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Quoth a political scientist:

If we truly believe that liberal arts is at the heart of our mission, then it seems to me we need to focus on some very specific questions that every student should have to think about seriously (and ones that will lead us in some widely varied directions):

1-Is my way of living the right or best way of living?
2-What are the competing right ways of living?
3-What principles should I guide my life by?
4-How does the way I choose to live my life impact others?
5-Can I acquire intellectual skills that will help me discern the difference between timeless debates and trendy issues?
6-Can I see the connection of intellectual arguments to moral and ethical arguments?

To which a biologist replied:

If your six questions became the focus of our curriculum, we in the natural sciences might as well pack our bags and find new homes. Your six questions are important, but they're not the only questions, and they're certainly not ours (except, to some extent, number 5).

Our questions are: What is the universe made of? How does it work? How do we fit into it? Where did it (and we) come from?

It is true that much of what we scientists do has implications for your six questions, and vice-versa. It is also true that as we pursue our questions we should recognize, and show students, the connections between our questions and yours. But our questions are in many ways fundamentally different, and I fail to see why they are any less timeless or important.

For that matter, I also doubt that your questions are the central ones of the fine arts, but I leave that dispute to our artists.

What you actually have proposed is an ethical philosopher's counterpart to MIT. It would be a highly focused curriculum that would do an outstanding job of educating students in one area of human endeavor while ignoring others. I have no interest in being the appendage of such an anthropocentric curriculum, restricted to teaching only courses that place humans and their ethical concerns at the center of the universe.

With which an historian concurred:

I like [the biologist's] questions and would modestly suggest that those are, in fact, pretty universal questions and ones with which we in history deal all the time (though obviously, from different perspectives). The study of history provides just as important an insight into "who we are" and "why we are the way we are" as does the study of biology, physics, anthropology or philosophy, post-modernist critiques to the contrary notwithstanding.

Provoking a philosopher to retort to all the above:

Questions about value in the form of the non-moral good lie at the heart of a liberal arts education. I note the last two of [the biologist's] questions: (3) How do we fit into it (the universe) and (4) Where did it (and we) come from? While I'm not at all opposed to the natural scientist trying to answer such questions, I believe it is important to note that they are not questions which can be answered in terms of natural science. They are philosophical questions, and the answers to them will require concepts such as purpose (teleology) or the lack thereof, materialism and immaterialism, and causation. Thus, what ultimately and necessarily shapes a liberal arts education is philosophy, which is why the rubric "historical consciousness" is, in the last analysis, indefensible for our core requirement.

And moving an education professor to ask:

My questions concern looking toward the future - interdisciplinarity is real in most professions and attempts are beginning on campus to stretch former disciplinary boundaries. Doesn't the meaning of liberal arts education transcend disciplines?

The ant specialist Edward O. Wilson's new book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, might have been written as a continuation of this lively exchange. His book is an ambitious attempt to reframe the discussion about the connectedness of knowledge as we know it in its familiar disciplinary boxes.

"Ethics is everything," Wilson says toward the end. He means everything in human life, of course, not in ant life. In so saying, he might well draw grimaces from his fellow biologist in the e-mail discussion above and from those sympathetic to their biology colleague. But Wilson comes to this bold assertion after showing how he thinks our scientific knowledge of the material world comports with our knowledge of human culture.

Indeed, he would have us revise the original Enlightenment dictum of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), "I think, therefore I am." The new Enlightenment for the new millennium, if Wilson has his way, will follow the dictum, "I link, therefore I am." He takes this slogan from the biologist S. J. Singer (p. 110). He is referring specifically to the complex cellular relationships in the brain, genetically derived, that produce "full scenarios of consciousness." More generally, Wilson would apply Singer’s slogan to the relationships between the neural operation of the human mind and its cultural products. Foremost among those products are the arts, myth, and religion:

In order to grasp the human condition, both the genes and culture must be understood, not separately in the traditional manner of science and the humanities, but together, in recognition of the realities of human evolution. (p. 163)

A new Enlightenment, following Singer’s dictum, would complete the original Enlightenment project, as Wilson sees it. More accurately, it would revive the now-moribund objective to "take all knowledge for our province," the grand vision of another seventeenth-century pillar of the early Enlightenment, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). Moreover, it would avoid the antagonism of the first Enlightenment thinkers against the superstitions of religion.

