Edward 0. Wilson was horn in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1929. He received his B.S. and M.S in biology from the University of Alabama, and, in 1955, his Ph. D. in biology from Harvard.  He is currently Pellegrino University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.  The author/coauthor of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books, On Human Nature (1978) and The Ants (1990, with Bert Holldobler), he is the recipient of many fellowships, honors, and awards.  Wilson 's other books include The Diversity of Life, Biophilia, Sociobiology:  The New Synthesis, and his autobiography, Naturalist.  A member of the International Academy of Humanism, Wilson is a frequent contributor to FREE INQUIRY.

The Enlightenment itself, however, was never a unified movement.  It was less a determined swift river than a lacework of deltaic streams working their way along twisted channels.  By the time of the French Revolution it was very old.  It emerged from the Scientific Revolution during the early seventeenth century and attained its greatest influence in the European academy during the eighteenth century. Its originators often clashed over fundamental issues. Most engaged from time to time in absurd digressions and speculations, such as looking for hidden codes in the Bible or for the anatomical seat of the soul.  The overlap of their opinion was nevertheless extensive and clear and well reasoned enough to bear this simple characterization:  They shared a passion to demystify the world and free the mind from the impersonal forces that imprisoned it.

They were driven by the thrill of discovery.  They agreed on the power of science to reveal an orderly, understandable universe and thereby lay an enduring base for free rational discourse.  They thought that the perfection of the celestial bodies discovered by astronomy and physics could serve as a model for human society.  They believed in the unity of all knowledge, individual human rights, natural law, and indefinite human progress.  They tried to avoid metaphysics even while the flaws and incompleteness of their explanations forced them to practice it.  They resisted organized religion.  They despised revelation and dogma.  They endorsed, or at least tolerated, the state as a contrivance required for civil order.  They believed that education and right reason would enormously benefit humanity.  A few, like Condorcet, thought human beings perfectible and capable of achieving a political utopia....

The Enlightenment, defiantly secular in orientation while indebted and attentive to theology, had brought the Western mind to the threshold of a new freedom.  It waved aside everything, every form of religious and civil authority, every imaginable fear, to give precedence to the ethic of free inquiry.  It pictured a universe in which humanity plays the role of the perpetual adventurer.

By the early 1800s, however, the splendid image was fading. Reason fractured, intellectuals lost faith in the leadership of science, and the prospect of the unity of knowledge sharply declined.  It is tiue that the spirit of the Enlightenment lived on in political idealism and the hopes of individual thinkers. In the ensuing decades new schools sprang up like shoots from the base of a shattered tree: the utilitarian ethics of Bentham and Mill, the historical materialism of Marx and Engels. the pragmatism of Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.  But the core agenda seemed irretrievably abandoned.  The grand conception that had riveted thinkers during the previous two centuries lost most of its credibility. ..

All movements tend to extremes, which is approximately where we are today.  The exuberant self-realization that ran from romanticism to modernism has given rise now to philosophical postmodernism (often called poststructuralism. especially in its more political and sociological expressions). Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment.  The difference between the two extremes can be expressed roughly as follows: Enlightenment thinkers believe we can know everything, and radical postmodernists believe we can know nothing.

The philosophical postmodernists, a rebel crew milling beneath the black flag of anarchy, challenge the very foundations of science and traditional philosophy. Reality, they propose, is a state constructed by the mind, not perceived by it.  In the most extravagant version of this constructivism, there is no "real" reality, no objective truths external to mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups.  Nor can ethics be firmly grounded, given that each society creates its own codes for the benefit of the same oppressive forces.

Scientists, awake and held responsible for what they say while awake, have not found postmodernism useful.  The postmodernist posture toward science in return is one of subversion.  There appears to be a provisional acceptance of gravity, the periodic table, astrophysics, and similar stanchions of the external world, but in general the scientific culture is viewed as just another way of knowing, and, moreover, contrived mostly by European and American white males.

It is tempting to relegate postmodernism to history's curiosity cabinet alongside theosophy and transcendental idealism, but it has seeped by now into the mainstream of the social sciences and humanities.  It is viewed there as a technique of metatheory (theory about theories), by which scholars analyze not so much the subject matter of the scientific discipline as the cultural and psychological reasons particular scientists think the way they do.  The analyst places emphasis on "root metaphors," those ruling images in the thinker's mind by which he designs theory and experiments.

As the diversity of metaphors has been added to ethnic diversity and gender dualism to create new workstations in the postruodernist academic industry, and then politicized, schools and ideologies have multiplied explosively.  Usually leftist in orientation, the more familiar modes of general postmodernist thought include Afrocentrism, constructivist social anthropology, "critical" (i.e., socialist) science, deep ecology, ecofeminism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Latourian sociology of science, and neo-Marxism. To which add all the bewildering varieties of deconstruction techniques and New Age holism swirling round about and through them.

Their adherents fret upon the field of play, sometimes brilliantly, usually not, jargon-prone and elusive.  Each in his own way seems to be drifting toward that mysterium tremendum abandoned in the seventeenth century by the Enlightenment.  And not without the expression of considerable personal anguish.  Of the late Michel Foucault, the greater interpreter of political power in the history of ideas, poised "at the summit of Western intellectual life," George Scialabba has perceptively written,

Foucault was grappling with the deepest, most intractable dilemmas of modern identity. . . . For those who believe that neither God nor natural law nor transcendent Reason exists, and who recognize the varied and subtle ways in which material interest  - power -  has corrupted, even constituted, every previous morality, how is one to live, to what values can one hold fast?  To Foucault I would say, if I could (and without meaning to sound patronizing), it's not so bad. . . . 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.

From Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by E. 0. Wilson, 1998  Reprited [in FI] by permission of Alfred A. Knopf and the author.

For John R. Searle's position on postmodernism, click here.

This site opened:  November 21, 1998.   Last Update: November 28, 1998