The Humanities in Our Intellectual and Cultural Life

Abstract

Forty-five years after C.P. Snow’s famous and contentious lecture at Cambridge on “The Two Cultures,” of the humanists and scientists, we continue to suffer, not so much from this dichotomy in our ways of thinking, but rather from their shared subservience in this country to a third “culture,” the culture of politics, of base survival and self-interest from the lowest to the highest levels of our government and society. If our critical faculties were truly at work, the Filipino humanist should have no trouble concluding that the way forward—culturally and economically—can only be led by a greater awareness and application of science in our national life, especially in our education. But rational decisions like this are held back by the supervening claims of politics, which are neither humanist nor scientific, and by a naïve and retrograde conception of science and humanities as options—mutual exclusivity, and bordering on frivolous—rather than imperatives. The humanities, in particular, are often taken for a little more than entertainment, a belletristic indulgence devoid of rigor and practical significance. The question to ask should really not be where the humanities might be located in our intellectual and cultural life—something for which I suspect we already know the answers—but rather where intellect and culture belong in our national consciousness.

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