Scientific and Humanistic Cultures

The Question

The terms “scientific culture” and “humanistic culture” reflect at once the dichotomy of culture, of which there should be only one. In a sense, this dichotomy reflects the essential human predicament, the limitation of the human mind. It is no wonder that this great divide has been noticed and debated since the dawn of civilization, from the time of Plato and the vedic seers to the present day. The two latest protagonists in the field are C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis.

Sir Charles Snow, who entered the field with his Rede lecture, The two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, delivered at Cam­bridge University in 1959, at once queered the pitch of the debate that followed, by the air of scientific superiority; and literary authority that he assumed, and in Leavis’s words, by the, utter lack of intellectual distinction and an embarrassing vulgarity of style, by unsupported cliches, void of any glimmer of what creative literature is or why it matters. The Leavis-Snow con­troversy was continued by Lionel Trilling (in Commentary, June 1962), Robert Oppenheimer (in Encounter, October 1962), Aldous Huxley (in Literature and Science, Chatto and Windus) and by many others.

It is true that Snow did not discuss the central problem of values implicit in what he called the “two cultures.” As Michael Yudkin remarks, “Curiously enough he (Snow) is more concerned with the number two than the term ‘culture’.” Dr. Leavis, in his Richmond lecture, delivered at Cambridge University in 1962 from which I have already given sample, thundered, “He (Snow) doesn’t know what he means, and doesn’t know he doesn’t know.” After the acrimonious controversy that followed, Snow offered an apologia The Two Cultures: A Second Look in 1964. This was by no means an improvement on the first look.

Snow or Leavis? That is the question. Which of the two cultures of Snow’s concept? Scientism or literarism? The truth is, as Aldous Huxley remarks, scientism is a disservice to science, and literarism to literature. Which to choose? We are reminded of the deliberation of our rishis of the Rig-veda (X, 121) more than three thousand years ago, “To which god shall we give our adoration?” – “kasmai devaaya havisha vidhema”this question occurring as a refrain eight times in the hymn.

Historical Perspective - India

Going to get a historical perspective of this ancient conflict between the two cultures, we come upon the same disturbing number two of Snow’s two cultures, two thousand and five hundred years ago in the Upanishads, not in the framework of culture but in that of knowledge-para-vidya or the higher knowledge pertaining to the Supreme Brahman, and apara-vidya or the lower knowledge pertaining to the phenomenal world.

The Mundakopanishad describes Saunaka, a righteous house­holder, approaching the sage Angirasa with the question, “Sir, what is that, by knowing which all else is known? (Kasminnu bhagavo vijnaate sarvamidam vijnaatam bhuvati). To him sage Angirasa replies, “Two kinds of knowledge are to be known, as those who have known Brahman say – the, higher knowledge and the lower” (dve vidye veditavya iti ha sma brahmavido vadanti paraa chaiva aparaa cha). Explaining this, sage Angirasa continues, “Of these, the lower knowledge comprises Rig-veda, Yajur-veda, Sama-veda, Atharva-veda–phonetics, rituals, grammar, etymology, prosody and astrology. The higher knowledge is that by which the immutable is known, namely Brahma-vidya. “Tatraaparaa rigvedo yajurvedah samavedo atharvavedah sikshva kalpo vyakaranam niruktam chanda jyotisham iti, ata aparaa yayaa tadaksharam adhigamyate.)The same is expressed again in Amrutabindoopanishad: “Two kinds of knowledge are to be acquir­ed.” These Vedic utterances, although pertaining to the Brahman, are not so far removed as it may appear, from the context of Snow’s two cultures, if we remember that one culture of Snow may appropriately be represented by poetry, and that the poet is allied to the seer, that the imaginative faculty may be the other side of religious prophecy, that the essence of religious expression is poetry. We may also recall the words of Words­worth who declared that “poetry is most just to its divine origin when it administers the comforts and breathes the thoughts of religion.”

