Science and Culture: “The Best That Has Been Thought and Said”

In the 1880s, there was a famous debate between the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold and the biologist and anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley (also known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”{{reference 1}}. The debate concerned the place of natural sciences vs humanities and arts in contemporary education and culture.  

In Arnold’s definition, the meaning of culture is “to know the best that has been thought and said in the world.” Fittingly, the Arnold-Huxley debate is itself in that category when it comes to understanding the still existing tension between the practice and practitioners of science, on the one hand, and humanities and arts, on the other. 

In this series, we will explore this tension, starting with the very notions of ‘scientist’ and ‘artist,’ so common in everyday language that we forget about their thorny origins. Next, we will follow the Arnold-Huxley debate itself and how it relates to the current state of affairs. We will then look into the workings of scientific and artistic imagination and representation in the arts and sciences.  

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Scientists, like artists, are praised for their ingenuity, imaginative thinking and aesthetic judgement. It is a sign of high appreciation to refer to a scientific theory or experimental design as an artwork, as did ‘the father of nuclear physics,’ Ernest Rutherford, in his speech at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1932: 

A strong claim can be made that the process of scientific discovery may be regarded as a form of art... A well constructed theory is in some respects undoubtedly an artistic production.

The French theoretical physicist and historian of science Pierre Duhem also spoke eloquently to this effect:

[I]t is impossible to follow the march of one of the great theories of physics, to see it unroll majestically its regular deductions starting from initial hypotheses, to see its consequences represent a multitude of experimental laws down to the small detail, without being charmed by the beauty of such a construction, without feeling keenly that such a creation of the human mind is truly a work of art.{{reference 2}}

On the other hand, a work of art is rarely compared to a scientific discovery as a matter of praise. For example, T.S. Eliot wrote that Joyce’s Ulysses “had the importance of a scientific discovery,” and Émile Zola in his essay The experimental novel (1880) likened working on a novel to experimenting, inspired by the physiologist Claude Bernard’s Introduction to Experimental Medicine (1865). But these cases stand out precisely because they are rare.   

Today’s practicing scientists and artists work at separate institutions, rarely collaborate, and communicate their work to the public in very different ways. But has this always been the case?   

It may come as a surprise that the very notions of ‘scientist’ and ‘artist’ are modern inventions. Before scientists, there were natural and experimental philosophers, scholars, theologians, and practitioners of various liberal and mechanical arts{{reference 3}} which some of the modern sciences sprang from (astronomy, agriculture, and medicine, to name a few). The term ‘artist’ in our modern understanding of a creator of works of fine art is itself less than 300 years old. As a matter of fact, ‘artist’ and ‘artisan’ were used interchangeably before the 18th century, when the split between ‘fine arts’ and ‘crafts’ crystallized.    

Debates over ‘scientist’

The word ‘science’ itself is a French import from the Middle Ages, initially used as a synonym of knowledge in general. It then acquired the connotation of systematized knowledge arrived at by logical demonstration (deduction) from first principles. This is the Aristotelian conception of knowledge, in distinction to the less reliable ‘common knowledge.’ In 1620, Francis Bacon in his treatise Novum Organum proposed a different conception of science as knowledge arrived at gradually, by means of observation and experiment – what we now refer to as empirical science.    

The English polymath William Whewell coined the term ‘scientist’ in 1833, in the course of his debates with the Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge on the nature of sciences and their place in the tree of knowledge.{{reference 4}} In his later book, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), Whewell further advocated the use of the term: 

We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist. Thus we might say, that as an artist is a musician, painter, or poet, a scientist is a mathematician, physicist, or naturalist.

That same year, the word ‘scientist’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Still, it wasn’t readily adopted into everyday use, partly because many (as we would call them) scientists of the day like Michael Faraday and Thomas Huxley{{reference 5}} strongly preferred the term ‘natural philosopher’, which encompassed broader philosophical and theological areas of inquiry. They saw themselves as men of broad liberal education, who chose to engage in scientific investigations both as a personal vocation and service for the benefit of mankind. They found it distasteful to pursue science for money. “To them the word scientist implied making a business of science; it degraded their labours of love to a drudgery for profits or salary.”{{reference 6}} 

As an interim solution, the phrase ‘man of science’ was used in formal discourse and writing for much of the 19th century. But fierce debates over the grammatical and semantic legitimacy of the word ‘scientist’ unfolded over the course of the second half of the century.

Even as late as the 1920s, the debates about ‘scientist’ continued on the pages of Nature, with the objections ranging from the pedantic, related to the word formation rules, all the way to the vocational, like an ‘antipathy to science as a calling or profession.’ What eventually sealed the term’s acceptance were educational reforms that placed science education on the same footing as education in medicine, law and theology. Science became merely another profession to choose among others, and to be a scientist now meant to be a professional, like a physician, a lawyer or a clergyman.

By the 1960s, ‘scientist’ fully took root in the language, with a definitive history of the term opening thusly: 

The appellation scientist is considered a title of honour, hotly contended for by economists, engineers, physicians, psychologists, and others. 

