CONSCIOUSNESS, LITERATURE, AND SCIENCE FICTION ii The Two Cultures But language is slippery, non-objective; not easily revealing repeatedly verifiable information, as does science. It is not even composed of irreducible symbols, and is, in fact, completely composed of metaphor. Words stand for something else; the Oxford English Dictionary is simply a compilation of exhaustive lists of examples of word usage, and the astonishing mutability thereof, through time. In the timestream of words, meaning ebbs, flows, changes. Perhaps this has something to do with the present splintered state of affairs between what C.P. Snow called, in his 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." [2] His subject was the difference between those who study words--which are exclusively the product of the human mind, and the shifting ways in which they can be assembled--and those who study the rest of nature. To describe what they have observed, scientists have invented new languages and borrowed the language of mathematics. But until recently, the study of consciousness was not seriously attempted by science. With the advent of the attempt to quantify consciousness, an intersection of these two cultures is not only useful, but inevitable. Snow, a research scientist who worked with Lord Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in the 1930's as well as a successful novelist, states in his talk, "Literary intellectuals (are) at one pole--at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two, a gulf of mutual incomprehension - sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground." [3]
Peter Watson, in The Modern Mind , [4] points out that although the arts incorporated the sciences during the first half of the twentieth century, art did not feed into the sciences in any meaningful way. Though it now seems obvious that this should be the case, this split is actually a new thing in history. Information and connections in the sciences gained phenomenal velocity beginning in the late nineteenth century. It was not until decades later that anyone in the sciences even tried to communicate the depth and importance of what they were about, although the fruits of what they were learning, in the form of technological change, were everywhere. In his book The Blank Slate, [5] Stephen Pinker blames the Modernists and Postmodernists for the insularity of the humanities in academe, for the fact that the "two cultures" of science and the humanities have grown so far apart. He also states that, in the main, those in the humanities would have the hardest time accepting that there is a genetic basis for much of who we are and what we do. He takes particular note of Virginia Woolf's 1924 essay, "Character in Fiction," (though he references "Mr. Bennett and Bennett and Mrs. Brown," an essay which, in its originally published form in 1923, did not contain this phrase) in which she states . . . "on or about December 10 1910 human nature changed." [6] Pinker says, "She was referring to the new philosophy of Modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to Postmodernism, which seized control in its later decades... Woolf was wrong. Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter." [7] Pinker assumes that "the philosophy of Modernism" was a largely artificial movement made up out of whole cloth by Woolf and other arbiters of taste--essayists, critics, and artists. The situation is actually a bit more complex. Although Pinker insists that, because of their evolved biological traits, humans prefer art that includes understandable landscapes, recognizable human faces, and novels that tell stories in the traditional fashion, it seems obvious that whatever Modernism and Postmodernism are, appreciation of them springs from biological roots as much as does appreciation of simpler modes of communication. He downplays another interpretation of the changes in the human psyche which Modernism concretely manifested - the fact that, due to changes in knowledge about ourselves and the world, and the use of new technologies which emerged from this knowledge, our reflection of these changes in art, literature, and architecture became radically new. Art emerges from humans, from some mysterious stratum intermingled with consciousness in ways which sometimes elude direct awareness. Art that is purely intellectual and calculated rarely finds as large an audience as did Modernism in all of its manifestations. Pinker's blame of literature for the intellectual impasse at which we find ourselves, and in particular the contention that Modernism and Postmodernism "caused" this impasse, are in some respects straw men. Science and the humanities differ in fundamental ways, particularly in the fashion in which they approach fact and knowing. Yet, it is in journals such as the one in which this paper appears that differences between "The Two Cultures" can be discussed so that there can begin to be a melding of the richnesses and insights of these two cultures, to everyone's benefit. Just as scientific progress in many fields, including that of consciousness studies, is crippled by lack of communication between specialized, but extremely knowledgeable people, so the idea that human progress in all academic fields can be given a boost by a cross-culturization of information seems plausible. It might, therefore, be useful to have more information about the change Woolf noticed, and how the change--if not in human character, then perhaps a change in what people thought of as human character, came about. Literature reflects zeitgeist; the spirit of the age is embedded in every literature that has ever been produced. Literary forms change as societal views change. Our modes of thought and representations of such are directly related to the culture in which they arise, whether that be medieval Germany or Postmodern America. In 1913, seven years before Woolf published her observations, the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti wrote about "...The complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science. Those people who today make use of the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the train, the bicycle, the motorcycle, the automobile, the ocean liner, the dirigible, the aeroplane, the cinema, the great newspaper (synthesis of a day in the world's life) do not realize that the various means of communication, transportation and information have a decisive influence on the psyche." [8] Even Henry James suggested that it is impossible for us to know how anyone in an age previous to the age when technology changed the human experience of time and space actually saw the world. And he further stated, in 1904, that "The notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a literal transcript has dawned on us." [9] To Virginia Woolf, the Post-Impressionist Exhibit of 1910 as well as the changes she observed in fiction were a testament to the changes that new scientific discoveries had brought about not in consciousness itself, which of course did not change, but in the contents of consciousness. A new lens through which to view the world and human nature had come into existence, and this new way of seeing time, space, matter, and human nature, as well as the new technologies thereby spawned, necessarily changed humanity, as Marinetti observed. The Moderns (who for the use of this paper are mainly James, Woolf, Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Eliot, though there were many more, both major and minor) realized that great changes were afoot; they lived through them and had the need to express their observations.
_____________ 2 Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures. 4 Watson, Peter. The Modern Mind. New York: HarperCollins, 2001 5 Pinker, Steven. The Blank Slate--The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking Press, 2002. 409. 6 Woolf, Virginia. "Character in Fiction," The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three, 1919-1924. Andrew McNeillie Editor. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovice 1988. 421. 8 Stevenson, Randall. Modernist Fiction--An Introduction . Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1992. 9. 9 James, William. Writings 1902-1910: The Varieties of Religious Experience/Pragmatism/A Pluralistic Universe/The Meaning of Truth/Some Problems of Philosophy/Essays. New York: Library of America, 1998. 860. |