Since I shall not revert to the two knowledges of the vedic concept, I may round off this theme here by saying that the attitude of Hinduism is such that it admits the propriety of everything at its own level and in its own time. The aim of Hinduism is to make one steadily less and less imperfect in life, until hope­fully one may pass beyond imperfection altogether. Hinduism permits, in fact enjoins on the individual to involve himself in the living values of life, comprising dharma, artha and kama, namely personal fulfilment and social values, until the last stage of life or sanyasa (that is, retirement /renunciation) when he is to seek moksha or liberation, pondering on the ultimate questions of life, “Who am I? What is this life for?” and the like. Even in the context of the Snow controversy, this attitude of readiness leading to ripeness will itself be a help to the solution of the problem.

Historical Perspective - Europe

To return to the world of Snow and Leavis – to the main-springs of European thought:

Plato (427-347 B. C.) in his Republic cryptically remarks, “Poets utter great and wise things which they do not understand”, and banned them from his ideal community. Will Durant observes that while Plato inveighs against poets and their myths, he himself adds one to the number of poets and hundreds to the number of myths. In respect of the humanities Plato assigned a high place in his curriculum to music, in order to make the soul graceful, as he put it. He gave a high place also to athletics and gymnastics for the cultivation of health. He considered mathematics to be the father of philosophy. Over the door of his Academy he placed the words, “Let no man ignorant of geometry enter here.”

Aristotle’s School (384-322 B. C.), the Lyceum, was oriented differently from Plato’s Academy. It leaned towards biology and the natural science, while Plato’s had stressed mathematics and philosophy. Without the literary brilliance of Plato, as Will Durant observes, Aristotle showed a greater understanding of poetry. He took poetry and the arts seriously. He enunciated that the function of art is catharsis or purification, that tragedy “through pity or fear effects the proper purgation of the emotions” which accumulate under the pressure of social restraints and may turn unsocial and destructive, that the noblest art gives an intellectual pleasure, appealing to the intellect as well as to the feelings.

The legacy of Greece passed to Rome and thence to Europe. Until the Renaissance (14th century A. D.), by reason of chronological propinquity, Latin prevailed in Europe. All higher knowledge had to be acquired in that language. Thus started the liberal arts tradition of medieval Europe. It consisted of two parts. The first part, the trivium consisted of grammar, rhetoric and logic. The second part, the quadrivium, consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music restricted to its mathematical basis.

During the Renaissance (14 - 16 centuries A. D.) Latin ceased to be the sole key to knowledge. The study of Greek came into its own as an essential part of higher education. Subsequently instruction in the modern literatures of England, France and Germany gradually supplanted the ancient classical literatures. Physical science was practically ignored.

The seventeenth century ushered the scientific instruments of revelation like the telescope and the microscope. Experiments with these, revealing new worlds, the very big and the very small, were productive of an experience so that the ideas of “experiment” and “experience” came to be associated in people’s minds.

However, in the eighteenth century, as science forged ahead with the scrutiny of things invisible, intangible, or likewise not lending themselves to experience, “experiment” and “experience” came to be differentiated from each other. “Experiment” denoted precise procedures that led to factual or quantitative information. “Experience” indicated a subjective inner knowledge beyond the pale of what the Royal Society concretized as “positive” knowledge. The poet Keats, out of the exuberance of his poetic intuition, casually coined the challenging counter-phrase “negative capability” as the mark of the poet, without any idea of enter­ing into the fray, or even possibly without any knowledge of the fray. Keats declared, “He (the poet) has no identity; he is continually in for, and filling some other body.” Negative capability is an openness to experience which obliterates personality.