That is indeed a 180° turn from the initial antipathy with which the word was met. But in most other languages the story of the equivalent of ‘scientist’ wasn’t nearly as dramatic as it had been in English. In many cases there was a gradual transition from a native ‘scholar’ or ‘sage’ or ‘learned man’ to ‘scientist,’ by way of narrowing the meaning of the original term.

In German, for example, the current term ‘Wissenschaftler’ literally means ‘practitioner of (systematic) knowledge’, though earlier terms included ‘Gelehrter’ (‘learned one’) and ‘Naturforscher’ (‘investigator of nature’). In Russian, ‘ученый’ is a ‘learned one,’ as is the Hungarian ‘tudós’ and the French ‘le savant.’ In Japanese (科学者, ‘science-person’) and Chinese (科学家, ‘science-expert’), however, the introduction of the equivalent of ‘scientist’ was a matter of deliberate linguistic modernization. 

The union of arts and sciences

The history of the notion of ‘artist’ unfolded in Europe over several centuries. The Latin ‘artem’ (plural ‘ars’) and Greek ‘techne’ originally referred to (technical) skill and mental agility in general. For over two thousand years, art signified “any human activity performed with skill and grace,”{{reference 7}} from shoemaking to architecture to rhetoric. And, for what it’s worth, even as late as 1755, one of the meanings of science itself was given in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language as ‘any art or species of knowledge’ or, alternatively, as ‘one of the seven liberal arts.’ Arts and sciences went hand in hand and were practiced by the same people. 

Artists-artisans of the Renaissance made extensive use of the technical knowledge from the liberal arts like geometry and mechanical arts like medicine in their work:

In the course of the fifteenth century, the accelerating spread of the knowledge of perspective and modeling, along with the revival of ancient models, led to the conviction that painting and sculpture now required not only apprenticeship but also some knowledge of geometry, anatomy, and ancient mythology. Alberti and Leonardo projected an image of the artist as a “craftsman-scientist.”{{reference 8}}

A similar sentiment was expressed by David Hume in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748):

An artist must be better qualified to succeed in this undertaking; who, besides a delicate taste and a quick apprehension, possesses an accurate knowledge of the internal fabric, the operations of the understanding, the workings of the passions, and the various species of sentiment which discriminate vice and virtue. How painful soever this inward search or enquiry may appear, it becomes, in some measure, requisite to those, who would describe with success the obvious and outward appearances of life and manners. The anatomist presents to the eye the most hideous and disagreeable objects; but his science is useful to the painter in delineating even a VENUS or an HELEN. <...> Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment.{{reference 9}} [bolding added]

In the older art system, what we separate today as arts, crafts, and sciences, was joined even at the institutional level: 

Instead of the modern art museum, for example, the sixteenth and seventeenth century had the “cabinet of curiosities,” which displayed seashells, clocks, sculptures, and precious stones as a visual table of knowledge.{{reference 10}} 

Besides the cabinets of curiosities, there were anatomical theaters where dissections were open to the public, and botanical gardens attached to universities, which also served as study contexts for painters and illustrators. In Florence, painters belonged to the same guild as apothecaries (Arte dei Medici e Speziali, Doctors and Apothecaries) who supplied them with pigments and varnishes. And some of the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, like Robert Hooke, were also talented illustrators themselves and accompanied their philosophical treatises with their own meticulous drawings of living things.     

Separating the ‘artist’ from the ‘artisan’

Throughout the Renaissance, making art usually was a cooperative affair, with many minds and hands at work, in masters' workshops, as exemplified by Raphael’s frescoes, Botticelli’s paintings and countless lesser known artifacts. Composers freely borrowed melodies and harmonies from each other, and plays were often adapted and remade in various theater productions. The rise of the singular ‘artist’ whose work is an expression of an individual creative spirit only became a pattern in the 18th century. 

Originally, the artist, also known as ‘artificer,’ was a maker, not a creator. In Renaissance terms, while God creates nature out of nothing, nature makes what is potential into the actual. The artificer simply modifies the actuality present in nature. Poets, painters and composers were viewed not as ‘creating’ beauty but as discovering what was already there, by imitating it. 

Until the 18th century, there was no sharp distinction between artists and artisans, or between ‘high art’ and ‘low art.’ Art was a part of life, and it was made with the purpose of serving a useful function — in churches, households, courts or town squares. Still, what distinguished exceptional works of art from merely good ones was the grace, invention and imagination of their makers.   

But after the 18th-century split, all of those graceful aspects of the older image of the artisan-artist were attributed solely to the artist, whereas the artisan or craftsperson "was said to possess only skill, to work by rule, and to care primarily for money."{{reference 11}} What happened? 

Diverging paths

Two major societal changes catalyzed the separation of arts from crafts, on the one hand, and arts and humanities from the sciences, on the other, - a picture familiar to us today. The Industrial Revolution, which spanned the 1760s to 1840s, brought about mechanization of many of the processes that were previously the provenance of skilled artists-artisans. And the Romantic movement that emerged towards the end of the 18th century represented a fundamental shift in the way people saw themselves and their relations with the human society and the natural world. 

