Peace! Peace! where there IS no Peace. The 3 Cultures

The Three Cultures.

“The Two Cultures is the title of an influential
1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist
C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that the breakdown of
communication between the "two cultures" of
modern society — the sciences and the humanities —
was a major hindrance to solving the world's
problems. As a trained scientist who was also a
successful novelist, Snow was well placed to
articulate this thesis

The phrase has lived on as a vague popular
shorthand for the rift— a matter of incomprehension
tinged with hostility—that has grown up between
scientists and literary intellectuals in the modern world.” Wiki

Turn up the rift, I say. Separate and polarize the
incommensurate difference between Science science-ing
and Humanism humanizing. Snow includes Art with
Humanities as we do here at WWC, but I say split and
separate—divide all gall into 3 parts: art arting. as
radically foreign to Humanism humanizing as
humanities is to sciences.

May we argue this out? I wish we would.
How else provide a basis for relationship
among this triad?

The 3 cultures:

........... arts
humanities..... sciences

Of course they all look the same here:
syllabi-driven, textual harassemental
quiz & exam reinforcement, paper-writing,
lab-otomy exercising, poster presenting
industrial institutionalized, power -point
educational environmentalism: one structure
fits all & reduces to GPA, credit and
accreditation.

Rigorous: Take a Course Inn.

Innovation and Creativity need not apply.
Can’t. Little tolerance for trial & error, room
for play, fooling around, messing and guessing,
celebrating confusion, and ambiguity, contra-
diction and paradox, slip sliding away, crashing
oh my —fundamental to mothering invention
and fostering emergent properties and values.

Sampling Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation.
(reformatted to fit my screed)

Collision.

When 2 or more “matrices” …

(“those cognitive systems which we variously
call “frames of reference,” “associative contexts,”
“mental sets,”of “universal discourse”--that is
to say, all habits, routines and skills governed by
an invariant code of rules (which may be explicit
or implicit) but capable of varied strategies in attacking
a problem or task”)

…crash, clash, bump into each other at the
crossroads, confound, consternate, crack up—
at that point: the origins of :

................... invention/discovery (science): aha
tragedy/humor........................ ART ah!
ha ha drama

any of the three might be born: all sharing a
common small BANG if not big origin. Collide.

The rest (below) is Koestler, on creativity.:

Large chunks of irrationality [are] embedded in
the creative process –not only in art, where we
take it for granted, but in the exact sciences as well.

“Creative originality…always involves the un-learning
and re-learning, undoing and re-doing. It involves the
breaking up of petrified mental structures, discarding
matrices which have outlived their usefulness, and re-
assembling others in a new synthesis---in other words
it is a complex operation of dissociation and bisociation
involving several levels of the mental hierarchy.

“All biographical evidence indicates that such a
radical re-shuffling operation requires the intervention
of mental processes beneath the surface of consciousness.
In the decisive phase of the creative process the rational
controls are relaxed and the creative person's mind
seems to regress from the disciplined thinking to less
specialized, more fluid ways of mentation. A frequent
form of this is the retreat from articulate verbal thinking
to vague, visual imagery.

“There is a native popular belief that scientists arrive at their
discoveries by reasoning in strictly rational, precise, verbal
terms. This evidence indicates that they do nothing of the sort.

“Consciousness is a narrow thing. Gauss, a great
mathematician who complained: “I have got my
solution, but I don't know how I arrived at it.”

“Most creative scientists, who have described their
working methods, seem to have been visualizers...
Verbal reasoning occupies the latest and highest level
in the mental hierarchy, but it can erect a screen
between the thinker and reality.

“Creativity often starts where language ends,
that is, by regressing to pre-verbal and seemingly
pre-rational levels of mental activity, which
may in some respects be comparable to the dream,
but closer perhaps to the transitory states between
sleep and full wakefulness.

“Such regression implies a temporary suspension
of the “rules of the game” which control our
reasoning routines; the mind in labor is momentarily
liberated from the tyranny of rigid, over-precise
schemata; their built-in prejudices and hidden axioms;
it is led to un-learn and acquire a new innocence of the
eye and fluidity of thought, which enables it to
discover hidden analogies and reckless combination of ideas
which would be unacceptable in the sober, wide-awake state.

“Cogitation in the creative sense is co-agitation,
the shaking together of the previously separate;
but the fully conscious rational mind is not the best
cocktail shaker. It is invaluable in our daily routines.
But the revolutionary break-throughs in science and
art always represent some variation on reculer pour
mieux sauter—draw back to take a running jump.

“We might call it an archetypal pattern, which is
reflected in the death and resurrection (or “withdrawal
and return”) motive in mythology. Joseph is thrown
into a well, Jonah is reborn out of the belly of the whale,'
Jesus is resurrected from the tomb.

“[This pattern} plays a crucial part not only in mental creativity,
but also in the creative evolution of higher life forms. ...Biological
evolution may be described as a series of escapes form the blind
alleys of stagnation, over-specialization, and maladjustment, by
an undoing and re-forming process which is basically analogous
to the phenomena of mental evolution and in some respects
foreshadows them.

We could improve Koestler's terms, if we found then
challenging. Engaging. It's another way of talking abouit
emergent values and properties and might generate
cross-disciplinary conversation--so necessary in these
troubled & turbulent times.