The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science

THE ELUSIVE SYNTHESIS: AESTHETICS AND SCIENCE
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
Editorial Advisory Board
mOMAS F. GUCK, Boston University

ADOLF GRÜNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLV AN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College of
the City University ofNew York
VOLUME 182
THE ELUSIVE SYNTHESIS:
AESTHETICS AND SCIENCE
Edited by
ALFRED I. TAUBER
Boston University
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS

DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7923-4763-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-1786-6

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-1786-6
Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,

P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Tbe Netherlands.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada

by Kluwer Acadernic Publishers,
101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A.
In all other countries, sold and distributed

by Kluwer Academic Publishers,
P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Tbe Netherlands.
Printed on acid-free paper
Also published in 1996 in hardbound edition in the series

Boston Studies in the Philosophy ofSciences, Volume 182
All Rights Reserved

© 1997 Kluwer Acadernic Publishers
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written perrnission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ALFRED I. TAUBER / Preface VII
ALFRED I. TAUBER /Introduction

DAVID KOHN / The Aesthetic Construction of Darwin's Theory 13
ROBERT S. ROOT-BERNSTEIN / The Sciences and Arts Share a
Common Creative Aesthetic 49
FREDERIC L. HOLMES / Beautiful Experiments in the Life Sciences 83
MICHAEL LYNCH and SAMUEL Y. EDGERTON, JR. / Abstract
Painting and Astronomical Image Processing 103
SCOTT F. GILBERT and MARION FABER / Looking at Embryos: The
Visual and Conceptual Aesthetics of Emerging Form 125
SAHOTRA SARKAR / Form and Function in the Molecularization of
Biology 153
JAMES W. McALLISTER / Scientists' Aesthetic Preferences Among
Theories: Conservative Factors in Revolutionary Crises 169
JOSEPH MARGOLIS / Objectivity: False Leads from T. S. Kuhn on
the Role of the Aesthetic in the Sciences 189
LEON CHERNY AK and DA VID KAZHDAN / Kant and the Aesthetic-
Expressive Vision of Mathematics 203
CA THERINE CHEV ALLEY / Physics as an Art: The German Tradition
and the Symbolic Turn in Philosophy, History of Art and Natural
Science in the 1920s 227
ALICIA CRAIG FAXON / Intersections of Art and Science to Create
Aesthetic Perception: The Problem of Postmodernism 251
HILDE HEIN / The Art of Displaying Science: Museum Exhibitions 267
ALFRED I. TAUBER / From Descartes' Dream to Husserl's Nightmare 289
NAME INDEX 313
V
Far Alice
ALFRED I. TAUBER
PREFACE
The tension between art and science may be traced back to the Greeks. What
became "natural philosophy" and later "science" has traditionally been posed
as a fundamental alternative to poetry and art. It is a theme that has commanded
central attention in Western thought, as it captures the ancient conflict of
Apollo and Dionysus over what deserves to order our thought and serve as
the aspiration of our cultural efforts. The modern schi sm between art and
science was again clearly articulated in the Romantic period and seemingly
grew to a crescendo fifty years aga as a result of the debate concerning
atomic power. The discussion has not abated in the physical sciences, and in
fact has dramatically expanded most prominently into the domains of ecology
and medicine. Issues concerning the role of science in modern society, although
heavily political, must be regarded at heart as deeply embedded in our cultural
values. Although each generation addresses them anew, the philosophical
problems which lay at the foundation of these fundamental concerns always
appear fresh and difficult.
This anthology of original essays considers how science might have a greater
commonality with art than was perhaps realized in a more positivist era. The
contributors are concerned with how the aesthetic participates in science,
both as a factor in constructing theory and influencing practice. The collec-
tion is thus no less than a spectrum of how Beauty and Science might be
regarded through the same prism. Because of its eclectic nature, these essays
will appeal to a wide audience troubled by the causes and consequences of
our Two Cultures. Philosophers of science and aesthetics, as weIl as prac-
ticing artists and scientists, will hopefully find these essays useful.
This book began with a symposium, The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and
Science held under the auspices of the Boston Colloquium for the Philoso-
phy of Science at Boston University (November 17-18, 1992). The partici-
pants were Robert S. Cohen, Hilde Kein, Gian-Caulo Rota, Eugene Stanley,
Catherine Chevalley, Scott Gilbert, Sahotra Sarkar, Larry Holmes, Stephen
Jay Gould and David Kohn. Much of this collection is based on this sympo-
sium, and we thank Professor Robert S. Cohen for his gracious assistance in
organizing the meeting. The final collection and editing could not have been
realized without the outstanding editorial assistance of Eileen Crist, whose
careful reading and corrections leave the contributors much in her debt. I
am also grateful to Scott Podolsky, who assisted in the editing process. The
patience and professionalism of the Kluwer Academic Publishers staff is also
gratefully acknowledged.
Finally a word regarding the dedication of this volume to my wife, Alice.
She is an outstanding painter, a lyricist in the full sense of the term. Through
VII
A. I. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, VII-VIII.

© 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
VIII ALFRED I. TAUBER
her work, I am constantly reminded of dimensions of reality weH beyond

my analytic gaze and which can be approached only through the experience
of art. I am grateful for the gende reminder that what she paints, and what
she leaves unsaid, remains most human and most profound.
August 25, 1995

3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
13
14
15
17
18
19
20
ALFRED I. TAUBER
INTRODUCTION
I was in college in the latter half of the 1960's, at the height of student umest
on campus and a general discontent with society-at-Iarge. Much of the debate
centered on the role of "science" in dehumanizing man, although a better focus
might have been on unbridled technology, a different problem altogether. In
any case, my friends and primary intellectual passions were in the humani-
ties, although I was a biology major. Confusion reigned and I pursued courses
to reconcile the tension. One course directly sought to find the common denom-
inator, or shared foundation, of aesthetics and science. It was my failure to find
aresolution then that has led to a lingering quest, in part expressed by this
anthology.
This group of essays ranges from what I would call the phenomenolog-
ical description of the beautiful in science, to analytical exploration of the
conjunction of the aesthetic and the scientific. There is enormous diversity
as to how the contributors to this volume regarded this task. Part of the eclec-
ticism is reflected by the various disciplines represented: art history, biology,
philosophy, physics, mathematics, history of science, and sociology. But I
suspect that the issue draws upon much more variegated opinions of how to
explore such a complex issue, reflections that override the particular academic
perspective of the writer. This collection is no less than a spectrum of how
artJbeauty/aesthetics and science might be regarded through the same prism,
and the refracted images are startling for their diversity. But there is some order
to the project and we might broadly schematize the major themes.
The book is organized around two central tenets: The first is that scien-
tific experience is laden with aesthetic content of the beautiful, which is
manifest both in the particulars of presenting and experiencing the phenom-
enon under investigation, and in the broader theoretical formulation that
binds the facts into unitary wholes. This orientation is what I refer to as the
shared ethos of the project, but coupled to it is the more prominent sense
of separation, a schism between the two domains. Thus the second major
theme acknowledges that there may be deeply shared philosophical founda-
tions grounding science and aesthetics, but in the twentieth century such
commonality has become increasingly difficult to discern. This problem
accounts in large measure for the recurrent attempts to address how science
and aesthetics are linked, and the tension inherent in the effort to explore often-
times only an intuited elusive synthesis. These essays therefore are diverse
in the sense of approaching the topic from several points of view, and in
their relative emphasis on either the synthetic or divisive character of the
art-science relation.
The first issue addressed is the psychological overlap between science and
A. I. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, 1-12.

2 ALFRED I. TAUBER
art. This problem is explored from several vantages. David Kohn adroitly
dissects the aesthetic influences on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Kohn
carefully traces how two governing metaphors in On the Origin 01 Species -
the "wedging" metaphor (the action of natural seleetion as a powerful force)
and the "entangled back" (to express the interrelatedness of nature) - operated
in a partieular aesthetic categorieal framework - to emerge in a profound
scientific theory. These are two themes developed here. The first is that Darwin
was subject to profound emotional reactions on his Beagle voyage which
provided the substantive foundation of Origin 01 Species, written more than
20 years later. For Darwin, the sublime and the beautiful not only were distinct
emotions, but psychologically resided in tense balance, if not opposition: the
peace of the former, the ecstasy of the latter. It was their tension that later
framed the critical Darwinian theme, and their essential reconciliation was
forged in the two striking metaphors of wedge and entangled bank. The second
theme then shows how in an aesthetic construction, these metaphors arose from
Darwin's youthful and highly emotional experience on the Beagle. In tracing
the origin of the wedge and the entangled bank, Kohn discerns how nature's
balance of life and death in natural selection began for Darwin with the
depiction of naturallandscapes in terms of a Romantic aesthetic. The metaphors
are shown to play important eognitive (and emotional) roles in the transition
between Darwin's appreciation of natural phenomena and his logically struc-
tured scientific expression of that understanding. Kohn's persuasive and
original thesis is that the long struggle to develop the theory of natural selec-
tion found its expression in large measure in the reconciliation of the sublime
and the beautiful in the critieal organizing force of these two striking
metaphors, and so Kohn thereby offers a lucid and carefully crafted portrait
of scientifie creativity.
The fu1crum of creativity is used by Robert Root-Bernstein to attack the
popular view of a two eultures society. The distinction between science and
art is based on an unacceptable distinetion between thought and emotion,
analysis and feeling. Yet, as many renowned scientists have argued, the work
of science is both driven and sustained by an appreciation of beauty and a
feeling of awe (e.g. Einstein, Dirae, Schrödinger). Analysis, emotion and
sensibility are integral eomponents of both the scientific and the artistic process.
The three levels of aesthetic experienee - sensual, emotional/imaginative and
analytical - are common to the experience and process of seience and art.
The same applies for such elements as the play of tension and relief, realization
of expeetations, and surprise upon the encounter of unexpected connections
of meanings. These aesthetic elements can be found in a scientific discovery,
just as they can be found in a good novel or a fine symphony. The under-
standing of an essential and deep affinity between (great) science and
(great) art is supported by the claims of many scientists, who submit that an
aesthetie drive underlies science. Root-Bernstein has assembled a large and
diverse testament for that opinion. He cites some scientists who even insist
that an aesthetic sensibility is aprerequisite for first class scientific research.
INTRODUCTION 3
He also adduces that the majority of scientists who were intellectual creators
in their fields were also active in one or more of the arts. Moreover there
are many examples of extremely fruitful interactions between artistic and
scientific ways of thinking, so that he concludes that the claim of science
and art embodying different approaches does not hold up to scrutiny.
An example of such a fusion is offered by Larry Holmes, who examines
the classic Meselson-Stahl experiment, which has been characterized by many
as "beautiful". By looking at this particular study, Holmes attempts to address
the question of what informs the judgement of beauty of an experiment.
Does the judgement refer to a historically specific expression of an experiment
or to a protocol? Is the beauty in the actual experiment or in its description?
The Meselson-Stahl paper reported how DNA replicates, providing a decisive
answer to an important problem in one stroke; as Meselson hirnself charac-
terized it, it was "clean as a whistle", and others described the study as
"beautiful", "elegant" and "wonderful". The cleanliness of the data, along with
the striking simplicity and symmetry of the visual representation of the results
(included in the original paper and found in standard biological textbooks)
seem to have struck scientists as qualities of beauty. Also the pedagogical value
of the experiment is apparently connected with its aesthetic properties of
simplicity and elegance. The features of simplicity and immediacy of the
experimental results are present despite the fact that the knowledge presup-
positions for carrying out and understanding the experiment are highly
complex. The simplicity and symmetry of the findings are regarded as criteria
of beauty, a theme that appears in several other papers.
Scientists obviously have described certain scientific insights and experi-
ments as beautiful, but beyond such appraisals they might also consciously
employ artistic design and license to depict their data. Michael Lynch and
Samuel Edgerton visited astronomers, who were constructing visual images
from raw mathematically represented stellar data, and found that the scien-
tists deliberately attempted to aestheticize their presentation. This case study
reverses the common notion of science playing a major role in defining the
aesthetic of its culture (as discussed later in this book by Faxon), and shows
how scientists inbred in their cultural milieu absorb an artistic temper, or
orientation, and use the vocabularies and aesthetic judgments in composing
images for analysis and publication. After briefly reviewing so me historical
connections between art and science, Lynch and Edgerton discuss the partic-
ular aesthetic factors invoked in digital image processing in astronomy. The
technical site of image production - the image processing laboratory - has
become a place where astronomers and their technical staff produce and repro-
du ce images that are designed to appeal to various specialized and popular
audiences. Choosing among an endless array of possibilities for turning "raw
data" into processed images, allows the information to be "read" and displayed
in various ways, reflecting the scientists "sense" of the visual depiction.
Composed and recomposed to reveal "structure", images of a comet, for
instance, might be highly varied and individualized. Thus the comet as a visual
4 ALFRED I. T AUßER
object is translated from raw electromagnetic data into multivarious visual

images that in fact reflect an aestheticization process. Lynch and Edgerton
offer some examples of how astronomers draw upon contemporary aesthetic
sensibilities that were established decades ago by artists and later by mass
media. There is a self-conscious limit to the artistic foray however, for the
images addressed to a scientific audience, are in asense, conservative; whereas
color embellishes the dramatic effects used for popular audiences, journal
articles and professional presentation largely eschew such bold images, and
less dramatic monochromatic pictures are used. In any case, there are dis-
tinctive features of digital images that link them stylistically to "non-objective"
paintings. Broadly, two basic areas of correspondence are identified: 1) a "play"
between images, and sensitivity to motion and energy rather than surface
and static form, and 2) the field of representation is flattened and composed
of color patches, which have merged graphic, iconic or semiotic features within
its frame. This represents one pole, the post-modern aesthetic, whereas other
more "natural" styles are invoked by some astronomers, who edit our "artifact"
and "humanize" their images. Irrespective of the artistic style, an aesthetic
judgement is made in relation to the interpretation of the data, invoking an
artistic translation to define a world far removed from direct visual perception.
Art thus mediates science into human experience.
Aesthetic principles mayaiso guide research programs as discussed by Scott
Gilbert and Marion Faber. They maintain that embryology is unique among
the subfields of biology in that an aesthetic perspective has always been central
to it. As holists, embryologists have conceptualized their research aesthetically.
Harrison, for instance, looked for the order of development of different parts
of the body and established rules of laterality and mirror-image duplications.
By identifying rules of order and symmetry, he approached the parts as working
harmoniously to form a coherent whole. Many embryologists of the early twen-
tieth century chose to study embryos while recognizing that the field of genetics
promised more successful careers. The aesthetics of embryology was central
to their choice. Historically, there has been a tension between embryology
and genetics. Gilbert and Faber suggest that a difference of aesthetic attitude
seems to 100m at the center of this tension. Geneticists have labelIed embry-
ologists "mystics", who believe developmental problems are too complex to
be solved by science. On the other hand, embryologists have been repelled
by the reductionist attitude of geneticists who would cast all embryonic devel-
opment in terms of gene action. The holism of embryology is expressed in a
philosophy of organicism. (Organicism views the whole as functionally prior
to the parts.) It is an approach through which embryologists attempted to
formulate an alternative ground between vitalism and reductionism. While
genetics emphasized uniformity, reductionism, preformation and simplicity,
embryologists celebrated diversity, organicism, epigenesis and complexity.
Recently genetics and embryology are coming closer together, which Gilbert
and Faber regard as achallenge to the embryological aesthetic - the unique-
ness of development of each species and to the philosophy of holism.
INTRODUCTION 5
Sahotra Sarkar has offered a provocative argument of how an aesthetic

choice, namely formalism, has governed certain scientific disciplines in the
twentieth century. He describes how, in the beginning of the twentieth century,
European art discovered the power of formalism, al ready practiced widely
in so-called primitive culture. Formalism, the pursuit of forms for their own
sake, takes on different meanings in various art forms. In painting, sculpture
and photography, the form becomes the subject; in architecture, form domi-
nates function. Forms are to be manipulated during construction of a work
of art, they are directly (i.e. sensually) appreciated, yet they mayaIso serve
as symbols. Abstraction thus must precede construction, however, and this is
an important caveat, the search for "meaning" or "truth" is eschewed. The
formalist's art is "non-representational because its subjects are the forms that
are, in asense, within-itself". After briefly tracing the significance of for-
malism in art and architecture, Sarkar turns 10 address how formalism in
both the physical and biological sciences, similarly functions to confer the
"fundamentalist" character to a theory, and how such "forms" are aestheti-
cally chosen. He maintains that the choice of the physics of elementary particles
rather than of middle-sized objects as fundamental is largely an aesthetic
choice. For instance, in particle physics, the usual defence of its fundamental
importance is based on the argument that all other bodies in the uni verse are
"composed of" these fundamental entities. But in the nether world of indis-
tinguishable particles and transient resonances, the notion of "composed of"
is highly problematic. To say that a proton is "composed of" undemonstrated
quarks is quite different from the analogy of saying an organism is "composed
of" certain organs. He suggests that the models which particle physicists
construct are the result of a process akin to the method of analysis in for-
malist art. With this, and other examples from physics, Sarkar has endeavored
to show that aesthetic considerations, along with evidential ones, are impor-
tant in the way scientists choose their priorities. Sarkar applies the same
argument to biology, where he ex amines how an erroneous deciphering of
the genetic code (the so-called commaless code) involved a formalist approach.
It was widely appealing until the experimental test proved it wrong. He notes
that it was the aesthetic qualities of this comma-free code, with its appeal to
mathematical manipulation, that captured the fancy of early molecular biolo-
gists. But more current, and perhaps more important, Sarkar cites the current
sequencing of the human genome as another drive towards some ideal for-
malism. He has grave doubts of its brave promises, and believes its scientific
appeal is based on its perceived aesthetic qualities.
Sarkar would draw our attention to an interesting postulate: the same pattern
of choice apparent in the pursuit of the arts has also been manifest in the
sciences. Formalism in the arts is mimicked by the pursuit of the smallest
particles in physics, with the unproven hope that the principles found at that
level will help explain phenomena at all other levels of organization. Similarly,
a formal universalism of the genetic code is pursued at the expense of more
complex biology. The similarities go even further. In the arts or in the sciences,
6 ALFRED 1. TAUBER
the skills gene rally required by the formalist do not completely coincide with
those that are required by those pursuing diversity and complexity. The skills
of the formalist are often technical, and if abstraction is pursued for its own
sake, the attention to technique can become of paramount importance. Note,
formalism is only one mode of artistic practice. Physics might pursue everyday
objects and processes, and biology could focus on exploring the diversity
and complexity of organic life. What is of cultural interest is that instead,
formalistic pursuits have caught our fancy.
The related issue of how aesthetic principles might govem scientific thinking
in a broad venue of theory construction is pursued by Joseph Margolis and
James McAllister, who each begin with a critique of Thomas Kuhn's assess-
ment of aesthetic factors in the natural history of scientific theories. In assessing
theories, scientists rely upon empirical criteria such as internal consistency,
predictive accuracy and explanatory power. However besides empirical matters,
aesthetic concerns are also operative, which cannot be defined in terms of a
fixed set of properties, since what is considered attractive or beautiful has
been different at different times and in different disciplines. In general,
however, beauty in science (as in art) is identified as those features (whatever
they may be) which convey an impression of aptness - they are appropriate,
fitting or seemly. McAllister 's paper contends that aesthetic criteria are as
central to the scientist's acceptance of a theory as are empirical considerations.
While a distinction can be drawn between empirical and aesthetic criteria,
the latter are not merely "extra-scientific" (as they are sometimes judged),
but an integral part of scientific development and change. The aesthetic
canon is constructed by the aesthetic features of all past theories - an induc-
tive mechanism which ensures that the aesthetic canon is conservative. What
compels scientists to accept a new paradigm is that it is empirically better-
performing. Allegiance to the aesthetic canon must be suspended to accept a
new theory. Indeed, for some the rupture is too deep and they hang on to
the established aesthetic paradigm, that is, to the conservative aesthetic criteria.
McAllister illustrates his view with an historical change, which (in contrast
to the transition from the Ptolemaic to the Copemican system) was a revolu-
tion: Kepler's theory of planetary orbits as elliptical. This view violated a
deeply rooted demand that the orbits be circular and uniform in motion.
However, Kepler's theory was extremely powerful, effecting the conversion of
scientists who were aesthetically repelled by it.
McAllister's paper argues that aesthetic factors are on the side of the con-
servative trend in the choice between theories, while empirical factors compel
scientists toward innovation and radical breaks with established views. Joseph
Margolis rejects the very basis of Kuhn's arguments regarding the role of
aesthetics in scientific revolution as a "great muddle". Margolis is dissatis-
fied with Kuhn's attempt to examine the interface of scientific theory with
aesthetics, since he maintains there are no useful definitions for such an explo-
ration, nor can one establish an epistemic disjunction between "objective"
and "subjective" as their respective grounding. Because there is no standard
INTRODUCTION 7
conceptual basis given in terms of "aesthetics" for pursuing any comparison

between the sciences and the arts, the entire enterprise "has proved a complete
shambles". Having thus summarily dismissed the very basis of our Elusive
Synthesis, Margolis does, however, admit a certain nagging connection between
science and art for consideration. Once he discards the need to secure scien-
tific method, objectivity or rationality in a firm definition (in order to seek
the influence of the aesthetic), and he further rejects any settled distinction
between aesthetic and nonaesthetic, he is now prepared to offer another avenue
to seek conceptual linkages between science and art. He argues that there is
in fact a common "reason" they both share: professional taste/reason in the
sciences, as in the arts, is a function of historical practice. What is "good"
explanatory theory (or of painting) is what accords with practice. Reason
then, in this view, is "an artifact of historical life" and the aesthetic is a con-
venient "catch-all term for the informality with which the most formal criteria
can be legitimated". In short, Margolis posits consensual practices broadly
grounding scientific praxis and aesthetic taste to so me common practical reason
goveming both. In this scheme, there can be no meaningful distinction between
"objective" and "subjective", but at the same time there is no principled dif-
ference between what counts as objectivity in the arts and the sciences. And
in this commonality, Margolis discems that science does not "borrow" from
the aesthetic, but rather the aesthetic is "essential to what we mean by objec-
tivity in the sciences".
The basis of shared experience between the "separate domains" of science
and art is fruitfully explored in a less nihilistic sense by Leon Chemyak and
David Kazhdan, who propose that mathematics is the true theoretical coun-
terpart of poetry. They employ Kant's aesthetic-expressive understanding of
mathematics to argue their case. The conception of aesthetic experience
changed radically with Kant's philosophy. Prior to Kant, aesthetic experi-
ence was identified as encountering self-expressive, authentic being; aesthetics
was captured in the mystery of that encounter. After Kant, Nature was no longer
conceived as self-expressive. Rather the subordination of Nature to a text
became Reason's accomplishment. In finding itself having to 'speak for' the
Other, or for non-Reason, Reason encountered its own limits - wh at Kant called
the "finitude of human Reason". Poetry and mathematics are alike in that
both seek ways to transcend the radical finitude of Reason. The Romantic
tradition - continued in this century by Heidegger and Gadamer - is unable
to discem anything more than a fascination with "calculating reason" in Kant's
veneration of mathematics. By according mathematics a special place, however,
Chemyak and Kazhdan contend that Kant identifies aesthetic experience as
a fundamental, constituent component of human rationality. In their interpre-
tation, aesthetic experience underpins Reason's activities. Reason depends upon
the aesthetic faculty of judgment to give articulate form to the nature of human
expressiveness. In effect, they understand poetry as the leap across the radical
finitude of Reason: the connection between the Other and Reason is achieved
in the power of language. Because mathematics accomplishes this same leap,
8 ALFRED I. TAUBER
it may be viewed as a kind of poetry. With this thesis, Chernyak and Kazhdan
attempt to provide an epistemological alternative to the fact that non-Reason
(the Other or Nature), is neither constructed by Reason (an erroneous inter-
pretation of Kant in their view) nor mirrored by Reason (the Enlightenment
conception).
Kant also serves as the beginning of Catherine Chevalley's comparison of
physics and art. Three lines of thought are interwoven: Kant and Cassirer on
the notion of 'symbol' and the nature of human know ledge; Panofsky' s analysis
of the shift to linear perspective in art, and his understanding of symbolic forms
in different fields as shaping specific "styles of art" in historical periods;
and finally, the idea of physics-like-art in the context of quantum theory in
the I 920s. She argues that Kant's view supported a deep division between
science and art (schematic versus symbolic knowledge). This view would
become troubled, however, if a language replete with analogies were used in
science, or if scientific knowledge were obtained for objects not directly avail-
able to intuition. Both of these developments were heralded with quantum
theory. In this case scientific knowledge would itself be symbolic. This was
precisely Cassirer's claim. His position required a radical shift away from
Kant's theory of knowledge, toward a unified view of all forms of knowing,
including science and art. On another front, Panofsky's work in the 1920s raised
the question of why linear perspective emerged when it did. He viewed it as
an "interpretation" of space in art, rather than a "natural" representation. He
showed that linear perspective emerged in connection with developments in
the science of optics, analytic geometry and the coordinate-system concep-
ti on of objects in space. In philosophy, linear perspective was connected to
a conception of aseparation between subject and object, with the knowing
subject as objective spectator who represents the world. The striking affini-
ties between developments in art, science and philosophy led Panofsky to
formulate his idea of "styles of art" as constitutive of the entire Weltanschauung
of aperiod. The connection between science and art was also accentuated
by Panofsky in the idea that techniques of representation effected development
in both.
In German physics of the 1920's these influences from philosophy and
Panofsky's work are seen in Bohr's and Heisenberg's explication of quantum
mechanics. Their interpretation of quantum theory engaged a comparison
between physics and art. Bohr's view was influenced by the "symbolic turn"
in that he rejected all mechanical models of the movement of electrons in
the atom. He pronounced "the failure of all spatio-temporal models" at this
level and the need for recourse to symbolic analogies. Especially after 1924
he used the notion of symbolic representation regularly, by which he meant
all elements of a physical theory with no correlate in intuition. A more sophis-
ticated - i.e. symbolic - language was required. Heisenberg claimed that
physical theories were like styles of art. He noted that the conceptual systems
of physics (for instance, Newtonian and quantum) differ not only because their
objects differ, but also because they create different groups of relations. As
INTRODUCTION 9
styles of art emerge through a set of formal rules so do symbolic idealiza-

tions underlying conceptual systems of physics. Contemporary science,
according to Heisenberg, is chan ging the entire view of classical physics and
modern philosophy, introducing (like a style of art) new presuppositions
about the nature of reality. Heisenberg underscored the cognate tendencies
toward abstraction in physics, mathematics and non-objective painting in the
20th century. Thus, both Bohr and Heisenberg broke ties with a Kantian epis-
te molo gy dividing science and art, and with a Cartesian view of a distinction
between subject and objecL
This post-modern perspective is pursued by Alicia Faxon, who reviews these
matters from the perspective of an art historian. She grapples with how the
traditional intersection between science and painting is blurred in a post-modern
aesthetic, and examines the notion of "aesthetics" in the post-modern world
that has revolted against the rigid modernist view of any value as universal
and ahistorical. If one regards modernism as resting on a narrow Western
aesthetic masquerading as universal, the alternative post-modern aesthetic
celebrates a multi-cultural vision, the availability of choices, and the efface-
ment of boundaries between high culture and popular culture; in a word,
post-modernism celebrates pluralism. It deconstructs such notions as originality
and the work of art as an autonomous objecL The dangers of the post-modern
conception are a loss of criteria of aesthetic value, widespread mediocrity
and a domination by consumerism and the commodification of art. According
to Faxon, the intersection of art and science occurs especially in the creation
of aesthetic standards by which to form a canon or rule to achieve correct
proportions of beauty, symmetry and harmony. In certain eras this canon has
been sought explicitly. For instance, in classical antiquity mathematically deter-
mined proportions were applied to architecture and sculpture; or in the
Renaissance, newly discovered anatomic facts of the human body were applied,
as illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci 's Proportions 0/ the Human Figure. How
might a post-modern application of scientific measurement of proportion and
mathematical formulas differ from past applications? There can be no one
set of measurements for a "perfect" human figure in the post-modern aesthetic.
What role the traditional intersection of art and science might be in color theory,
space and even time remains highly problematic, as Chevalley so clearly
illustrated in the preceding essay. This leaves the current role of how science
might influence aesthetics to be defined and expressed. Whatever that function
might be, according to Faxon, the possibilities must be mutable, non-hierar-
chic, and permeable in order to echo change, multiculturalism and an attitude
of inclusiveness.
Perhaps one of the more interesting pots in which to mix science and art
is in a science museum. Hilde Hein explores the complex dynamics invoked
in depicting science to the public, exposing the conceptual and social biases
of such exhibits. Like Faxon, Hein is sensitive to post-modernism effects
beyond the nature of the subject material, to include curatorial motives and the
scientific education of the viewer. Science museums, like other museums,
10 ALFRED I. TAUBER
are essentially designed to engage and satisfy their audience, and thus aesthetic
factors are instrumental in this design. Like museums devoted to other areas,
science museums aestheticize their contents by decontextualizing and recon-
textualizing them, or as she says, "an object must die and be reborn in order
to enter into a exhibition", and in this sense each exhibit is a work of art in
being newly minted for aesthetic contemplation. In such presentation, partic-
ular orientations and messages are converged that may convey hidden agendas.
After surveying the types of science museums and describing now history
and purpose have affected their exhibited strategy, Hein turns to the role aes-
thetic factors have played in formulating the curatorial message. Without
attempting to summarize the rich historical examples offered in this essay,
simply note that the modem science museum, although still offering dioramas
and other viewer-separated exhibits, has moved increasingly towards partici-
patory experience. New technologies seek to actively transform the- passive
spectator into an engaged active one. Visitors easily access into film and
video displays, holography, computer simulations and manipulable objects
of various sorts, but Hein questions whether genuine cognitive interaction is
produced. Are the limits imposed in the design of choices restrictive of the
learning experience and does the viewer remain passive? The theatricality
that shifts the viewer from the "objective" depiction of an older style to a
"phenomenological" veridicality may be only an aesthetic choice, although
this change has purported advantages: the static mausoleum in which objects
are tom from their natural context and coldly (viz. fuIly) analyzed, may now
be regarded in a more complete sensory setting, where sensuous interaction
strengthens the viewing experience. Aesthetics are a crucial element in the
effective lesson, but "the didacticism of such coercion is hidden by its aes-
thetic form". Hein reminds us that the problem of wh ich reality to present
remains unresolved. The isolated object has now been contextualized, imbued
with meaning from complex interaction with other parts of the exhibit as
weIl as the active participation of the viewer. But beyond the perceptive manip-
ulation, there are conceptual social issues bestowing particular significance
to the contextualization, the point of view and the construction of reality by
perception. In response to this challenge, some recent exhibits have been
designed to confront visitors with a profusion of data and invite them to
create their own exhibition, or others have asked audiences to choose among
alternative interpretations. The aesthetic dimension remains crucial to the
success of an exhibit, and although there are various criteria, the invitation
to engage the visitor to ask questions and ponder problems seems founda-
tional to a gratifying experience: The museum must speak to its public, who
then become participants in a dialogue. The insight that museum exhibits are
fulfilling their historical role reflecting achanging post-modem ethos, suggests
that they not only continue to serve as responsive public educational institu-
tions, but also offer us insightful visions of ourselves.
My own contribution views the elusive merger of science and the aes-
INTRODUCTION 11
thetic as essentially a philosophical problem. I begin by examining Goethe

as an exemplary case of the scientist-artistlartist-scientist, whose scientific
venture is guided by an aesthetic holism, a sense that all aspects of experi-
ence must be included to describe phenomena, and that sole reliance on
reductive characterization was doomed to falsifying our observation and
stripping nature of its full meaning. Goethe as a scientist employed abstrac-
tion in seeing primal essences and was a proto-positivist in vigorously
maintaining a strict separation of observing subject from his inquiry. But he
included a third element, an aesthetic concern for the whole that would employ
all the intellectual and intuitive faculties to place the "facts" in their broadest
theory. He was highly sensitive to value-laden facts and the tyranny of
scientific opinion, and sought to incorporate his own personal vision into the
broadest conceptual framework, which included history and psychology as
active agents on the scientific stage. For this eclecticism he was vilified. The
nineteenth century witnessed the complete schism of science and the arts,
and by examining the case of Nietzsche, I have chosen to show how radical
aestheticization of experience was the extreme response to an objectified
science totally divorced from the personal. I could just as pertinently have
assumed the other side and shown the philosophic practice of a severely
positivist scientist. The case I argue is simply that science as aesthetic is not
a generally acknowledged category of judgment, yet in large measure science
assumes a personalized (viz. meaningful) dimension when the phenomenon
or theory is appreciated aesthetically.
I believe our true predicament is captured by Husserl's dismay that a uni-
versal rationality could not encompass both science and art. This anthology
has been designed to highlight points at which an elusive synthesis might begin.
Notwithstanding the protestations of each of these essays, we complain of a
Two Culture society. It is this intuition that lies at the foundation of Faxon's
puzzlement of what will constitute a post-modern aesthetic. It is the same
sentiment that drives Chevalley, Chernyak, and Kazhdan to seek a philosophical
foundation for both science and art. It is the same orientation from which
Margolis, McAllister, and Sarkar seek to expose aesthetic principles under-
lying scientific theory, and finally it is the psychological unity of experience
that propels the observation of Root-Bernstein, Gilbert, Faber, Kohn, Lynch
and Edgerton to cite aesthetic experience as underlying scientific insight, or
in the case of Hein, education. These essays each claim an intersection, at
some level, between science and art. Their respective syntheses would mend
a fracture, amistrust in a unifying knowledge. The drive toward objective
contemplation, logical analysis, scientific classification cuts us off from
what existential phenomenologists refer to as being in the world. Always to
scrutinize is to divorce ourselves from personal meaning. The dissection of
the world yields a kind of knowledge which must still be integrated mean-
ingfully. The scientific object may reside seemingly separate - "out there"
- the focus of an inquiry of what it is - in itself - (ignoring the philosoph-
12 ALFRED I. TAUBER
ical difficulties of that expectation), but the issue is to integrate that object
to its observing subject in both, rational and emotional domains. The search
for this common ground is the elusive synthesis of our very selves in a
world ever more objectified from uso No wonder the "problem" of aesthetics
and science remains - a beguiling reminder of the lingering fault of our very
being.
DAVID KOHN
THE AESTHETIC CONSTRUCTION

OF DARWIN' S THEORY*
INTRODUCTION
The nature and operation of natural selection are conveyed in the Origin
0/ Species by two famous metaphors, whose history in Charles Darwin's
consciousness form the substance of this paper.!
The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed
elose together and driven by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another
with greater force. (Origin 67)
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, elothed with many plants of many kinds,
with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling
through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different
from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
by laws acting around uso (Origin 489)
The first passage, embodying Darwin's "wedging" metaphor, expresses the

action of natural selection as a powernd natural force. In the second passage,
Darwin uses the metaphor of an "entangled bank" to express the inter-
relatedness of all nature.
By the aesthetic construction of Darwin's theory, I have in mind two inter-
secting theses. First, that Darwin's understanding of nature was conditioned
by a particular aesthetic framework, namely: the aesthetic categories the
sublime and the beautiful. As apart of this first thesis, I wish to argue that
the relationship between the sublime and the beautiful is present in Darwin's
thought from at least as early as the Beagle voyage through to the writing of
the Origin 0/ Species. There is an aesthetic-emotional ambition awakened
on the Beagle that is later transformed into high scientific theory. From the
Beagle to the Origin, Darwin sought the reconciliation of the sublime with
the beautiful. As we shall see, he sought the peace of the beautiful with the
ecstasy of the sublime. On the Beagle the sublime and the beautiful are distinct,
even oppositional, or in tense balance. Yet that tension between the sublime
and the beautiful first framed what later became the critical Darwinian theme.
For the formation of nature out of a balance of life and death as we under-
stand it in natural selection, began with the depiction of naturallandscapes
in terms of balancing spirits of death and life on the Beagle. 2 In the Origin,
after twenty one years of struggling to express the theory of natural selec-
tion (1838-1859), Darwin found the reconciliation of the sublime and the
beautiful in his two most striking metaphors.
Without these metaphors what would the Origin be? It would be as Darwin
put it, one long argument. But we might add, it would be one long and rather
13

14 DAVID KOHN
dull book. This raises a crucial question that brings me to my second thesis.
By the aesthetic construction of Darwin's theory, I also mean that at the heart
of Darwin's activity as a scientist, that is, in the conceptual act of constructing
natural selection - along with other well documented, culturally conditioned
resources from political economy and metaphysics - we find old and reworked
metaphors that arose from and survived his youthful, emotion laden, demon-
strably romantic aesthetic. What is the function of these aesthetic resources
in the construction of Darwin's science? That is my key question. In the
Origin, "wedging" and "the entangled bank" could be viewed as ornamental
- aesthetic in the sense of ancillary decoration for the syllogistic "long
argument" they illustrate and dramatize. But each of these metaphors had a
long textual history in Darwin's writing - both were deeply rooted in Darwin's
pre-evolutionary, not to mention pre-selectionist, consciousness. Thus we can
trace the ontogeny of these metaphors, and we find two things: first, of most
immediate importance, that their ontogeny is intertwined with and constitu-
tive to the developmental process by which Darwin came to formulate natural
selection. Hence, what may look like ornament in the Origin is there out of
developmental necessity. It is there as the organic remnant of the process of
theory construction. Second, we find that although the "wedging" metaphor
and the "entangled bank" metaphor have very different textual ontogenies -
appearing separately over aperiod of decades, and together only in the Origin
- there are important structural/functional paralleis in the way these metaphors
developed and in the way they are related to the ontogeny of natural selec-
tion. Thus, from a developmental perspective, Darwin's metaphors are hardly
ornamental. Rather, I will argue they play important cognitive and emotional
roles in the transition between Darwin's understanding of natural phenomena
and his logically structured "scientific" expression of that understanding. The
relationships between science and aesthetics may be elusive, but in Darwin's
case they do indeed form a demonstrable synthesis.
To connect my two theses, Darwin has an aesthetic: the romantic aesthetic
that reconciles the "sister horns" of the sublime and the beautiful in the
contemplation of nature. As Wordsworth put it:
From Nature doth emotion come, and moods

of Calmness equally are Nature's gift:
(Prelude, Book XIII)
And Darwin's aesthetic, embodied in his oldest most expressive metaphors,

shaped his most substantive scientific theory. Underlying both these theses
is the claim that Darwin seeks, and hence reveals hirnself, first in his responses
to nature and ultimately through his identification with his explanatory theory
of nature.
CONSTRUCTION OF DARWIN'S THEORY 15
PART I 1832. EARLY CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE

ENTANGLED BANK. FORMATION OF A LATENT METAPHOR
Let us proceed by first establishing a general sense of the Darwinian sublime

on the Beagle. From there we will move to an account of the history of our
two central metaphors, looking in Part I at the entangled bank on the Beagle
- which iIlustrates the Darwinian sublime and the Darwinian sense of the
beautiful. Then in Part 11 we will consider the his tory of the wedging metaphor.
From these histories I will try to infer a model for the developmental function
of metaphor in the formulation of Darwin 's theory, while this model will in
turn shed light on the reconciliation of the sublime and the beautiful in the
maturation of Darwin's theory.
Darwin experienced joy in the presence of striking natural beauty during
his Beagle voyage. He registered strong emotional responses to nature, which
he recorded as part of his scientific researches. Interwoven with Darwin's
Humboldtian scientific practice on the Beagle was the composition of texts
informed by aesthetic criteria. Thus, Darwin's Beagle enterprise was conducted
according to one of the characteristic norms of romantic science, namely:
Darwin self-consciously incorporated affect and imagination into his early
science.
Sources of the Darwinian Sublime

The quintessential setting for the Darwinian sublime is his joy as he " ...
entered a Forest, which in the grandeur of all its parts could not be exceeded"
(Beagle Diary 53).3 The sublime quality of the scene is imparted first by the
totality of vision, which focuses not on one part but is elevated by grasping
the "grandeur of all its parts". Second, as befits the sublime, in the presence
of this beauty speech passes into silence, as Darwin is "at an utter loss how
sufficiently to admire this scene". In that awed silence the rhetoric of the
sublime turns to art for expression. At the point where speech fails in the
presence of natural beauty, Darwin typically resorts to the distinction between
art and what he calls reality, and his discourse is either polarized between
the ineffability of "reality" and the insufficiency of art, or art becomes a
point of reference that moves hirn beyond ineffability and enables focussed
"scientific" description of nature. Thus, the forest may oscillate between being
an Arabian fantasy "with the advantage of reality" or he may believe that
without "the reality of nature" ... [natural scenes] "if faithfully represented
in a picture [raise] a feeling of distrust ... in the mind, as ... is the case in
some of [John] Martins views" (Figure 1: John Martin The Bard). Or works
of art may actually facilitate description of the forest:
As the gleams of sunshine penetrate the entangled mass, I was forcibly reminded of the
two French engravings after the drawings of Maurice Rugendas & Le Compte de Clarac. -
(53)
16 DAVID KOHN
Fig. I. lohn Martin. The Bard. c. 1817(7) (Yale Center for British Art. Paul Mellon Collection)
(See also colorplate I).
Darwin's referenee is to Foret vierge pres Manqueritipa by the German artist

Joaehim Mortiz Rugendas (Figure 2a) and the even more lush Fortier engraving
of Le Comte de Clarae's painting Interieur d'une forer vierge du Bresil
(Figure 2b), whieh was exhibited in the Paris salon of 1819 and is an example
of the romantie illustrational style.
The eontent of the sublime depieted here is tied to the overwhelming density
and abundant luxurianee of the vegetation revealed as the light pours through
the "entangled mass". As Darwin says:
In these [engravings) is weil represented the infinite numbers of lianas & parasitical plants &
the contrast of the flourishing trees with the dead & rotten trunks. I was at an utter loss how
sufficiently to admire this scene. - (53)
The Rugendas and Clarae depietions of the riot of nature give a visually
preeise impression of wh at moved Darwin. He refers to them in the Beagle
Diary, but also in letters to his sister Caroline and to Professor Henslow. To
Caroline he wrote:
Fig. 2a. Joachim Moritz Rugendas. Foret Vierge pres Manqueritipa. Voyage Pittoresque dans
le Bresil. lere div. PI. 3. Paris. 1835 (Firestone Library, Princeton University).
Forest, & flowers & birds, I saw in great perfection, & the pleasure of beholding them is
infinite. - I advise you to get an French engraving, Le Foret du Bn!sil: it is most true and
clever. (Correspondence 1:226)4
To Henslow he wrote even more effusively:

