History Bump

I took it as, "if we hope to show that culture is a human artifact rather than an unintended natural byproduct". This is something close to saying "if we hope that humans really have free will" or "if we hope that there's really a difference between humans and other animals".

In other words (expanding earlier in the paragraph a bit), we have to integrate art and science to understand what human consciousness can understand/produce, if we hope to have something we can point to as human at the end.

I think.
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page reference?

I think of it as a distinction between ways of understanding the world according to natural, inevitable facts (such as the indisputable laws the physical sciences aspire to provide us with) and, on the other hand, the more interpretive, sliding-scale human sciences. He ends the intro by saying we don't have to choose between them, right? Perhaps we mustn't choose between them?

White would have us accept that through discourse, all orderings of understanding are preformed by the limits/devices of human consciousness. But I'm pretty sure this is the same thing Carol already said. Helps me clear up my own thinking to attempt another paraphrase.

last page of the introduction. penultimate sentence? i don't know precisely--i surrendered my book to my hubby, who's taken it to bed. :)

Page 23...near the end of the last paragraph.

pg 23, last paragraph, last sentence, quoted below. I have to say it reads like exactly the kind of thing White complains about at the start of Chapter I; I can't wait to see how he gets out of that one!
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"My aim has been to show that we do not have to choose between art and science, that indeed we cannot do so in practice, if we hope to continue to speak about culture as against nature - and moreover, speak about it in ways that are responsible to all the various dimensions of our specifically *human* being."

You'll find White *doesn't* get out of all his self-contradictions. The text is much more exploratory than it is airtight argument. So an important question for readers is whether loose ends and contradictions invalidate his arguments.

this one bugs me because it confuses me. i put above that the definitions of the terms he was setting in opposition were important, b/c if he and i are defining them differently, then i could walk away w/a very different impression of his meaning than he intended (obviously). but what's _really_ bugging me & has been all along is the word "against." why in the world, in an argument--even if you lay the rest of this aside--FOR a productive overlap of art & science, would you set up a head-to-head between culture (art) & nature (what science studies)?

i feel like i must be reading this sentence totally wrongly--because otherwise it just doesn't seem to fit here. how else might i read this instead? i mean, becky, i hear you about contradiction, but you don't put them back to back about that & just LEAVE them there! do you?

I think that the phrase "as against" is idiomatic, and means "in contrast to", "as distinct from" without (in White's mind)
*real* opposition implied.

I've heard "this as opposed to that" used in the same way in class.
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Part of it might be, and this is very tentative, that nature is not what science studies. From an extreme cultural studies perspective, science is an amalgomation of socially accepted patterns of behavior, which means that science is part of culture.

What I read into this is the awareness that our ways of receiving/perceiving notions of the world are not innate or immutable (i.e. natural), no matter how much we try to pretend they are. I think it was Burke who wrote about science not actually measuring nature, but measuring very specific reactions or interactions within nature. For example, we have never seen a black hole, only evidence that leads us to conclude (and theorize the existence of) a very dense place in the fabric of the universe. In fact, we do not "see" a black hole, but the lack of telltale signs of an otherwise consistent universe.

so (way out on a limb) if we read "culture" as his word for "that good stuff you get when you combine art + science" and "nature" as "our unfortunate natural tendancies to divide everything up and quarrel about it," then the whole thing makes sense?

i could still kick the man for making such a big deal about the ways our brains categorize things for meaning-making & then being so confusing (irresponsible?) in this particular example of word choice as to have us making up categories right & left to try to explain him.

From my reading here, it seems that White does see a real distinction between "Scientific knowledge, of the sort actually attained in the study of physical nature," and "knowledge of human nature."

In terms of the second, he says "we cannot achieve a properly scientific knowledge of human nature." er, in order to say this, it seems that he must accept a "properly scientific knowledge."(23).

I don't see him conflating the two--it seems he is claiming that they are niether right or wrong, better or worse, nor the same, but are different methods for different systems of knowledge. Scientific methods are great, but don't work when dealing with culture...