1. science

CHAPTERS FROM BRITISH
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
7. Progress, history, literature (Farkas)
Utopia and poetic vision
“[…] More’s seminal text Utopia offers us a
quasi-realistic account of a vastly improved
society.”
(Gregory Claeys, Searching for Utopia 12)
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land
(William Blake, “Jerusalem”, 1808)
Blake’s “Jerusalem”
Progress: definition
“The belief that later times are an improvement
over earlier times.” (CODPh)
A strong, quasi-religious, belief but by no means
universal: ironic inversions
“Jerusalem” – an ironic rendeing
From the film …
… based on a novella by
Alan Sillitoe,
… directed by
Tony Richardson
… in
1962
Progress  Decline and fall in …
•
•
•
•
•
Myth
Biology
Literature
The human sciences
The Arts
Myth: metals precious and base
The Four Ages of Man




Golden Age (justice, peace, plenty: leisure)
Silver Age (agriculture and architecture: work)
Bronze (warfare but piety)
Iron (warfare, impiety; nations, boundaries;
greed)
… in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses, Virgil Solis’s illustration
The Golden Age
Metamorphoses, Virgil Solis’s illustration
The Iron Age
Biology: devolution
“Any new set of conditions which render [a species'] food and
safety very easily obtained, seem to lead to degeneration.”
(Ray Lankester, Degeneration, A Chapter in Darwinism,1880)
Parasitism: the barnacle
Literature: backward evolution
The Morlocks in …
H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
(1895)
Arts and the human sciences:
degeneration theory
•
•
•
•
•
Racial typology: de Gobineau, Essay on The Inequality of
the Human Races (1855)
Clinical psychiatry: Benedict Morel, Treatise on
Degeneration (1857)
Criminal anthropology: Cesare Lombroso, Crime, its Causes
and Remedies (1899)
Historiography: Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline
and Fall of The Roman Empire (1776-1789), Oswald
Spengler, The Decline of the West (1919)
Art and literary criticism: Lombroso, The Man of Genius
(1889) (L’uomo di genio in rapporto alla psichiatria), Max
Nordau, Degeneration (1892), Degenerate Art exhibit
(1937)
A Nazi exibition: Munich, 1937
Max Ernst
Wassily Kandinsky
Paul Klee
Oskar Kokoschka
Lovis Korinth
Piet Mondrian
Progress  Circularity 1
Cyclical history
• Giambattista Vico, The New Science (1725)
recurring cycle (ricorso) of three ages: the divine, the heroic, the human
• W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1925)
Perns in a gyre: contracting/expanding cones of history spinning
around
• Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed (1962)
Cycles of (liberal) Pelphase – (authoritarian) Gusphase – (anarchic) Interphase
Progress  Circularity 2
Cyclical narration
• James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of
bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of re-circulation back to
Howth Castle and Environs” (FW 3)
“A way a lone a last a loved a long the” (FW 628)
Progress: a strong, persistent belief
“It still needs to come, it still will come
A better age, for which
Fervent prayer yearns
On hundreds of thousands’ lips.”
Mihály Vörösmarty, “Summons” (1836)
Progress through
the ages
• "You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be
hidden." (Jesus Christ in Matthew 5:14) =>
• "wee must consider that wee shall be as a city upon a hill" (Rev.
John Winthrop to would-be colonists in Boston on board the
Arabella)
• Secular version in Enlightenment:
The theories of progress […] in the eighteenth
century were born in France […] which was
preparing its revolution. […] in 1750, AnneRobert Turgot associated the idea of the
inevitability of progress with the idea of
infinite human perfectibility. (CCUL)
Progress in time
Euchronias
temporal displacement - projection of utopia into the future
• Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand
Five Hundred (1771) – the first euchronia
• Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888)
socialist euchronia – technophiliac
• William Morris, News From Nowhere (1890)
anarchist euchronia – technophobiac
• Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (1975)
green euchronia – soft technology
Progress and its aspects
In philosophy
Aesthetic:
Ethical:
Epistemological:
kitsch =>
art
injustice => justice
ignorance => knowledge
ugliness =>
evil =>
error =>
beauty
goodness
truth
In related fields of public activities
Political: totalitarianism => democracy; capitalism => socialism; chaos => order
bondage => liberty; hostility => fraternity; inequity => equality
Social:
Scientific: pseudo-science => reliable s.; destructive s. => humane science, e.g.?
alchemy => chemistry, astrology => astronomy, numerology => mathematics;
A-bomb => nuclear energy; deforestation => IT
Progress and knowledge
“Is the world no better for any book?”
(Mihály Vörösmarty, “Thoughts in the Library” (1844)
“Ment-e / A könyvek által a világ elébb?”
Verbatim: Has the world progressed due to books?
