ABSTRACT
Many of the forms of interdisciplinarity I have examined so far in this book have sought to question the traditional hierarchy that subordinates the humanities to the more narrowly defined concerns of the sciences. The long-standing division between the humanities and the sciences remains a resilient obstacle to interdisciplinary study, but it is still capable of being challenged. This chapter explores some of the connections that have been made in recent years between literary studies and the sciences – and between literary studies and geography, a social science that deals fundamentally with the relationship between the natural and social world – in relation to new understandings of space, nature and the physical world. It goes on to discuss ecocriticism as a field that merges those of literary and cultural criticism, geography and the natural sciences, with its fundamental premise that human culture is inextricably connected to nature. Finally, it investigates the efforts of some scientists to use evolutionary theory and developments in neuroscience to interpret literary and cultural texts. The most widely discussed attempt to question the divide
between the sciences and humanities is C.P. Snow’s ‘The Two
Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’, a lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1959 which was almost immediately published and provoked intense debate in several countries. Snow bemoaned the ‘gulf of mutual incomprehension’ that existed between the sciences and humanities, arguing that the British education system exacerbated the situation by forcing pupils to specialize too early (Snow [1959] 1993: 4). As I pointed out in Chapter 1, F.R. Leavis was the most outspoken critic of Snow’s thesis, perhaps because of the latter’s barely concealed animosity towards the ‘literary intellectuals’ whom he regarded as the dominant force in the humanities. However, although Snow accused these literary intellectuals of being ‘natural Luddites’ and of ‘the most imbecile expressions of anti-social feeling’ ([1959] 1993: 22, 8), he also expressed deep reservations about the insularity and narrow-mindedness of much of the scientific profession. His main aim was clearly to show that both fields were impoverished by their ignorance of each other, so that ‘in our society … we have lost even the pretence of a common culture. Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual concern’ (Snow [1959] 1993: 60). In fact, Snow’s anxieties about specialization had considerable
affinities with Leavis’s, since he conceded that there was ‘no complete solution’ to the problem and that ‘in the conditions of our age … Renaissance man is not possible’ ([1959] 1993: 61). Like Leavis, he suggested that the best opportunities for improving the situation were provided by education, and particularly interdisciplinary studies. Unlike Leavis, though, he did not propose any one subject as a meeting point for all the others, suggesting that productive connections needed to be made across the science-humanities divide:
Snow’s lecture sketched out the fundamental nature of the disagreement between the sciences and humanities, in a way that remains topical. Those in the sciences still tend to criticize humanities scholars for disregarding empirical methods and relying on subjective interpretations; those in the humanities attack scientists, in turn, for a misguided faith in the possibility of absolute objectivity, a narrow conception of useful knowledge and an unwillingness to interrogate the broader social, political and cultural implications of their work. Many of these disagreements can be traced not only to the different scope and subject matter of the sciences and humanities but their contrasting assumptions about how knowledge should actually be accumulated. I want to begin this chapter by tracing the origins of this division in the belief that the sciences have a special claim to ‘truth’, rooted in the empirical method, which represents a powerful argument for the separation of the disciplines. I then want to look at recent challenges to this unquestioned empiricism from within the sciences themselves, which have paved the way for more productive connections to be made with non-scientific disciplines.
