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When Charles Percy Snow rose to deliver the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, he had good reason to be satisfied with himself. By sensible tenacity he had reached an upper station of English society, an unlikely terminus for one raised by a lower-middle-class family from a suburb of Leicester. He had grown up surrounded by artisans and labourers, a distant but kindly father, three beloved brothers, and a smothering mother. But by his 55th year, around the time he presented his Cambridge lecture, one could find Snow living in the only red-brick building on Eaton Terrace in one of London’s prestigious neighbourhoods, issuing calmly authoritative opinions on books and politics and science. He was, to his happiness, considered a serious man, with opinions worth hearing.
Of the many opinions he expounded at formidable length over his lifetime, only the phrase he introduced in his Cambridge lecture remains relevant: the ‘two cultures’. Within a few years, his term passed into common speech, and it is still quoted, a lifetime later, by people who have never read a word of Snow. But after more than half a century of overuse, it’s largely been wrung of its original meaning so that today the two cultures refer rather blandly to distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, calling attention to two apparently incommensurable ways of going about understanding the world.
But this is a thin, surface reading of what Snow actually said. His real opinion of the two cultures differed dramatically from what is now remembered. It incited a chorus of commentary; many praised his pithy articulation of how we enquire into the world. But it struck one man as so obtuse, so grossly symptomatic of the times, that it warranted a violent public response. That man was the Cambridge English scholar F R Leavis. Three years after Snow’s lecture, he delivered an improbably savage rebuttal in which he called Snow, among other things, a ‘preposterous and menacing absurdity’. This 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.
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 but wouldn’t be caught telling one himself. He could almost be compared to a computer, given his literal cast of mind and extraordinary capacity for work. With his large bald head, surfeit of chins and thick glasses that magnified big, bemused eyes, Snow’s visage was ripe material for caricaturists. Private Eye magazine even ran an unkind poll asking its readers if ‘C P Snurd’ was not the ugliest public figure of the day (Snow promptly sued for libel, and won; the results of the poll, alas, were never released).
But mockery is the price of fame, and a price well worth paying for the class-conscious and title-titillated Snow (his name had recently been ornamented with a knighthood by the young Queen). In 1959, he was most of the way through writing his semi-autobiographical cycle of novels, Strangers and Brothers. He had published seven of an eventual 11, tracking the life of his shadow, Lewis Eliot, who spent much of his time dealing with lengthy bureaucratic squabbles, sometimes in government, sometimes in university (Snow coined the term ‘corridors of power’). The eighth instalment of the series, called The Affair, was just finished when Snow gave his lecture. It contains in its closing an immortal line of literature, which captures better than anything else the tenor of Snow: ‘sensible men,’ a character grimly announces, ‘usually reach sensible conclusions.’
When he approached the lectern on 7 May 1959, Snow set out to make an eminently sensible point to the attendees of the Rede Lecture, crowded into the august Senate House at Cambridge. He titled his lecture ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’ (having discarded his original title, ‘The Rich and the Poor’). Despite the prestige of the event, Snow had little reason to expect much of a reaction to his lecture. More than two years earlier, he had published much the same thesis in New Statesman magazine without making a ripple. But now the idea had found its time, and Snow, to his own surprise, conjured a tempest that blew his name across the continents.
The content of the talk itself was explosive, even if delivered in a tone of invincible modesty
Snow told the crowd that, though he was no longer a practising scientist (he trained as a physicist in the 1930s), he still closely followed scientific developments. But his vocation, he noted with delighted self-curiosity, was that of a working and acclaimed novelist. (Sometimes over-acclaimed: George Steiner once said that Strangers and Brothers made Snow a peer of Proust.) Snow claimed that this uncommon duality of a life spent in science and in literature gave him a rare vantage on the ‘intellectual society’ of the West. He would, he explained, go from spending the day in the company of scientists to dining in the evening with their counterparts, whom he termed ‘literary intellectuals’, or simply ‘intellectuals’.
From Snow’s experience with these scientists and literary men – all men – he discerned a deep cultural cleft. The scientists read literature, but not seriously (Charles Dickens comes to them as someone ‘extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding’). Meanwhile, the intellectuals have a shy respect for science, but couldn’t tell you quite what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is – which Snow decides is the scientific equivalent of not having read a single work of Shakespeare. And the two cultures are drifting further apart:
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.