Voltaire (1694-1778) and other European intellectuals mounted a concerted attack on organized religion. In America, Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) and others viewed the ordained clergy as tyrants who used religious piety to fetter human Reason. But the opposition to religion failed in the nineteenth century. The bearers of the Enlightenment did not press on beyond the natural sciences to the science of the mind, culture, art, myth, or religion. Their great failure, in Wilson’s reading, was to allow the split of matter and spirit, dating back to Descartes, to stand. The fields of physics, chemistry, and biology sustained the momentum of the Enlightenment. The study of social and cultural life, however, failed to free itself from non-scientific foundations of thought. By 1959, C. P. Snow could persuasively say that Western knowledge polarized into two incompatible cultures.

Wilson believes this polarization persists. In the non-scientific culture, uninformed ideas survive about the materials and operations of the natural world. Wrongheaded conclusions inevitably follow, causing dissonance and dysfunction. In the scientific culture, the great issues of human ethics and morality, myth, art, and religion remain at the margin of interest--as the e-mailing biologist above attests. The inductive process--Bacon’s gift--spawns increasing quantities of precise knowledge about the way the natural world works, including, in the past couple of decades, the biochemical workings of the human brain. But that scientific knowledge and our non-scientific knowledge of human behavior remain unlinked.

Wilson believes that professional specialization in the natural sciences on one hand and in the humanistic and social science disciplines on the other has legitimized the ignorance on both sides. It has perpetuated a fractured state of human knowledge.

Faced with the failure of the first Enlightenment, Wilson advances the idea of consilience to revive the vision of the unity of knowledge. Consilience, says Webster, occurs when one set of inductive laws concurs with another set derived from a distinct class of fact. This uncommon word, for Wilson, points to the way that he would rearrange knowledge hierarchically. Knowledge of the basic building blocks of the natural world lies at the bottom rung of a ladder. Here, precision and predictability have become most certain. The ladder ascends through knowledge of organs and organisms, especially of the human brain. The same ladder continues upward beyond knowledge of the physical phenomena to knowledge of social and cultural expression, the wonderful and awful drama of human history.

So organized, the new Enlightenment would avoid the split that broke the back of the original project. It would boldly go where no eighteenth-century philosophe went before. That is, it would find the linkages between the natural sciences and the ways of knowing about human social and cultural development. It would show the concurrence of our knowledge of physical, chemical, and biological phenomena with our knowledge of the most elegant and imaginative products of the human mind, including religion.

Wilson takes the study of economics as an example. He would have it end its marriage to the simplistic "rational man" theory of human motivation (significantly, a legacy of the first Enlightenment). Economics would reform its approach armed with the knowledge of motivation grounded on the ever-growing knowledge in neuroscience. In doing so, it would rescue itself from an oversimplification that leads economists to perpetuate faulty models of economic reality.

In brief, Wilson hopes to see an historic shift in the frame of discourse of all the intellectual disciplines. His prominence in the scholarly community of natural scientists gives him the confidence to express such a goal. He has been at Harvard through a long career in biology; his books include the Pulitzer Prize winner, The Ants (1990), and the controversial Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975).) Within the scientific community in the past couple of decades, he has witnessed--and contributed to--a remarkable consilience. He lucidly explicates the concurrence of theory in the several natural sciences of the past twenty or thirty years.

The promising focal point of that concurrence turns out to be the operations of the human mind itself. In Wilson’s view, rapidly expanding understanding of the genetically based working of the brain creates the connecting link. He offers the vision of a jump from new brain science to a newly informed knowledge of culture itself.

The dramatic findings coming from cognitive neuroscience, in Wilson's view, demolish the separateness of the study of human culture, including art, ethics, and religion. The efflorescence of human culture becomes, for him, an expression of the workings of the human brain explained by neuroscience. In the brain, the dynamic interactions of nature's basic materials lead to the adaptive consciousness on which human survival depends. It is that adaptive consciousness, the outcome of evolutionary development, that creates the culture studied in the humanities and social sciences. Wilson would have that study change so that it linked with the "epigenetic rules" being parsed by neuroscience. In the end, he would have us study the "coevolution" of genes and culture.

As he sees it, the continuation of human life on the planet depends upon the adaptiveness adhering to the whole human project. Not only are the basic building blocks of our brain adaptive. The cultural forms that emerge from their operation are adaptive in the same way. These exist as a result of the imperative to survive, just like the smallest ingredients of matter and life. In his vision, this "Ariadne's thread" connects all of human knowledge as it winds through the labyrinth of ignorance.

Wilson's summary of the coevolution of genes and culture is worth quoting in full. It succinctly displays the circular interaction that he sees between human physical and cultural life: