BOOKS
Lynch, William F. & Shea, George W. & Gitlin, Todd
S c i e n t i f i c Man ENRICO CANTORE, S.J. 1.S.H. Publications, $20 GEORGE W. SHEA In his latest book, Scientific Man, Enrico Cantore studies .the significance of science for humanity. His...
...yet it remains vague at major junctures...
...For one thing, it has been suggested by Martin Esslin that B.B...
...Studded throughout the text like Eliot's "garlic and sapphires in the mud," are superb insights into the nature of aesthetic situations, and trenohant critiques of the reigning Marxist pieties and the hauteurs of high criticism alike...
...This is why Cantore's book is important...
...One especially laments the absence of any reference to Plato's Timaeus or, at the other end of the historical speotrum, to modern realist philosophers like Whitehead and Santayana...
...Body and Spirit is a good book...
...One would think that the matter had been settled at least in the arts, where feeling, and great feeling, might have the primacy...
...It treats the epistemolpgical, ontological and ethical questions which are raised by science, and attempts to demonstrate the inability of science to answer these by itsei,f...
...It is here that all the agonizing ethical questions will arise, where nature and her forms meet the forms of man's imagination and intellect...
...For example again: we all know that there are mad or impossible forms of authority which can destroy the healthy autonomy of a human being;but to conceive these t~o things..authority and autonomy--as mutually self destructive is all too rapid for me...
...What it needs most of all is the larger space of another companion volume, One cannot say a better thing of a book than that it deserves more space...
...For that reason the intellectual approach to reality, being an incomplete response, reveals reality only partially...
...With Charles Davis,, for the very most part, his own stand goes exactly in reverse to this: if there is, in "religious experience," a polarity between our two great factors, the part that must be given new and added life is feeling and the 'body...
...was itself one form of a lapser social division, in which the "real material ba~" ~ while "cut...
...The book fmsuatm...
...Cantore brings us to this question, but does not, understandably, give .us the whole answer...
...It occurs to this reviewer that there are more forms of this dichotomy between feeling and thought in history and in our present midst than we ordinarily reckon with...
...What he is concerned about from beginning to end is (1) the strengthening or, where need be, the re-storation of religious /eeling in religious life...
...Their moral lives are tired more and more by consulting the yeb low pages or TV commercials, less and less by reflection, work, and acts of character and will...
...and second, that science cannot alone provide a satisfactory answer to the questions of man's place in the cosmos, but must be complemented by philosophical reflection, which takes the achievements of science into account...
...I~ mm'.ar of io~ dbco...
...W'dlims's amhod is Irst of ~ll dlt/o...
...In some moments Williams succeeds in synthesizing the best of the Marxist and the formal critical traditions...
...Foliowiml these mm.tl~s~m of mmm we I~ critical It~mmls c=mbing--daq~e W'dllems~, subver...
...And this may be one of the most dllBcult things for the charismatic and evangelical movements to understand, that neither poetry nor ecstasy will ever come at the drop of a hat or a wink of an eye or a command of the will...
...This, it seems to me is the crux of the matter...
...Certainly the two of them, in not very different ways, have given us splendid images of the mad and sane parts of a human being and the need of somehow building the two into a common house...
...W'dl/ams's insistence on culture as a Imm=m proeees, on cultursl institutions as well as Imrticudar artworks u ~mms ot mc~l relating, has carried Mm~t iit~ary studies past the deadly simple pseudothmdes of "base" and "superstructure" which for over a centu~ have...
...And he would do this in order that the dramatist, the director, the actors, be scientists who would help the audience to think straight, and to make objective social judgments and contributions toward the changing of the world...
...Marxism and J[Jterwture RAYMOND WI, LDIA~S Ox/ord Univ...
...because schematic...
...was himself a man of powerful and threatening feelings who needed such a powerful rational system as Marxism to keep his feelings under what looks like excessive mastery...
...but if here he says his say with force, his say is also said with professional composure and thoughtfulness...
...Anyone who has been involved in teaching undergraduates during the past decade, knows that students are troubled by the fragmentation of knowledge and by the seeming impossibility of pursuing, let alone achieving, wisdom...
