Science and Culture, Part II: The Arnold-Huxley debate

Oh, most magnificent and noble Nature!

Have I not worshipped thee with such a love

As never mortal man before displayed?

Adored thee in thy majesty of visible creation,

And searched into thy hidden and mysterious ways

As Poet, as Philosopher, as Sage? 

Humphry Davy, as quoted in John Davy's"Fragmentary Remains"

It may seem that scholars have been arguing about the relative priority of sciences and humanities in education and culture since the earliest days of the Academy.{{reference 1}} But, as we saw in the previous post, the idea of separating academic disciplines into these groups is in fact no older than the 19th century. In the last quarter of that century, two eminent scholars and public figures of their time, the poet Matthew Arnold (“at once the most formidable and the most temperate champion of the Humanities”{{reference 2}}) and naturalist Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”), had a gentlemanly but pointed public exchange on the matter that encapsulated some of the best arguments on both sides. 

Since then, the debate has resurfaced many times in various forms and contexts — from the much more bitter C.P. Snow – F.R. Leavis controversy in 1950s Britain, to the more light-hearted repartees over physicists and lyricists in the Soviet Union and the shape rotator vs wordcel memes in recent internet memory.  

That the debate has been recurring and each time emotionally stirring tells us something about the lasting tensions about who gets to define "culture" and what it means to be "educated." But there is also an unwavering desire for a unified culture. There is a sense that the things an engineer or a biologist cares about and those salient to a novelist or a musician ought to somehow belong to a single conversation rather than to isolated subcultures. The tension is not only about whose work matters more or less but about whether we can make ourselves intelligible to one another. 

Physician-writers, linguists turned mathematicians, English majors who went on to become neurologists and history majors who switched to theoretical physics (not to mention scientists who make art and music) are all testaments to the affirmative. Yet the very fact that we single them out suggests that this cultural unity is not to be taken for granted. It may well exist in individual lives but it is hard to come by at the institutional level. 

In the 19th century, as Western economies were industrializing, major educational reforms were under way. In Britain, the traditional curriculum of Greek, Latin and English literature which would previously grant one the “stamp of the educated man” was starting to be deemed insufficient to prepare the new professional classes for modern life.{{reference 3}} In a time of rapid technological advances, training in science was becoming as essential for education as Horace’s and Milton’s poetry had once been. But it took time for this disposition to be widely accepted. 

Enter Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold. The two gentlemen were on friendly terms and had exchanged extensive private correspondence in the 1860s and 1870s before taking their debate on the sciences and humanities into the public space. 

Thomas Huxley on the role of the sciences in culture

Huxley delivered his lecture titled Science and Culture at the opening of a science college for working and middle-class students in Birmingham in October 1880. Mason Science College wasn’t the first educational institution in Britain to teach the sciences{{reference 4}} but it was first to take a stand against the classics, banishing not only theology but also “mere literary instruction and education” from its curriculum. It is no coincidence that Thomas Huxley chose the opening of this college as an occasion to advance his arguments on the increasingly important role of the sciences in culture.

He starts out with painting a picture of the state of science education of his time. It would seem quite unusual to us, reading the lecture in the 21st century, that in Huxley’s Britain the natural sciences had to fight for their rightful place in university curricula, to be on par with ancient and modern literature. The advocates of science education, Huxley notes, have been opposed both by the practical men of business and by classical scholars of the day.{{reference 5}} Yet Huxley comes forth offering his defense of the educational experiment commencing at Mason College: 

For I hold very strongly by two convictions—The first is, that neither the discipline nor the subject-matter of classical education is of such direct value to the student of physical science as to justify the expenditure of valuable time upon either; and the second is, that for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education. [here and below, bolding added]

For the majority of educated Englishmen at the time, however, culture was to be acquired only through “liberal education,” which meant primarily instruction in literature, particularly of Greek and Roman antiquity. 