This divergence disquiets Snow, and one would think from how his diagnosis is remembered that the purpose of the lecture was to call for a rapprochement between the cultures. In fact, Snow considered the lecture – and much of his work – to be an honest effort at mediation. But the content of the talk itself was explosive, even if delivered in a tone of invincible modesty. ‘The Two Cultures’ is incendiary, made more provocative by the pose he initially assumes as a disinterested diplomat ready to scurry between the two camps. He is, in fact, a highly motivated and partisan agent of the scientists.
Snow locates the origin of difference between the scientists and the intellectuals in their varying attitudes toward humankind’s existential situation. He intones that:
the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone: sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone.
Life is brief and brutal – and, confronted with this stark fact, how is one to respond? For Snow there are two options: supine submission to fate, or heroic struggle against the inevitable. ‘There is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle,’ he says. That is: one could be a scientist, striving to make the world a better place to live in, or one could be an intellectual, ‘complacent in one’s unique tragedy, and let the others go without a meal.’
Caring about bettering this life sets the two apart: the scientists do, and the intellectuals don’t. Snow’s argument then ratchets up rather abruptly when he intimates that the literary folks should be blamed, in part, for Auschwitz, though fortunately this isn’t a line of thought he follows. What he does say, however, is that the complacency of intellectuals makes them yearn for a yesterday that never was and yet also wish ‘the future did not exist’. In support of this, Snow looks to the Industrial Revolution, which ‘the traditional culture didn’t notice: or when it did notice, didn’t like what it saw.’ Intellectuals may be content contemplating an invented past, when things were supposedly seamless and simple, but in the face of modernity and its challenges, they ‘shuddered away’; their novels and poems ‘not in effect more than screams of horror’. It’s clear to Snow that the Industrial Revolution was a Good Thing, since he says that ‘Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor.’ So what would that make the intellectuals? ‘Natural Luddites’ were his exact words.
Snow considered scientific research to be in and of itself a moral act
Snow was nothing if not a practical man, and he declares that, on practical terms, political power must be wrested from the traditionalists, otherwise Britain will sunset before its time, like the decadent Doges of the long-lost Venetian Republic (then a common image of decline). Snow goes on to elaborate his view on education, and to some muddled extent the Cold War, but by now the sensible point has been made: that society must turn away from the ‘feline and oblique’ intellectuals and towards the scientists, who, you’ll be relieved to know, are ‘steadily heterosexual’ (as he described them in the New Statesman).
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. They ‘have the future in their bones’, Snow declaims, and it is this that also makes them more moral than the intellectuals (he considered scientific research to be in and of itself a moral act). Their minds, honed by contact with the real, innocent facts of the world, can grapple with its ailments, namely poverty and the Cold War. Being conversant in the ways and discoveries of scientists, then, is the best way to be fully modern, fully of our time. Science is the morally necessary stance to take towards the world in order to truly understand it and make it better. And just how do the scientists do this? Technology, mostly, which can be used to alleviate life’s brutality for the impoverished ‘common men’ throughout the world. Material comfort is the ultimate aim.
Toward the end of the lecture, Snow counsels that the country needs a substantial investment in the education of scientists, who with technocratic coolness will one day hold the reins of power and steer Albion towards a happy future. Science is the solution, and because of its quantitative rigour, able scientists can quickly be identified and elevated – the perfect meritocratic system, which hugely appealed to Snow, who made his way to the top not by land or by family but by good, hard, sensible work.
Public reaction to Snow’s lecture was swift and divisive. The Spectator magazine printed letters about the two cultures for months, and many important people in Britain, and eventually the United States, debated it. Senator John F Kennedy called it ‘one of the most provocative discussions that I have ever read of the intellectual dilemma.’
