Postmodern Postures
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Postmodern Postures

Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate

Daniel Cordle

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eBook - ePub

Postmodern Postures

Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate

Daniel Cordle

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About This Book

In 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal planted a hoax article in the journal Social Text, mimicking the social constructionist view of science popular in the humanities, and sparked into life the 'science wars' which had been rumbling throughout the 1990s. Postmodern Postures puts this contemporary controversy into the context of earlier debates about the 'two cultures', between F.R. Leavis and C.P. Snow, and Mathew Arnold and T.H. Huxley. Through an interrogation of interdisciplinary approaches to literature and science, and a discussion of the arguments surrounding postmodern culture, the book formulates a literary critical methodology for literature/science criticism, highlighting both the benefits and the limitations of attempts to link the two cultures. Three case studies, focused through the issues of knowledge, identity and time, put this methodology into practice, showing how ideas resonate through the culture between literature and science.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351909648

Part One
Theory

Chapter 1
The Two Cultures: Literature versus Science

When, on a lecture tour of America in the 1880s, Mathew Arnold took issue with T.H. Huxley's views on literature and science, he referred to his antagonist as 'an excellent writer and the very prince of debaters'.1 Yet, despite the courteous tone, even this relatively early debate on the topic of the two cultures was characterised by an underlying sense of conflict. Indeed, an atmosphere of profound disharmony is a notable aspect of almost all discussions about the relationship between literature and science.
Arnold was responding to assertions Huxley had made in 1880 at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason's Science College in Birmingham. Near the beginning of his speech, Huxley had used the image of warfare to explain the relationship between scientific and literary education, arguing that whereas in the eighteenth century the battle over education was about the relative merits of ancient versus modern literature, in the mid-nineteenth century 'the contest became complicated by the appearance of a third army, ranged round the banner of Physical Science'.2 Huxley presented himself as a 'full private' in this new guerrilla force, fighting to place science at the centre of education.
Although metaphors of warfare were apparent in this nineteenth-century debate, it was with the most famous two cultures dispute, between C.P. Snow and F.R. Leavis in the 1950s and 1960s, that the tone of personal respect epitomised by Arnold's description of Huxley was sacrificed for a more belligerent manner. When Snow coined the phrase 'the two cultures' in his 1959 Rede Lecture, he established his authority to speak for both camps by referring to his scientific training and his vocation as a novelist. It was this authority that Leavis sought to undermine with an extraordinary piece of invective:
Snow is of course, a - no, I can't say that; he isn't: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist ... The seriousness with which he takes himself as a novelist is complete - if seriousness can be so ineffably blank, so unaware ... He can't be said to know what a novel is. The nonentity is apparent on every page of his fictions - consistently manifested, whatever aspect of a novel one looks for.3
With the resurfacing of the dispute about literature and science in the 1990s, predominantly as a result of humanities scholars' determination to view science as a social construction, the discourse has again been dominated by images of conflict. The phrase 'science wars' has been bandied about, and the first British edition of Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's book, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science (which protests about the inappropriate use of scientific ideas, and the misconceptions about science, in the humanities) carries on the cover a number of provocative, antagonistic responses to the 1997 French edition of the book, including 'C'est la guerre' from Le Figaro.4
Despite the warlike nature of the debate, it is not the intention in this chapter to provide a military history of the conflict over the last century and a half, charting with painstaking detail the ebb and flow of sorties, skirmishes and campaigns. Instead, the chapter produces an analysis that scrutinises the terms on which the two cultures debate has been constructed. These have remained remarkably stable over the period, although the last decade has seen a slight shift as researchers - mainly, though not exclusively, in the humanities have sought to abolish the two cultures model. Because there has been this shift in the terms of the debate in recent years, this chapter will limit itself to the first two manifestations of the conflict, leaving a discussion of the latest battle to chapter 2. The prize for which the war has been, and continues to be, fought is the territory of education, culture and (linking these two) civilisation; and many of the disputes have been for possession of these concepts.
The analysis will begin by looking at the question of why it is that literature and science, in particular, should so frequently be seen to be at odds with one another. I will go on to describe the two cultures model in detail, offering an example, in the work of I. A. Richards, of some of the consequences it has for literary criticism, and suggesting some of the drawbacks of the model.

Why Literature and Science?

