Sinds C.P. Snow in een bekende lezing de scheiding tussen de “two cultures” – kunst en wetenschap vaststelde, zijn de twee enkel nog meer uit elkaar gegroeid. Hij schreef: “Their attitudes are so different that they can’t find much common ground.” (gecit. 190). Snow stelde een “third culture” voor: “Our fictions and our facts would feed off each other. Furthermore, this third culture would rein in the extravangances of both cultures at their extremes.” (190).
In zijn boek Proust was a neuroscientist bewijst Jonah Leher dat artiesten ook een waarheid brengen: “What the artists in this book reveal is that there are many different ways of describing reality, each of which is capable of generating truth. Physics is useful for describing quarks and galaxies, neuroscience is useful for describing the brain, and art is useful for describing our actual experience.” (192). Deze derde cultuur zou “a celebration of pluralism“ (192) moeten zijn. Maar vele wetenschappers (Pinker, Dawkins, …) falen als het gaat als het gaat over het niet-wetenschappelijke; alles is voor hen een “symptom of our biology” (192). Oojk het absoluut relativisme van de postmodernisten is niet toereikend; “No truth is perfect, but that doesn’t mean all truths are equally imperfect.” (193); Lehrer stelt een fourth culture voor.
Het totnogtoe beste voorbeeld daarvan is Ian McEwan’s Saturday: ” McEwan’s work is a potent demonstration that even in this age of dizzying scientific detail, the artist remains a necessary voice. Through the medium of fiction, McEwan explores the limits of science while doing justice to its utility and eloquence. Though he never doubts our existence as a property of matter -this is why a surgeon can heal our wounds- McEwan captures the paradox of being a mind aware of itself. While each self is a brain, it is a brain that contemplates its own beginnings.” (196)
“Saturday is a rare cultural commodity, and not only because of McEwan’s artistry. It symbolizes, perhaps, the birth of a new fourth culture, one that seeks to discover relationships between the humanities and the sciences. This fourth culture, much closer in concept to Snow’s original definition (and embodied by works like Saturday), will ignore arbitrary intellectual boundaries, seeking instead to blure the lines that separate. It will freely transplant knowledge between the sciences and the humanities, and wil focues on connecting the reductionist fact to our actual expierence. It will take a pragamatic view of the truth, and it will judge truth not by its origins but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem or protein teach us about ourselves? How does it help us understand who we are? What long-standing problem has it solved?” (196)
Jonah Lehrer gaat dus na “how art and science might be reintegrated into an expansive critical sphere.” (197). Want”[b]oth art and science can be useful, and both can be true. In our time, art is a necessary counterbalance to the glories and excesses of scientific reductionism, especially as they are applied to human experience. This is the artist’s purpose: to keep our reality, with all its frailties and question marks, on the agenda” (197).
Categorie: belang van fictie, belang van literatuur, Literatuur, Vehalen, wetenschap
