Upon repeated requests from some Heteronormativity and Performativity readers, my good friend and collaborator, Dimitri, is contributing another post on the Humanities.
Thank you, Dimitri for contributing to a most relevant and important topic of discussion.
To access Dimitri's blog, click
here.
Consilience
Boundaries between sciences and humanitarian disciplines exist only in part thanks to objective qualitative differences between the phenomena that they study and methods employed by their practitioners. No reason should convince us to respect these boundaries. New disciplines and approaches prove most useful when they breach these mostly artifactual boundaries. In many ways the language we speak defines our vision and prevents communication with someone studying the same subject using a different language.
Let me give you an example. In the middle of the 19th century few disciplines seemed as disparate as psychiatry and anatomy. Theodor Meynert, an Austrian anatomist, spent the early part of his career dissecting the brains of deceased patients at the Vienna Asylum. Through this experience, he came to appreciate the significance of anatomy in diagnosing mental disease and argued that psychiatry should become a branch of neuropathology, a controversial position at the time. He became the founder of the brain psychiatry movement. His 1874 treatise Psychiatry: Diseases of the Forebrain became a textbook in both neuroanatomy and clinical psychiatry. Neurobiology today owes much to Meynert's anatomic methods. Using Meynert's techniques and observations, his student Carl Wernicke formulated the disconnection theory of aphasia and modern theories of regional and hemispheric specialization of the brain.
Meynert's most acclaimed student, Sigmund Freud, was fully immersed in his teacher's mindset and recognized the organic origin of the mind. Daunted perhaps by the complexity of the physiological approach to the mind, Freud shied away from physiology and developed his psychoanalysis -- an abstract dead-end discipline that has never passed the muster of empirical proof or brought about any effective treatment.
Meynert coined the term Ego denoting the totality of structural connectivity patterns in the brain formed and honed by the experiences specific to the individual. This conception of the psychological personality remains coherent with modern neuroscience research, over a century later. Freud's redefined ego, super-ego, and id remain abstract 19th-century ideas.
What lesson do we learn from this? Insistence on the unity of knowledge, or consilience, and disregard for constructed barriers will always push our understanding forward. Another lesson: doing so may not make you more famous than someone who will help you blame your problems on your mother.
What boundaries will we disregard tomorrow? How about the boundaries between arts, literature, engineering, science, ethics, and philosophy. Let's recognize and understand the tools that each employ and apply them in every unlikeliest permutation.
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