PD Smith

Two cultures

12 July 2007 | Brockman, Science & literature, Vonnegut | 2 comments

The Span­ish philoso­pher Sal­vador Pániker has writ­ten a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on the two cul­tures for the Opin­ion page of El Pais (Feb­ru­ary 18, 2007). He argues that “per­me­abil­i­ty between sci­ences, arts and let­ters” should become “a hall­mark of our times”.

Refer­ring to John Brock­man’s idea of a “third cul­ture” of sci­en­tist-writ­ers and the dawn of a new age of human­ism, he sug­gests that intel­lec­tu­als out­side the sci­ences do need to engage with sci­ence: “Human­is­m’s received task is more def­er­en­tial toward the auton­o­my of sci­ence: To tru­ly under­stand our most fun­da­men­tal con­di­tion­ings; to ensure that sci­en­tif­ic par­a­digms tru­ly fer­til­ize philo­soph­i­cal and even lit­er­ary dis­course.”

Cul­ture is “born from the cross-fer­til­iza­tion of indi­vid­ual dis­ci­plines”. Rather than seek­ing to uni­fy all fields of knowl­edge beneath the ban­ner of sci­ence, Pániker joins French philoso­pher Edgar Morin in call­ing for a spir­it of “trans­dis­ci­pli­nar­i­ty”, which “aspires to a com­mu­ni­ca­tion between the dis­ci­plines based on com­plex thought”.

I agree very much with Pániker’s argu­ment. You can’t ignore sci­ence, but nei­ther should you be a pas­sive consumer. As some­one who writes about the his­to­ry of sci­ence, lit­er­a­ture and film, find­ing those moments where these dif­fer­ent fields meet and pro­duce new ideas is what it’s all about.

It reminds me of a mem­o­rable quote from the late great Kurt Von­negut: “I think that nov­els that leave out tech­nol­o­gy mis­rep­re­sent life as bad­ly as Vic­to­ri­ans mis­rep­re­sent­ed life by leav­ing out sex.“ 

Pániker’s arti­cle is on Brock­man’s site, Edge.

And while we’re on the sub­ject of the two cul­tures, there’s an amus­ing blog on poet­ry and sci­ence by Shirley Dent at Guardian Unlim­it­ed. Tim Adams has also writ­ten an intrigu­ing piece for the Observ­er on “The new age of igno­rance”. It’s inter­est­ing that in this arti­cle, Brock­man says Von­negut was one of the lead­ing nov­el­ists who declined to take part in the meet­ings with sci­en­tists, artists, archi­tects, and musi­cians that even­tu­al­ly became Edge. I won­der why…

2 comments so far:

  1. shannon | 12 July 2007

    I found this inter­est­ing:
    “A new human­ism should begin with a mod­esty cure, per­haps by abjur­ing the very arro­gant con­cept of human­ism, which places the human ani­mal as the cen­tral ref­er­ence point for all of exis­tence.”

    Real­ly, could we have any oth­er ref­er­ence point than the one that comes from our own con­scious­ness? I don’t think we can. From this ref­er­ence point comes the rea­son for both sci­ence and literature–our search for answers on our ori­gins, our motives, where our future will take us, etc. They are just two dif­fer­ent tools used to dig for the same answers, as far as I can see.

  2. PD Smith | 12 July 2007

    Hmm. I see your point. I agree this is a prob­lem­at­ic how-do-we-know-what-it’s-like-to-be-a-bat kind of state­ment.

    But sure­ly there’s some­thing lib­er­at­ing in acknowl­edg­ing that ours may not be the only view of the way things are…?