A few days after arriving I started on an expedition of 150 miles to Rio Macao, which las ted
18 days. - Here I first saw a Tropical forest in all its sublime grandeur. - Nothing, but the
reality can given any idea, how wonderful, how magnificent the scene iso - If I was to specify
any one thing I should give the preeminence to the host of parasitical plants. - Your engraving
is exactly true, but underrates, rather than exaggerates the luxuriance. - I never experienced
such intense delight. - I formerly admired Humboldt, I now alm ost adore hirn . . . .
(Correspondence 1:237)
There are certain contextualizing clues to Darwin's aesthetic response that

flit like "gaudy butterflies" through the Rugendas and Clarac forests. The
Darwinian aesthetic response is to an important degree something he brought
with hirn. How was that shaped? Perhaps the most immediate influence was
his weIl known reading of Humboldt. But this enthusiastic reading is only
the most familiar part of a much richer chain of connections between Darwin's
cultural and educational exposure and European romantic natural history.
18 DAVID KOHN
Fig. 2b. Charles Othon Frederic Jean Baptiste Comte de Clarac (1777-1847) painter; Claude
Francois Fortier (1775-1835) engraver. Interieur d'une Foret Vierge du Bresil. 1819, deI. 1822,
sculpt. (Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Gift of Belinda
Randall from the collection of lohn Will RandalI, RI2478).
First, Darwin's Humboldtism is usually tied, as in this letter, to Henslow and

thus to Cambridge. However, it should be remembered that Darwin's omitho-
logical mentor while he was a student in Edinburgh was William McGillivray,
who in the very year Darwin first entered a Brazilian forest published a con-
densed narrative of Humboldt's joumeys. Indeed, Darwin's student notebook
at Edinburgh indicates he took field trips with McGillivray, with whom he was
initiated into a style of local natural historical observation reminiscent of
White's Selborne. Thus, Darwin in Edinburgh may have been exposed to a
fusion of Selbornian and Humboldtian styles of natural history and nature
appreciation, which later blended weIl enough with Henslow's approach.
Perhaps it was Darwin's Edinburgh Humboldtianism that helped forge the
link between Darwin and Henslow. In Henslow, Darwin found continuity at
Cambridge with his Edinburgh exposure to natural history. One dimension
of that continuity was not merely love of collection and observation. In both
settings he was exposed to the romantic tradition of natural history.
In this regard, it is interesting to note that Henslow appears to have pos-
sessed either the Rugendas or the Clarac engraving, which Darwin obviously
saw in Cambridge and yet appears to have on hand in Brazil to help capture
the "reality" of the forests he is physically exploring. Darwin arrived in Brasil
CONSTRUCTION OF DARWIWS THEORY 19
with strongly conditioned textual and visual expectations that allowed hirn
to maintain the link to Cambridge and to horne, but also, without contradic-
tion, to Europe and to the romantic tradition of science fed by imagination,
while he "experienced" beauty with the advantage of reality. lronically,
Darwin's connections to the romanticism inherent in Humboldt also gave
hirn a deeper, though indirect, affinity with the romantic roots of William
Whewell's imaginative inductivism. This is an affinity that Darwin's more
straight forward bond with John Herschel 's liberal theology has tended to mask.
One wonders, did Henslow ignore the theological contradictions raging in
Cambridge between the romantic-tinged post-Kantian science William Whewell
preached as a Don and the dated Paleyian rational theology Darwin was
required to cram as a student? Did Darwin and Henslow on their walks discuss
the theological and aesthetic implications of their enthusiasm for natural
history? Or did they just talk joyously about beetles?
The historical depth of Darwin's romantic connection is enhanced by
Secord's work, which demonstrates the unappreciated impact of Robert
Jameson's Wemerian geologicallectures on Darwin. As Secord notes, Jameson
shared with Humboldt direct exposure to Wemer at Freiburg. 5 Thus Darwin
in Edinburgh and Cambridge had multiple direct and indirect exposures through
Humboldt and Wemer to the German natural history of the 1790s to early
1800s. As an example of how interconnected the Edinburgh and Cambridge
exposures may have become for Darwin, consider that the artist Rugendas,
whose work so appealed to Darwin, was a protege of von Humboldt and had
been attached to the Martius and Spix Brazilian expedition of 1817-1820.
Martius hirnself was not only a naturalist, he was also a friend and corre-
spondent of the doctor, botanist, artist and aesthetician Carl Gustav Carus. And
Carus who developed a theory of romantic landscape painting in his Neun
Briefe über Landschaftsmalerei was weIl known to be influenced by the thought
of his close friend, the German romantic landscape artist Caspar David
Friedrich - who was hirnself close to the Wemerian romantic geologists. 6
Although Darwin probably never saw a Friedrich landscape and never read
Carus 's landscape theory, he is netted together with them and both may help
illustrate and delimit his own aesthetic.
It is this aesthetic that Darwin brings to the luxuriance of the forest. It
takes away Darwin 's speech in admiration and brings hirn to focus on the drama
of the scene, on "the contrast of the flourishing trees with the dead & rotten
trunks". We may infer that Darwin's contrast of life and death, which would
later be at the center of his theory, is first and already present at the thematic
heart of his awe.
Sublime Entanglement
Let us now consider the early history of Darwin's entangled bank. On the
Beagle we find the two elements of the metaphor "entanglement" and "bank"
- but we find them in separate passages describing separate scenes. They
20 DAVID KOHN
are nevertheless linked and that linkage comes from Darwin 's reading aboard
the Beagle of John Milton's Paradise Lost. Consider the Darwinian sublime
expressed in the Beagle Channel of Tierra dei Fuego at the very southern tip
of South America. Just as in the Brazilian forest, Darwin in Tierra dei Fuego
is struck by the density and entanglement of the vegetation. Here, however,
the tone of the sublime is more one of pain than delight, as Darwin has to
struggle to escape the awesome grip of the forest to experience the grandeur
of a good view. Also the wild entanglement of the forest is associated with
the wildness of the Fuegian natives, from whom he also tends to flee. Here
again, high-culture, horne, and romanticism suffuse the scene. For example,
when he describes a party of Fuegians, the chief spokesman for whom "had
a filet of white feathers tied round his head, which partly confined his black,
coarse, and entangled hair" (Journal 0/ Researches 228f (Figure 3a: Conrad
Martens Fuegians in Beagle Channel), Darwin says "they resembled the
representations of Devils on the Stage, for instance in Der Freischutz" (Beagle
Diary 122). The reference is to the wolf-gien scene in the archetyp al German
romantic opera by Carl Maria von Weber (Figure 3b), which Darwin saw in
1825, with his brother Erasmus, during his first week in Edinburgh.
Let us now follow Darwin's entrance into this forest (Figures 4a and 4b:
Beagle Channel):
The almost impenetrable wood reaches down to high water mark. - ... I determined to attempt
to penetrate some way into the country. - ... all the hills are so thickly clothed with wood as
to be quite impassable. - . .. The trees are so close together & send off their branches so low
down, that I found extreme difficulty in pushing my way even for gun-shot distance. - I
followed therefore the course of a mountain torrent; at first from the cascades & dead trees, I
hardly managed to crawl along; but shortly the open course became wider, the floods keeping
clear the borders. - For an hour I continued to follow the stream, & was weil repaid by the
grandeur of the scene. (Beagle Diary 124-125)
Notice the waterfall in the Holdermann rendering of the Der Freischutz

scene (Figure 3b). Darwin of course has become part of the international broth-
erhood of the waterfall, whose English expression is weil illustrated by Joseph
Wright of Derby's Rydal Waterfall. While the grandeur of the view he saw
might be illustrated by the scene in Figure 4c (Beagle Channel). The Beagle
Diary text then goes back into the ravine, whose atmosphere at least is captured
by Casper David Friedrich's painting, The Ravine (Figure 5):
The gloomy depth of the ravine weil accorded with the universal signs of violence. - in every
direction were irregular masses of rock & uptom trees, others decayed & others ready to fall.
- ... the number of decaying & fallen trees reminded me of the Topical forest. - But in this
still solitude, death instead of life is the predominant spirit. (125-6) ... In the deep ravines
the death-like scene of desolation exceeds all description. (219)
So the Fuegian sublime, arises from the entangelment of the vegetation. This
forest, just like the entangled lianas of the Brazilian forest, contributed a
personal experience of nature that underlay the entangled bank of the Origin.
Fig, 3a. Conrad Martens. Fuegian of the Yapoo Tekeenica Tribe. 1834 (C.M. 131, In Keynes,
R. D. (ed.) The Beagle Record (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 97. "Engraved by
T. Landseer ... in Beagle Narrative 2, frontispiece") (See also colorplate 2).
In one sense the Nothofagus forest of the Beagle Channel, where trees are
so densely entangled that they often do not fall when they die, is the original
entangled bank. In particular it is the difficult passage up the water course,
through the thick branches and decaying logs that forms Darwin's strongest
impression. Darwin interprets the experience of being in such a natural setting
in terms of a contrast between life and death, with the spirit of death domi-
nating the scene. Thus, from the very beginning the metaphor of entanglement
is intertwined with a sublime sense of the pathos of life and death forces in
balance.
The experience of Fuegian entanglement was fundamental in the ontogeny
22 DAVID KOHN
Fig. 3b. Carl Wilhelm Holdermann. 1822. The wolf's gIen scene in the opera Der Freischütz
by Carl Maria von Weber. (Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar; graphische Sammlung. In Wolff,
H. c., Oper: Szene und Darstellung von 1600 bis 1900. Bd 4, Lieferung 1, In Musikgeschichte
in Bildern. Eds. Heinrich Besseler and Max Schneider. VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik,
p. 159. n.d.) (See also colorplate 3).
of the entangled bank metaphor. However, it is critical to note that the Fuegian
"scene of desolation" of the Beagle Diary has an altogether different tone from
the gentle beauty we contemplate in the Origin's entangled bank, where the
sublimity has been sublimated. To understand that process and the bridge
between Tierra deI Fuego and the Origin, we have to understand Darwin's very
concrete absorption and transformation of Milton's Paradise Lost. We know
that Milton was Darwin's favorite reading on the voyage. Moreover, Milton,
particularly Milton's Satan, was the darling of the romantics. So Darwin's
attachment to Milton is a further identification with romanticism. 8
What specifically did Darwin absorb from Milton? One thing was the
language. In Paradise Lost, Milton uses the figure of tangledness in a quite
consistent manner and in a manner that is consistent with Darwin's usage in
the Beagle Diary. The words tangled and tangling are associated with the
outermost of the four concentric "enclosure[s] green" that like a "rural mound"
CONSTRUCTION OF OARWIN'S THEORY 23
Fig, 4a. Beagle Channel. "The alm ost impenetrable wood reaches down to high water mark".
Beagle Diary: 124 (0. Kohn, 1991) (See also colorplate 4).
surround and form the landscape setting of the Garden of Eden. These enclo-
sures are:
1. a steep wilderness
2. a loftiest shade tree forest
3. a verdurous wall of Paradise
4. a circling row of goodliest fruit trees
The shape is almost like a drawn out telescope, or steep-sided volcano, with
Eden, man's "high seat" nestled at the top. It is the outer enclosure, which
is described four times, that interests us:
1. a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides

With thicket overgrown, grotesques and wild,
Access deni'd (134-36)
2. that steep savage Hill (172)
3. . .. thick entwin'd,
As one continu'd brake (175-76)
And finally,
4. . .. the undergrowth
Of shrubs and tangling bushes (176-77)
24 OAVID KOHN
Fig. 4b. Beagle Channel. "1 followed therefore the course of a mountain torrent". Beagle
Diary: 124 (0. Kohn, 1991).
The "tangling bushes" guarding Eden offer Satan very much the same
sort of impediment that the steep and entangled Beech forest posed to
Darwin. In Paradise Lost, Satan tried at first to enter Eden by struggling
directly through the outer enclosing forest. But he fails to get through the
entanglement:
[He] joumey'd on, pensive and slow; But further way found none ...
So, Darwin climbing in Tierra deI Fuego is not only inspired by Milton,
he even suprasses the heroic Satan. If the Darwinian connotations of "tangled"
on the Beagle are with the overwhelming luxuriance of natural vegetation
and the overabundant presence of death in the wild, Milton's assüciations
with the word are consistently negative. Für example:
Fig. 4c. Beagle Channel. "I ... was weil repaid by the grandeur of the scene".
(D. Kohn, 1991).
26 DAVID KOHN
Fig. 5. easpar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Felsenschlucht im Elbsandsteingebirge (The

Ravine). c. 1823 (Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna) (See also colorplate 5).
The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.
Indeed, Milton's many allusions are not only to impenetrable thickets but
also to mischief, sin and death, as conveyed in lohn Martin's engraving of
the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (Figure 6). I conclude
from this evidence that the Darwinian fixation with entanglement, both in
Tierra deI Fuego and Brazil expresses a struggle towards the sublime that is
rooted in Milton's language. Again we find experience of nature and experi-
ence of high culture mutually implicated in the construction of imagery that
would later become a potent vehicle in support of a scientific conception.
Certainly crawling up and down the torrents and ravines of a Nothofagus forest
was a powerful experience. Equally the language that experience evoked was
shaped by Milton. Further, the very act of attempting such a climb was a
romantic venture that called for powerful language to convey its emotion.
And that emotion was the thrill of action tinged by gloom. In a word, it was
Satanic.
CONSTRUCTION OF DARWIWS THEORY 27
Fig. 6. John Martin (1789-1854). Expulsion from the Garden 0/ Eden. Illustrations to Paradise
Lost. Septimus Prowett elephant edn. 1825-27 (Firestone Library, Princeton University).
Milton's Beautiful Bank

Darwin's sense of the beautiful, particularly the "bank" in the Origin's entan-
gled bank mayaiso have its deepest roots in Darwin 's reading of Milton aboard
the Beagle. The word "bank" is associated with the most delightful land-
scapes of Eden - with private locales at the center of the garden. In short it
is associated with settings that epitomize "the beautiful" as an aesthetic
category. Consider, for example, the appreciation of such settings, and their
contrast with the grandeur of more sublime landscapes, as expressed by the
German romantic aesthetician Carl Gustav Carus who writes:
It could be concluded .. . that only the most gigantic scenes in the largest formats should be
depicted .... But that is not in the least my opinion, . . . actually every aspect, even the quietest
and simplest side of life on earth, is a noble and beautiful object of the art, if only its own
particular meaning, the hidden and divine idea in it, is truly comprehended . . . . The smallest
corner of the forest with its manifold stirring vegetation, the simplest grassy hili with its delicate
plants, ... will offer the most beautiful earth-life-picture, wh ich, done in a small or large
space, will leave nothing to be wished for, if only it is grasped by the soul. 9
Milton 's six uses of bank in Paradise Lost, which probably informed
Darwin 's sense of natural beauty, are all such beautiful "smallest corners"
as Carus evokes. For example, on one bank (Figure 7a: John Martin, Eve
Bathing):
28 DAVID KOHN
Fig. 7a. lohn Martin (1789-1854). Eve Bathing. Illustrations to Paradise Lost. Septimus
Prowett elephant edn. 1825-27 (Firestone Library, Princeton University) .
. . . murmuring waters fall

Down ...
. . . to the fringed Bank with Myrtle crown'd.
Another bank is the spot where Satan (and the reader) has his first sight of
Adam and Eve. It is the absolute center point of Eden where Adam and Eve
"live", love and reside in retirement (Figure 7b: Vaughn. Satan Espies Adam
and Eve):
On the soft downy Bank damaskt with flow'rs:
A third bank marks Eve's first speech, that is the locus of her first self
discovery. A fourth marks Adam's first dream - the first dream ever! On the
fifth, Satan spies Eve separated from Adam (Figure 7c: Vaughn. Satan Espies
Eve).
This scene is suggestive, perhaps even prophetie of the Origin, because
the bank here is encroached with tangledness, the emblem of Satan's approach:
Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen

Among thick-wov'n Arborets and Flow'rs
Imborder'd on each Bank.
Fig. 7b. After E. F. Burney [1799]. Satan Espies Adam and Eve. Illustrations to Paradise
Lost. Bk 4: 395-401 "Then from his lofty stand on that high Tree / Down he alights ... /Nearer
to view his prey, and unespi'd / To mark what of their state he more might 1earn / By word or
action mark: ... " Septimus Prowett quarto edn. 1827 (Firestone Library, Princeton University)
(See also colorplate 6).
Likewise there is the association of thick and bank to describe the locale of
Adam and Eves' first sex after they have eaten the forbidden fruit (Figure
7d: William Blake. Satan Watehing the Caresses of Adam and Eve).
Her hand he seiz'd, and to a shady bank,

Thick overhead with verdant roof imbowr'd
He led her nothing loath;
Thus the Miltonic bank is first a scene of contemplation (Satan's) in the

presence of quiet beauty. But then it quickly becomes the primary scene of
procreation, from which all human's spring, with Satan lurking in the "thick"
bower. How akin to Darwin's entangled bank, where "from the war of nature,
30 DAVID KOHN
Fig.7c. After E. F. Burney [1799]. Satan Espies Eve. Illustrations to Paradise Lost. Bk 9:434-38
"Nearer he drew, .. .I Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen / Among thick-wov'n Arborets
and Flow'rs / Imborder'd on each Bank, the hands of Eve:" Septimus Prowett quarto edn. 1827
(Firestone Library, Princeton University) (See also colorplate 7).
from famine and death, the most exalted object ... directly follows". (Origin
490)
Entangled Bank: Synthesis 0/ the Latent Metaphor

While Satan will ultimately bring corruption to Eve's "damaskt" bank, the
Miltonic bank is first a scene of quiet beauty and the object of Satan's con-
templation. As landscape settings, of course, such quiet banks and bowers
are not restricted to Milton. They have a long iconographic tradition, which
is due brief homage if we are to contextualize Darwin's sense of the beau-
tiful on the Beagle. Rubens' Rest on the Flight to Egypt (Figure 8a), for
example, is in the same broad tradition of travellers at rest as the contemplative
young men in Friedrich's The Dreamer (Figure 8b) and Joseph Wright's
Fig. 7d. William Blake. Satan Watehing the Caresses of Adam and Eve. Illustrations to
Paradise Lost 1808 (Gift by Subscription, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) (See also
colorplate 8).
Darwin-like Portrait 0/ Bmoke Boothby (Figure 8c; compare the Richmond

portrait of Darwin, Figure 8d, which might be called The Contemplative
Traveller Returned).
This brings us back to Darwin in the Brazilian Forest, now comfortably
reclining on a forest bank or eagerly delighting in collecting and observing:
Whilst seated on the trunk of a decaying tree amidst such scenes, one feels an inexpressible
delight. - The rippling of some little brook, the tap of a woodpecker, or scream of some more
distant bird, by the distinctness with which it is heard, brings the conviction how still the rest
of nature iso (Beagle Diary 74)
Although the word "bank" is not used, this is a scene evocative of the
Origin's bank "clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing
on the bushes". Later in Darwin's Beagle Diary account of a quiet moment
in Australia, "bank" is used in a parallel passage:
32 DAVID KOHN
Fig. 8a. P. P. Rubens after woodcut by Christoffel Jepher. The Rest on the Flight to Egypt.
1632-36 (Print Dept., Metropo1itan Museum of Art, New York).
A Iittle time be fore this I had been Iying on a sunny bank & was reflecting on the strange
character of the animals of this country as compared to the rest of the world. (383)
We know Darwin had great talent for intellectual synthesis. Ultimately,

he would synthesize what are in Milton conflicting elements of tangled thicket
and bucolic bank into the imaginative tension of the entangled bank. Ultimately,
he would also reconcile the contrast of life and death through the destruc-
tive creative balance of natural selection. But to do justice to the ontogeny
of Darwin's metaphor we cannot move to that synthesis prematurely. It is
important to remember that there is a long hiatus of twenty seven years between
the origins of the entangled bank on the Beagle and the realized metaphor
of the entangled bank in the Origin. In all Darwin's many manuscripts over
the intervening years the image of the entangled forest is absent, yet it is a
presence that lies fallow and unworked. Imbued with strong conflicting
emotions of delight and gloom, an expression of romantic aesthetic cast in
Miltonic terms - the "entangled bank" is long a latent metaphor. Fixed in
the contrasting language used explicitly to describe the Fuegian mountains and
their torrents and implicit in the description of Brazilian brooks and Australian
sunny banks, the metaphor floats unstated in the intertextual domain between
Miiton's language and Darwin's memory of Miiton. Perhaps it would be best
to represent the latent "entangled bank" at this stage more as a kind of
Fig. 8b. Caspar David Friedrich (1774--1840). The Dreamer. c. 1835 (Hennitage, SI. Petersburg)
metaphoric field fixed by emotion and experience in nature, and partially

fixed in language, but as yet devoid of scientific content and explanatory
significance. Indeed, demonstrable only in reconstructive hindsight, it remains
concrete yet unformed.
PART 11 1826-1859. COGNITIVE HISTORY OF DARWIN'S WEDGING

IMAGERY. METAPHORS AND SYLLOGISMS IN TRANSITION
1. Salisbury Craigs
What does take form and grow over the intervening years is the wedging
metaphor. Only first clearly formulated in September 1838 upon Darwin's
reading of Malthus (Notebook D 134), and then reworked in every version
34 DAVID KOHN
Fig. 8c. Joseph Wright of Derby. Portrait 0/ Brooke Boothby. 1781 (Tate Gallery, London)
of Darwin's theory up until the first edition of the Origin whereafter it is

dropped, the wedging metaphor forms part of one of the most intensely inter-
preted texts in the annals of scientific discourse. However, this metaphor
also has an intricate pre-history that has not previously been considered in these
interpretations. I am indebted to Dr. Ralph Colp for drawing my attention to
a mention of wedges in a short manuscript from Darwin 's medical school
days in Edinburgh. The MS, which Colp will soon be publishing, is an ac count
of abrief Darwinian expedition - a "Zoological Walk" to Portobello with a
fellow student. 1O In my view, it constitutes the one substantive reference to
wedges that truly predates and prefigures the Malthus passage wedging
metaphor. Darwin writes at age seventeen with a penchant for atmospheric
landscape description reminiscent of the Beagle documents:
[Because of the weather] we were miserably disappointed, even ne ar objects being «rendered
totally» invisible by the den se & impenetrable mist. ... If the day had been more favourable,
we might have seen on our right hand, the far-famed Salisbury Craigs, another striking specimen
of Scotch taste. - «Not of picturesque beauty, but of money. At one time this belted [?] hilI.
was perchance, an ornament to Edinburgh» - Now it merely stands a monument. [to] what
Gunpowder & ye Wedge can perforrn. - (DAR 5:49-50)"
The evidentiary clue to the development of the wedging metaphor provided

by this isolated, almost casual, mention of "ye Wedge" is slight yet tantalizing.
Again, there is over a decade's hiatus between "Gunpowder & ye Wedge"
on the walk to Portobello and the reading of Malthus that precipitated the
wedging metaphor. The intervening years, which included Darwin's educa-
fig. 8d. George Richmond. Charles Darwin. 1840.
ti on at Cambridge and the Beagle voyage, witnessed enormous enhancement

in Darwin's store of experience. Yet the gap between the 1826 and 1838
passages is not as great as it appears. Indeed I propose to treat this text as a
latent metaphoric source of the Malthus passage. This interpretation begins
to become plausible when we remember that it was Darwin himself who pre-
served these notes. Thus the Salisbury Craig text was always at hand to be
re-read and to serve quite literally as a source of metaphoric material. More
concretely, it appears that they served exactly this function, for in July 1838
36 DAVID KOHN
Darwin revisited Salisbury Craigs for a day en route to GIen Roy. This day,
24 June 1838, was the first Darwin spent in the field after the return of the
Beagle. It marked areturn both to nature and to his old Edinburgh haunts.
We have to assume Darwin reread his old Edinburgh notes as an aide memoire
for his day trip to the cliff overlooking Edinburgh's Holyrood palace. Nostalgie
recovery of memory doubtless combined with Darwin's geologie al motivations
for adding a day at Salisbury Craigs to his GIen Roy itinerary. As he wrote
his cousin W. D. Fox:
I go by steam-packet to Edinburgh. - take a solitary walk on Salisbury crags & call up old thoughts
of former times ... (Correspondence 2:91)
So what can we learn if we entertain the assumption that writing the Malthus
wedge metaphor involved some memory of Salisbury Craig and the Salisbury
Craig text? First, the passage, although written after a scientific excursion,
conveys no immediate scientific content. In this respect the context of com-
position paralleis the Beagle channel uses of entanglement. Second, if we
treat the 1826 passage as a latent metaphor it helps clarify which one of the
several meanings of wedge actually formed the primary image for Darwin's
true 1830's metaphor. This has always been a little indistinct. The Salisbury
Craig wedge is quite visual and clear: it is the kind of wedge quarrymen use
to cut stone: "thick at one end and tapering to a thin edge at the other end"
(OED). Thus the stone blasted from the hill by gun powder is pounded and
broken apart with the wedge. Further, consider the tone of the "Gunpowder
and ye Wedge" passage: it is angry. Darwin is angry that he has little but "a
few stray shells" to show for the walk to Portobello. He is angry at the bad
weather, at the Scotch and above all angry at and simultaneously awed by
the destructive power of human industry to turn picturesque beauty into an
ugly "monument" to what gunpowder and the wedge can perform. I suggest
these qualities recommend the Salisbury Craigs image as a latent metaphor:
its conditions of composition - set in nature, in the act of doing science, but
without scientific content. A striking visual image imbued with awe, written
in the sublime mode and colored by anger, it becomes a vehicle for aggres-
sive emotions. These begin to be tapped when Darwin rereads the passage upon
his return to Salisbury Craigs in 1838.
Of course, we should remember that Darwin was a man whose mother
was a Wedgwood, who was raised in the constant presence of Wedgwood aunts,
uncles, and Wedgwood cousins, one of whom he would marry. The word
"wedge" seems bound to have had a certain resonance for Darwin. Such a
resonance need not be unrelated to the Salisbury Craig latent metaphor. Emma
Wedgwood emerged into the foreground of Darwin's life as part of a
chronology of "wedge" repetitions just preceding the Malthus reading:
24 June 1838 Returns to Salisbury Craigs
Reads "Gunpowder & ye Wedge" Note
30 July Visits Wedgewoods at Maer
Begins courtship of Emma Wedgwood
28 September Reads Malthus

Writes "wedging metaphor" (D135)
Here not only the familial associations with Wedgewood but the sexual
connotations of "wedges" with Emma (cuneus, quaint, cunt) noted by Colp
and others seem relevant metonymies for the role of reproduction in natural
selection. Likewise the connection between sexuality and aggression may
make the Wedgwood resonance a link between the aggression of the 1826
"Gunpowder & ye Wedge" and the aggression of the 1838 Malthusian wedging
force.
2. Transmutation Notebook D
Let us turn to the 1838 Malthus metaphor of Transrnutation Notebook D,12
written some two years after the return of the Beagle to England. Describing
the consequences for adaptation of Malthusian population pressure, Darwin
writes:
One may say there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges trying force dnto> every kind of
adapted structure into the gaps <of> in the oeconomy of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting
out weaker ones. (Notebook D: 135)
Consider this metaphor in relation to the Salisbury Craigs image. The stone
of the geological formation has been abstracted to the whole "oeconomy of
Nature". What "Gunpowder & ye Wedge" can perform is amplified into a
natural force - yet one that is "like a hundred thousand wedges". Thus "force",
more precisely the act of "forcing", has become a machine, and, in an image
that could only come from the early industrial age, the simplest tool has been
amplified into apower engine with global consequences. Darwin's original
emotional aggressivity can still be feIt in his "thrusting out weaker ones".
But there is now a sublimated higher positive purpose to "all this wedging":
it is "to sort out proper structure & adapt it to change". The balance of death
and destruction with life and growth - the oeconomic balance sheet of nature
- finds its meaning in adaptive change.
Darwin's wedges are now Malthusian and full of latent scientific meaning.
Indeed, the wedge metaphor is widely credited with participating in Darwin's
first formulation of natural selection. Just how it participates has been the
subject of some controversy.13 I think the notion of aesthetic construction
can help clarify this problem. The wedging metaphor, in part, captures the
elevated experience of insight, while in part it conveys the scientific content
of that insight. These two dimensions of the wedging metaphor - elevated
experience and scientific content - fuse. As the old gunpowder and wedge
metaphor becomes filled with latent scientific meaning, Darwin is able to
express not natural selection as a precise vera causa but that there is a natural
force (later to be called natural selection) whose operation he has glimpsed.
Rather than express what natural selection is, he is able to express what it is
like, namely: it is like the action of one-hundred-thousand quarrymen's wedges
38 DAVID KOHN
being pounded into the oeconomy of nature. But there is a scientific content
embedded in this forceful metaphor. Each wedge represents a species or
adaptive type. 14 Darwin's metaphor is not a fixed image; it captures a dynamic
process. The quarryman's wedges are so closely packed together that pounding
in one wedge dislodges adjacent wedges, thereby "forming gaps". Through this
metaphor Darwin is able to express not the full conceptual structure of natural
selection, rather its key proximate and ultimate consequences: to thrust out
"weaker ones" and to produce "adaptive change".
Transition from Metaphor to Syllogism

The full-blown aesthetically shaped metaphor is a complex fusion of feeling
and science. It is also a complex of transitional states in the construction of
the theory. Of itself unpublishable and unjustifiable, yet suggestive of a
profound new comprehension, it expresses a piece - but not the whole - of
the logic of natural selection as a vera causa. Precisely because of the fusion
of feeling and science, the logical status of the wedging metaphor is compli-
cated. On the one hand, as conveyor of emotion, it is a pre-syllogism, which
is to say it conveys the ineffable feeling of what natural selection is like and
what it might do. On the other hand, as conveyor of scientific interpretation
it forms - as we will now see - part of a true syllogism, which is to say it is
a piece of incomplete logical argumentation.
3. Transmutation Notebook E
At the end of November 1838 (27 Nov-l Dec), just two months after writing
the Malthus passage, Darwin pinned down the argument in syllogistic style.
He wrote in Notebook E:
Three principles, will account for all
(I) Grandchildren. like. grandfathers
(2) Tendency to small change . . «especially with physical change»
(3) Greal fertilily in proportion 10 support of parents (Notebook E:58)
The three principles are (I) heredity (reversion), (2) variation, (3) Malthusian
"population pressure", where superfecundity overcomes resources. The first
two principles Darwin had emphasized throughout the early Notebooks, while
the third is at the heart of what he learned from Malthus. Every syllogism
has two parts: its premises and its conclusions. Darwin's argument in the Origin
is truly syllogistic and that is why in its contemporary population genetics
guise, philosophers have been able to render the argument symbolically. But
Darwin's three principles in E58 only form the first part of the natural selec-
tion argument. That is, they comprise a complete statement of the premises
on which the argument is based. The "three principles" format is but a first
step on Darwin's long road to give systematic expression to his theory. These
three principles, or as I would have it, three premises are the empirical, jus-
tifiable, ultimately mathematizable core of Darwin's argument. But there
appears to be a great deal missing. lronically, what is missing is already
there. The inferences or conclusions to be drawn from the interaction of these
principles in nature is eJtactly what had already been packed into the scien-
tific content of the wedge metaph~r; The missing inferences, found in a11 the
1842-1859 texts are (a) the inevitable competitionensuing from thepremises
(struggle for existence), (b) the immediate consequences of competition
(survival of the fittest) and (c) the ultimate consequences ofcompetition (tQ
produce adaptation). So we have the premises of a sy110gism without the
inferences. Yet that Darwin knows there are such inferences is condensed
into the opening phrase: "Three principles, will account for a11". Indeed, for
the "all" they will explain is the origin of adaptation. These are the missing
inferences he already knows because they are already present in the wedging
metaphor: "to thrust out weaker ones" (inferences a and b: struggle for exis-
tence and survival of the fittest) and "force adapted structure" (inference c:
produce adaptation). Thus the "three principles" are also only part of a syl-
logism. And in perfect complementarity, the part-syllogism of September's
wedging metaphor is the missing part of the November sy11ogism.
Clearly, from Salisbury Craigs to the November syllogism, there is a devel-
opmental process at work, with the aesthetie contribution being crucial, perhaps
necessary, but not sufficient. From pre-metaphor Darwin moves, after a long
delay, to genuine metaphor. But that metaphor is a complex of two transi-
tional states: an emotional pre-syllogism and a cognitive part-syllogism.
Specifically, the metaphor expresses the inferential part of the natural selec-
ti on argument. From there, after a short delay, he moves to syllogism-style
argument. But here he expresses only the premises of the natural selection
argument. Recapping the overall process, from scientifically empty, emotion-
ally charged image based on visual imagination and visual experience, a
template is formed. 15 Later, after years of scientific preparation, inte11ectual
growth and conceptual work on the subsidiary problematics of transmutation
(biogeographie patterns, various patterns of change and stability, e.g. varia-
tion and heredity, adaptation and ancestry, novel behavior and instinct, etc.)
he finally gets it. The emotion at "getting it" experienced by this romantic
scientist capable of great joy in nature taps into his ancient pre-metaphoric
template. Ancient memory serves new insight as Darwin creates a scientific
metaphor suffused with the sublime intimations of global power and uni-
versal law. This is the aesthetie construction of scientific knowledge. But of
itself it is incomplete. Presently, Darwin calms down and moves from "getting
it" to "saying it" in some sort of logieal form. Then he spends the next twenty
or so years refining the logic, gathering the evidence, and formulating the
subsidiary problematies to substantiate the argument.
40 DAVID KOHN
CONCLUSION: 1859. PSYCHOCULTURAL HISTORY OF

DARWIN'S WEDGING AND ENTANGLEMENT IN THE ORIGIN.
IDENT/F1CAT/ON, RECONCILIATION, AND MALE VIOLENCE
The latent origins and complex histories of the wedging metaphor and the
entangled bank came into a common focus in the writing of tbe Origin.
Remember tbe salient facts (1) tbat tbese two metapbors appear to develop
independently and (2) tbat tbe entangled bank - witb its oxymoronic recon-
ciliation of tbe sublime and tbe beautiful - is only truly formulated from ancient
latent Beagle materials in tbe final writing of tbe Origin, wbile tbe wedging
metapbor underwent a long massaging in tbe several draft versions of Darwin's
theory. So as we come full circle to look at tbe two metapbors as tbey appear
togetber in tbe Origin, our perspective needs to be adjusted. Wbile we still
bave to remain sensitive to tbe logic of development, we now bave to bear
in mi nd tbat tbe Origin text is botb a stage in a long developmental sequence
and a unique event, wbere diverse elements are woven into a single common
text.
How do tbe long dun.~e and tbe present moment interact in this instance?
My claim is that tbe birtb of the entangled bank in 1859 was already fore-
sbadowed in tbe textual jraming of tbe 1838 wedging metapbor. Tbus, as
we will see, tbe wedging metapbor and tbe entangled bank prove to be
intimately related in tbe Origin. In the end, tbey are almost one - functioning
as parallel depictions of tbe same scene, witb deep structurallinks - their com-
monality derives from Darwin's powerful attacbment to his version of tbe
romantic aestbetic. Furtber, altbough we bave been pursuing tbe aesthetic
construction of Darwin 's tbeory, aesthetics, at least in Darwin 's case, is a matter
of emotion. Ultimately, as we will also sbortly see, tbese texts are about Darwin
bimself. The ne ar identity of the wedging metapbor and the entangled bank
arises because tbey are common manifestations of Darwin's identity. Tbe same
is also true for Darwin's attachment to tbe romantic aestbetic. Tbus our explo-
ration leads us to a sense of Darwin's own place in the construction of bis
tbeory.
Now back to tbe texts to corroborate tbese concluding interpretations.
Immediately preceding tbe 1838 Transrnutation Notebook version of tbe
wedging metapbor, Darwin wrote a sbort framing passage:
I do not doubt, everyone till he thinks deeply has assumed that increase of animals exactly
proportional to the number that can live. - (Notebook D: 134)
This frame placed Darwin in tbe position of a distanced ob server, who simul-
taneously contemplates nature and reflects on his own assumptions. 16 Tbe frame
also puts Darwin on an equal narrative plane witb other cerebral observers. 17
Implicitly, he appeals to reader/ob servers to see tbe world as be bas suddenly
come to do. It is as if be invites an imagined reader to experience tbe cbange
in assumptions tbat accompanied his discovery. Tbe Transrnutation Notebooks
were private documents, but tbe stance of tbe distanced observer has the rbetor-
ical potential to engage public readers as if they were co-discoverers of natural

selection.
Darwin does indeed make good use of this distanced-observer rhetorical
frame in the Origin treatment of the wedging metaphor. In fact there is a double
frame preceding the wedging metaphor in the Origin's first edition. For the
wedge metaphor is incorporated into an extended passage (opening on p. 62
and continuing to p. 67) that centers around a personified representation of
nature through the image of "the face of nature". The passage opens with
the distanced-observer frame:
Nothing is easier to admit in words than the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more
difficult - at least I have found it so - than consistently to bear this conclusion in mind! (Origin
62)
The surface rhetorical function of the distanced observer who narrates the
Origin is to explain natural selection and to preach its theodicy of land-
scape. 18 This is the point where Darwin 's metaphysics, aesthetics, and emotions
intersect. Here we again see Darwin beckoning the reader to stand back and
reorient his way of thinking - to bear new conclusions in mind. But then
Darwin does something he didn't do in the Transmutation Notebooks. He makes
another beckoning motion. This time the reader is invited to contemplate -
indeed to enter - what appears to be a beautiful natural scene. The passage
then continues:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we
do not see or we forget that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or
seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life. (Origin 62)
The passage opens gently with beauty but it ends with ominous clouds dark-
ening the bright face. Then the passage picks up again on p. 66 with another
frame: "In looking at Nature, it is necessary to keep the foregoing consider-
ations always in mind . . .". In perfect parallel the frame leads again to the
"face of nature". Now the beauty has fully given way to a scene of awesome
destructive sublimity. Here then is the u1t~mate setting Darwin has created
for the wedging metaphor:
The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed
close together and driven by incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another
with greater force. (Origin 67)
Together the double structure of Origin 62 and 66--7 can be parsed as frame
plus natural scene, with the scene encompassing first the beautiful and then
the sublime. Both are present.
Finally, if we consider the entangled bank passage, we find precisely the
same structure. An introductory distancing frame functions as an invitation
to contemplate and then to enter a natural scene:
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds,
with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flining about, and with worms crawling
42 DAVID KOHN
through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different
from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced
by laws acting around uso (Origin 489)
In this case, we have learned from our study of Darwin's Beagle encounter
with Milton that the sublime and the beautiful are not only both present, they
intersect in the same figure: the entangled bank.
So in the Origin we have two scenes to contemplate. Our two metaphors
are embedded in passages that share a paired and parallel structure. As it
turns out on further examination these two scenes reduce to one. To see this
it is helpful to note that our parallel structure bears interesting similarities to
the structure of alandscape painting. We have our frame, with DarwinIreader
contemplating nature. How reminiscent this is of the landscape painting con-
vention that always puts a human figure in the corner to overlook a picturesque
or sublime scene. 19 Perhaps more precisely, how reminiscent Darwin's distant-
observer frames are of the Beagle images we have explored, where Darwin
sits like Brooke Boothby rapt in the observation of nature (Figure 8c) or
Darwin contemplates the "spirits" of death and life, like Satan espying Adam
and Eve on their "damaskt bank" (Figure 7e). In short, Darwin 's framing
passages are extremely useful because they lead us to envision Darwin
hirnself as participant ob server in the landscapes of his imagination. But we
should be careful not to accept Darwin's perspective as distanced ob server
uncritically. Can we not detect Darwin's presence within those landscapes
that Darwin invites us to explore? Inside the frame we find the wedging
metaphor and the entangled bank metaphor. But what do these metaphors
tell us about their creator? Here we need to draw on the developmental history
of the wedging metaphor again.
Darwin used the wedge metaphor in all the drafts of his theory after 1838.
As Gould has pointed out,20 the 100,000 wedges goes down in 1842 to 1000,
up in 1844 to 10,000 and stays constant at this number in the 185710ng version
(Natural Selection) and in the 1859 Origin. In my view, wh at really changes
in these drafts is a question of psychology, namely: Darwin's agentie identi-
fication with natural selection and the degree of aggression Darwin allows
hirnself to express towards the image of nature embodied in the metaphor.
Ralph Colp in his 1979 paper seized the essence of this process: "at the
moment that he was vividly seeing the many wedge shapes of nature, Darwin
was also, probably mainly unconsciously, identifying hirnself with nature".21
Rather than with nature in general, it would be more direct to say that Darwin
identifies with the act of wedging. That is he identifies with the force he
discovered - the agency of natural selection. 22 If the wedging portrayed in
the metaphor is a vehicle for his personal identification with natural selec-
tion, then perhaps Darwin 's presence is implicit as the silent pounder of
wedges. Beyond its scientific content and its role in the development of a
scientific theory, wedging is also a personified metaphor. The drama of
Darwin's psychic life is implicated in the metaphor.
This interpretation leads us to so me even more direct psychological ques-

tions. If Darwin is pounding wedges, he is clearly pounding them into nature.
But we have already reconstructed Darwin's representation of nature.
In 1826, "nature" is the literal stone formation of Salisbury Craigs. The
stone is blasted by gunpowder and shattered with wedges. Darwin is not the
agent here. He abides excIusively in the narrative frame. It is the quarrymen,
the tasteless Scotch, the greedy destructiveness of the modem age. Darwin's
role is to lament nature's destruction.
In 1838, the representation of nature is abstracted as the "oeconomy of
nature" - that is both nature as a whole and nature as a balance sheeL This
abstraction hides the violence done by "thrusting out weaker ones". The
visual emphasis is on the agency of pounding rather than on the effect this
agency inflicts on its objecL Indeed, what is emphasized is not the represen-
tation of nature, but the higher meaning of Darwin's discovery: adaptation
as the final cause.
Then, in 1842 a fundamental shift occurs: the face of nature appears for
the first time. The abstract oeconomy of nature is present together with a
personalized face of nature:
Natural Selection. DeCandolle's war of nature - face of nature - may be weil at first doubted
... a thousand wedges are being forced into the oeconomy of nature.
By 1844 the "oeconomy" has dropped out and become a surface:

Nature may be compared to a surface on which rest ten thousand sharp wedges ... driven inwards
by incessant blows.
Now this is a critical modification. Darwin is getting concrete: Nature is a

surface. And here Darwin's personal identification with natural selection comes
to the fore. For the first time - somebody is hammering those wedges: they
are "driven inwards by incessant blows".
In 1857, the same surface and the same incessant blows are maintained
unchanged along with the constant 10,000 wedges. But in 1859, finally, surface
and face are combined and I think we glimpse the emotions that have fueled
Darwin's metaphor all along:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness. We forget the birds singing round us are
constantly destroying life. The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten
thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven by incessant blows.
The wedger and the wedged are finally both present as persons. 23 More pre-
cisely, through two parallel synecdoches, they are represented as male and
fern ale persons. The part represents, and its partiality masks, the embarrassing
presence of the whole. Yet there are two wholes. Darwin's personal agency
is the male presence who delivers "incessant blows" and nature is present as
the one who has a face "bright with gladness" and a face like a "yielding
surface". In the wedger, pounding his "incessant blows", we detect Darwin's
44 DAVID KOHN
own complex personification of and identification with natural selection. And

the wedged other here is Nature personified as a woman.
Nature is a woman with a "face ... bright with gladness". At least Darwin
leaves us free to imagine that a "face" of Nature "bright with gladness" is a
beautiful female face. Perhaps it is a young face, like Eve's. Thus, deci-
phering Darwin's synecdoche of the "face", we infer that the whole is clearly
female if the face is female. Of course, Darwin's feminization of Nature follows
a long tradition. 24 But in what manner does Darwin participate in this tradi-
tion? We note that the face of nature is also like a "yielding surface". In the
imagery of male fantasy, a woman may be seen as yielding and her body -
rather than her face - experienced as a "yielding surface". There are two layers
of synecdoche: first face for woman and then face for woman's body. Thus
in Darwin's representation, the imagery moves from the face to the body of
Nature.
Finally, we come again to the "entangled bank". As we have noted, the
wedging passage and the entangled bank passage are structurally knitted
together. We can add now that both combine the contemplation of good and
evil with agentie induction into the severe secret laws of nature. Likewise,
both use sexual imagery. Nature is "an entangled bank". Here all is focussed
on the representation of nature. There is no personified wedger. Instead we
find the abstract laws. The entangled bank is again a female sexual image.
Here the synecdoche works from part to whole. We are asked to contemplate
an entangled sexual bush, as part of an entangled damask't bed of sexual
activity. If the activity of this small locale is meant to represent the whole
of Nature, then the entangled bush that cloaks the female sexual part, is
meant to represent woman.
The act of imagination Darwin requires of the reader is that we personify
the laws of nature referred to in this passage. We have to give the woman of
the entangled bank her man. We have to pi ace Darwin as wedger into his
masked fantasy. That is, we have to place Darwin, as Adam and as the usurper
Satan, into the midst of the entangled bank, where Eve/Nature beckons hirn.
That is what unifies the two metaphors: the two aspects of the entangled
bank - as a place of apparent gentle beautiful repose and as a place of the
hidden violent sublime struggle of wedging - together embody the drama of
Darwin's own sexuality. If it is he who "wedges" on the entangled bank,
both passages become sexual metaphors for Darwin's fantasy of pounding
incessant blows of sexual passion into the woman of the entangled bush who
lies on the damaskt bank. Thus, Darwin's reconciliation of Nature's sublime
and beautiful aspects, is like for so many romantics, a sexual dance.
But we must take one further step. Focus back to the face image and then
Darwin's mature formulation of wedging becomes most disturbing: "The face
of nature", "the yielding surface" have "sharp wedges" "driven" into them
by "incessant blows". If Darwin identifies with pounding the blows that drive
in the sharp wedges, the metaphor not only masks sexuality, it also masks
sexual violence. It is in fact misogynist. It is not nature, but Darwin's passion
that is red in tooth and elaw. Beer, alone of all recent readers, also recog-
nizes Darwin's violence and looks at "the particular relationship between the
image of the wedge and wedging and Darwin's image of nature". She writes,
"The drive towards actualization has created an image so grotesque, so dis-
turbingly figurative of violence, in which the barriers between earth and
body have so far vanished, that the wedge image has become shockingly
sadistic ... ".25
However, even Beer seems to be deflected from directly addressing Darwin's
sadism as misogyny.26 If we do focus clearly on the violent misogyny of this
passage, the first question we have to ask is against what woman or women
is this anger directed and what conflicts does it encode? We can readily imagine
that the anger relates to the primary women in his life, his mother Susannah,
his sisters, his wife Emma, and his daughters Annie and Etty. Perhaps it is
the ensemble of Darwin's relationships with these women that shapes his
relationship to "women". Unfortunately, the bearing of these relationships
on Darwin's work has only begun to be developed. 27 Yet Moore's excellent
work on Darwin and Annie make her see m particularly relevant to our
discussion.
Moore has shown a elose textual parallel between Darwin's depiction of
his daughter Annie's face and "the face of nature" in the Origin. However,
it is important to remember that the relationship between the "face of nature"
and the "wedges" was already formulated by 1842, Le., nine years be fore
Annie's death in 1851. Thus while language in Darwin's memorial to Annie
such as "her dear face bright all the time, with the sweetest smiles" may indeed
have been a latent source for the "face of nature bright with gladness", it serves
to fill in the depiction of a "face of nature" that was already part of the deep
structure of Darwin's rhetoric. 28
Annie, then may have become the focus of Darwin's misogyny in the Origin.
There are certainly overtones of sexuality in his tender relation with her. But
Annie is crushed by the cruel operation of the forces of nature. She is wedged
and "thrust out". As Moore shows, it is the death of Annie that becomes the
personal emblem for the selection theodicy. Her death, which personifies the
blind cruelty of nature, is sublimated into the higher consolation of evolu-
tion. Yet as much as it may be a measure of Darwin's religious sentiment,
the transformation of Annie's death into a naturalistic theodicy, still does not
account for Darwin's own cruelty. Namely, the cruelty with which he writes
of "wedges pounded into [the bright] face of nature". Indeed, if the face is
Annie's and Darwin is the wedger, then the cruelty is even more profound.
It suggests a darker side of his love for Annie where more complicated feelings
and more ancient emotional structures feed the love of a father for a special
daughter.
Such emotions, and the capacity for metaphor that I have argued Darwin
uses to mask them, are both products of natural selection. Perhaps in the future
a cultural analysis of science, as developed here, might be illuminated by
Darwin's own science. For now, if the aesthetic constructionofDarwin's
46 DAVID KOHN
theory, which has lead us to consider well-known texts from several new
perspectives, reveals irrational aggression, it also reveals how Darwin thinking
deeply on the rationale of violence in Nature - and feeling tenderness and
passion more intensely than we have known - shaped art and self into
science.
Department of History
Drew University
NOTES
* Many friends and colleagues have contributed to this paper in a variety of ways. I wish to
acknowledge the insight of my student Ronald SettIe, and the help, criticism, and support of
my colleagues in the Drew University Graduate School Sarah Henry-Corrington and Robert
Ready, and of fellow students of science and culture GiIlian Beer, Howard Gruber, Robert
Richards and Jim Secord. I owe especial thanks to Ralph Colp and Jim Moore.
I Darwin, c., On the Origin of Speeies by Means of Natural Seleetion, or the Preservation of
Favoured Raees in the Struggle for Life, facsimile of Ist edn. (1859) (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1964).
2 I am indebted to Ronald Settle for sharing his insight into the suggestive relationship between
Darwin's concern with Iife and death on the Beagle and his later theory of natural selection.
3 Keynes, R. D. (ed.), Charles Darwin' s 'Beagle' Diary (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988).
4 Burkhardt, F. and Smith, S. (eds.), The Correspondenee of Charles Darwin (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, v. I, 1985.

5 Secord, J. A., 'The discovery of a vocation: Darwin's early geology'. Brit. J. Hist. Sei. 24:
134-142, 1991.
6 Carus, C. G., 'Nine letters on landscape painting', in E. G. Holt (ed.), From the Classieists
to the Impressionists: A Doeumentary History of Art and Arehiteeture in the 19th Century
(New York: NYU Press, 1966), p. 84; Rupke, N. A., 'Caves, fossils and the history of the
earth', in A. Cunningham and N. Jardine (eds.), Romantieism and the Seien ces (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 254.
7 Darwin, c., Journal of Researehes into the Geology and Natural History of the Various
Countries Visited by H.M.S. Beagle . .. from 1832 to 1836 (London: 1839).