But what is meant by culture here? Huxley turns to the definition offered by “our chief apostle of culture,” Matthew Arnold, stating that the meaning of culture is “to know the best that has been thought and said in the world.”{{reference 6}} 

Huxley readily agrees with Arnold that culture is “criticism of life contained in the literature,” our way of making sense of it:

For culture certainly means something quite different from learning or technical skill. It implies the possession of an ideal, and the habit of critically estimating the value of things by comparison with a theoretic standard. Perfect culture should supply a complete theory of life, based upon a clear knowledge alike of its possibilities and of its limitations.

But, he says, literature alone is not sufficient to supply this knowledge, and that natural sciences are essential for a complete culture. In what follows, he unfolds his criticism of the contemporary state of humanities and calls for a revision of the British educational system. 

Looking back at the history of education, Huxley contrasts the modern study of science with the Medieval scholastic approach to learning, which was “essentially bookish” (as C.S. Lewis put it in The Discarded Image{{reference 7}}). Fluency in Latin was a necessity for acquiring “all the higher knowledge of the western world,” since it was contained in books written in that language. Through these written works, Medieval people were equipped with a complete and essentially theological criticism of life — their Model of the Universe and the place of humanity in it:

Our ancestors had a living belief in this theory of life, and acted upon it in their dealings with education, as in all other matters. Culture meant saintliness—after the fashion of the saints of those days; the education that led to it was, of necessity, theological; and the way to theology lay through Latin.

This apparent completeness of the Medieval system of the world was challenged by the revival of the Greek studies through Arabic translations (and later originals) of ancient texts from the 12th century onward. Greek philosophy and literature tremendously enriched and expanded Western European culture. With the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, classical learning spread more broadly, and “[t]hose who possessed it prided themselves on having attained the highest culture then within the reach of mankind.” Huxley refers to them as the Humanists. By the Renaissance, ancient Greeks were seen as the paragon of “perfect intellectual freedom – of the unhesitating acceptance of reason as the sole guide to truth and the supreme arbiter of conduct.”

But, says Huxley, in his own 19th century the classics alone no longer represent the only avenue to culture or a complete encapsulation of it, because of the increasing importance of natural sciences. Natural knowledge is what may be called “a scientific criticism of life”:

It appeals not to authority, nor to what anybody may have thought or said, but to nature. It admits that all our interpretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic, and bids the learner seek for truth not among words but among things. It warns us that the assertion which outstrips evidence is not only a blunder but a crime.

Moreover, and this is the crux of Huxley’s argument, – what we now know as classics is itself a part of a culture that was deeply engaged with the natural world. In what feels like the culmination of the lecture, Huxley puts forward his main sharp criticism of “the modern Humanists”:

…that they may be learned specialists, but that they possess no such sound foundation for a criticism of life as deserves the name of culture. And, indeed, if we were disposed to be cruel, we might urge that the Humanists have brought this reproach upon themselves, not because they are too full of the spirit of the ancient Greek, but because they lack it.

That is quite a devastating contention – that the humanists have betrayed the Greek spirit whose torch they claim to carry forth. Indeed, for ancient Greeks a complete education meant natural philosophy – knowledge of the natural world — along with metaphysics and rhetoric and poetry and gymnastics. The spirit of the ancient Greek was inquisitive about all that exists in the universe and certainly wasn’t content with written texts only. Huxley continues, 

We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of the Greeks unless we know what they thought about natural phenomena. We cannot fully apprehend their criticism of life unless we understand the extent to which that criticism was affected by scientific conceptions. We falsely pretend to be the inheritors of their culture, unless we are penetrated, as the best minds among them were, with an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth.

The use of the “scientific method” is rather anachronistic here but otherwise this is Huxley’s strongest challenge to classical humanism.{{reference 8}} Granted, he acknowledges that the innate capacities and talents of mankind are varied, as accordingly are the paths to culture:

I am the last person to question the importance of genuine literary education, or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete without it. An exclusively scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusively literary training. 

Yet at the end of the lecture he reiterates and reinforces his main argument that for those who want to dedicate their lives to the study and practice of science or medicine or business — “for all these … classical education is a mistake.”

Shots fired. It would take a no less eminent and articulate thinker than Huxley himself to present a worthy response.

