Specialization vs. Generalism

I have been a convinced eclectic, generalist, and holist since 1962 or so. As a result, I have not found the last forty years to be at all hospitable, since the specialized-methodological model has increasingly dominated the university.

An eclectic is topic-oriented, problem-oriented, or question-oriented. Once he begins with a problem, he looks around for tools capable of handling it. (The toolbox metaphor is characteristically pragmatist, but has been used both by Foucault and by Wittgenstein.) A methodologist, by contrast, decides on a method (“paradigm”) and then looks for problems to use it on.

A specialist divides reality up into “fields”, based on the spatial metaphor, and chooses to become expert on one or a few of them. A generalist realizes that he can’t know everything, but is not timid about going into new areas, and realizes that in many cases topics which do not seem to be related actually are. The holist is a generalist who tries to describe an overall picture.

Academic life, especially grad student training, strongly favors the analytic movement (dividing up a question and dealing with part of it) over the synthetic movement (putting things into a larger context, seeing things as related  which had formerly been dealt with as separate.) Both methods are intellectually  valid, but it’s not hard to find people who seem unaware of this. It would seem obvious that the job of thinking comprehensively is capable of being done either well or badly. But there are those who disagree:

In earlier eras, when it was not obvious that the scope of human knowledge far exceeded what could be encompassed by a single mind, the challenge of explaining how everything hung together was not transparently unmanageable. Today – when single minds cannot encompass substantial sub areas of any established discipline – it is. The solution is not to do badly what cannot be done, but to do well what can – to construct a series of limited, but accurate and overlapping, syntheses that together illuminate reality as we know it. This, I argue, is what we should ask of analytic philosophy.

 (Scott Soames’ response to Richard Rorty)
 

What Soames says is true of every area of study. No one can know all of physics, or all of chemistry, yet physicists and chemists still make general statements about physics and chemistry. If a new discovery in a specialized area seems to contradict what has been thought to be a fundamental principle of the science, there’s a flurry of activity until either the problem has explained away, or the whole science has been revised.
 

The reason why it doesn’t work this way in philosophy is probably because philosophy, contrary to the claims of its advocates, is not yet a well-formed science on the type of physics; there really is no overall theory to revise. (Scientists seem less defensive about generalist writing than writers from fields that are regarded as “softer”. Right at hand I have excellent philosophical books by Stephen Jay Gould, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela, Antonio Damasio, Stuart Kauffman, and Ernst Meyer. You only wish that philosophers would write that way.)
 

One way of thinking about generalism is to think of two highly-intelligent friends who have specialized in widely different fields, but  who retain a curiosity about one another’s work. (Each, in other words, is an expert in his own field, but a layman in the other’s). Imagine each of them writing a generalist description of his own field of study for the benefit of the other. The result would be two non-technical generalist works of the highest quality.

It seems reasonable that generalist thinking should be fostered in the university, and the departments where generalism would seem most appropriate are history, literature, and philosophy. But nowadays these departments, too, have been methodologized, so an eclectic generalist like me really has nowhere to go. The university has apparently abandoned generalist thought. This amounts to the abandonment of public philosophy to street preachers, demagogues, and hack journalists. Every department nowadays wants to be an expert discipline with specialist methodologies and paradigms, and the ones that think of themselves as more successful in this regard sneer at the others (“butterfly collecting and social work”.) 

The fields in which generalist, eclectic thinking would seem most comfortable are history, philosophy, and literature. History seems to be doing fine, with some pressure from econometricists, etc. Philosophy seems totally lost and destroyed. English is embattled. Post-modernism, which seems so eclectic and holistic, actually functions as an imposed methodology, and furthermore has the kind of extreme messiness that gives holism and eclecticism a bad name. People assure me that our present era is a post-post-modernist, “generation z” or something like that, but the new historicism that supposedly replaced it seems to be the same kind of algorithmic cake-mix-recipe methodologism that I’m arguing against.

In short, I think that history, literature and philosophy should be holistic, generalist, eclectic – and proud! It’s worth doing, and where else is it going to be done?

Longer and more schematic version of this

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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.

Original materials copyright John J Emerson

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