Snow, for his part, was winningly humble about the hubbub: a few years later, he said that it ‘was clear that many people had been thinking on this assembly of topics. The ideas were in the air.’ Which is true. If anything – and that’s a singular if – the originality of the lecture lies in its unabashed endorsement of science over the humanities, not in any fine distinctions or diagnoses. Indeed, the tone of Snow’s lecture approached the indignant clarity of a manifesto. In the aftermath, his reputation reached its apotheosis. The prime minister Harold Wilson briefly appointed him to the Ministry of Technology, and Snow ascended once again to become a baron in 1964. He chose as his motto Aut Inveniam Viam aut Faciam: I will either find a way or make one. Lord Snow expected the Nobel Prize in due course.
But by the time of his barony, Snow’s name had become linked to someone who had a rather different view of the issues confronting modernity. In fact, this man seemed to hate him with thoroughgoing ferocity. So comprehensive was it that Snow later blamed him for the stubborn lack of a Nobel. If it was any recompense to Snow – and it wasn’t – the literary critic Frank Raymond Leavis was an insufferable prick to pretty much everyone.
In February 1962, almost three years after Snow gave his diagnosis of science and literature, Leavis delivered the Richmond Lecture at Downing College, Cambridge, ominously titled ‘The Two Cultures? The Significance of C P Snow’. Leavis was small, angular, large-collared, with a potent gaze that unnerved his students. He ‘was Seriousness personified’, recalled Clive James. ‘He even had a serious way of being bald.’ In the early 1960s, Leavis was at the height of influence, and the twilight of his teaching career.
The Evening Standard predicted ‘Stormy Don’s Swan Song Should Be A Fiery One’
For a generation, Leavis had exercised his will on English Literature at Cambridge, shaping the sensibilities of readers over decades. Indeed, he did more than anyone else, save I A Richards, to turn literature into a fit subject of rigorous academic enquiry. He was zealous, loved, loathed and extraordinarily successful. Noel Annan called him a ‘deviant’ of the age, a ‘don who despised scholarship as pedantry, a critic who called for collaborative enterprise yet considered compromise as treachery, a moralist who demanded writers – in fact everybody – should be judged by a single standard.’ Nevertheless, five years after Leavis’s death in 1978, Terry Eagleton could still write that there ‘is no more need to be a card-carrying Leavisite today than there is to be a card-carrying Copernican.’
Given his stature, the press took an interest when Leavis announced he had something to say about Snow’s thesis. The BBC even wanted to record the lecture, but Leavis refused. Several reporters were present, however, and the hall was packed and full of expectation, fanned by an article in the Evening Standard that predicted ‘Stormy Don’s Swan Song Should Be A Fiery One’.
It was. Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow ‘is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity’, and ‘portentously ignorant’. While outraged Cantabrigians angrily quit the hall, Leavis barrelled on imperviously: ‘Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist.’ It was not just that he was a deficient writer, ‘for as a novelist he doesn’t exist; he doesn’t begin to exist. He can’t be said to know what a novel is.’ On and on, Leavis torched his target. Snow’s lecture was distinguished by ‘a show of knowledgeableness’ that Leavis claimed he wouldn’t permit in a group discussion, ‘let alone a pupil’s essay’. Snow’s ‘unconsciousness is an essential characteristic’; ‘a mind to be argued with – that is not there.’ Then the speaker paused to assure his audience, quite unconvincingly: ‘Don’t, I beg, suppose that I am enjoying a slaughterous field-day.’
Leavis’s invective yanked the focus of the debate from the nature of intellectual life in postwar Britain to an examination into precisely how stupid the roundheaded nonentity from Leicester really was. Pretty much everybody, on both sides of the Atlantic, was appalled by Leavis’s cruelty, by the searing petulance so unexpectedly served up in the hallowed halls of an ancient university. The English writer Hilary Corke, after allowing that Snow’s lecture was ‘not very original’, spoke for many startled onlookers when he wrote that ‘there is really not the slightest reason why the thought of the good Snow should bring blood-flecked froth to the mouth.’
But froth Leavis did. Why? Because, for Leavis, Snow had become a symbol of the times, the primary example of its vacuity, its thoughtlessness, its bloodlessness. The point is that for Snow to be considered a ‘sage’ – and he was – then something very wrong had happened to intellectual life. As Leavis says, it was the fact that prospective students of Downing College, Cambridge continued to reference Snow’s lecture in their applications that set him off – as if Snow was anything like the ‘great English novelists’ that he once enumerated with typical definitiveness (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad). In a world attuned to the values of great literature, Snow would’ve been laughed into annihilation; instead, he was crowned a leader of thought. So, in taking down Snow, Leavis meant to take down the whole soulless system that had raised him up in the first place.