(Vörösmarty, „Gondolatok a könyvtárban”)
Scientists: YES!
The paragon of progress: science
“The progressive nature of scientific enquiry is
probably the most impressive example of progress
that we have […].” (CDOPh)
“[…] progress has no definite and unquestionable
meaning in other fields than the field of science”
(George Sarton 1936,
Qtd. in SEOP)
Scholars would be scientists
“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.”
(Walter Pater, The Renaissance 1890)
=>
In the 20th c.: all arts and disciplines constantly aspire towards
the condition of (natural) science.
Wissenschaft, наука (naúka), scienzia, tudomány =
science, discipline (incl. the humanities)
savant, tudós = scientist + scholar
“All science is either physics or stampcollecting.” (Ernest Rutherford)
Shoulders and sight
“If I have seen further
it is by standing on
the shoulders of
giants.”
(Isaac Newton, 1676)
Rose window of
Chartres Cathedral
Strong shoulders
“The dwarf sees farther than
the giant, when he has the
giant’s shoulder to mount on.”
(S. T. Coleridge, 1828)
Cumulative, collective: progressive!
“the acquisition and systematization of positive knowledge are
the only human activities which are truly cumulative and
progressive” (Gerges Sarton)
science is a collective enterprise
of researchers in successive generations
It is the method (systematic, cumulative, collective) that counts:
individual researchers or research teams, perhaps entire
disciplines can go wrong, but science marches on.
Progress: knowledge and society
Auguste Comte’s program of positivism:
by accumulating empirically certified truths
science also promotes progress in society
Edward Bellamy
Julian Huxley
J. F. K.
“We choose to go to the moon”
“[…] man, in his quest for knowledge and progress,
is determined and cannot be deterred. […]
We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon in this decade.”
(John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Houston, Texas,
September 12, 1962)
That's one small step for (a) man, one
giant leap for mankind.
(Neil Armstrong, the Moon, July 20, 1969)
“Oh, 'impressed' is not the right word!”
Who said the following?
“Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or
rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable
romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery.”
A. Isaac Asimov
B. Anthony Burgess
C. Vladimir Nabokov
D. Kurt Vonnegut
C. Vladimir Nabokov
(Strong Opinions)
The humanities self-destruct?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix (Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”)
No offense intended, but it would never occur to me
to look for the best minds in any generation in an
undergraduate English department anywhere. I
would certainly try the physics department or the
music department first—and after that biochemistry.
(Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday)
Apollo moon landing a hoax?
Plenty of third party
evidence proving that it
actually happened.
<=>
Conspiracy theories
still persist.
Reason: postmodern ubiquity of simulacra and hyperreality
• Simulacra: copies that depict things that either had no
original to begin with. (Jean Baudrillard)
• Hyperreality: the real and the fictional seamlessly blended
together with no clear distinction between the two.
Scepticism about
science and progress
The progressive nature of scientific enquiry is
probably the most impressive example of progress
that we have, although even this is doubted by
philosophies of a sceptical and relativistic bent, that
see in science only a history of revolutions. (CDOP)
Revolution: dictionary definitions
1.
(2) a radical and pervasive change in society and the
social structure, esp. one made suddenly and often
accompanied by violence => clash of interests <=>
communality; (3) a sudden, complete or marked
change in something => instantaneousness <=> slow
accumulation; discontinuity <=> successive generations
2.
(4) a procedure or course, as if in a circuit, back to a
starting point; (6a) a turning round or rotating, as on
an axis => circularity <=> no forward motion, no
progression
(Webster’s)
Science not progressive
Change without growth:
Kuhn’s model of 1962
Normal science: paradigm of accepted
assumptions capable of solving puzzles.
Too many unsolved puzzles => anomaly =>
breakdown of normal science => revolution
/ paradigm shift => new paradigm
Paradigm shifts
•
•
•
•
P1 Aristotelian dynamics =>
P2 Newtonian mechanics = >
P3 Einsteinian mechanics = >
(P4 Quantum physics = > Pn)
Pn not better/worse than P1
No progress: incommensurability
No common measure between paradigms
“When two theories are incommensurable there
may be no neutral standpoint from which to
make an objective assessment of the merits of
the one versus the other.” (CODPh)
“The supposed untranslatability of one theory or paradigm into
another.” (Alex Rosenberg)
Aristotelian impetus
Newtonian inertia
Newton’s absolute mass
Einstein’s relative mass
Paradigm shift = Gestalt shift
A young
beauty?
An old hag?
Either?
Yes.
Both?
NO!
