THE SOLUBLE AND THE INSOLUBLE
OR

ARE TWO CULTURES BETTER THAN ONE?

S. E. Luria

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

and

Zella Luria

Tufts University
C. P. Snow, a sharp observer of society as well as of science, coined
the expression "The Two Cultures" to ,suggest an intellectual segregation
between the two moieties of the intellectual enterprise, the humanistic
and the scientific. The theme of the present paper is that the two
cultures do exist and are in fact separate, although they are not
mutually exclusive or incomprehensible. On the contrary, a clear
definition of the contents and methodology of each of the two cultures
can make them mutually supportive and enhance cur understanding and
teaching of both. We shall also advance the proposition that conflict
between the two cultures stems from their competition for Lebensraum
in the middle area of the cultural enterprise, the so-called social
sciences, and that only when each of the two cultures has accepted the
limitations of its role and learned to respect the role of the other
can they usefully cooperate in the social domain.

Let us examine a case history. At a prestigious technical
university undergraduates, including engineers, have long had a
requirement for eight one-semester courses in the humanities and
related subjects, including a rigorous and demanding sequence of three
literature courses. These requirements have been relaxed in recent
years, mainly by allowing substitutions of some social science courses
with humanistic implications, such as psychology. A new proposal is then
presented and approved by the appropriate committees to substitute for
the original requirement a new one for eight courses in a "distribution
area" including humanities, philosophy, psychology, social sciences,

art appreciation and so on. This is debated and approved, with the sole
provision that at least three out of ‘eight courses must be from a list
of subjects with "humanistic orientation," a list to be promulgated by
committee. (What would one call a college course without humanistic
orientation? anti-humanistic? or dehumanistic? or bestialistic?)

The significant aspect of this case history is not in the above
facts but in the arguments presented in the debate. Specifically,
each group attempted to present its case in the terms of the other
group, the social scientists vaunting the humanistic contribution of
social science teaching, the humanists making the strange claim that
humanities are the key way to understand the functioning of man in
society.

Only at one point did the debate touch -- so delicately that only
the experts noticed -- upon the central issue. Strangely enough, this
was when a philosopher and a humanist argued whether symbolic logic --

a mathematical course, a favorite for mathematicallly minded students --
would or would not be acceptable as a course with humanistic orientation.
It was here, rather than in some conflict between physics and literature
or between sociology and poetry, that the two cultures confronted
themselves. This was significant because it highlighted the fact that
the confrontation was not primarily between traditional disciplines but
between methodologies, and it was such because of the intrinsic
dichotomy in subject matters. Symbolic logic deals with mathematics:
literature deals with the human predicament. And they use fundamentally
different tools.

The sciences (among which mathematics and symbolic logic belong) as well

as parts of the social sciences are problem-solving disciplines. They
‘assume that the problems they deal with have rational solutions.

They aim at converting each problem into a set of propositions, whether
mathematically formulated or not, whose solutions represent a more
complete or more effectively usable picture of the subject matter.

The classical model for the culture of science is physics and the
classical model of the application of the methods of science to

social problems is economics. Sociology, social anthropology, and
political science also attempt to follow the same path by metricizing
variables other than the strictly economic ones, such as opinion shifts,
family patterns, and so on.

In the rush to quantification, however, something may go wrong.

On the one hand, quantification may be applied where it has no
_ business to be; on the other hand, emphasis on quantification may lead
to discarding essential but nonquantifiable elements.

Take history, for example, traditionally the backbone of the
humanities, without which all other branches of the humanities would
make little sense. Can history be fully quantified? A group of
scholars who call themselves cliometricians has recently emerged.

In an important and widely publicized book? two cliometricians,

Fogel and Engermann, have recently analyzed American slavery as an
economic institution. With some surprise these authors have come to
the conclusion that, contrary to traditional beliefs, slavery was a
relatively benevolent institution, at least as compared to the most
lurid descriptions of it, and a rather efficient economic structure,
compared to the condition of free industrial workers of the same times.

(The latter conclusion cannot have come as a great surprise to writers
acquainted with classical Marxist writings.) No claim is made

by the cliometricians, of course, that Slavery was a humane institution

as well as an economically adequate one. The important point, however,

is that the category of humaneness has something intrinsically different
from economic categories: it doas not lend itself to numerical analysis.
One may succeed, perhaps, in estimating the efficiency of the death penalty
in inhibiting crime. But how can one measure what the death penalty

does to the morality of a nation?

Here we hit the nub of the problem and the focus of our thesis.
There are categories -- freedom, dignity, guiit, joy, sorrow -—- that
are not quantifiable and which we call humane because they are
uniquely human: expressions of consciousness turning inwardly upon
itself. The profit of the slaveowner or the income of the slave tell
us little about what slavery does to the humanity of slave and slave-
owner. Cliometrics may be excellent economics; but is that all there
is to history?