8 See Pointon, M. R., Mi/ton and English Art (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970).
9 Carus, C. G. in Holt, op. eit., pp. 89, 92-3.
10 Colp, R., Darwinian Reeolleetions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), in prepara-
tion.
11 Darwin Papers, Cambridge University Library.
12 Kohn, D. (ed.) 'Notebook D', in P. H. Barrett, P. J. Gautrey, S. Herbert, D. Kohn and S. Smith
(eds.), Charles Darwin' s Notebooks, 1836-1844 (Ithaca: British Museum (Natural History) and
Cornell University Press, 1987).
13 Hodge, M. J. S. and Kohn, D., 'The immediate origins of natural selection', in D. Kohn
(ed.), The Darwinian Heritage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 193-196.
14 Mayr notes Darwin began as a typologist and that even after 1838 typology remained an
important component of his thinking. Mayr, E., One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the
Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 79.
Mayr's observation is iIlustrated by the maturation of the wedge metaphor. Only in Natural
Seleetion, written after the decade-Iong study of barnacle and pigeon variation has the shift to
individuals taken place: 'Nature may be compared to a surface covered with ten-thousand wedges,
many of the same shape representing different species, all packed c10sely together and all
driven in by incessant blows': Here we have each wedge an individual and each wedge with
its unique species shape. The quarryman's wedge has faded, and Darwin is considering wedges
of many shapes and sizes. So we are dealing with populations of wedge species. Even here the
variability of the individual shapes is not specified. So as Mayr suggests, in some sense the
shift to populational thinking is never total. To some historians Mayr's terminology of popula-
tional versus typoplogical 'thinking' may seem to reveal an anachronistic commitment to an
essentialist history of antonomous ideas. Yet Darwin clearly participates in the larger his tor-
ical transition that really concerns Mayr. Thus, for a modern evolutionist such as Mayr, by
1857 Darwin's 'thinking' - here meaning his imagery - was implicitly populational while in 1838
it was not. Given Darwin's argument with its explicit use of variation, how else would one
interpret individual wedges but as variable individuals? Yet it is also implicitly typological. A
tme Mayrian Darwin should never have written 'many of the same shape representing different
species'. The issue never gets beyond the implicit. He will always reside in the contradictory
zone of implicitly 'typological' and implicitly 'populational' thinking. But the contradiction is
not Darwin's. It arises because history probably doesn't operate in the way Mayr assumes it does:
as a march of developing 'thinkings'. But, I suggest we should be grateful to Mayr for his
Whiggish categorical distinction between typological and population thinking. He gives us,
and himself employs very effectively, a hermeneutic that helps clarify Darwin's intentions.
15 Gruber, H. E., 'Aspects of scientific discovery: aesthetics and cognition', Reality Club 5,
in press, attempts to systematize the aesthetic process of creative scientists. In part his model
is based on his own deep study of Darwin. But he suggests that 'For creative scientists the use
of a relatively free literary form may be one good way to get some ideas said provisionally,
unhampered by the demands of scientific discipline' MS p. 18. He is referring to the 'Beagle'
Diary as a narrative medium. As we see here the process of 'playing' may be very deep and
have very concrete pay off.
16 Beer, G., '''The face of nature": Anthropomorphic elements in the language of The Origin
0/ Speeies', in L. Jordonova (ed.), Languages 0/ Nature: Critieal Essays on Seienee and
Literature (London: Free Association Books, 1986), p. 236 discusses an analogous phenom-
enon in the 1857 version where Darwin's use of similes such as 'may be compared to',
representing', and 'we may suppose' dilutes 'the elaboration and immediacy of experience'.
17 Ibid., p. 225, 'The author presents himself not as abstract authority, but as arguer, inter-
preter of observations, as companion'.
18 Kohn, D., 'Darwin's ambiguity: The secularization of biological meaning', Brit. J. Hist.
Sei. 22: 234, 1989; Moore, J. R., 'Of love and death: "Why Darwin gave up Christianity"', in
J. R. Moore (ed.), History, Humanity and Evolution: Essays /or John C. Greene (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
19 Novak, B., Nature and Culture: Ameriean Landseape and Painting, 1825-1875 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980).
20 Gould, S. J., 'The wheel of fortune and the wedge of progress', Nat. Hist. 3: 14-16, 1989.
21 Beer, op. eit., 1986, p. 233 aptly summarizes the important wider claims in Colp, R., 'Charles
Darwin's vision of organic nature', New York State Journal 0/ Medieine 79: 1627, 1979: 'Colp
speculates on the sexual and unconscious significance of wedging for Darwin. He links its appear-
ance in Darwin's thought to his imminent marriage and also to his feelings towards his Wedgwood
relations, and he considers that it may have come to symbolize Darwin's assertion of himself
in the areas of work, sex, money, and resistance to opposition'.
22 As Beer, op. eit., p. 228 notes, "In the first edition of The Origin both nature and natural
selection have grammatically the function of agents". Natural Selection after all is the analogue
of Artificial Selection, wh ich implies a breeder -" As Beer further notes: Darwin endows
natural selection 'with latent activity'. Variation causes, generation multiplies, but natural selec-
tion 'picks out with unerring skill'. The implication of an active and external agent is far
stronger in the long run". In this regard also note (Beer p. 231): The sense of a brooding
presence [in the Origin, 1sI ednl was perhaps reinforced by the way in which he distinguished
the gender of nature and natural selection. Nature is always 'she' whereas natural selection is
neuter - the neuter becomes a form of sex. sexless force.' PerhaDs it is Darwin' s own sexu-
48 DAVID KOHN
ality that is masked as a 'sexless force'. Although Beer does not go as far as Colp in asserting
Darwin's self identification inlwith the wedging metaphor, having clearly deciphered that natural
selection is an agency, with implied personification, and possessor of a sexless (neuter) gender
- she clearly recognizes a personal agency in the 'wedger' when she speaks of 'the implied
presence of a figure wielding a hammer'.
23 Cf Beer, op. eil., p. 237: 'The wedge imagery is here [Originl summarized and placed in
apposition to Nature - not 'the economy of Nature', or 'the surface' but 'the face of Nature'.
24 See Beer, op. eil., pp. 232-3 for Victorian scientific and literary expressions of nature as
feminine. Note that feminizing Nature serves Darwin's secularizing naturalistic strategy by
distinguishing 'her' from God.
25 Beer, op. eil., p. 234.
26 Beer's concerns (op. eil., p. 234) are with the 'quagmire of metaphor' that endorses Darwin's
'insistence on proper estrangement' and approves his dropping the sadistic wedge metaphor in
subsequent editions of the Origin. She is deflected from exploring the gloomy revelation of
self. Her concern is 'How to control the emotional force of words becomes a specific diffi-
culty for Darwin's argument in the case of 'faces' and curiously, 'wedges'.
27 Colp, R., 'Charles Darwin's "insufferable grief"', Free Assoeialions 9: 7-44, 1987; Bowlby,
J., 'Charles Darwin: a New Ufe (New York: W. W. Nonon, 1991).
28 Moore, op. eil., 1989, pp. 220-222; Burkhardt, F. and Smith, S. (eds.), The Correspondenee
ofCharles Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), vol. 5, pp. 540-542, 'Charles
Darwin's memorial of Anne Elizabeth Darwin'; Colp, op. eil., 1987; Darwin Papers, Cambridge
University Library, DAR 210.13).
ROBERT S. ROOT-BERNSTEIN
THE SCIENCES AND ARTS SHARE

A COMMON CREATIVE AESTHETIC
On the same tenns, therefore, as art is attained to, is aIl knowl-

edge and science acquired; for as art is ahabit with reference
to things to be done, so is science a habit in respect to things
to be known: as that proceeds from the imitation of types or
fonns, so this proceeds from the knowledge of things. Each
has its origin in sense and experience ....
Sir William Harvey'
In the truths of the natural sciences there is, perhaps, a nearer

analogy to the productions of the refined arts [than anything
else]. The contemplation of the laws of the universe is con-
nected with an immediate tranquil exaltation of mind, and pure
mental enjoyment. The perception of truth is alm ost as simple
a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of
Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel,
are not very remote in character from one each other.
Imagination, as weIl as reason, is necessary to perfeetion
in the philosophical mind. A rapidity of combination, a
power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by
facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination
and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research,
are other words for taste; and the love of nature is the same
passion as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the
beautiful.
Sir Humphrey Davy 2
The sciences and arts were once, not so very long ago, considered to be very
similar, certainly complementary, and sometimes even overlapping ways of
understanding the world. No longer. Today we accept such generalizations
as that the sciences are objective, analytical, and rational whereas the arts
are subjective, emotional, and based on intuition. But I am a controversialist.
The fact that arts and sciences are not widely perceived to be similar does
not mean that they are not. Fashions often dictate perceptions of beauty and
knowledge alike, and fashions are notoriously changeable. Thus, I am willing
- indeed eager - to challenge the new fashion of separating sciences and
arts into two, uncommunicating and even antagonistic camps. I believe that
such achallenge is not only necessary if we are to develop a viable theory
of thinking, but also healthy, for it should create controversy. Unlike some
people, who believe that knowledge is best advanced by the slow accumula-
tion of validated and undoubtable bits of information, I believe that we learn
most by challenging conventional wisdom with the biggest and best arguments
we can muster. This is my style. Sometimes it fails; sometimes it succeeds.
But in either case, the process of trying to undermine dogma often reveals new
49

50 ROBERT S. ROOT-BERNSTEIN
aspects of knowledge, or forces it to be utilized in new and innovative ways

that justify the rethinking.
It is in this anti-dogmatic context that I put forth the following propositions:
First, the sciences and the arts share a common aesthetic; second, that aesthetic
sensibility underlies the most significant creative endeavors in science; and
third, that by hiding the aesthetic dimension of science and denying its debts
to the arts, we mis-train science students and stunt their creative abilities.
We must train whole people who can draw upon the best of all disciplines if
we are to solve the important multi-faceted and multi-cultured problems of
the future.
SOME COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS

ABOUT THE SCIENCES AND ARTS
Undoubtedly the very notion that sciences and arts share anything let alone
a common aesthetic, or that the sciences can owe anything of significance to
the arts, will act on some people like a red cape waved before a bull. Despite
several important studies demonstrating consequential links between the
sciences and arts,3 many people in both sets of disciplines appear to believe
that there are no interactions of significance. I can only imagine that they
have visited the sciences-arts arena when it was empty, for when it is full, there
is much to be observed. The crucial point is not whether there is interaction,
but what sort is it. Will it be the bull or the matador that is pierced by the thrust
of razor sharp truth?
I have been in the sciences-arts arena before. My introduction to the subject
was C. P. Snow's famous essay on "The Two Cultures", in which he proposed
the thesis that the sciences and humanities (in which he inc1udes the arts)
were intellectual and emotional opposites sharing so little in common that com-
munication between practitioners of these subjects is virtually impossible. 4
As an artistically and musically trained scientist who knew many similarly
polymathic individuals, I found Snow's dichotomy questionable at best. It
was not until about 1980, however, that I first waved the red cape of chal-
lenge in an artic1e entitled, "On Paradigms and Revolutions in Science and
Art", in which I argued against Thomas Kuhn's position that the sciences
and the arts evolve in very different ways.5 I particularly objected to his con-
tention that the arts have neither paradigms nor revolutions. Several of the
key arguments that I layed out there will provide an introduction to argu-
ments that 1 think can now push my thesis much further than I was then
aware.
Perhaps the best summary of the differences that are often perceived between
sciences and arts is the following widely accepted statement: If you give ten
scientists the same problem, they will reach exactly the same answer (assuming
they each solve the problem); but if you ask ten artists to paint the same
scene, you will get ten different paintings. In other words, science strives
for an objective consensus, whereas the arts strive for subjective individualism.
A COMMON CREA TIVE AESTHETIC 51
These statements can be interpreted to mean either that science has no

aesthetic (since there is no room for personal interpretation or choice in
problem solving), or that all scientists share one, common aesthetic (objec-
tivism), whereas there are as many aesthetics in art as there are artists. These
statements seem to be so obviously correct that it is hard to imagine ques-
tioning their conclusions. And yet question them we must, for careful
consideration reveals fundamental flaws.
One of the things that I demonstrated in my essay contra Kuhn, and later
expanded upon in my book Discovering,6 was that working scientists (as
opposed to individuals solving textbook problems) rarely, if ever, reach exactly
the same solution to the same problem by the same route. Examples are legion,
and I have presented many in my previous works. I will therefore limit myself
to two of the most striking examples here. The first is the periodic table of
elements, that most boring and seemingly immutable of scientific edifices.
Actually, over four hundred valid versions of the periodic table have been
proposed over the past century (and continue to be proposed), ranging from
standard chart forms to spirals, three-dimensional architectural arrangements,
christmas-tree-like layouts, and even curliques. 7 The purpose of these modi-
fications of the standard textbook affair is that we continue to leam so much
about the properties of the elements that simple tables are poor means of
displaying the many layers of order we can now recognize. Chemists, in con-
sequence, continue to explore different visual displays incorporating different
amounts of information. Far from being boring, the periodic table is vibrantly
alive and constantly evolving.
My second example of scientists reaching different solutions concerns
another of those discoveries that is so set in stone that it would seem to be
incontrovertible and unalterable: the double-helical structure of DNA proposed
by J ames Watson and Francis Crick. Since 1970, at least four new structures
have been proposed to challenge the double helix. 8 The most interesting of
the ones that satisfy all existing data is called the "warped zipper", since it
looks like a zipper that has been warped back and forth by aseries of half
twists. This "warped zipper" model has been proposed to solve a problem with
the double helix that has plagued it from the very first papers: no one knows
how the helix unwinds during replication, why it does not get tangled as it
does so, or what forces are involved. As Watson and Crick themselves wrote
in 1953, "This is a very fundamental difficulty when the two chains are inter-
laced as in our model. . . . The difficulty is a topological one and cannot be
surmounted by simple manipulation".9 The "warped zipper", since it is a zipper
rather than a helix, does not have to unwind. Whether any of the new models
will supplant the double helix is irrelevant to the present argument. The fact
is that both the periodic table and the DNA structure paradigms have been
and are being challenged continuously. Thus, it is clear that all scientists
given the same problem do not arrive at identical or even necessarily equiv-
ale nt answers. Idiosyncracy is just as prevalent in the creation of new science
as it is in the creation of new art. Scientists, like artists, reach consensus
conceming the best form of answer within any given school of thought only
in hindsight, and only when no one is actively working in that area any
longer.
Multiple formulations of scientific results not only present the scientist
with aesthetic choices - which of the valid versions of the periodic table or
the models of DNA best satisfies his or her needs and does so most simply,
beautifully, comprehensibly, usefully - such multiple formulations are also part
and parcel of the creative process of scientific discovery. If we accept the time-
honored observation that one of the most fecund sources of insight in the
sciences is the use of analogies, then the more different ways in which a
result can be obtained or displayed, then the greater the probability of encoun-
tering a fruitful analogy. Thus, many of the greatest scientists have actively
eschewed textbook formulations of results in favor of reading the original
historic papers of the inventors. Jacques Hadamard reports in his famous The
Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field that Jules Drach and
Evariste Galois read original works in order to discover the characteristic traits
of the inventors. They desired to know as many different ways of inventing
as possible. Leibniz gave similar reasons for studying the his tory of mathe-
matics, and James Clerk Maxwell for presenting scientific truths in as many
different forms as possible. 1O
Indeed, no less a scientist than Richard Feynman discusses the method of
multiple formulations in his book The Character of Physical Law. There, to
quote adescription by Alan Lightman, "he places great value on seeking dif-
ferent formulations of the same physical law, even if they are exactly the
equivalent mathematically, because different versions bring to mind different
mental pictures and thus help in making discoveries. 'Psychologically they
are different because they are completely unequivalent when you are trying
to guess new laws' ".11 Chemist Robert Bums Woodward, considered by many
to be the greatest synthetic chemist of this century, wrote similarly, "write
formula in as many ways as possible. Each way may suggest different pos-
sibilities"Y Thus, the notion that ten scientists given the same problem will
arrive at the same answer may describe what will happen when ten unimag-
inative scientists are asked to solve a problem for which the answer has already
been published. It is not what one would expect if one gathered the Pasteurs,
Darwins, Paulings, Einsteins, Bohrs, Woodwards, and Feynmans of the world
together and asked them to address a problem. These are the people who
drive science, and for them there is never one, single formulation or solution
that suffices to describe any area of science.
The converse of the ten-scientists-reaching-one-solution fallacy is that ten
artists will achieve ten very different results. These results are often por-
trayed as being so unique that they cannot be duplicated. For example,
physicist-inventor-novelist Mitchell Wilson maintains that,
If Shakespeare had never written Harn/et, if Beethoven had not lived to create the Eroica, no
one else would have brought these works into existence. Other artists would have created other
works. In science though, if Einstein had never lived to work out relativity, if Maarten Schmidt
A COMMON CREATIVE AESTHETIC 53
hadn't recognized the nature of quasars in the sky, or if Crick and Watson had not solved the
structure of DNA, other scientists would have done so. The world of art is infinite in creative
possibilities, the world of science is restricted. 13
Statements such as Wilson's are very common, and once again, very mis-
leading.
To begin with, it is not evident that science is more or less limited
than the arts in terms of creative possibilities. Faraday said of hirnself
that he could as easily have believed the tales in the Arabian Nights as
any scientific work were his imagination not balanced by an equal desire
for experimental verification, and Woodward wrote about the balance he
sought between "fantasy" and the "physical restraints" imposed by chemical
experimentation. 14 Similarly, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar has written of
astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild that one of the crucial aspects of his
scientific creativity was that he, "allowed his imagination to contemplate a
world that may have features of fairyland!"'5 Perhaps the ultimate expres-
sion of the necessity for such fantasizing circulated in an apparently true
story that circulated at Princeton University when I was a graduate student.
A brilliant mathematician returned from sabbatical to find that a favorite
student had left the university. Upon inquiring of a colleague, he was told
that, "Oh, Mr. X didn't have enough imagination to be a mathematician, so
he went off to become a poet". Conversely, a nineteenth century wit, noting
that Sir Humphrey Davy was an accomplished poet, quipped that, HA chemist
is a poet who has taken a wrong turning".16
Chandrasekhar makes abundantly clear in his book, Truth and Beauty, that
imagination becomes manifested in styles of scientific creativity that are just
as unique as those of any artist. No one could have written On the Origin 0/
Species had Darwin not lived, nor Two New Seien ces had Galileo turned to
other pursuits. These works are, as much as any work of literature or art,
individual, idiosyncratic, and historically unique. Indeed, in the case of Darwin,
we have Wall ace to vouch for the fact that even when two theories are con-
sidered to be independent, simultaneous discoveries, they nonetheless differ
substantially (e.g., on issues such as whether man evolved or was created), and
completely in the form in which they are presented. Joseph Le Bel's inven-
tion of the tetrahedral theory of carbon valency is not equivalent to J. H.
van't Hoff's, nor did they arrive at their conclusions from identical starting
points. I? Mendeleev's periodic table is not Lothar Meyer's, nor did they
make identical predictions. Indeed, Kuhn hirnself has documented that non-
equivalence characterizes all known cases of so-called simultaneous discovery,
including all of the various formulations of the first law of thermodynamics
by Heimholtz, Mayer, Liebig, Mohr and a dozen other contributors. 18 Thus,
while there is little doubt that some version of evolution, so me version of
the tetrahedral carbon atom, some version of the laws of thermodynamics
would eventually have been discovered by some scientist had not the famous
historical names we know lived, yet I maintain that these alternative formu-
lations would have differed in consequential ways. Every specific piece of
science is an embodiment of individual scientific style, and is therefore as

unique as any piece of art. Textbook science attempts to strip the result of
this uniqueness in presenting it in as objective and compelling a way as
possible.
If we also strip artistic works of their unique embodiments, then it is false
to maintain that had any great artist or musician not lived, their contribution
to the arts would never have been made. Had Shakespeare not written Harnlet,
that specific version would certainly not exist, but equally certainly other
versions of Harnlet by other writers would have and did exist. It is an historical
fact that Shakespeare invented few if any of his plots. Thus, had he not
lived, we would simply consider some other writer to have created the most
definitive version of Hamlet's story. Indeed, had Hamlet himself not been
immortalized, so me other figure would be considered the archetype for the plot
and themes we associate with his character. The same argument can be made
for Beethoven or any other composer or artist. True, the Eroica symphony
would never have been written had Beethoven never lived, but we would
have so me other symphony that epitomizes those themes and that style. In
short, we must differentiate c1early between the specific way in which artists
conveyed their artistic insight, and the specific artistic insight that they dis-
covered or invented. I maintain that had any particular artist never lived,
someone else would have reinvented the same style and produced the epito-
mizing work in that style.
The c1ear implication of my position is that there is something to be dis-
covered in the arts, just as there is in the sciences; therefore, the inevitability
of discovery in the arts should lead, just as it does in the sciences, to simul-
taneous, independent discoveries. I believe that this case can be made and have
attempted a first pass at it elsewhere. 19 Had Schoenberg not lived, Stravinsky
would have (as he in fact did) invented dodecaphony, and I have been told
that Schoenberg himself considered it to be a logical and necessary histor-
ical development. Picasso and Braque never could agree on who actually
invented cubism. And if one examines the history of dynamism, it is c1ear
that Dmberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Marcel Duchamp all solved the
problem of how to portray movement on a static canvas in an identical way
- despite the unique appearances of each of their paintings. In short, artists
recognize problems just as c1early as do scientists, and can agree on their
solutions to the extent that "simultaneous discoveries" and priority disputes
are common. Thus, art evolves (and I use the term evolve quite purposefully)
according to a process no different than science, and is just as dependent
for its expression on unique chance events of place, context, genetics, and
personality.
STYLE, AESTHETICS, AND MOTIVATION IN SCIENCE
These generalizations about the similarities between the sciences and arts
do not, of course, demonstrate that the sciences and arts have the same
aesthetic. They do not, in fact, address the problem of aesthetics at all. They
only eliminate obstacles that would make it impossible for a common aesthetic
to exist. After all, if every scientist agreed with every other scientist concerning
the answer to any given problem, and artists could ne ver agree, then clearly
the criteria used by scientists to evaluate their science would have to be sub-
stantially different than those used by artists. Scientists do not, of course,
always agree on the answer to any given scientific problem - otherwise there
would be no scientific controversies - and artists often do agree - otherwise
there would be no recognizable schools of art. Thus, there is certainly room
for aesthetics in science, and for science in aesthetics. The question that must
now concern us is my assertion that the scientific and artistic aesthetic are
the same.
To begin with, I will define what I mean by aesthetic, a process I will
elaborate throughout this essay, and one that will no doubt be as controver-
sial as any other aspect of it. Having read dozens of definitions, I find that
the single element that is common to all aesthetics, as diverse as their par-
ticular details may be, is an evaluation of some aspect of nature or of human
creation in terms of whether or not it is acceptable and satisfying within a
given cultural and historical context. In using this definition, I reject absolutely
the traditional notion, embodied in most dictionary definitions of aesthetics,
that an aesthetic evaluation must concern one or more of the five senses.
Such definitions assurne that it is possible to feel without engaging one's
emotions and intellect simultaneously. Sensory impressions are not equiva-
lent to feelings, and I refuse to accept that feelings are divorced from thinking.
To think is to feel. I maintain that it is this integration of thinking and feeling
that characterizes the highest forms of aesthetic experience in both the sciences
and arts.
The integration of thought and emotion, analysis and feeling is as typical
in science as in poetry, music, or painting, and many scientists have been
explicitly clear on this matter. Richard Feynman, for instance, wrote that,
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can
see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the
heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-
year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am apart .. . what is the pattern, or the meaning,
or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more
marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present
not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of lupiter if he were a man, but if he is an
immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?20
Ethologist Niko Tinbergen made exactly the same point about his experience
of nature:
our approach was analytical and I have often met people who were not sympathetic towards
this approach. They argued that it made us forget the beauty of the things we analysed; they
feit that we were tearing the wonders of Creation to pieces. This is an unfair accusation. We often
feit that there is not less, and perhaps even more, beauty in the result of analysis than there is
to be found in mere contemplation. So long as one does not, during analysis, lose sight of the
animals as a whole, then beauty increases with increasing awareness of detail. ... I believe
that I myself am not at all insensitive to an animal's beauty, but I must stress that my
aesthetic sense has been receiving even more satisfaction since I studied the function and
significance of this beauty.21
Indeed, Tinbergen 's colleague and co-Nobel ist, Konrad Lorenz notes that,
"He who has once seen the intimate beauty of nature cannot tear himself
away from it again. He must become either a poet or a naturalist and, if his
eyes are good and his powers of observation sharp enough, he may weIl become
both".22 Lorenz was himself ethologist, poet, and artist, and spoke from
experience.
The expression of a scientific aesthetic combining analysis, emotion, and
sensibility is no different than that described by those in the arts for music,
poetry, and painting. Despite popular misconceptions that artistic types just
express what they feel, all arts involve structured analytical thinking in just
proportion. We forget that the poem that makes us weep, or the painting that
makes us tremble, or the music that brings us ecstasy was, as "all art is", to
quote Leon Feuchtwanger in a study of the novel, "a continuous struggle
between the imagination and controlling reason".23 T. R. Henn, who taught
poetry to science students at Cambridge University for many decades, made
this point in the introduction to his course. He assumed that, as scientists,
his students brought, "logical habits of thought, refusal to accept without
demonstration, and a general precision of approach" to the poetry they read.
These habits of reason were one element necessary to appreciate poetry. In
addition, however, he encouraged them to bring two further elements to their
reading:
exited curiosity as regards the workings of the human mind in all its manifestations, and a pre-
occupation with the perception of relationships - other than those which we call quantitative -
of one thing to another. ... For this is the justification of all poetry: that it seeks to express a
peculiar fusion of ideas and emotions which are normallyon the edge of consciousness, or
even beyond it. 24
Composer-conductor Aaron Copland suggests a virtually identical set of

aesthetic criteria for evaluating music. An individual must listen simultane-
ously on what he calls,
"(I) the sensuous plane, (2) the expressive plane, (3) the sheerly musical plane". Copland intro-
duces an analogy to clarify his point. "In the theater, you are aware of the ac tors and actresses,
costumes and sets, sounds and movements. All these give one the sense that the theater is a
pleasant place to be in. They constitute the sensuous plane in our theatrical reactions land are
equivalent to the pure sound of the music.] The expressive plane in the theater would be derived
from the feeling that you get from what is happening on the stage ... a certain emotional
something which exists on the stage, that is analogous to the expressive quality in music. The
plot and plot development is equivalent to our sheerly musical plane. The playwright creates
and develops a character in just the same way that a composer creates and develops a theme.
According to the degree of your awareness of the way in wh ich the artist in either field handles
his material will you become a more intelligent listener".25
Copland dismisses so-called music lovers who equate an appreciation of music

with nothing more than attention to the sensuous plane at the same time he
chides professional musicians who all too often (like their scientific colleagues)
pay exclusive attention to the purely analytical or musical plane. An under-
standing of music, poetry, and art comes from the integration of sense, emotion,
and analysis.
Scientific aesthetics also requires a blending of analysis, an appreciation
of interrelations between things, and a purely sensual and emotional response.
Ludwig Boltzmann, who combined physics and music in his own life, once
compared mathematical styles to musical styles in an analogy that makes
this integration of sense, emotion, and analysis crystal clear by showing that
a great piece of science has a unique sensuous or stylistic component, an
emotional impact often involving a sense of surprise, drama, and beauty, and
an ever-present analytical component manifested, unexpectedly, as a plot
with problems to be solved, characters in conflict, and a necessary resolu-
tion. All this is experienced by the literate scientist, said Boltzmann, just as
a literate person experiences an opera:
Even as a musician can recognize his Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert after hearing the first
few bars, so can a mathematician recognize his Cauchy, Gauss, Jacobi, HelmhoItz or Kirchhoff
after the first few pages. The French writers reveal themselves by their extreme formal elegance,
while the English, especially Maxwell, reveal themselves by their dramatic sense. Who for
example, is not familiar with Maxwell's memoirs on his dynamical theory of gases? ... The
variations of the velocities are, at first, developed majestically: then from one side enter the equa-
tions of state: and from the other side, the equations of motion in a central field. Ever higher
soars the chaos of formulae. Suddenly, we hear, as from kettle drums, the four beats "Put N =
5". The evil spirit V (the relative velocity of the two molecules) vanishes: and, even as in
music a hitherto dominating figure in the bass is suddenly silenced, that which had seemed
insuperable has been overcome as if by a stroke of magie .... This is not the time to ask why
this or that substitution. If you are not swept along with the development, lay aside the paper.
Maxwell does not write programme music with explanatory notes .... One result after another
follows in quick succession till at last, as the unexpected climax, we arrive at the conditions
for thermal equilibrium together with the expressions for the transport coefficients. The curtain
then falls. 26
Reading a great piece of science is, in short, no different than attending a classic
opera or hearing a brilliantly played symphony. The scientist who misses the
drama, the style, the surprises in the plot, the subtleties and unexpected uses
of the instruments, the culminating crescendo of results, has simply failed to
comprehend the piece.
There is no doubt that Boltzmann's experience of science is far from
unusual. Aldous Huxley, whose dose circle of friends included his biologist
brother Julian, the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and many other scientists,
wrote in his book Literature and Science that, "For some people the con-
templation of scientific theories is an experience hardly less golden than
the experience of being in love or looking at a sunset".27 Indeed, the mathe-
matical physicist Pierre Duhem proclaims that,
It is impossible to follow the march of one of the great theories of physics, to see it unroll
majestically, starting from first principles, in serried deductions, to see its consequences repre-
se nt in the most minute detail a crowd of experimental la ws, without being ravished by the beauty
of a like edifice, without feeling vividly that such a creation of the human spirit is truly a work
of art. 28
And J acob Bronowski, the mathematician, poet, and humanist, wrote that,
"It may be odd to claim that same personal engagement for the scientist [as
for the artist]; yet in this the scientist stands to the technician much as the artist
stands to the craftsman".29 Science is not a job for those who excel at it; it
is a passion that must be understood at least partially in terms of its motiva-
tions and emotional expressions.
It is not enough to say that scientists become emotionally engaged in their
work, or even that they experience beauty, ugliness, and other aesthetic feelings
while doing it. For many, their sense of aesthetics has been and continues to
be their motivation for doing science. Albert Michelson wrote that,
If a poet could at the same time be a physicist, he might convey to others the pleasure, the
satisfaction, almost the reverence, which the subject inspires. The aesthetic side of the subject
is, I confess, by no means the least attractive to me. Especially is its fascination feIt in the
branch wh ich deals with Iight. JO
Not only did Michelson win his Nobel Prize for studies of light, but equally
relevant, he also painted in a luminous style for much of his life, and made
frequent asides from his physics to study such curiosities as the basis of the
shimmering colors of beetle carapaces and bird feathers.
Robert Bums Woodward expressed a similar aesthetic reason for choosing
chemistry over mathematics. Although he expressed a great appreciation for
"the formal beauty, precision and elegance of mathematics," it lacked, he
said,
the sensuous elements which play so large a role in my attraction to chemistry. I love crystals,
the beauty of their form - and their formation; liquids, dormant, distilling, sloshing!; swirling,
the fumes; the odors - good and bad; the rainbow of colors; the gleaming vessels, of every
size, shape and purpose. Much as I might think about chemistry, it would not ex ist for me without
these physical, visual, tangible, sensuous things. 31
Many other chemists, including Woodward's collaborator Roald Hoffmann

have expressed similar views.
Aesthetics also motivates many biologists. Neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon
y Cajal, another visual artist who painted and took photographs, wrote that
pure visual beauty was what attracted hirn to the study of the brain:
It is an actual fact that, leaving aside the flatteries of self-Iove, the garden of neurology holds
out to the investigator captivating spectacles and incomparable artistic emotions. In it, my
aesthetic instincts found full satisfaction at last. Like the entomologist in search of brightly
coloured butterflies, my attention hunted, in the flower garden of the gray matter, cells with
delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies of the soul. J2
And, of course, there is the oft-quoted statement of mathematician and

theoretical physicist Henri Poincare that, "The scientist does not study nature
because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in

it because it is beautiful ... intellectual beauty is what makes intelligence
sure and strong".33
In light of the aesthetic drive the underlies and motivates much scientific
research, it is not surprising to find that some scientists have expressed the
opinion that the cultivation of this aesthetic sensibility is an essential pre-
requisite to first class research. William Beveridge, for example, writes in
his Art of Scientific Investigation that,
An important aim of education in any art, including the art of research, is to develop the student's
inherent talent, to bring out the individuaJ's particular aptitudes, notjust for hirn to acquire knowl-
edge and leam skills. One way of doing this is to cultivate taste. 34
What is striking and unexpected is that a number of scientists have averred

that scientific taste can be developed by studying the masters of any art,
whether it is the art of research itself, or the arts of painting, music, or dance.
The most clearcut espousal of the philosophy that the study of the arts
develops scientific taste is undoubtedly to be found in the life and work of
Georg von Bekesy, whose studies of the function of the ear eamed hirn a Nobel
prize. Bekesy had been tom between being a pianist and a scientist as a
teenager, and obviously found a way to meld the two in his research inter-
ests. Even in his laboratory, he devoted many hours each day to the study of
art and archeology, a use of his time that his colleague Floyd Ratliff explains
was made to enhance his scientific acumen.
It was based upon his desire to do everything weIl. His first idea about how to excel as a
scientist was simply to work hard and long hours, but he realized that his colleagues were working
just as hard and just as long. So he decided instead to follow the old rule: Sleep eight hours,
work eight hours, and rest eight hours. But Bekesy put a "Hungarian twist" on this, too. There
are many ways to rest, and he reasoned that perhaps he could rest in some way that would improve
his judgement, and thus improve his work. The study of art, in which he already had a strong
interest, seemed to offer this possibility .... By tuming his attention daily from science to art,
Bekesy refreshed his mind and sharpened its faculties. For example, he was always concemed
about the quality of his own work and of the work of others that he was studying. But how
can one recognize quality? He asked this question of practically everyone he knew. Finally, as
his interest in art and in the collecting of art objects gradually developed, he put the question
to an art dealer. ... The ans wer was: "There is only one solution - to constantly compare,
and compare, and compare".... This was the basic method of assessing quality which Bekesy
ever afterwards applied both in art and in science .... In science, this method of constantly
comparing was - for Bekesy at least - an almost certain guarantee of high quality work over a
long period of time. 35
In fact, Bekesy put his artistic aesthetic principles to even more concrete
uses than evaluation. He also used them to invent. One day, he was holding
a Minoan perfume boUle from the fourth century B.C., explaining to a col-
league how perfectly the shape was adapted to the hand, as if it had been
designed to be held. If only, he remarked wistfully, we designed our surgical
tools with such a feel. His colleague responded, then why not do so. And
so, Bekesy did, producing a new line of surgical instruments as carefully crafted
to his hand as the Minoan perfume boule. 36
Other scientists have also found ways to justify their aesthetic urges through
scientifically practical applications. Scientists who began their professional
careers as professional artists include physicist John TyndalI, who was trained
as a draughtsman for the railways, Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin,
who entered college as an arts major before tuming to medicine, and Edwin
S. Goodrich, one of the finest comparative anatomists of the early 20th century,
who studied art at the Slade School of the University College, London before
becoming assistant to zoologist Ray Lankaster, and then an independent
scientist in his own right. 37 Ramon y Cajal, whose avocations included painting
and artistic photography, describes what he and many other artistically inclined
scientists gained from their art:
If our study is concemed with an object related to natural history, etc., observation will be accom-
panied by sketching; for aside from other advantages, the act of depicting something disciplines
and strengthens the attention, obliging us to cover the whole of the phenomenon studied and
preventing, therefore, details from escaping OUf attention .... The great Cuvier had reason to
affirm that 'without the art of drawing, natural history and anatomy would have been impossible'.
It is not without reason that all great observers are skillful in sketching. JR
Similarly, Julius Sachs and Theodor Boveri were both known to say that, "Wh at
has not been drawn has not been seen".39 And Sir Francis Seymour Haden,
a distinguished surgeon of the Victorian era who collaborated with Whistler
and founded the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, also advo-
cated arts training for medical men:
How much sooner would the eye accustomed to observe and estimate cJosely the differences
of color, aspect, weight, and symmetry - leam to gauge their aberrations as the signs which
make up the facies of the disease; how much better would the hand, trained to portray them
accurately, be able to direct with precision and safety the course of the knife!40
In fact, the majority of scientists who we consider to be the intellectual

creators of their fields have been active in one or more of the arts. This
correlation between scientific imagination and artistic avocations was first
noticed by J. H. van't Hoff, the inventor of the tetrahedral carbon atom and
one of the founders of physical chemistry in an essay entitled, "Imagination
in Science.,,41 Having written extensivelyon this correlation elsewhere,42 I will
simply assert here that van't Hoff's observation appears to have been correct.
Literally hundreds of the most eminent scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries
have been and are active as highly competent amateurs and sometimes even
as professionals in music performance and composition, poetry, fiction writing,
painting, sculpture, and other media. Particularly insightful studies of how
vocation and avocation interact to foster beUer science are Philip Ritterbush's
The Art ojOrganic Form, which examines the aesthetic basis of embryology,
Donna Haraway's Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields, a study of the aesthetics of
physical form, Brooke Hindle's Emulation and Invention, a look at how two
of America's greatest 19th century artists, Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse
evolved into two of its greatest inventors, and Jamie Kassler's essays on the
ways in which music and musical instruments have been a source of analo-
gies and models for scientific theories from the Renaissance to the present. 43
These books and essays lay a firm basis for the thesis that talents, skills, and
insights leamed in the arts are transferrable to the sciences and consequently
affect how that science is done.
ARTISTIC AND SCIENTIFIC AESTHETICS ARE SIMILAR
Now I do not want to claim that to leam to compare, to perceive, or to invent

one must study the arts. Many scientists, such as van't Hoff and physicist
Clifford Truesdell tumed to the history of science as a comparative guide to
what is good and bad in science. 44 By reading widely, and thinking critically
about science itself, taste may be cultivated. Other scientists have leamed to
perceive the scientific details that differentiate the expert from the amateur
through diligent observation in the laboratory, as Nathanial Shaler makes
clear in his classic essay, "How Agassiz Taught Me to See".45 Nonetheless,
the impact of the arts can be sensed even here, for perception and pattern
are just as inherent in the arts as in the sciences. Shaler's experience leaming
to see scientifically is no different than the experience artists undergo during
their extensive studio training. Thus, perceptive scientists and artists often find
it very easy to communicate with each other. Maurice Goldsmith has recorded
several striking examples involving crystallographer J. D. Bemal, who once
suggested that his autobiography should be printed on three colors of paper,
one for science, one for the arts, and one for personal matters, so that people
could find the material of interest:
Marcus Brumwell, who was introduced to Bemal by Herbert Read, came to know hirn
intimately for over thirty years. He was delighted, particularly, by the way in wh ich Bemal
was able to link the ans, especially visual arts, and sciences .... In Barbara HepwOfth's studio
in St. Ives, Brumwell would see hirn " write the equation of a sculpture on that part, using
delible pencil, of course. Barbara has told me how they both used to clear space on the floor -
very difficult in her studio, and draw things for each other, both excitedly understanding each
other's ideas" .... On another occasion, he took the artist Ben Nicholson to C. D. Darlington's
laboratory at the lohn Innes Horticultural Institute, so that Nicholson could "look at vegetable
cells, or genes, or chromosomes through the microseope. Des wanted the artist to see how
an observanl and imaginative and accurate scientist' s eye, such as Darlington' s, can see things
which most people would not realize were in front of their eyes, until it was pointed out to
them. Ben, very unscientific, was fascinated, and clearly understood what Darlington showed
him".46
Now, if artistic and scientific imagination and vision are as similar as I have
portrayed them, then it follows that the scientific aesthetic must be the same
as the artistic aesthetic - or, more accurately, scientific aesthetics (plural)
are formulated within the same social, political, and philosophical milieu as
are artistic aesthetics (plural) and will therefore reflect the same historical
and cultural underpinnings. The historical basis and plurality of aesthetics in
the sciences is just as clear and just as important as in the arts. Contemporary
scientists such as Bohr and Einstein differed as much in their aesthetic criteria
as did, say, Rodin and Picasso, and we can be sure that Galileo or Newton
would have been just as upset by Bohr and Einstein 's ideas as the Romanticists
were by modern art. The important point is that differences between aes-
thetics within science are on the same order, and comprised of the same sorts
of elements, as stylistic differences in the arts. Thus, we find the physicist-
pianist Victor Weisskopf stating that,
Wh at is beautiful in science is the same thing that's beautiful in Beethoven. There ' s a fog
of events and suddenly you see a connection. It expresses a complex of human concerns that
goes deeply to you, that connects things that were always in you that were never put together
before. 47
This is, thought for thought, exactly the belief of novelist-painter Paul Horgan:
How can one listen to the Eroica symphony without learning something about form? Part of
the aesthetic pleasure of structured and understood form is the pleasure of anticipation answered
- the surprise which confirms itself after the fashion of an open secret. Random example:
Beethoven's ritornelli. 48
Indeed, this surprise that uncovers hidden insight is the fundamental basis of
all creative discoveries. As Arthur Koestler once wrote,
Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but
was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit. This equally applies to the discoveries of
the [scientist and of thel artist who makes us see familiar objccts and events in astrange, new,
revealing light. . . . Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related
than they seem"9
The details of personal aesthetics are always unique, but the nature of an
aesthetic experience seems to be universal.
What, then, comprises this aesthetic experience? To begin with, aesthetics
in sciences, as in the arts, are based upon concepts of beauty, harmony, and
pattern. When simplicity, coherence, and understanding replace confusion then
beauty and truth emerge hand in hand. The mathematician G. H. Hardy claimed
that,
a mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. The mathematicians patterns,
like the painter's or poet's, must be beautiful; ideas like the colours or words must fit together
in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is not a permanent place in the world for
ugly mathematics. 50
Equally famous is P. A. M. Dirac's oft-quoted statement that, "It is more impor-

tant to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment".51
Similarly, Hermann Weyl told Freeman Dyson that, "My work always tried
to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the
other, I usually chose the beautiful".52 On several occasions, Weyl in fact stood
by his choice of beauty when the facts refused to cooperate - and turned out
to be right when problems with experimental observations eventually emerged.
And Linus Pauling has written that what distinguishes important from trivial
science is the type of question one asks at the outset. Most scientists - average
practitioners - ask, "What conclusions ... are we forced to accept by these
results of experiment and observation?" Pauling says that he asks himself
instead, "What ideas" - note the plural - "about this question, as general
and as aesthetically satisfying as possible, can we have that are not elimi-
nated by these results of experiment and observation?"53
The statements by Pauling, Dirac, Weyl and Hardy are, in asense, no
different than Rudolf Arnheim's comment about beauty in works of art:
" 'Beauty' is not an added decoration, a mere bonus for the beholder, but an
integral part of the statement".54 A person who cannot appreciate the beauty
in a piece of art, or in a piece of science, does not understand it any more
than if they cannot appreciate its intellectual content. Indeed, Neils Bohr
once commented to Werner Heisenberg that P. A. M. Dirac held just this
view of both science and art:
Whenever Dirac sends me a manuscript, the writing is so neat and free of corrections that
merely looking at it is an aesthetic pleasure. If I suggest even minor changes, Paul becomes
terribly unhappy and generally changes nothing at all .... Recently the two of us went to an
exhibition which included a glorious gray-blue seascape by Manet. In the foreground was a
boat, and beside it, in the water, a dark gray spot, whose meaning was not quite clear. Dirac
said, "This spot is not admissible". Astrange way of looking at art, but he was probably quite
right. In a good work of art, just as in a good piece of scientific work, every detail must be
laid down quite unequivocally; there can be no room for mere accident. 55
Thus, the pattern of Dirac's thought, its internal consistency, the absolute neces-
sity for each equation and explanation, left no room for unsightly additions,
ugly asides, or other breaks in the symmetry of his thought. It had to be the
way it was, or it had to be completely redone. Feynman agreed. Commenting
on why a single anomaly may require the entire rethinking of a field, he
noted that modifications to a theory are unacceptable: "To get something that
would produce a slightly -different result it had to be completely different. In
stating a new law you cannot make imperfections on a perfect thing; you
have to have another perfect thing".56
What Dirac and Feynman were talking about, to use an analogy, is the
difference between filming by natural light and using what one might call
"Hollywood lighting". We have all seen those older movies in which the scenes
were clearly shot in a studio rather than outdoors. We know this because of
the inconsistencies in the lighting. Outdoor light comes from one direction
if the sun is out, has a particular color, and casts shadows in one direction.
All too often, studio lighting is from several directions at once, has a sharp-
ness or color inconsistent with reality, and casts shadows in several directions
simultaneously. We sense these inconsistencies even if we cannot pinpoint their
details. Similarly, most bad or amateurish painting suffers from "Hollywood
lighting" syndrome. And so does much science. Ad hoc assumptions, fudge
factors, inconsistencies, discrepancies, gaps in the picture blemish it. One of
the hallmarks of the best science is therefore to choose a perspective, to light
the scene appropriately, and to carry through with the pattern of discourse
and the interpretation of the data absolutely consistently and rigorously.
Scientists of the caliber of Dirac and Feynman refused to add an extraneous
light just to bring out details that might otherwise be hidden if that extra
light was not intrinsic to the system they had described. It was in their styles
and their personalities to be impatient with others who were less exacting
than themselves.
The notion that sciences are characterized by rigorous personal styles as
integral to their form and function as in the arts is a very important insight,
for it reveals to us the inadequacies of the ways in which we teach mathematics
and the sciences. Students rarely, if ever, are given any notion whatever
of the aesthetic dimension or multiplicity of imaginative possibilities of
the sciences, and therefore, no matter how technically adept, can never truly
understand or appreciate them. Mathematician Seymour Papert puts it this
way:
Popular views of mathematies, ineluding the one that inforrns mathematical education in our
schools, exaggerate its logical face and devalue all connection with everything else in human
experience. By so doing, they fail to recognize the resonances between mathematics and the
total human being wh ich are responsible for mathematical pleasure and beauty.57
One could obviously generalize this problem to all of the sciences.