Matthew Arnold’s Rede lecture in defense of humanities

It wasn’t until August 1882, about two years after Huxley’s lecture, that Matthew Arnold delivered his Rede lecture{{reference 9}} titled Literature and Science at the University of Cambridge in response to him. Arnold opens his talk documenting the turning tide in the place of sciences in education, with “friends of physical sciences”{{reference 10}} becoming “a growing and popular body.” Leading publications of his time were already prophesizing the downfall of humanities in a not so distant future: 

…the Times…takes the gloomiest view possible of the future of letters, and thinks that a hundred years hence there will only be a few eccentrics reading letters and almost every one will be studying the natural sciences…{{reference 11}}

In response to Huxley’s insinuation that literature alone does not supply sufficient knowledge to represent and make sense of culture, Arnold suggests that some clarification of terms is in order. Namely, what is meant by literature, as a path to culture? Literature that Arnold has in mind is not just belles lettres (“fine letters,” like fiction, poetry and drama{{reference 12}}), as implied by Huxley. It’s not just “superficial humanism” or “a smattering of Greek and Latin and other ornamental things” which can be seen as the opposite of the exact and veridical scientific knowledge. Instead, in Arnold’s definition:

Literature is a large word; it may mean everything written with letters or printed in a book. Euclid’s Elements and Newton’s Principia are thus literature. All knowledge that reaches us through books is literature.

If culture is defined as “the best that has been thought and said in the world,” Arnold also includes in it the works of “the great observers and knowers of nature.”{{reference 13}} By this token, all serious thought participates in the same enterprise – building a shared recorded culture. And in this sense, there’s no disagreement between Huxley and Arnold. However, some later commentators have argued that “to reduce science to literature by insisting that science is a kind of writing” is misleading.{{reference 14}} Science is first and foremost a living practice and is far from being fully contained in academic articles and books.{{reference 15}}    

Arnold goes on to praise the value of scientific knowledge as rooted in verifiable observation and experiment that everyone should have some experience of. Indeed, from the beginning of his career as Inspector of Schools, Arnold defended the view that while not every student needed to learn the classics through original Greek and Latin, a balanced, complete education would include both humanities and scientific training.

But where Arnold diverges in opinion with “the friends of the physical sciences” is when it comes to universally making science the predominant, or even exclusive, program of education. In the following, Arnold builds a compelling line of argument in defense of humanities.

What do the advocates of science education risk missing by neglecting or excluding humanities from a complete education? The very constitution of human nature, no less. Arnold starts by enumerating the major forces that play out in human life and that build up human nature: “the power of conduct, the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, and the power of social life and manners.”

In other words, these are the powers that are essential for the answers to eternal questions like “How should I live my life?”, “How should I carry myself in the world?”, “How should I relate to people around me?”. Importantly, these powers are not isolated:

Following our instinct for intellect and knowledge, we acquire pieces of knowledge; and presently, in the generality of men, there arises the desire to relate these pieces of knowledge to our sense for conduct, to our sense for beauty, and there is weariness and dissatisfaction if the desire is balked. Now in this desire lies, I think, the strength of that hold which letters have upon us.

Bits of knowledge in any field can be interesting in and of themselves but it is in human nature to seek to piece them together and relate them to general principles. This is a clear tendency within the disciplines of natural science. The periodic table systematizes our knowledge of chemical elements and equips us with the ability to predict their properties. Conservation laws in physics set constraints on the possible behavior of physical systems. Phylogenetics in biology is a reconstructed view of evolutionary history based on genomic relatedness of organisms in the tree of life.  

But the same tendency just as well applies outside of systematic natural knowledge: 

We feel, as we go on learning and knowing… the need of relating what we have learnt and known to the sense which we have in us for conduct, to the sense which we have in us for beauty.

In Plato’s Symposium, the priestess Diotima of Mantinea speaks of men’s desire that “that which is good should be for ever present to them.” This desire, she says, is the essence of love (eros). Strange as it may sound to the modern ears, Diotima’s definition points not to romantic love but to nothing less than a cosmic striving for unalloyed Good (agathon) that manifests as a drive to “beget in beauty” – through children, through works of thought, deeds of virtue and, at a societal level, through laws and institutions. 