Multistable perception =>
incommensurability
Progress without science: 1960s-’80s
Aspects of radical anti-scientism: arrange titles under headings
COUNTERCULTURE AND ANARCHY
CONSTRUCTIVISM AND LANGUAGE
FEMINISM AND STANDPOINT THEORY
• 1968 – Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture
• 1973 – Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe
• 1975 – Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of
Knowledge
• 1977 – Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
• 1979 – Bruno Latour and S. Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of
Scientific Facts.
• 1982 – Carol Gilligan, C. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s
Development
Progress without science: 1960s-’80s
Aspects of radical anti-scientism
COUNTERCULTURE AND ANARCHY
• 1968 – Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture
• 1975 – Paul Feyerabend, Against Method:
Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge
CONSTRUCTIVISM AND LANGUAGE
• 1973 – Hayden White, Metahistory:
The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
• 1979 – Bruno Latour and S. Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life:
The Construction of Scientific Facts
FEMINISM AND STANDPOINT THEORY
• 1977 – Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One
• 1982 – Carol Gilligan, C. In a Different Voice:
Psychological Theory and Women’s Development
Counterculture: Roszak
The counterculture rebelled against the hegemony
of scientific rationality by proclaiming the
cognitive value of subjective experience. This
rebellion was manifested in the turn to
hallucinogenic drugs, Eastern and shamanistic
religions, and the paranormal. (Keith M. Parsons on
Roszak)
“The truth of the matter is no society, not
even our severely secularized technocracy,
can ever dispense with mystery and
magical ritual.” (Roszak, 1969)
Anarchy: Feyerabend
The most radical interpretation of Kuhn’s views:
Paul K. Feyerabend,
Against method: Outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge (1975)
Against “the tyranny of abstract concepts such as ‘truth’, ‘reality’, and ‘objectivity’.
The heroes of the scientific revolution, such as
Galileo, were not as scrupulous as they were
represented to be. Galileo made full use of
rhetoric, propaganda, and various
epistemological tricks in order to support the
heliocentric position.
“the rich material provided by history” =>
“anything goes”
Conceptual relativism
or
Epistemological anarchism?
Language: H. White
What is historiography?
Traditional view: it is science dealing with facts.
It only shows what actually happened: „bloss zu zeigen wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”
(Leopold von Ranke).
Hayden White: it is literature, dealing with tropes.
“I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the
form of a narrative prose discourse... One of my principal aims... has been to
establish the uniquely POETIC elements in historiography and philosophy of
history... Thus I have postulated four principal modes of historical consciousness...
Metaphor, Synecdoche, Metonymy, and Irony” (Hayden White).
White’s predecessors:
Giambattista Vico: rhetoric (4 tropes)
Northrop Frye: literature (4 emplotments)
Karl Mannheim: philosophy (4 ideologies)
Constructivism: Latour and Woolgar
“Anthropologists” in scientists’ “native habitat,” the lab
=>
Reality is constructed
“It is not simply that phenomena depend on certain material
instrumentation; rather the phenomena are thoroughly constituted by
the material setting of the laboratory. The artificial reality, which
participants describe in terms of an objective entity, has in fact been
constructed by the use of inscription devices.” (Latour and Woolgar)
Power is knowledge
the winners of this negotiation are not the group with the best evidence but
the group with the strongest social power (A. Rosenberg)
Language is power
results of laboratory experiments do not speak for themselves, but are created,
put together by discussion, dispute and compromise (A. Rosenberg)
Feminism and standpoint theory
“What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the
equation [E=mc2] is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons,
rather it is having privileged that which goes faster.” (Luce
Irigaray)
(Qtd. in A. Sokal and J. Bricmont, Intellectual Impostors)
Women approach practical reasoning from a
different perspective from that of men.
[Women’s] emphasis is on community, caring,
and bonding with particular individuals, in
place of abstract individuality.
(CODPh on Carol Gilligan)
A scientist’s complaints
From the left, a variety of postmodernists, Marxists, feminists,
literary critics, radical ecologists, sociologists, and others have
sought to debunk the traditional image of science as objective
knowledge. They charge that the guiding values and methods of
science are pervaded with reactionary, environmentally destructive,
and patriarchal assumptions. Some of their more vaporous musings are
hard to understand clearly, for instance, the charge that science
adheres to a Western, linear, masculine (all bad things) way of
thinking or presupposes the “metaphysics of presence.” However
opaque their rhetoric, their aim is clear enough: They want to deflate
science, to cut it down to size, and to display it as no more “rational”
or “objective” than any other form of discourse.
K. M. Parsons, Drawing Out Leviathan:
Dinosaurs and The Science Wars (2001)
Literature strikes back
Chapters… (Farkas)
Humanities garoted
“Humanities and liberal arts are garroted
[strangled] by funding shortages, while
science faculties bloom, […] Next to the
research colossi of modern science, literary
studies must appear a cottage industry.