Papert's remarks raise two interrelated issues that I will have to treat
separately due to the limitations of linear argument imposed by the printed
page. (Would that this essay could be written in simultaneous, parallel themes
such as those utilized in music!) The first concems the aesthetic experience
of understanding; the second, what Papert calls the "resonances" that must
be set up between such experiences and the "total human being" for under-
standing to result. Begin with the question of what characterizes this aesthetic
experience, whether artistically or scientifically initiated. These considerations
will, by necessity, raise the issue of why such experiences require resonance
with the total human being.
There are at least three levels of aesthetic experience, corresponding to
the three levels described above by Henn for poetry and Copland for music
- that is to say, the sensual, the emotional-imaginative, and the analytical.
Oddly, most discussions of aesthetics in science are topical at best and tend
to focus exclusively on analytical aspects, perhaps because these are the most
easily described. Papert himself has summarized these analytical elements of
aesthetics as being the attainment of a goal (that is to say, successful problem
solving); the sudden and unexpected linkage of two meanings or symbols in
a way most often associated with the quality of a pun or a joke; and the element
of surprise. These are all, certainly, elements of aesthetics in the arts. A
Ion ger list of aesthetic criteria is given by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh
in their book The Mathematical Experience, which are similarly reminiscent
of what we find beautiful or pleasurable in a good novel, a fine symphony,
or a visual masterpiece:
alternation of tension and relief, realization of expectations, surprise upon perception of unex-
pected relationships and unities, sensuous visual pleasure, pleasure at the juxtaposition of the
simple and the complex, of freedom and constraint, and, of course, ... elements familiar from
the arts, harmony, balance, contrast, ete.58
In addition, they also discuss analyzability, finding order in disorder, patterns,

regularities, predictability, and understanding as aesthetic criteria.
Additional rational sets of aesthetic criteria have been described by various
eminent physicists. Sir George Thompson's list of what is beautiful is one
of the most complete. He maintained that:
generality counts high, very high, and so does simplicity. Anything that has obviously been
put in to make the theory fit, such as particular numerical quantities, is a blemish, but this blemish
may turn into a beauty if the quantity can be shown to be connected with one in an accepted
theory of something else . .. . To many physicists it is essential that the theory be intuitive,
based on ideas wh ich can be visualized, to others whose turn of mind is more abstract and
mathematical, this is not required; a few may even go so far as to consider it a disadvantage.
Strict definition of the concepts and precise logical arguments then take the place of intuition
. . . it is a great beauty if a theory can bring together apparently very different phenomena and
show that they are closely connected; or even different aspects of the same thing , as when
... Newton showed that the moon is falling like an apple. Beauty in experiment depends firstly
on devising an experiment which goes straight to the heart of the problem and asks a question
which nature is prepared to answer. In the actual experiment one admires economy of effort
by wh ich no more is attempted than is strictly necessary for success, and at a lower level
detailed ingenuity. As in all artistic achievements the aesthetic qualities must be supported by
technical ability, or the experiment will simply fail to get any answer at al1. 59
Physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar has elaborated even further, sug-

gesting through aseries of detailed examples, that the aesthetic basis of physics
lies in half-a-dozen key aspects. First, a description of nature must be natural;
it cannot be ad hoc; the insight must be imaginative (that is, go beyond the
obvious data and ideas at hand); it must have an element of strangeness or
unexpectedness; this insight usually results in the discovery of simplicity in
apparent complexity; the insight must be verifiable by others who take the
time and effort to recreate it; in the absence of simplicity and verifiability,
mathematical integrity, internal consistency, and harmonious coherence, may
substitute when augmented by generalizability of the principles to an extremely
wide range of previously disparate phenomena. A final test of the beauty of
a scientific insight is the emergence of a wide range of unexpected and unfore-
seeable consequences from the solution (i.e., the element of surprise). In short,
great science, like great art, cannot be a singular fluke that can neither be
emulated nor developed. It must change, as Thomas Kuhn has pointed out
so weIl, the normal way in which professionals do their work. 60
But these analytical aspects of scientific and artistic aesthetics are those
that can be recognized only aposteriori. They miss the actual process of
creating science, and cannot explain the aesthetic joy of doing science on a
daily basis. Thus, without denying the very important role of intellectual
analysis in all complete aesthetic experiences, limiting discussion of aesthetics
to this part of the experience disregards the equally important sensual-emo-
tional-imaginative facets that supposedly set the arts off from the sciences.
Fortunately, some aesthetic theorists have recognized these limitations and
when they are taken into account, they make the sciences look even more
like the arts than one might expect.
SYNAESTHESIA AND SYNSCIENTIA AS BASES FOR

AESTHETIC EXPERIENCES
The most attractive account that I have found of the aesthetic experience is
that of I. A. Richards, in his book The Foundations of Aesthetics. Richards
argues that the clearest "explanation of the aesthetic experience described by
many of the greatest and most sensitive artists and critics of the past" is what
he calls synaesthesis - the simultaneous, harmonious experience of diverse
sensory impressions from complex works of art resulting in a fusion of apparent
opposites or unification of differences. 61 The most important aspect of
Richards' thesis for me is that it recognizes that any form of art - painting,
music, dance - can have simultaneous effects on visual, kinesthetic, gusta-
tory, auditory, olfactory, and tactile senses. Thus, the most intense aesthetic
experiences, for Richards, are always multi-modal.
Steve Odin has recently proposed a more radieal version of Richards' theory
of synaesthesis. Odin redefines synaesthesis as being not only a "harmony
of the senses", but more importantly an interfusion of them.
Synaesthesia represents a degree of unified sensibility so profound that the boundaries of the
senses actually merge, and the multivariate sense qualities - colors, sounds, flavors, scents, tactile
and thermal sensations - all seem to melt into a continuum of feeling. Synaesthesia can also
be termed cross-modal perception, insofar as it involves a transposition of sensory attributes from
one modality to another, for instance, when sound takes on the accoutrements of sight, so that
musical tones are translated into a polyphony of luminous colors - an intersensory phenom-
enon known as "auditory vision" or "visual hearing".62
Odin proposes further that such synaesthesia plays three interconnected

roles in the aesthetic experience of artists and writers: in defining an artists'
experience of nature; as a technique for expression; and as a response to
artwork.
The attractiveness of this synaesthetic approach to aesthetics for me is
simply explained: first, as I stated above, I believe that thinking and feeling
are integral; second, I therefore proposed several years aga that scientific
insights are gained by what I call synscientia. Synscientia means literally
"knowing in a synthetic way" - being able to conceive of objects or ideas inter-
changeably or concurrently in visual, verbal, mathematical, kinesthetic, or
musical ways.63 Very simply stated, I have found no eminent scientist who
simply solves mathematical equations or pours chemicals into test tubes and
analyzes the results or catalogues chromosomal abnormalities. Scientists -
or at least scientists who are worth their salt - feel what the system they are
studying does. They transform the equations into images; they sense the inter-
actions of the individual atoms; they even claim to know the desires and
propensities of the genes. In many cases, they become so engaged in wh at
they study that they become one with it, thereby losing their objectivity and
simultaneously acquiring what Michael Polanyi has called "personal knowl-
edge".64 In short, I maintain that the best scientists think by integrating their
feelings.
Examples of synscientia and its concomitant of personal knowledge are

legion. Ethologist Desmond Morris recalls in his autobiography having had
a dream as a teenager which foreshadowed his approach to science:
It was astrange little scenario. Not only was I sUITounded by animals, but I changed into one
myself. In essence, this was what was going to happen to me in my future research, when I became
a full-time student of animal behavior. With each animal I studied I became that anima\. I
tried to think like it, 10 feel like it. Instead of viewing the anima I from a human standpoint
- and making serious anthropomorphic errors in the process - I attempted, as a research
ethologist, to put myself in the animal's place, so that its problems became my problems, and
I read nothing into its life-style that was alien to its particular species. And the dream said
it all. 65
Many other ethologists, including Konrad Lorenz, Jane Goodall, and Dian
Fossey have utilized the same approach to understanding their subjects, often
to the dismay of less imaginative, and less successful colleagues. It is ironic
that all of these scientists have been accused of just the anthropomorphism that
Morris maintains is eliminated by the synscientific approach.
It is not, perhaps, surprising that people studying animals find it possible
to become that animal mentally and emotionally. Wh at may be much more sur-
prising is to find that scientists from all fields utilize "personal knowledge".
Chemist Peter Debye said he solved his problems aesthetically: "I can only
think in pictures .... [I] had to use feelings - what did the carbon atom
want to dO?,,66 Metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith wrote that in the course of
developing new metals, he gained
a feeling of how I would behave if I were a certain alloy, a sense of hardness and softness and
conductibility and fusibility and deformability and brittleness - all in a curiously internal and
quite literally sensual way, even before I had sensual contact with the alloy itself. ... All the
work I did on interfaces really beg an with a combination of an aesthetic feeling for a balanced
structure and a muscular feeling of the interfaces pulling against each other! 67
Physicist Hans Alfven has similarly reported that,

instead of treating hydromagnetic equations I prefer to sit and ride on each electron and ion
and try to imagine what the world is like from its point of view and what forces push to the
left or to the right. This has been a great advantage because it gives me a possibility to approach
the phenomena from another point than most astrophysicists do and it is always fruitful to look
at any phenomenon under two different points of view. 68
Sir Arthur Eddington once chided Chanrasekhar for looking at astrophysics

"from the point of view of the star".69 Even mathematicians have adopted
the synscientific approach. Stan Ulam recounts "attempts to ca\culate, not
by numbers ·and symbols, but by almost tactile feelings combined with rea-
soning".70 In short, to use Ernst Mach's analogy, "The [scientific] hunter
imagines the way of life of the prey he has just sighted, in order to choose
his own behavior accordingly".71
So common is this form of personalized, sensual understanding as a basis
for discovery72 that Joshua Lederberg has generalized the point: "The scien-
tist", he says,
needs the ability to strip to the essential attributes some actor in a process, the ability to imagine
oneself inside a biological situation; I Iiterally had to be able to think for example, 'What
would it be like if I were one of the chemical pieces of a bacterial chromosome?' and try to
understand wh at my environment was, try to know where I was, try to know when I was supposed
to function in a certain way, and so forth. 73
What one strives for is what Barbara McClintock described as "a feeling for
the organism" - an understanding so complete that each plant, each bac-
terium, each cell you study is a unique individual known almost empathically.
McClintock reported that,
I found that the more I worked with [chromosomes], "the bigger and bigger [they] got, and
when I was really working with them I wasn't outside, I was down there. I was part of the system .
. . . I actually feIt as if I were right down there and these were my friends .... As you look at
these things, they become part of you. And you forget yourself. The main thing about it is you
forget yourselC 4
Scientific understanding, then, results in an intemalization of knowledge

and experience so complete that a loss of self-consciousness results. The
individual becomes one with his or her universe. This is, according to a number
of scholars, the essence of any aesthetic experience. Evelyn Fox Keller glosses
Barbara McClintock's description of her feeling for the organism by com-
menting that,
A hundred years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing;
I see all". McClintock says it more simply: 'Tm not there!" The self-conscious "I" simply dis-
appears. Throughout history, artists and poets, lovers and mystics, have known and written
about the "knowing" that comes from loss of self - from the state of subjective fusion with
the object of knowledge .... Scientists often pride themselves on their capacities to distance
subject from object, but much of their richest lore comes from a joining of one to the other,
from a tuming of object into subjecl. 75
"What distinguishes the aesthetic experience", writes Louis Dupre,

is that it is never a pure perception, but a perception colored by a subjective disposition.
Schleiermacher regarded the aesthetic experience as an awareness of the self with the object, a
conscious merging of subject and object, rather than a perception ofan objecl. It is this subjective
disposition which gives its unique character to the aesthetic perception. The merging of self
with its object is usually referred to as a feeling . ... 76
And feeling is primary in science as in art. "Feeling", wrote physiologist Claude

Bemard,
from which everything emanates, must keep its complete spontaneity and all its freedom for
putting forth experimental ideas; ... Just as in other human actions, feeling releases an act by
putting forth the idea which gives a motive to action, so in the experimental method feeling
takes the initiative through the idea. Feeling alone guides the mind and constitutes the prim um
movens of science. Genius is revealed in a delicate feeling which correctly foresees the laws
of natural phenomena. 77
Aesthetic feeling, as evinced by the loss of self in the object of study must
then be the apogee of scientific creativity, for it is precisely this merging of
subjective and objective knowledge to yield understanding that is described by
so many of the greatest men and women of science as the most memorable
aspect of their work. Somehow, external stimuli must set up internal resonances
that amplify and purify perception. Consider, for example the physicist
Wolfgang Pauli commenting on the infIuence of archetypal or psychologi-
cally innate ideas that weIl up from inside the soul of the scientist:
The bridge, leading from the initially unordered data of experience to the Ideas, consists in certain
primeval images pre-existing in the soul- the archetypes of Kepler. These primeval images should
not be located in consciousness or related to specific rationally formulizable ideas. It is a question,
rather, offorms belonging to the unconscious region ofthe human soul, images ofpowerful emo-
tional content, which are not thought, but beheld, as it were, pictorially. The delight one feels,
on becoming aware of a new piece of knowledge, arises from the way such preexisting images
fall into congruence with the behavior of the extemal objects. 78
In short, Pauli espouses the view that, that which we know innately or sub-
jectively and that which we know objectively and externally must be melded
to yield understanding.
The similarity between Pauli's description of doing physics and a passage
from neurologist Oliver Sacks' Awakenings are uncanny:
It is the function of medication, or surgery, or appropriate physiological procedures, to rectify
the mechanisms which are so deranged in these patients. It is the function of scientific medicine
to rectify the "It". It is the function of art, of living contact, of existential medicine, to call
upon the latent will, the agent, the "I", to call out its commanding and coordinating powers, so
that it may regain its hegemony and rule once again - for the final rule, the ruler, is not a
measuring rod or dock, but the rule and measure of the personal "I". These two forms of medicine
must be joined, must co-inhere, as body and soul. 79
In short, science, whether it is the science of physics, or the science of

medicine, must look simultaneously inward to the mind-soul and outward to
the universe and find harmony in the juxtaposition to be aesthetically satisfied.
It is only thus that we can understand the importance of Einstein's remark
that, "I am a little piece of Nature",80 or Max Planck's criterion of accept-
able and satisfying science could be summarized by the single phrase, "Only
when I have convinced myself".81 That which is true is what satisfies me
after I have struggled with it, interrogated it, and pondered the meanings of
its answers in light of my experience, my existence, myself. I become what
I study, and when the land It merge, understanding has been achieved. But
because that understanding is inextricably personal, it is also, as Chandrasekhar
points out, fallible. 82 Thus, there is a need to convince others of our aesthetic
insight, or eliminate all public traces of it - problems that I shall address
momentarily.
POLYMATHY AS A BASIS FOR SYNSCIENTIA
But what is the basis of synscientia? If, to use Sacks' terminology, the "I"
and the "it" must correspond, overlap, inhere, or, to use Papert's words instead,
if understanding emerges only from a resonance between nature and the total
human being, how is such understanding to be achieved? Clearly, as Papert
urges, the teaching of science must strive to create the resonance if it is to
succeed. Thus, what must be attained, to use Gerald Holton's words about
Einstein, is a "mutual mapping of the mind and lifestyle of this scientist,
and the laws of nature ... of the style of thinking and acting of the genial
scientist on the one hand, and the chief unresolved problems of contempo-
rary science on the other".83 Everything that a scientist does seriously and
thoughtfully, whether as part of vocation or avocation must therefore affect his
or her science and be recognized to be potentially useful to it. Thus, polymathic
abilities must be a source of synscientific insight.
Evidence for this proposition is legion, as I have shown in several previous
essays,84 and comes very often from the mouths of scientists themselves or
from their biographers. Consider Emile Argand, a famous early twentieth
century geologist. His biographer writes that he had the talent and ability to
have been an architect, an artist, a linguist, a writer, or a businessman. He would have been
outstanding at any of these professions. His extraordinary ability to think in three dimensions
allowed hirn to visualize and represent not only very complicated solids, but also their move-
ments and deformations. A gifted artist, he could also sketch these solids as seen from different
angles. Argand had his own recognizable style, not only in his illustrations, but also in his writing
- and, as a result, in the kind of geology he developed. 85
Similarly, Paul Bert wrote of physiologist Claude Bemard that,

Nothing in his pure and harmonious life was turned aside from its chief aim. Enamored of
literature, art and philosophy, Claude Bernard as a physiologist lost nothing by these noble
passions; on the contrary, they all helped in developing the science with which he identified
hirnself, and of which he is the highest and most complete embodiment. 86
Biochemist David Nachmansohn writes in an autobiographical essay that,

character, emotions, literary and artistic experience, philosophy, and political involvements
form an integral part of a personality. Since scientists are human, all these factors determine
their reactions, their way of thinking, and must be essential elements in the formation of sci-
entific ideas and views, motives, and attitudes. Knowledge alone of a special scientific field,
however solid and profound, provides only the tools. Wh at is achieved with these tools depends
to a very large extent on the complex factors of personality. 87
Physicist-painter Pierre Duhem wrote that,

[The scientist's) dominant faculties, the doctrines prevalent in his entourage, the tradition of
his predecessors, the habits he has acquired, the education that he has received are going to
serve hirn as guides, and all of these influences shall be rediscovered in the form taken by the
theory that he will conceive: 8
Thus, Nobel laureate Richard Willstätter - an ardent collector of art - wrote

that, "It is the lover of nature which attracts me in an artist, and in a scien-
tist I search for the artist. We belong together".89
Now, as I mentioned above, there is a problem created by the recognition
that the sciences rely as completely on personal aesthetics and synscientia as
do the arts: the creative process is c1early personal and subjective, but science
requires the extemalization and objectification of this experience. Many
scientists have therefore written of the distinction between the processes that
lead to insight and those that are involved in communicating these insights.
Einstein said often that, "No scientist thinks in formulae" ,90 and expanded
on that thought in his famous description of how he worked in response to
Jacques Hadamard's psychological survey of scientists:
The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my
mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are
certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined .
. . . Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary
stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at
will. 9l
Other scientists have reached the same conc1usion. C. S. Smith writes that
in his experience, "The stage of discovery was entirely sensual and mathe-
matics was only necessary to be able to communicate with other people".92
Barbara McClintock also described a similar experience to Evelyn Fox Keller.
Faced with data that made no sense, McClintock had been so disturbed that
she had gone off by herself to wrestle with the problem. "Suddenly I jumped
up and ran down to the field [where the other investigators were] ... land]
shouted 'Eureka, I have it! I have the answer!" Then, she told Keller, she
realized she couldn't provide the reasoning behind her insight.
I sat down with a paper bag and a pencil and I started from scratch, which I had not done at
all in my laboratory. It had all been done so fast; the ans wer came, and I'd run. Now I worked
it out step by step - it was an intricate series of steps - and I came out with what it was ....
Now, why did I know, without having done a thing on paper? Why was I so sure that I could
tell them with such excitement and just say, 'Eureka, I solved it'?93
I believe that the insight resulted from ways of thinking that are not of the
sorts we usually associate with linear, logical, analytical, scientific thought.
A secondary stage was necessary to transform, or translate these insights into
words, diagrams, or equations that others could understand.
THE ARTS AS INSPIRATION FOR THE SCIENCES
There are three lessons inherent in the realization that creative problem solving,
whether it is in the arts or the sciences, involves an indispensable aesthetic
component. First, creative scientists tell us that the languages we use to com-
municate objective results of science - mathematics and words, in the main
- are simply inadequate for performing creative scientific thinking or for giving
people insight into how this thinking occurs. Ironically, our science curricula
consist almost entirely of teaching the tools of communicating objective results
with not even an indication of the aesthetic tools necessary to actually do
science. This failure is disastrous, for as Wittgenstein pointed out, "The limits
of my language mean the limits of my world".94 What cannot be said or written
as numbers must have other means of expression or they will not exist for
students. Only imagine, then, the possibilities if the tools of imagination -
pattern recognition, pattern forming, analogizing, abstracting, kinesthetic
72 ROBERT S . ROOT-BERNSTEIN
feelings, modelling, a "feeling for the organisms", and ways to synthesize these
- what I call the "tools of thinking"95 - were directly communicable!
I believe that such direct communication may be fostered by adopting
some of the tools developed by the arts. Artists, after all, spend their entire
lives developing the skills for communicating just such emotional, synaesthetic
experiences as those just described by so many scientists. The difficulty, as
any artist will attest, is that even artistic taols of communication give only a
glimmer of the vision that gave birth to it in the artist's mind so that even
art is but a translation of some, unexpressable vision. 96 Yet some of the tools
of communication developed by artists are far more powerful for some aspects
of experience than those of scientists. Thus, accepting their limitations, they
may still extend the range of ideas that scientists may share.
The second lesson inherent in recognizing the aesthetic component of
science is that an aesthetic experience always involves interpretation, and so me
people will be better interpreters than others. Thus, physicist-historian-of-
science Clifford Truesdell, drawing upon an insight by physicist-pianist Victor
Weisskopf, has proposed that the sciences need the equivalent of the performer
in music: a professional interpreter. We are all trained to be the equivalent
of the composer, complains Truesdell, and we have few people who can imbue
the music with life. Only the best musicians can do this weil. The result,
says Truesdell, is what
Viclor Weisskopf has described as a "deslructive element" within the community of science, "Ihe
low esteem in wh ich clear and understandable presentation is held .. . . In music, the interpre-
live artist is highly esteemed. An effective rendering of a Beethoven sonata is considered as a
greater intellectual feat than the composing of a minor piece. We can leam something here:
Perhaps alueid and impressive presentation of some aspect of modem science is worth more than
a piece of so-ca lied "original" research of the type found in many Ph.D. theses . ... 97
This point is particular apt in light of the necessity for multiple formulations
of results that scientists like Maxwell, Feynman and Woodward believed to
be necessary to the invention of new theories. There are as great contribu-
tions to be made by reformulating, interpreting, and extending existing science,
as there are in original research.
The third lesson inherent in the recognition that scientific creativity relies
upon the same aesthetic tools of thinking as the arts is that the arts can be
the source of skills and insights that science needs to progress. Indeed, the
use of the arts for scientific ends is a powerful demonstration that scientific
and artistic aesthetics overlap to a very significant degree.
Examples of scientific discoveries beginning with artistic insights or tools
are legion, though often little known. Some, such as the works of Ramon y
Cajal, Morse, and Fulton have been mentioned above. It is perhaps worth
adding here that Morse 's first telegraph was actually made from a modified
canvas stretcher formerly used to prepare paintings!98 A few more random
examples will give some sense of the range of similar artistic insights. Manuel
Garcia, a famous 19th century Iyric baritone became so interested in how he
produced song that he not only discovered the essential role of the vocal chords
and their conformations in the production of sound, but also invented the
principle of indirect laryngoscopy in 1854, about the time that Hermann von
Helmholtz was inventing the ophthalmoscope. 99 In fact, Helmholtz's bio-
physical work on perception is so shot through with musical and artistic insights
and experiments that it is impossible to determine where the science begins
and the art ends. Paul Cranefield has pointed out that aesthetic considera-
tions were an integral part of the biophysics movement he launched with
other major 19th century artistic scientists such as Emil DuBois Reymond
and Ernst Brücke. 1OO The same can be said of Karl Rudolph Koenig, a student
of Helmholtz who studied both physics and the violino As a young man, he
became so interested in musical instruments that he apprenticed hirnself to
the violin maker Vuillaume in 1851. Melding vocation and avocation, he began
to invent new types of acoustical equipment. Within a few years he became
the preeminent European manufacturer of equipment designed to produce
and to measure both sound and light. His equipment was incorporated into
several of Edison's inventions and was utilized by Michelson and Morley to
measure the speed of light. 101 More recently, Ilan Golani of the Weizmann
Institute in Israel, in collaboration with American neurologist Philip
Teitelbaum, made a major advance in the analysis and recording of movement
disorders resulting from neural disease by adapting the Eshkol-Wachman
movement notation, one of the most widely used forms of dance notation, to
clinical and laboratory settings. Prior to this, the only way neurologists had
to record and analyze motor disfunction was to videotape it. Now they can
model it, since movement notations have been computerized. 102 And the latest
breakthrough in color printing processes, made just this past year, was not
made by chemists at Kodak or Fuji, but by an independent fine arts photog-
rapher named Charles Berger, who could not find a process that had sufficient
detail, color, and resistance to fading to satisfy hirn. So he invented Carbo II
prints, a unique process involving ultrastable colors and digital technology
to separate and recombine the layers of color to yield prints of unprecedented
sharpness, thermal stability, and longevity.103
Other scientists have utilized the arts ill more analytical ways. The psy-
chologist Carl Jung, for instance, was a very accomplished painter and sculptor,
and unusually attuned to his mental imagery. He became interested in his
patients' imagery as weil. During his psychoanalytic sessions with patients,
they often described mandalas - images that clarified their relationship to their
world. Jung not only had his patients draw and paint these mandalas for hirn,
but also explored them in his own art. It was from his personal explorations
that he began to realize their significance.
I sketched every moming in a notebook a small circular drawing, a mandala, which seemed 10
correspond to my inner situation at the time. With the help of these drawings I could observe
my psychic transformations from day to day. Only gradually did I discover what the mandala
really is: " Formation, Transformation, Etemal Mind's etemal recreation" .. .. My mandalas
were cryptograms conceming the state of the self which were presented to me anew each
day.l04
Thus, Jung discovered that his art became a means to understand not only
hirnself, but his patients, and art itself increasingly became a rite d' entre for
the ideas and works that followed hard upon it.
An equally vibrant tradition of exploring nature through art continues to
characterize all of the sciences from the biological through the technolog-
icaI. Paleontologist Robert Bakker illustrates his own papers and reports that
doing his own drawings allows hirn to explore ideas. He is joined in his
sentiment by other eminent scientists such as Harvard's entomologist and socio-
biologist E. O. Wilson and ethologist Desmond Morris; Morris also exhibits
his paintings professionally.l05 NASA expert Milton Halern, Chief of Space
Data and Computing at Goddard Space Flight Center is currently collaborating
with artist Sara Tweedie of the Corcoran School of Art. Halem and Tweedie
study works of art by painters such as Arthur Secunda in search of princi-
pIes of form and color that may improve the ways in which satellite imd
other complex data are analyzed and represented. 106 Bell Labs has employed
computer artist Lillian Schwartz for many years for the simple reason that
her desires to utilize the imaging functions of computers often extend beyond
current capabilities, and so she is a fruitful source of new problems that drive
both hardware and software production. 107 Indeed, computer visualization has
become an indispensable tool for mathematicians as weil, and many mathe-
maticians are currently collaborating with artists to invent ways to view
previously unimaginable mathematical objects. 108 In this context, it is impor-
tant to remember Linus Pauling's admonition that "modelling is a form of
thinking"109 and Rudolf Arnheim's equally important insight, "that artistic
activity is a form of reasoning". 11 0
Specific examples of discoveries that have resulted from such artistic
modelling include the elucidation of virus structures. Around 1960, a group
of British scientists using x-ray crystallography to determine the structure
of viruses was having difficulty determining the details. Anyone familiar
with x-ray crystallography knows that one needs to have a general idea of
what sort of symmetries one is looking for in order to properly interpret the
photographic results. Preliminary results suggested a spherical geodesic struc-
ture of the type that Buckminster Fuller had invented some decades earlier.
As Fuller recounts,
having previously seen published pictures of my geodesie structures they corresponded with
me and I was able to give them the mathematics and show them how and why these structures
occur and behave as they do. They have now found the polio virus structure ... to be the
same structure as [my] "possible moon structure" .... The number of "humps" or structural
clusters of five or six prismatic sectioned struts of the pro tein shells of the virus follows my
law of IOv2 + 2." 1
This type of geodesic structure has been found to be quite general, and its
artistic elaboration and mathematical formulation clearly preceded its scien-
tific application. Similarly, the discovery of quasi-crystals - alloys whose
structures have pseudo-five-fold symmetry - would not have been possible
save for physicist-artist Roger Penrose's fascination with the geometric art
of tiling surfaces which led to his invention of new forms of aperiodic tilings,
first as an artistic puzzle, and then as a form of mathematics. lI2 I have listed
many additional examples in some of my other essays.113
So fruitful are such interactions between artistic and scientific ways of
thinking that Cyril Stanley Smith has concluded that the artistic way of thinking
must become part and parcel of science.
Having spent many years seeking quantitative formulations of the structure of metals and trying
to understand the ways in which the structures change with composition and with treatment,
and the ways in which structure relates to useful properties, I have slowly come to realize that
the analytic, quantitative approach I had been taught to regard as the only respectable one for
a scientist is insufficient. Analytical atomism is beyond doubt an essential requisite for the under-
standing of things, and the achievements of the sciences during the last four centuries must
rank with the greatest achievements of man at any time: yet, granting this, one must still acknowl-
edge that the richest aspects of any large complicated system arise from factors that cannot be
measured easily, if at all. For these, the artist's approach, uncertain though it inevitably is,
seems to find and convey more meaning. Some of the biological and engineering sciences are
finding more and more inspiration from the arts."<
Mitchell Feigenbaum, one of the inventors of chaos theory, has also touted
the arts as a source of scientific insight. James Gleick reports that,
In the last few years, [Feigenbaum] has begun going to museums to look at how artists handle
complicated subjects, especially subjects with interesting texture, like Tumer's water, painted
with small swirls atop large swirls, and then even smaller swirls atop those. "1I' s abundantly
obvious thatone doesn't know the world around us in detail", he says. "What artists have
accomplished is realizing there 's only a small amount of stuff that's important and then seeing
what it was. So they can do some of my research for me .. . . I truly do want to know how to
describe clouds. But to say there's a piece over here with that much density, and next to it a
piece with this much density - to accumulate that much detailed infOmiation, I think is wrong.
It's certainly not how a human being perceives those things, and its not how an artist perceives
them. Somehow the business of writing down partial differential equations is not to have done
the work on the problem .... In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human
beings".115
One of Feigenbaum's goals is to learn how to translate those artistic insights

into new forms of mathematics.
And so we reach one of the oddest conclusions of this essay. Perhaps
artists actually have knowledge about things that scientists do not. Space
does not permit a full discussion of this provocative topic, but 1et me juxta-
pose several quotes that embody my thought. The first is from John Masefield,
an early 20th century poet and novelist who became Poet Laureate of Britain.
"My work", he wrote, "is to find out certain general truths in nature, and to
express them, in pro se or verse, in as high and living a manner as possible".116
Indeed, in his novel, Multitude and Solitude (1911), he actually explored the
possibility that the artist might be able to perceive or understand some truths
of nature that escape the objectivist, reductionist approach of modern science.
Physicist Victor Weisskopf agrees:
Especially in human relations, a piece of art or a well-written novel could be much more revealing
than any scientific study. In many respects, Madame Bovary is a piece of sociology - in fact ,
better sociology, than much of what is done by aping the techniques and language of the natural
sciences." 7
Just as science retains its truth-value across the ages by resonating with the
structures of the universe we perceive, perhaps literature, poetry, art, and music
also retain their vitality by speaking to us of equaBy universal truths whose
messages we have yet to comprehend or appreciate as science. This is certainly
the basis of the Mayo Clinic's "Insight" program, begun in 1981 in coBabo-
ration with actor Jason Robards. The Clinic staff attend performances of scenes
from plays such as Eugene O'Neill 's Long Days Journey into Night and !ceman
Cometh to explore the human dimensions of drug and alcohol addiction, or
Laurence Houseman 's Victoria Regina to explore the experience of aging.
The program is predicated on the belief that physicians do not need more
"objective" facts about these issues, but rather the sort of "personal knowl-
edge" of the patient's experience that epitomizes aesthetic understanding.
Literature provides that understanding in a way that physicians may not be
able to achieve as individuals. 118 And so we return to a point with which this
essay started: the need to formulate ideas in as many ways as possible in
order to increase their power by linking them up with other ideas. The arts
provide one way of providing new insights through new perspectives and
are sometimes ahead of the sciences in imagining them.
Marvin Cohen, a professor of physics at the University of California,
Berkeley, is another scientist who has recognized the knowledge in art. Cohen
is a theoretician trying to explain the basis of superconductivity. A few years
ago, he began collaborating with choreographer David Wood to produce a
dance caBed "Currents" that explores the various states - paired or unpaired,
symmetrical or asymmetrical - that electrons may take around the nucleus
of an atom. It is an extremely effective way to display superconductivity theory
for those who lack the mathematical tools of understanding, for it brings the
theory to life as Cohen envisages it in his mind. But "Currents" is also more
to Cohen. Since there is much that is not understood about superconduc-
tivity, Cohen viewed the collaboration as a form of physical research (pun
intended): "I told David Wood that if he or the dancers came up with some
new ordered state or some new motions I'd appreciate hearing about them.
We're hoping that perhaps he can give us some new ideas".119
"Does the modern man object that aB this is poetry and not science?" asks
Professor of Engineering Sir Alexander Kennedy.
Yes, truly it is poetry - the mere words stir one like a Beethoven symphony - but who among
us is entitled to say where science ends and poetry begins, in mauers about which we are so
supremely ignorant? May not the poetic vision be sometimes as far in advance of the scientific
as the scientific is in advance of that of the ordinary commonplace mortal?"o
If SO, then just imagine what mathematician Joseph Sylvester once dreamed
of when the artistic and scientific aspects of unified experience are explic-
itly whole:
May not Music be described as the Mathematic of science, Mathematic as Music of the reason?
the soul of each the same! Thus the musician feels Mathematic, the mathematician thinks Music
- Music the dream, Mathematic the working life - each to receive its consummation from the
other when the human intelligence, elevated to its perfect type, shall shine forth glorified in
some future Mozart-Dirichlet or Beethoven-Gauss - a union already not indistinctly fore-
shadowed by the genius and labors of a Helmholtz!121
It is a heady dream indeed, and one that has not only been dreamed, but
lived by many of the scientists quoted in this essay with exciting results for
both the sciences and arts_
One final and very important conclusion follows from everything that I
have said above_ If I am correct in my analysis of the role of aesthetics in
science, and the nature of its integral sensual and emotional-imaginative com-
ponents, then there cannot be a purely cognitive basis for thinking, or a
purely logical description of the mind - at least as logic is now constituted.
Cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence based upon objectivism and
reductionism are sure to fai!. On this point, I follow Poincare and Papert. 122
We will understand imaginative thinking, and through it how sciences and
arts are created, only when we invent a theory of knowledge that places the
whole person at the center of thinking and thereby reconstruct what objec-
tivist reductionism has so successfully taken apart. Analysis is important for
doing science, but if this essay has any message it is that synthesis - whether
it is in the form of synaesthesis or syncientia - is equally necessary. The dif-
ficulty with synthetic enterprises is that they require people possessing the
skills, training, insight, and aesthetic appreciation that we now associate only
with Renaissance polymaths and the rare "geniuses" who have peppered this
essay. Such people need to be encouraged and their skills and abilities emulated
and honed. The arts and sciences will have to be alloyed once again to create
new materials of understanding. Then, as artist Todd Siler has suggested, the
artist, musician, poet, and novelist who is also interested in science, in thinking,
or in the bases of creativity may have as much to say about knowledge and
understanding as any scientist. 123
One of the greatest obstacles to the free and universal movement of human knowledge is the
tendency that leads different kinds of knowledge to separate into systems. This is not a conse-
quence of things in themselves, because everything in nature is connected with everything else
and nothing should be viewed in the isolation of a system .
Claude Bemard 124
Profoundly to understand one art is to be able to articulate principles - though not necessarily
techniques - applicable to all arts. "Form" in one art can never convincingly be imitated in
another; but analogies are possibl~ - and not only from one art to another, but from science to
art, and vice versa.
Paul Horgan 125
The acute problems of the world can be solved only by whole men, not by people who refuse
to be, publicly, anything more than a technologist, or a pure scientist, or an artist. In the world
of today, you have got to be everything or you are going to be nothing.
C. H. Waddington 126
Michigan State University

NOTES
1 Ritterbush, P. c., The Art of Organic Forms (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1968), p. vi.
2 Davy, H., 'Paralleis between art and science', in John Davy (ed.), The Collected Works of
Sir Humphrey Davy (London: Smith and Cornhill, 1840), Vol. 8: pp. 307-308.
3 Curtin, D. W. (ed.), The Aesthetic Dimension of Science (New York: Philosophical Library,
1982); Eklund, J. B., 'Art opens the way for science', Chemical and Engineering News 56: 25-32,
1978; Hoffmann, R., 'How I work as poet and scientist', The Seientist, p. 10, March 21, 1988;
Meeker,1. W., 'The imminent alliance: New connections among art, science, and technology',
Technology and Cultures 19: 187-198, 1978; Leonardo, passim: Monro, T. K., The Physician
as Man of Letters, Science, and Action (Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone, 2nd ed., 1951);
Pollack, M. (ed.), Common Denominators in Art and Science (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University
Press, 1983); Waddington, C. H., Behind Appearance: A Study of the Relations Between Painting
and the Natural Seien ces in This Century (Edinburgh: The Edinburgh University Press, 1969);
Wechsler, J. (ed.), On Aesthetics in Seience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978).
4 Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
5 Root-Bernstein, R. S., 'On paradigms and revolutions in science and art', The Art Journal
(Summer): 109-118,1984.
6 Root-Bernstein, R. S., Discovering. Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Seience
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 199-202,213-223,273-307.

7 Mazurs, E. G., Graphie Representations of the Periodic System during One Hundred Years
(University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1974).

8 Cyriax, B. and Gäth, R., 'The confonnation of double-stranded DNA', Naturwissenschaften
65: 106-108, 1975; Rodley, G. A. R., Scobie, S., Bates, R. H. T. and Lewitt, R. M., 'A possible
confonnation for double stranded polynucleotides', Proc. Natl. Acad. Sei. USA 73: 2959-2963;
Sasisekharan, V. and Pattabiraman, N., 'Double stranded polynucleotyeds: Two typical alter-
native confonnations for nucleic acids', Current Seien ce 45: 779-783; Stokes, T. D., 'The double
helix and the warped zipper - an exemplary tale', Soeial Studies of Science 22: 207-240;
Stokes, T. D., 'Reason in the Zeitgeist', History of Science 24: 111-123.
9 Watson, J. D. and Crick, F. H. c., 'The structure of DNA', Cold Spring Harbor Symposia
on Quantitative Biology 18: 123-131, 1953.
10 Hadamard, J., The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton, N. J.:
Princeton University Press, 1945), p. 11; Ruykeyser, M., Willard Gibbs (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday Doran, 1942), p. 439.
11 Lightman, A., 'The one and only' [A review of Genius: The Life and Seien ce of Richard
Feynman by James Gleick] The New York Review of Books 39, no. 21 (17 Dec 1992): 34.
12 Woodward, C. E., 'Art and elegance in the synthesis of organic compounds: Robert Bums
Woodward', in D. B. Wall ace and H. E. Gruber (eds.), Creative People at Work (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 250.
13 Wilson, M., Passion to Know (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), p. 15; Huxley, A.,
Literature and Science (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).
14 Williams, L. P., Michael Faraday (London: Chapman and Hall, 1965), p. 467; Woodward,
op. eit., 1989, p. 238.

15 Chandrasekhar, S., Truth and Beauty. Aesthetics and Motivations in Seien ce (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 146.

16 Read, J., Humour and Humanism in Chemistry (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1947), p. 212.
17 Ramsay, O. B. (ed.), Van't Hoff - le Bel Centennial (Washington D.C.: American Chemical
Society, 1975).
18 Kuhn, T. S., The Essential Tension (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977), pp. 66-
104.
19 Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1984.
20 Gleick, J., Genius. The Life and Seien ce ofRichard Feynman (New York: Pantheon, 1992),
p.373.
21 Tinbergen, N., Curious Naturalists (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books and the American
Museum of Natural History, 195811969), p. 154.
22 Lorenz, K., King Solomon's Ring (New York: CrowelI, 1952), p. 12; see also Woodward,
op. eit., 1989, p. 237.
23 Feuchtwanger, L., The House of Desdemona. Or the Laure/s and Limitations of Historical
Fiction, trans. by H. A. Basilius (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963), p. 136.
24 Henn, T. R., The Apple and the Spectroscope (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), pp. ix and
5.
25 Copland, A., What to Listen for in Music (New York: McGraw-HilI, 1957), pp. 18-22.
26 Boltzmann, quoted in Curtin, op. eit., 1982, pp. 26-27.
27 Huxley, A., op. cit., 1963, p. 53.
28 Duhem, quoted in Lowinger, A., The Methodology of Pierre Duhem (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1941), p. 41.
29 Bronowski, J., 'The creative process', Seientific American 199: 62, 1958.
30 Michelson, A., Light Waves and Their Uses (Chicago: The Chicago University Press, 1903).
31 Woodward, op. eit., 1989, p. 137.
32 Ramon y Cajal, S., Recollections of My Life, trans. by E. H. Craigie and J. Cano (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1937), pp. 36-37.
33 Poincare, H., The Foundations of Scienee, trans. by Gb. Halsted (Lancaster, Pennsylvania:
Science Press, 191311946), pp. 366-367; see also: Wilson, quoted in Rayleigh, L., The Life of
Sir J. J. Thomson, O. M. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 99; alJ of
the references listed in note 3 above.
34 Beveridge, W. I. B., The Art of Seientific Investigation (New York: Vintage Books, 1980),
p.99.
35 Ratliff, F., 'Georg von Bekesy: His life, his work, and his "friends" " in J. Wirgin (ed.),
The George von Bekesy Collection (Malmö: AlJhems Fölag, 1974), pp. 15-16.
36 Ibid.
37 Crowther, J. G., Seientifie Types (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1968), pp. 163-164; Bliss,
M., The Discovery of Insulin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 45; De Beer, G.
and Goodrich, Edwin S., Dictionary of Seientific Biography, vol. 5, New York: Scribner' s, 1975),
p.467.
38 Ramon y Cajal, S., op. eit., 1937, pp. 134-135.
39 Ritterbush, P. c., The Art of Organic Forms (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,
1968), p. 70.
40 Zigrosser, C. (ed.), Ars Mediea: A Collection of Medical Prints Presented to the Philadelphia
Museum of Art by Smith-Kline Corporation (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art,

1955/1976), pp. 14-15.
41 Van't Hoff, J. H., 'Imagination in science', trans. by G. F. Springer. Molecular Biology,
Biochemistry, and Biophysics 1: 1-18.
42 Root-Bernstein, R. S., 'Creative process as a unifying theme of human cultures', Daedalus
113: 197-219, 1984; Root-Bernstein, R. S., 'Visual thinking: The art of imagining reality',
Transaetions of the American Philosophical Soeiety 75: 50-67, 1985; Root-Bernstein, R. S.,
'Harmony and beauty in biomedical research', Journal of Moleeular and Cellular Cardiology
19: 1-9, 1987; Root-Bernstein, R. S. [Diseovering, 1989, passim, but especially pp. 312-342.
43 Ritterbush, op. eit., 1968; Haraway, D. J., Crystals, Fabries, and Fields. Metaphors of
Organicism in Twentieth Century Development Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1976); HindIe, B., Emulation and Invention (New York: New York University Press, 1981);
Kassler, 1., 'Music as a model in early science', History of Seienee 20: 103-139; Kassler, J., 'Man
- A musical instrument: Models of the brain and mental functioning before the computer', History
of Scienee 22: 59-92.
44 Van't Hoff, op. eit.; TruesdelJ, C.,An Idiot's Fugitive Essays on Science (New York: Springer-
Verlag, 1984).
45 Shaler, N., The Autobiography of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1909).
46 Goldsmith, M., Sage: A Life of J. D. Bemal (London: Hutehinson, 1980), pp. 225-226.
47 Cole, K. c., Sympathetic Vibrations. Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life (Toronto: Bantarn
Books, 1985), p. 230; see also Woodward, op. eit., 1989, pp. 246-248.
48 Horgan, P., Approaches to Writing (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 45.
49 Koestler, A., The Act 01 Creation (London: Hutehinson, 1976), p. \08.
50 Hardy, G. H., A Mathematieian's Apology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940),

p.25.
51 Dirac, P. A. M., 'The evolution of the physicists' picture of nature', Scientific American,
May 1963, p. 47.
52 Chandrasekhar, op. eit., 1987, pp. 65-66.
53 Pauling, L., 'The genesis of ideas', Proceedings ofthe Third World Congress of Psychiatry,
1961 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, McGiII University Press, 1963), Vol. I, p. 46.
54 Arnheim, R., Visual Thinking (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 260.
55 Heisenberg, W., Physics and Beyond. Encounters and Conversations, trans. by A. J. Pomerans
(New York: Harper Torch Books, 1972), p. 87.
56 Gleick, op. eit., 1992, p. 369.
57 Papert, S., 'The mathematical unconscious' , in J. Wechsler (ed.), On Aesthetics in Seience
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), p. 104.
58 Papert, op. eit., 1978; Davis, P. J. and Hersh, R., The Mathematical Experience (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 47, 170--172; see also Cole, op. eit., 1985, pp. 218-231; Tsilikis,
J. D., 'Simplicity and elegance in theoretical physics', American Seientist 47: 87-96; Root-
Bernstein, op. eit., 1987.
59 Thompson, G., The Inspiration 01 Seien ce (Garden City, N.Y.: Doub1eday, 1961), pp. 22-
23.
60 Chandrasekhar, op. eit., 1987, especially pp. 59-73 and 144-170.
61 Richards, I. A., Ogden, C. K. and Wood, J., The Foundations 01 Aesthetics (New York :
International Publishers, 1925), p. 7.
62 Odin, S., 'Blossom scents take up the ringing: synaesthesia in Japanese and Western
aesthetics', Soundings 69: 256-258.
63 Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1989, p. 335 .
64 Polanyi, M., Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1958).
65 Morris, D., Animal Days (New York: Morrow, 1979), p. 58.
66 Debye, P., Interview in The Way of the Scientist (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966),
pp. 79-81.
67 Smith, C. S., A Searchfor Structure. Selected Essays on Science, Art, and History (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1981), p. 353.

68 Alfven, H., 'Memoirs of a dissident scientist', American Seientist 76: 250, 1988.
69 Chandrasekhar, op. eit., 1987, p. 67.
70 Ulam, S., Adventures 01 a Mathemarician (New York: Scribner' s, 1976), p. 17.
71 Mach, E., Knowledge and Error: Sketches on the Psychology of Enquiry, trans. by T. J.
McCormack and P. Foulkes (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), p. I.
n Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1987; Root-Bernstein, op. eil. , 1989.
7J Lederberg, J. quoted in Judson, H. F., The Searchfor Solurions (New York: Holt, Rinehart,
and Winston, 1980), p. 6.
74 Keller, E. F., A Feeling lor the Organism. The Life and Work 01 Barbara McClintock (San
Francisco: WH Freeman, 1983), p. 117.
75 Ibid., p. 118.
76 Dupre, L., 'Aesthetic perception and its relation to ordinary perception', in E. Straus (ed.),
Aisthesis and Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1970), p. 174.
77 Bernard, c., An Introduction to the Study 01 Experimental Medieine, trans. by H. C. Greene
(New York: Macmillan; reprint New York: Dover, 1927/57), p. 43.
78 Chandrasekhar, op. eit., 1987, p. 67.
79 Sacks, 0. , Awakenings (New York: Summit, 1967; Dutton, 1983).
80 Holton, G., Thematie Origins of Seientifie Thought. Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 366-374.
81 Planck, M. quoted in 'Kangro, H. Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck', in C. C. Gillispie (ed.),
Dietionary of Seientifie Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1975), p. 8.
82 Chandrasekhar,op. eit., 1987, p. 67.
83 Holton, op. eit., 1973, pp. 366-374.
84 Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1989; Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1987; see also Ramon y Cajal, S.,
Preeepts and Couneils on Seientifie lnvestigation: Stimulants ofthe Spirit, trans. by J. M. Sanchez-
Perez (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press Publishing Association, 1951), p. 75; Sarton, G.,
'The history of medicine versus the history of art', Bulletin of the History of Medieine 10;
128; Kubie, L. S., 'Some unsolved problems of the scientific career', Ameriean Seientist 41:
596; 42: 104,1953/1954; Wilson, M., op. eit., 1972, 11.
85 Wegman, C. E., 'Argand, Emile', in C. C. Gillispie (ed.), Dietionary of Seientifie Biography
(New York: Scribner's, 1970), vol. I, p. 235 .

