The Third Culture: Literature and Science

337 Pages·1997·53.094 MB·English

by  Elinor S. Shaffer

The Third Culture: Literature and Science
W
DE
G
European Cultures
Studies in Literature and the Arts
Edited by
Walter Pape
Köln
Editorial Board:
Philip Brady j% London · Keith Bullivant, Gainesville
Frederick Burwick, Los Angeles · Peter de Bolla, Cambridge
Mark Galliker, Heidelberg · Joachim Gessinger, Potsdam
Marian Hobson, London · Günter Jerouschek, Halle
Francois Lecercle, Lyon · Carlo Ossola, Torino
Terence James Reed, Oxford · Elinor S. Shaffer, Norwich
Barbara Stafford, Chicago
Volume 9
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1998
The Third Culture:
Literature and Science
Edited by
Elinor S. Shaffer
Walter de Gruyter · Berlin · New York
1998
© Printed on acid-free paper
which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure
permanence and durability.
Die Deutsche Bibliothek — CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
The third culture: literature and science / ed. by Elinor S. Shaffer.
Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1998
(European cultures ; Vol. 9)
ISBN 3-11-014292-9
© Copyright 1997 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-10785 Berlin.
All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher.
Printed in Germany
Typesetting: Greiner & Reichel, Köln
Printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin
Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer GmbH, Berlin
Cover design: Rudolf Hübler, Berlin
Cover illustration: Based on Johann Wolfgang GoeAe,
Symbolische Annäherung zum Magneten,
Stiftung Weimarer Klassik/Museen
Contents
E. S. SHAFFER
Introduction: The Third Culture — Negotiating the 'two cultures' ....
Theoretical Approaches
GILLIAN BEER
Has Nature a Future? 15
MARIO VALDES/ETIENNE GYON
Serendipity in Poetry and Physics 28
WILLIE VAN PEER
Sense and Nonsense of Chaos Theory in Literary Studies 40
Romanticism
JOHN NEUBAUER
Goethe and the Language of Science 51
JEREMY ADLER
The Aesthetics of Magnetism: Science, Philosophy and Poetry
in the Dialogue Between Goethe and Schelling 66
ROSWITHA BURWICK/FREDERICK BURWICK.
"Hollin's Liebeleben": Arnim's Transmutation
of Science into Literature 103
FERGUS HENDERSON
Novalis, Ritter and 'Experiment':
A Tradition of 'Active Empiricism' 153
JOANNE MERRISON
The Death of The Poet: Coleridge and the Science of Logic 170
VI Contents
NIGEL J. LEASK
Mont Blanc's Mysterious Voice:
Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science 182
LUDMILLA JORDANOVA
Writing Medical Identities 1780-1820 204
Modernism and Post-Modernism
DUNCAN LARGE
Chemical Solutions: Scientific Paradigms in Nietzsche and Proust.... 217
Bo G0RANZON
Beyond All Certainty: Wittgenstein and Turing: An Account of a
Philosophical Dialogue on Skill and Technology 237
SALLY SHUTTLEWORTH
Natural History: The Retro-Victorian Novel 253
JEFF WALLACE
"The World Before Eyes": Calvin, Barthes and Science 269
Bibliography 285
Figures and Illustrations 305
Notes on Contributors 307
Index 313
E. S. SHAFFER
Introduction:
The Third Culture — Negotiating the 'two cultures'
The title of the volume may merit a word or two of explanation, though both
the notion of the 'third culture' and the interdisciplinary field of literature and
science have become established points of departure. A very brief reminder
will suffice of the terms in which the 'third culture' was defined in English.
The phrase 'the two cultures' was given currency by the Snow-Leavis debate,
set off by C. P. Snow's Rede Lecture of 1959, "The Two Cultures," and carried
on in ER. Leavis's fierce riposte in 1962, "The Two Cultures? The Signifi-
cance of C. P. Snow." This debate was in turn a conscious updating of the
Arnold-Huxley debate, initiated by Thomas Henry Huxley's 1880 lecture
"Science and Culture," and responded to by Matthew Arnold in his Rede Lec-
ture, "Literature and Science" two years later.1
C. P. Snow had argued that "in advanced Western society we have lost even
the pretence of a common culture." He had pointed out that the traditional lit-
erary culture and the scientific culture — and their representatives — had almost
nothing in common. He made a bid for the recognition of a "scientific culture"
by the guardians of traditional culture. In the second edition of his lecture
(1963) he was most impressed not by Leavis's slashing rejection of this bid but
by suggestions from his public that a new, a "third culture," which he had over-
looked, was possible and indeed already on the horizon. "I am now convinced
that this is coming," he wrote. He excused himself for not having recognized it
on the grounds that he was "conditioned" by his English education "to be sus-
picious of any but the established intellectual disciplines, unreservedly at home
only with the 'hard' subjects."
Casting about for a name to characterize the third culture, he described it as
'social history'. "Social historians," he said, "are those who are on speaking
1 Huxley: Science and Culture and Other Essays; Arnold: "Literature and Science." Selected Essayes.
— For a more detailed discussion of the Huxley-Arnold debate and its implications for liter-
ary criticism, see E. S. Shaffer: "How Many Cultures Had Lady Macbeth?" Gustafsson et
al., eds: Science and the Powers, pp. 136—92.
2 Introduction
terms both with scientists and literary intellectuals." But he went on to define
this group more broadly, including intellectuals in a variety of fields — not only
social history, but sociology, demography, political science, economics, psychol-
ogy, medicine and the social arts such as architecture.2
Since the Snow-Leavis debate the 'third culture' has come to have a pow-
