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Rereading E. O. Wilson’s Consilience from the Perspective of Liberal Education : Focusing on the Metaphor of Ariadne’s Thread

  • The Journal of General Education
  • 2025, (31), pp.225~258
  • DOI : 10.24173/jge.2025.04.30.6
  • Publisher : Da Vinci Mirae Institute of General Education
  • Research Area : Social Science > Education > Field of Education > General Education
  • Received : March 20, 2025
  • Accepted : April 18, 2025
  • Published : April 30, 2025

Han, Soo Young 1

1중앙대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper reinterprets Edward O. Wilson’s Consilience from the perspective of liberal arts education and explores how the problem of knowledge integration can be reframed as a core task for contemporary general education. Wilson, drawing on the traditions of Ionian philosophy and Enlightenment thought, proposed a “unification of knowledge” that seeks to connect the natural sciences with the social sciences and humanities. His consilience theory, rooted in William Whewell’s concept of inductive consilience, attempted to construct a common explanatory framework across disciplinary boundaries. However, his approach reveals limitations in its reduction of the complexity of human and cultural phenomena to physical and causal principles, without sufficiently addressing the tension between material existence and interpretive understanding. Despite these limitations, Wilson’s vision of connecting the natural sciences and the humanities continues to offer valuable insights for liberal arts education today. This paper employs the metaphor of “Ariadne’s thread” to reinterpret Wilson’s concept of consilience through the dual structure of the labyrinth and the maze. The thread symbolizes not a simple path to escape, but a bridge between reductionist reasoning and humanistic imagination—a metaphor for interdisciplinary inquiry at the heart of liberal education. While the labyrinth represents order and determinism, the maze evokes unpredictability and interpretive plurality. The thread enables navigation between these two realms, supporting a more dynamic and complex understanding of knowledge. From this perspective, liberal arts education should enable students to grasp the material foundations of the world through scientific reasoning, while also engaging their imaginative capacities to explore existential meaning. Learning is not merely the transmission of fixed knowledge, but a creative process in which students chart their own exploratory paths through the structures of knowledge and the complexities of lived experience. By critically examining both the limitations and potential of Wilson’s consilience, this paper repositions the ideal of knowledge integration as a practical goal of liberal arts education. In doing so, it proposes a new educational horizon that transcends disciplinary fragmentation and reconfigures the landscape of learning as a space of meaningful convergence.

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