86 Quoted in Bernard, op. eit., 1927, 1957, p. xix.
87 Nachmansohn, D., 'Biochemistry as part of my life', Annual Review of Bioehemistry 41: I,
1972.
88 Lowinger, op. eit., 1941, p. I, n. 3.
89 Willstätter, R., From My Life. The Memoirs of Riehard Willstätter, trans. by Lilli S. Hornig
(New York: W. A. Benjamin, Inc., 1965), p. 395.

90 Infeld, L., Albert Einstein: His Work and Its Injluenee on the World (New York: Scribner,
1941), p. 312.
91 Hadamard, J., op. eit., 1945, pp. 142-143.
92 Smith, C. S., op. eil., 1981, pp. 353-354.
93 Keller, op. eit., 1983, p. 104.
94 Wittgenstein, L., On Certainty, trans. by D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell,
1921/61), p. 115.
95 Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1985; Root-Bernstein, R. S., 'Tools of thought: Designing an inte-
grated curriculum for lifelong learners', Roeper Review 10: 17-21; Root-Bemstein, op. eit., 1989,
especially pp. 313ff.
96 Huxley, op. eit., 1963, p. 118.
97 Truesdell, op. eit., 1984, 589; Weisskopf, V., 'The significance of science' , Seien ce 176:
145,1972.
98 Hindie, op. eit., 1981, p. 120; Mabee, C., The Ameriean Leonardo. A Life of Samuel F. B.
Morse (New York: Octogon Books, 1969), p. 184.

99 L'Echevin, P., Musique et medieine (Paris: Stock Musique, 1981), p. 99.
IOD Warren, R. M. and Warren, R. P., Heimholtz on Pereeption: Its Physiology and Development
(New York: Wiley, 1968); Cranefield, P., 'The philosophical and cultural interests of the bio-
physics movement of 1847', Journal of the History of Medieine 21: 1-7, 1966.
101 Shankland, R., 'Koenig, Karl Rudolph ' , in C. C. Gillispie (ed .), Dietionary of Seientifie
Biography (New York: Scribner's, 1973), vol. 7, pp. 444-446.
102 Golani, 1., Wolgin, D. L. and Teitelbaum, P., 'A proposed natural geometry of recovery from
akinesia in the lateral hypothalamic rat', Brain Research 164: 237-267, 1979; Dalva, N. V.,
'Cunningham computes a new season', Danee Magazine 12, March 1991; Wyman, M., 'Computer
program aids dancemakers', Danee Magazine 12-13, March 1991.
103 Dumiak, J., 'Color almost too good to be true', New York Times 6 December 1992,
p. 27Y.
104 Jaffe, A., C. G. Jung. Word and Image. Bollingen Series XCVII: 2 (Princeton NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1979), passim, but especially pp. 77-95 and 205.
105 Pers. comm.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.
108 Cipra, B., 'Cross-disciplinary artists know good math when they see it', Seienee 257:
748-749, 1992; Peterson, 1., 'Twists of space', Seienee News 132: 264--266, 1987.
82 ROBERT S . ROOT-BERNSTEIN
109 Judson, ap. eil., 1980.

1 JO Arnheim, ap. ci!., 1969, p. V.
111 Fuller, B., 'Conceptuality of fundamental structures', in G. Kepes (ed.), Structure in Art
and in Seience (New York: George Braziller, 1965), p. 72 caption.
112 Anonymous, 'Interview. Roger Penrose', Omni, 66-108, June 1986.
113 Root-Bernstein, R. S., 'Sensual science', The Seiences (NY Academy of Science), Sep.-Oct.
1990; Root-Bernstein, R. S. , 'Beauty, truth, and imagination: A perspective on the science and
art of modeling atoms', in J. Burroughs (ed.), Snelson's Atom Catalogue for "Novo Presents:
Art at The Academy" Exhibit (New York Academy of Sciences, New York, NY), Jan. 1989,
pp. 15-20; Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1984; Root-Bernstein, op. eit., 1987; Root-Bernstein, op. cit.,
1989.
114 Smith, C. S., 'Structura1 hierarchy in science, art and history ', in Wechsler, op. cit., 1987,
p.9.
115 Gleick, J., 'Solving the mathematical riddle of chaos [interview with Mitchell Feigenbaum)',
New York Times Magazine: 71, 1984.

116 Masefield, 1., Multitude and Solitude (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911), p. 132.
117 Weisskopf, V., 'The frontiers and limits of science' , American Seientist 65: 410, 1977.
118 Anonymous, '''Insight'' at the Mayo Clinic', International Arts-Medicine Assoeiation
Newsletter 1: 5, 1985.
119 Quoted from '''The Race for the Superconductor" NOVA', WNET Boston, 1988.
120 Kennedy, A., quoted in Hill, A. V., The Ethical Dilemma of Science (London: The Scientific
Book Guild, 1962), p. 43 .
121 Sylvester, J., 'Algebraical researches containing a disquisition on Newton's rule for the
discovery of imaginary roots', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Soeiety of London 154:
613n, 1864.
122 Poincare, ap. eil., 1913/1946; Papert, op. eil., 1978, p. 107.
123 Siler, T., Breaking the Mind Barrier (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).
124 Bemard, ap. eil., 1927/57, p. 223.
125 Horgan, op. eit., 1973, p. 157.
126 Waddington, C. H., Biology and the History of the Future (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1972), p. 360.
FREDERIC L. HOLMES
BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS IN THE LIFE SCIENCES
What do scientists mean when they caH an experiment beautiful? An influ-

ential collection of essays entitled The Uses 0/ Experiment finds no place to
discuss experimental beauty. I Perhaps that is an appropriate omission. If we
follow the dictionary definition of beauty, as "that quality ... which affords
keen pleasure to the senses ... or which charms the intellectual faculties", 2
we may conclude that beauty does not belong within the category of utility.
Does the beauty that scientists see in experiments, therefore, bear no relation
to their pragmatic objectives? On the other hand, if, as one scientist has
expressed it to me, "all important experiments are beautiful,"3 is beauty a func-
tional attribute of the experiments that display it? Are there any more particular
"indicators of beauty" shared by those experiments that scientists declare to
be beautiful? Such questions are not frequently discussed by historians of
science, and are, as the title of this volume implies, elusive. One way to
begin to examine them is to focus our attention on specific historical examples
of experiments that drew from contemporaries to whom it was pertinent the
accolade "beautiful". I am presently engaged in writing a historical recon-
struction of the origins of one such experiment. The Meselson-Stahl experiment
on the replication of DNA was not only described by contemporaries as "beau-
tiful" when they first learned of it, but it has even been called in retrospect
by one scientist who was nearby at the time it was performed "the most
beautiful experiment in biology".4
Before I turn to a substantive description of the Meselson-Stahl experiment,
there are further questions of definition to pose. Is the judgment that a par-
ticular experiment is beautiful collective and stable, or are the particular
historical circumstances under which each of those who pronounced it beau-
tiful encountered it essential to the qualities of beauty that it displayed? When
we speak of such an experiment do we do so in a generic sense? That is, do
we me an a certain protocol that has been performed repeatedly, or do we
mean the historie initial performance of the experiment? Sometimes scien-
tists speak of a particular experiment, using the singular form, when there
was actually a cluster of individual experiments leading to a single result, or
supportive of a single conclusion. More than some "classic" experiments,
the Meselson-Stahl experiment can be identified historically with a single
experiment whose first successful performance was already decisive. Some
of those who called it beautiful did so upon hearing of that single performance,
at a time when no others like it had been completed.
Another question we must ask is whether the actual, physical performance
83

84 FREDERIC L. HOLMES
of the experiment in real space and time was intrinsic to its beauty, or whether
the beauty lay in the verbal description of the experiment together with accom-
panying visual representations of its results. Did those scientists who received
verbal results of it and responded that it was beautiful conjure mental images
of the experimental performance, or was the sense of beauty conveyed in
the verbal description of its abstract essential features and result? The paper
in which Meselson and Stahl subsequently presented the experiment in the
formal scientific literature can itself be described as beautifuHy written. To
what extent did those who first learned about it through this paper perceive
beauty in what Latour and Woolgar caH the "inscription" into which the results
of an experiment are later incorporated,5 rather than in an experimental per-
formance? As with other experiments of its prominence, the Meselson-Stahl
experiment has also been represented in pedagogical forms that reduce it to
its most salient features. Some of these who regard the experiment as beau-
tiful have in mi nd as much how it can be used to teach certain ideals about
biological experimentation as they do the original experiment in its research
context. The case illustrates, therefore, that there can be diverse "images" of
the beauty of the experiment, each related in different ways to the historie
performance that took place during the month of October, 1957 within certain
spaces in a laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Frank Stahl once remarked to me that "it is easy to do a beautiful experi-
ment to solve a minor problem. The difficulty is to devise a beautiful
experiment that will solve an important problem".6 I think that it is evident
that the beauty contemporaries perceived in the Meselson-Stahl experiment
was inseparable from their sense of the centrality of the question to which it
was addressed. Before describing the experiment itself, therefore, I must sketch
in the outlines of wh at was known in the wake of discovery of the double helix
in 1953 as "The Replication Problem".
James Watson and Francis Crick recognized the formidable nature of the
problem of how DNA replicates from the outset, with their wry comment in
April 1953, that "it is difficult at the moment to see how these processes can
occur without everything getting tangled".7 For several years the question of
whether the two polynucleotide strands coiled around one another in the helix
can separate from one another without themselves breaking apart troubled some
of the prominent members of the group around which the fjeld of molecular
biology was coalescing.
The most co gent theoretical analysis of "the problem of the replication of
DNA" was provided by Max Delbrück in a paper that appeared in PNAS in
1954. Delbrück had worried about how the 500 turns of the two threads wound
around each other could be "untwiddled" ever since Watson wrote hirn about
the helieal structure in the spring of 1953. In May he had declared to Watson
that "The difficulties of untangling the chain ... seem ... insuperable".8 In
his published discussion Delbrück wrote that "The principal difficulty" in
the Watson-Crick mechanism "lies in the fact that the two chains are wound
around each other in a large number of turns and that, therefore, the daughter
BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS 85
- duplexes genera ted by the process . . . are wound around each other with
an equally large number of turns". Rejecting as "too inelegant to be effi-
cient" the possibilities that the daughter duplexes can either slip past each other
longitudinally or unwind, Delbrück proposed a "break and reunion" scheme:
Let us consider a duplex in which replication has proceeded synchronously along the two
chains up to the link n. We will call this point the "growth point". If we now break both the
old chains between links n and n + I, we may join the lower terminals of the breaks in a criss-
cross fashion, not to the upper terminals of the breaks but to the open ends of the new chains
of equal polarity. The upper terminals of the breaks now become the open ends for the
continuation of the replication process. 9
Delbrück represented this scheme as an abstract model, depicted in his article

as shown in Figure I (below). We need not pause over its details. The most
cogent feature of his discussion was that Delbrück pointed out how his scheme
and the alternatives that he rejected could be tested:
It is an important implication of the proposed mechanism that the chains of the daughter·duplexes
consist of altemating sections of parental and assimilated nucleotides, each section with an average
length of five nucleotides. If a labeled duplex replicates repeatedly at the expense of an
unlabeled pool, then according to this model, the label will be statistically equally distributed
to the daughter-duplexes at each successive replication. Without the breaks and reunions the
distribution of the label would occur only at the first replication. At each subsequent replica-
tion one daughter·duplex would receive aU the labels, the other none. 1O
Delbrück illustrated these alternatives with the scheme reproduced in Figure

I (below).
The kind of label that Delbrück had anticipated would be applied to the
replication was a radioactive isotope whose presence in DNA molecules could
be detected by means of its decay. Gunther Stent was al ready engaged in
such studies, using 32p, and Delbrück was confident that Stent was the person
most likely to solve the problem. Like most members of the "phage group",
Stent believed that the simplicity of bacteriophage made them particularly
suited to the solution of genetic problems at the molecular level. Between 1954
and 1957 Stent and his collaborators applied these methods resourcefully,
but he and Niels lerne could only come to the conclusion in 1955 that "parental
[phage] DNA experiences a certain dissociation within the host cell"." Their
conclusions could not provide a clear-cut decision between the dispersive
prediction of Delbrück's scheme and the more limited distribution of parental
DNA predicted by the Watson-Crick mechanism. Cyrus Levinthal devised
a method for studying the distribution more directly, "using an electron-
sensitive photographic emulsion for the measurement of the radioactivity of
a single virus particle or a single DNA molecule". Despite this advantage,
he was only able "to rule out any mechanism of duplication which implies
repeated sharing of the atoms of the parental structure between the daugh-
ters". The "detailed predictions inferred from the Crick-Watson model",
Levinthal acknowledged, "cannot be checked by these experiments"Y
It gradually became evident that phage did not provide the ideal simplicity
for studying DNA duplication that had originally been assumed, because a
(0) (b) (c) (d) (~)
t
xx
....
xx
x .. ....
.. t
....
x ..
xx
xx
....
xx
.. /C
....
....
..x
~
...t ...t
.J.
..x.! t
...
·x
.x
...
ox
·x
x.
x.
x·
x·
.x
.x
•x
...
.x x. .x
x. .x x. .x
.x xo x·
•x x. x. ·x
~
J( •
t .t .t
~
·.
.x
t
x·
t ~
..t .t
~
t
.. ·• ..x
x. .x •x
..x..
x.
.. ·.
x. x. • x
.1<
•x x.
J( •
I< • .x • x x. •x
·X x. x. •x
•x x. x. •x
~ + ~ J. + l" l" •x
+
(a) (b)
Fig. I. From M. Delbrück, "On the Replication of Desoxyribonucleic Acid" (DNA).
single growth cycle included multiple replications, matings, and recombina-

tions, the effects of all of which were combined in the distribution of parental
DNA to progeny phage. Moreover, Levinthal introduced a further complica-
tion in 1956, when he claimed to discover that the DNA in phage is divided
into two portions: a single "Iarge piece" containing forty percent of the total
DNA, and the rest distributed in many pieces too small to detect. Despite these
difficulties, Delbrück and Stent still maintained in 1956, "We believe it to
be not unlikely ... that experiments on DNA replication more decisive than
those which we can discuss at this time will likewise be carried out with
bacteriophage" .13
The Meselson-Stahl experiment can be viewed as a direct response to
Delbrück's suggestion to label a duplex that will then replicate in an unlabelled

pool. As a graduate student at Caltech, Meselson encountered Delbrück in
1953, and was probably stimulated to think about the replication problem by
Delbrück's forcefully stated opinion. The results that Meselson and Frank Stahl,
who came to Caltech on a postdoctoral fellowship in 1955, reached in 1957,
provided a decisive answer to Delbrück's question. Historical investigations,
however, seldom follow the straightest line between two points. During the
4 years between the time that Meselson had the germinal idea that one might
be able to separate and identify parental and progeny DNA molecules according
to density differences rather than by radioisotopic labelling, and the time that
he and Stahl performed the experiment that fulfilled Meselson 's dream, this
problem changed form several times, was deferred and retrieved, became
successively entangled with several other problems and opportunities and again
isolated from them. Meselson and Stahl, who first discussed the idea of working
together on the invcstigation in the summer of 1954 at Woods Hole, had to
mark time on it for over two years, before they could come together and dispose
of other, unre1ated obligations. The density gradient method that they devised
originally for the specific purpose of experiments on DNA replication proved
to have such powerful potential for other purposes that they embarked on a
long "detour" while they explored the method and its various applications.
Attracted by arecent discovery that 5-Bromouracil-substituted DNA can be
incorporated into bacteriophage, they attempted to exploit the larger density
difference between this and normal DNA in place of Meselson's original idea
to use a heavy isotope, such as 'SN. Strongly influenced by the ethos in Max
Delbrück's phage group, where they carried out the investigation, Meselson
and Stahl persisted in attempting to carry out their "transfer experiments" in
phage T4 despite continued difficulties. For nearly a year they resisted the idea
that the experiment might succeed more easily with bacteria.
The central aim of my current research on this topic is to reconstruct, in
as close detail as the surviving record will permit, the investigative trail that
Meselson and Stahl followed during these years. I began by talking extensively
with Matt Meselson and then with Frank Stahl. Their memories were very
helpful, but, as to be expected concerning events that took place 30 years
ago, incomplete. The correspondence from the time and the progress reports
they filed then filled in so me of the gaps, supplemented and checked their
memories, but still did not yield a continuous story. In my previous recon-
struction of the investigative trails of other scientists, I have re1ied extensively
on surviving laboratory notebooks to provide the chronological structure of the
research. The laboratory records that Meselson and Stahl kept have, however,
apparently vanished. When I began to reconstruct the narrative, therefore, I
was able to identify the major phases of the work, but could not reach the
fineness of resolution that I had hoped for. Then, last spring, Meselson was
able to find the log book kept for the ultracentrifuge runs that formed the
principal backbone of the experiments. These logs give few experimental
details, but they enable us to identify the films, which Meselson still possessed,
and whieh eonstitute the raw data of the experiments, with the dated runs
reeorded in the eentrifuge log. When Meselon went through these reeords with
me, his reeolleetions of the events assoeiated with them beeame far more
speeifie and detailed than they had appeared in our earlier diseussions. With
this new evidenee it beeomes possible to reeonstitute a dense narrative of
the historie pathway that led Meselson and Stahl to their classie experiment.
The story will be, I believe, richly illuminating about the nature of ereative
experimental seience. It is also a poignant human story about two highly
talented, very different young men, merging their efforts in a partnership
destined to last just long enough to produee a historie outeome.
I will not delve further into this story here. Onee performed, historie
experiments aequire a life of their own, inereasingly independent of the loeal
and eontingent historical eireumstanees from whieh they have emerged. The
aesthetic qualities of the Meselson-Stahl experiment refleet very little of the
research trials and errors that lie behind it. I shall, therefore, move direetly
to adescription of "The" definitive historical "Meselson-Stahl experiment".
11
On Oetober 21 or 22, 1957, Frank Stahl and Matt Meselson began growing
Escherichia co li B. in a glucose medium, with 15N H 4Cl as the only source
of the nu trient nitrogen. They followed the growth of the colony by standard
assay methods and mieroseopieal eell counts. After about 12 hours, when
the titer had reached 2 x 108 , representing 14 bacterial generations, they
switched the baeteria abruptly to 14N by adding a tenfold excess of medium
containing 14N H4C 1. This medium included additional sources of nitrogen
in the form of ribosides of the four bases contained in DNA. At the time
of the shift they withdrew the first sampIe from which they would extract
the DNA. They chilled it immediately, carried out the procedures for lysing
the baeteria, placed the lysate in a tube labelIed 2.I.A (for 2nd experiment,
1st generation [really "Oth generation"] 1st sampIe), and stored it in the
cold. 14
As the bacteria continued to grow, Stahl and Meselson added fresh medium
as necessary to keep the titer between 1 and 2 x 108 • They removed five
more sampIes at approximately 15 minute intervals, lysed and stored them
in tubes labelIed 2.11.A to 2.II.E.
On Wednesday, October 23, at 6:27 PM, Meselson started up the Spinco
Model E ultracentrifuge, eontaining in its centrifuge cell the sampIe taken at
the time the bacterial medium had been switched (2.I.A.): Twenty-two hours
later he switched off the maehine and took the exposed photographic films into
the dark room. When developed, they showed a single sharp band, representing
"pure heavy" DNA. Working now around the clock, he beg an at 6:32 on the
same evening a run with the first sample drawn during the baeterial genera-
tion following the switch (2.II.A). That run, eompleted just before no on on
Friday, yielded two bands - a somewhat less dense heavy band, and a fainter
band just to its left. By 3:55 that aftemoon he was ready to begin centrifuging
the next sampie, 2.II.B.
The centrifugation of sampie 2.II.B was finished on Saturday moming. It
showed, as expected, a faint band in the position of heavy DNA and a stronger
band in the "heavy-light" position. Within 45 minutes of the completion of this
run Meselson switched the centrifuge back on with 2.ILC, the sampie taken
from the bacteria at approximately the end of the first generation of their
growth in the medium containing the ordinary nitrogen. By Sunday after-
noon he knew that this lysate produced the anticipated single band of
heavy-light DNA. Moving on that same aftemoon to sampie 2.II.D, he had
found by late Monday afternoon that midway through the second generation
of growth a band representing "pure light" DNA was appearing in its proper
place above the heavy-light band. Continuing without let up, he began on
Monday evening the run with 2.II.E, drawn at the end of the second
generation. Late Tuesday he obtained the remarkable final result, that there
were two bands that appeared visually to be of equal density, in the posi-
tions of heavy-light and pure light DNA. By then Meselson and Stahl knew
that they had produced an experimental demonstration of semi-conservative
replication so nearly perfect that it was alm ost embarrassing.
One doubt remained. The "heavy-light" band might represent, not true
hybrid DNA molecules composed of equal amounts of light and heavy sub-
units, but merely a mixture of light and heavy DNA molecules held together
by proteins. To check this possibility, Meselson ran two experiments, on
Tuesday and Wednesday, in which he placed sampies of 2.II.C (which had
during the previous run shown a single intermediate band) in the centrifuge
cell with guanidinium chloride added to the usual cesium chloride solution.
Guanidinium chloride would be expected to dissociate DNA molecules that
might be conjoined by protein. The single bands remained intact, confirming
that he was really observing molecules of hybrid DNA.
I have included these narrative details to emphasize that the Meselson-Stahl
experiment can be specifically identified with a unique performance conducted
over a well-defined interval of historical time. This was not the initial experi-
ment of its type. One previous attempt had turned out unsatisfactorily, because
Meselson mixed up the samples. 15 The appearance of discrete bands in that
experiment had, however, already signified to hirn what the outcome of a
correct1y performed experiment would be. Meselson and Stahl also repeated
the experiment three months later, carrying it out to four generations.
Nevertheless, what I have described here was the decisive historical occur-
rence of the experiment. It is clearly identifiable in the results that appeared
later in their published paper.
My verbal description does not, of course, fully capture the experiences
of Meselson and Stahl as they carried out this experiment. The craft details
of laboratory life are visual and tactile. Central to the experience were the
routines required to perform a run on the analytical centrifuge. The Spinco
Model E was an imposing presence in the lives of those scientists who operated
it. At the time Meselson and Stahl began to use one, the machines were still
relatively rare, and they have recently again become rare. In their prime,
however, they were crucial to the development of molecular biology. The
picture shown in Figure 2, taken from a Beckmann advertising brochure, can
provide only a faint glimpse of how the real object appeared to its users. I have
never operated one, but have had the opportunity to witness the preparation
for and beginning of a run on one of the few remaining in service. It seems
obvious to me that the routines of carrying out experiments on this machine
were, particularly for Meselson, intimately associated with the aesthetic feeling
of the Meselson-Stahl experiment. 16
We can come closer to the immediate visual experience of the outcome
of this experiment, because the original films on which the absorption of the
light passed through the centrifuge ceHs was recorded still survive. I will
not reproduce them here in their original form as negatives, but in a reorga-
nized form into which Meselson must have integrated them shortly afterward.
Figure 3 shows how the films looked when they were made into positive prints
and then lined up to indicate how the positions and darkness of the bands
had changed at successive time intervals. The numbers on the right refer to
time measured in bacterial generations. As a pure design this photo graph
may or may not appear beautiful to the unitiated observer, but to anyone
cognizant of the point of the experiment its beauty seems so apparent and so
direct as scarcely to require explanation.
Fig. 2. Beckman Model E Analytical Ultracentrifuge.

Generations
0.28
0.71
1.1 4
1.57
2.00
0&
2.00
mixed
14N & IS N
Col. ONR
mixed for
Fig. 3. Composite photograph of absorption bands from first successful

"Meselson-Stahl" experiment.
The first recorded comment that the experiment was "extremely beautiful"
came from Cy Levinthal,17 at a time when Levinthal had neither witnessed
the experiment at first hand, nor seen its visual result. Meselson conveyed
the news of its success to several colleagues, including Levinthal, about two
weeks after completing the experiment. This first paragraph of the account
he sent to James Watson on November 8 is nearly identical to the account
Levinthal received: 18
Dear Jim,
A transfer experiment with bacterial DNA has been completed - E. coli was grown from 10'
to 10' cells per ml. in 'SN M9. The generation time was 45 minutes in this medium (and was
the same in a parallel 14N culture). Upon reaching 10', a 20-fold excess of 14N was added to the
culture along with adenosine and uridine. Sampies of the bacteria were withdrawn just before
the change of medium and afterwards for two generation limes. The generation times, as measured
both by colony formation assays and direct particle counts remained constant at 45 minutes.
The bacterial sampies were chilled and centrifuged immediately upon their withdrawal. The
sedimented cells were resuspended in versene, treated with lysozyme and then duponol and placed
in the refrigerator. This treatment yields a clear Iysate which is added to CsCl and centrifuged.
Nothing is thrown out. DNA bands of three discrete densities were found in the various sam pies
as shown in the following table. Times are given in units of one division time.
Fraction of total DNA of each type

time heavy intermediate light
0 0 0
0.28 0.7 0.3 0
0.71 0.2 0.8 0
1.14 0 0.9 0.1
1.57 0 0.7 0.3
2.00 0 0.5 0.5
Clean as a whistle! Who would have imagined that, with all the other great good luck we've
had, the DNA molecules would replicate all at the same rate?
Meselson was obviously not sending his correspondents a complete descrip-

tion of the experiment. He did not specify the type of centrifuge used or the
density gradient method so central to the experiment. Nor could the recipi-
ents of his report view the bands that constituted the immediate data of the
experiment. From the time sc ale at the left of the table in his letter, we can
infer that the "heavy", "intermediate", and "light" types of DNA represent
the same bands shown in the preceding photograph. The numerical "frac-
tions of DNA of each type" were based on estimates of the relative darkness
of the bands he had made by eye - a quantitative interpretation that an unskilled
eye such as my own could hardly make, but that was, according to Meselson,
easy for hirn because of the practice he had had as an x-ray crystallographer
estimating the darkness of spots on x-ray diffraction patterns. Meselson was
not sharing with his correspondents the experimental data itself, but reporting
a result that already incorporated an interpretation of the data. The interpre-
tation was unproblematic. Nevertheless, the recipients of his letters were several
stages removed from actually "seeing" the Meselson-Stahl experiment. On
what basis, therefore, did the experiment appear "extremely beautiful" to
Levinthal?
Like any professionals who share common training and expertise, scien-
tists communicate with one another in shorthand. Much of wh at they leave
out of their highly condensed descriptions they can expect their colleagues
to fill in mentally from their own similar experiences. Levinthal was undoubt-
edly able to visualize the preparative stages of the experiment because he
too had frequently done experiments that required growing bacteria on selected
media and lysing them. He may not have been familiar enough with the density
gradient centrifuge to reconstitute the experimental procedures mentally,
because that method had only recently been invented by Meselson and Stahl
(with some assistance from Jerome Vinograd). Levinthal had, however, read
their earlier paper describing the method, and corresponded with Meselon
on the question of whether the bands were at equilibrium. He would, there-
fore, have been able to supplement Meselson's description of the experiment
with his prior knowledge of the methods they used.
I suspect, however, that the "beauty" that Levinthal sensed in this experi-
me nt was less dependent on visualizing it in concrete detail than on his recog-

nition that in a single stroke it provided the decisive answer to a crucial
question that he had hirnself sought unsuccessfully to resolve. Abstracted from
both the tangible procedures of the centrifuge runs and the visual display of
the results, the beauty was concentrated on the sharpness and significance of
the outcome. Meselson hirnself seemed to be ex;pressing something similar
in his remark that it was "clean as a whistle".
There is one other written record of the response of colleagues who learned
about the Meselson-Stahl experiment from Meselson's letters before Meselson
and Stahl had written up a paper for publication. In February, 1958, Sydney
Brenner wrote from the Cavendish laboratory, where the double helix had
originated 5 years earlier, that he, Francis Crick, and others "were all very
excited to hear about your wonderful experiment with the light and heavy
DNA".19 Something "wonderful" is, according to the dictionary, something that
"excites wonder or astonishment".20 We might ask what scientists mean when
they call an experiment wonderful, and what is the relation between wonder
and beauty, but I will leave that question open for future examination.
III
Meselson and Stahl had to be prodded repeatedly by Max Delbrück to finish

their paper on "The Replication of DNA in Escherichia co/i". Although
Meselson began drafting pieces of it not long after the first successful experi-
ment, his progress was slow. He wrote and rewrote parts of it, and sometimes
procrastinated, feeling not quite ready to put it together. Stahl concentrated
on the analysis and repr~sentation of the data, but they consulted closely
about how to formulate their presentation. They gave a great deal of thought
to what the experiment meant, independent of the assumptions with which they
had approached it. As Meselson recalled in a conversation with me, "I spent
a long time trying to write down sentences which would say in the [most]
rigorous and briefest form, what it was that the experiment said".21 By the
beginning of May, 1958, when they had still not produced a paper, Max
Delbrück was, Meselson reported to Jim Watson, "in a near fury driving us
to finish writing in time for the May PNAS deadline".22 Despite this final rush,
the care that the authors had put into their writing is obvious in the product.
The clarity and economy of expression in the prose, as weIl as in the visual
representations that accompany the text, are exemplary. The beauty perceived
by those scientists who first encountered the Meselson-Stahl experiment by
reading this published account of it would be hard to separate from the beauty
of the paper.
More easily than the experiment itself, the beauty of the paper can still
be experienced. The aesthetic impact on us of a paper which has become a his-
toricallandmark of early molecular biology is undoubtedly different from what
it was on those who read it at the time the "replication problem" was a con-
troversial current issue; but with a little imagination we can place ourselves
in the position of someone reading it in 1958. Beauty recedes in summaries

or paraphrases, so I will not attempt to outline the paper, but I will quote
the three succinct "propositions" that could, according to the authors, "be drawn
regarding DNA replication under the conditions of the present experiment".
I . The nitrogen of a DNA moleeule is divided equally between two subunits wh ich remain
intact through many generations. The observation that parental nitrogen is found only in half-
labeled molecules at a11 limes after the passage of one generation demonstrates the existence
in each DNA molecule of two subunits containing equal amounts of nitrogen. The finding that
at the second generation half-Iabeled and unlabeled molecules are found in equal amounts
shows that the number of surviving parent molecules is twice the number of the parent mole-
cules initia11y present. That is, the subunits are conserved.
2. Following replication, each daughter molecule has received one parental subunit. The
finding that all DNA molecules are half-Iabeled one generation time after the addition of N 14
shows that each daughter molecule receives one parental subunit. If the parental subunits had
segregated in any other way among the daughter molecules, there would have been found at
the first generation some fully labeled and some unlabeled DNA molecules, representing those
daughters which received two or no parental subunits, respectively.
3. The replicative act results in a molecular doubling . This statement is a corollary of con-
clusions land 2 above, according to which each parent molecule passes on two subunits to
progeny molecules and each progeny receives just one parental subunit. It follows that each single
molecular act results in a doubling of the number of molecules entering into the act. 23
When we turn to the figures included in the paper we can more readily
arrive at a convergence between experimental beauty and commonly accepted
standards of visual beauty.
The published version of the previously shown photograph of the DNA
bands is shown in Figure 4. Now the results from the two completed experi-
ments have been intercalated to form one continuous series extending over four
bacterial generations. Beside the bands, which display their relative density
visually by their relative darkness, are microdensitometer tracings made by
Stahl, which transform into rigorous form the quantitative estimates of relative
densities originally estimated by Meselson by eye. We might discuss whether
the beauty of this figure resides in the "cleanness" of the data, and is there-
fore a form of intellectual beauty, or whether there are present visual patterns
that directly please the senses.
Figures 5 and 6 reproduce two diagrams prepared for the paper. The first
is a visual representation of the conclusions stated verbally in the three propo-
sitions quoted above. The second is a schematic rendition of the replication
mechanism of DNA proposed by Watson and Crick. The correspondence
between the two provides an immediate and powerful visual impression of
Meselson and Stahl's experimental answer to the replication question. If we
recall the diagrams Delbrück had used to illustrate the alternative possibili-
ties, we can see that the whole replication problem and its resolution are
represented in these diagrams.
In these two diagrams we encounter, more directly than in any other aspect
of the Meselson-Stahl experiment so far described, conventional canons of
beauty. Wh at is most immediately evident is the striking simplicity and
BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS 9S
Fig. 4. From Meselson and Stahl, "The Replication of DNA in Eseheriehia eoli".
symmetry of these two visual representations. Whenever beauty is referred

to other qualities rather than merely perceived, simplicity and symmetry are
two of the properties most often mentioned.
The earliest recorded response to Meselson and Stahl's paper came on
lune 3, from Maurice Wilkins, to whom Meselson had se nt a mimeographed
copy of the manuscript. Wilkins thanked Meselson for "the MSS describing
your elegant and definitive experiments," As a result of the experiment, he
added, "I personally begin to feel real confidence in the Watson and Crick
duplication hypothesis",24 The second senten ce foreshadows areaction that was
widespread after the paper appeared in print, and summarizes very nicely
the historical importance of the Meselson-Stahl experiment. 1 want to focus,
however, on the adjective "elegant" that Wilkins used. Scientists often apply
I
ORIGINAL
PARENT
IJ
MOLECULE
FIRST
GENERATION
IJ UJUJlI
DAUGHTER
MOLECULES
SECOND
GENERATION
DAUGHTER
MOLECULES
Fig. 5. From Meselson and Stahl, "The Replication of DNA in Escherichia coli".
ORIGINAL
PARENT
MOLECULE
FIRST
GENERATION
DAUGHTER
MOLECULES
SECONO
GENERATION
DAUGHTER
MOLECULES
Fig. 6. From Meselson and Stahl, "The Replication of DNA in Escherichia coli".
the word "elegant" to experiments or theories. Do they intend it to be a

synonym for beautiful, or is elegance one of the qualities by which beauty
is specified? Or is there a clear distinction between what scientists mean
when they call an experiment elegant and when they call it beautiful? When,
as in this case, both terms are applied to the same experiment, do they refer
to the same or to different qualities of the experiment?
Scientists active in the field in 1958 were most likely to leam about the
Meselson-Stahl experiment through correspondence, informal contacts,

symposia, or its description in Meselson and Stahl's original paper. Later
generations of molecular biologists and biochemists were more likely to
encounter it first in one of the pedagogical guises in which it has been appro-
priated by textbooks. Of the numerous textbook representations through which
the experiment has appeared during the past 3 decades, I will take as an
example the presentation in James Watsons' well-known Molecular Biology 01
the Gene (from the 2.d ed., of 1970). Watson gave abrief, two paragraph verbal
summary in his text, but more information about the sequence of experi-
mental operations is incorporated into the accompanying full-page diagram
reproduced in Figure 7.
Whether its symmetry and simplicity make this diagram itself visually beau-
tiful is dubious; but the description is very clear, and it is perhaps an effective
vehic1e to suggest something of the beauty of the experiment itself. Notice,
however, that in some respects the simplicity is achieved by misrepresentation.
The most obvious misrepresentation is that the swinging tubes of an ordinary
preparative centrifuge are substituted for the cells of the analytical ultracen-
trifuge. The former were undoubtedly more familiar to undergraduates, some
of whom may have operated such eentrifuges, but they look nothing like the
tight littIe eells with which the experiment was aetually conducted. The DNA
bands are shown as double helixes, obviously a symbolic rather than a literal
representation. Not so obvious to students, perhaps, is that the bands are shown
as directly observable in the centrifuge tube itself, and nothing is mentioned
about ultraviolet absorption spectra, optical systems, or photographic films.
Pedagogical simplicity is inevitably achieved at some eost to verisimilitude.
It would be interesting to examine to what extent the mental images of the
Meselson-Stahl experiment held by practicing biologists who are aware of
the historie significance of the Meselson-Stahl experiment, but who have
neither seen it performed nor read the original paper, resemble such simple
schematic diagrams more c10sely than they do the experiment that Meselson
and Stahl performed in Oetober, 1957.
In his text Watson did not identify the experiment in question as that
of Meselson and Stahl. In the literature references for the chapter, however,
he listed their artic1e with the comment that it was "a c1assie experiment in
molecular biology".25 A review artic1e on Deoxyribonuc1eic acid in Annual
Reviews 01 Biochemistry for 1963 also referred to the "c1assie experiment of
Meselson and Stahl" - a mere 5 years after its first publie presentation. 26
The adjective "classic" is frequently applied by scientists to greatly
admired experiments. The first dictionary definition (OED) of c1assic is "of
the first rank or authority: standard, leading".27 The designation may, there-
fore, be unrelated to beauty in experiments. Still , the long association with
Greek and Roman literature and art would lead us to think that aesthetic
overtones are also implied when experiments are called elassic. When the same
experiment has been called both beautiful and c1assic, can we infer that in some
sense it is thought to possess classic beauty?
Bacterie growing
in N·. All ih Transfer Conlinued growth
-
ONA is heavy. to N' medium in N" medium
~~----------------~V ~-----------------')
ONA isolaled Irom Ihe cell is mixed wilh C,CI .olulion
(6 M; den.ily - 1.7) and
Cenlriluge cell
!
ONA moleeules move 10
positions where their
densily equals Ihal 01
Solulion cenlr uged 01 very Ihe C.CI solulion. )
high speed fo - 48 hr
....,-,.----1 p = 1 65 p = 1 80
0".." 'O"~,~'"" ~~i [3: c"f* ~~ ~N' .'_lN· ·~h·~Y:b~r~,vd~oO~N~A~

1
of CsCI 01 Ihe oulside ·11 '
is due 10 ils sedimenlalian lei light ONA
under the centrifugal force. N~~""'~
The location 01 ONA moleeules within the cenlriluge cell can be determined by ultraviolel
o 8E
optics. ONA solution. absorb slrongly 01 2600 A.
Before transfer One cell generation Two cell generations

to N" after IransflOr 10 N" after transfer 10 N"
Fig. 7. From J. D. Watson, The Molecular Biology of the Gene, p. 272.
IV
What has it meant to Meselson and Stahl that their experiment is regarded
as beautiful? For both of them the beauty in the experiment is deeply feIt. Stahl
said in 1988 "I think it is one of the most beautiful experiments I've ever
seen, and I'm proud as hell to have been involved in it. Yes, it's gorgeous. And
I've been trying to do something half as pretty since".28 Meselson thought,

in 1987, that the beauty of the experiment was "very important". 29
But what are the qualities of this experiment that made it beautiful for them?
It was Meselson, whom I had in mind at the beginning of this paper, who
said simply "WeIl, I think nearly all important experiments are beautiful".30
Perhaps he had already expressed his aesthetic judgment in his initial report
to Watson that the results were "clean as a whistle". Stahl elaborated on this
quality of cleanness. "It's very rare in biology that anything comes out like
that. It's all so self-contained, so intemally self-supporting. Usually, if you 're
lucky to get a result in biology you then spend the next year doing all those
plausible controls to rule out other explanations; but this was just a self-
contained statement".31
I have begun to ask other biologists what they think is beautiful about the
Meselson-Stahl experiment. Here is the reply of Gunther Stent:
Weil, I don't know, it really teils the whole story. You have the heavy band, the light band, which
are the controls and then you have the band in between, halfway. I don't know whether I can
explain it, but it is in its simplicity. Any fool can see that immediately, you don't have to be
sophisticated. And that is true even among the sophomore students when I show them this. 32
Stent showed me aseries of large horne-made drawings that he had, until

recently, hung up on the wall each year when he lectured on the Meselson-
Stahl experiment. He described also how he would use the experiment to teach
a number of basic scientific concepts, such as the nature of chemical equilibria,
of density gradients, and of hydrostatics, in addition to the mode of replica-
tion of DNA.
A comparison of the comments of Stent with those of Meselson and of
Stahl illustrates how images of beauty depend on the context within which
the subject is viewed. Meselson and Stahl were describing the beauty of the
experiment as they experienced it after they had performed it. Stent was
describing its pedagogical beauty as he experienced it whenever he explained
it to a class of college sophomores. I hope to gather more images of this
beautiful experiment.
In arecent, thoughtful paper entitled "Truth and Beauty in Scientific
Reason", James McAllister contends that beauty is frequently a significant
factor in determining which theories scientists prefer. McAllister asserts that
one can isolate several "indicators ofbeauty", including, particularly, simplicity
and symmetry, which constitute the aesthetic criteria scientists apply to their
theories and hypotheses. Neither simplicity nor symmetry can, however, be
defined independently of the context in which scientists in a given field
within a given time period recognize these qualities in their theories and
their reasoning. 33 According to McAllister, the aesthetic qualities of theories
that have previously proven successful and fruitful guide the sensibilities of
a community of scientists in the perception of beauty in their current reasoning.
McAllister's view can, I believe, also be applied to the aesthetic qualities
scientists attach to experiments. If so, then in order to understand the aes-
thetic responses of molecular biologists and geneticists to the Meselson-Stahl

experiment, we should explore the previous investigations in these fields
that were taken to be beautiful. Such examples are not difficult to find, because
beauty was a quality highly valued within the ethos of the phage group
and among others who participated during the 1950s in the emergence of
molecular biology. The prototypical example of beauty, though it was not
immediately experimental, was the structure of the double helix itself. It
would, however, take me beyond the boundaries of my topic to compare the
Meselson-Stahl experiment with other "classics" of early molecular biology,
such as the Hershey-Chase experiment, or Seymour Benzer's studies of the
fine-structure of phage genetics, that were regarded by this same scientific
community as beautiful.
The simplicity displayed by the Meselson-Stahl experiment is in one sense
a surface phenomenon. The result can be expressed in an elegantly simple
form, and the central experimental operations can also be described simply.
Underlying each experimental operation, however, are more complex foun-
dations. Fully to explain the experiment entails understanding the operation
of a highly sophisticated ultracentrifuge, whose design and function involve
a great deal of physics, optics, theory of solutions, of the movements of
particles under resultant forces, chemical and hydrostatic equilibrium. The
optical arrangements in turn involve knowledge of absorption spectra and
the physical and chemical properties of DNA. Biologically, much knowledge
of the physiology and genetics of bacteria is incorporated into the experi-
ment. The use of 15N relies on prior knowledge of the physical and chemical
properties of isotopes. Underlying the replication problem itself are the theo-
retical and experimental structures of x-ray crystallography and the nature
of the chemical bond that Watson and Crick built into the double helix.
That this intrinsically complex experiment can nevertheless appear
extremely simple to someone like Gunther Stent is because all of these atten-
dant factors can be relegated to background knowledge - or, to use currently
fashionable language, can be black-boxed. They were shared with other con-
temporary experiments performed in the same field. When scientists in the
same or related fields form a mental image of the Meselson-Stahl experi-
ment, they need include in it only the way standard components are combined
in it to produce the novel features of this experiment. The simplicity and clean-
ness of the experiment appears immediate to them, because they need not
recapitulate to themselves, for example, all the steps in reasoning that connect
a picture of 3 dark bands spaced on a photographic film, with the 3 cate-
gories of "heavy", "intermediate", and "light" DNA.
The simplicity of the pedagogical presentation of the experiment is of a
different order. Students introduced to molecular biology for the first time may
not be prepared to connect the many background components to the salient
features of the experiment, so these complexities are eliminated. The result
is elementary, a simplicity that is superficial. The simplicity of the original
experiment, built on complexity, is, not elementary, but profound.
We may summarize this discussion with a simple old adage: beauty lies
in the eye of the beholder.
NOTES
I Gooding, D., Pinch, T. and Schaffer, S. (eds.), The Uses of Experiment (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
2 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) 1:171.
3 Matthew Meselson, conversation with author, Cambridge, Mass., 2 December 1987.

4 Judson, H. F., The Eighth Day ofCreation: Makers ofthe Revolution in Biology (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 188.

S Latour, B. and Woolgar, S., Laboratory Life: The Construction of Seientific Facts, 2d ed.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 45-53.

6 FrankIin W. Stahl, conversation with author, 10 July 1992, Woods Hole, Mass.
7 Watson, J. D. and Crick, F. H. C., 'Genetical implications of the structure of Deoxyribonu-
c1eic Acid', Nature 171: 965-966, 1953.
8 Max Delbruck to J. D. Watson, 14 April, 1953, 12 May, 1953, Max Delbruck Collection,
California Institute of Technology Archives.
9 Delbruck, M., 'On the replication of Desoxyribonuc1eic Acid (DNA)', Proc. Nat. Acad. Sei.
40: 783-788, on 785, 1954.
10 Ibid., pp. 787-788.
11 Stent, G. S. and Jerne, N. K., 'The distribution of parental phosphorus atoms among bacte-
riophage progeny', Proc. Nat. Acad. Sei. 41: 707-709, 1955.

12 Levinthal, C., 'The mechanism of DNA replication and genetic recombination in phage', Proc.
Nat. Acad. Sei. 42: 394-404, 1956.

13 Delbruck, M. and Stent, G., 'On the mechanism of DNA replication', in William D. McElroy
and Bentley Glass (eds.), A Symposium on the Chemical Basis of Heredity (BaItimore: The
Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), p. 699.
14 The narrative given in this and the following paragraphs has been reconstructed from the
Ultracentrifuge Notebook, the surviving films of the experiments recorded in that notebook,
and Meselson, M. and Stahl, F. W., 'The replication of DNA in Escherichia Coli', Proc. Nat.
Acad. Sei. 44: 671-682, 1958.
IS Meselson, conversation with author, 2 December, 1987.
16 Meselson described these routines, in concrete detail, in a conversation with the author, 20
May, 1992.
17 Cyrus Levinthal to M. Meselson, November 18, 1957, Meselson personal papers.
18 M. Meselson to J. D. Watson, 8 November, 1957, ibid.
19 Sydney Brenner to M. Meselson, 18 February, 1958, ibid.
20 SOED, 2, 2566.
21 M. Meselson, conversation with author, 2 December, 1987.

22 M. Meselson to J. D. Watson, May 18, 1958, Watson Archive, Cold Spring Harbor.
23 Meselson and Stahl, 'Replication of DNA', pp. 676-677.

24 Maurice H. F. WiIkins to M. Meselon, 3 June, 1958, Meselson personal papers.
2S Watson, J. D., Molecular Biology of the Gene, 2d. ed. (New York: W. A. Benjamin, Inc.,
1970), p. 298.
26 Kit, S., 'Deoxyribonuc1eic Acids', Ann. Rev. Biochem. 32: 64, 1963.
27 SOED, I, 345.
28 F. W. Stahl, conversation with author, 21 November, 1988.
29 M. Meselson, conversation with author, 2 December, 1987.

30 Ibid.
31 F. W. Stahl, conversation with author, 21, November, 1988.
32 Gunther Stent, conversation with author, 5 May, 1992.

