Overcoming the Two Cultures

Science vs. the Humanities in the Modern World-system

Richard E Lee Jr, Immanuel Wallerstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317254843
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

This book tells the story of how the very idea of two cultures-the so-called divorce between science and the humanities-was a creation of the modern world-system. The contributors, working from a common research framework, trace the divorce of "facts" and "values" as part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This led to a polarization between universalist "science" and the particularist "humanities" and finally to the creation of the social sciences as an uneasy intermediary in this epistemological debate. The book addresses the contemporary attempts to overcome the division between the two cultures that emerge from science, feminism, race and ethnic studies, cultural studies, and ecology, ending with an analysis of the culture wars and the science wars. Contributors: Volkan Aytar, Ay,se Betul Celik, Mauro Di Meglio, Mark Frezzo, Ho-fung Hung, Biray Kolloupglu K3/4rl3/4, Agustin Lao- Montes, Eric Mielants, Boris Stremlin, Sunaryo, Norihisa Yamashita, Deniz Yukeseker.

1

Introduction: The Two Cultures

Richard E. Lee and Immanuel Wallerstein

 

 

 

The “two cultures” is a phrase invented by C. P. Snow in 1959,¹ but the phenomenon he was describing is of course older. It is not, however, all that old, and that is the point of this book. In terms of human history, the idea that there are two cultures is relatively recent. Furthermore, whereas when Snow wrote his book, the concept seemed self-evident, which is why Snow’s phrase caught on, its validity has come under increasing challenge since the 1960s. We shall try to explain the origin of the concept, its impact and pervasiveness, and the nature of the challenges to it in recent years. This will, we hope, enable us to assess the likelihood that this way of structuring knowledge will continue to prevail and, if it does not, what the alternatives are.

The word “culture” in the phrase “two cultures” refers to the fact that scholars do their research, writing, and teaching on the basis of underlying epistemological presuppositions, which they use but seldom expound. To say that there are two cultures (in the structures of knowledge) is to say that scholars tend to group themselves in two different, indeed often opposing, camps with regard to the set of epistemological presuppositions they employ and believe useful and/or correct to employ.

The idea that there are two cultures is a comparatively simple one. The problem posed by Snow, “by training … a scientist: by vocation … a writer” (1993: 1), was that the two cultures did not “understand” each other. He was the master of a college at Cambridge, where fellows from many different disciplines met at high table. Snow observed,

Constantly I felt I was moving among two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean. (1993: 2)

Snow felt that such lack of mutual understanding among scholars was dangerous and a social loss, and his lectures were an attempt to bridge the gap by explaining each of the two cultures to the other. Snow was of course certain that there did exist two cultures and that they were quite different one from the other, and that in a sense they ought to be different. For Snow, the fact that there were two cultures represented an intellectual division of labor that was intelligible and justifiable. He was primarily (perhaps only) concerned with minimizing the internecine strife that had resulted from this scholarly reality. We are, by contrast, asking how the gulf between the two cultures was created and whether it can be overcome. Is it being overcome? Should it be overcome?

What does one mean by the two cultures? What even are their names? The answer is not so simple. One of the two cultures is usually called the scientific culture. The other has many names: the literary, the philosophical, the humanistic culture. We shall see that the fact that the latter has many names, while the name of the “scientific” culture is largely agreed upon, is not completely accidental. For Snow, as for many others, the two cultures are not symmetrical. They exist in a hierarchy of importance and/or merit, although which is higher has been a subject of de-bate.² And they are of different longevity: the humanistic culture is considered to be the older one, the “traditional” one, whereas the scientific culture is usually said to be the newer, more “modern” one.³

We shall be challenging this chronology as well. We shall be arguing that, prior to the existence of the modern world-system, the structures of knowledge were radically different in their epistemology from those of the modern world. We shall be arguing that, in the modern world, it was what eventually came to be called the scientific culture that emerged first and that the creation of the humanistic culture was in large part a consequence of the creation of the scientific culture.

It is important to start the analysis by thinking about the premodern world—not merely the premodern world in Europe, or what we now call the West, but the premodern world across the globe. There were of course many, many differences among the multiple civilizations, or historical systems, that existed prior to, say, AD 1500, but there was, it seems to us, a common feature to their structures of knowledge. This common feature was an inability to conceive that there were two distinctive ways of knowing, two epistemologies that one could employ in different domains.

