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The two cultures revisited
Newton’s Sleep: The two
cultures and the two kingdoms by Raymond Tallis,
260pp., Macmillan, 1996
RAYMOND TALLIS
IS a philosopher, poet and literary critic who also happens to be a
professor of medicine. His latest book, Newton’s Sleep, is an
investigation of the roles played by art and science in human culture, and
is at once ambitious and energetic. Tallis can, and frequently does, write
extremely well. He also writes with considerable passion. The first part
of the book in particular, which is given over to the question of the Two
Cultures, and in which the debate between F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow is
re-run for the 1990s, is written in a kind of lucid rage.
Tallis himself
offers an interesting clue to the origins of the intellectual passion
which runs through all his work. As a medical student, he writes in his
preface, he considered himself rather bright. He eventually put his
abstract medical knowledge into practice by making a series of ‘brilliant’
diagnoses, in which he identified a number of rare conditions. All these
diagnoses, however, turned out to be wrong. And they were wrong, as Tallis
notes, ‘precisely because they were brilliant’. From this he learnt that
patient observation may be more useful than abstract thought and that
interpretations which reflect the brilliance of one’s own mind are almost
certain to be mistaken.
The experience,
he writes, made him angry both with himself and with the intellectual
world in general. He confesses to a particular animus against humanist
intellectuals who habitually make large pronouncements about literature or
about life on the basis of unfalsifiable theories. Those who are familiar
with Tallis’s earlier book, Not Saussure, may recognize one of the
outcomes of this experience. For by harnessing his anger to a profound
critique of Lacan, Derrida and like-minded theorists, Tallis produced one
of the most brilliant and effective of all rebuttals of post-Saussurean
literary theory.
Tallis’s
self-confessed animus against some humanist intellectuals is also in
evidence in Newton’s Sleep. Like Snow before him, he is disturbed
by how little most people know about the methods and principles of
science. His particular target, however, is not ‘most people’ but those
‘humanist intellectuals who, ignorant of science themselves, have been
influential in ensuring that such ignorance should be acceptable . . .’.
Many of his strictures are entirely just. He is clearly right to reject
the kind of shallow disdain for technology which declines to acknowledge
the immense material benefits which technology has brought with it. He is
right also to point out that Romantic opposition to science has been
exaggerated and to remind us of the immense role played in science by the
human imagination. Yet his defence of science is so zealous that even his
admirers (of whom I am one) may find some of his arguments extreme.
The humanities
are never dismissed. But they are firmly put in their place as exhibiting
just the kind of ‘ordinary gossipy interest’ in human life which
scientists eschew. Science, we are told, ‘is about as remote as possible
from gossip. It doesn’t appeal to the airhead in us.’ The totally
objective view which science idealizes is, in Tallis’s view, ‘far from the
egocentric particulars of everyday life and the self-absorption that is
our natural and comforting standpoint’. Novels, in contrast, appeal to our
‘everyday curiosity’. Even history is an easy option, since ‘The stories
told by historians are closer to the tales told in pubs than to a
scientific account of a natural phenomenon.’
In so far as
Tallis puts forward these characterizations in order to account for the
appeal of the humanities and the relative difficulty of science, he is
entirely correct. But the moralism of his view cannot be hidden, and he
himself compares the ‘strenuous’ renunciatory demands made by science with
those of religion. ‘Science’, he writes, ‘teaches humility: the Great Man
matters less than the Great (co-operative) Enterprise.’ He goes on to
suggest that the search for truth undertaken by science ‘in which one’s
own contribution is likely to be at best that of an anonymous ant to a
great ant-hill is perhaps a better model to young people than certain
sectors of the humanities . . .’ Some may be prompted by such morally
uplifting rhetoric to submit to the refined disciplines of physics. For
myself, I must confess that I still find the stories told by historians
more attractive.
One of the
reasons is that the stories which they tell about science are indeed
replete with the ‘gossipy’ details that Tallis tends to pass over, but
which are essential to any understanding of the historical process. The
extent to which the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century was
‘caused’ by Puritanism is a matter of dispute. But what cannot be disputed
is the intimate association between the rise of modern science and
Christianity. Even when Darwinian biology broke this profound alliance,
the Church Scientific which emerged under Huxley and others continued to
see itself in terms dictated by Christianity. The Huxley of history, as
opposed to the ‘benign’, ‘well-mannered’, ‘gentle’ Huxley who appears
fleetingly in Newton’s Sleep, was a pugnacious preacher of the
scientific gospel who looked forward to a ‘New Reformation’ and to the
time when he might see ‘the foot of Science on the necks of her enemies’.
No man, as was observed at the time, ‘ever manifested more of the moral
presuppositions of a Puritan evangelicalism’.
Raymond Tallis,
in this book at least, is perhaps best seen as an exceptionally
interesting and broad-minded heir to Huxley, preaching the cause of the
Church Scientific not simply because it affords accurate, objective
knowledge of nature, but also because it promotes ‘honesty’, ‘rigour’,
‘humility’ and ‘co-operation’, while all the while battling against the
‘ignorance’, ‘idleness’ and ‘self-absorption’ frequently displayed by
humanist intellectuals.
The great irony
about this particular historical lineage is that Tallis, while himself
invoking the example of Huxley, goes out of his way to repudiate the very
doctrine upon which the original Church Scientific was founded. For, in a
philosophical interlude entitled ‘The Uselessness of Consciousness’, he
returns to the theme of his last book, The Explicit Animal, and
expounds afresh his view that, pace the neo-Darwinians, human
consciousness ‘is largely without purpose’ and that it cannot therefore
‘be understood in terms of biological utility’. Entering yet further into
the realm of scientific heresy, he explicitly denies the status of
consciousness ‘as a biological phenomenon’. As he himself notes, this view
‘assaults one of the great received ideas of this present century that
animality lies at the heart and root of humanity’.
It may well be
true that current Darwinian thinking is unable to account adequately for
the extraordinary richness, complexity and seeming evolutionary redundancy
of human consciousness. But, just as the fact that a particular natural
phenomenon may be difficult to explain does not mean that it is
‘paranormal’, so the fact that human consciousness remains problematic
does not mean that it is ‘para-Darwinian’. It suggests rather that
evolutionary theorists need to try harder. In boldly maintaining that
consciousness is not a biological phenomenon at all, Tallis puts forward a
view which, though it is clearly not intended to lead to a creationist or
spiritualist conclusion, seems to be motivated by a similar impulse
towards transcendence.
Since, according
to Tallis’s argument, art is the perfection of human consciousness, it
follows that art too is useless. He goes on to expound a theory of art
which develops this view. It should immediately be said that this
argument, which contains a beautifully written account of ‘The Systematic
Elusiveness of Cornwall’ as experienced during a family holiday, is
complex, subtle and richly freighted with real insights. But like all
grand aesthetic theories, it operates at a level of generality which too
often transcends the particularities of individual works of art in order
to enter the realm of metaphysics.
In one respect, the
tendency of Tallis’s arguments to soar impressively, far above the
evidence provided by ordinary human behaviour, is mysterious. For it is
just such a tendency which he criticizes so cogently in Not
Saussure. But Tallis is at his best when, as in that book, he subverts
his own metaphysical impulses. In Newton’s Sleep, however, it is
his allegiance to the remoteness and mathematical abstraction of the
physical sciences which triumphs, and his subversive vitality which, while
still very much in evidence, suffers defeat.
Times Literary Supplement, 16 February 1996
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© Richard Webster, 2002
www.richardwebster.net
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