ABSTRACT
The skirmish initiated by C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures declaration represented only a short battle in a long-standing feud between romantics and positivists. As discussed in chapter 2, during the nineteenth century, science and the arts had diverged, and instead of finding some form of reconciliation between their opposing ways of knowing, the Romantics held fast to an irreconcilable schism. They willingly paid the cost of a defense that would place the subjective ego close to its original conundrum:
Romanticism, far from providing an alternative to scientific objectification, simply turns reality over to the sciences once and for all and rests content with creating its own reality in imagination. Romanticism’s final story is that we can let science have reality, because we have another reality—a special reality that is in here, within the self. Given this view of things, however, the self is not just the center of the universe. It is the universe. (Guignon 2004, 65)
