The Snow/Leavis ‘two cultures’ clash

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.

> 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.

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.

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.279.5353.992

And his actual book on the two cultures is worth reading too (and only 54 p.).

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.

> ... otherwise Britain will sunset before its time, like the decadent Doges of the long-lost Venetian Republic ...

i love it when history rhymes

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.

Interesting article. While there's a lot to criticize about Snow's talk - that techno-optimism has aged very badly, after all - I think he's right that too many scientist types lack true artistic interest and thus insight going beyond a "neat!" while reading Herbert or listening to prog rock.

But I don't think the problem concerns scientists much more than the general intellectual class; yes, even amongst so-called literature or philosophy intellectuals. Learned but not wise is the recurring motif and I doubt anything can be done about a "problem" that's always been.

Michael Boland writing in New Polity recently pinned down this difference to a modern “forgetting” of Aristotle’s Final and Formal causes in favor of a flattened, horizontal worldview that only sees material and proximate (efficient) causes. The way Leavis went ad hominem didn’t help him make his point, but he had an important message: to philosophically reduce everything to concepts addressable by a scientific worldview is to produce a kind of death. It is to produce what C.S. Lewis called “Men without chests”—-men lacking zoe, life.

Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that it doesn’t quite make sense that things have intrinsic “being” and “ends” to which they are objectively and irrevocably oriented. It’s ultimately all raw material to be fashioned to purpose. This was demonstrated in a small way in a recent thread on Magnifica Humanitas.

The dichotomy is particularly important at this moment given that many of Leavis’ disposition see AI as the final technological embodiment of Snow’s worldview. If you see only efficient and material causes (and I’d argue even material causes are on their way out given cultural developments towards trans humanism), then AI is a smarter, more capable person (person being defined by what they can do, or effect in the world). If we leave out form and ends, then we will have birthed the first creation that surpasses the creator, on his own terms, in all ways. Someone of Leavis’ persuasion might say, “AI is a facsimile intelligence. Worse, a fraudulent intelligence. One that is missing the very essence of what it means to be intelligent, because “to be intelligent” entails relationship, and care, and ultimately love of the other who shares in your intelligence. The very meaning of intelligent “output” relies on this relationship being present, which is impossible for a cold, formless machine that renders tokens instead of words.”

The accelerationists are the ultimate result of taking Snow’s argument too its ultimate conclusion.

Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?

You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.

You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"

Just put it at the end, please!

If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.

Heck even in reader mode:

    ...his confrontation between Snow and Leavis – two dramatically different thinkers, representing traditions long in tension – gets at something more fundamental than
     the worn phrase that survived it: our deepest and conflicting temperaments towards life.
    
    Join more than 270,000 newsletter subscribers
    
    Our content is 100 per cent free and you can unsubscribe anytime.
    
    According to the English novelist Anthony Powell, C P Snow was affable, and rather humourless, the sort of man who gladly recognised a joke in conversation...