Michael Boland writing in New Polity recently pinned down this difference to a modern “forgetting” of Aristotle’s Final and Formal causes in favor of a flattened, horizontal worldview that only sees material and proximate (efficient) causes. The way Leavis went ad hominem didn’t help him make his point, but he had an important message: to philosophically reduce everything to a concept addressable by a scientific worldview is to produce a kind of death. It is to produce what C.S. Lewis called “Men without chests”—-men lacking zoe, life.
Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that many never come across the idea that things have intrinsic “forms” and “ends.” This was demonstrated in a small way in a recent thread on Magnifica Humanitas.
The dichotomy is particularly important at this moment given that many of Leavis’ disposition (at least the ones I read in Catholic circles) believe that AI is the literal final technological embodiment of Snow’s worldview. If you see only efficient and material causes (and I’d argue even material causes are on their way out given cultural developments towards trans humanism), then AI is a smarter, more capable person (person being defined by what they can do, or effect in the world). Someone of Leavis’ persuasion might say, “AI is a facsimile intelligence. Worse, a fraudulent intelligence. One that is missing the very essence of what it means to be intelligent, because “to be intelligent” entails relationship, and care, and ultimately love of the other who shares in your intelligence. The very meaning of intelligent “output” relies on this relationship being present, which is impossible for cold, formless machine that renders tokens instead of words.”
Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.
I think his anger was just a wounded ego. He reduces his argument to an ad-hominem and sleight of hand mostly.
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power of his station.
> Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them
As in 'Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow "is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity", and ‘portentously ignorant’. This must be an example of what Wikipedia reports from one critic 'the passionate advocate degenerated into the hectoring bigot.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis
> He sees these scientists as strong men, willing to wrestle with the tragedy of existence by increasing the amount of happiness in the world. That struggle makes them optimists.
He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.
There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.
> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.
The scientific method is inherently introspective. Studies seek to affirm or falsify the null hypothesis. Those studies are subject to peer review. Verification and falsifiability are baked into every step.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
> He points out the value of introspection, which the literary culture has in spades, but the scientific culture utterly lacks.
Maybe this was true at one point but I don't think modern literary culture has much capacity to be introspective. The politicization of academia hit the liberal arts harder than anywhere else[1], and when it comes to politically charged topics there's little room for disagreement left. Introspection is not possible if questioning the status quo can be a career-ender[2].
It's interesting to think about how the culture around AI can also loosely be considered as coalescing between these two camps. But the camp who are the descendants of Leavis, if we can call them that, includes many scientists who (before AI) would have agreed with Snow.
Anti-AI arguments are often literally 'It's anti-Life' - that mysterious thing that creative humans have which a machine couldn't possibly ever.
I'd be more convinced if the antis demonstrated this clearly in their own work instead of simply affirming it.
I'm agnostic. I have no idea what Leavis meant when he said Life, and he clearly didn't either. He comes across as a rather narcissistic figure who enjoyed tearing others down to build himself up - the opposite of Snow, who seems to have been a rather dull bureaucrat with genuine good-intentions.
It's possible the two cultures aren't really the humanities vs science but those who have genuine concern for others and those whose fragility drives their ambition at the expense of those around them.
There just might be an empirical fact that when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all scientist" or "all intelectuals", that person is just full of it.
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
>when someone projects opinion or attitude on "all [ anyone ]", that person is just full of it.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
Thomistic and Catholic intellectual tradition in general has long recognized this strange intellectual fragmentation which it does not itself suffer. It is not a matter of mere difference of temperament, because reality is what it is. One may take one perspective or another, but there remains one reality. The fragmentation is rather the result of intellectual error and error that is historically rather recent.
Each special field or domain focuses on a particular aspect of reality. Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is not merely an available and defensible stance in the ring, but an incoherent position to begin with. The central claim of scientism—that empirical science is the only source of knowledge—is itself not a scientific claim and not one that empirical science can demonstrate. To establish the correctness of this proposition requires us to step outside or above empirical science in order to make empirical science itself an object of study. But as soon as we do that, we have by that very act disproven scientism. One can only wonder how such a basic philosophical error fails to figure into the reasoning of scientism's advocates, especially given the failure of logical positivism which crashed and burned for very similar reasons.
So, to reject scientism isn't to reject science for what it truly is. It is to reject sola scientia.
The solution to the problem must occur on a philosophical plane. Only on a philosophical plane can we ask (and answer!) "what does empirical science actually tell us?" or "what is the knowledge the humanities give us?". Only on a philosophical plane can be talk about metaphysics and the nature of being (where metaphysics is the general science, while all the others are special sciences). Only philosophy allows us to relate and to locate the fruits of every field in the larger patchwork of human knowledge.
Kind of off topic, but anyone finds the "Subscribe to the newsletter" jarring?
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode:
...his confrontation between Snow and Leavis – two dramatically different thinkers, representing traditions long in tension – gets at something more fundamental than
the worn phrase that survived it: our deepest and conflicting temperaments towards life.
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According to the English novelist Anthony Powell, C P Snow was affable, and rather humourless, the sort of man who gladly recognised a joke in conversation...
I have long had the policy that I close the window as soon as those pop up. I'm hoping that enough people join me that eventually somebody finds data that a significant (minority) of people just close them and so they are not worth it.
I have a similar policy - tab closed on 2nd nag, so if there's an inline subscribe box and the overlay pops up, I'm out. Fighting the good behavioral fight, but I don't expect us to win, it's just about saving myself the brainpower. Same for dark patterns - they're clearly unserious, so I'll take my business elsewhere.
Same here. If it's really interesting I'll try Reader Mode. Otherwise I close the tab. I'm not going to waste my time figuring out where to click to get rid of it.
