College by Saikat Majumdar

Author:Saikat Majumdar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

The Contra-disciplinary

Here is my key advice to the smart and ambitious young people in 21st century India:

If you are attracted to different disciplines, don’tchoose between them. Go for them both.

Feeling torn between disparate disciplines is the best possible thing. It is a mark of genuine liveliness and curiosity. It is such a good thing that I recommend it to everyone. To those of you who don’t feel torn between incompatible things—those who know what you love and are monogamous about it (as I was)—try to cultivate a disciplinary field that is quite different from, even incompatible with from your primary interest.

Contra-disciplinarity is the best model of liberal artscience education. It is also its exciting future. Dual majors such as Computer Science and English, or Music and Computer Science embody high models of contra-disciplinary education. Philosophy and physics might form a similar pair, as old as it is new, a timeless classic. Their shared interest in explaining the universe is split between the natural, the human, and the spiritual. Between concrete reality through the senses and larger patterns that appear as abstract. Experience and data on one hand and theory on the other. Both moving toward the latter through the means of mathematics—the ultimate symbolic system of abstract language.

These are tall orders. No matter how exciting. For those to whom these feel too tall, there are plenty of other options. If you truly hate and fear mathematics and have your heart set on the arts and the humanities, perhaps you could pair your specialisation with a quantitative social science. Of such social sciences, economics would be the bravest choice, as in its current form it’s not that different from mathematics. If that’s too daunting, there is sociology, which, too, makes liberal use of quantitative models, unlike, say, cultural anthropology, which, as it’s practised today, is softer, far less quantitative, a qualitative or imaginative social science rather. And the least courageous would be to combine a core humanities subject, such as literature, with history, a subject that straddles the humanities and the social sciences.

Placed next to each other, literature and the social sciences shed light on each other’s epistemic forms in ways that do not come to surface when studied on their own. Literature, particularly in its modern life, is imagined as the articulation of a special individual—the artist who creates life and reality out of her own mind. More importantly, literature seeks to portray the private lives of individuals; the commitment of literature, as of all art, is to the particular, not to the general. Social sciences on the other hand, are more interested in the general than the particular; in larger patterns more than the individual stories. If they are interested in the particular or the private, it is usually as a means to understanding general or larger patterns in society. They seek to throw light not on a unique man or woman, but on the larger social, cultural, economic, and historic conditions that shape such men and women.

The collective instinct of the social sciences throws into greater relief the private instinct of literature.

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