In the premodern world, to know was to know. And while one could argue about what one knew, one did not really argue about how one knew. The specialists in knowledge, the intellectuals, did not know everything. But what they knew or claimed to know did not fit within any of the boxes called disciplines that we have created in modern times. The so-called disciplines in fact took quite a while to be established even within the modern world. They were not there in 1500 and were barely there in 1800. They are creations largely of the nineteenth century. And we are not really sure today if they will continue to be there, at least in the form we now know them, in 2100.

What is it that one knows? Three kinds of things: what is true, what is good, what is beautiful. The definitions of each of these abstract concepts constitute precisely what we mean by a civilization. The details of the definitions are of course debated, often quite fiercely, within the general framework of each so-called civilization. But one of the elements that integrate the historic civilizations has been that each believed that it could define and obtain knowledge about the true, the good, and the beautiful. And up to the modern world, no one seemed to think that these three objectives of knowledge were segmented, separable activities. Keats’s line of poetry “Truth is beauty, beauty truth” would have resonated well in all the historic civilizations, although it seems romantic and quaint today, and already did so in nineteenth-century Europe when it was written.

The story we shall tell seems to us quite straightforward. The first part of this book concerns the historical construction and institutionalization of the two cultures. This, in effect, is the story of the construction of an altogether new and unique structure, or “whole,” organized as a relational hierarchy of disciplinary “parts.” However, we are not writing a history of ideas. We are asking which ideas were widely accepted or influential and received the sanction of becoming the basis of institutions of knowledge, such that they were passed on, perpetuated, and developed by successive generations of intellectuals, scholars, scientists, in direct relation with the material processes of the modern world-system.

Concepts are not constructed in an instant. There is often a long process of slow gestation. Once a concept is constructed, one can always locate forebears. There is scarcely ever a totally new idea. But this does not concern us. We are interested in when and how some concepts become widely accepted as the basis of ongoing structures of knowledge. We believe, as you shall see, that the scientific culture was growing in importance and autonomy from the beginning of the modern world-system, which we date at the second half of the fifteenth century, even if the scientific culture as we know it today was not fully institutionalized until the nineteenth century. We believe that as the “scientific” culture, the putative realm of “truth” and “facts,” was separated out of what had been theretofore an all-encompassing “philosophy,” and a “humanistic” culture devoted to “willing the good” was constructed at the opposite pole of the consolidating structures of knowledge, there came about a major reaction, largely after the French Revolution, to the growing preeminence of the sciences. It includes but is not limited to romanticism. Thus, in the nineteenth century, the humanistic culture, or perhaps we should say a humanistic counterculture, was constructed defensively against the imperialist claims of the scientific culture.

And finally, in response to developments in the real world of human social relations that challenged the dominant modes of understanding in both the sciences and the humanities, in the latter half of the nineteenth century a third institutional arena, that of the social sciences, began to emerge, one that, we shall argue, has always been caught between the contradictory pulls of the by then well-established two cultures. Because the pressures on this arena were so great, the resulting confusion and lack of clarity has been perhaps greatest in this field of knowledge activity.

It seems clear to us that in this nineteenth-century struggle the scientific culture was able to impose itself socially as the dominant culture in the world of knowledge of the modern world-system. The degree of its supremacy seems to have been a steady upward curve until it reached a high point in the period 1945–1970. And then the scientific culture began to come under a severe counterattack. Externally, this occurred because of a broad-based shift in the political economy of the world-system, for which the world revolution of 1968 stands as a marker and a symbol. Internally, this occurred as an outcome of the process of development within the sciences themselves. We shall try to trace seven major intellectual movements, primarily in the period from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century. They are movements of quite different sorts. The first is that of complexity studies, a movement from within the scientific culture that has been challenging the formerly dominant epistemology. A second is the social studies of science, which is a movement that has been asking questions about how scientific knowledge is constructed. Then there are the movements we are calling “diversity movements”: feminisms and movements organized around race and ethnicity in the West. These movements exist both within the structures of knowledge and within the general political arena. We shall also consider popular culture/cultural studies, a movement that explicitly contests the divide between the humanities and the social sciences. We shall also look at ecology/environmentalism, again a movement that operates within both the structures of knowledge and the general political arena and, in this case, contests the divide between the sciences and the social sciences.

We shall try to outline the issues that are being raised by each movement and the degree to which they have been able to institutionalize themselves in the world university system and other loci of the structures of knowledge. But we shall do more than this. We shall try to evaluate the degree to which their concerns have led them to question the validity of the concept of the two cultures and to see how far they have been willing to go in this questioning. And finally, we shall look at the so-called culture wars and science wars as arenas of conflict over the validity of the concept of the two cultures. We believe that this kind of overall historical and analytic view of the ways in which the concept of the two cultures has served as a central pillar of the geoculture of the modern world-system has not hitherto been attempted. We believe further that the questioning of this concept that occurred in the last third of the twentieth century is a major cultural event, inseparable from important transformations in the world-system and contributing in its turn to further transformations. We think we are living in a sort of cultural hurricane or earthquake and that it is crucial for everyone to be very clear what are the issues and what are the alternative possible outcomes.

