Is science, especially natural science, "the most valuable part of human learning--much the most valuable part because it is much the most authoritative, or serious, or beneficial''? (1). Not really, Tom Sorell argues in this closely reasoned but remarkably narrow book.



The cultural fracture noticed in the Snow-Leavis controversy rears even larger now, in a time more affected by science's unsettling revelations about ourselves and our position in the natural order, and by relentless technology, science's burly handmaiden. While F.R. Leavis smugly thought that the prospect of more jam "cannot be regarded by a fully human mind as a matter for happy contemplation,'' bringing as it does "human emptiness and boredom'' (Spectator, March 9, 1962), the traditional perspective he represented has withered before the implication that the salvation of the bulk of humanity, especially in the Third World, was not a matter of much concern to humanists. Snow proposed a more scientifically sophisticated culture as key to saving the masses outside the West. This moral point has not truly been worked out in the thirty years since it was put forward.



Sorell points out rather devastatingly that neither Snow nor Leavis realized that "there is the whole genre of creative writing, namely science fiction,'' devoted to imaginative inspection of the divide he fretted over. And "such omissions are evidence, I think, of Snow's not having taken seriously the possibility of literary culture taking science in its stride'' (105). Then Sorell proceeds to do the same thing.



What does science do that's so unsettling to literary types? It "disturbs or perhaps eliminates entirely our sense of being at home in the world'' (107). This brings an "objectifying tendency the alienating effects of which arts, and especially the fine arts, are needed to counteract'' (106). But is estrangement from the world the poisoned gift of science? Not if we mean botany, or human anatomy, or zoology. It is simply false to proclaim that physics, the Brahmin discipline of this century, represents the entire spirit of science. Sorell rightly urges a view of science and art as mutually dependent, each needing the insights of the other. What we should seek is some mediation beyond mere popularization, cross-talk not quite so cross, which reconciles "practitioners of different intellectual disciplines to the reality of different intellectual demands'' (112).



History and philosophy he recommends as sources of mediation, never again taking up literature, especially science fiction. Though he does entertain the notion that "poetry is a species of fantasy'' (125), he seems to feel that science can be integrated into the "high'' cultures through academic disciplines, forgetting the immense change we see in literature.



A pity, for he has thought widely in other matters. He occasionally touches upon the spirit seen in much science fiction (SF), when he flails at sociobiology without laying a glove on it. It is an oddly ineffectual flailing about, never imagining that perhaps empiricism has some claim to priority in describing what humans most deeply are. He feels the same about Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy, which rather science-fictionally proposes that we abandon the classic questions about human consciousness, and seek new categories and questions, based on what we learn from computers and the pursuit of artificial intelligence.



In the end Sorell's excursions against philosophers such as Quine, and the general posture of anti-metaphysical investigation, ring rather hollow. Often his discussion turns upon close readings of definitions, nose pressed studiously into the middle of a dictionary, ignoring the more recent spirit of rather casual acceptance of science in other aspects of culture, such as SF. He recognizes that there is much to be done by philosophy when "some of its central questions are cut down to the size of scientific ones'' (128) and calls for "a way of thinking about the principal parts of learning or culture all at once'' (176).



But seldom does literature with its sweep and insight commend itself to him as a bridge across the Snow-called abyss. Perhaps SF is too popular, and the efforts of litbiz to incorporate science too anemic (Kurt Vonnegut comes to mind), to suggest a fresh path to him. In any case, this is a blinkered look at an immense problem, more interesting for its silences than for its rather skimpy conclusions.

--Gregory Benford University of California, Irvine