Home About Edge Features Edge Editions ... Edge Search The true "sacred texts" of the western tradition have been for centuries, those of the great authors. Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare. But also Victoria, Bach, Handel, Beethoven. And Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rembrandt. And Archimedes, Pascal, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg. And Paul Celan and Bela Bartok. Etcetera. All of them are "sacred authors." Canonical. Quantum physics is no less-inspired a monument than the Bible. Nor less ambiguous. REGARDING A NEW HUMANISM
Translation by Karen Phillips Edge Bio Page REGARDING A NEW HUMANISM In 1959, C. P. Snow gave a famous lecture at Cambridge entitled "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", lamenting the academic and professional scission between the field of science and that of letters. In 1991, the literary agent John Brockman popularized the concept of the third culture, to refer to the dawning of the scientist-writer, and hence, the birth of a new humanism. A humanism no longer bound to the classical sense of the term, but instead a new hybridization between the sciences and the humanities. In fact, what occurs in the philosophical genre is that words must transmit concepts, leaving little room for the flowers of rhetoric. In philosophy, it is very difficult to escape from a determined grammatical mode. Martin Heidegger has already explained that he had to give up writing the second part of Being and Time because of the inadequacy of the language of metaphysics which always identifies a being with the event of being, forgetting the ontological difference. Today, when philosophy tends to blend with literature, what other recourse to we have? Gregory Bateson used to say that we must adapt to a new form of thinking which substitutes objects with relationships. But substituting objects with relationships is telling stories. In such, Bateson is inviting us to tell stories. | |
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