Arnold suggests this same primordial desire is at the root of the human instinct for unifying and integrating knowledge, including natural knowledge, with our sense of what it means to live a good life. In following this instinct, “we are following the instinct of self-preservation in humanity.” Eros in Diotima’s sense is an integrative force, it refuses to be content with fragmentary and disconnected facts. Instrumental, factual knowledge is useful inasmuch it can serve as a bridge to something beyond itself:

Knowledges which cannot be directly related to the sense for beauty, to the sense for conduct, are instrument-knowledges; they lead on to other knowledge, which can. 

In the words of Saint Bernard,{{reference 16}} “There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity. There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity. There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.” Of course, any discipline, scientific or artistic, can be engaged with at any of these levels or their combination. But Arnold argues that it is the unique role of the humanities to cultivate a disposition toward the world which nurtures the third level of knowledge seeking and integration, one built on Love.    

The realm of science is that of means, not ends. It tells us how to best do things we have already decided to do, not why we ought to do them. Scientists work with dedication to expand and deepen our knowledge of nature - but take any scientific theory or experimental result, and ask: what does it mean in the grand scheme of things, how does it relate to our sense of beauty and moral conduct? 

There are of course practicing scientists who are inspired and imaginative writers communicating new ideas in science to the general public, and it can be argued that they were proportionately even more numerous earlier in science history. But those that take on the daunting task of addressing Arnold’s questions are few and far between. That is a task more fit for the humane letters, at least in Arnold’s view. But the question remains, whether modern humanities are indeed up for the task. Do humanities in practice deeply engage with new scientific knowledge and integrate it into the collective humanistic sensemaking? We will return to this question later. 

Someone who is a “born naturalist” can perhaps be so deeply absorbed by his research that he can “pass his life happily in collecting natural knowledge and reasoning upon it,” and be content with it. Arnold relates a sentiment expressed by Darwin, who was said to have once admitted to a friend that he lacked the need for two things “which most men find so necessary to them – poetry and religion; science and the domestic affections, he thought, were enough.”{{reference 17}} Though this anecdote must have taken place later in his life – in his 20s, while on the board of the Beagle, Darwin had one constant companion book with him, and that was Milton’s Paradise Lost, which he re-read multiple times.  

Arnold thought “Darwins are very rare”, but perhaps (late) Darwin was in fact a harbinger of things to come. In Arnold’s own time a more typical man of science was more like Michael Faraday, who still considered himself a natural philosopher with a deep interest in theology, rather than a “mere” scientist.  

While Huxley was largely critical of Medieval education as static and limited, Arnold calls attention to the fact that scholastic knowledge   

…delivered by Scripture and the Church so deeply engaged men’s hearts, and so simply, easily, and powerfully related itself to the desire for conduct, the desire for beauty <...>. All other knowledge was dominated by this supposed knowledge and was subordinated to it <...>.

And even if, as Huxley warned, the new knowledge brought forth by modern physical sciences threatens to shatter the harmonious worldview that our predecessors lived by, the more there is a need for the humanities to reintegrate and relate this knowledge to our sense of how to live a good life:{{reference 18}}

…if we find by experience that humane letters have an undeniable power of engaging the emotions, the importance of humane letters in man’s training becomes not less, but greater, in proportion to the success of science in extirpating … “mediaeval thinking.”

That the letters indeed have this power over us, says Arnold, is ubiquitously attested by experience. As an immediate example, Arnold invites us to ponder the difference between two statements: a common saying like “Patience is a virtue” and this weighty quote from Homer, “for an enduring heart have the destinies appointed to the children of men.” The former, more plain saying conveys its message clearly, to be sure, – but it is the latter that stirs something in us, that elevates us above mundanity. This is not merely a matter of stylistic or aesthetic differences. Great literature doesn’t merely express thoughts more beautifully; it makes conceivable kinds of thoughts that plain speech cannot reach. It creates a larger expanse for thoughts that can be thought within it. 