Concomitant with the Industrial Revolution, the artist patronage by wealthy nobility was replaced with an emerging art market and a middle-class art public. Where art was once made for specific purposes (to serve ritual and worship, glorify rulers, embellish furniture and garments), it now had to deliver to the demands of the public. This catalyzed the splitting apart of the old, unified art system into ‘fine arts’ and ‘crafts.’ In a society undergoing industrialization and commercialization, the (fine) arts retreated from the world:

Although Schiller and Goethe never completely abandoned the hope that art might improve society, by the late 1790s, both had given up the eighteenth-century view of art as a means of public enlightenment. Schiller could even write in 1803 that Art should “totally shut itself off from the real world.” Many saw art as fundamentally alien to a society propelled by commerce and industry. Moreover, following the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, the various absolute monarchies of Central and Eastern Europe vigilantly exiled or imprisoned most social and political dissenters, including those who championed a politically engaged art, such as Heine. This made it easier for the idea of a completely autonomous art to gain early acceptance.{{reference 12}} [bolding added]

Schiller and other Romantic thinkers were developing a new idea of the self-contained, standalone work of art that demanded a refined and inward-looking aesthetic response. And in doing so, these thinkers were in fact reacting to their own frustrations with the art market and the new public.{{reference 13}} Art was to remain free from the concerns of money and class, and it is in this regard that fine arts and crafts started diverging. The fine arts — poetry, music, painting, sculpture — were thus conceived of as a matter of inspiration and genius, standing apart from the world, and were meant to be enjoyed for themselves, privately, in moments of refined pleasure. Both the creation and contemplation of fine art became a private and personal matter. In contrast, the crafts and popular arts like embroidery, pottery and weaving were seen as only requiring skill and rule-following and were meant for wide public use or entertainment. 

Interestingly, as artists moved away from guilds and workshops to private studios, scientists moved from private investigations to laboratories and research universities and became more cooperative. The founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660 and the Académie Royale des Sciences in France in 1663 were only the most visible signs of the growing institutionalization of science as a distinct realm of activity. In the 18th-19th centuries, modern institutions of science beyond royal academies included public scientific lectures, laboratory demonstrations and public debates — the hallmarks of Romantic science.{{reference 14}} In parallel, separate new institutions were emerging also in the arts: art museums, secular concerts and literary criticism. Romanticism in many ways contrasted itself with the Enlightenment rationalism:

The scientific revolution of the late seventeenth century had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its lingua franca was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of scholars and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public.{{reference 15}}

Romanticism birthed a new, Faustian, image of a scientist who was a “solitary scientific ‘genius’, thirsting and reckless for knowledge, for its own sake and perhaps at any cost.”{{reference 16}} It was the time of Alexander von Humboldt, Humphry Davy and the Herschel dynasty of astronomers who became the successors to the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment like Newton, Hooke, Locke and Descartes. This notion of a scientific genius possessing an intense imagination and obsession with discovery echoes the inspired image of the Romantic poet and artist.  

But as a movement of contradictions, Romanticism also engendered a suspicion toward science as a method of inquiry that was draining the beauty and mystery and our sense of the transcendent from the universe, by replacing them with a purely mechanistic image. The English Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge, whom we met earlier, spoke in 1816 of the contemporary state of science in France: "We have purchased a few brilliant inventions at the loss of all communion with life and the spirit of nature."{{reference 17}} And the Scottish historian and philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1833, "The progress of science is to destroy wonder, and in its stead substitute mensuration [measurement] and numeration." This ongoing ‘naturalization’ as a process of transformation of our understanding of the world and ourselves was believed to lead to a disenchantment of the world. This is what Edgar Poe’s Sonnet — To Science (1829) is about:

In his lecture series on The Roots of Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin highlights this Romantic resistance to “scientists, bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen, deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes.” Coming mainly from the men of letters, such an attitude seems quite in contrast to how the men of science themselves saw their craft at the time — a quest to uncover the secrets of nature through thoughtful and skillful experiments whose design demanded flights of imagination no less audacious than those of the poets and artists of the day.  

Thus, from the early decades of the 19th century, the arts/humanities and sciences went their separate ways. ‘Science’ came to be used to describe only empirical sciences (primarily physics, but also chemistry and biology) and had to carve out a space in university curriculums still dominated by humanities. 

It is in this atmosphere of separation and growing alienation of the sciences and humanities that the famous debate between the two gentlemen and good friends, the poet Matthew Arnold and the naturalist Thomas Huxley, took place. They articulated some of the most poignant arguments about the place of natural sciences and humanities in human culture that are as apt and relevant today as they were in the late 19th century. In the next post, we will explore these arguments and the subsequent cultural commentary that the debate inspired. 

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Header image: Domenico Remps, Cabinet of Curiosities (1590s)