put me in my place.
So, anyway, the thing about pontificating about Kant or Zizek is that even if someone is familiar with half of the esoteric phrases that you are randomly connecting and explaining, they couldn't logically criticize you for articulating shameless intellectual fallacies because their opposing take on it, at best, is really just a difference of opinion. Mathematical algorithms on the other hand, are pretty much set in stone. The table of elements; not much room for improvisation. You can't argue what the labor value of any given human organ is, or if one species of canine is socially oppressed by the other. Neuronal signaling is not an abstract mechanism in the big impressionist painting of the phenomenology of perception.
The biologist E.O. Wilson is concerned with how seriously people tend to take some of this stuff. The focal point of his polemic, in terms of philosophy (a huge part of the social sciences), is the postmodern or poststructural variety and its intentional attempt to cause intellectual anarchy by proposing ideas such as science being a social construct, all knowledge being impossible, and some pretty over the top theoretical propositions about moral and cultural relativism. In the first chapter on the Enlightenment, Wilson discusses his dream of intellectual unity, and makes mention of his rule of thumb concerning philosophy and the social sciences, "To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong." Here are a few snippets on both Derrida and Foucault.
On Derrida:
"Nor is it certain from Derrida's ornately obscurantist prose that he himself knows what he means. Some observers think his writing is meant as jeu d'espirit, a kind of joke. His new "science" of grammatology is the opposite of science, rendered in fragments with the incoherence of a dream, at once banal and fantastical. It is innocent of the science of mind and language developed elsewhere in the civilized world, rather like the pronouncements of a faith healer unaware of the location of the pancreas. He seems, in the end, to be conscious of this omission, but contents himself with the stance of Rousseau, self-professed enemy of books and writing, whose work Emile he quotes: " ... the dreams of a bad night are given to us as philosophy. You will say I too am a dreamer; I admit it, but I do what others fail to do, I give my dreams as dreams, and leave the reader to discover whether there is anything in them which may prove useful to those who are awake."
On Foucault:
"To Foucault I would say, if I could (and without meaning to sound patronizing), it's not so bad. Once we get over the shock of discovering that the universe was not made with us in mind, all the meaning the brain can master, and all the emotions it can bear, and all the shared adventure we might wish to enjoy, can be found by deciphering the hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history. Reason will be advanced to new levels, and emotions played in potentially infinite patterns. The true will be sorted from the false, and we will understand one another very well, the more quickly because we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains."
I quote Wilson on these two particular philosophers because it elucidates his theoretical project of consilience. Throughout the entire book, Wilson goes through the long list of the academic social sciences, coming up with sound reasons why many of these disciplines truly require a little consistent natural science or basic empirical observation in order to make knowledge more communicable and useful; poststructuralism is many things, but a useful theoretical application it most definitely is not. To sort of paraphrase Wilson's thoughts on the social sciences, what he is basically trying to say is that many of these texts and ideas are kind of intellectually neat, but in the end they really just make for nothing more than very eloquent reading, or possess a purely literary value, including some commentary on subjects such as politics, economics, and social interactions.
I've come to feel the same way myself. Maybe it's a sign of aging, but I've have a hard time mustering up the energy to read a really long, dense philosophical text in recent years. I'll often just choose a novel instead because it's a way of reminding myself that this is the reading that I set aside for emotional escapism. These books are for that abstract, romantic, ponderous side of me, that, despite the way this review might make me sound, is definitely still there. In other words, I'm a dreamer, but I don't sleep all of the time.
Consilience was a wonderfully enhanced wake up call to many of my thoughts regarding philosophy, the social sciences, and the invariable superiority of the natural sciences. This is just one aspect of this great book, and a big part of Wilson's proposal to create a sort of synthesis of the two academic worlds. It's a lofty one, and also one that is probably neglected by practicing scientists because, as Wilson mentions, they are mainly specialists working in esoteric fields, with far too much work on their hands to dedicate any time to giving such a theoretical project much consideration at all. As for academics working in social science departments, they clearly wouldn't want to be involved because the notion of consilience, in essence, really utilizes a majority of the methods and approaches of the natural sciences to explore more complicated and abstract social concerns, thus eliminating the role that the actual sociologist or philosopher plays at this point. I actually have a few friends (ones who I disagree with a lot) with graduate degrees in social science departments who typically scoff at me when I mention Wilson's name, or the concept of sociobiology. That, in and of itself, is an entirely different Pandora's Box that I'd rather not crack open right now.
I've focused on one aspect of this wonderful book, but aside from its central thesis, there is so much practical information on evolution, neuroscience, biology, and basic intellectual history, to be gleaned from it. Not everyone will agree with Wilson; especially the sociologist, anthropologist, political scientist, or philosopher. However, those that are willing to acknowledge the inherent faults of the social sciences while embracing their value as mere earnest reflections on terribly complex social issues with no conceivable answers, will enjoy Consilience as a sort of canonical statement of intellectual honesty spread across several disciplines. None of this is to suggest that philosophy is a waste of time. It can truly be a lot of fun, but there seems to be a large crowd of readers out there who just aren't willing to admit how flawed it can be. That or they're just not curious enough about the natural world to want to read anything other than a bunch of esoteric babbling about the essence of their own being. In other words, life is too short to be a douchebag. I found this out the hard way, though I can say that I do know better than to wear a fucking Black Flag sweatshirt.
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