...Why is this so...
...tal...
...Tha co~ of ~ h~em~snce as ~m aping of God's work...
...But if we stick to a purely romantic and beautlfel image of the human interior, then we will place all ugliness and evil in the exterior...
...After examining its contents, one might conclude that Scientific Man is a book likely to be of interest to philosophers and scientists alone...
...Writ...
...Thus, if thinking is in the head, he cuts off the heads of such majestic thinkers as Homer, Parmenides, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and how many others it is impossible to count...
...Again and again, in manifold ways, Williams insists on the complexity and contradictoriness of the processes of cultural production, and the impossibility of reducing it to anything more schematic...
...Vulgar Marxism and semiology are each demolished...
...But u a step forward in its own ri~t, it su~m by .epm~m frm ~ dm~ed ~ in W/llimm's esder books...
...The long range politica~ effects of this can be devastating to a tree society...
...the other half will de~end the tire of Charles Davis' book...
...They slip into lives of quiet desperation, in which all serious questions are referred to experts...
...The first explores the practice of scientific research, the relationship of the scientist to the natural world, and the nature and significance of his discovery...
...This is not, I think, the case...
...A title is sound if it makes increasing sense as the hook goes on in its soundings...
...I hope I misunderstood, for this sounds to me like a vast and impossible task...
...wo~ of George Lukam, Bertol~ ~ and the French semiolosim mid structuralists, academic superstars all...
...The lines of argument Commonwelth 221 wesving h~m Cu~ure and thro, sh T~ Co~r~ and the Ci~ (the acme...
...but the writing maintains a fine and difficult discipline...
...We remake nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem...
...noto~ and Cul~ml Form have accumulated into a body of cultural .thought that need not defer to the more fashionable (became Continen...
...Still, even for the journey this 'far, we should he grateful...
...rare" was the terrain reserved m the rel~tory for...
...So it means the distance one thing has from another, or the creation of a space between two things...
...As a result students lose confidence in their ability to guide their own lives and solve their own problems...
...s be act of m ~ ~ the Marz~ mdlt...
...he brings the latter into the beauty of its larger context by a beautiful distinction: "I want to distinguish two kinds of asceticism, which I call the asceticism of punitive discipline and the asceticism of achieved spontaneity...
...I will not presume to say which half will be damned...
...There is a way ton in which the secondary title (The Nature of Religious Feeling) could have gone overboard with smothering feeling...
...Students want desperately, in such an intellectual climate, to be reassured that human knowledge ,forms a coherent whole, and that they can achieve the kind of understanding that will enable them to direct their own lives intelligently...
...fordng the preva/I/~ +cul~', commodity s t ~ of value, ~ con o~I~ = ,phare Marx~ a~l I~ermere Williams Nt oet to aaeu'a half.oeatury of theoretical wrWlinp =way from this co.~ninS orthodoxy, and to put the Marxian study of lttzramre and cultu_m on _9 new foot~ His r r b=ion ~s ~ o~tm im,eniom...
...Yet there he is himsetf, as so many of his contemporaries, thinking and saying that the life of religious feeling is lost unless we move into the life of the world in a 31 Morch 1978:220 sacramental way...
...Cantore will no doubt be criticized by those who equate excellence with specialization, and consider all attempts 31 March 1978:218 At gaining broader vision as amateurish or superficial...
...This reviewer found many things to praise in the book and a ,few to blame...
...They will accept no view of knowledge that leaves science out, and they are, of course, right in this...
...Cantore's book is divided into two parts...
...What Davis is largely trying to do, and what he does, is to make a contribution to that side of the history of ideas which refuses the easy dichotomy: "Since the human self is both intelligent and bodily, spiritual and material, its spontaneous responses are indissolubly both intelligent and hodflyf spiritual and physiological...
...It stresses the dynamism and orderliness of nature, .its mysteriousness, and the connection between scientific discovery and religious awareness...
...The sharpest and most detailed refutation of this abysmal hypothesis about the early poets and poetic feeling (that therein there is no thought) may be found in H. D. F. Kitto's Poiesis...
...Just to pick out an ;m...
...wishes, feelin~ and thoo~t~ ~lmted from the dom~-t therefore ended up pervmety rein...
