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- It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.by tropdrop
- > ... otherwise Britain will sunset before its time, like the decadent Doges of the long-lost Venetian Republic ...
i love it when history rhymes
- Thomistic and Catholic intellectual tradition in general has long recognized this strange intellectual fragmentation which it does not itself suffer. It is not a matter of mere difference of temperament, because reality is what it is. One may take one perspective or another, but there remains one reality. The fragmentation is rather the result of intellectual error and error that is historically rather recent.
Each special field or domain focuses on a particular aspect of reality. Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is not merely an available and defensible stance in the ring, but an incoherent position to begin with. The central claim of scientism—that empirical science is the only source of knowledge—is itself not a scientific claim and not one that empirical science can demonstrate. To establish the correctness of this proposition requires us to step outside or above empirical science in order to make empirical science itself an object of study. But as soon as we do that, we have by that very act disproven scientism. One can only wonder how such a basic philosophical error fails to figure into the reasoning of scientism's advocates, especially given the failure of logical positivism which crashed and burned for very similar reasons.
So, to reject scientism isn't to reject science for what it truly is. It is to reject sola scientia.
The solution to the problem must occur on a philosophical plane. Only on a philosophical plane can we ask (and answer!) "what does empirical science actually tell us?" or "what is the knowledge the humanities give us?". Only on a philosophical plane can be talk about metaphysics and the nature of being (where metaphysics is the general science, while all the others are special sciences). Only philosophy allows us to relate and to locate the fruits of every field in the larger patchwork of human knowledge.
by lo_zamoyski - And his actual book on the two cultures is worth reading too (and only 54 p.).by jruohonen
- Related and worth reading: The Third Culture by the former executive editor of Wired (when Wired was good): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.279.5353.992by brandonb
- Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.by b450
- > He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
Loved that.
by herodoturtle - I enjoyed the piece but the conclusion is weak and so broad as to be meaningless.
>So, what of the two cultures today?
Well, Snow won of course. Removing Latin and Greek in favor of more science and engineering? Teenagers used to read Thucydides. What was that study recently, that fifty-eight percent of English majors at two universities couldn't read the opening paragraphs of Bleak House and that only five percent could read it acceptably? "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor"? Science and engineering will bring us material comfort? We are living in Snow's world!
>Above all, this style of thought valued analysis and exactness, and it was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis, for it neglected what he considered should be the true focus of serious thinking: ‘life’. The idea of life haunts Leavis’s thought. It is central to it and yet maddeningly opaque. He believed the mark of great literature – or rather, what it is that makes great literature great – is its ability to manifest life, to summon it and make it exist for the attentive and dedicated reader. Literature is the locus of life. If a piece of writing does not make the close reader somehow sense life, then it can fairly be denied the status of literature. The absence of life is the most common cause of Leavis’s derision, with which he was so generous (even extending once to a rant against Jimi Hendrix, of all people). So: what did he mean by it? What is life?
To me this comes to mind: feeling, intuition, thinking, active, moving, creative, danger, the highs and the lows. Not-Life is the efficient modern world, the commoditized, reactive, standardized, efficient, safe, low-risk, smooth featureless extrusions of a massive system.
n.b. Dresser has things mixed up here about Jimi Hendrix. Interesting read which, of course, gets to Life: http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/5/confessions-of-a-lapsed-l...
>It involves, in the Laurentian manner, life, lived, with intensity, experienced with full consciousness in a real, a very real, organic and intense way.
by owenversteeg