The infelicitous name that Leavis chose for this system was ‘technologico-Benthamism’. Leavis did not mean by this classification anything political. In fact, his politics overlapped with Snow’s. As Guy Ortolano writes in his excellent book The Two Cultures Controversy (2009), they ‘shared a commitment to meritocratic ideals, along with a corresponding hostility towards egalitarian demands – both of which they expressed by defending elites.’ They were snobby liberals who disdained Marxists as much as fascists, if not more, and proud Englishmen who were unthinking defenders of their ‘natural’ rights and privileges. ‘If ever two men were committed to England, Home, and Duty,’ wrote the American critic Lionel Trilling in 1962, ‘they are Leavis and Snow.’ But Leavis was ultimately invested in ideas and literature as he understood them, not the grime of the day-to-day, and it’s notable that the virulent interwar debates on pacifism, rearmament, communism and the General Strike seemed not to interest him very much (though the quarterly review he founded, Scrutiny, had its political dimensions and would influence the next generation of highly engaged critics such as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall). Naturally, the future Minister of Technology was more responsive to events, but his political predictions, especially at the opening of the Second World War, are striking for how consistently and assertively wrong they were.
Then what did Leavis mean by ‘technologico-Benthamism’? What is this heartless system that anointed Snow and invited such ruthless contempt? It is the stance one takes towards the world that makes analytical and reductive thinking the most promising path towards truth and wellbeing. It is shaped by the idea of utility, and it speaks the evidently precise language of logic and formulae. It aims for rigour, for certitude – for the cool satisfaction of correct answers to solvable problems. It is systematic, conceptual, and feeds off data rather than anecdote; objectivity is valued more than subjectivity. It is materialistic and tends to assume that language is a reasonably accurate reflection of reality. It is gratifyingly commonsensical. Right words rightly put would give one a sense of how the world is, in and of itself – that is to say, simplistically, that ‘science’ is ‘true’. To understand the world, one must be conversant in science and its morphing conclusions, responsive to its methods, deferential to its practitioners. It is this style of thought, or approach to life, that Leavis sees as having launched Snow to his unearned heights – all while draining British culture of any meaningful vitality.
It was just this drab preoccupation with exactness that bothered Leavis
With the intensity of a paranoiac, Leavis saw technologico-Benthamism everywhere he looked: the Sunday papers, the Wilson government, the recent statistical turn in the social sciences. And it’s not difficult to find exemplars of technologico-Benthamism in British history. Jeremy Bentham, of course, and his utilitarian epigones arrayed against Coleridge and his romantic mystifications; optimistic men of science like Thomas Huxley and H G Wells taking on the more aesthetically inclined likes of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater; and J B S Haldane, a friend of Snow’s, who in his debate with Bertrand Russell in the 1920s foresaw unbelievable technological progress tempered by ethical stasis. John Stuart Mill glossed the distinction with acuity: ‘By Bentham … men have been led to ask themselves … Is it true? And by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it?’ In the 20th century, when scientists became more influential, and technological advancement bemused and inspired the public, Leavis saw the cold quantitativeness of technologico-Benthamism stultifying culture to a tragic degree.
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?
Unfortunately, to have even asked this is, for Leavis, already to have misunderstood life. Life cannot be adequately defined. It is too big for that – too fluid, too profound, too inexhaustible, too limitless. The few times Leavis actually stooped to give some modicum of an indication about what this word is doing in his thinking, he barely did more than gesture. ‘Life (which is creativity),’ he once wrote parenthetically. Ortolano attempted to sum up Leavis’s definition of life as ‘the creative act at the core of what it meant to be human’. Near his death, Leavis said: ‘Life is growth and change in response to changing conditions.’ But none of these are robust definitions: he’s hardly saying more than ‘life is alive’.
