Going beyond the boundaries of two cultures

Hasok Chang
The author is a chair professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge.

Korea maintains the tradition of dividing high school students into the humanities and STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) categories. Though the partition was removed from the official educational curriculum, the legacy remains as the one-time state-administered college scholastic ability test (CSAT) is still based on the differentiation.

The categorization sticks for life. Students are segregated into two differing groups with a bias toward one another, a habit that continues into adulthood. The humanities-STEM division came from Japan and was adopted under its colonial rule. But Korea’s deep-rooted tradition also reflects the mindset of respecting scholars and disregarding the profession of skills.

The breakdown runs deeper in East Asia, but it has been a common feature across the world. In his famous book “Two Cultures,” published in 1959, British scientist and author Charles Percy Snow lamented at the great cultural divide of “science” and “arts,” which separates the “intellectual life of the whole of western society.” Snow himself did not fear crossover. With a PhD in physics, he served in the British government, published novels, and worked as a literary critic. He bemoaned how the British elites who mostly studied humanities were so ignorant in simple scientific knowledge despite Britain’s traditional strength in basic science, technology and medicine. While expressing contempt for anyone who had not read Shakespeare, few could describe the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics. Snow criticized the British education tradition and argued that true education should put an equal emphasis in the two areas of studies.

Snow’s “The Two Cultures” stoked much debate at the time and still remains in the spotlight. But the education and culture have not improved as hoped by Snow. As he was not one of the greatest scientists or writers, many probably would not listen to his views.

But there are other intellectuals with greater influence than Snow with a critical view of the breakdown in earlier time. German writer Johann Wolfgang Goethe was one of them. He is regarded as the greatest writer of German language and an iconic name of German Romanticism. The plays, novels and poems he wrote are cultural heritages Germans are most proud of. Most Korean readers of classics would have read — or those from STEM background would have at least heard of — “Faust” or “The Sorrows of Young Werther.”

But Goethe was a serious scientist — a fact that many people from both STEM and humanities background may not know. The German intellectual of the Romanticism movement did not differentiate natural and social science. Poetry was a study on the human essence, which inspired Goethe to dig into morphology and physics. He put forward an ingenious theory on colors that boldly challenged Newton’s understanding of color.

The standard at the time was based on the discovery by Isaac Newton, who demonstrated through prism that the visible spectrum of rainbow colors forms a colorless white light. Goethe, on other hand, observed different color outcomes from the collision of brightness and darkness. The argument did not just come from his imagination, but it was built through persistent observation and experiments. Many still recreate the experiments of Goethe from 200 years ago. I was bewildered by a recent exhibition displaying the difference. Under Newton’s theory, sunlight passing through a thin slit apparatus generates a rainbow coloring at the edges. Goethe’s produces a different color spectrum when placing an opposing apparatus to the slit on the pathway of sunlight.

Although a less familiar name than Goethe, Henri Bergson in the early 20th century commanded supreme influence on French philosophy with his somewhat abstract rationalism theories. His prioritization was with the concept of time. He distinguished the “lived” time which he called “real duration” between the mechanical time of science to argue that it was wrong to understand human time according to the clock. He did not expound on his time theory from an abstract perspective, but against the well-established theory of relativity by Albert Einstein. Bergson went on to publish a paper on “Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory” in 1922, which demonstrates the philosopher’s deep understanding of the scientist’s novel theories on physics.

Expounding on the validity of scientific findings, by literary figures like Goethe and Bergson, is too complex to cover in the restricted space of a newspaper column. But history shows that great literary men had sufficient knowledge and interest to confront the greatest scientists of their time. To truly overcome the bisection of liberal arts and science, we should look back on the history of convergence for inspiration.

Translation by the Korea JoongAng Daily staff.