Maybe I've been desensitized by all the "Subscribe now" pop ups that take over your entire browser, but seeing the subscription box inline with the rest of the text didn't bother me too much.
They wouldn't do it if it didn't work. People have been complaining about these sorts of popups for nigh two decades now and it still continues to happen.
Our culture is so steeped in Snow’s worldview at this point that many never come across the idea that things have intrinsic “forms” and “ends.” This was demonstrated in a small way in a recent thread on Magnifica Humanitas.
The dichotomy is particularly important at this moment given that many of Leavis’ disposition (at least the ones I read in Catholic circles) believe that AI is the literal final technological embodiment of Snow’s worldview. If you see only efficient and material causes (and I’d argue even material causes are on their way out given cultural developments towards trans humanism), then AI is a smarter, more capable person (person being defined by what they can do, or effect in the world). Someone of Leavis’ persuasion might say, “AI is a facsimile intelligence. Worse, a fraudulent intelligence. One that is missing the very essence of what it means to be intelligent, because “to be intelligent” entails relationship, and care, and ultimately love of the other who shares in your intelligence. The very meaning of intelligent “output” relies on this relationship being present, which is impossible for cold, formless machine that renders tokens instead of words.”
His basic concepts are almost supernatural in nature and require a subjective feeling to get it and his reaction is probably more due to a threat to the power of his station.
As in 'Leavis promptly informed his audience that Snow "is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be’, an ‘intellectual nullity", and ‘portentously ignorant’. This must be an example of what Wikipedia reports from one critic 'the passionate advocate degenerated into the hectoring bigot.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis
i love it when history rhymes
Loved that.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it. If they had that capacity, they might do it ahead of time. And some do…but not enough to stop the inevitable tide.
Ironic, given the role that chance and statistical prediction plays in the mechanisms of AI. Free will is in fact a thing, and moral choices have moral consequences.
I think you're drastically overgeneralizing. There exist many scientists who think about the impact and ethics of their work, and choose what to work on accordingly, as well as trying to discourage or mitigate harms.
There aren't necessarily enough, but I wonder how much of that is actually lack of introspection, rather than lack of being in a position where their reflections are able to amount to much. I wish everyone were empowered to follow their ethics without worrying about their next paycheck.
> If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, the scientists who worked so hard to enable it are unlikely to reflect deeply about it.
If we get the worst outcomes from AGI, which are also the modal outcomes from AGI if we don't thread the needle, there won't be anyone left to reflect.
There are numerous examples of fraud in science. When this occurs it is a scandal. There will certainly continue to be fraudulent papers being published. Hopefully these will be caught and retracted.
This comment is probably not talking about peer review and verification, however. The notion is likely that scientists are progress-oriented and not thinking whether an advancement should be done, not whether it can be done.
However, for virtually every scientific advancement, the leading scientists write extensively about the implications of the technology! Specifically to the commenter's example of AI research, it's trivial to find long essays by the leading AI researchers, company leaders, and venture capitalists. It's more uncommon for an accomplished AI researcher to not have a series of essays about their work.
Contrary to the assertion that AGI scientists are not introspecting, their introspection dominates discussion on this website.
Maybe this was true at one point but I don't think modern literary culture has much capacity to be introspective. The politicization of academia hit the liberal arts harder than anywhere else[1], and when it comes to politically charged topics there's little room for disagreement left. Introspection is not possible if questioning the status quo can be a career-ender[2].
[1] https://www.independent.org/tir/2022-23-winter/the-hyperpoli...
[2] https://www.fire.org/research-learn/sanctioned-scholars-pric...
I'd be more convinced if the antis demonstrated this clearly in their own work instead of simply affirming it.
I'm agnostic. I have no idea what Leavis meant when he said Life, and he clearly didn't either. He comes across as a rather narcissistic figure who enjoyed tearing others down to build himself up - the opposite of Snow, who seems to have been a rather dull bureaucrat with genuine good-intentions.
It's possible the two cultures aren't really the humanities vs science but those who have genuine concern for others and those whose fragility drives their ambition at the expense of those around them.
At best they are bushitting. More likely, they are trying to achieve political goal by creating us vs them dynamic of two simple camps.
It's just that our society, at least in the US, is pretty much built around projecting opinions, and a whole lot of other attributes, onto large groups of "others".
As a nation, we kind of started out that way from the outset, and it's hard to develop better ways of interacting at scale once tendency becomes culture.
Each special field or domain focuses on a particular aspect of reality. Snow's view appears to lean toward the scientistic, and scientism is not merely an available and defensible stance in the ring, but an incoherent position to begin with. The central claim of scientism—that empirical science is the only source of knowledge—is itself not a scientific claim and not one that empirical science can demonstrate. To establish the correctness of this proposition requires us to step outside or above empirical science in order to make empirical science itself an object of study. But as soon as we do that, we have by that very act disproven scientism. One can only wonder how such a basic philosophical error fails to figure into the reasoning of scientism's advocates, especially given the failure of logical positivism which crashed and burned for very similar reasons.
So, to reject scientism isn't to reject science for what it truly is. It is to reject sola scientia.
The solution to the problem must occur on a philosophical plane. Only on a philosophical plane can we ask (and answer!) "what does empirical science actually tell us?" or "what is the knowledge the humanities give us?". Only on a philosophical plane can be talk about metaphysics and the nature of being (where metaphysics is the general science, while all the others are special sciences). Only philosophy allows us to relate and to locate the fruits of every field in the larger patchwork of human knowledge.
You're in the middle of a read and suddenly you get this annoying interruption. It makes me feel like the article is no longer worth it.
You're there, trying to build all the mental scaffolding to properly understand, and then "Subscribe!"
Just put it at the end, please!
If you put it in the middle it cheapens the content, yeah, you may get more "engagement", but it's probably shallow.
Heck even in reader mode: