Science and the Rejection of Realism in Art

Author(s): Benjamin De Mott

Source: Synthese, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Dec., 1963), pp. 389-400
Published by: Springer
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20114479
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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

SCIENCE AND THE REJECTION OF

REALISM IN ART

A rejection of representational realism characterizes much of Western art

after 1850. And various inquirers have sought to found this rejection in
- an audience that
the desire of recent artists for a new kind of audience
would admire the artist not because he succeeded in reproducing the
familiar world of everyday experience, but because through his genius he
created a pure art-world independent of everyday experience. However,
many serious students of contemporary arts have been offended by this
type of explanation. They have, indeed, gone so far as to condemn all
socio-aesthetic analysis which is patterned after that of Ortega Y Gasset.
For, in their view, such analysis ends by denying the integrity of the whole
body of recent art. No result save this is possible, these students assert,
when an analysis begins with the assumption that poet and painter alter
their styles solely because they refuse to tolerate a philistine audience
which does not appreciate the technical imagination of the artist.
Now it can be admitted that this assumption seems unlikely to provide
a thoroughly adequate analysis of the motives of artists in the period in
question. But precisely what an adequate analysis of motives would
consist of is unclear. The defenders of the integrity of the modern artist
set forth their own in generalities. They aver that the artist alters his mode
- or even - because
of expression in the direction of difficulty obscurity
he feels that older modes are inadequate for the presentation of his dis
coveries in an unexplored range of experience. And hence we are to
conclude for ourselves that the modern artist's flight from simple repre
sentational realism (and from the analogues of this style in verse and
music) has been in some measure a result of a new conviction that truly
realistic interpretation of human experience was impossible in that mode
of art.
But what was the source of this conviction? If it were possible to find
one which, in its finality, excluded all others, the entire dispute might end

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Synthese 15 (1963) 389-400; ? D. ReidelPubl Comp., Dordrecht-Holland

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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

rapidly. And though this cannot be done, it may be possible at least to

sharpen the outlines of the conviction by limning what could have been
a key influence in shaping it. In all events, this will be our task: the effort
of the present paper will be to suggest that the contemporary artistic
sensibility has been immediately affected by a breakdown of belief in the
ability of man to order his experience in terms of general, intelligible
principles which can be directly related to the external world itself. In
consequence, it will argue that developments of late nineteenth and early
twentieth century science, and, more particularly, trends in the philosophy
of science, have been main factors in the artist's repudiation of the simpler
modes of imitative realism.
Let us first consider the principle upon which rest the simple imitative
styles which are grouped here simply as representational realism. The
principle is this: the single test of whether conscious, rational man is
imitating the "true nature" of an object external to him is the judgment
of his sensuous apprehension. This means that if his sensuous appre
hension assures the artist that he is reproducing an object in conformity
with the general order of his sense impressions, then he is in fact repro
ducing the object as it exists in the external world. For, as the principle
presupposes, sensuous apprehension is perfectly adjusted to the intelligible
structure of the world: it responds by nature to such "plausible" dis
tinctions as that between mental substance and material substance, and
that between space and time.
Approaching the principle from another viewpoint, then, we might
say that representational realism depends upon the immediate intelligi
bility to the senses of the general principles of the universe : it requires
that these principles actually be "of the universe" rather than "of the
subject mind". In order for the artist confidently to imitate what is per
-
ceived, he must believe in the reality or truth of what he sees which is
only to say that he must unconsciously assume that the order of sense
experience and the fixed principles of his world are complementally
intricated in a realm of absolute truth.
A glance at the art of the Cubists or at the poetry of Mallarm? makes
evident that characteristic artists of the past 50 to 75 years were not
satisfied with this assumption. Indeed, they seem to have convinced
themselves that it was entirely unjustifiable. For the younger artists
introduced, early in this century, a new assumption which contradicted

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 SCIENCE AND THE REJECTION OF REALISM IN ART

the old. The substance of it was this: when a painter or poet imitates or
describes something external to himself a
in manner which satisfies the
judgment of his sensuous apprehension and seems to accord with his own
rational conception of the object, he is in no sense rendering the object
as it exists in reality : on the contrary, he is but imitating himself.
This new, solipsistic conviction has many implications, of course. But
the primary one is that man's logic of sensuous apprehension is untrust
worthy because it is not necessarily in agreement with anything beyond
itself. Man's arrangement of his sense experience is by no means abso
lutely adjusted to the intelligible principles of the universe. What ismore,
itmay not even be tangential to them. Therefore it follows that the artist
is only justified in assuming that the manifold of sense testimony takes
the form it does simply because man has fallen, more or less by chance,
into certain rigid habits of organizing that testimony. The artist may
choose to order his images in a fashion which accords with the order of
his sense perceptions; but he must conceive the latter order as simply a
habit with no meaning beyond itself, one which he could without com
punction exchange for another.
It is this circumstance which accounts for the fact that a younger
artist who has broken with an old habit of imitation sometimes argues
that his new order is more justifiable than the old. He may support this
argument by citing a specific new scientific theory as, for example,
Guillaume Apollinaire cited relativity theory in justification both of his
own poetry and of the art of Braque and Picasso. More generally, how
ever, the artist has based his argument on broad intuitions which in some
way are thought to synthesize philosophical, scientific, and sociological
developments and which cause him to assert that the world is "more
complex" (as T. S. Eliot put it) than it had appeared to earlier artists.
But both types of justification of the complex anti-realism of contemporary
art have something in common: they imply that those phases of con
temporary thought which are the product of the information accumulated
in postrenascence centuries have had some effect upon the artist's denial
of the equivalence of the order of his sense perceptions with the order of
the universe, the complete picture of the nature of things.
We may secure our own intuition of what that effect was if we begin
with a contrast between Greek science and philosophy and contemporary
science which Percy Bridgman once made. "The Greek", Bridgman said,

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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

"thought of the external as so intrinsically

world reasonable that its
structure could be recovered
by the sufficiently cogent use of the naked
reason of an armchair theorist." And having made this observation, the
founder of operationalism went on to contrast the view with the quite
opposite one which modern man must hold as he faces the extremely
complex accounts of phenomena in the direction of the large and small
given in quantum mechanics and in relativity theory.
Analogous to Bridgman's contrast is one we may make between the
underlying coherence of Greek art and what has been considered the
characteristic "incoherence" of contemporary poetry and painting. And
our contrast gains weight if we recall that metaphor of Professor White
head's which drama to Greek science and philosophy.
yoked Greek For,
as Whitehead perceived, the concepts of "plan" and final cause which
ruled the Greek world view also were the bulwarks of Greek art. The
coherence of Sophoclean tragedy, the magnificent orderliness of the march
toward crisis, the inevitable downfall of a hero whose hybris had driven
him on wrongly to seek heights reserved for deities - all these elements
in the drama had fairly specific counterparts in the whole Greek world
view, not least of which was the Greek scientific and philosophic doctrine
of the "natural place".
Such organismic emphasis upon plan is scarcely characteristic of the
dominant thought in contemporary science and its philosophy: we are
aware that this ancient foundation for coherence in art -
quite namely
the analogy with the coherence of the universe - is no longer a potent aid
for the artist. In 1950 or in 1850 the artist could not believe (with the
dramatist of ancient Greece) that the general principles of the universe
were so immediately recognizable in the manifold of his own sense ex
perience that the tragic fall of an aspiring but mortal ruler stood in direct
relation to the sense evident fact of the downward movement of the
grosser materials of the universe. To say truth, not since Shakespeare has
the analogy of microcosm-macrocosm been more than dead metaphor;
and it is to be remembered, moreover, that the great tragedies did not
grow out of acceptance of the analogy but rather out of doubt of its
finality.
Neither could the artist of the past hundred years gain strength from
the next pattern of universalorder which marked the history of Western
thought. Admittedly, throughout much of the eighteenth century the

