Humanists, Scientists, and the Cultural Surplus

There’s nothing, situate under heaven’s eye
But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky . . .

The Comedy of Errors (II, i, 16-17)

One of the aggravating things about humanists is the way they have to begin their essays with epigraphs. Strangely privileged words that hover an inch or so above the text, they generate vague resonances but rarely settle into a definitive relation with what follows. In this, the practice of using epigraphs is simply an extension of the humanist tendency to avoid nailing down the case. Humanists like to hover while scientists like to land. And in this difference lies much distrust and mutual disdain and not a little envy. At the heart of this difference is the issue of limits, which is not so much an issue as a maze of issues. My own epigraph resonates with this complexity. Since it comes early in The Comedy of Errors and since the comedy is by Shakespeare, it is not long before Luciana’s statement gets turned on its head. But then it doesn’t really get turned on its head. That is, it does and it doesn’t. And this is something like the pattern for this essay about limits, or bounds, or the bounds of limits. But bear with me, for the issue is important. I will take the subject of this special issue of SubStance–the application of evolutionary and cognitive science to the study of the arts–for my immediate focus in addressing the general issue of the difference between the way scientists and humanists go about making arguments.