...I wish Williams's critiques of "socialist" practice in China and elsewhere were equally unequivocal and specific...
...But it is a tribute to Brecht that very tittle of his theorizing got into his own dramatizing...
...Many ~eel .that knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, is so extensive and complex that it can be known only in bits and pieces by specialists, who themselves understand on4y a fragment of reality...
...The author is to some extent the captive of his own organizational structure, and this makes the book somewhat longer than it need have been...
...But as a guide to future cr studies and practices the whole argument emerges much more blurred than it ought: partly because of unnecessarily tangled syntax, partly ~a~cause Williams bends over backwards to be fair to too many other arguments...
...it attempts to .point the ~vay to such a coherent view of human cognition, a view which includes science and includes it as a centerpiece not as a troublesome appendage...
...But meanwhile the fight goes on...
...William's overall approach to a sociology of culture, as best I understand it, is to study the whole tissue of relations in which cultural transactions are embedded...
...Susan Sontag gives us a book of criticism (Against Interpretation) which demands that literature stay aggressively away from all concepts and interpretation...
...My only large criticism of Body and Spirit is that he is inclined to catch too many questions in the net of his central argument and plea...
...Brecht wants to create a distance or space between feeling and thought in the theater...
...Finally, it is in dealing with the concept of creativity that Cantore has, I think, both raised the largest questions and left the most work still to he done...
...Nevertheless, those who know first-hand students' longing for coherence, and 'for an escape 'from fragmentation, will appreciate Cantore's work more deeply, and better still, criticize his attempt...
...and mom TI~ ledOSUm -lwm ~ : . we ram...
...But this will be an eternal conflict...
...It should be of special interest to educators, especially to those in higher education who are concerned about ,the ~videning gap between the two cultures, between the sciences and the humanities...
...It is fructifying if it casts more and more light on more and more human problems as one chapter melts into another without the title dissotving...
...Eliot the great poet seems to have laughed at the idea that he the poet might be taken for "a thinker...
...Specifically, the author's presentation of earlier epistemolog...
...He refers to man as "coresponsible creator of the universe," and quotes Bronowski: "Science, like art, is not a copy of the universe, but a recreation of her...
...The word simply means what it literally meant in Latin: to be or make other...
...and he thus leaves himself open to the charge of setting up "straw men...
...The second part places these issues in a philosophical perspective...
...Unfortunately they may 'he joined in their criticism by some liberal thinkers who wrongly see the concept of a coherent worldview as a threat to cultural pluralism...
...and of his "'natve and self-deceptive expectations...
...However, this is more than made up for by the many and interesting quotes from scientists themselves, which give the book a liveliness and authenticity not often encountered in such works...
...she intent/on-4o that dismal punmit of the kernel of truth whioh ,c~.be brandished as what Hr ratty meant, v+,miMs surveys the ~im Mmrxi~ m~dit/on In cultural st.d~, a numl~ of ~ . m ~ d obscure heretics, in lds 212 lpmled Throudumt"he tri~"to see cultural transactions =s active practieos...
...His study is based upon two theses: first, that science is an essential factor in the historical development of man, not merely an esoteric pastime to be engaged in ,by chosen initiates...
...At the end of the world half of the world will be proclaiming that feelings cannot think and cannot collaborate in the tasks of the spirit or philosophy or theology...
...in~ for exa~e, i. ~mer the ~vUqed azation of "test," from outside society, nor a passive "reflection" of m "material" u any ~ a...
...It also turns out to be a sound and ~'uctifying title...
...This is impossible without some kind and some degree of interior authority...
...Marxism and Literature is one of a series of Marxist Commonweal: 225...
...In the case of Bertold Brecht, for example, we have an important contemporary instance of the fear of feeling...
...It is written with great clarity and can he easily understood by bright undergraduates...
...It reminds us that theL achievement of true and spontaneous feeling is the work of a lifetime, no matter what the instant achievers of sincerity and authenticity say...
...That this is so is a part of Davis's aesthetic of feelings: they cannot he truly born without a relation to history and education...