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 SCIENCE AND THE REJECTION OF REALISM IN ART

Newtonian world machine provided a scheme of order which poets and

painters alike seized upon and to which they adjusted their art forms. It
is a commonplace of criticism that a dominant English verse form of this
- the heroic - was itself
period couplet distinguished by a certainty of
rhythmic movement that bespoke confidence in an intelligible universal
order capable of ending the "confusions" of some seventeenth century
verse. But more apparent is the circumstance that the couplet was used
to celebrate a grand unification of terrestrial and celestial realms.
Yet, as we said, this confidence cannot be shared by the contemporary
artist. In a moment we shall look very rapidly at a few of the factors which
have made the Newtonian system of little aid to him. But before we do,
let us consider one highly significant difference between Aristotelian and
Newtonian world order.
Newton's theories were, initially, far more remote from the content
of sense experience than were those of the organismic world view Newton:
had attained a higher level of abstraction. Indeed, the laws of motion now
an - a "natural state" of rectilinear motion -
began with abstraction
which was scarcely as plausible in immediate sense experience as was the
natural state of rest with which the Greeks had begun. What we are saying
is that though familiarity with Newtonian theories increased their plausi
bility, the connection between theory and sense observation under this
system was never as apparent as it had been under the organismic view.
To a degree not required by Aristotle, the Newtonian world machine
demanded an imaginative realization of facts and symbols beyond sense
experience. Thus the poet could not assume the new order; he was forced
to discuss it. He could not give the order indirect expression through the
unfolding of a narrative of men and events as Sophocles gave expression
to the order which he knew; on the contrary, he had little choice but to
discourse directly upon the subject of nature's great plan.
The novelty of the Newtonian principles was of course partially re
sponsible for this. But a larger share of the responsibility belongs to the
nature of the Newtonian principles themselves: they were not evident
enough in ordinary sense experience to be assumed. In order to describe
them, a quite high level of abstraction in language was needed. Doubtless,
itwould even be possible to argue that because this was true, the Newtonian
system itself weakened the faith of the artist in the immediate intelligibility
in sense experience of the principles of the universe and therefore laid the

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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

groundwork for the more recent refusal to believe that by imitating the
order of sense impressions one automatically imitated the order of the
universe.

In any event, the scheme of Newtonian can no longer be

materialism
accepted uncritically by the artist. And the kind of criticism which he
must make of it renders it impotent to bulwark a belief in the immanence
of universal truth in sense data, in ordinary experience. To isolate any
one factor as controlling the criticism is impossible. We must note that
after the Newtonian system had grown familiar enough for its principles
to seem intelligible in everyday experience, there came many scientific
- from of to ad
developments ranging investigations electro-magnetics
vances in physiological studies of the relation of mind and body - which
indicatedthat to reduce all phenomena to the action of simple mechanical
forces was not to give final explanations. And there followed in poetry
and metaphysics a resurgence of idealistic, organismic and mystical ap
proaches to reality, all which rejected mechanistic materialism at least
partially on the grounds that the new science itself proved it an inadequate
account of the universe.
But possibly more important was the development of a very precise
critique of all scientific or metaphysical theories which claimed to be
connected with something beyond sense experience, or insisted that they
were the grand general principles by which the universe operates. This
critique focussed upon the relation of scientific theory to sense experience
and to the external world. And in so doing it profoundly altered man's
conception of the relation of his sense experience to a "final reality". It
is not necessary to list the names of all the significant figures in this
movement. We need say only that its roots are in Hume and in early
nineteenth century positivism; and that from men whose ideas and fields
of interest were as varied as were those of Stallo and James, Mach and
Poincar?, Bridgman and Korzybski, there issued (and continues to issue)
penetrating analysis of the concept of scientific principles as akin to
effluences from the external world which are to be valued in proportion
to their innate intelligibility to the senses. The combined influence of these
men and the schools they represent was to make clear that what had been
thought of as general principles of the order of the universe are something
- no matter whether
considerably less than that they are simply useful
devices for controlling situations, or economic descriptions of sense ex

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 SCIENCE AND THE REJECTION OF REALISM IN ART

perience, or free creations of the mind, or results of man's habit of

binding time in language and perception.
Naturally it is not easy to separate the influence of the individuals -
from pragmatists to semanticists - who in various ways contributed to
this critique. Yet it is even more difficult to separate their combined
influence from that of the new scientific theories - including quantum and
- which in several cases
relativity they anticipated. For these, too, had
the effect of making it even more difficult to conceive that the intelligible
order of the universe was directly in sense experience. The new
given
theories, together with philosophical analysis of the nature of any scientific
theory, seemed to assert that though a conclusive test must always in
some degree be connected with sense experience, it does not necessarily
have to be connected with our own everyday order of sense experience.
For it is apparent that our present optical nerves hardly permit obser
vation of conclusive evidences of the principle of indeterminacy or of the
phenomena involved in the general theory of relativity. We come no
closer through our sense experience to the scientific theory itself than
merely checking statements logically deduced from the theory.
We might formulate all that has been said thus far into three general
contentions, as follows :
1. The Greek artist's aesthetic principle - imitation of the general
principles of universal order as they can be grasped in immediate sense
- was
experience closely related to the Greek organismic world view. The
intelligibility of the principles of this world view in sense experience
provided a basis for belief in the possibility of imitating reality or "ob
jective truth" by imitating a particular order in sense testimony.
2. In a rather weakened condition a similar aesthetic principle con
sciously guided the artists of the great neoclassical period in art, the
eighteenth century. At this time new scientific principles of universal
order were somewhat less directly disclosed in the manifold of sense ex
perience than were the principles of the organismic view; and there was
a consequent failure on the part of artists to dramatize - make concrete -
the new principles. They were forced to discuss them rather than project
them: "objective truth" was more distant from everyday experience.
3. In our own century, the general principles which were once obvious
to sense observation have retreated farther and farther from our im
mediate experience. Moreover, the new principles have been accompanied