Where the usefulness of quantification ends, where problem-solving
meets its boundary, there the domain of the humanities begins. If
science is the art of the soluble (the felicitous title of a book by
Medawar>) the humanities might well be called the art of the insoluble.
Take, for example, dignity. Can we speak of an animal's dignity?
Certainly: as we see a proud giraffe towering in a landscape; Or a
Siamese cat resting statuesque on a door stoop; or an Afghan dog
undulating in its gait, we think of dignity. But dignity is in our
thoughts because we are human, unique in our power of abstraction,

conscious of the distinction between dignity and abjection. More
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important, we sense that dignity, and freedom, and justice, are not
‘absolutes whose comprehension demands more precise measurement, like

the diameter of the Earth or Planck's constant. From the time we emerge
from childhood, we are aware that these are areas of personal judgment,
areas for choice and not for final solutions, for search and not for
final explanation. We seek clarity, lucidity, but no ultimate answers.
Even philosophy searches, not for final answers but for insights into
those mental processes that pose for the human mind its schematic frame-
work and its boundary conditions. Essentially, the study of the human-
ities is the bolstering of our oun inner search for meaning using the
illuminations that poets, philosophers, writers, historians have
projected upon the problems of the human condition.

No matter how accurate their measurements, econometricians or
cliometricians cannot throw any light upon the torments and ambivalences
of jealousy, or guilt, or vengefulness; but Shakespeare can. When a
young man is torn between love of country and love of humanity,
between accepting service in Vietnam and becoming a deserter, no one
can give him a slide-rule answer. He may derive some insight into the
essence of his quandaries by reading Sophocles' Antigone, but hardly
any from the writings of political scientists like the distinguished
professor who viewed the American bombing of South Vietnam simply as
a "force-draft urbanization and modernization."* Reliable as the
analytical predictions of such scholars might ever turn out to be,
they obviously left out some variables, such as the value of human
life and the question of who makes decisions for whon.

At some point in his own life, every individual faces the emotional
abyss that existentialist philosophers have called the "absurd" of the
human condition: the absence of intrinsic purpose in human life

coupled with need to make moral choices. Even the most convinced
believer in a revealed religion that makes human life a test for future
salvation realizes that what gives meaning to his or her inner life is an
emotional revelation rather than an analytically demonstrable proposition.
Pascal's best efforts led him to a bet that would hardly be taken seriously
by an econometrician, let alone a smart bookmaker. The senior author of

this paper, brought up in the religious tradition, remembers from his early
teens the shattering yet liberating experience of asking himself: Why should
the Jewish religion be the right one just because I happened to be born a Jew?

Growing up means facing the absurd aspect of life: accepting the relative
arbitrariness of one's choices in the area of values as distinct from the
choices we make at the forks of a road when we know where we are going. The
real adult, especially the adult intellectual, is the person who can act
purposefully in society and yet realize that his or her purpose is only a
choice, an act of the will, utterly different from the purpose of a scientist
in. exploring and interpreting natural phenomena. The difference, of course,
is not just in the degree of determinism. Many natural phenomena have
stochastic features as well as deterministic ones. But in science, even at
the least deterministic level, indetermination does not mean free choice,
only uncertainty. Choice is the product of consciousness, and morals are but
the impact of consciousness on relations between human beings.

This view of morals is not equivalent to the view of the cynical
rationalist who dissects every value into motives and reduces every choice
into impotent frustrations. Nor is it a justification for a random,
psychic, or solipsistic pattern of action. This is where the humanistic
tradition comes in, offering not only the alternatives proposed by others ~
in the past, but the arguments that were offered in their support, the
comforts that these arguments provided, and the stimulus to further search.
The humanities are a methodology appropriate to dealing with the insoluble
and to the need of those wno face the absurd.

Because of what they deal with, the humanities may be as insusceptible
of useful quantification as the natural sciences and some areas of the
social sciences are unsuitable for emotionalization. We believe that
there is no way of rationalizing out of existence the problems of growing
up and facing the existential uncertainty and yet acting and choosing
as if one's choices were well grounded, all the time maintaining the
integrity of one's inner questioning. Yet, attempts are always made,

in a variety of ways, to deal with the insoluble as if it were soluble.
On the one hand there is the Pretense that the science of the
human spirit is not yet quantifiable only because it is still backward,
like physics 500 years ago. But this is a self-delusion. ‘There is
little reason to believe that future knowledge of the human brain and
of language and of the physiology of emotions will ever bring to man
a scientific solution of the conflicts between the self and the non-
self, between consciousness and impermanence, between life and death.