There’s no straightforward answer or a recipe as to how exactly the humane letters can relate new scientific knowledge to our moral and aesthetic values. But Arnold is convinced that the art and poetry of those who lived before us, who even had a limited or erroneous knowledge of nature, have in fact

…not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they have also the power, – such is the strength and worth, in essentials, of their authors’ criticism of life, – they have a fortifying and elevating and quickening and suggestive power capable of wonderfully helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for conduct, our need for beauty.

Arnold thus reinforces his belief that the appeal of humanities will remain irresistible and essential in our cosmic quest to unify all knowledge in service of a good life, so long as the human nature remains what it is.

*

There is undoubtedly an untold wealth of this “elevating power” contained in the writings of those who came before us, regardless of the accuracy of their scientific picture of the world. But it seems that the modern humanities have been taking this point to implicitly mean that there’s little to be added to our understanding of human nature, besides the already existing literature, or other literary works building on it. This may explain the general resistance of the modern humanities to absorbing new scientific knowledge into a more complete criticism of life. Cognitive literary studies, environmental humanities and a suite of new humanities disciplines with the neuro- prefix (neurophilosophy, neuroaesthetics, neurohistory, neuroarthistory; usually based on the work of a single innovative author) are all steps in this unifying direction; yet they are marginal movements that command little engagement both within the broader humanities and outside of them.  

Contrary to Arnold’s expectation, it seems that historically it has in fact been scientists who have made more earnest and rigorous attempts to reach across the growing divide between “the two cultures”, as C.P. Snow called the estranged institutions and practitioners of literature and of the sciences, nearly 80 years after the Arnold-Huxley debate. And while initially the scientists’ role as cultural translators was, in a way, a social necessity imposed by the then existing cultural conventions, in more recent times such attempts to synthesize and work towards a consilience of all knowledge have come from maverick undertakings of individual scientists, going against institutional pressures for specialization.  

In the 19th century, a practicing scientist, like any educated person, had to be closely acquainted with the Western literary canon to be admitted to the “cultured class.” Breadth of reading was highly prized, and scientists in their writings made refined references to contemporary and older fiction and poetry to win the confidence of their readers. And indeed, if you read through the essays by scientists and literary writers of the 19th century collected in this anthology, you’ll see that scientists of the day were no less skilled and imaginative writers than their contemporary men of letters. Some even wrote poetry reflecting their scientific work or criticism of scientific practice (see also the epigraph to this post).{{reference 19}}

Today, if we hear about a professor of molecular biology who also reads lectures on Faust and theology, we are rather surprised (and delighted). People like Dr. Stephen Meredith of the University of Chicago are quite rare. Among their small but notable number are Iain McGilchrist, Terrence Deacon, E.O. Wilson, Antonio Damasio, Eric Kandel and Amos Funkenstein. Each of them has seriously attempted to weave new scientific knowledge into a unified picture of human nature and human culture.{{reference 20}}  

But perhaps another source of the still predominant recalcitrance of the contemporary humanities to deep engagement with the contemporary sciences is the implicit fear that science is capable of “explaining away” human nature with crude reductionism. A wonderful account of this tension is developed by C.S. Lewis in Meditation in a Toolshed where he relates his experience of standing in a dark shed with a shaft of sunlight falling through a crack in the door. One can look at the beam and see a bright column of dust motes, or one can step into its path and look along the beam, out of the shed altogether, seeing the sun and the green world beyond. 

Looking at and looking along, Lewis suggests, are not rival methods competing for the one true picture, but two irreducible modes of our access to reality. To look only at is to risk mistaking external detached analysis for the whole of experience, and to look only along is to risk never seeing how our experience might in fact itself be open to probing and explanation. The best of two worlds is to learn how to move between them without losing sight of one while inhabiting the other. 

The faculty that allows us to do so is imagination. Scientific imagination lets us build abstractions of reality and model that which we cannot observe directly – worlds too small or too large to access with our senses. Artistic and literary imagination lets us inhabit other minds, other times and other lives at the immediate human level. At its best, a complete education is the cultivation of a unified imagination – The Educated Imagination – capable of both looking at and looking along, which would allow us to recognize the sciences, the humanities and the arts all as different manifestations of the same underlying human project.