Two poverties, and the eye beyond the eye

A question at dinner

C. P. Snow was an unusual man to be asking this question, because he belonged to both camps. Born in Leicester in 1905, he took a doctorate in physics at Cambridge, became a Fellow of Christ’s College, and then moved into the civil service. At the same time he wrote novels: the eleven-volume Strangers and Brothers sequence, which ran from 1940 to 1970 and includes The Masters and Corridors of Power. “By training I was a scientist,” he said of himself: “by vocation I was a writer.” In his world, at dinners and in common rooms, he moved between people who spoke two different languages.

He had a test. Gatherings of highly educated people, he noticed, were quick to express their astonishment at the ignorance of scientists. Once or twice, provoked, he asked how many of those present could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. “The response was cold,” he recalled: “it was also negative.” He added that this was about the scientific equivalent of asking, “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?” A simpler question, what do you mean by mass, or acceleration, was the scientific equivalent of “Can you read?” No more than one in ten of the highly educated, he believed, would have felt that he was speaking their language.

He had sketched the idea in an article in 1956. He turned the observation into the Rede Lecture, given in the Senate House at Cambridge on 7 May 1959 and published that year as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Its claim was that the intellectual life of the West was splitting into two groups, literary intellectuals at one pole and scientists at the other, with “a gulf of mutual incomprehension” between them. Snow said this was a Western problem, not only an English one, though it seemed sharpest in England, which he blamed on a “fanatical belief in educational specialisation.”

Two poverties

Snow’s verdict on both sides was the same word: impoverished. Scientists, he said, tend to find that the whole literature of the traditional culture does not seem relevant to them, and of the books that are “bread and butter” to most literary people (novels, history, poetry, plays) they read almost nothing. They are, he wrote, “dead wrong,” and as a result their imaginative understanding is poorer than it could be: “They are self-impoverished.” It is worth noticing what “bread and butter” means here: the books the literary live on, which scientists barely open. Snow gave scientists credit too. He thought their culture “exacting and admirable.”

And the other side? “They are impoverished too,” he said, “perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it.” Literary people, he said, like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of culture, as if the natural order did not exist. They have no conception of what he called the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man: the edifice of physical science.

This course takes Snow’s two poverties as a case of something larger. In this reading, both are poverties of cognition: each side has a way of looking, and mistakes it for the whole of looking. A narrow view feels complete from inside, which is why it is so hard to notice. Snow himself offered a modest remedy, rethinking education so that no one leaves school unable to read the other side’s language. He ended with a question: “Isn’t it time we began?”

The parable of Venice

Late in his lecture Snow told a story that has been repeated ever since. He introduced it as “a historical myth,” and said that whether it was good history or not did not matter to him. He thought of the Venetian Republic in its last half-century. Like Britain, they had once been fabulously lucky. They had become rich by accident and had acquired immense political skill. They knew that the current of history had begun to flow against them, and many of them worked out ways to keep going. But that would have meant breaking the pattern into which they had hardened, and they were fond of the pattern, as the British were fond of theirs. “They never found the will to break it.”

Venice, traditionally dated from 697, fell to Napoleon on 12 May 1797. Historians find its decline a good deal more complicated than a failure of will: it was drawn out over two centuries, from lost trade and long wars, and its political system still looked to eighteenth-century thinkers like a model. Snow knew he was telling a myth.

What is the lesson? In Snow’s text the “will” is a political and educational one, the will to change a system that has set hard. His chief example of a pattern actually broken was in Cambridge itself: the ranking of students in the Mathematical Tripos, the Cambridge mathematics examination, which in his telling was abolished some fifty years before his lecture because the mathematicians Hardy and Littlewood kept saying that it had no intellectual merit. The pattern-breakers there were scientists. This course draws a bigger moral, and it is its own. In this reading, the humanities supply the will to break an existing model, because they teach a person to ask whether the pattern itself is right, and so to decide more firmly when the current of history turns. Snow does not say that. It is an argument, and the next section says where it is weak.