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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

by a new philosophy of science which denies their relation to a "real"

world and insists that scientific truth is a truth limited to observed facts
in the world of the many.
This summary perhaps suggests the nature of our major point. It is
this: if the influence of the new developments in science and in the phi
losophy of science at all touched the contemporary artist, there is a
probability that they would have directed him away from simple repre
sentational realism. Awareness either of the new science or of the phi
losophical critique of scientific theory would have lessened his assurance
that he could order his practical experience in terms of intelligible princi
ples directly related to the objective world itself. Such awareness might
have caused him to doubt whether he could any longer believe that what
he saw exhausted the truth, for he would be conscious that at least one
account of the content of his perceptions - the scientific account - is
expressed in symbolic structures which, though tested by experience are
not as yet evident to the senses and make no claim to inherent intelligi
bility. In short, if he were influenced at all by the new science and its
philosophy, he might well conclude that the world ismore complex than
the usual order of sense testimony or the older belief in the presence of
intelligible principles in sense testimony, admits it to be. And from this
conclusion the step toward a rejection of exact imitation of the sensuous
order would be but a short one.

ii

Until now we have avoided the problem of finding clear evidence of a

connection between philosophical interpretations of the new science and
the dominant movements in art from
1850-1950. We have simply noted
an apparent connection in two previous ages - in ancient Greek and
during the Enlightenment. And we have pointed out that the skepticism
concerning the finality of everyday experience which is perhaps the most
striking element in modern art stands in interesting relation to the de
- in the same - of the
parture period general principles of nature from
what was once an obvious intelligibility in such experience.
Our desire has been to sharpen the outlines of the rather shadowy
conviction that imitation of the sensuous order will not be a sufficient
basis for realistic interpretation of human experience, by calling to mind

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 SCIENCE AND THE REJECTION OF REALISM IN ART

developments in the history of thought which would cause distrust of the

sensuous order. But, confessedly, parallel trends proving nothing in them
selves. Furthermore, as Stephen Spender has declared, no sane poet has
written or will write a poem about relativity theory. Is it possible, then,
to go beyond interesting comparisons of ideas and find a genuine nexus
of art and philosophy of science in the nineteenth century?
Within the limits of this paper we can assuredly do little more than
compare. But that it is possible at least to approach more closely the
particular terms of our comparisons may be demonstrated first by a brief
glance at the poets, Apollinaire and Eliot, whom we mentioned before;
and then by a summary consideration of the nineteenth century back
ground which is relevant to them.
Apollinaire was the most vocal opponent of photographic realism in
-
the early twentieth century. If we accept his own statements
especially
those contained in Le Po?te Assassin? - we must conclude
that he felt
himself and all artists who were truly alive in his age to be rejecting a
false reality when they rejected the camera eye of simple representational
ism. "We should abandon," he wrote in 1908, "for a while, long enough
to realize what reality is, all this false realism which overwhelms us in
most novels of today and which is only platitude." What did Apollinaire
find false in that realism? He indicates that he believed its falsity lay in
the fact that it equated true reality with the usual order of sense data.
Apollinaire hinged this opinion upon his own awareness of the develop
ments in science (including relativity theory) which seemed to imply a
complexity in the external world to which experience alone could give
no key.
But it is not only Apollinaire's prose which illustrates his conscious
ness of an ambiguous relation between the order of the universe and the
content of sense experience. His verse constantly dislocates the arrange
ment of the universe which the senses normally follow, wrenching fixed
patterns of perception, freely altering perspectives in space and time to
make them, he believed, accord with relativity theory and with a new
scientific world wholly unfamiliar to sense logic.

