The Future of Culture

Abstract

It is not as easy as one thinks to define the new dimension created by science in the life of modern societies; a considerable number of prejudices, resulting from conceptions which are often directly inspired by science itself, produce an unsuspected degree of resistance in this respect. Our only means of overcoming them seems to lie in isolating the real implications of the current scientific revolution, in breaking with the clichés which ensnare us, in becoming aware that research plays a very different part from the one that the preceding generation saw fit to attribute to it, so much so that one of the great barriers erected between art and science dissolves. Thus the hope placed by Gyorgy Kepes in “a new awareness of the interdependence of knowledge and feeling,” in “the links between the intrinsic characteristics of natural and artistic forms” would be justified, together with the efforts of such men as Buckminster Fuller to erect “a bridge between our conception of the constitutive principles of nature and the application of this knowledge to the creation of man-made forms,” and with the will to “renew the ancient marriage of art and science.”