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.  Thetheme 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 our 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


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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 iqhich mathematics and symbolic logic belong) as ~211

as parts of the social sciences are problem-solving disciplines.  They


3

-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


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acquainted with classical Marxist writings. 2,  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 catego,ry of humaneness has something intrinsically different

from economic categories: it does 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, guilt, 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
Medawar3) 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.   Xore


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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


work and its


ities is the

processes that pose for the human mind its schematic frame-

boundary conditions.  Essentially, the study of the human-

bolstering of our own inner search for meaning using the

illuminations that poets, philosophers, writers, historians have

projected upon the problem s 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,

betneen 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."4 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 WSO makes decisions for whom,

  At sorre point in his own life, evelry individual faces tlhe emotional

abyss that existentialist philosophers have called the "absurd" of the

huiian condition:  'Ihe absence of intrinsic purpose in human life

coupled with need to make moral choices.  Even the most convinced


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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 wouid 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 happed 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.  Rut in science, even at
the least deterministic level, indetermination does not mean free choice,
only uncertainty.  Choice is the product of cons+ousness, 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 who 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 wsre well grounded, all the time maintaining the
integrity of one' s inner questioning.  Yet, attem.pts are always made,
in a variety of ways,  to deal with the insoluble as if it were soluble.


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  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 'from our wild


arkestors.  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 remants 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 Skinner5, 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 contipencies 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


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is only one possible act, one preferred choice, and that one selected by

the programmer. What about when ther(e 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.


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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.   Host 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 in;3lica-
tion of these limits: Gidel's theoren, relativity, quantum mechanics,


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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 better than either one

alone.

REFERENCES

1.  R. 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 iJniv. 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, Nex York, Knopf, 1971.