In analyzing this cultural past, we are participating in the struggle to create our cultural future.

Notes

1. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Canto edition, 1993).

2. Snow himself makes clear his hierarchy: “Most people, wherever they are being given a chance, are rushing into the scientific revolution. To misunderstand this posi-tion is to misunderstand the present and the future. It simmers beneath the surface of world politics” (1993: 80).

3. “If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist. It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the western world” (1993: 11). Note here that Snow speaks of the “western” world rather than of the “modern” world. This is an often tacit premise.

PART I

Historical Construction of
the Two Cultures

2

Constructing Authority: The Rise of
Science in the Modern World

Boris Stremlin

During the European Middle Ages, the production of knowledge generally conformed to the model outlined by St. Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, “[t]he uses of a knowledge of languages, of history, of grammar and even logic” lay in their capacity “as aids to the study of the Bible” (Southern 1953: 171). The Scholasticism that arose on this foundation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been described as purely logical and “extreme rationalism,” a “routine study of Latin,” which, owing to the chronic shortage of books, placed a “great emphasis on disputation and oratory” (Bowle 1970: 151–52). Despite the clumsiness of its methods, in aiming to “study problems of universal significance,” Scholasticism was animated by a wide-ranging curiosity (Southern 1953: 170). Its authority remained, nonetheless, indissolubly linked to a single and unquestioned set of values.

Ultimately, Scholasticism was undermined both internally and externally. From within, scholars eventually found themselves in agreement with those, like William of Ockham, who argued that since the power of God was absolute, it did not need to be explained rationally and therefore there was no need of finding ways of combining religion with worldly thought. From outside the Scholastic community, a variety of so-called humanist movements sought initially a modest objective—to reestablish what they perceived as the original form of Latin. But in so doing, they implicitly rejected the method of the Schoolmen who argued that Latin was the sole written and liturgical language and that therefore all ancient texts retained an air of inviolability, fit for commentary but not to be repaired. Over time, the consequence was that

the exacting philology [developed by the Humanists], which made it possible to restore the authentic form of an ancient work … could not be confined to the writings of pagan antiquity …. Thus, the humanist method called into question the Catholic Church’s most fundamental traditions, by the very procedures it followed. (Mandrou 1979: 47–49)

By the sixteenth century, the humanistic method had come to be widely used for the purpose of biblical exegesis and as such stimulated the proliferation of religious radicalism, both Calvinist (Moeller 1972) and Jesuit (Olin 1994). Moreover, its use was no longer restricted to Latin but applied to a variety of texts in Greek and Hebrew, which not only resulted in an increase of the number of texts available to the literate public but also uncovered theological traditions that many believed antedated that of the Catholic Church (Yates 1964: chs. 1, 4). Once the humanists embraced oral vernaculars, they shook the institutional foundations of the medieval structures of knowledge. The appearance of new secular literary genres—poetry, tales, romances, drama, and more localized conceptions of history—fostered the rise of new networks of readers located within circumscribed linguistic regions, no longer extending over the whole of Latin Christendom (Mandrou 1979: 130–31, 309–11).

Unlike the university Schoolmen, who were all technically representatives of the ecclesiastical estate and whose collective mission was to codify orthodox doctrine (French & Cunningham 1996) and teach it to all worthy students, the humanists shared no common social or professional ethic. Drawn to the best libraries, academies, observatories, collections of curiosities, and botanical gardens, many of them entered state service as ministers, diplomats, or artisans and came to resemble courtiers in their social outlook (Moran 1991; Biagioli 1992). Some became teachers at the new humanist colleges founded by princes or by the Jesuits, or at the few (notably Italian) universities that opened up to humanist learning (Schmitt 1984: chs. 14, 15). Other literati congregated around the new printing houses, which offered employment to translators, indexers, abridgers, and illustrators (Eisenstein 1983: 61–63). Some still depended on the mutual support offered by the informal network known as the Republic of Letters (Mandrou 1979: 55–57). Their lack of cohesion often elicited feeling...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Introduction: The Two Cultures
• Part I Historical Construction of the Two Cultures
• Part II Contemporary Challenges in and to the Structures of Knowledge
• References
• Index
• About the Contributors