Under the banner of postmodern “theory,”
its intellectual harvest is often no more
relevant than Thomist scholasticism, giving
additional ammunition to near-sighted
humanities-bashers.”
(Swirski, Peter. Of Literature and Knowledge:
Explorations in Narrative Thought Experiments,
Evolution, and Game Theory. 2007)
The escape: self confidence
“More and more mankind will
discover that we have to turn to
poetry to interpret life for us, to
console us, to sustain us. Without
poetry, our science will appear
incomplete; and most of what now
passes with us for religion and
philosophy will be replaced by
poetry (Matthey Arnold, “The Study
of Poetry.” 1880).”
The crime: dissociation
The poets of the seventeenth century, the successors
of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a
mechanism of sensibility which could devour any
kind of experience. They are simple, artificial,
difficult, or fantastic, as their predecessors were
[…] In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in, from which we have never
recovered [later] poets revolted against the
ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt
by fits, unbalanced
(T. S. Eliot “The Metaphysical Poets”).”
The tool: cognitive power
“[…] scholars of literature,
humanists, and even general
readers alarmed by the political
hegemony of scientism […] might
be keen to find out how literature
relates to science in cognitive terms.
They might be no less keen to find
out what a puissant [powerful]
intellectual tool it is in its own
right (Swirski).”
Science, philosophy and
the cows of literature
[P]hilosophy is in some sense continuous with
science […] when considered in cognitive terms,
literary narratives lie on a continuum with
philosophical thought experiments, differing from
them not in kind but only in degree […] [My study is]
about milking real knowledge from unreal cows
(Swirski).”
Recognition from science
“The planner, the builder of castles in the
air, the novelist, the author of social and
technological utopias is experimenting
with thoughts; so too is the hardheaded
merchant, the serious inventor and the
enquirer. All of them imagine conditions,
and connect with them their expectations
and surmise of certain consequences: they
gain a thought experience. (Ernst Mach
qtd. in Swieski).”
More than handmaiden
“There is, of course, nothing in the
above research program to
endorse a reduction of belles lettres
to a handmaiden of analytic
philosophy or the social sciences.
Thought experiments provide a
constructive way of investigating
how knowledge in literature
works. But that’s not all there is to
telling and reading stories
(Swirski).”
Recognition from psychology
“It is quite possible ... that we will always learn
more about human life and personality from novels
than from scientific psychology (Noam Chomsky,
Language and Problems of Knowledge, 1988).”
Qualia
Qualia, plural of the Latin quale, is
a key term in consciousness studies,
meaning the specific nature of our
subjective experience of the world.
(David Lodge, Consciousness and the
Novel, 2002.)
“Examples of qualia are the smell of freshly ground coffee or the taste of
pineapple; such experiences have a distinctive phenomenological character
which we have all experienced but which, it seems, is very difficult to
describe (The Oxford Companion to the Mind, qtd in Lodge 2002)”
“Lyric poetry is arguably man’s most successful effort to
describe qualia (Lodge 2002).”
Virtual fruit with real taste
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.
(Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” 1621-1678)
“We see the fruit, we taste it and smell it and savour it with what has
been called ‘the thrill of recognition’ and yet it is not there, it is the
virtual reality of fruit, conjured up by the qualia of the poem […]
(Novelist character at cognitive science conference in David Lodge’s
Thinks, 2001).”
Hear, feel, see, know
That’s the way the stomach rumbles
That’s the way the bee bumbles
That’s the way the needle pricks
That’s the way the glue sticks
That’s the way the potato mashes
That’s the way the pan flashes
That’s the way the market crashes
That’s the way the whip lashes
That’s the way the teeth gnashes
That’s the way the gravy stains
That’s the way the moon wanes
(William S. Burrows,
Tom Waits, “That’s the Way” 1993)
The novelist’s task
“My task which I am trying to achieve is,
by the power of the written word, to make
you hear, to make you feel — it is, before
all, to make you see. That — and no more,
and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall
find there according to your deserts:
encouragement, consolation, fear, charm
— all you demand; and, perhaps, also that
glimpse of truth for which you have
forgotten to ask (Joseph Conrad qtd in Lodge
2002).”
Let us advance together…
“That the purified language of
science, or even the richer
purified language of literature
should ever be adequate to the
givenness of the world and of
our experience is, in the very
nature of things,
impossible. Cheerfully accepting
the fact, let us advance
together, men of letters and
men of science, further and
further into the ever-expanding
regions of the unknown
(Huxley, Literature and Science
1963).”
How much truth?
“We all know objective truth is not obtainable [...] But
we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable;
or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or
if we can’t believe this we must believe that 43 per
cent objective truth is better than 41 percent”
(Julian Barnes’s The History of the World in 10 ½
Chapters,1989).