The eye beyond the eye

The second half of this lesson turns from poverty to riches, with an image: cognition as an eye, and the humanities as the eye beyond the eye. Its main example is a god of love.

“Love is blind,” people say, and Shakespeare says it more than once. In The Merchant of Venice Jessica says that love is blind and lovers cannot see the pretty follies they commit. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the jilted Helena explains why the god of love is painted blind:

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 1

Helena goes on to say that the blindness stands for “unheedy haste”: choosing without judgment. In classical art Cupid is not blind at all; he is a sighted winged child, and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses he takes aim with care. The two famous arrows are used once, on Apollo and the nymph Daphne: a gold one, sharp and shining, that makes love, and a lead one, blunt, that makes flight. Cupid shoots Apollo with the gold arrow and Daphne with the lead, and at once one loves and the other flees. It is not, as is sometimes said, a general tool for joining and parting couples. Blindness came later. In the Middle Ages the blind or blindfolded Cupid, the usual image, was often a warning against lust and folly. Some Renaissance Neoplatonists then turned the image around: in 1486 Pico della Mirandola wrote that Love is said to be without eyes “because he is above the intellect.”

This course’s reading is closer to Pico’s than to Shakespeare’s, and it should be labeled as a reading. In this reading, Cupid is blind because the god of love does not look with human eyes: he sees the whole, in a way that skips the reasons we give for loving. On this view, love at first sight is the glance that sees the end at the start, and the years of analysis that follow may add nothing to it. The point is that cognition is not simply gathering more: sometimes it means closing the eyes that give you false confidence.

The five eyes

The same line of thought reaches for a Buddhist image: the five eyes. In chapter 18 of the Diamond Sutra, in Kumārajīva’s Chinese version of the early fifth century, the Buddha asks his disciple Subhūti five questions in the same form: does the Tathāgata have the flesh eye, the divine eye, the wisdom eye, the dharma eye, the Buddha eye? Each time Subhūti answers yes. (The same sutra is the text of the earliest dated printed book known, a scroll from Dunhuang of 11 May 868.) In the sutra the five are listed as what the Buddha has. Later teaching reads them as a scale of seeing, from coarse to subtle. Try each.

Known according to the knower

Behind both images is an old idea about knowing: what you see depends on the one seeing. Thomas Aquinas put it in a sentence in the Summa Theologiae: the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower. Kant gave it a modern form in the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787). Suppose, he said, that we try an experiment and assume that objects must conform to our knowledge, instead of our knowledge conforming to objects. He compared it to Copernicus. Space and time, he argued, are forms in which the mind receives experience, and they are not features we discover in things. (Kant’s categories are different: they are concepts of the understanding.) William James wrote in 1902 that science had ended by “utterly repudiating the personal point of view.”

Perspective changes what a thing means. Snow, who worried a good deal about the poor, wrote that the Industrial Revolution looks different according to whether one sees it “from Chelsea or from a village in Asia.” (His point was that industrialization was the hope of the poor, not a plea for humanist breadth; the course borrows the phrase for the idea of standpoint.) And two modern thinkers offer pictures of how to hold more than one perspective at once. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that a myth should be read the way a conductor reads an orchestral score: along the line of the story, and across it, for how its parts relate. He is also reported to have distinguished two ways of explaining things: reducing a complicated thing to simpler parts, or working out the relations among the parts. The physicist Lee Smolin, in Time Reborn (2013), argues that time is real and not an illusion and favors a “relational” view of space and time, in which things are defined by their relations to other things. Unlike Kant, who made time a form of our intuition, Smolin makes it a feature of the world itself. This course sees in all of them one point: the world shows more to a mind that can switch between a close view and a wide one, and the switching is what we call creativity. The Buddhist idea of emptiness, in which nothing exists on its own but only in dependence on other things, is a cousin.