...Or he argues for the use of a dialectical method--a bringing together of opposites or the fading of opposites into a new and hiBher unity --but at times he is unfair and forgets his own directives...
...As Centore himseH acknowledges in his preface, earlier *attempts at synthesis by philosophers are not dealt with...
...And without this enormous area of responses to values we do not even think: "Not to feel injustice is not to perceive injustice, even if we learn to name it from what others sdy...
...At best the wrainZ com...
...This is a very beautiful distinction...
...As a critic of theater his key word is "alienation," though it is very important to realize that in his context the word never means what it meant for Kkrl Marx or for the sad metaphysicians of modern culture...
...3) There is a third Commonweal: 219 parallel form in which the world of feelings emerges in Body as Spirit: it is that whole world of reaction to values without which we are not really human, much less religious...
...In the realm of classical scholarship Erich A. Havelock (in his book Prejace to Plato) locates the beginnings of thought in Plato and his discovery of the concept...
...it ~ from the f~ a dbsu/~ 31 Mmek 197#: 222 of the facts of the artist's conflicted social identity, and helped shield h~n from the Church...
...Press, $10 cloth, $2.95 paper TODD GITLIN Raymond Williams's latest book is a theoretical culminatins of the h't~ary and cultural studies he has been producing for over twenty years: surely one of the most fruitful careers, however one measures, in radical scholar' ship anywhere...
...made them = srotmque escape from reckontherefore conkon~tion--~eith mltm...
...he is one of the few critics who could do so...
...The book closes with a chapter which provides suggestions for the creation of a new synthesis of scientific knowledge and philosophical reflection...
...In order to be so reassured they must be satisfied that the newest and most powerful kind of knowledge, scientific knowledge, fits into the overarching worldview with which they are provided...
...It is first necessary to have coped with the interior analogue of this question before we will be at home with the always painful working out of the exterior phases of autonomy and authority...
...But Cantore also warns us of man's seeing himself as a "new Prometheus capable of fashioning the universe as he pleases...
...This can lead to too great rapidity and the sense of a scholasticism that does not belong to such a book...
...2) But if feeling belongs so much to the body then the place o/the body needs considerable restoring in the life of the human spirit...
...Is man's creativity as scientist and poet cognitive only, or cognitive and moral, or cognitive moral and physical, in that he gives shape to a plastic, moldable universe...
...It should be of general interest to all who are concerned with the place of science in our culture and with the dangers and promises it holds for us...
...aedf As Spirit CHARLES DAVIS Seabury, $8.95 WILLIAM F. LYNCH The title Body As Spiritmwlfich Charles Davis has c~osen for his new book--is not simply an eye-or-ear catching phrase, though it is that...
...cal and ontological solutions, many of whose bases are philosophical, is somewhat superficial...
...poem an =smd~ of m,pmm~ m in~/mtely shaped u a Cubit .But at worn it..b ~,ammt a set of oft~ ~., oddly o~-.r~ ~,D r~ o~~ arsm~t...
...portent pair of people, Pascal and Freud, will help us to deal with the question in a slower way...
...This is understandable, given the limits of space, but it creates some difficulties...
...Indeed, the scientists fare .better than the philosophers...
...W'dllams, charected~c~/, would be the tint to =ay that the split in ~ 1ML~xxism IxCweea the %'ea~ matert,l bin" of ,och~ aad the mmehow dedvatt~ ~el~structure" of consciomNu and culture...
...Archibald MacLeish gave us the formula long ago (but probably without the foreknowledge of its endless quotability), that a poem does not mean but is...
...Even at the endmto which I shall return--Davis moves with resolution into a discussion of the eternal battle between the inward autonomy of religious thought-feeling and the ogre of external authority...
...I think) and Tdevlafon: Teck...
...nor is there any more sympathy for the orthodox criticism that is content to manufacture typologies and to assign hierarchies of aesthetic value by purely internal criteria...
...But his own feelings come out more lightly when he puts in a stout vote for the gift of spontaneity...
...ram m ,o<~ m,~ ,m mom~ so .doml With ~ ill the .hmSwllp :m+a~ll b, ~I~ aU...
...P~ this way, the design seems almost obvious...
...B~t not necessarily so at all...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 7
