CREATIVE LEAPS:
Journal for the Arts in Leadership and Interdisciplinary Learning

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A Word: Consilience

by John Cimino

The word this month is consilience: a rare word until recently, recovered for us by biologist Edward O. Wilson. Consilience (literally, a “jumping together” of knowledge across disciplines) is all about “connectivity” and the weaving together of ideas from different domains of knowledge to reveal deeper, common groundworks of explanation.

Our minds delight in consilience, notwithstanding the serious fragmentation of knowledge bequeathed to us by 20th and 21st century specialization. Consilience, in turn, delights in inductive thinking, bringing us from the specific and readily apparent to that which is more general, more pervasive, but perhaps hidden. Above all, consilience loves metaphors. Metaphors, the unifying insights!

They connect: the color of my love’s eyes to the silver blue sea, or Juliet’s radiance to that of the sun. And that connection pleases us precisely because the field of meaning around something unique and dear—“my love’s eyes” or “Juliet”—has been fully expanded within the larger fabric of all that we know, all that we care about. Our “big picture” has also been bumped up in coherence. The zillion bits of information rolling around in our head suddenly feel like they fit together more appropriately. That’s a good feeling. That’s consilience, at least, in miniature.

Multiply the effect across the depth and breadth of the disciplines of knowledge and the myriad tones of experience and we see consilience as Wilson would have us see it, writ large: the goal of a true liberal arts education. Knowledge fit together in a broad connected landscape. If only educators and leaders today could glance up from their bottom lines and lowest common denominators to see this writing on the wall. The “jumping together” of knowledge across disciplines (interdisciplinary learning and project-oriented research) is thinking and learning at its best—and most joyful. It’s high time we invest our time and resources in this joy.

Consilience is the higher ground in education; it will require many brave, creative leaps from us all—and we will have to “leap” against the prevailing currents of specialization. But that leap, that “jumping together” promises great joy. What price learning?

~JC

For more information on Edward O. Wilson and his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge:

CNN – Books – “Consilience: Unity of Knowledge” by Edward O. Wilson

http://www.cnn.com/books/beginnings/9805/consilience/

PBS Online NewsHour: A Dialogue with Edward Wilson

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/june98/wilson_6-30.html

For more information on Creative Leaps programming and Interdisciplinary Thinking and Learning:   http://www.creativeleaps.org