Another way to explain away the human predicament is to look
backward into our ancestry and to attribute human emotions to human-
kind's animal past. Ethologists have looked at human drives and
aggressions as biologically determined inheritance fron our wild
ancestors. No doubt we have inherited modes of emotional response
and behavioral attitudes, just as we have inherited skin, teeth, and
eyes. But on top of all that, in the last few million years we have
developed language and consciousness and abstract reasoning. These
are the developments that produced the unique quandaries of the human
spirit. A much greater part in our emotions and drives must be
played by this uniquely human heritage than by the remnants of our
wild ancestors. |

A more sophisticated attempt to do away with the insoluble
conflicts of the human condition would be to assume, along the lines
championed by Skinner”, that the variety of choices and questionings
that human beings face are not a manifestation of insoluble inner
conflicts but are generated by a learned avoidance of punishment.
These problems are soluble, according to Skinner, if only one learns
to program the environment so that contigencies between choices or
acts and their outcomes are not punishing. The weakness of this reason-

ing, however, stands revealed as we consider the assumptions: that there
is only ane possible act, one preferred choice, and that one selected by
the programmer. What about when there are two or three or n programmers?
One who says to our young man of draft age: serve in Vietnam; or another:
escape to Canada; a third: go to jail for your convictions?

The essence of the insoluble is just that: we live, and would
choose to live, in a world full of freedom and dignity, not beyond |
it -~ even if it were possible to do so. Despite the suffering that
questioning generates, we choose to live with it because we sense that
anything different would in one way or another -- by focusing on
animal instincts or on our programmability ~- make us into automata
or into tools instead of free agents. It is precisely the willingness
to face the categorical imperative -~ to deal with men as goals and
not as tools -- that generates the insoluble knots of the moral life.
And that is where the humanities -- nonprescriptive, nonprogramming,
but infinitely reassuring -- offer to us a strong line of support.

Yet from within the humanities themselves there comes a weakening
of the humanistic spirit. The acceptance of pseudoscientific scholar-
ship, and even one-sided analysis of human phenomena, as in cliometric
history, undermine the status of the humanities as the source of inner
enlightenment. Unfortunately this kind of distortion is fostered by
the academic tradition, which requires of humanists as of chemists or
civil engineers the production of "original research publications."
This forces inane pursuits on people -- the great majority of humanists --

whose real scholarship is reading, interpreting, and, fortunately for

their students, teaching.
We must make a distinction, however, lest our thesis be misinter-
preted as a defense of the irrational against the rational, of the
counterculture against culture, of mystical intuition against
scientific knowledge. In attempting to define the proper purview of
the humanities we do not wish to claim that factual problems can be
solved by irrational means or by an intuitive, uneducated approach. We
question the belief that the humanistic approach can apply usefully to
the field of the solvable, even though in the progress of science one
recognizes the important role of insights whose origins have a quasi-
artistic quality. What we maintain is simply that the humanities provide
a guiding light in the search for constructive approaches towards
satisfying mankind's yearnings. Only in the nightmare of a psychologically
conditioned humanity, as in Huxley's Brave New World, could these yearnings
disappear and, with them, humanity itself as distinct from the primate
Homo sapiens.

It was not the purpose of this paper to place science and the
humanities in opposition. In fact, the sciences may have a major role
to play in helping rescue the humanities from the danger of submersion
into an irrelevant aping of the scientific enterprise. In the first place,
scientists more than other intellectuals are aware of the power and of the
limitations of their disciplines. Most of the great advances of science have
consisted in the clarification of the knowable and the unknowable, of
the limits of specific approaches, and of the methodological implica-

ou
tion of these limits: Godel's theorem, relativity, quantum mechanics,
10

information transfers in living cells. Serious scientists have never
claimed that the methods of science are appropriate to the ethical and
emotional problems deriving from human consciousness, even though they
may hope that a science of the human mind may ultimately throw some
light also on the dilemmas of the human condition. Yet, for the time
being science and the humanities can best remain separate and mutually
respecting intellectual activities, the one providing the instrument to
deal with the soluble, the other offering some hope for coping with the
insoluble. The two cultures together are still batter than either one

alone.

REFERENCES

1. mR. W. Fogel and S. L. Engermann, Time on the Cross: The Economics

 

of American Negro Slavery. Boston, Little, Brown, 1974.
2. See: F. Engels. The Condition of the Working Class in England.
Stanford Univ. Press, 1968.
3. P. B. Medawar. The Art of the Soluble. London, Methuen, 1967.
4. S. Huntington. Foreign Affairs 46, July 1968.

5. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, New York, Knopf, 1971.