The nineteenth century was preoccupied, with these two different kinds of knowledge. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the prophets of poetic experience. An experience was not to be acquired in the manner of the extraneous positive knowledge of science; a personal involvement or relationship to the knowledge was required for experience. An experiment was impersonal, a thing outside of the experimenter’s personality. It was cumulative in respect of knowledge. In experiment the field of knowledge grows. In experience the knowing person grows. Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude was fittingly sub-titled Growth of a Poet’s Mind. In matters of experience, knowing is becoming. The Mundakopanishad says that knowing Brahman is becoming Brahman: sa yo ha vai tat paramam brahma veda brahmaiva bhavati. Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, says, “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings out the whole soul of man into activity, with the subordination of its faculties to each other, according to their relative worth and dignity.” The use of the word “soul” in this description of the poet’s office is noteworthy.

Thus the words “experiment” and “experience” became a polar pair, analogous to the two cultures of Snow’s concept.

Historical Perspective - The Modern Period

The modern debate between science and arts, as also between science and religion, started with the great Victorians early in the last century when science was getting to be recognized as indispensable in general education. It found a great crusader in Thomas Henry Huxley, biologist and paleontologist, who had also a broad liberal ground. On one occasion he shared a platform with Bishop Wilberforce, a classicist, in what has been called the most famous debate over a theory of modern science. It was in 1860, the year following the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. The bishop, attacking the theory of evolution, ended his talk by flourishing a question at Huxley whether he (Huxley) counted his descent from the ape on his father’s or his mother’s side. Huxley’s crushing reply is recounted by him in a letter as follows: “If then, said I, the question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grand-father, or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence, and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion­ – unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.”

In 1880 this formidable debater, delivering the inaugural address at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason’s College in Birmingham (later to become the University of Birmingham) made his celebrated and controversial attack on the neglect of science in education. Sir Josiah Mason had specified the policy of his college as excluding party politics and theology from its precincts, and also as not providing “mere literary instruction and education.” Taking the cue from the last, Huxley launched an attack on Classical education, tilting lances with Matthew Arnold, poet and apostle of sweetness and light.” Huxley described classical scholars as Levites in charge of the ark of culture. He declared:

I hold very strongly by two convictions the first is that neither the discipline nor the subject matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time on either; and the second is that, for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education...Nevertheless I am the last person to question the importance of genuine literary education, or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete without it...French and German, and espe­cially the latter language, are absolutely indispensable to those who desire full knowledge in any department of science. But even supposing that the knowledge of these languages acquired is not more than sufficient for purely scientific purposes, every Englishman has, in his native tongue, an almost perfect instrument of literary expression; and in his own literature, models of every kind of literary excellence. If an Englishman cannot get literary culture out of his Bible, his Shakespeare, his Milton, neither in my belief, will the profoundest study of Homer and Sophocles, Virgil and Horace, give it to him.

Referring to Matthew Arnold’s two propositions that criticism of life is the essence of culture and that literature contains the materials which suffice for such a criticism, Huxley declared:

I think we must all assent to the first proposition...and yet strongly dissent from the assumption that literature alone is competent to supply this knowledge.

I think we today will agree with Huxley essentially, but with the reservation that he overstated his case. We may go with him to the extent that an exclusively scientific education may in its highest reaches, impart real culture, but we will also hold that science cannot usurp the place of literature in the criticism of life.

Sir Charles Snow

Since Huxley’s time the gap between men of science and men of letters seems to have widened. Sir Charles Snow, in his Rede Lecture of 1959, warned that there might be a total divorce between the two groups. He declared:

The two cultures were already dangerously separate sixty years ago ... None of that degree of interchange (as was in vogue at that time) at the top of the Establishment is likely, or indeed thinkable now ... In fact, the separation between scientists and non-scientists is much less bridgeable among the young than it was even thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, the cultures had long ceased to speak to each other; but at least they managed a kind of frozen smile across the gulf. Now the politeness has gone, and they just make faces.

Rival factions ran in hot pursuit of the ghost of alarm that he raised since the situation concerned the nation’s power-­structure.

Snow stated his thesis as follows:

I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. At one pole we have the literary intellectuals...at the other, scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension ­sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike but most of all, lack of understanding … The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment.

Apropos of this, T. R. Heno remarks, “I cannot find any meaning in the phrase ‘the existential moment’.”