33 McAllister, J. W., 'Truth and beauty in scientific reason', Synthese 78: 25-51, 1989.
MICHAEL LYNCH AND SAMUEL Y. EDGERTON, JR.
ABSTRACT PAINTING AND

ASTRONOMICAL IMAGE PROCESSING
FROM PICTORIAL SCHEMATA TO

(NON)REPRESENTA TIONAL TECHNIQUES
For ages, astronomers have sought to "envisage" the stars - that is, to imagine
them as if they were elose up, at the same distance from the viewer as ordinary
three-dimensional objects on earth. This has meant that all astronomers, par-
ticularly if they wished to communicate their sky-images to others, have had
to think of asterisms in the forms of traditional schemata, the accepted con-
ventions of picture-making in the astronomer's native culture at a given
historical time.
All over the world before the Italian Renaissance, culture-bound schemata
were limited to diagrammatic devices arranged in flat but aesthetically attrac-
tive patterns.that accorded with local myths about cosmology. The Babylonians
and Greeks preferred to see the various celestial formations as personified like-
nesses of gods and heroes, just like those painted and sculpted on their religious
monuments. The elassical names and images of these still persist in modem
Western civilization, prejudicing our perceptions to this very day. Indeed,
for those of us schooled in Western traditions of astronomy, it is practically
impossible not to see the constellation "Orion" in any other shape than that
of a striding chiton-elad Hellenic hunter drawing his bow. The ancient Maya,
on the other hand, would see the same stars as forming a great turtle with three
stones on its back. In sum, every civilization in the world has had its own
peculiar "visual language" for cataloguing heavenly bodies. A Chinese Taoist
would hardly have known what a Greek Aristotelian was trying to describe
(and vice-versa) if the two of them were ever together comparing their culture-
bound pictures of astronomy.
To be sure, the special "visuallanguage" invented in the Renaissance - wh at
we understand today as geometric linear perspective and chiaroscuro (light and
shadow rendering) - likewise had its roots in the unique cultural attitudes of
Christian Europe. Renaissance thinkers just like their medieval forbears were
ever trying to discern God's moral master plan for the universe. Euclidian
geometry and geometric optics, along with long forgotten practical applica-
tions of these elassical sciences to map making and theater stage construction,
were being retrieved continuously from antique sources, fueling as never before
the zeal of philosophers to rationalize in ever more visualizable detail how God
created the cosmos during the six days of Genesis. As Johannes Kepler
declared,
... the Creator, the true first cause of geometry ... always geometrizes ... [His] laws lie
within the power of understanding of the human mind; God wanted us to perceive them when
He created us in His image in order that we may take part in His own thoughts.'
103
A. I. Tauber (ed.). The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, 103-124.

104 MICHAEL LYNCH AND SAMUEL Y. EDGERTON, JR.
Notwithstanding such purely Christian cultural associations, Euclidian

geometry did (and still does) provide a quantitative explanation of how the
human eye receives light rays and then forms internal images-to-scale of the
external physical world. It is likewise a fact that Renaissance artists quickly
reapplied these ancient Euclidian tenets to the making of pictures, trans-
porting the geometric reconstruction of what the human eye beholds "retinally"
in three dimensions into techniques for producing the illusion of three-dimen-
sionality on a two-dimensional picture surface. To repeat: the "reality" of a
Renaissance-style perspective picture was constructed in ac cord with the
same principles that accounted for how visual images are optically formed
by the human eye.
Furthermore, the same geometrical optical rules used for constructing a per-
spectival picture also informed the construction of optical devices like the
telescope, while justifying how it was possible for a human being with normal
eyesight to look through an instrument and see the sky as uniformly magni-
fied. For the inheritors of the Renaissance "rationalization of sight",2 the ability
to understand a geometric perspective picture, just as the ability to compre-
hend what one sees through a telescope, is governed by the same universal
geometrical laws.
Thus it happened that Galileo Galilei of Renaissance Florence began to
observe the moon though ahorne-made telescope which he mounted on the
bell tower of the Venetian church of San Giorgio Maggiore during the winter
of 1609. After looking at the lunar disk for several months, he made a number
of ink-and-wash drawings of its phases, five of which were engraved and
published in his epochal book, Sidereus nuncius ("Starry Messenger").3 Two
of these are shown in Figure 1, as originally printed on facing pages. They
are the first illustrations ever published anywhere showing a heavenly body
not just as theorized in culture-bound diagrams, but recorded in a (more or
less) point-for-point scale replication of the visible lunar surface. Wh at con-
temporary vi ewers can still comprehend from the pictures alone, and what
Galileo took pains to explicate further in the words of his text, is that the
moon is essentially an unsmooth body, pocked and studded all over by con-
cavities and protrusions. Until Galileo's vivid illustrations showed otherwise,
everyone had thought the dark markings on the lunar face were only interna I
discolorations, and that the moon itself was of perfect spherical form and
composed of so me sort of unearthly ethereal substance.
Though crudely engraved for printing by an untalented journeyman,
Galileo's original pictures were rendered with consummate skill in the best
style and professional technique of High Renaissance art as then practiced
in Florence. Galileo, in fact, was hirnself an expert draughtsman, and was even
elected to the prestigious Accademia dei Disegno or - 'Academy of Drawing'
- to which the most famous painters and sculptors of his native city belonged.
Galileo's design clearly shows how weIl he understood the way that sunlight
differentiates a concave hoIlow from a convex protrusion (forming shadows
on one side of the former, and only on the opposite side of the latter). Because
PAINTING AND IMAGE PROCESSING 105
Fig. I. Two facing pages from Galileo's Sidereus nuncius, 16\0, showing the waxing and waning
moon. Courtesy of Jay M. Pasachoff, Field Memorial Professor of Philosophy, Williams College,
Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA.
Galileo had already practiced such perspective-projection exercises during

his youthful studies of geometry and optics, he was able to recognize instantly
that the mysterious markings on the magnified moon were not caused by
alabaster-like marbling as the traditional Aristotelians maintained, but by the
sun illuminating an irregular, opaque lunar plain, casting dark shadows into
deep valleys just as the Alps do in the earthly region of Bohemia! 4
Although Galileo suffered rejection and perseeution in later years beeause
of his theory that the earth revolved around its own axis as weIl as around
the sun, his stunning early revelation regarJing the moon's earth-like surfaee
was quiekly aeeepted by most eontemporary Europeans preeisely beeause it
was so easy to illustrate by means of eurrent pie tori al eonventions. Linear
perspeetive and chiaroscuro shadow-rendering had been the stuff of European
art and printed-book illustration already for a eentury and a half. Onee pointed
out in now eommonplaee perspeetive pietures, the new image of the moon
which Galileo proclaimed made eommon sense. Even the lesuits were eom-
pe lIed to believe that what Galileo beheld through his teleseope was just as
optieally plausible, and therefore just as "real", as the impeeeable Catholie
miracles then being seulpted and painted in the ehurehes of Rome by great
Baroque artists like Gian Lorenzo Bemini.
Linear perspeetive, after all, presumes the vi ewer is standing fixed and
immobile - the ideal position from which to examine eaeh phase of the mo on
in separate, static images. On the other hand, Galileo's later theory eon-
cerning the earth's rotating motion was not so conducive to Renaissance-

style illustration, which may be one reason why it met immediate hostile
resistance.
By the eighteenth century, in any case, geometric linear perspective rep-
resentation was so universally accepted in Western Europe that everyone
believed that all natural (and even supernatural) phenomena could be revealed
by its rules. Sir Isaac Newton especially agreed with the perspective premise
that the viewer is ever fixed and immobile. In fact, that is the foundation of
his famous arguments concerning the laws of celestial motion; the measuring
ob server must always imagine himself standing motionless in absolute time
and space as he calculates the velocity and direction of moving bodies.
In the early nineteenth century, photography was invented as a purely
mechanical means far making Renaissance-style pictures, thereby intensi-
fying the equation between linear perspective geometry and absolute visual
"realism".5 It could be said, however, that the optical structure of the first
picture-making camera was arbitrary in this respect. Louis-Jacques Daguerre
(or William Henry Fox Talbot) could just as weIl have used a concave instead
of a convex lens as his focussing device, thereby producing images equally
correct optically, yet "distorted" by conventional pictorial standards. Thus,
Daguerre's original "photographic realism", ever since embraced as received
truth, is only relative in so far as it deliberately replicates the geometric
optics of a linear perspective picture. In truth, early photographic devices could
just as easily have lent their mechanical imprimatur to the "reality" of those
weirdly abstract shapes imagined by the avant-garde Expressionist and Futurist
painters of the early twentieth century.
What astrange coincidence, therefore, that at almost the same place and
time - in France, England, and Germany during the second quarter of the nine-
teenth century - doubts began to be raised about the validity of some of
Newton's concepts; simultaneously, on the one hand, by scientists discov-
ering exceptions to his laws of gravity and absolute space, and on the other,
by artists dissatisfied with the "absolute reality" of Renaissance perspective.
Curiously, these two unprecedented forces of perceptual revision in Western
culture arose quite independently of one another. In spite of numerous recent
attempts by historians of both art and science to trace some interconnecting
influence, there is not a shred of evidence that ideas or inspiration were
ever exchanged between, say, the seminal late-nineteenth century Modernist
painter, Paul Cezanne, and any of the revolutionary non-Euclidian mathe-
maticians whose lives overlapped his own, like Karl Friedrich Gauss, Nicholas
Lobatchevsky, and Bernhard Riemann, not to mention Albert Einstein.
In fact, as Hermann Minkowski, one of the most prominent scientists
involved with Einstein and the developing theory of relativity, lamented,
there were no adequate means at hand - that is, none that turn-of-the-century
scientists trusted - for legibly illustrating (and thereby advertising) the
extraordinary concept of spatial curvature in picture. Even the recently
invented half-tone print, making it now possible to publish photographs of
spectacular astronomical events like Halley's Comet of 1910 in the mass media,
was of Httle help in explaining the new concepts. Unfortunately too, the parallel
revolutionary painting styles so influenced by Cezanne - the Cubists and
Futurists for example - were scorned as cultural anarchists (the unkindest
cuts of all often coming from astronomers and physicists). 6 It was probably
at just about this time that the "two cultures" thesis, later defined by C. P. Snow
as a polarizing split between traditional "liberal arts" and the ever more
arcane mathematical sciences, reared its Byzantine double-head in the realm
of academe. Ironically, this happened at the very moment that artists and
scientists expressed similar desires to find appropriate "new languages" for
visualizing the same ideas. Apparently, however, the revolutionary artists were
more interested in what scientists were doing than vice versa, and, unlike
Galileo, the scientific innovators of the period did not directly apply techniques
developed first by artists.
In 1914, for instance, the Italian artist Giacomo Balla painted a picture
entitled The Transit 0/ Mercury Across the Sun (Figure 2). What had inspired
Balla was not just the astronomical event per se, but the notion of speed and
Fig. 2. Painting by Giacomo BalJa, Mercury Passing Befare the Sun, 1914. Courtesy of the
Collezione Gianni Mattioli, Milan, Italy (See also colorplate 11).
space beyond all earthly comprehension, the dynamics of huge planetary bodies
hurtling through endless vacuum at unimaginable velocities. In fact, there
was quite a vogue in the popular press at the time for Jules Verne-type stories
about the "fourth dimension" and imaginary journeys to the stars. For the
Futurists in particular, the new physics of speed heralded a whole new era
of visual and artistic perception completely negating the old aesthetics of
EuclidianJRenaissance perspective.
Compare Balla's picture to a later photograph (Figure 3) taken through an
optical telescope in 1973, showing the same planet once more in the act of
transiting the sun's face. There is no doubt that the painting shows the event
(which repeats every 339 days) far more intensely, both in color and action,
than the fixed-focus lens of the camera. Indeed, the latter's "truth" makes
Mercury so tiny as to render the entire cosmic drama more like a dispropor-
tionate, innocuous nature mort, hardly appropriate to our attempts to imagine
the miracle of planetary motion, happening at egregious speeds 93,000,000
miles away from any minuscule human eye (or its mechanical surrogate) on
earth.
In spite of recalcitrant opposition (often coming from scientists), avant garde
pictorial abstraction and its concomitant anti-Renaissance perspective aesthetics
was gaining ever more favor among the art-appreciating public in Western
Europe and America by the mid-twentieth century. The relevant modes of
Fig. 3. Photography by Dr. Fred Espenak, Mercury Transits the Sun, November 10, 1973.
Courtesy of Dr. Espenak, Planetary Sytsems Branch, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA (See also colorplate 12).
"transmission" here, however, was no longer limited to the realm of "ideas"

or cultural schemata, but included films, mass advertising, and electronic media
technologies through which images were composed, reproduced, combined,
and disseminated. In the post-war period, the mass media, quick to take advan-
tage of anything "new", especially began to adopt the evolving conventions
of "Modem Art", such as the use in its advertising and cover lay-outs of
flattened, brightly-colored, overlapping shapes as invented by the Cubists,
and the pointilliste effect of breaking up color fields into small dots or patches
of contrasting complementaries as practiced by the French Impressionists.
In contemporary times, even persons who have no particular interest in "high
art", but who have access to mass media productions, can hardly avoid
exposure to the latest computer graphics wizardry, where images decomposed
into digital bits respond instantly to the commands of a programmer. We
become accustomed to seeing hybrid images that combine photographic realism
with cartoon simulation; images whose rapidly changing shapes and "false
colors" no longer respect the laws of fixed perspective and natural color.
Themes like the erosion of the reality/simulation distinction, the emphasis
on speed and change, and the heterogeneity and hybridization of representa-
tional possibilities have become emblematic of "post-modemity", although
it can be argued that they are no less characteristic of "modem" artistic devel-
opments beginning over a century ago. Late nineteenth and early twentieth
century visionary experiments with color, light, composition, decomposition,
abstraction, and montage are now realized through a more commonplace pro-
duction of high-speed digital images.
MODERN ART AND DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING
Modem science and technology have of course become prevalent themes in

modem art and literature. Most often in discussions of the modem art-science
connection, artistic developments are treated as parasitic upon, or reactive
to, the novelties and hazards of technoscientific development. 7 Modem science,
it seems, obeys its own laws, and generates its discoveries and technological
innovations without reference to art. Several years ago, however, we beg an
to see a different connection between science, art, and technology. Instead
of seeing actual or imaginable science and technology as representational
contents of pictorial or literary work, we began to appreciate how scientists,
working with new imaging technologies, were using artistic vocabularies and
making aesthetic judgments when they composed images for analysis and
publication. In the remainder of this chapter, we describe how practitioners
of the ancient science of astronomy not only are exposed to a modem milieu
of professional and vulgar art, they also make use of much of the same
image-making and image-processing technologies that media production
specialists and computer artists have grown accustomed to using. Even if
they have paid relatively little heed to the claims of modem art, contempo-
rary astronomers have been see king new modes of image processing in order
to visualize the range of optical and non-optical phenomena "seen" through

powerful telescopes and satellite detectors. Specifically, they have begun to
make use of digital equipment to collect, compose, and reconfigure electro-
magnetic data into sensible pictorial images.
Dur interest in image processing in contemporary astronomy was inspired
by an impression that color-enhanced and false color images of astronomical
phenomena often resemble paintings by artists in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century. We wondered whether Seurat's pointillism, Monet's
experiments with light effects, and Kandinsky's and Klee's abstract expres-
sionism somehow had an influence on scientists and technicians working at
computer terminals many decades later. To follow up on this possibility, we
decided to visit places where astronomers work on images, and to talk with
practitioners about the "aesthetic" judgments they make while doing so. The
astronomers who were kind enough to meet with us were based at two image
processing facilities in the greater Boston area, both of which we repeatedly
visited over a two year period. 8 These were an image processing laboratory
in the Boston University Astronomy Department, and the Imaging Processing
Facility (IPF) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics. During
the visits we engaged in extended conversations with directors, staff
researchers, research assistants, and technicians. Most of these discussions
occurred while the researchers were analyzing data and preparing exhibits
for books, articles and public presentations. Typically, while speaking with
us, the astronomers demonstrated equipment and software functions which they
used to exhibit and analyze phenomena under investigation. We were pleased
to find that they were quite willing and very able to speak of how "art" and
"aesthetics" were relevant to their work.
We learned that with the introduction of digital equipment and software
for recording and processing optical, radio and X-ray data, astronomy has
become a laboratory science. To a large extent, astronomers have come down
from the mountaintop, as they nowadays spend a great deal of their time at
image processing laboratories, often located at university campuses. At such
facilities they work with data recorded from remote observatories or beamed
down from orbiting detectors. Image processing laboratories are constructed
around key items of equipment, including mainframe and stand-alone com-
puters, digitizers, and specialized interfaces. Many astronomers conduct much,
if not aIl, of their research at such facilities, where they and their technical
assistants compose and modify images at computer keyboards while trying out
various prepackaged and custom-designed software programs for visualizing
data on television monitors.
TypicaIly, the astronomers we vi si ted worked alone or in groups of two
or three when analyzing their data or preparing figures for publication. Their
work stations were crammed with different kinds of technology for "trans-
lating" photographic and electomagnetic data into numerical arrays, maps, and
differently configured pictures. 9 The equipment included terminals connected
to mainframe computers as weIl as stand-alone image processors. The com-
puters were outfitted with specialized accessories like a large and sensitive
"track ball" for manipulating images on a screen, and a "touch screen" tele-
vision monitor for keying standard software functions by touching the
appropriate sec tor on the face of the screen. Other hardware included equip-
ment for converting digital signals into color slides, and also doing the
opposite: turning photographs into digital data. Some of the software was
used in the form of "packages" like the Astronomical Imaging Processing
System (AlPS), but these packages were frequently modified by local staff.
When working on a project, astronomers and technicians also consulted various
printed sources, including observational log books, astronomical charts and
sky surveys, published articles, and software manuals.
Astronomers and image processing specialists thus surrounded themselves
with an intertextual array when they analyzed data. With the equipment at hand
they could convert "raw" data into processed images in order to more easily
"see the physics" and prepare figures for publication. By using different tech-
nologies and software functions they were able to command immediate
adjustments of color pattern, orientation, scale, contrast, and other features
of a televisual field. By producing a continuous play of images developed from
a data frame, they could "bring out" or visually highlight different gestalts
in a field of optical, ultraviolet, radio, or X-ray radiation, and they could
also combine images additively to enhance a given intensity gradient, or to
compose montages showing different ways of displaying and analyzing "the
same" data. The "artist" at the keyboard, much like Monet at his canvas,
was able to hold the subject constant while composing aseries of contrasting
images that systematically exposed a radiant atmosphere. As a consequence
of these eidetic variations, the viewer's understanding of the original subject
literally is placed in a new light, and the fields of light themselves become
the subject. lo
Similar image processing technologies are used to "handle" digital data
collected from different regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. For sim-
plicity's sake, in this paper we shall focus on the more traditional area of
ground-based optical (visible light) astronomy. Optical astronomers continue
to make use of reflecting and refracting telescopes and emulsion photog-
raphy. Increasingly, however, they work with digital data produced by scanning
emulsion photographs with a digitizer at the image processing center, or by
directly attaching a CCD (Charge-coupled device) camera to an observatory
telescope. A CCD is a postage-stamp sized computer chip that acts like a
photographic plate, only instead of being composed of light-sensitive grains
in an emulsion, its surface is made up of an array of thousands of picture
elements (pixels) arranged in a rectangular grid. Each pixel collects photons
for abrief interval and transforms the aggregate into a digital electronic
signal which represents a level of "intensity" at a point in the field. 11 Light
from a celestial field focused by a telescope is thus collected by the CCD, con-
verted into digital electromagnetic signals, and "dumped" on to a storage
tape in the form of a linear record of the light intensities recorded at each pixel.
At image processing centers, the digitally encoded da ta are displayed on

television monitors in the form of visible pictures, graphs, maps, and numer-
ical arrays. A data frame can be "read" and displayed in various ways; for
example, as an array of numbers representing an intensity gradient, or as a
series of intensity maps using contour lines, shades of gray, or contrasting
colors. Endless possibilities are available for visually displaying a given array
of intensity values. Take, for example, a digital picture of Halley 's comet during
it's rather disappointing "visit" to our region of the solar system in 1986.
When viewed through a set of binoculars or an amateur's optical tele-
scope, the 1986 incarnation of Halley's comet appeared to be a fuzzy star,
or at best a faint streak more concentrated at one end and diffuse at the other.
Long-exposure emulsion photographs taken through high-resolution telescopes
exhibited a much more sharply focused, vivid, and delicately configured mono-
chromatic objecl. In contrast, the below picture is brilliantly "false-colored"
(to use an astronomers' idiom), and it also has a striking pointillist quality
like Seurat's Eiffel Tower (Figure 5). The astronomer who supplied the picture
for Figure 4 remarked casually that this generation's children may come to
remember the spectacular false colored images of Halley's comet that were
circulated in the popular press, forgetting that the "real" comet had no such
color. A similar worry has been expressed about the "color enhanced" pictures
of the planets and planetary moons that became popularized when Voyageur
11 passed by Jupiter and Saturn. 12 The brilliantly swirling red spot of Jupiter
Fig. 4. Digital Image of Halley's Comet. M. MendiIIo and J. Baumgardner (Boston University)
1986 (See also colorplate 13).
Fig. 5. Painting by Georges Seurat, Eiffel Tower, c. 1889. Courtesy of the Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, Museum Purchase, William H. Noble Bequest Fund, 1979 (See
also colorplate 14).
and the pizza-like surface of the voIcanic mo on 10 will be etched in our

memories, but not a "more realistic" array of dull yellows and muted con-
trasts that would simulate what an orbiting astronaut might see.
In digital image processing, false colors are used to "translate" specific
intensity values into colors selected from a "palette" (again an astronomers'
idiom). The palette, or look-up table, is aseries of colors corresponding to
different levels of intensity, much in the way colors are sometimes used to
represent elevation in terrestrial relief maps.13 In Figure 4, dark blue is used
for the lowest intensity values, with light blue, green yellow, red, and white
for progressively higher intervals of recorded intensity. The correspondence
between intensity values and colois is arbitrary: there is no set limit on the
number of colors (or gray scale"values) available, nor is there any limit to
the number of contour intervals selected. Any of the available colors can be
used to represent a given intensity value or interval. In this case, like many
others we have seen, the color composition is conventional, and quasi-natu-
ralistic, with a dark blue "sky" placed in the background, and the brighter parts
of the field being colored yellow, red and white. It would be just as easy,
however, for an image processing technician to "paint" the comet as a char-
treuse streak superimposed on a magenta sky. Indeed, when composing and
recomposing the data at an image processing center, astronomers often produce
such unconventional images, sometimes in order to expose "structure" by
means of a play of contrasts, and sometimes simply to play.14
There is, of course, no absolute limit to the "traditional" ways a comet
can be seen, drawn or photographed, and the historical record shows inter-
esting variations in the way comets have been described, sometimes as
"fireballs" trailed by smoke, or as anthropomorphic heads trailed by curved
rainbow-like tails. In emulsion photography, different filters, grain sizes,
exposure times, and developing techniques can be used to compose grainy
or smooth pictures, using "true", "enhanced" or "false" colors, and exposing
any of an indefinite range of contrasting features. By developing a time-Iapse
series, like nature photographers, astronomers can show a progression of
changes in the shape and internal configuration of the subjecL Digital image
processing adds tremendous speed to existing possibilities for resolving aseries
of photographic compositions, while losing some of the resolution of emulsion
photography. The grainy, pointillistic quality of the digital image in Figure 4
can be attributed to the relatively rough resolution of the data, but that is
only part of the story. If we were to watch carefully while an astronomer
"plays" with the image in real time on a video monitor, while rolling a track
ball to try out different color-intensity translations, we would see a "movie"
of a distinctive kind. With each turn of the track ball , and with each new
command the astronomer "punches in" at the keyboard, we would see a con-
tinuous series of different compositions of "the same thing" (Figure 6).
Aseries of images composed at a computer terminal is not a time-Iapse
story of the naturalistic object's changes over time; rather, it tells a story of
aseries of technical interventions. Figure 6, for instance, shows a succes-
si on of differently colored and textured fields. Other series, can be composed
by rotating and zooming-up features, and arrays of variously exposed or
occluded features and structures. A grainy or blocky image, such as the one
shown in Figure 4, in an instant can be turned into a "smoothed" image,
where abrupt breaks between the intensity values of adjacent pictures are
averaged-out, and the resultant picture appears to be less fragmented. If the
hands in charge of the keyboard so choose, the color can also be made to appear
more naturalistic, mimicking the composition of a black-and-white or color
photograph. Given the fact that a more "traditional" rendering could just as
easily have been composed, the picture we see in Figure 4 is by no means
Fig. 6. Color Processing of Electronics Galaxy Image. University of Hawaii, IFA (See also
colorplate 15).
an inevitable product of the technology. Digital image processing technology

facilitates the production of the particular form and visible 'predicates' of
the picture, but it does not explain why just that composition is the one
chosen for display.
When selecting a figure for analysis or display, astronomers freeze the
flux of images and create a still frame. At this point, selected images are
stabilized in a way that "orients" simultaneously to objective claims being
made about them and the prospective audiences to which they may be shown.
When preparing an image for specialized publications, so me practitioners (par-
ticularly those we spoke to at Harvard-Smithsonian) tend to produce graphic
and rnonochromatic images, rather than brightly colored spectacles. Partly, this
has to do with the costs publishers charge for including color plates in small-
circulation journal articles, but we were also told that the technical community
would take (literally) a dirn view of images with wild color contrasts that do
not immediately index technically accountable features. The same astronomers
said they feIt much freer to produce colorful spectacles when composing
slide shows and illustrating semi-popular texts and magazine articles, or
preparing an eye-catching cover photo for a proposal submitted to Congress.
Not all astronomers suppressed the use of color when displaying pictures for
technical purposes, however. For example, Figure 7, _which was produced by
aBoston University group, shows a characteristic "cartoon" style of false-color
rendering which incorporates different modes of representation within the same
field.
The contrasting colors have more than a stylistic appeal in this case, as
they also produce "reality effects" that enhance a particular understanding of
the object. Notice how the yellow-green regions of the comet's tail see m to
divide into two streams. This visual feature was "teased out" by setting the
break between the green part of the palette and the slightly lower-intensity
light-blue region, so that it exposes very slight variations in brightness. With
a different adjustment, the tail could just as easily be shown to be a uniform
green or blue field. In this case, the color was used deliberately to exhibit a
"two-tailed" configuration congruent with aseries of numerical measure-
ments beamed back to earth from a Russian "space probe" which traversed
a path through the comet's tail. The image in Figure 7 was constructed at
Fig. 7. Comet Giacobini-Zinner. M. Mendillo and J. Baumgardner (Boston University) Sept.

12, 1985 (See also colorplate 16).
the image processing laboratory by rolling the trackball to adjust the relation
between the colors on the palette and the recorded intensity values of the image,
while watching the screen until the "feature" was maximally exposed. The
evident split between the two components of the tail that was exposed is "valid"
in the sense that it can be corroborated by independent measures, but at the
same time the picture is designed to maximize a visible discontinuity that gives
sensual form to a nominal designation ("two tailed comet").
MECHANISTIC ART
The "crafting" of scientific images is largely responsive to local considera-

tions: available publication formats, anticipated audiences, and properties of
phenomena being exhibited. Even if they can be said to involve "art", the
constituent practices have no immediate relation to the professional "world"
of art studios, museums and galleries. Nevertheless, as stated above, we noticed
striking similarities between selected non-objective paintings and digital
images. In our judgment these are due to a complex interaction between the
particular technologies used and tacit conventions for making sensible and
attractive depictions of celestial objects. The operator of an image processing
system can manipulate the colors and values of the CCD image in virtually
any way he or she pleases, although, like with any computer system, some
modes of action are more readily accomplished than others. The user makes
aesthetic choices from among standard (or, for ski lIed programmers, non-
standard) menus for selecting colors, composing textures, framing features,
imposing scales, and establishing gestalt coherences. Images are thus con-
structed from proto-semiotic design elements that are abstracted from the object
of reference, and which "express" a kind of machinic sensibility. Consequently,
some digital images resemble "non objective" paintings, like those of Wassily
Kandinsky or Paul Klee (see Figure 8, compare to Figure 6). Such resemblances
do not necessarily indicate that a Zeitgeist was transferred directly, after a
several decade lag, from the art world to the world of science. Although
some of the astronomers with whom we spoke were familiar with modemist
artistic movements, and so me of them had artistic skills and interests, the
key to the novel modes of image production and processing was the local
use of digital technology and software.
When they compose images for professional purposes, astronomers are
not directly aiming to produce artistic effects, to be appreciated as such, so
much as they are working through a medium that tends to inscribe a "mech-
anistic" style to the images produced. The astronomers' actions are thus situated
in a cyberspace that implicitly embodies a modernist fascination with the
machine. But rather than portraying or parodying the representational theme
of the machine, as so many artists have done over the past century, the
scientist-artist acts creatively to project and extend a mechanistic vision. The
decomposition of the visual field into uniform and repeating "picture elements",
the electronic brush-strokes through which the user "paints" or modifies an
Fig. 8. Painting by Wassily Kandinsky, Color Studies: Squares with Concentric Rings, GMS
446, c. 1913. Courtesy of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany (See also
colorplate 18).
image pixel-by-pixel, and various other programmed interventions mediated

by keyboard commands, tend to create uniform, geometric, and primary-colored
fields that recall modern artistic experiments with form abstracted from
content. 15
The machinic "perception" of the CCD camera produces a regime of signs
that evokes, not the snapshot vision of the Renaissance eye peering at a
scene, but a robotic or even industrial repetition of gestures that composes a
field of light and motion (see Figure 9). The imaginary machineries of per-
ception on ce created by artists are now paralleled by the lived-machines at
the image processing centers. We are not arguing that the technology alone
determines what astronomers perceive and represent, but that the ready-to-hand
facilities at the image processing center tend to "prejudice" the user to con-
struct stylistically coherent visualizations of a universe, which are tailor made
to suit the tastes of various audiences. The following list identifies a set of
distinctive features of digital images that link them stylistically to "non-
objective" paintings:
1. The use of repeating patches or geometric blocks of primary color to
compose a visual field.
Fig.9. M-87 (Anonymous) (See also colorplate 17).
2. The flattening of the visual field.

3. A merging of ieonie, graphie, and semiotie features within the frame of
a pietorial field.
4. A shift from a realistie interest in the eorrespondenee between image feature
and objeetive property, to a foeus on the diachronie "play" between images.
5. A sensitivity to motion and energy rather than surfaee and static form.
To an extent, these features are automatie by-produets of the way a digital
eamera resolves a field into pieture elements. But, the teehnology by itself does
not determine what astronomers do with the resultant images to represent extra-
galaetic eelestial reality. The way they approach their own teehnological
image-making proeedures paralleIs, however inadvertently, the way the early
modemists struggled to adapt the oil-paint medium to the representation of
newly diseovered "spaeetime" phenomena during the early years of this
eentury. Espeeially when exhibiting pietures in "popular" fora, astronomers
orient to their and their editorial advisors' views of what will impress the
modem audienee. This implieitly brings into play the artistie legacies in terms
of whieh the image is eonstrueted and appreeiated.
CONCLUSION
Astronomical image processors who are every day setting standards for this
new procedure take advantage, however unwittingly, of the obvious fact that
modem painting during the 1900-1920 period had long since established and
institutionalized a number of well-accepted conventions for signifying the non-
Euclidian visual anomalies they wish to illustrate. Strange as it may seem,
the tenets of early twentieth-century abstract painting - intended originally
to reveal a subjective "reality" adverse to and beyond the "scientifically
verifiable objectivity" of Renaissance perspective - have finally been adopted
by modem scientists, see king ever to explain their complex work to an ignorant
public. When presenting visual displays of their work to popular audiences
they often resort to currently acceptable pictorial conventions. Abstract art,
in spite of being once reviled as perversely "unreal", has now become blandly
conventional, not to speak of commercial. Even in the modem era, public
faith in the "truth to nature" of scientific products - and support of scien-
tific projects - depends on the imagery of spectacular and novel objects.
Today, the "publics" for astronomical images are various. Some images
are prepared for semi-popular publications like Scientific American, or pro-
motional slide shows designed to persuade members of the public and
congressional committees to support such projects as the Hubble space
telescope. "Modem Art", nurtured now by nearly a century of media popu-
larization, is an inseparable part of our cultural landscape. Whether or not
they are skilled in art, or familiar with art history, scientists and their audi-
ences tacitly know how to see arbitrarily colored two-dimensional compositions
of abstract geometric shapes as intelligible forms and iconic signifiers. Sensible
pictures are no longer limited to what can be rendered in illusionistic
Renaissance-style linear perspective.
Although the connection to modem art is striking, astronomy has not lost
its connection to traditions of photographic realism and naturalism. Some
astronomers, such as one we interviewed extensively, prefer to use their digital
equipment to simulate wh at they believe are the "true" colors of the plane-
tary and galactic objects they investigate. They are faced with a paradox that
may be familiar to artists: how to make a visual exhibit of what is essen-
tially invisible.
The astronomer who made the picture in Figure 10 admitted that he "cheats"
a bit - but only a bit - when he assigns colors to the data. The colors we
see are "slightly enhanced" from what we would see with a high-powered
optical telescope. In fact, these colors are manufactured by a program that
assigns red, green, and blue primaries both to visible and invisible (near-
infrared) light collected by the array of pixels in a CCD device. The machinery
simulates what the astronomer would have us see as the "natural" objecL In
this case, the astronomer romanticizes the object; presenting us with a color
enhanced version that is also highly worked-over to remove what he calls
"cosmetic defects" reflecting the operations of the machinery.
Fig. 10. Galaxy N4631. Rudolph Schild, H. S. Astro. Observatory (See also colorplate 19).
In many cases, the "raw data" are blocky and robotic in appearance, and
the astronomer repeatedly retouches them to smooth out the blocky contours.
The programming is also used to sharpen the scattered configurations of light
to pack the figure back into what the object is supposed to look like. If you
permit us some metaphoric license, the astronomer's hand at the keyboard
interacts with the "robotic eye" to bring the mechanized-vision into line
with assumptions about what the object should look like. A residue of "arti-
fact" is edited out of the picture, as the scene becomes progressively
naturalized. The resultant images are often "humanized" in a nostalgic and
romantic way.
It has often been pointed out that twentieth century artists have been
fascinated with the imagery of science and technology. It is not just that they
portray modem machinery and novel phenomena associated with scientific dis-
coveries (bubble chamber tracks, helical struCtures, and planetary landscapes).
They enact (and sometimes parody) the very workings of a machinic author-
ship: maehine rhythms, exaetly repeating motions and traees, chunky or bloeky
productions, geometrie regularity, and so forth.
To some extent inhabitants of our culture have developed a taste for the
artificiality and 'unreality' of computer graphics, Day-Glo color, and piston-
like drumbeats, so that astronomers, when presenting their images to a public
can appeal to such tastes for a kind of mechanistic glitter. Consequently, art
not only follows after science, it creates a cultural context in which scien-
tific work is developed. The astronomers we spoke to acknowledge that they
spend a great deal of their time making "pretty pictures" for presenting to
contemporary audiences. So, in at least one sense, they shape their work to
appeal to existing popular tastes. But, as we have seen, there is no single
style or standard for using digital image processing to make appealing images.
In many cases the same machinery is used to reduce the blockiness, artifi-
cial color, and other "unreal" features of a data frame while simulating more
traditional naturalistic images composed of rounded contours and more muted
tones. Although "natural" in style or appearance, such compositions are no
more or less simulated than are the "loud" false-colored and blocky forms.
Unlike some of the more radical experiments in twentieth century painting,
astronomical image processing never entirely becomes an exercise in pure non-
objective expression. In one way or another, the images retain a referent.
Astronomers are thus "conservative" artists, who go only so far when ven-
turing into the free play of color and form enabled by their image processing
technology. But since there are so many possibilities for making 'realistic'
images, and so few standards for how to represent invisible arrays of X-ray
data or ionic emissions, astronomers are faced with having to "make" their
objects at the same time that they reveal what those objects are. In that sense,
they are thrown into a partly autonomous world of artistic creativity.
University 0/ West London, Brunel

Williams College
NOTES
1 As quoted in Holton (1973, pp. 84-85).

2 Ivins (1973).
3 Edgerton (1991, pp. 223-254).
4 Ga1ilei (1989 [1610]: 1610: p. 10v; 1989: p. 47). For an excellent analysis of how Galileo
was able to iIIustrate what he saw through his telescope, see Winkler and Van Heldon (1992:
195-217).
5 Szarkowski (1989, pp. 11-35).
6 Henderson (1983).
7 Waddington (1970), for example, gives virtually no consideration to the idea that modern
art may have led science, and in a more recent discussion of the connection, Vitz and Glimcher
(1984) go only so far as to theorize that modern art and science developed along parallel psy-
chological tracks.
8 Most of the information was collected du ring the summers of 1986 and 1987. Michael Lynch's
part in the project during the latter summer was supported by aNational Endowment for the
Humanities Summer Stipend (Ref: PT -29556-87, July-August, 1987). Michael Mendillo of Boston
University, and Matthew Schneps, Rudy Schild, Christine Jones, and Fred Seward of the Harvard-
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory were particularly helpful for our purposes. For an account
of this research, see Lynch and Edgerton (1988).
9 In social studies of science, the term "translation" often is used metaphorically to refer to
various rhetorical and strategic maneuvers through which innovators attempt to enlist and
extend support for their ventures (Latour, 1987, pp. 108ff.; Star and Griesemer, 1989). Our
use of the term in the present context is also metaphoric, but in a more restricted way, refer-
ring to various technical transformations of electronic data into numerical, graphic, and pictorial
images.
10 Walter Benjamin initially raised the topic of how mechanical modes of image reproduction
change the "aura" associated with the "original" work of art and its subject (Benjamin, 1969).
Image processing in science not only "reproduces" an artistic subject, it reconfigures and respec-
ifies what the subject is, or always was, as weil as the different "appearances" under which it
can be viewed (Lynch, 1991).
I I Other measures besides intensity can also be made.
12 For a discussion of how the color-enhanced images from Voyageur compare to the " actual"
colors of the planets and planetary moons, see Young, 1985.
13 Colors and other visual features can also be used to index other qualities, such as spectral
frequency and polarization, but for the sake of simplicity we discuss the common use of color
to index light (or x-ray, radio, etc.) intensity.
14 One astronomer showed us a collection of " artistic" renderings of data that he distinguished
from his "scientific" images. These were wildly colored, stretched, and otherwise reconfigured
images of galaxies, supernovae remnants, and other "interesting objects" that the practitioner
cJaimed he would never dare exhibit "seriously" to other astronomers.
15 For an interesting discussion of the relationship between the theme of mechanization in
science, the factory, and the studio, see Giedion (1948, pp. 14-30).
REFERENCES
Benjamin, Walter, 'The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' , in W. Benjamin,
Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 217-251.
Edgerton, Samuel Y, The Heritage of Giotto' s Geometry: Art and Scienee on the Eve of the
Seientific Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Galilei, Galileo, Sidereus Nuncius, trans. by Albert Van Helden (Chicago; Venice: University
of Chicago Press; Tomasco Baglione, 1989[ 1610]).
Giedion, Siegfried, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948).
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern
Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
Holton, Gerald, Thematie Origins of Seientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1973).
Ivins, William, On the Rationalization ofSight: With an Examination ofThree Renaissance Texts
on Perspeetive (New York: Oe Capo Press, 1973).
Latour, Bruno, Science in Action: How to Follow Seientists and Engineers through Society
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987).
Lynch, Michael, 'Science in the age of mechanical reproduction: contextual uses of diagrams
in contemporary biology' , Biology and Philosophy 6: 155-176, 1991.
Lynch, Michael and Edgerton, Samuel Y., 'Aesthetics and digital image processing: Repre-
sentational craft in contemporary astronomy', in Gordon Fyfe and John Law (eds.),
Picturing Power: Visual Depietions and Social Relations (London & New York: Routledge,
1988).
Star, Susan Leigh and Griesemer, James, 'Institutional ecology, 'translations ' and boundary
objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39',
Social Studies of Science 19: 387-420, 1989.
Szarkowski, lohn, Photography Until Now (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1989).
Vitz, Paul and Glimcher, Amold, Modern Art and Modern Science: A Parallel Analysis 0/
Vision (New York: Praeger, 1984).
Waddington, C. H., Behind Appearance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970).
Winkler, Mary G. and Van Heldon, Albert, 'Representing the heavens: Galileo and visual
astronomy', ISIS 83: 195-217, 1992.
Young, Andrew T., 'What color is the solar system', Sky and Telescope, May 1985: 399.
SCOTT F. GILBERT AND MARION FABER
LOOKING AT EMBRYOS: THE VISUAL AND

CONCEPTUAL AESTHETICS OF EMERGING FORM*
The greatest progressive minds of embryology have not

searched for hypotheses; they have looked at embryos.
- Jane Oppenheimer'
DISCIPLINE AND AESTHETICS
The tide of this essay implies that there is an aesthetic of living organisms
and that the aesthetic of embryology differs from those of other areas of
biology. First, we believe that one can seriously discuss the aesthetics of the
embryo much as one would discuss the aesthetics of an artist's creation.
Terms such as symmetry, balance, pattern, rhythm, form, and integration are
crucial in both disciplines and are used in similar fashions. 2 The scientist
observing the embryo can act analogously to a critic, and the different sub-
disciplines of biology are not unlike different schools of literary or art criticism.
Indeed, all our knowledge of cells is based on interpretations of visual abstrac-
tions. Different stains and lenses emphasize different structures in the cell, and
autoradiograms are used to imply functional relationships. Centrifugation
analysis of cell components also gives us radioactive and enzymological data
that are then placed back onto a map of the cello As Oscar Schotte pointed
out, the embryologist's visualization of the cell differs from the geneticist's
visualization of the cello Thus, there are different "schools" of biology. Some
(such as physiology) seek the "meaning" of a structure; while others (such
as cell and molecular biology) regard the animal's general structure as rela-
tively unimportant and look for unifying concepts and mechanisms underlying
the apparent diversity of structures. A biochemist, a geneticist, a cell biologist,
an embryologist, a physiologist, and an evolutionary biologist will each have
a different appreciation of the cell or the human hand. Not only have they
learned different techniques of analysis, they have come from different schools
of interpretation. 3
Second, the aesthetic perspective of embryology is unique in the biolog-
ical sciences. Mayr4 has categorized biology as being divided into functional
biology and evolutionary biology. Developmental biologists often do not feel
comfortable with this categorization. Embryonic development takes part in
the physiological concerns of functional biology, but it is also a biology char-
acterized by change, akin to evolutionary biology. We propose a different
typology that is based on temporal change. Let functional biology equal phys-
iology, anatomy, cell biology, genetics, etc. Developmental biology equals
A[functional biology]/ ~t. It is characterized by progressive changes during
the lifespan of the organism which irreversibly alter the structure and function
125
A./. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, 125-151.
126 SCOTT F. GILSERT AND MARION FASER
of the individual. Let evolutionary biology then equal Mdevelopment biology]/

ßt, the change of development over time. This is essentially the definition
that Richard Goldschmidt 5 presented when he correctly stated that evolution
can be considered as hereditary changes made in developmental patterns. In
this scheme, developmental biology - which obtains its problems and justi-
fication from embryology - has a status equal to and intermediate between
functional biology and evolutionary biology. Going from functional biology
to evolutionary biology (two biologies of adults, as Gould has pointed out),
is equivaIent to going from displacement to acceleration without considering
velocity. The aesthetic of embryology, then, is not informed by the contin-
uing homeostasis of the adult organisms nor by the grandeur of aeons as
seen by evolutionary biologists. It is an aesthetic informed by the ordered,
directional change manifest during the life of individual organisms as they
develop from a single fertilized egg into complex patterns of different yet inter-
acting cell, tissues, and organs.
Embryology has rarely been considered a very prestigious part of biology.
A minor subfield of anatomy and physiology,6 it became a source of evidence
for evolution during the last part of the nineteenth century. In the first decade
of the present century, embryology declared its independence from evolutionary
studies and set out to become a science based in both anatomy and experi-
mental physiology. However, almost immediately a schism arose within the
ranks of the new physiological embryologists with respect to the question of
whether the nucleus or the cytoplasm controlled development. The result of
this debate was Morgan's demonstration of chromosomal inheritance and his
postulation of the gene theory. The embryologists who founded modern
genetics had no hesitation in claiming that their methods were superior. By
the 1930s, genetics and embryology had their own journals, organizations,
experimental organisms, vocabulary, rules of evidence, paradigmatic studies,
and professorships. Inheritance became redefined as genetics. 7 The geneti-
cists claimed the nucleus as their realm, while the embryologists studied the
cytoplasm. 8 In America, genetics superseded embryology as the way to study
inheritance.
Given that genetic methods gave quicker and more quantitative results,
that medicine was more prestigious and lucrative, and that in some cases -
such as that of E. E. lust9 - one couldn't even find a research position in
one's own country, why did anyone go into embryology? In many cases the
reason appears to involve the aesthetics of the embryo. Hans Holtfreter IO wrote
about embryological research in the Weimar Republic:
We managed more or less sueeessfully to keep our work undisturbed by humanity's strife and
struggle around us and proeeeded to study the plants and animals, and partieularly, the seerets
of amphibian development. Here, at least, in the realm of undespoiled Nature, everything
seemed peaceful and in perfeet order. It was from our growing intimaey with the inner harmony,
the meaningfulness, the integration, and the interdependenee of the structures and funetions as
we observed them in dumb ereatures that we derived our own philosophy of life. It has served
us weil in this eontinuously troublesome world.
LOOKING AT EMBRYOS 127
Writing in 1938, Just ll claims:

