'"Snow or Leavis? The bland scientism of The Two Cultures or, violent and ill-mannered, the one-track, moralistic literarism of the Richmond Lecture?"--that was the choice offered by Aldous Huxley's Literature an Science, published in 1963, four years after Snow's Rede Lecture.' (Ray Porter)
I discovered Ray Porter's essay The Two Cultures Revisited after looking for references to Aldous Huxley's Literature and Science. Quite a joy to find as its provides interesting discussion and background to C.P. Snow's famous essay.
Ray Porter manages to outline in his essay a number of points that relate to my interest in trying to align the two fields of art and science.
'"Charles Percy Snow, as every school person knows, deplored the polarization of the English intelligentsia into two camps marked by "hostility and ... lack of understanding": "Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension." ... Now, of course, the philistine scientist ignorant of Shakespeare was rightly ridiculed; but, Snow claimed, if you asked arty coteries to state the second law of thermodynamics, not only would they not be able to do so, but they would be positively proud of their scientific illiteracy.'
Historically, states Porter, debates were often framed by scripture versus science, Genesis versus geology 'jousts brought to a head in Victorian times by the publication in 1859 of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and which culminated, a full century later, in the antiscientific countercultural backlash of the hippie sixties. For, as Aldous Huxley insisted when asking "Snow or Leavis?" there was an alternative, indeed there were many. "The field has known a long succession of fighters for this cause or for that," he maintained, "a long succession, too, of earnest compromisers."'
The perceived incompatibility of art and science has a huge impact on the fields today. This project seeks to argue, predominantly via practice and artefacts that this incompatibility is a myth.
Huxley, A (1963), Literature and Science. New York: Harper and Row
Porter, R. (1996). The Two Cultures Revisited. Duke University Press
Snow, C.P. (1959). Two Cultures. Cambridge University Press