Labouring to show that scientists have their own culture, Snow makes the following pronouncements in a style that shows the man:

At one pole, the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense. ...They have their own culture, intensive, rigorous, and constantly in action. Their culture contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous and almost always at a higher conceptual level than literary person’s arguments­–even though the scientists do cheerfully use words in senses which literary persons don’t recognize...

...They (the scientists) have the future in their bones....
...Intellectuals, particularly literary intellectuals, are natural Luddites...
... In the moral (life) they (the scientists) are, by and large, the soundest group of intellectuals we have.

Snow relates that in his experience many scientists find Dickens unintelligible and that almost all non-scientists are unable to define mass or acceleration – comparative accounting as droll as the Picwickian sense. To quote Leavis, “He (Snow) enforces his intention by telling us, after reporting the failure of his literary friends to describe the second law of Thermo­dynamics, ‘Yet I was asking them something which is about the equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespeare?’ ‘There is no scientific equivalent to that question,’ says Leavis. ‘Equations between orders so disparate are meaningless’.

Snow bewails further:
They (the literary intellectuals) still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of culture as though the natural order did not exist...Most non-scientists have no conception of that (the scientific) edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness does not come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.

Sir Charles Snow has here unwittingly used the word ex­perience in the purpose “intellectual experience” which, if he had paused over it, should have given him light. Intellectual experience is the essence, factual information per se has no value. It is no use carrying loads of learned lumber in one’s head. The brain, as Sherlock Holmes explained to Dr. Watson is a vessel of limited content, and one has to know what one stuffs it with, so that one may take care that one stuffs it with things which will be useful to one by way of giving either information or intellectual pleasure.

This leads us further to the examination of Snow’s concept of two cultures. As Michael Yudkin remarks, “There are, regretta­bly, dozens of cultures, in Sir Charles’s use of the term, even if the gap between the scientist and the non-scientist is probably the widest … By concentrating attention on the gap between scientific and non-scientific intellectual effort, he bypasses the many gaps within each culture ... Do those members of the traditional culture, who do not specifically study literature or music or the fine arts enrich themselves by contact with them? Do they not, like the scientist, believe works of art to be irrelevant to their interests? ... If Snow, the writer; can so easily dismiss Yeats, Pound and Lewis, Snow, the scientist, exhibits a limitation, no less remarkable, For him, science includes only the physical sciences. But where are the biologists, the biochemists and the physiologist? ... For a non­scientist, an understanding of science rests not on the acquisition of scientific knowledge but on scientific habits of thought and method.”

Dr. F. R. Leavis

After Snow, Leavis. As Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959 was filtering into schools and was being studied “earnestly” in sixth forms, Dr. Leavis felt that it was time to counteract the damage done by it. His Richmond Lecture of 1962 entitled Two Cultures?, The Significance of C. P. Snow was an attack on Snow’s thesis, unsparing and trenchant, if angry and ill-mannered. It was like Macaulay’s exposure of Robert Montgomery’s poems when they were beginning to be classed with Milton’s. Macaulay, however, was relatively urbane, though equally ruthless, in his work of demolition. Nevertheless one feels that Dr. Leavis goes to the root of the matter when he says that there is no equivalent to a play of Shakespeare in science, that artistic experience cannot be equated with scientific finding, and when further he says, “In coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for–what ultimately for? What do men live by? – the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling.” This enunciation of Dr. Leavis is significant. In this I would particularly draw attention to the word religious which has, as it were, insensibly slipped into the vocabulary of the purely literary man that Leavis was. And thus is literature linked to religion and philosophy, rendering them in human terms. Lest I be misunder­stood, I hasten to add that the poet (in the words of Jacques Maritain) has his own way, which is neither scientific nor philoso­phical, of knowing the world, and that the man of letters is kindred to the poet. “The poet is a man speaking to men,” said Wordsworth in very simple terms. These few words mark at once the distinction between literature and science.