The egg cell also. is a universe. And if we cüuld but know it we would feel in its minute
confines the majesty and beauty wh ich match the vast wünder üf the würld üutside üf uso ...
The sundering of the egg intü many parts, tü be woven again intü a whüle is nü less wünderful
than the breaking up üf the primeval unit üut üf which the sun and the stars, the earth and the
müün were made separate and brought tügether again in the pattern üf the heavens and the
earth. The lüne watcher üf the sky whü in some distant tower saw a new planet flüating before
his lens cüuld nüt have been more enthralled than the first student whü saw the spermatüzoün
preceded by a streaming bubble moving tüward the egg-centre. And as every nüvitiate in
astronümy must thrilI at his first glance into the würld üf the stars, so. dües the student tü-day
whü first behülds this microcüsm, the egg-cell.
Just (whose book is as much an aesthetic valuation as a science text) found

the embryo to be a source of political, philosophical, and aesthetic values. 12
Moreover, such wonder before the egg cell is not to be found only amongst
novitiates. The French embryologist, Jean Rostand,13 writes, "Were I to live
a thousand years I should still be as deeply moved to see a frog's egg at the
moment of segmentation". Embryologists expect their textbooks to "capture
the magic of the embryo".14
Such praises to the glory and wonder of one's research animals and cells
is not what one typically finds in science, especially not in genetics. In fact,
the difference in aesthetic attitude between the geneticists and the embryolo-
gists has been a major stumbling block to the current reunification of these
disciplines. When the two groups attended meetings together, it was inevitable
that these differences would emerge. In 1958, molecular geneticist Sol
Spiegelman 15 had the following to say about his colleagues in embryology:
I have füund it difficult tü avoid the cünclusiün that many üf the investigatürs cüncerned with
mürphügenesis are secretly cünvinced that the problem is insoluble. I get the feeling that many
üf the intricate phenümena described are greeted with a sürt üf glee as if tü say, "My God,
this is wünderful, it is so. cümplicated we will never understand it".
It seems tü me that perhaps the time has cüme tü abandün this joyful pessimism and its
attendant cünviction üf incümprehensible cümplexity. In particular, I shüuld like tü make a
plea für a müre üptimistic view based ün a belief in simplicity. The phenomena üf mürphügenesis
can hardly be as cümplicated as implied by the weiter üf apparently unrelated übservatiüns
cünstituting the literature üf embryülügy . . . . It is nü lünger relevant these days tü phrase ques-
tiüns üf cell physiülügy in terms üf üther than chemically defined entities. It seems tü me that
the same is true für mürphügenetic events.
This aesthetic Kulturkampf between embryology and genetics has recently been
commented on by Peter Lawrence. 16
The lüng-lived rift between genetics and embryülügy sterns from the different natures üf the
twü subjects. Genetics is a hard discipline full üf calculations, statistics, and measurements;
even morphülügy is transfürmed intü numbers representing hereditability and expressivity.
Embryülügy, at least until recently, has bürdered ün the philüsüphical and has featured wonder
as much as analysis. The twü disciplines have always attracted different kinds üf scientists and
this cüntributed in the pasttü the mutual distaste that delayed the disciplines' inevitable fusion.
This laUer quotation is particularly apt because it recognizes that different areas
of biology attract practitioners by their different aesthetic values. It also empha-
128 SCOTT F. GILBERT AND MARION FABER
sizes what has traditionally been a central component of the embryological

aesthetic: wonder.
A DIGRESSION ON WONDER
The aesthetic of embryology is grounded in the continual and renewable

wonder of the embryo. The development of the mouse embryo between days
five and ten has been described 17 as being as like "a lump of iron tuming
into the space shuttle. In fact it is the profoundest wonder we can still imagine
and accept, and at the same time so usual that we have to force ourselves to
wonder about the wonderousness of this wonder". As all the other components
of the aesthetics of embryology have their source in the notion of wonder, it
behooves us to discuss this elusive concept and its scientific consequences.
There has long been an appreciation that wonder is an experience between
humans and the natural world which can engender proper thought and action.
It is a totally and typically human experience. Plato said that "philosophy
begins in wonder", and his embryologist student Aristotle concurred that "it
is owing to wonder that people philosophize and wonder remains the begin-
ning of philosophy". At the beginnings of modem science, Francis Bacon
reaffirmed wonder as the "seed of knowledge".18
But wonder has a short half-li fe. It decays rapidly into awe and curiosity,
two potent but less immediate products. According to philosopher A. J.
Heschel,19 "Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe".
So wisdom and knowledge, faith and reason are cousins whose geneologies
both trace back to wonder. According to this view, science and religion are
both supported by the ability to wonder; and both will be diminished in a world
whose sources for wonder are being removed. But the embryologist is being
exposed constantly to sources of wonder. Curiosity and awe are never far apart,
and they reinforce one another. It is not difficult to understand why embry-
ologists have been described as mystics by other scientists.
A VISUAL AESTHETIC OF CONTINUAL WONDER
There are two components to the embryological aesthetic, and both are based
in wonder. The first is a visual aesthetic, the second is a conceptual aes-
thetic. The visual aesthetic had always induced a holism and a sense of artistic
appreciation in its practitioners. Even before the genetics-embryology split,
embryology had attracted artist-scientists such as Louis Agassiz, Ernst Haeckel,
and Theodor Boveri. The conceptual aesthetic is not as immediate as the visual.
Rather, it is reflective of what one perceives and is influenced both by the
visual aesthetic and by the context of embryology as a science. As we will
see shortly, the conceptual aesthetic of embryology was formed largely in
response to the discovery of regulative development and to the aggressively
reductionist program of genetics.
The visual aesthetic of embryology puts a premium on emergent form and
finds expression in its foeus on symmetry, order, pattern repetitIOn, and

eleganee (visual simplieity). This visual aesthetie is even aeknowledged by the
embryologist-turned-geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan/o who believed that it
had been an obstacle to a more seientifie embryology.
A transparent egg as it develops is one of the most fascinating objects in the world of living
beings. The continuous change in form that takes plaee from hour to hour puzzles us by
its very simplicity. The geometrie patterns that present themselves at every turn invite mathe-
matical analysis. The constancy and orderliness of the wh oIe series of events, repeating themselves
a thousandfold in every batch of eggs, assures us of a causal sequence conspiring to create an
object whose parts are adjusted to make a machine of extraordinary complexity.
This pageant makes an irresistible appeal to the emotional and artistie sides of our nature.
Hence not without a feeling of jealous regret, the old-fashioned embryologist sees these gems
of nature consigned to test tubes for ehemieal analysis, to centrifuges to disturb their arrange-
ments, to mierodissecting instruments to pick them to pieces, and to endless tortures by alterations
in the environment to disturb the orderly, normal course of events. Yet we feel , too, that if the
mystery that surrounds embryology is ever to come within our comprehension, we must try
not to be sentimental and have recourse to other means than description of the passing show.
The recompense, we hope, will be to substitute a more intelligent interest in place of the older
emotional response to the order of nature.
Indeed, sueh an experimental embryology did supplant deseriptive embryology

(mueh to the dismay of E. E. lust who spent 70 pages of The BioLogy of the
CelL Surface in diatribe against it), but as the 1958 quotation from Spiegelman
suggests, the visual aesthetics of the embryo persisted. Those features that
make "an irresistible appeal to the emotional and artistie sides of our nature"
- the eontinuous change, the simplicity of form, the geometrie patteming,
the confluence of events to create complexity, the orderliness and repeatedness
of the changes - each survived experimentation. 21
" ORDER UNDERLYING BEAUTY " :

THE ELEMENTS OF EMBRYOLOGICAL VISUAL AESTHETIC
In discussing the beauty of biology, Maura Aannery22 notes that "rhythm, form,
order, and pattern are themes that constantly recur from the molecular to the
eeological level". They are not exclusively embryonic. However, the embryo
is perhaps the most accessible and provocative place to see this beauty. The
rhythms of eeosystems are too large, and the patterns of the adult organism
too baroque or obscured. The beauty of the cell is usually a static beauty,
and those of molecules too small unless interpreted through computer graphics
or other means. The embryo, however, is a coherent unit that changes before
one's eyes. The reeurring patterns are obvious, though transient. The ordered
nature of the ehanges is also obvious, as one sees the embryo move from a
relatively simple egg to a far more complex and diversified organism. The
unity of form is present, although the embryonie enterprise is, after all, the
creation of a diversity of cells and organs. Like a work of art, the embryo solves
the problems of permanence and change, simplicity and complexity, unity
and diversity. And each species' embryo solves these problems in a different
manner. In some embryos, symmetry is accentuated. In other embryos, it is the

repetition of pattern. In still other embryos, the beauty is seen in the sudden
breaking of symmetry or rhythm.
The most explicit analysis of the visual aesthetics of embryos was performed
in 1955 by Paul Weiss of the Chicago University and the RockefeIler Institute.
Weiss' lecture at the American Association for the Advancement of Science 23
consisted of seventy-three slides showing the identity of the formal elements
of art and the formal elements of development. "For, beauty is order; life is
order; hence life is beauty. It is a syllogism - that simple". Not quite. Now
that he had the audience's attention, he launched into a more complex analysis
of this relationship. His first principle was that living forms showed all the
classically enumerated attributes of beauty: "symmetry, balance, rhythm, and
may I add, a pleasing ratio of constancy and variety". The beauty of natural
forms was characterized by their display of regularity (symmetry, repetition,
and the alternation of elements) and consistency (the use of curves, propor-
tions, size gradients, etc. in subdividing space). Order dominates randomness.
This leads to Weiss' second, and central principle: Those beautiful forms
of nature are beautiful only because of their developmental history that estab-
lished this beauty.
What we admire as order and beauty in the final fonn is only a product and an index of the
measured orderliness of the developmental actions and interactions by which it has come abou\.
Static fonn is only the precipitate of underlying and antecedent fonnative dynamies. Goethe called
architecture "frozen music", in the same sense, organic fonn is frozen development; the fonnal
beauty reflects the developmental order.
Weiss then gave an account of the orderliness of embryonic formations,

emphasizing periodicity and emergent self-organization. Electron microscope
pictures of collagen fibrils and muscle tissues are shown next to photographs
of striped caterpillars, grooved snail shells, and Japanese paintings to show
that rules of periodicity and order are present in embryonic substructure, the
natural world, and the art we most admire. "The final harmony we visually
admire is but the product of the rules of harmony that have governed its
makings".
Weiss' third point was that order and beauty, the triumph of non-random-
ness over randomness, is not the same as fixity. "Let us not confound rule with
fixity, order with rigor, regularity with stereotypism. Each individual is a unique
form of expression of general norms and laws". There is order in the large
elements, but "freedom of excursion" in the sm aller elements that comprise
it. Within the general order, there is randomness and variation. Thus, handi-
craft, where no two items are identical, is superior to monotonous production
by machine. "Our sense of beauty only confirms it, for it combines pleasure
in contemplating the gross, over-all order with appreciation of pleasing vari-
ations of detail".
The analysis of form is perhaps more readily done on embryos than on
any other part of nature, and (as mentioned) the language of aesthetics shares
many terms that are typically used in embryology: symmetry, balance, rhythm,
pattern. It is even possible that aesthetics uses these terms as metaphors derived
from physical bodies such as those that embryologists study.24 This similarity
in the vocabularies of aesthetics and embryology is not surprising, given that
both are rooted in eighteenth century German philosophy. Philosophers such
as Kant and Goethe were concemed both with aesthetics and with the biology
of emergent form. 2S Indeed, as has been emphasized by Ritterbush 26 and
Haraway,27 both the conceptual and the visual aesthetic of embryology can
be traced back to the German philosophy of this period. However, whereas
the conceptual aesthetic was drawn primarily from the intellectual movement
that became Romanticism, the visual aesthetic had definite Classical overtones.
Goethe applied his classical dictum of "Dauer in Wechsel" [permanence
in changef8 to embryos, and he studied embryos in order to find the simi-
larities underlying apparent change. Whereas similarities between structures
might be distorted or hidden in adult organisms, the appearances of embryos
gave important indications of their structural similarities. This notion enabled
Goethe to rediscover the human intermaxillary bone - a bone present in most
mammalian adults, but not the human adult. Goethe found it in the human fetus·
and it enabled hirn to posit a common facial structure for all mammals. 29
Winckelmann's definition of Classical style -" edle Einfalt und stille Größe"
[noble simplicity and quiet grandeur]30 is also obvious in the published descrip-
tions of embryos. The embryologists were concemed with line and form.
The presence of an enduring form that underwent defined and predictable
changes offered a spectacle of logical progression towards a defined telos,
the adult form. The aesthetic of rhythm (Dewey), form (Fry), and simplicity
(Blinderman) are exemplified in the embryo.
The leading American embryologist of his day, Ross Granville Harrison,
was a major proponent of this classical visual aesthetic. He was a great admirer
of Goethe's works, and according to zoologist E. J. BoelV' he quoted Goethe
frequently. This is not surprising, as Harrison's life work was to uncover the
laws of embryonic pattern, polarity, and form. Early in his career, Harrison 32
stated that "anatomy must, in short, busy itself with all phases of the problem
of organic form .... Organic form is the product of protoplasmic activity
and must, therefore, find its explanation in the dynamics of living matter,
but it is the mystery and beauty of organic form that sets the problem for
us". Note that what sets the problem is the "mystery and the beauty of organic
form"; not curiosity, not medical concems (Harrison was a physician). The
beginning of Harrison's research is aesthetic. Harrison thought that these
mysteries were solvable, but he was no polemicist (such as Loeb) who thought
the mysteries unimportant. Harrison's research established that there were
rules of order and symmetry. He showed that the limb developed its axes in
a particular order and established the rules of laterality and mirror-image dupli-
cations. He showed that the limb mesoderm had the ability to form limbs at
other places in the body, and although the initial li mb rudiment could be divided
to form several limbs, the parts worked harmoniously in nature to form a
coherent whole. Harrison's student, Victor Twitty,33 relates that "if I had to
identify a single factor that made Harrison's work great, I would do it in
terms of esthetic considerations. He was constitutionally incapable of leaving
a project until all its pieces had been fitted into a unitary whole whose com-
position met his artistic requirements". Indeed, Harrison kept artefacts in his
office to help hirn think out the aspects of embryonic symmetry and asym-
metries. 34 It is Harrison 35 in his Silliman Lectures at Yale who relates Driesch's
discovery of embryonic regulation to Faust's asking Mephistopheles "Du
nennst dich einen Teil und stehst doch ganz vor mir?" and who then concJudes:
"We may assert, then, that each and every living being can be encompassed
in the organization of a single cell of its species". This cell, we are told, is
the fertilized egg whose organization implies the configuration and function
of the mature individual.
Another embryologist who feIt the mystery and beauty of the embryo as
primary was E. E. Just. Like Harrison, Just saw form as inherent in the egg,
and he, too, was a great devotee of Goethe, A quotation from Goethe is used
as his credo on the title page of his book, The Biology of the Cell Surface. 36
This notion - "Natur hat weder Kern/Noch Schale,lAlles ist sie mit einemmale"
- was a polemic against the geneticists who would reduce all of embryonic
development to gene action. Like Harrison, he was concemed with order, form,
and the relationship of the parts to the whole. "Whether we study atoms or
stars or that form of matter, known as living, always must we reckon with inter-
relations. The universe, however much we fragment it, abstract it, ever retains
its unity".37 For Just, like Harrison, beauty and ordered form were the starting
points for research. These were also Just's end points. 38
We feel the beauty of Nature because we are part of Nature and because we know that however
much in our separate domains we abstract from the unity of Nature, this unity remains. Although
we may deal with particulars, we return finally to the whole pattern woven out of these. So in
our study of the animal egg: though we resolve it into constituent parts the better to under-
stand it, we hold it as an integrated thing , as a unified system: in it Iife resides and in its
moving parts Iife manifests itself.
Just stands in good contrast to Harrison, because they shared a similar visual
aesthetic of the embryo, even though they were diametrically opposed on
the most important methodological issue of the day: whether experimenta-
tion could give valid concJusions conceming the normal development of the
embryo. Whereas Harrison was one of the field's leading experimentalists who
thought that the laws of ordered change and form could be discovered by
transplantations and exisions, Just feit that such experimentation killed the
embryo and destroyed any meaningful account of its organization. 39 Just
belonged to an embryological tradition that incJuded Goethe, Johannes Müller,
and Oscar Hertwig. His account of embryonic development is poetic and
glorious, but it is the account of a naturalist rather than that of an experi-
mental biologist. Yet, although Just's attitude harkens back to this earlier
tradition of embryology, the visual aesthetic is shared by experimentalists,
as weIl. Unity and beauty are inherent in the embryo for both the naturalist
and the experimental ist.
The visual aesthetic of embryology is an important starting point for
research. The form, pattern, polarity, symmetry, order, and elegance of the
embryo are regarded as solvable mysteries. In this aesthetic stance, our science
is aided by our appreciation of such categories, for there is a resonance between
our mind's order and that seen in the embryos we study. Paul Weiss empha-
sized this important part of the embryological aesthetic: 40 " • • • nature is not
atomized. Its patterning is inherent and primary, and the order underlying
beauty is demonstrably there; what is more, the human mind can perceive it
only because it is itself part and parcel of that order".
ANOTHER VISUAL AESTHETIC IN EMBRYOLOGY : YÜGEN
The embryo need not conform to our Western vocabulary of aesthetics, and
it is possible that the embryologists in the first part of this century appreci-
ated the aesthetics of the embryo in other terms. Several embryologists claim
(in private) that observing embryos gives them a sense of serenity and the
sublime, a response akin to appreciating certain musical compositions or paint-
ings. The visual aesthetic of embryology may come close to the Japanese
concept of rügen. rügen, a concept connoting cloudy impenetrability, is the
term attached to the mood or atmosphere generated by an external object of
exceptional elegance or gracefulness. 4 \ Yoshimoto's list of such elegant objects
emphasizes their tran si tory nature: unmelted snow, early summer rain, cicadas,
glow-worms, tinted autumnal leaves, winter grass etc. It is characterized by
movement in stillness, by the embodiment of form in changing substance.
The No-master Zeami wrote that rügen connoted "elegance, calm, profun-
dity, mixed with the feeling of mutability". It is used when a particular object
cannot be studied analytically or objectively without destroying it or when a
particular object enables one to perceive universal form or rhythm. 42 Moreover,
an aspect of resigned sadness is always present in the notion of rügen, a feeling
that this beauty will perish and indeed, that it would be wrong if it were to
continue. Such, of course, is the case with embryos, whose integrity depends
on their transient nature.
The concept of rügen and other aesthetic principles of Asia were almost
certainly known to the German embryologists of the early twentieth century.
Viktor Hamburger43 writes that one of the favorite courses that he and Hilde
Mangold attended while graduate students was Professor Grosse's course in
Chinese and Japanese art. Hamburger noted that many scientists took the
time to attend his lectures. Perhaps no Western scientist imbibed Japanese
and Chinese aesthetics as much as Richard Goldschmidt, an embryological
geneticist who was fascinated by pattern and form. Goldschmidt's autobiog-
raphy delights in the refinement and taste of the Japanese high culture, and
he was thrilled to be accepted into the exclusive group of aesthetically minded
Japanese who were privileged to attend No plays, tea ceremonies, and chrysan-
134 SCOTT F . GILBERT AND MARION FABER
themum viewing parties. Goldschmidt's description of the cha no yu tea

ceremony is obviously written by a person who was, as he admitted, "afflicted
with estheticism". Goldschmidt describes Japanese art with superlatives not
used elsewhere in his writing. His description of the Japanese room noted
that "the beauty and perfection and harmony of those rooms put to shame
any known Western style", and the lkegami temple gardens are described as
"the most beautiful piece of landscaping imaginable".44 Goldschmidt became
a highly trained connoisseur of Japanese paintings, wrote a monograph
on Asian art,45 and enjoyed much of his time coIlecting Asian sculpture.
Embryologist Johannes Holtfreter similarly adopted Asian art and culture.
He describes his stay in Bali as the happiest time of his life. An artist, hirnself,
who had tried to make a living painting before he returned to be the leading
embryologist of the 1930s, Holtfreter enjoyed the "unique sense of beauty
and artistic expression" that characterized Balinese life and art. 46 Like
Goldschmidt, Holtfreter delighted in their music, their dance performances,
and the Balinese theater and religious ceremonies. Like Goldschmidt, he found
hirnself attracted to the traditional "ancient cultural activities", the gamelan
performance and the shadow-play. Another embryologist, Joseph Needham,
became so fascinated by Chinese culture that he abandoned embryology to
become the leading Western commentator on Chinese science and technology.
Thus, the classical visual aesthetics of Asia were not unknown to biologists
of the 1930s and were appreciated by so me of the major embryologists as
an antidote to the turbulent and "decadent" aesthetics of Western Europe. Some
of the appreciation of the embryo seen by these authors and by contempo-
rary students of embryology may be influenced by Asian aesthetic principles
(such as fügen) as weIl as by the classical Western attributes of form, order,
pattern, and simplicity.
THE CONCEPTUAL AESTHETIC OF EMBRYOLOGY
Science can be practiced in different aesthetic modes. This has been shown
by disciplines which have their own "antidiscipline" at the same level of
complexity.47 Both biochemistry and molecular biology seek to discover the
physical bases of life, but they do so under different aesthetic and metaphor-
ical traditions. Biochemistry sees metabolism as the sine qua non of life, and
emphasizes those living properties involving flux; while molecular biology
sees replication as the sine qua non of life and emphasizes those living prop-
erties involving repetition and stasis. 48 Similarly, comparative anatomy and
morphology have studied the same entities, the former having an Aristotelian
aesthetic that emphasizes the differences between organisms, the latter having
a Platonic aesthetic that emphasizes their underlying similarities. Embryology
and genetics originated as antidisciplines with embryology emphasizing holistic
properties and differences between species, while genetics adopted a strictly
reductionist research pro gram that emphasized the underlying similarity
between species.
LOOKING AT EMBR YOS 135
The visual aesthetic of embryology is largely ahistorical and is similar for

Aristotle, Goethe, Harrison, the sophomore biology student, and the viewer
of NOVA. It will no doubt persist as long as there are embryos and people
to watch them. The conceptual aesthetic, however, is context dependent and
very much a product of the scientific environment of the embryologist. 49 One
can almost discuss the conceptual aesthetic of embryology in the past tense
since its aesthetic positions were formed during a time of mutual opposition
and self-definition between embryology and genetics. As embryology and
genetics begin fusing, this aesthetic is being revised (as will be discussed later).
Below is a first approximation of the aesthetic differences between genetics
and embryology that emerged in the 1930s and which continues (in a modified
fashion) up to this day.
Embryology Genetics
celebrates diversity celebrates underlying uniformity
acknowledges complexity assumes simplicity
emphasis on organicist models emphasis on reductionist models
interaction and epigenesis information flow and preformation
multiple analytical methods single major analytical method
humility before problems great confidence before problems
emphasis on becoming emphasis on being
Even making such a list of "opposites" would be against the dialectical views
of many embryologists such as E. B. Wilson who saw interactions as being
crucial, and how spent much time denying the existence of polar opposites.
Rather, Wilson would pI ace "opposing entities" on a continuum and then show
the existence of intermediates between them. 50 However, whether one wants
to place a horizontal continuum line between these groups or a vertical line
of either/or division, we believe that this categorization will stand as a first-
order approximation. Wh at becomes obvious is that while the visual aesthetic
of embryology may be Classical, its conceptual aesthetic leans heavily towards
the Romantic. 51
While geneticists claimed an underlying uniformity to all nature, embry-
ology stressed its diversity. Jacques Monod 52 has celebrated the "Platonism"
of molecular genetics: all living things share the same DNA coding mecha-
nism, the same informational readout system, and the same amino acids in
their proteins. Moreover, according to Monod,53 if you understand the E.
co li bacillus, you understand the elephant. Embryologists, however, have
celebrated, not the underlying unity, but the sensual diversity of living organ-
isms. Each organism develops in its unique fashion. Thus, Berrill 54 writes
repeatedly of "the amazing diversity of developmental performances", and
the "rich and diverse material" that forms the subject matter of embryology.
Wh at is noise to the geneticist is music to the embryologist. Even within a
single organ such as the mammalian placenta, there are numerous variations
that may be lost to one thinking in general terms. In fact, the category
"mammalian placenta" is misleading. There are mammalian placentas, and
the physiological performance and anatomical structure of one species' placenta

need not be similar to another except in their most basic functions. 55 The geneti-
cist underscores the theme that all organisms follow. The embryologist thinks
the importance lies in the variations. Reconciling genetics and embryology
is part of an ongoing aesthetic tension between those who applaud universality
and those who applaud individuality.56
Similarly, the geneticist embraces the simplicity of the system. Spiegelman 's
diatribe against the morphologists was a plea for simplicity. Like abstract
artists, one has to pare away the externals to show that the basic plan of an
organism is quite simple. As a matter of fact, it can all be inscribed in the genes
which synthesize RNAs and proteins. Morphology is a simple matter of
chemical interactions. Again, it was Spiegelman 57 who simplified embry-
ology by redefining differentiation as the controlled synthesis of different
enzyme patterns, not the production of complex tissue-specific anatomical
architecture. Geneticists have traditionally marginalized or trivialized those
processes that embryologists consider "the complex reality" of animal devel-
opment (Berrill, 1961). Phages, geneticists claimed, have morphogenesis,
and it is nothing more than protein-protein interaction. 58 In 1992, the Encyclo-
pedia of the Mouse Genome was advertised 59 as: "The Complete Mouse" and
in parentheses: "some assembly required". The "some assembly" is the entirety
of development needed to go from genotype to phenotype. The whole field
of embryology was trivialized in parentheses. Embryologists such as Weiss,
Berrill, Harrison have emphasized the complexity of the embryo, and Wilhelm
ROUX,60 one of the principal founders of developmental mechanics, wrote
that "the causal investigation of organisms is one of the most difficult, if not
the most difficult problem the human intellect has attempted to solve". Nothing
is so simple that it cannot be made more complex. Even the cell cycle so
beloved of yeast geneticists has become a bewildering set of circles and arrows
in the hands of embryologists who study how that cycle becomes regulated.
No part of the embryological aesthetic has been so pronounced as its
emphasis on organicism (see notes 25-27). This organicism is one of the
chief differences separating embryology from genetics; for genetics and embry-
ology are about as far apart as they can be on the spectrum of mechanistic
philosophies. The geneticists of the 1930s and the molecular biologists of
the 1980s tend to be reductionists. 'The complete mouse" is in the genome.
Allen and Roll-Hansen 61 have both documented the reductionist philosophy
of the Morgan school of genetics, and the same philosophy is seen in their
molecular descendentsY The whole can be fully explained by an analysis of
its component parts. In contrast, embryology had traditionally espoused a
different relationship between the parts and their wholes. Organicism asserts
that the whole is functionally prior to the parts, that the whole organism is
greater than the sum of its parts, that no part of the organism existed inde-
pendently of its other parts, and that an account of the whole organism is as
necessary for the explanation of its parts as is the account of the parts for an
explanation of the whole (Figure 1).63
PIRATES BEAT BACK GIANTS AS FANS ROAR.

PARTY LEADERS WERE SPLIT ON THE PLATFORM.
PRINCE IS A BLACK ROCK STAR.
Fig. 1. Metaphor for wholist organicism. Words are made from characters, sentences are made
from words, and there are different mies governing what makes a word and what makes a
sentence. The meaning of a sentence obviously depends upon its component words (parts defme
the whole). However, the meaning of each word is also determined by the meaning of the sentence
(the whole defmes the part). Each level is defmed by the levels above it and below it.
Organicist holism has been prevalent in embryology since its modern incep-
tion. In seeking a middle ground between vitalism and physicalist reductionism,
the major embryologists of the nineteenth century formulated and embraced
some type of organicist view. Tim Lenoir64 has shown that the founders of
modern embryology - Dollinger, Pander, Baer, and Rathke - subscribed to
the organicism set forth in Kant's Critique 0/ Judgement. Said Kant: 6S
The first principle required for the notion of an object conceived as a natural purpose is that
the parts, with respect to both form and being, are only possible through their relationship to
the whole [das Ganze] .... Secondly, it is required that the parts bind themselves mutually
into the unity of a whole in such a way that they are mutually cause and effect of one another.
Kant would also postulate that the end result of development gave a purpo-
sive [zweckmässige] direction for the embryo and its parts. Such integration
and purposiveness were also seen by one of the major founders of modern
embryology, Karl Ernst von Baer, who wrote,66 uAlthough it is in itself dear
that that each step forward in development is made possible only by the pre-
ceding state of the embryo, nevertheless, the total development is governed
by the whole essence [Wesenheit] of the animal that-is-to-be. And thus con-
ditions at any moment are not alone absolutely determining its future". Here,
then, we have two simultaneous relationships of wholes and parts: a spatial
and a temporal organicism. Not only is the whole logically precedent to the
parts and the parts both define the whole ahd are defined by the whole before
it, but is precedent to and defines the earlier wholeS. 67
Johannes Müller would declare the priority of the whole over the parts
and use it as a methodological principle: u... just as nature proceeds by the
development and preservation of the organic being, that from the whole one
strives toward the parts, assuming that in the process of analysis one has
recognized the particulars and succeeded in arriving at the idea of the whole".68
The advent of the cell theory did not destroy the organismic conception of life.
Rather, Müller and Virchow extended the organized properties of the embryo
to the organized properties of the cell: organized bodies within organized
bodies. Just as the cells of the embryo were defined by and harmonized
within a whole, so the constituent parts of the cell were integrated into func-
tional associations that defined and were defined by the whole cello
At the end of the nineteenth century, Roux 's version of Entwickelungs-
mechanik would attempt a reductionist embryology, but the discovery of

embryonic regulation by Hans Driesch and Oscar Hertwig caused its imminent
failure. No physical principle could explain how a cell destined to become a
particular part of an embryo could, when isolated from other embryonic cells,
form a complete larvae. No machine existed where one part could alter its
function to become a different part or even the entire machine. The inability
to explain this phenomena by existing physical concepts and metaphors drove
Driesch into vitalism. It allowed Hertwig, a staunch embryologist, to polemi-
cize against Roux and Weismann (always a dangerous thing) and to propound
a restored organicism. 69 "The parts of the organism develop in relation to
each other, that is, the development of the part is dependent on the develop-
ment of the whole". Organicism became the framework for most of the
American research in embryology at the turn of the last century, and it char-
acterised the researchers along the Woods Hole - University of Chicago axis.
C. O. Whitman, the first director of the Marine Biology Laboratory at Woods
Hole, emphasized the priority of the whole over its parts, and his successor
(both at the MBL and Chicago) Frank Lillie,70 confirmed that "the organism
is primary, not secondary; it is an individual, not by virtue of the co opera-
tion of countless lesser individuals, but an individual that produces these lesser
individualities on which its full expression depends".
Between the World Wars, organicism provided the framework for most of
the major embryological research of Britain, America, and Germany. Hans
Spemann 71 pointed out that the whole is not only greater than the sum of its
parts, but that the parts were defined by their position within the whole. "We
are walking on those cells that could have been used for thinking had they
been in.a different place in the embryo". Paul Weiss was most insistent on
the importance of the unified whole and the impossibility of understanding
the organization of the embryo form the catalogue of its component parts. In
1968, he wrote,72 "The true test of a reductionist system is whether or not
an ordered unitary system ... can, after decomposition into a disorderly pile
of constituent parts, resurrect itself from the shambles by virtue solely of the
properties inherent in the isolated pieces". He graphically illustrated this poinr7 3
by showing a photo graph of an intact chick embryo, a chick embryo that had
been blended through a homogenizer, and a chick embryo whose homogenized
components had been centrifuged. The problem for reductionists, he main-
tained, was how to get that chicken back.
The organicist holism that characterizes embryology may not be a major
part of art criticism. But embryos are not static objects, and one of their most
important characteristics is that they are developing continuously. They refuse
to be fixed (lndeed, fixed is a technical term in embryology which is equiv-
alent to "killed in its development for visual analysis"). Rather, embryos move,
and they move from a simple beginning (the egg) to a defined and more
complex and (a multicellular, multisystemed organism that hatches, swims,
is born, etc.) In other words, the visual events are continually unfolding. The
critique from cinema might be more appropriate than that from the static visual
arts. This was recognized by C. H. Waddington,74 an art critic as weIl as an

embryologist:
When, or if, the cinema becomes the most important technique of artistic creation, and movement
one of the fundamental raw materials out of wh ich beauty is created, then, perhaps, we shall
have to turn our attention to the aesthetic characteristics of developmental processes.
Indeed, we find a fully articulated organicism in the film criticism of Sergei

Eisenstein. 75 In montage, for instance, "two film pieces of any kind, placed
together, inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality arising out
of that juxtaposition". Moreover, "the juxtaposition of two separate shots by
splicing them together resembles not so much the simple sum of one shot
plus one shot-as it does a creation". Any embryologist would be familiar
with this concept, as it is the basis of inductive organogenesis. Here, the
juxtaposition of two embryonic tissues creates structures that neither could
generate alone (see note 69). Eisenstein relates this holism directly to science,
as weIl. Moreover, he feit that the single frames and their juxtapositions must
be subordinated to the general whole and its unifying needs. Like embryos,
films have an end point toward which they develop. Eisenstein noticed that
"this final, this general, this whole resuIt is not merely foreseen, but itself
predetermines both the individual elements and the circumstances of their
juxtaposition. In such cases, the whole emerges perfectly as 'a third some-
thing'. The fuIl picture of the whole, as determined both by the shot and by
montage, also emerges, vivifying and distinguishing both the content of the
shot and the content of the montage". Here, the whole determines the parts just
as the parts determine the whole. The concept of "endpoint" is crucial, because
it determines the type of story. The story of embryos is an optimistic story,
a success story, a story of creating manifold form from a humble beginning.
It is a story of successful negotiations between whole and part, history and
mathematics, Being and Becoming, form and substance, permanence and
change, generalizations and individuations. Weiss, Just, Holtfreter, Waddington,
O. Hertwig, and Goldschmidt ground their worldviews in that of the devel-
oping embryo. It is a wonderful show which repeats itself endlessly but which
is never exactly the same.
The organicismlreductionism difference merges into another aesthetic split
between embryology and genetics: their divergent emphases on nuclear pre-
formation or cytoplasmic epigenesis. E. B. Wilson said in 1925 76 that "heredity
is effected by the transmission of a nuclear preformation which in the course
of development finds expression in a process of cytoplasmic epigenesis". Note
that he was using the old term - heredity - which incorporates both genetics
(which stresses the transmission of preformed genes) and embryology (which
stresses the epigenetic changes that create new ceIl types and organs from
the mitotic descendents of the fertilized egg). Geneticists have long claimed
that development is merely differential gene expression. That is, develop-
ment is but an epiphenomenon of gene regulation. Many embryologists have
feIt that genes were just a new form of preformationism, and in 1895, O.
Hertwig (see note 69) explicitly criticized Weismann as bringing back a dis-
credited preformationism into embryology. Saxen77 has satirized the view
that "all the information required to build a complete organism is already
present within the zygote and development is seen as a progressive expres-
sion of this genomic information" by showing a classical homunculus next
to a cartoon diagram of DNA. Susan Oyama78 has also commented extensively
on the similarity in the modern use of "genetic information" and "genetic
program" with older concepts of entelechy and preformation. In embryology,
especially deuterostome embryology, interactions between parts determine
the final form of the organism. There is no program that says that any par-
ticular cell must become a particular part of the whole. Rather, there is a
great deal of movement and interaction within the embryo; and the destiny
of a ceH to become embryo or placenta, epidermal ceH or neuron, erythro-
cyte or lymphocyte, is a matter of chance. The core of modern embryology
concerns interactions: interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm wherein the
cytoplasm controls the nucleus as much as the nucleus controls the cyto-
plasm; interactions between cells such that the fates of the respective cells
are fixed by the community of cells in wh ich they reside, and (especially in
the embryology of O. Hertwig and in studies of mammalian development) inter-
actions between the developing organism and its environment. 79
Embryology also has differed from genetics in retaining a different view
concerning what constitutes a science. Genetics organized itself around a
mathematical method of analyzing progeny. It was a mathematical science
dealing with the transmission of traits. All organisms were allowed (so long
as they evidenced an early segregation of the germ line), but very few
techniques were permitted. On the other hand, embryology is known by its
plurality of methods. Developmental biology is not a science characterized
by a technique, but by a set of problems .. When Roux set forth the instruc-
tions for contributors to his new journal, he stated that any good experimental
technique would be permissable. When N. J. Berrill 80 convened the Growth
Symposium in 1939, he relished the fact that "representatives of the fields [of]
agriculture, bacteriology, biochemistry, biophysics, botany, cytology, embry-
ology, endocrinology, genetics, histology, mathematics, pathology, philosophy,
physiology, and zoology" were brought together to discuss the problems of
development. Note that the order was alphabetical, even to the extent that
philosophy is not listed separately. Moreover, even though the problems of
development were framed by embryology, Berrill granted the other disci-
plines equal billing. Edmund Sinnott,81 one of the invited speakers at that group,
also held that different disciplinary perspectives were needed: "Biologists
are coming to realize that not simply metabolic changes nor growth processes,
nor the biochemical basis of living stuff provide the central problem of their
science, but the way in which these phenomena are so interrelated that aformed
organism is produced". Until recently, the problems were the best part of devel-
opmental biology. It certainly didn't have any answers. While geneticists
were stating that they had solved the problems of hereditary transmission
and evolution, embryologists were trumpeting their ignorance.
Finally, embryology is a science of becoming. It deals not with the telos
of each species, but with the organism on its way towards that end. Embryology
denies the hegemony of the adult form and sees the immature forms as equally,
if not more, important. 82 Certainly, they are more interesting. It is process,
not stasis, that excites embryologists. Here, too, we find conscious echoes of
German philosophy,83 of the Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, for
example, who proclaimed that "Romantic art is still in the state of becoming;
indeed its true essence is that it can go on becoming forever, but can never
be completed". Goethe, of course, viewed Gestalt (fixed form) as but a momen-
tary phase of Bildung (development).
CONVERGENCE AND EXTENSION
The aesthetic of embryology differs from that of other areas of biology.

The principal feature of this aesthetic is an appeal to wonder. The aesthetic,
itself, has two major components: A visual aesthetic which emphasizes the
classical concepts of form, symmetry, pattern, integration, and harmonious
interdependence; and a context-dependent conceptual aesthetic which has
recently emphasized complexity, holism, diversity, and the category of
becoming. It is also possible that Asian aesthetic categories had been employed
by embryologists, especially those of the 1930s. The conceptual aesthetic
was formed largely by interpretations of regulative development and by the
mutual antagonism of embryology and genetics. However, as the fields are
presently merging, this aesthetic has to be revised.
In the first revision scenario, the embryological aesthetic is eclipsed by
the reductionism of genetics and cell biology. Most present-day developmental
biologists would not subscribe with Dalcq84 to a "scientific faith in Organicism,
which reconciles the struggle for objectivity with a full respect far life".
Modern developmental biologists are probably not aware of this philosophy
that has underwritten so much of their discipline's history. While organicism
has received support from philosophers such as A. N. Whitehead85 and C.
Dyke,86 it is not a philosophy that has had much acceptance in contempo-
rary reductionist science. The fact that a majority of the membership of the
Society for Developmental Biology recently recommended merging with the
American Society far Cell Biology suggests that present-day developmental
biologists do not hold any unique philosophical positions.
However, there is a second species of revision that is far more promising
than that accomplished by the domination of one field by the other. Here,
the reductionism of the geneticist and the organicism of the embryologist
can be reconciled in an aesthetic of homology. This might form the basis for
a truly "biological" aesthetic. Homology has always been an important part
of embryology, starting in the 1830s with K. E. von Baer and G. Saint-
Hilaire. During the past twenty years, however, homology has become the
single most important concept in an biology.87 When we say that a mammalian
hormone is like an insect hormone or when we call the central germ layer
of both insects and vertebrates "mesoderm", we are saying that the verte-
brate and the arthropod entities have some underlying sameness despite their
apparent differences. Nowhere has the importance of homology been more pro-
nounced than in those genes that are responsible for constructing the polar axes
of an known animals. Indeed, the merging of the genetics and embryology
comes largely from studies showing that the same set of homeotic genes appear
to be active in constructing organisms as diverse as Hydra, Drosophila,
Xenopus, and Homo. 88 Embryology ceased to be an independent discipline once
gene knockout experiments demonstrated that the genes that are responsible
for development of vertebrate neck organs are the same set of genes that are
used by the fruit fly.89 One can no longer discuss embryology without genetics
(and discussions of genetics without embryology are just as pointless). But
as in any discussion of homology, whether one highlights the differences or
the similarities is a matter of contextual and aesthetic judgement. Humans
will form their body axes through the regulative interactions of cells; flies
will form their body axes through the interactions of proteins in a common
cytoplasm. Both will utilize the same sets of genes, although for different func-
tions. Drosophila will use the hedgehog gene to form the boundary between
segments of the larval trunk (wh ich vertebrates lack). Mice will use their
homologous hedgehog gene to induce the formation of dorsal neural tube
(that flies don't have) and to distinguish the digits at the end of their limbs.
There is agreement on the data, but there are still differences in aesthetic judge-
ments. One can look at this as a wonderful example of diversity, such as
McGhee and Mains 90 depict:
At some point in eaeh of our lives, usually in our youth, we come to the realization that no
single philosophie outlook is adequate to explain the complexities of life. Perhaps the study of
developmental biology is now at a similar stage. It is becoming more and more probable that
different organisms develop in fundamentally different ways. Developmental tactics and their
underlying biochemical mechanisms may be held in common between diverse organisms, but
the way in which these taetics are integrated into overall developmental strategies differ remark-
ably.
However, one can take the view of Maniatis and Weintraub 91 and emphasize
the similarities:
Most of these advances [in eukaryotic gene expression] were built on the basie principles estab-
lished from the studies of bacteria and phage A gene regulation, thus fulfilling the famous
dictum of Jaeob and Monod that 'what is true of E. coli is true of the elephant'. Although the
relationship between bacteria and higher eukaryotes has been immensely instructive, additional
layers of complexity and eontrol in higher eukaryotes have brought new surprises and challenges.
However, both agree with the importance of homology as the basic rela-
tionship between genes, cens, and organisms. An aesthetic based on homology
was proposed by comparative anatomist Richard Owen in 1848 and 1849. 92
However, Owen's aesthetics were so charged with Christian Platonism that
they would not be acceptable today.93 The challenge is to create a new

homology-based biological aesthetic that will allow the emphasis to be placed
on the underlying unity (as per the geneticists) and the critical species-creating
diversity (as per the embryologists) and which will not subsume one by the
other. Homology is the notion that acknowledges both similarity and differ-
ence; simplicity and complexity. Perhaps only the notion of homology can
encompass an aesthetic that does justice to life.
EPILOGUE
We purposely did not include illustrations in this paper (as Paul Weiss did
in 1955). However, there is an illustration that the senior author would like
to show. It is the frontispiece of the second edition of his Developmental
Biology (Figure 2).94 This collage shows three views of gastrulation OCCUf-
ring in the sea urchin. The first is that of a living embryo seen by phase contrast
microscopy. The central panel shows the same type of gastrulating embryo
under immunofluorescent microscopy that highlights the ring of mesenchyme
cells expressing a certain gene. The right-hand panel shows such an embryo
by scanning electron microscopy under conditions that emphasize the extra-
cellular matrix. The same embryonic process is seen under three types of light.
Fig. 2. Frontispiece of Developmental Biology text book showing three views of sea urchin
gastrulation, each in a different light. To even partially understand gastrulation, one must
integrate at least these three figures in one' s mind.
It is his likening of the embryo to Monet's La Cathedral de Rouen. In order

to understand the embryonic process, one must see the embryo in a multiplicity
of ways: One must see it as a living entity, as a function of gene expression,
and as a product of complex interactions between its component parts.
Otherwise, one does not see the embryo.
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA
NOTES
* This paper is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Hans Holtfreter, embryologist and artist,
who died, November 13, 1992, and to Dr. N. J. Berrill who celebrated his 90th birthday in
April, 1993. Our thanks to Fred Tauber for encouraging these reflections, Michael Somers for
his copy of RusselI, Rick Eldridge and Alex Juhasz for discussing art and film criticism, respec-
tively, Michael Marrissen for demonstrating the remarkable differences in interpreting the
notes of Pachelbel's Canon, and Colin Hecht and Eileen Crist for pointing out some textual
ambiguities.
1 Oppenheimer, J. M., 'Analysis of development: Problems, concepts, and their history', in B.
H. Willier, P. A. Weiss and V. Hamburger (eds.), Analysis 0/ Development (Philadelphia: Saunders
Press, 1955), pp. 1-24.
2 That natural forms can be the su bject of aesthetics is emphasized in Kant' s Critique 0/
Judgement, trans. by J. H. Bernard (NY: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 177-181. He specified the such
aesthetics would concern the "beautiful forms of nature" and not the "charms that she is wont
to combine so abundantly with them ...." Moreover, if the beauty of natural forms interests a
man, "we have reason for attributing to hirn, at least, a basis for a good moral character". As
will be discussed later, Kant's combination of teleology and organicism had great appeal to
em bryologists.
) The Schotte example is quoted (with illustration) in Sander, K., 'The role of genes in onto-
genesis', in T. J. Horder, J. A. Witkowski and C. C. Wylie (eds.), A History 0/ Embryology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 363-395. Lewis Thomas, Late Night
Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (NY: Vi king Press, 1983) has pointed out
that science criticism should exist parallel to literary criticism, but likening science to art
criticism has also been made by the Princeton embryologist, J. T. Bonner. He notes that readers
of his book on Morphogenesis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 6-7, might think
that in discussing the components of the embryo, he will lose the main point in all the details.
He continues that "I will be put in the same category as an art historian who analyzes the per-
spective of a Flemish master and is accused of failing to see that the pietures themselves are great
and beautiful. But the chances are excellent that the art historian will first have been moti-
vated by the beauty, and 1 suspect that those who study nature, even if only subconsciously,
were also first motivated by noble emotions".
4 Mayr, E., Tause and effect in biology', Science 134: 1501-1506, 1961.
5 Goldschmidt, R. B., The Material Basis 0/ Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1940), p. 6. A similar point is made by Bonner, J., Size and Cyc/e: An Essay on the Structure
0/ Biology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 3. Three levels of biological orga-
nization (evolution, function, and development) are also implied in Waddington, c., 'The character
of biological form', in L. L. Whyte (ed.), Aspects 0/ Form (London: Lund Humphries, 1951),
pp. 43-52. Horan, B., 'Functional explanations in sociobiology: A reply to critics', Biol. Phi/os
4: 205-228, 1989, also criticizes Mayr's typology in that "it leaves no place, or at least gives
no account of the place, to be held by studies of development".
6 Cohen, Living Embryos (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1963). Similarly, C. H. Waddington (op.
cit., 1951; p. 4) depicts embryology and genetics as two younger sisters being neglected by
physiology and evolutionary biology. The relationship of embryology to physiology and anatomy
paralleIs the relationship of pediatrics to internal medicine. Biologies of becoming are traditionally
looked upon as inferior to biologies of the adult being.
7 Gilbert, S. F., 'The embryological origins of the gene theory', 1 Hist. Biolll: 307-351,
1978; Gilbert, S. F., 'Cellular politics: E. E. Just, Richard B. Go1dschmidt, and the attempt to
reconcile embryology and genetics', in R. Rainger, K. R. Benson and J. Maienschein (eds.),
The American Development 0/ Biology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988),
pp. 311-346; Sapp, J., Beyond the Gene (NY: Oxford University Press, 1987); Gi1bert, S. F.,
'Bearing crosses: The historiography of genetics and embryology' , manuscript submitted.
8 Lillie F. R., 'The gene and the ontogenetic process', Science 66: 361-368, 1927. To wit,
"The germ exhibits the duality of nucleus and cytoplasm; the geneticist has taken the former
for his field, the embryologist the latter". N. J. Berrill, would 1ater refer to the undergraduate
student of cell bio10gy as being Iike "a child of divorced parents, Iinked by all possible bonds
to each of them but subject to their individually biased points of view". 'Pearls of Wisdom:
An Exposition', Perspec. Biol. Med 28: 3, 1984.
9 Manning, K. R., The Black Apollo 0/ Science: The Li/e 0/ Ernest Everett lust (NY: Oxford
10 Holtfreter, J., 'Address in honor of Viktor Hamburger', in M. Locke (ed.), The Emergence
0/ Order in Developing Systems (NY: Academic Press, 1968), p. xi.

