First-person Rant on Segregated Academic Ideologies

I am sorry for the current state of academia. And I mean this in two distinct ways: (1), in the sense of pity and (2), in the sense of apology and guilt, as I feel partly responsible for the nature of this ‘current state,’ one in which the modes of thought applied in the hard sciences must be seen as separate and excluded from those applied in the arts and humanities. As a sort of ‘dual citizen,’ balancing my own mindset between the ironic deification of objective ‘truth’ in the physical and mathematical sciences and the supremacy of subjectivity one must inevitably subscribe to as an English major, I find myself in a position to mend this academic divide. I will go further: Mine is an urgent desire, a call, something vital, an activism for the realization that the human drive to know, to want to know, the longing to satisfy the murky curiosities of our own nature, to understand our position and purpose in the grand scheme of the Universe, runs across discipline and transcends ideology.

I pity this contemporary notion that we (by which I mean the entirety of academia, including students) must artificially separate the ‘objectivists’ from the ‘subjectivists,’ as this segregation of knowledge destroys, utterly demolishes, the very basis and reason for why we are so passionate about our compartmentalized little worlds to begin with—i.e., universal human curiosity, to which we apply an unnecessarily limited worldview in futile attempts for understanding. And my guilt arises from the fact that I am helpless in fighting against it, that I must feel like I am, quite literally, ‘coming out’ (and at times am disowned) when I confess to fellow physicists and mathematicians that I am, above all, some sort of flimsy romantic who views subjectivity as an accurate model for reality. If I may preach briefly, I will say that with a greater harmony and resonance, with a more open-minded acceptance, both fields would benefit from the commonality and unison of human knowledge—no longer should we be limited to a single mindset or mechanism for seeking truth. (And my suspicion is that the stubborn sciences would benefit more from this unity than the humanities, which seem, at the very least, a bit curious about what goes on beyond its borders.)

This is a matter between the hermeneutics and the poetics of not only literature, but all forms of communicating meaning and truth (and big-t Truth, surely). Whether one approaches the mysteries of the physical Universe as the supreme questions of human nature, questions which must be answered for our own understanding of ourselves, or whether one views narrative truth as more vital for the comprehension of human psyche should not be a valid duality. These notions should be identical, they should answer the same questions, unravel the same mysteries. The ways in which we approach the hows and whys of human existence (of physical existence, of existential significance) should not be so radically polarized, lest we run headless toward our own tragic extinction as the creatures who once had the potential to come together and yield understanding from conflict, but that, ultimately, allowed irrational passions to take over and lead them to a precipice of infinite, inevitable confusion.