There is clearly an imbalance between the terms 'literature' and 'science'. Science denotes a whole range of disciplines and subdisciplines, across the range of chemistry, biology and physics. It is a term which, on its own, is applied in universities to faculties rather than individual departments. Indeed, one of the points of contention that sometimes arises in the two cultures debate is that science is described in the humanities as a single, unified thing, with examples from, say, biology wrongly taken as paradigmatic for the whole of science.5
Literature, on the other hand, is a concept of a fundamentally different type. It is only one of the arts, on a similar level to music and history, for example. In an academic context there might be literature or English departments (and these might divide up their study according to different periods or types of literature, or varying theoretical approaches to it), but it does not exist on a faculty level. It is only one aspect of study in arts or humanities faculties.
Why, then, has the vocabulary of the two cultures debate so frequently laid stress upon literature and science, and less frequently the arts and the sciences? One answer is that, for its proponents, literature has been used (perhaps rather self-importantly from the point of view of other subjects) as a champion of the arts. It has, in this sense, been constructed within the literature-science debate as a paradigmatic humanities subject.
For example, when Snow coined the phrase the 'two cultures' he made clear that the distinction he was aiming to enunciate was one between scientists and 'literary' intellectuals; and the person who rose to meet his challenge most readily was F.R. Leavis, whose association with the promotion of English studies as a serious discipline is inescapable.6 Similarly, in calling for a reassessment of the role of science in education, eighty years before, Huxley had protested science's lack of status in relation to the study of literature (and, more specifically, the classics).
This, perhaps, gives us a clue as to the origins of literature's status as the wider champion of arts subjects in the two cultures debate. Education was, before the advent of the systematic study of nature called for by science, essentially text-based. There might have been disputes about the type of literature it was appropriate to study - whether classical or modern literature was the best way to a cultured personality - but texts, of one kind or another, were the repository of knowledge. Indeed, as the insights of other approaches to knowledge - including science - tended (and tend) to get stored and passed on through texts of various kinds, it is perhaps not surprising that the study of texts should itself be seen, by some, to lie at the heart of education.
Another possible source for the importance of literature in two cultures debates lies in the early Enlightenment, with the shift in balance in theology that was occasioned by the success of science. In Science and the Enlightenment Thomas L. Hankins draws our attention to three main routes to knowledge about God available before the Enlightenment: the revelation of scripture, the application of pure reason, and natural theology. With the dawn of the modern scientific age, the last of these three - which involved searching for laws and regularities in nature so as to reveal the divine order underwriting it - became more important. 'As the- achievements of science grew in the seventeenth century', Hankins argues, 'the argument from design [a key aspect of natural theology] began to replace a priori rational arguments and often even the Revelation of Scripture as the principal evidence for religion'.7 In other words, the success of science demonstrated the promise of a path to knowledge that rejected literary criticism (analysis of the Bible and other sacred texts) and replaced it with natural philosophy (what we would term science): 'If God could be known from his creation, the Bible was not necessary to prove the existence of God'.8 If one of the origins of the institutional split between the arts and the sciences is a split between the study of texts and the study of nature, then it is conceivable that these characteristics should persist into the present as a way of characterising the differences between the arts and the sciences.
When the relationship between literature and science is debated, then, although the comments made are specific to literature (or to literary study another important distinction), they also often have a more general applicability to the arts. So, despite the discrepancy between the two terms, with science a concept which normally operates on a higher level than literature, spanning many disciplines, the effect of the two cultures debate is to promote literature from the level of an individual discipline to a broad umbrella term. It comes to function as equivalent to the arts, on the same conceptual level as the sciences. Using the context of the university to understand this transition, we might think of literature as a 'discipline-level' concept which, in two cultures debates, is transfigured into a 'faculty-level' concept so as to make it equivalent to science.
Although literature generally functions in this way in two cultures debates, it is important to note that there is another term which is frequently placed in opposition to science: religion. The religion-science debate opens up a vista of other questions; for instance about whether religious and scientific world-views are mutually exclusive or complementary, and about the nature and purpose of quests for knowledge. These questions, and this debate about the relations between science and religion, clearly intersect with the literature-science debate. For instance, in cruder versions of the debate, literature is sometimes imbued with a moral force and opposed to a stereotypical and simplistic perception of science as the statement of cold facts. However, although the two debates are related, they are conceptually distinct, and in order to maintain a coherent focus, this book only touches upon aspects of the religion-science debate as they pertain to the literature-science debate. For instance, the use of machine metaphors to understand what it is to be human and what it is to be alive, discussed in chapter 4, often relate to a demystifying of the human essence, and a challenge to the idea of human life as divinely ordained.
In order to explore farther the relationship between literature and science, and develop an understanding of the parameters of the two cultures debate, it is now necessary to scrutinise exactly what is at stake in the battles between some of the key combatants, from the polite spat between Huxley and Arnold, to the aggressive duel between Snow and Leavis.

The Territory for Conflict: Education and Culture

Although education was the primary subject of T.H. Huxley's speech at Sir Josiah Mason's college, and although culture was the primary subject of C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture, the two terms are closely intertwined. When Huxley called for science to become more central to education, one of the arguments he made supporting this point of view was that 'for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education'.9 Education is important here precisely because it offers a route to the cultured personality. The divergence between him and Arnold lay not so much in the actual definition of what culture entailed, however, as in the method by which it could be attained, and this explains the focus on education in their debate. Huxley claimed to agree with Arnold that 'real' culture is 'the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and of its limitations'.10 However, he diverged from Arnold in his belief that literature does not lay a 'sufficiently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, which constitutes culture'.11 By implication, Huxley's argument was that science's broadening of our understanding of the world meant that an appreciation of it was essential to the cultured personality; in a scientific age, scientific education is the means to the acquisition of culture.
Snow's project, eighty years later, was similar. As well as drawing attention to the gulf between the sciences and the arts, his lecture was clearly aimed at highlighting the failure of those on the literary side of the divide to perceive science as cultural. His famous assertion, that not knowing the second law of thermodynamics is equivalent to ignorance of the works of Shakespeare, was a rhetorically effective way of making this point.12 Just as culture and education are linked by Huxley's attempt to promote the place of science in education by stressing its importance to culture, so also are they joined by Snow's suggestion that the specialisation encouraged by the British education system leads to a failure to perceive science's cultural value.
While both Huxley and Snow identified failures in the British education system with the refusal to see science a...

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