Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures

INTRODUCTION

1. In his essay C. P. Snow focused specifically on humanist scholars who were literary intellectuals. But the essay applies to all the humanists and has generally been interpreted more broadly (see for examples Wilson 1977, Ramachandran 2011).

2. The term Abstract Expressionism actually has a long history. It was first used in 1919 by the German magazine Der Sturm to describe German Expressionism. In 1929 Alfred Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, applied the term to the work of Wassily Kandinsky. It was first applied to the New York School in 1946 by the art critic Robert Coates.

C. P. Snow followed up his original Rede Lecture of 1959 on The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution with The Two Cultures: A Second Look, published in 1963. In this second book Snow introduced the idea, which I emphasize here, that there can be mediating third cultures. The notion of third cultures was elaborated upon by John Brockman in The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995).

In my book on figurative art and science, The Age of Insight (2013), I discuss the two cultures in the following terms:

In the decades since Snow’s lecture, the gulf separating the two cultures has begun to narrow. Several things have contributed to that narrowing. The first was Snow’s coda to the second edition of his book The Two Cultures: A Second Look, published in 1963. In it, he discusses the extensive response to his lecture and describes the possibility of a third culture that could mediate a dialogue between scientists and humanists:

With good fortune, however, we can educate a large proportion of our better minds so that they are not ignorant of imaginative experience, both in the arts and in science, nor ignorant either of the endowments of applied science, of the remediable suffering of most of their fellow humans, and of the responsibilities which, once they are seen, cannot be denied.

Thirty years later, John Brockman advanced Snow’s idea in his essay “The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution.” Brockman emphasized that the most effective way of bridging the divide would be to encourage scientists to write for the general public in a language that an educated reader can readily understand. This effort is currently under way in print, on radio and television, on the Internet, and in other media: good science is being successfully communicated to a general audience by the very scientists who created it (Kandel 2013, 502). For a discussion of reductionism in biology, see:

Crick, Francis. 1966. Of Molecules and Men. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Squire, L. and E. R. Kandel. 2008. Memory: From Mind to Molecules. 2nd ed. Englewood, Colo.: Roberts and Co.

1. THE EMERGENCE OF A REDUCTIONIST SCHOOL OF ABSTRACT ART IN NEW YORK

For a discussion of the New York School and the movement of the center of art from Paris to New York, see:

Greenberg, C. 1955. “American Type Painting.” Partisan Review 22: 179–196. Reprinted in Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1961, 208–229).

Rosenberg, Harold. 1952. “The American Action Painters.” Art News (December).

Schapiro, M. 1994. Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society. New York: George Braziller.

2. THE BEGINNING OF A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO ART

Kandel, E. R. 2012. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House.

Riegl, A. 2000. The Group Portraiture of Holland. Trans. E. M. Kain and D. Britt. 1902; reprint, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities.