Both [Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis] are concerned with what Leavis calls “the cultural consequences of the technological revolution.” Both argue passionately against the trivialization of culture, against what Arnold dismissed as “a superficial humanism” that is “mainly decorative.” And both looked to culture to provide a way of relating, in Arnold’s words, the “results of modern science” to “our need for conduct, our need for beauty.” This is the crux: that culture is in some deep sense inseparable from conduct—from that unscientific but ineluctable question, “How should I live my life?” Leavis’s point was the same. The stunning upheavals precipitated by the march of science and technology had rendered culture—the arts and humanities—both more precarious and more precious. Leavis understood that the preservation of culture —not as entertainment or diversion but as a guide to “conduct”—was now more crucial than ever. If mankind was to confront the moral challenges of modern science “in full intelligent possession of its humanity” and maintain “a basic living deference towards that to which, opening as it does into the unknown and itself unmeasurable, we know we belong,” then the realm of culture had to be protected from the reductive forces of a crude scientific rationalism.
The “Two Cultures” revisited (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion)
By Humanities Watch|2017-08-15T20:10:59-04:00August 16th, 2017|Academia, Debate / dialogue, education, Employment, Europe, Language, Literature, News, Philosophy, science, STEM, Technology|0 Comments
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