As Eagleton later scorned: ‘If you asked for some reasoned theoretical statement of [the definition of life], you had thereby demonstrated that you were in the outer darkness: either you felt Life or you did not.’ Aldous Huxley, in his novel Point Counter Point (1928), had made a similarly sardonic remark:
Burlap’s belief in Life was one of the things Walter found most disturbing. What did the words mean? Even now he hadn’t the faintest idea. Burlap had never explained. You had to understand intuitively; if you didn’t you were as good as damned. Walter supposed that he was among the damned.
Many have been content to count among the damned. There’s no doubt that such a view of life was wilfully exclusionary, not dissimilar from the keepers of ancient esoteric truths. Indeed, Leavis was an out-and-out elitist whose overarching purpose at Downing College was to create a caste of literary hierophants who would possess a rarified understanding of life, preserve the highest of high culture, and duly dispense correct opinions to the befuddled masses. That whole endeavour can strike us today as rather silly or perhaps even authoritarian. But shorn of his cult-building, Leavis’s attitude towards life deserves to be taken seriously because it is not, historically, an unusual view.
For Leavis, Snow represents the denial of life, the disregard for its mystery
The urge to gesture towards things that do not seem possible to articulate is common, perhaps ubiquitous. The limits of language – that is, what is permissible to say about the world so that others may understand you and disagree with you – are by nature fluid. Our experience of being is neither fully captured by our awareness nor by our language. To adapt the American philosopher Richard Rorty, a part of our dealings with the world, especially when we’re thinking philosophically, is the effort to say what hasn’t been said before, to try to put into words sensations or phenomena that haven’t yet been. It’s what people do in these moments, when confronted in an immediate way with the feeling of trying to say the unsayable, or encountering things that in some sense seem too expansive for the confines of words, that tends to demarcate certain approaches to how one lives. For some, logic, exactitude, quantification, definition and analysis hold out the promise of greater understanding about ourselves and the world. For Leavis, in sensing life in great literature, it was necessary to leave its mystery unblemished by attempts at analysis, or quantification, or definition. That is, life’s essential mystery is best illuminated by not making it explicit, but by showing, through works of great literature, where life could be found.
For Leavis, ‘life’ is not something ‘out there’ to be sought or communed with. It’s not like a spirit or a God. It’s rather a secular disposition that searches for the extraordinary qualities of the present, the quotidian. It imbues the natural with the supernatural – a hallmark of Romantic thought according to the American critic M H Abrams, and one that also marks Leavis’s thought. And it is a profoundly personal experience to sense the life that courses through great literature.
Leavis’s approach to literary criticism stresses the personal encounter, as when he fairly summed up how to deal with art, with life, in his Richmond Lecture. To the question ‘This is so, isn’t it?’, an interlocutor replies: ‘Yes, but – .’ As the critic Chris Joyce explained, the ‘but’ stands ‘for reservations, qualifications, and so on.’ It is not that each encounter with literature produces incommensurable and utterly idiosyncratic responses so that, in those vapid words, ‘everyone is right’. It is that, by navigating literature with others by way of ‘Yes, but …’, better judgments will be alighted upon.
Leavis says that technologico-Benthamism, defined by its scientism and its devotion to logic and clarity, cannot account for everything that can be thought. To him and others with a sympathy for inexhaustibility and ineffability, the promoters of technologico-Benthamism seem to hold that they can either ignore or explain away the mystery of life, or that it can somehow be tamed and stilled by analysis. In this way, they are, to borrow from John Keats, not burdened by that mystery. That is what makes them so suspicious and what makes Snow – ‘the blind enlightened menace’ – so portentous. He represents the denial of life, the disregard for its mystery. By deflating the unnameable quality of life to such a dreary term as ‘standard of living’ – which is what Snow did – he threatens to ossify all that makes living interesting and creative. Snow and the technologico-Benthamites’ indefatigable certainty ignores something crucial to being human, and by ignoring it diminishes it.
Snow is like the minister of commerce in E T A Hoffmann’s anecdote, who, after listening carefully to a long symphony, asks the man sitting next to him: ‘And what, dear Sir, does that prove to us?’
