Arts and sciences, on the edge of divorce - By: AndreaPP

A few days ago I was pleased to meet an old friend, who I have not seen for a long time. Proudly, he told me about his graduation in sub-nuclear physics, full marks with honors. Unfortunately, mines were sour congratulations, because the conversation ended up on the same old dispute between humanists and scientists, with an exemplary statement on our different curriculum: “If my son studied humanities, I would strangle him with my own hands”. A though expressed roughly and summarily, without any further clarification. However, it helps us understanding how frivolous and not very useful humanities are considered among some technical professionals. In particular, I perceived in his words a twisted reputation of arts, identified with the realm of dreams, of irrationality and uncontrolled emotions and studied without a scientific methodology.

The divorce between humanities and sciences is the result of western culture and its distinctive education, excessively specialist and fragmentary. However, if we look carefully at the two macrocosms of human knowledge, we will realize that they work under common methods and aims. Consider, for instance, fictional and poetic literature: there are two, main approaches to their reading. The first is a reading taken out of its context, free from external information, which allows a personal and exclusive interpretation of the text, according to each reader’s background. This is the case of contemporary poetry which, by exaggerating its visual element and operating through images, can be interpreted in a number of ways. The second is an analytic reading which, according to the historic, social and literary context of the text, investigates the author’s original message: an unambiguous interpretation, as happens with the regular literary studies carried out at school.

In my opinion, the approaches mentioned are similar to those provided by a scientific training: there is basic research, applied research and engineering. If we consider the field of chemistry, the chemist and the chemical engineer share similar studies, but pursue very different aims. The chemist is a pure scientist, committed to setting and verifying the universal principles of chemistry, but without practical application. The chemist discovers new reactions and connections between elements, in the same way an analytic interpretation of the text provides new information about the author and his age. The chemical engineer, on the contrary, dedicates to find a practical application of the laws set by his colleague, and therefore interpret them in a personal way according to his own background of experiences. As a consequence, engineering an out-of-the-context reading address to the world of subjectivity. However, this does not mean working in absence of logic and understanding: as the engineer must deal with laws that cannot be ignored, I must subordinate myself, while writing this text, to the principles of linguistics, in order to deliver a precise message.

In addition, there are many other examples pointing out the connections between humanistic and technical sciences: there is Chomsky’s modern linguistics and its generative grammar, which establishes laws regulating the language production of a precise time and place, not based on an abstract grammar, but on the opinions of native speakers and, therefore, turning frequently to statistics; statistics also allowed us to discover a certain regularity in the demographic trend in history, an harmonic alternation between periods of war and famine and periods of peace. In the same way, it is important to remark the strict relationship between philosophy, ethics in particular, and the recent findings in the field of genetics, and between sociology and architecture. The diatribe, therefore, is just the attempt of separating two universes which are not so different, and pursue the same purpose, the progress of human kind.

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