erful input from a new group of literary theorists, who have created a ferment
inside traditional literary studies. This would not have been so surprising to
Matthew Arnold as to Snow or Leavis. His reply to Huxley's call for scientif-
ic education — and English literature — to replace the classics was to give liter-
ature the broadest possible definition: it included books such as Euclid's Ele-
ments, Newton's Principia, and his contemporary Darwin's Origin of Species.
Arnold was not so much countering the claims of science, as opposing
Huxley's call for the founding of a department of sociology: for him, litera-
ture itself was the repository of 'moral science'. ('Moral sciences' was, of
course, J. S. Mill's term for the new social sciences or what in Germany were
called the Geisteswissenschaftenl) In short, literature may be construed as a form
of 'concealed sociology' and one in which a particularly subtle and nuanced
representation of complex social facts is supplied. For an informed foreign
observer like Wolf Lepenies, in his book Between Literature and Science: The Rise
of Sociology (1988), this position remains England's most distinctive contribu-
tion to sociology.
Whereas Snow seemed to envisage a rather loose grouping of 'mediators'
between the two cultures, recent critics in the United States, for example,
George Levine, in his book of that tide, One Culture: Essays in Science and Litera-
ture (1987), have called for the One culture', — or indeed, proclaimed its arrival.
The One culture', according to Levine (himself a literary historian and critic), is
not a discipline in which two independent kinds of disciplines are to be merged,
but a cultural discourse in which the significance and function of both are de-
fined. The premise here is that both science and literature have been trans-
formed into 'discourse'.
The interface of science with other disciplines has become a matter of ur-
gency in our time, because science is the dominant intellectual discipline, whose
authority, influence and, through its practical applications, financial and politi-
cal power are unequalled. Even on 'ultimate' questions science today has taken
the place of both theology and philosophy, and books offering scientific an-
swers to the age-old questions of the formation and end of the universe, the es-
sential character of human nature and consciousness, and the parameters of de-
2 Snow: The Two Cultures, p. 70.
Shaffer: The Third Culture - Negotiating the 'two cultures' 3
cision-making about matters of life and death have attained a remarkable pop-
ularity.
At the same time, as it gained in power, however, science has been increas-
ingly subjected to question, both as to its intellectual claims, and as to the prac-
tical consequences of its hegemony. The intellectual questions have come espe-
cially from philosophers and historians of science who seek to place the
construction of the scientific mode of thought, scientific logic, models, and ex-
perimental method in the context of the times in which they originated and de-
veloped; like any discipline, natural science had its reasons in the culture of its
time, and its claims even to universal validity may be analyzed in those histori-
cal and social terms. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) (whose author
Thomas S. Kühn died last year) has been a seminal book, challenging the claim
to a continuously progressive and coherent body of scientific inquiry and
knowledge, suggesting rather a succession of relatively discrete dominant
'paradigms'; almost equally suggestive have been the studies by Foucault, espe-
cially in The Order of Things, of the dominant 'epistemes' of any historical period
as they affect the shaping of apparendy disparate disciplines within them. The
major change of the last thirty years (with its remoter modernist roots in the
wave v quantum debate) is the move away from the 'Whig history' of science,
that is, away from the tracing of a progressive, cumulative, and ultimately uni-
fied set of interlocking theories and experimental structures. Sociologists of
science study the power structures which govern scientific practice and the in-
stitutional confirmation and support it receives from them. In twentieth centu-
ry terms science (in its many branches) is a language or discourse which may be
analyzed like any other. Literary studies are concerned both with the way sci-
ence impinges on literary works or is represented within them, and increasing-
ly with the ways literature and related fields may have found a resonance with-
in scientific thinking and the formulation of 'research programmes'. The traffic
is not all one-way. Further, it is concerned with looking upon science as produc-
tive of a literature — a scientific prose, operating through some or all of the gen-
res of note, document, proof (mathematical or logical), empirical evidence or
data, experiment, self-experiment, thought-experiment, case study, journal arti-
cle, public address — which urgently requires analysis in rhetorical terms. If sci-
ence is in important respects a social product, how does it persuade? First, how
is consensus reached within the scientific community? How does it persuade
the individual scientist, his colleagues and peers, the institutions (university, la-
boratory, leading journals, funding councils)? Beyond consensus among scien-
tists, how are more remote institutions persuaded (colleagues in adjacent fields,
business, government agencies and ministries)? And finally, how is the wider
public persuaded? These questions have called forth a wide range of studies,