The Spectator printed Leavis’s lecture a few weeks after he delivered it, and, wickedly, illustrated the issue with several insulting caricatures of Snow’s unusual face. Snow reported to a friend that he was ‘nettled’ by Leavis, though this is an understatement. In fact, he lurched into action by swiftly deploying his network of dignitaries to attack Leavis through letters, editorials and lectures. It was a coordinated if not very successful campaign, executed by his devoted friend the historian J H Plumb. Then Snow himself responded in the essay ‘The Two Cultures: A Second Look’ (1963). He didn’t mention Leavis by name, reiterated and (unnecessarily) stressed how simple his original thesis had been, and quibbled about how he had been misquoted. He speculated, too, about the emergence of a ‘third culture’ that would somehow bridge the gap between the original two (a project unconvincingly taken up by the American impresario John Brockman in the 1990s). It was not an effective outing.
Leavis, for his part, remained enchanted by himself. He sent his fulsome self-congratulations to friends and devotees. A ‘classic’, he deemed his lecture, and marvelled at its complete ‘unanswerableness’. But these loving reviews rather miss the mark: reading Leavis’s lecture today, one is still struck most of all by its vituperation, its overwhelming hatred for Snow and what he represents. Even without the abuse, much of what Leavis presumes – especially his idea of ‘life’ and literature – goes unsaid, and what Stefan Collini observed of Leavis’s criticism as a whole applies to the lecture: ‘one can encounter the disconcerting sense that the real work of analysis had always already been performed.’ That which had already been performed was the development of the mystical – some, including Leavis, say ‘religious’ – idea of life. It had been performed not only by Leavis, but by the long line of Romantic and mystical thinkers who preceded him.
Snow’s view of life, on the other hand, is not religious. It is not mysterious. It is solid and examinable and fashionably dull. When Snow says that the scientists want to improve people’s lives, he means that he wants people to have their material necessities taken care of so that they may do whatever they will, even if it’s embarking on a monstrous career in English at Downing College. But for Leavis, this idea that life can be whittled down to material comforts is entirely to miss the point of living in the first place, which he takes Snow himself to be so colourfully exhibiting.
It’s not necessary to try to resolve the two cultures, or to collapse them into one, or to invent a third
So, what of the two cultures today? The condition that Snow described more or less remains: there is indeed an obdurate incomprehensibility between the sciences and the humanities. From the vantage of the scientists, the humanities – some subjects more than others – are of dubious value if not purpose, an accusation that sometimes stings given the relentless and defensive soul-searching among humanities scholars (though this is also part of what it means to be engaged with the humanities at all). From their side, the incomprehensibility is both of the achievements of science itself, but also that the scientists think they can do without the humanities, as if their discipline can exist in a culture-less vacuum without scrutiny of non-scientific issues like morality, value, history and purpose. Of course, neither view is very fair.
But this is a surface-level understanding of the gap between the two cultures today. Snow and Leavis’s confrontation gets at something more fundamental. Their mutual incomprehensibility is better understood through the lens of a number of distinctions or dichotomies: technologico-Benthamism and life; science and literature; Snow and Leavis. These distinctions extract cross-sections of the two cultures at varying angles, suggesting tendencies, temperaments and emphases of each side. More dichotomies come to mind: utilitarianism and romanticism; tough-minded and tender-minded; Bentham and Coleridge; mechanical and dynamic; fact and interpretation; objective and subjective; thought and feeling; future and past; truth and meaning. There are no doubt many more.
When arrayed before us in such a way, it’s tempting to see in these dichotomies two poles of a conversation that extends back at least as far as Plato, and to see Snow’s two cultures as a sort of piquant formalisation of both. What William James said in 1907 about the history of philosophy can be applied to the two cultures: it is ‘to a great extent’ a ‘clash of human temperaments’. As such, it’s not necessary to try to resolve the two cultures, or to collapse them into one, or to invent a third. What we should consider instead is something simpler: what are we doing when we raise the question of the two cultures in the first place?
We are reflecting upon our intellectual and existential life in the widest possible arena. We are making judgments about varying ways of dealing with human experience. Of course these different approaches will clash, sometimes fruitfully, sometimes not. But raising the question of the two cultures is also to see the multiplicity of intentions people bring to their existence, the great varieties of hope people have for their labours and investigations; it is to engage in the irrepressible dialogue about what experience is about at the highest level because it asks questions of an ultimate nature. And this is what Leavis thought was the essence of literature, of art: to ask ‘What for – what ultimately for?’