Humanity and the life of language : the "Two Cultures" to Montaigne's "De l’Institution des enfans".

This article analyses the often aggressive discussion between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis about the « Two Cultures » – what might otherwise be termed the « war of literature and science » – which took place in the 1950s and 1960s. It suggests that behind Leavis’s strident attack lurks a novel, even unique, understanding of the « human ». For Leavis, the « human » is neither a genre, nor a stable category, but a literary activity; a mode of reading and its phenomenological effects. But the precise qualities of this « human » response to language are often unclear from Leavis’s implications; the final section of this article thus analyses Montaigne’s De l’Institution des enfans, the chapter where Montaigne – often seen as the inventor or anticipator of contemporary, post-modern or post-human subjectivity – explicitly deals with the kind of pedagogical themes discussed by Snow and Leavis, and which offers concrete signs of the kind of reading which might respond sensibly to words which live and make live.