Culture and Nature in the Prism of Knowledge

Abstract

According to the thesis of the two cultures of knowledge, during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century the sciences and the humanities parted ways, becoming separate areas of knowledge no longer able to understand each other. This essay shows that times are changing. A dualistic account is no longer helpful. First, the essay presents the dynamism of the disciplines through the example of the history of biology, showing that disciplines are configurations subject to dramatic historical change. Drawing on texts by Ernst Cassirer, Karl Mannheim, Gaston Bachelard, and Pierre Bourdieu, it then discusses concepts of nature and culture and looks at knowledge formations that traverse disciplinary boundaries. The essay argues that they may be regarded as a reaction to the beginnings of a fundamental transformation of the disciplinary dichotomy of nature and culture, matter and spirit in the course of the twentieth century. The historian of science’s closing appeal is not only for historical retrospection but also for a new culture of reciprocal invitation and challenge in a universe of knowledge that can no longer be understood in dualistic terms but that has become irreducibly plural.

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