Thoughts Regarding CP Snow's "Two Cultures Divided"

“Two Cultures Divided” was a lecture given in 1959 by C.P. Snow, arguing that culture is fluent in the humanities while illiterate in science. I don't believe this has ever truly been the case. The vast majority of the people I've encountered (including those in art school) seem to be only capable of thinking in purely analytic terms. In my view, this is a root problem in our cultural psyche that must be resolved. I am by no means devaluing analytical thought (any coherent thought must contain a degree of analysis), but it's privileged reign as the sole method for understanding presents a worldview that is myopic, provincial, and destructive. Viewing the world in such a manner emphasizes the universally embraced means-ends dogma, which in itself is poisoning our society. We must eliminate it by learning to disregard all ends and practical measures. We must be sincere in our actions, aware of the intrinsic value in each of our daily activities. There must be autonomy in our day-to-day activities; by this I mean that we must recognize the value of this moment, rather than deferring its value to an unrealized hypothetical moment. We must widen our definition of knowledge and truth to contain poetic truths. Poetic knowledge and scientific knowledge are not at odds with each other. To distinguish them is a profound category mistake, one that has proven to be detrimental to humanity. I believe only when these are embraced not merely as equally valid, but also as IDENTICAL, will we overcome the practical maladies this conceptual misnomer has caused (hatred, global warming, etc.) If you are thinking to yourself, “how idealistic,” then it is only evidence of the problem’s ubiquity. To assign categories is to make judgments regarding the thing(s) that the categories are assigned to, and this is a direct consequent of the tyrannical grip the analytical has on our psyche. By this practice of placing an object (be it person, thing, argument, etc) into a category, we are confining our understanding of that object. I’m not suggesting that we ought to abandon names or language altogether, but that the perverse habit of confinement ought to be regarded as such. Rather, we ought to refine our analysis to description. Once our understanding of poetry and science have been merged into a single unified understanding, then we will be able to expand our concepts of things beyond the restrictive limits that centuries of dogmatic analysis has proclaimed to be the limits of sensible, coherent understanding and see coherence and meaning beyond the contradictions that have until this point marked off the bounds of what we are permitted to cognize. In other words, to say there is a divide between “humanities” and “science” is an illicit and superficial distinction; since they are at heart the same thing, (a process of induction rather than reduction), then they ought to be able to communicate as such.