Apollinaire's knowledge of new trends in theoretical science caused

him to suspect that man has constructed a world of words distant from
- to
"being". And his response to applied science unnatural, created
- led him to
reality believe that the nature of true reality, in light of the

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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

ease with which man seems to create both verbal and physical worlds, is
in some way independent of sense testimony. He concluded that reality
was dependent not on physical nature but upon the mind's creativeness.
And he conceived that, in the interest of a realism which would be true
to this fact, the arts had to promote a revolution against representation
and Though a poet, he saw in the Cubistic experi
in favor of creation.
ments of Braque and Picasso, the only possible direction for the art of
his moment - namely, away from the sensuous order of experience.
There is clearly a connection between Apollinaire's belief in science
as free creation of the mind and the position of Henri Poincar?; the
corpus of Apollinaire's work is admittedly influenced by a conception
of what the theory of relativity means in terms of human experience ;and,
finally, there is an evident link between Apollinaire's work in promoting
the new principles of art which provided a direction for a whole series of
movements in painting after Cubism, and the tendency of the leaders of
those movements to use science to justify their experiments.
Philosophical arguments stemming from scientific developments
rather than the scientific developments themselves, appear to be involved
in the art of T. S. Eliot. It is true that the theme of Time which Eliot
(like Joyce and Virginia Woolf and many others) has not ceased to explore,
has gained eminence in contemporary art not only as a result of Bergson
but even more obviously as a result of interest stirred by Einstein's
theories. Nevertheless, long before his acquaintance, Lewis Wyndham,
began a campaign against the new theory of relativity, Eliot was attracted
by philosophical speculation over issues which science had helped to shape.
Two philosophers interested the early Eliot: Bradley and Husserl, the
idealism of the former contributing an awareness of the isolation of man
within himself, far from any universal truth immanent in sense data; and
the latter's phenomenology contributing a conception of the need for a

multiplicity of views of an object before the object can be realized. Both

contributions can be related to the techniques of Eliot's poetry. For the
complexity of his verse is due in large part to the poet's refusal to permit
individual thought or sense experience to stand alone :Eliot attempts al
ways to secure a multiplicity of view by allusion and symbol and by a
kind of ideological counterpoint. He relates present action and perception
to that in the past, and the perceptions of a single individual to those of
groups with widely variant points of view.

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 SCIENCE AND THE REJECTION OF REALISM IN ART

But it is not, of course, to be thought that these philosophers shaped

a style for Eliot. We must turn to other poets, to Corbi?re and Laforgue
at first; and from them we must turn back to the beginnings of the
Symbolist movement in France. And here, rather than in isolated figures,
we may find the nexus for which we seek.
that virtually every major movement
It is often observed in verse and
after 1850 has been stimulated or directed by the development
in painting
of the Symbolist aesthetic. But only infrequently is it remembered that
Symbolism arose in France as an immediate result of the positivism of
Comte. The latter's recognition that the general - or metaphysical -

principles which had once been evident in the observable facts were no
longer evident, and that new positivistic principles must hence be de
veloped, overturned the traditional aesthetic as the earliest French Ro
mantics had been unable to. And with that overthrow came astonishing
results: suddenly made aware of a virtually undreamed of complexity in
the relation of truth to experience, poets and painters leaped in many
directions at once: idealism, mysticism, even frank solipsism, had tre
mendous vogues. Out of the ferment came the aesthetic which assumed
as its first principle a complexity in the ways of perceiving truth. And
throughout all the alterations the aesthetic has undergone, the principle,
unique in the history of Western art, has remained constant.
We cannot here pursue the complicated interrelations of this aesthetic
with the disillusion with science in the late nineteenth century which the
name of Reymond DuBois is enough to suggest. Nor can we discuss the
manner in which Symbolism has responded to the further development
of the critique of general principles which was mentioned earlier.
And yet we may have succeeded in establishing a foothold for our
premise nonetheless. For it should be evident that the positivism of Comte
and the Symbolist outburst that followed it are closely connected with
the previous history of the relations of art and the knowledge of nature.
Moreover, the point has been made that the most important agent of the
- the - arose in
rejection of simplistic realism in art Symbolist movement
response to a philosophy of science which took cognizance of a higher
complexity in the relation of principle to experience than had been ad
mitted in the past.
In light of these facts we may return to our original problem and set
down a tentative conclusion: it is possible to understand the rejection of

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 BENJAMIN DE MOTT

simple realism inmodern art in terms other than those of a socio-aesthetic

analysis which conceives the rejection to be only a result of a whimsical
longing for a new audience.For as this paper has attempted to show, a
means of interpreting the rejection is offered by the history of the relations
of art, science and epistemology.

Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.

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