11 Just, E. E., Biology 0/ the Cell Sur/ace (Philadelphia: Blakiston Press, 1939), p. 368. That
the embryo or egg is an even greater wonder than the heavenly bodies is a longstanding trope
among embryologists. Aristotle states that while the glory of heavenly bodies may fill us with
delight, looking at the Iiving creatures will give more pleasure to our senses and be just as
beautiful and important in revealing purposes in nature. Similarly, in the seventeenth century,
E. Puteanus (Ovi Encomium, Maire, Leyden. Quoted in Needham J., Chemical Embryology,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931, p. 8) declared that while men may "marvel at
the sun, at meteors f1ung from the heavens, at the stars swimming therein", the egg is a far greater
wonder. The imagery of outer space continues explicitely in the Lennart Nilsen photo essay in
Life Magazine (August 1990). Here, the reader is told that the ovum leaving the ovary appears
"Iike an eerie planet floating through space"; and when implantation is initiated, we are told,
"The blastocyst has landed! Iike a lunar module, the embryo ... facilitates its landing on the
uterus ...." The article provides interesting support for Zoe Sophia's essay ('Exterminating
fetuses: Abortion, disarmament, and the sexo-semiotics of extraterrestrialism', Diacritics 14:
47-59,1984) which looks at the rhetoric offetus as alien visitor. The darkfield in situ photographs
of mRNA expression patterns currently seen in embryological literature are often visual puns
of star patterns, and this has been used in several advertisements for molecular cloning systems.
12 Gilbert S., op. cit., 1988.
13 Rostand, J., The Substance 0/ Man (NY: Doubleday, 1962), p. 181.
14 Bard, J., 'Attracting future developmental biologists', BioEssays 14: 293-294, 1992; see
also Bates, M., 'Beauty and the Beasts', Trends Cell Biol2: 119,1992. He states that the
liberal use of excellent illustration is important in such texts. "After all, embryos are very
beautiful".
15 Spiegelman, S., 'Discussion'. in W. D. McElroy and B. Glass (eds.), The Chemical Basis
0/ Development (BaItimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1958), p. 491.
16 Lawrence, P. A., 'Chocolate kookies', Nature 358: 720, 1992.
17 Holub, M., 'From the intimate life of Nude Mice', trans. by D. Häbovä and D. Young, The
Dimension 0/ the Present Moment (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 38.
18 Plato, Thaetetus 155d; Aristotle, Metaphysics 12, 982b: 12. To put our biases in the open,
the text book by the senior author, Developmental Biology (Sunderland: Sinauer Associates, 1988)
begins with Aristotle's declaration of wonder.
19 Heschel, A. J., God in Search 0/ Man (NY: Harper, 1955), pp. 74-75. Wisdom and knowl-
edge have often been conflated in the twentieth century, but they represent very different concepts.
Both derive from wonder. Interestingly, the representatives of wisdom (Athena, Hokmah,
Minerva) are generally female; while the representatives of knowledge (Mercury, Apollo) are
generally male. Science represents active mastery and public achievement; religion often connotes
passive acceptance and fulfillment (a most sexually charged noun).
20 Morgan, T. H., Experimental Embryology (NY: Columbia University, 1927).
21 Given such an attitude which characterized embryology as artistic and emotional, it became
very difficult for embryologists who wanted reputations as analytic scientists to admit to having
such feelings. Even Johannes Holtfreter, who certainly maintained 11 reputation for ana1ytic embry-
ological research, wrote (letter to SFG, Feb. 8. 1988) that "My artistic inclinations I have kept
a secret from my colleagues". The situation is analogous to those German biologists who
refused to voice their views on eugenics even though they knew it was wrong and dangerous.
To voice one's opinions would suggest that one was not a serious, objective scientist (1. B. Jenkins
on interview with Curt Stern in 1976, pers. comm.). Even today, scientists who voice aesthetic
or political views are in danger of not being taken as seriously by their colleagues.
22 Flannery, M. c., 'Biology is beau tifu I' , Perspect. Biol. Med 35: 422-435, 1992.
23 Weiss, P., 'Beauty and the beast: Life and the rule of order', Sei. Monthly 81 : 286-299,
1955. For an appreciation of the visual embryologica1 aesthetic very similar to that of Weiss,
see Waddington, op. eit., 1951, where the same freedom within order is mentioned, and is
1inked directly to Whitehead's aesthetics. Weiss explicitely depicts the freedom-within-order
of the embryo as a model for politics as weil." And politically, it ought to be our cue.... Freedom
within the law: responsible freedom to move within an orbit as wide as, but no wider than
what is compatible with the preservation of the over-all order that defines the harmony of rela-
tionships on which effective living and survival depend". The embryo as a political model was
used by others such as Just, Goldschmidt, and Waddington (Gilbert, op. cit., 1988). O. Hertwig
(1985) explicite1y uses the embryo and society as analogies for one another.
Certainly, given that each embryo has a telos, embryology does not engender either a sur-
realistic or decadent aesthetic. Although not mentioned in Weiss' paper, there does appear to
be an aesthetic of the grotesque for the results of abnormal development. Grotesqueries and
mal formations have long been a source of wonder quite apart of the "normative" aesthetic of
embryology (see Hamburger, V. and Born, W., 'Monsters in nature and art , , CIBA Symp. 9(5/6):
666, 1947; Fiedler, L., Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (NY: Simon and Schuster,
1978). Here "beautiful pathology" (a term similar in meaning to "textbook pathology" and
psed to cover numerous diseases and aberrations) resides in the amount of deviation from the
expected norms of health and proportion. Such results are ab-normal, mal-formed, or de-formed;
i.e., they deviate from the norm that is the expected physical and aesthetic range. However, as
pointed out by Pere Alberch ('The logic of monsters: Evidence for internal constraint in devel-
opment and evolution', Geobios 12: 21-57, 1989), there are specific patterns of deviation, and
teratologists have long classified the results of abnormal development into a limited number of
categories. Not just any type of deviation is allowed, and these follow certain laws. In the
Drosophila mutation Antennapedia, legs extend from the antenna1 sockets. However, these legs
are point-for-point homologous to the antennae they rep1aced. The embryos that result in these
malformed stages can be quite beautifu1 by the standards mentioned here, and they often result
from the retention of earlier types of symmetry. In Drosophila mutants such as bicoid, bicaudal,
or engrailed, for instance, anterior-posterior polarity is replaced by mirror-image duplication.
24 Johnson, M., The Body in the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
25 Lenoir, T., The Strategy of Ufe (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1982); Cassirer, E., The Problem of
Knowledge (New Haven: Ya1e University Press, 1970), pp. 176-216.

26 Ritterbush, P. C., The Art of Organic Forms (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institute
Press, 1968).
27 Haraway, D. J., Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors ofOrganicism in Twentieth-Century
Developmental Biology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976).
28 Goethe, J. W., Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1804. Cotta, Tübingen. The poem by this titte
ends by celebrating substance in the heart and form in the mind as enduring elements in the
f1ux of time and nature.
29 For discussion of Goethe's " unity of plan" and its bearing on his research on the inter-
maxillary bone, see RusselI, E. S., Form and Function (London: Murray Publishers, 1916),
p. 46. For a fuller commentary on Goethe's aesthetics and science, see Tauber, F., this volume.
30 Winckelmann, J. J., Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei
und Bildhauerkunst. 1754. Heilbronn: Gebr. Heninger.

3\ Boell, E. J., quoted in Haraway, op. cit., 1976.
32 Harrison, R. G., ' Anatomy: Its scope, methods, and relations to other biological sciences ' ,
Anat. Rec 7: 401-410, 1913.

33 Twitty, V. C., Of Salamanders and Sdentists (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1966),
p.9.
34 Haraway, op. dt., 1976, p. 190.
35 Harrison, R. G., Organization and Development of the Embryo (ed. S. Wilens) (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1949), pp. 258-260. The translation of Goethe reads: " Y ou call yourself
apart, yet stand before me whole".
36 Just, op. eil., 1939, preface. "Nature has neither kernel nor shell; it is all everywhere". Kern
is a pun on the German word for nucleus and Schale also refers , in Just's book, to the cell
membrane, the shell of the cell. The full quotation (wh ich would probably have been known -
at least by other embryologists if not by geneticists) went: "Oh, you Philistines who would
think that Nature has bounds".
31 Ibid., p. 368.
38 Ibid., p. 26. Since we will be dealing with experimental embryology, we will not be con-
sidering this earlier, naturalistic, tradition. For an account of Hertwig 's and Müller's aesthetics
of observation, see Cassirer, op. eil., 1970, pp. 176-187.
39 Ibid., p. 369. In this, Just also follows Goethe: "Dann hat die Teile in seiner Hand,lFehlt
leider! nur das geistige Band". [Then he has all the parts within his hand/Excepting only, sad
to say, the Iiving bond.]
40 Weiss, P., 'Ross Granville Harrison 1870-1959: A memorial minute' , RockefeIler Inst. Quart.
p. 6, 1960. Here we have an aesthetic theory of nature that appears 10 extend that of the pre-
Critical Kant. Beauty is to be found phenomenally in the object, and we know it is beautiful
because it resonates with certain facuities of the mind. Weiss would go further and say that
we recognize it as beautiful only because our brains were constructed by the same rules of
order. One theme that often arises is thaI Nature is Ihe supreme artist, but Ihe scientist must
also be an artist (of a lesser kind) in order to appreciate it. Spemann, H. , Embryonie Development
and Induction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 367 says this forcefully: "I should
like to work Iike the archaeologist who pieces together the fragments of a lovely thing which
are alone left to hirn. as he proceeds, fragment by fragment, he is guided by the conviction
that these fragments are part of a larger whole which, however, he does not yet know. He must
be enough of an artist to recreale, as it were, the work of the master, but he dare not build
according to his own ideas. Above all, he must keep holy the broken edges of the fragments;
in that way only may he hope to fil new fragments into the resloration of the master's creation".
In some cases, such as Emil Witschi, the scientist had been Irained in art before being drawn
to embryology (J. Opitz, pers. comm.).
4\ Ueda , M., Literary and Art Theories of Japan (Cleveland: Western Reserve University
Press, 1967), pp. 37-71.
42 Suzuki, D. T., Zen and Japanese Culture (NY: Bolligen, Press, 1965).
43 Hamburger, V. The Heritage of Experimental Embryology (NY: Oxford University Press,

1988), p. 177.
44 Goldschmidt, R. B. In and Out ofthe Ivory Tower (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1960), pp. 109, 114.

45 Ibid., p. 206. We cannot find a copy of the " monograph" mentioned in the autobiography.
46 Hoitfreter, J. , 'Reminiscences on the life and work of Johannes Hoitfreter', in S. Gilbert

(ed.), A Conceptual History of Modern Embryology (NY: Plenum Press, 1992), p. 125.
The link between classical Asian aesthetic concepts and embryology may be more Ihan super-
ficial. Embryologist C. O. Whitman, one of the most persistant organicists and the director of
both the Marine Biology Laboratory and. the critically important biology department at the
University of Chicago, was Professor of Zoology at Tokyo Imperial University for two years
before becoming the director of the MBL (Okada, J. S., 'Experimental embryology in Japan,
1930-1960', Int. J. Dev. Biol. 38: 135'-154, 1994). The current logo for the Society of
Developmental Biology not only resembles the Yang and Yin symbol, but was consciously drawn
that way by Dr. Nadia Rosenthai, a developmental biologist and.artist who has a longstanding
interest in Asian philosophy. The claim that transformation and change are at the heart of Chinese
art, while permanence and fixity constitute the core of the European art tradition is made by
John Hay (Hay, J., 'Some questions conceming c1assicism in relation to Chinese art', Art. J.
47: 26-34, 1988).
47 See Wilson, E. 0., 'Biology and the social sciences', Daedalus 106(4): 127-140, 1977.
Although he states that antidisciplines are on different levels of the hierarchy of explanation
(biochemistry and cell biology, for instance), we would posit that antidisciplines can be at the
same hierarchical level.
48 Gilbert, S. F., 'Intellectual traditions in the life sciences', Persp. Biol. Med. 26: 151-162,
1982.
49 Lest anyone doubt that conceptual aesthetics exists, let them recall that until the 1800s,
Americans saw wildemess and mountains as being "pimples" and "blemishes" on the face of
Nature (Nicholson, M. H., Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Ithica: Comell University Press,
1959, p. 2.) The importance of the conceptual environment upon our appreciation of art is dis-
cussed at length in Danto, A. c., The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press. 1981).
50 Gilbert, S., op. cit., 1978.
51 The aesthetics of embryology have a parallel in the aesthetics informing the feminist
critiques of science. In earlier essays (Biology and Gender Study Group, 'The importance of
feminist critique for contemporary cell biology', Hypatia 3: 61-76, 1988), it was shown that
during the split between embryology and genetics, the nucleus became coded as male (central,
sperm-derived, unchanging, rational, command center and brain of the cell) while the cyto-
plasm became coded as fern ale (changing, egg-derived, malleable, passive, and peripheral). As
we mentioned earlier (ref. 8), genetics took upon itself the study of the nucleus, while embry-
ology took on the study of the cytoplasm. In an interesting way, genetics and embryology took
bn traditional male and fern ale aesthetics. Genetics became a biology of control and regulation
(see Baltimore, D., The brain of a cell', Science 84 [NovI: 149-151, 1984; Keller, E. F.,
Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985». Embryology,
on the other hand, became a science of organicist interactions between parts, a biology based
on negotiations between equal partners. Donna Haraway (Primate Visions (NY: Routledge
Pub1ishers, 1989), p. 397), characterizes work done by women primatologists as being
"skeptical of genera1izations, and their strong preference for explanations full of specificity, diver-
sity, comp1exity, and contextuality". The same ingredients are prominent in the organicist
conceptual aesthetic of embryology. Embryological discourse is also characterized by the het-
eroglossia and situated knowledge mentioned below (see notes 80-81). These gendered differences
are also acknowledged in the use of the divorce trope to describe the split between these
disciplines.
52 Monod, 1., Chance and Necessity (NY: Knopf, 1971), p. 103.
53 Monod, 1. Quoted in Jacob, F., The Statue Within (NY: Basic Books, 1988).
54 Berrill, N. J., Growth, Development, and Pattern (San Francisco: Freeman, 1961).
55 See, for instance, Faber, J. J., Thomburg, K. L and Binder, N. D., 'Physiology of placental
transfer in mammals', Amer. 200132: 343-354, 1992. Whereas geneticists are prone to emulate
physics and construct "Iaws", embryologists and developmental biologists have created an
essentially "Iawless" science that sees individual cases as being more important than generali-
ties (see Conklin, E. G., 'Mosaic vs equipotential development', Amer Nat 67: 289-297, 1933).
In !his sense, developmental biology has remained a science much in the sense that Kant envi-
sioned biology in his Critique of Judgement.
56 Dubos, R., The God Within (NY: Scribner's, 1972), pp. 18,71. The trope of "theme and
variation" is used repeatedly in embryology, and is seen as early as Thomas Huxley's work in
the late nineteenth century. The relationship between molecular biology and artistic formalism
(and between embryology and naturalism) is made in Gilbert, S. F. Developmental Biology, second
edition (Sunderland: Sinauer Associates, 1988), p. 812; and it is elaborated upon in Sahotra
Sarkar's essay in this volume.
57 Spiegelman, S., 'Differentiation as the controlIed production of unique enzyme patterns', in
J. F. Danielli and R. Brown (eds.), Growth in Relation to Differentiation and Morphogenesis

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), p. 287.
58 See, for instance, DeMars, R. 1., 'The production of phage-related materials when bacterio-
phage development is interrupted by proflavine', Virology 1: 83-99, 1955; Kamarata, D. et al.,

'Sur une particule accompagnant le developpement du coliphage 1', Path. Microbiol. 25: 575-585,
1962.
59 Advertisement for Eneyc/opedia 0/ the Mouse Genome, Bioteehnology 1992.
60 Roux, W., 'The problems, method, and scope, of developmental mechanics', Biol. Leet.
Woods Ho1l3: 149-190,1984.
61 Allen G., 'Thomas Hunt Morgan: Materialism and experimentalism in the development of
modern genetics', Trends Genet 3: 151-154; 186-190, 1985; Roll-Hansen, N., 'Drosophila
genetics: A reductionist research program " J. Hist. Biol 11: 159-210, 1978.
62 Tauber, A. Land Sarkar, S., 'The human genome project: Has blind reductionism gone too
far?', Persp. Biol. Med 35: 220-235, 1992.
63 See Haraway, D., op. eit., For further use of organicism as the philosophical underpinning
of biology, see: RusselI, E. S., The Interpretation 0/ Development and Heredity (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1930); Ritter, W. E., The Unity o/the Organism, or the Organismal Coneeption
0/ Life (Boston: Gorham Press, 1919). The word organicism is being used here because organ-
ismal is now used primarily to describe those areas of biology which concern phenomena above
the tissue level, and holism is often used to include vitalist as weil as materialist philosophies.
Holism can easily slide from organicism into vitalistic mysticism, and it should be emphasized
that the embryologists discussed herein are not vitalists. There were, of course, embryologists
such as Hans Driesch and Johannes von Uexküll who were vitalists, but their aesthetics are
not being discussed herein. For a discussion on these terms in embryology, see Maienschein,
J., 'T. H. Morgan's regeneration, epigenesis, and (w)holism', in C. E. Dinsmore (ed.), A History
o/Regeneration Research (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 133-149.
64 Lenoir, op. eit., 1982.
65 Kant, 1., Kritik der Urteilskraft. Quoted in Lenoir, op. eit., 1982, p. 25. In the 1930s, nearly
all the world's embryologists could trace their academic lineage to Kant. See Allen, G., Thomas
Hunt Morgan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 406.
66 Baer, K. E. von, Über Entwickelungsgeschichte der Thiere. Beobachtung und Reflexion. I.
1828. Quoted in 'K. E. von Baer's beginning insights in causal-analytical relationships during
development', in J. M. Oppenheimer (ed.), Essays in the History 0/ Embryology and Biology
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1967), pp. 295-307.
67 Perhaps this is why von Baer could not support the theory of evolution, even though Darwin
utilized von Baer's conception of embryogenesis to support his theory. In Darwin's view, the
adult form was not an end that imposed itself upon the earlier stages. In both the progressive
unilinear and the branched-tree conceptions of evolution, the end result does not determine the
early stages of development. J. W. McAllister ('Truth and beauty in scientific reason', Synthese
78: 25-51, 1989) has shown that scientific revolutions can also cause "aesthetic ruptures" and
that the allegiances of scientists to prior aesthetic committments can hinder their acceptance of
the new hypothesis.
68 Lenoir,op. eit., 1982, pp. 105,227.
69 Hertwig, 0., 'Urmund und spina bifida', Areh. Mikrosk, Anat 39: 353-503, 1892; quoted in
Sander, K., 'Wilhelm Roux and the rest: Developmental theories 1885-1895', Roux Areh. Dev.
Biol 200: 297-299, 1991. Hertwig (The Biologieal Problem 0/ To-Day: Pre/ormation or
Epigenesis?, trans. by P. C. Mitchell (NY: Macmillan, 1895» saw harmony as being a higher
principle that unity (and I suspect that this is a common aesthetic principle among embryolo-
gists). Rather than creating more of the same type of cell, the egg generates differences. These
different cells can then interact in manners that cells of the same identity could not; "for the
self-multiplying system of units, continually enter into new interrelations and afford the oppor-
tunity for new combinations or forces - in fact, of new characteristics".
70 Lillie, F. R., 'Observations and experiments concerning the elementary phenomenon of embry-
onic development in Chaetopterus', J. Exper. Zool 3: 153-268, 1906. What Lillie did was to
demonstrate that differentiation could take place without cell division. Regions of the egg
developed different structures even when cytokinesis was inhibited. This confirmed Whitman's
notion that the cells were merely physical units that made mechanical movements possible, but
they were not intrinsically important to cell fate determination. Morgan, too, believed this until
around 1910 (See Gilbert, op. cit., 1978; RusselI, op. Git., 1930; and Maienschein, op. cir.,
1991).
71 Spemann, H. Forschung und Leben, 1943. Quoted in Horder et al., op. eit., 1984, p. 219.
Some philosophers would maintain that organicism also included a notion of the whole being
contained within each part. Schlegel, for instance, defined Goethe's novel Wilhelm Meister as
"organic" in that the parts repeated the whole and all elements were interdependent. Such inter-
dependence was fundamental to the embryology of Spemann and Harrison who studied regulative
phenomena in development. As mentioned earlier, Harrison noted that "each and every living
being can be encompassed i the organization of a single cell of its species". Indeed, each of
the interdependent parts contained, in potentia, the entire whole.
72 Weiss, P., Dynamics of Development: Experiments and Inferences (NY: Academic Press,
1968).
73 Weiss, P., 'From cell to molecule', in J. M. Allen (ed.), The Molecular Control ofCellular
Activity (NY: McGraw-HiII, 1962), pp. 1-72.

74 Waddington, C. H. in Whyte, L. L., op. eit., p. 44, 1951.
75 Eisenstein, S. M., The Film Sense (NY: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1942), pp. 3-11.
76 Wilson, E. B., The Cell in Development and Heredity, Third Edition (NY: MacMilIan,
1925), p. 1112.
77 Saxen, L., 'Tissue interactions and teratogenesis', in E. V. Perrin and M. J. Finegold (eds.),
Pathology of Development (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, 1973), pp. 31-51.

78 Oyama, S., The Ontogeny of Information (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1985). H. F.
Nijhout ('Metaphors and the role of genes in development', BioEssays 12: 441-446, 1989) and
S. Gilbert ('Cytoplasmic action in development', Quart. Rev. Biol 66: 309-316. 1991) have
also commented on the poor fit that the "genetic program" metaphor has to development. An
aesthetic metaphor might be appropriate in this paper. The genes are likened to the notes of a
score (program) that gets read out by the instruments. However, the resulting performances of
the same score can be very different. Compare, for instance, the recording of Pachelbel's Canon
played by the English Chamber Orchestra, directed by Johannes Somary (Vanguard Everyman
Classics, SRV 344 SD, 1975) with the recording of the same piece by Musica Antiqua Köln,
directed by Reinhard Goebel ("Deutsche Kammermusik vor Back", Archive Produktion, 2723
078, 1981). They will hardly be recognizable as having the same notes.
79 Malacinski, G. M., Cytoplasmic Organization Systems (NY: McGraw-HiII, 1990); Gilbert,
ibid., 1991.
80 Berrill, N. 1., 'Forward', Growth 1 (supplement): i, 1934. The knowledge of embryology is
therefore much more "situated" than that of other sciences. There are very few "Iaws" of embry-
ology (see note 56). The mixing of disciplines is also in the tradition of German Romanticism,
which delighted in mixing genres and techniques, putting poems into novels, poetry and phi-
10sophy, science and humanities, etc.
81 Sinnott, E., The Problem ofOrganic Form (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp.
8-9.
82 Bonner, J., 1965, op. eit., pp. 5-8.
83 Schlegel, F., Athenäums-Fragmente, 116. 1800; Goethe, J. W., 'Formation and Trans-
formation', in Goethe's Botanical Writings, trans. by B. Mueller (Woodbridge: Ox Bow Press,

1989), pp. 21-29. Goethe's views are discussed in RusselI, E. S., Form and Function (London:
Murray Publishers, 1916), pp. 45-51. Not only are the embryos given this Romantic aesthetic,
but so is embryology. According to Roux, each answer brings forth new causal questions, and
our knowledge of the embryo can progress but can never be completed. Moreover, Paul Weiss
explicitly (in the passage cited above) relates his remarks to this concept of Gestalt as frozen
Bi/dung.
S4 DaJcq, A. M. in Whyte, L. L., op. cit., 1951, p. 113.
S5 Whitehead, A. N., Process and Reality (NY: Macmillan, 1929).
S6 Dyke, c., The Evolutionary Dynamics of Complex Systems (NY: Oxford University Press,
1988).
S7 Hall, B. K. (ed). Homology: The Hierarchical Basis of Comparative Biology (San Diego:
(Academic Press, 1994). Also, review of this book by Wake, D., 'Comparative terminology',
Science 265: 268-269, 1994.
ss Gould, S. J., 'Geoffroy and the homeobox', Nat. Hist. 94 (Nov): 12-18, 1985. This essay
looks at the tension in embryology and anatomy between those who would accentuate the dif-
ferences and those who would look for the underlying unities. Geoffroy St. Hilaire, in common
with Goethe, Kant, and Herder, feit that there was a common underlying plan to all living
organisms. The similarities in sequence, chromosomal position, and expression pattern of
homeobox genes throughout the animal kingdom seems to support this view (Slack, J. M. W.,
Holland, P. W. H. and Graham, C. F., 'The zootype and the phylotypic stage', Nature 361:
490-492, 1993).
S9 Chisaka, O. and Capecchi, M. R., 'Regionally restricted developmental defects resulting
from targeted disruption of the mouse homeobox gene Hox-I.5', Nature 350: 473-479, 1992.
Also, new studies show that Drosophila and mammalian homeobox genes can encode similar
proteins and perform similar developmental functions.
90 McGhee, J. D. and Mains, P. E., 'Embryonic transcription in Caenorhabditis elegans' ,
Semin. Dev. Biol 3: 163-173, 1992.

91 Maniatis, T. and Weintraub, H., 'Gene expression and differentiation', Curr. Opin. Genet.
Devel2: 197-198, 1992.
92 Owen, R., On the Archetype and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (London: 1848);
On the Nature ofthe Limbs (London: John van Voorst, 1849).

93 Gilbert, S. F., 'Owen's vertebral archetype and evolutionary genetics: A Platonic apprecia-
tion', Persp. Biol. Med 23: 475-487, 1980.
94 Gilbert, S. F., Deve/opmental Biology, Second edition (Sunderland: Sinauer Associates, 1988).
SAHOTRA SARKAR
FORM AND FUNCTION IN THE

MOLECULARIZATION OF BIOLOGY*
FORMALISM
During the first few decades of this century European art finally discovered
the power of formalism which had long been known to many other societies,
particularly those of central and southem Africa which Europe, in its colonial
frenzy, had scomfully designated as "primitive".l The new formalism came
to dominate, however briefly, one medium after another, from painting through
sculpture to photography and architecture? No medium except those that, by
convention, necessarily had "a story to tell" was immune to formalism's
invasion and even these, including the novel and the new medium of cinema,
did not go completely unscathed. Formalism did not play itself out in exactly
the same way in all media. However, what is remarkable is that, from Wassily
Kandinsky and Paul Klee in painting, to Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe
in architecture, early 20th century formalism transcended the differences
between media and can be characterized by a few basic ideas.
"Formalism", as I construe it, is the pursuit of forms for their own sake.
In those media, such as painting, sculpture and photography, that can poten-
tially admit a subject, the form becomes that subject. In media such as
architecture, where there is no question of subject, form comes to dominate
other pursuits such as immediate function. In any medium, there can be a
wide variety of forms which can be distributed, if not precisely partitioned,
into categories. What these categories can be depends on the medium in
question and cannot all be known apriori: a tradition of reflection, by both
artists and critics defines these categories. 3 In color photography, for instance,
useful categories include color, line, tone, light, and balance (see Figure 1).
In contrast to black-and-white photography, texture probably is not. The par-
ticu1ar forms of color are obvious. The forms that lines may take include
intersections, paralle1s, repeats and so on. Their articulation can help achieve
or destroy balance - the categories are not independent of each other. Perhaps
because of the relative youth of color photography (compared to other
media), and because there has been surprising1y 1ittle critical reflection on
it, individual descriptive (rather than evaluative) terms for the individual
forms of tone or light are not in common use. In literature, in very sharp
contrast, given its long history of reflection, no such terminological poverty
befuddles critical attention.
In aB media, the use of "form" to refer both to particular forms and to
what I have been calling "categories" is commonplace. I do not think that such
a catholic use of "form" does any harm. It does not matter whether we say
that Edward Weston, in later life, was pursuing color and tone as forms or
153
154 SAHOTRA SARKAR
that he was pursuing blues and reds, and tonal concentrations as forms (see
Buchsteiner, 1989, pp. 65-67). Wh at is important is that form was being
pursued, whether it be a particular one or a set of forms. What is also impor-
tant is that the ability to be able to distinguish different forms from each
other - for instance, to distinguish color from tone or regularity from symmetry
- is an important part of the skill of a critic. To be able to actualize such poten-
tial differences is part of the skill of an artist.
Those who prefer desert ontologies designate a few forms - say the triangle,
square and circle (see, e.g., Kandinsky, 1979), or blue, red and yellow (the
"primary" calors), or the cube, sphere and cylinder (e.g., Corbusier) - as
fundamental. Other forms are to be reduced to, and constructed from, these
fundamentals. However, fundamentalism is no more necessary in art than in
religion: no thing prevents a formalist from preferring the ontology of a rain
forest. For a formalist, forms are to be manipulated du ring the construction
of a work of art and, above all, they are to be directly, that is, sensually
appreciated. Forms can be symbols for other things. However, and this is
critical to formalism, that need not be the case. Forma1ism cannot be reduced
to a form of symbolism. The search for "meaning" - or, even worse "truth"
- before appreciation of a form is little more than yet another unfortunate incur-
sion into aesthetics of the dubious linguistic turn of 20th-century philosophy.4
It makes a mockery out of modem art: we need not undertake an inquiry
into meaning and truth before we pass from apprehension to appreciation of
a work by Kandinsky or Weston. 5
It should be clear, then, that I do not construe "formalism" as one of the
two parts of a "form-content" dichotomy, usually (and, unfortunately) expli-
cated by philosophers in analogy with the syntax-semantics distinction of logic.
Even in those media that admit subjects, the contrast, here, is with "repre-
sentation" rather than with subject or content. In a formalist work, whether
there is a one-to-one correspondence between the parts and their relations in
the work and the putative "reality" it refers to is no desideratum for its success.
It is not that representation in art is itself a particularly lucid concept. Short
of an at least implicit appeal to convention, it is hard to see why even the
most "perspectival" of paintings should appear as "real" to anyone except a
one-eyed midget. But a formalist work is non-representational not because
of a failure of correspondence or of "realism"; it is non-representational
because its subjects are the forms that are, in asense, within itself.
In all media, formalism can involve a variety of strategies from abstrac-
tion (or analysis) to construction (or synthesis). The forms that can (though
need not be) designated as the most basic may be obtained from actual objects
through abstraction: a circle may be abstracted from any reasonably symmetric
closed curve, a right angle from an upright tree, as "irrelevant" detail is ignored
during the pursuit of what are taken to be more fundamental forms. 6 If abstrac-
tion provides one part of formalism, construction provides its counter-point.
Either of these parts can be emphasized over the other. If Klee is taken to
have abstracted geometry from nature, the de Stijl group put the emphasis
MOLECULARIZATION OF BIOLOGY 155
Fig. 1. Paris I, 1988. © Sahotra Sarkar, 1993. The subject of this photograph is color. Lines
are important. To some extent, they generate balance. This photograph has no non-formal
subject (See also colorplate 20).
156 SAHOTRA SARKAR
on pure construction. 7 But, perhaps, the happiest products emerge when the
dialectic between abstraction and construction remains dynamic but stable
enough to prevent the dominance of one over the other - witness the greater
success of Kandinsky and Mondrian.
Nevertheless, in most cases, abstraction and analysis has to precede, con-
ceptually, if not temporally, construction and synthesis. To construct or
synthesize, units are necessary, and these units, whether they are the primary
colors or shapes or volumes, have to be available before they can be put
together. Should these units ultimately owe their origin to some actual entity,
they are at least indirectly the products of abstraction. Whether all units must
have their ultiinate genesis in this manner is an old question. Full-blown empiri-
cists ins ist on an affirmative answer; most others remain non-committal even
if they do not indulge in explicit denial. Of course, any of these units may
well stand in need of further refinement after construction but, though the
dialectic has no end, it has a beginning of sorts.
During abstraction, what makes one form more "fundamental" than another?
Stated in this fashion, this question appears to be ontological. But such concerns
can be avoided. Shorn of irrelevant ontological connotations, one can - and,
perhaps, must - ask why one form is to be preferred over another. Why prefer
a circle to an ellipse? Why prefer yellow over green? There is no simple
scientific answer. An ellipse is a more general conie section than a circle. In
fact a circle is adegenerate ellipse. In the theory of additive color mixing,
which goes back to Newton, red, green and blue, rather than red, yellow and
blue, are the primary (or fundamental) colors.
Another form of the same question is to ask why certain details are
irrelevant to the characterization of an underlying form. Or, to put it in a
form sanctioned by the ancient Greeks, how is accident to be distinguished
from essence? In either form, this question is fundamental to the analysis of
formalism. Nevertheless, I will not attempt to begin to ans wer this question.
There is no easyanswer, and it suffices for my present purposes simply to note
that some theory, implicit or explicit, has to provide the criteria by whieh a
recursive consistent procedure of abstraction can be effected. In the Bauhaus
in the 1920s, attempts were made to determine such criteria through psycho-
logieal experimentation. Efforts of this kind have not found much sympathy
among professional philosophers, presumably in an attempt to avoid a poten-
tial naturalistic fallacy in the context of aesthetics. But to the extent that a
naturalistic perspective is of value even in obviously normative disciplines,
and there is little reason to object to naturalism so long as it does not replace
science with fantasy (as in evolutionary ethics or human sociobiology), inves-
tigations of this sort are philosophically important. At the very least they
provide constraints that can serve to eliminate some of the putative candi-
dates for such criteria that philosophy might put forward. If indigo and blue
cannot routinely be distinguished by the human eye, there is little insight to
be gleaned from a suggestion that these be two of at most three primary
colors.
MOLECULARIZA nON OF BIOLOG Y 157
As I have already noted, the unit forms from whieh construction can proceed
need not have been obtained through abstraction. Formalism that puts an
extreme emphasis on construction from pre-ordained units has been partieu-
larly influential in 20th century architecture. Extreme examples include the
constructivism of de Stijl and, barely more successfully, the geometrie con-
structions of Corbusier in the 1920s. In fact much of early modernism - of
the so-called "International Style" - was a thoroughly formalist enterprise.8
The case of architectural modernism is particularly relevant for my purposes
because of its similarities to some of the developments in molecular biology
that I will discuss below.
In architecture, formalism cannot be straightforwardly contrasted to "rep-
resentation" since, except perhaps metaphorically, buildings do not represent.
The useful contrast to form is function and attempts to resolve the tension
between the two have led to such slogans as "form follows function". Of the
most influential of the founders of early architectural modernism - Walter
Gropius, Corbusier and Mies - only the first paid any serious attention to
function though his successor at the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, attempted to
transform it into dogma (Whitford, 1984, p. 180). Corbusier wrote exten-
sively - indeed, it is at least arguable that he wrote more extensively than
he built. However, no matter whether his writings can be interpreted as
endorsing the primacy of function over form, there is little evidence of that
in his geometrical constructions - see for example the famous Villa Savoye
(1930) at Poissy-sur-Seine. 9
That Mies was no functionalist is scarcely controversial. Moreover, few
architects have pursued formal elements, whether it be material and balance
(the Barcelona Pavilion,.1929) or shape and light (the Farnsworth House,
1946-51), as systematiea11y as Mies. That the latter building is also a func-
tional nightmare is hardly open to question (see Schulze, 1985, pp. 252-259).
Its original crimes included poor ventilation, inadequate temperature control
and a failure to guard against the invasion of seasonal insects! Nevertheless,
even such vociferous crities of architectural modernism as Jencks (1985, pp.
104-105) have feIt compelled to pay tribute to striking form of the Farnsworth
House. If imitation is the best form of flattery, Philip Johnson's Glass Hause
(1949) further underscores the importance of that building.
I do not have space, here, to pursue further how extensively Mies, Corbusier
or, for that matter, other formalists such as Alvar Aalto, J. J. P. Oud, or the
architects of de Stijl, influenced early modem architecture, though an inves-
tigation of this sort, and how formalism is related to traditional theories of
architecture, would be a very welcome contribution to aesthetics. 10 However,
I hope that the example of the Famsworth House and the invocation of the
names of Mies and Corbusier, together suffice to demonstrate that one
signifieant part of modem architecture was guided by the pursuit of form at
the expense of function.
158 SAHOTRA SARKAR
THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
I wish to suggest that the pursuit of formal elements forms a significant part
of research, especia11y theoretical research, in the empirical sciences. I do
not wish to criticize or defend this feature of science in general. I merely
wish, for the time being, to demonstrate its existence. There are circum-
stances in which, I think, it can be useful. Formal investigations might, for
instance, prepare the way for new theories and models, contrive examples to
illuminate some unexpected characteristic of a theory, or perhaps even generate
mathematical or logical investigations that are interesting in their own right.
I am going to set aside a proper discussion of these possibilities for some other
occasion. In other instances, the pursuit of formal elements can lead to less
desirable consequences. The examples I give below will serve to illustrate
the latter point.
Meanwhile, note two consequences of the claim that I am advocating: (i)
the development of science cannot be understood solely by concentrating on
the relation of experiment to theory; and (ii) the pursuit of formal elements
might we11 lead to what is usua11y ca11ed the underdetermination of theory
by evidence. However, I wish to emphasize that this does not entail that no
other influences, such as social or political influences, might also be impor-
tant in the development of science or that the pursuit of formal elements
necessarily leads to evidential underdetermination of theories.
Besides the general claim that the pursuit of formal elements is a signifi-
cant part of science, I also wish to advocate a subsidiary one: that this pursuit
can often be seen in the way in which certain parts of a scientific discipline
get designated as "fundamental", whereby other parts implicitly get moved
to its periphery. Given what I have said in the last section, this designation,
in turn, shows that there is a similarity between formalist scientific and artistic
pursuits: both are highly concerned with what ought to be considered "fun-
damental"." I will try to illustrate this latter point by a very brief excursion
into contemporary physics and the sort of philosophical reflection that it has
so far generated.
What is considered to be fundamental physics today is largely limited to
just two areas: the study of spacetime, that is, general relativity, and the
study of the sma11est known constituents of matter and their interactions,
including the framework theory that governs them, that is, quantum field theory.
Both of these studies come together in modem cosmology. I do not wish to
criticize the attention that is paid to these areas. However, I do wish to suggest
that attention to these areas, along with an implicit concomitant decision not
to regard other areas - the physics of viscous fluids or of large molecules or
what has come to be called "physics on a human scale" - as equa11y "funda-
mental" is based, in part, on aesthetic preferences. 12
When attention is fixed on particle physics, the usual defence of its fun-
damental importance takes the form what might be ca11ed "ontological
fundamentalism": after a11, a11 other bodies in the universe are "composed
of" these fundamental entities. But, in a world of indistinguishable particles,
transient resonances, virtual particles, and entangled states, the notion of

"composed of'" is far from clear. 13 Certainly, we cannot fall back upon pre-
cisely locating these entities at specific spatial points within composite systems.
When, so far, nobody has even found indubitable evidence of the existence
of free quarks, it should be clear that to say that a proton is "composed of"
quarks is to make a rather different claim about composition than when I
say that my body is "composed of" certain organs or that a bacterial cell is
"composed of" certain organelles. 14 I wish to suggest that the models that
the particle physicist constructs are the result of a process akin to the method
of analysis in formalist art that I described earlier. There is little synthesis
to provide a counterpoint. That is why particle physicists do not seem to
be able to come up with any other experimental design than collisions of
particles at higher and higher energies. I am not at all denying that there are
differences, too, between artistic and scientific pursuits of form. In partic-
ular, empirical adequacy, as understood in the sciences is an important
constraint that cannot be easily violated. All I am trying to demonstrate is
the existence of ultimately aesthetic considerations, along with evidential ones,
in science. 15
A more sophisticated defence of particle physics would forego too much
concentration on ontology of this sort and would emphasize, instead, deep
"symmetries" of nature that the laws of high energy physics allegedly reveal.
A similar argument can also easily be made for spacetime physics. But, note,
here that even the language is aesthetie. The pursuit of symmetry, espeeially
the rather peculiar kind of symmetry revealed by the invariance of equations
under transformations, is something that any formalist in the arts would fee I
happy with. Falling back on symmetry emphasizes the aesthetie dimension
of scienee rather than deny it. A physicist eould, at this point, onee again
attempt to invoke ontology and argue that these symmetries are there to be dis-
eovered in nature. But, as usual, the ontological move falls afoul of the usual
empirieist objections that the symmetries are usually approximate, are prop-
erties of the models, and are subject to revision. Spacetime, we now know,
may well be neither homogeneous nor isotropic. Indeed it need not even
admit a single symmetry (in teehnical language, a Killing field).
There is yet another, and potentially quite powerful, defence of the osten-
sible fundamental nature of the lowest levels of organization in physies (that
is, that of the particles of high energy physics). Casting ontology aside, the
argument now becomes epistemological: all behavior of all bodies in the
universe is to be explained in terms of their eonstituents. This is what philoso-
phers call explanatory reduetionism (Sarkar, 1992a). This looks good on
paper, but is !ittle more than a dream in praetiee. No one understands
quantum mechanics on a macroscopic scale yet, let alone quantum field theory.
There are many important and startling connections between microseopie
physics and maeroseopic physics, especially in phenomena such as superflu-
idity and superconductivity. But all of these involve post hoc approximations.
And they exhaust little of the known macroseopie phenomena of the physical
world.
160 SAHOTRA SARKAR
Wh at does physics on a human scale look like? Physicists have already

begun to discover surprising kinds of "universality" where certain macro-
scopic behaviors do not depend on the finer details of the behavior of the micro-
scopic parts (see Leggett, 1987). It has begun to be able to account for the
shapes of clouds. From the discovery of chaotical dynamical systems, it has
already shown why weather prediction is so difficult. Moreover, chaotical
phenomena of the same sort unite as apparently diverse subjects as physics
and ecology. At the human scale, complexity and diversity are more apparent
than the simplicity and elegance of the symmetries of particle interactions.
The physicist is left with the daunting task of discovering general principles
in the maze of things and behaviors that surround us as we go from day to
day.
A sophisticated physicist would, no doubt, argue at this point that physi-
cists do not deny that there are other areas of physics as fundamental as the
study of high energy particles or of spacetime. They would point out, for
example, that today's physicists are fascinated by scaling between levels of
organization and the issues raised by complexity. This is true, but such sophis-
ticated physicists are still relatively rare. That is why the physics community
can present an almost monolithic front against critics of the supercollider
project, the particle physicists' dream (and guarantee of job security, at least
in the short term). That is also why philosophers of physics often rederive
old results in new notation, especially in the quantum measurement problem,
but pay little attention to areas of physics other than quantum mechanics,
particle physics and spacetime. 16
BIOLOGY
Let me turn to biology. For the last generation, research in biology has been
dominated by molecular biology. Not only has molecular biology illuminated
a wide variety of fields from genetics to immunology, some of its models,
especially the DNA double helix, have become cultural icons of importance.
On the surface, molecular biology appears as a natural, and perhaps even
inevitable, development from biochemistry, as the chemical characterization
and explanation of biological phenomena was pursued systematically as more
and more experimental techniques became available. But there is more to
this development than first meets the eye.
Central to molecular biology is molecular genetics. It is from this sub-
field that most (though not all) of the dominating ideas of molecular biology
have been framed. In principle, molecular biology includes the study of all
those molecules that comprise biological systems, whether they be lipids,
nucleic acids or proteins. Indeed, in practice, molecular biology does include
all of these in its domain. However, the study of DNA has come to dominate
molecular biology to a greater and greater extent. Moreover, central to the con-
ceptual structure of molecular biology is a concept of "information" which
is construed exc1usively as sequence information ultimately contained in the
DNA. The "genetic code", from this point of view, mediates between the DNA
sequence and everything else there is to life.
It is important to note how myopic this construal of biological informa-
tion iso Even the chemical specificities of the proteins and, especia11y, other
molecules that may initiate or terminate gene expression, are not ultimately
deemed to carry information. This is not the place to pursue the possibilities
generated if this restrictive notion of "information" is relaxed; suffice it to
observe that this notion has been critical to conventional interpretations of
molecular biology (see, e.g., Yockey, 1992). For example, it is only because
of it that the central dogma of molecular biology, that information flows
from nucleic acid to protein, but never in the reverse direction, can be
maintained. 17
One consequence of maintaining this assumption is that the DNA sequence
and the genetic code come to occupy central positions in the conceptual
structure of molecular biology. It then makes sense to pursue the behavior
of DNA, and even just the sequence, for its own sake. Moreover, the genetic
code has a property that is comparatively unique in biology, namely, its relative
universality: the code is almost exactly the same in virtually a11 species.
The relative universality of the genetic code was only demonstrated in the
late 1960s. However, the fascination with the genetic code began long be fore
the demonstration of its near universality. The idea of a "hereditary codescript"
goes back to Erwin Schrödinger (1944) and the term "information" was explic-
itly introduced in a genetic context in 1953 (Ephrussi et al. 1953).18 As so on
as the double helix model of DNA was announced by James D. Watson and
Francis Crick (1953), George Gamow (e.g., 1954) designated the relation
between DNA and protein as being one of "coding". His own attempts to crack
the code were futile but, in an important conceptual contribution, he distin-
guished between the problem of determining the mechanisms of gene
expression and the abstract coding problem, that is, of finding the transla-
tion table between the DNA "Ianguage" written in a 4-letter alphabet and
protein "language" with a 20-letter repertoire. 19
In a striking formalist move, Crick, Griffith and Orgel (1957) attempted
to solve the abstract coding problem without reference to that of finding the
mechanisms of gene expression. The formal theory that provided the back-
ground were assumptions about the desirable properties of biological
information. The translation procedure, they argued, presented "two difficul-
ties: (1) Since there are 4 x 4 x 4 = 64 different triplets of four nucleotides,
why are there not 64 kinds of amino acids? (2) In reading the code, how
does one know how to choose groups of three (Crick, Griffith and Orgel,
p. 417)1" The first problem was that of potential degeneracy. If 64 triplets only
coded for 20 residues, some triplets would have to code for more than one
residue. There was no experimental reason that precluded adegenerate code,
but they obviously feit that it was undesirable. The second problem was that
of synchronization: do we read the sequence ACCGTAGT as ACC, GTA,
... or CCG, TAG, ... or CGT, AGT, ... ?
162 SAHOTRA SARKAR
Their solution to both problems was the ingenious "comma-free code". They
assumed
that there are certain sequences of three nucleotides with which an amino acid can be associ-
ated and certain others for which this is not possible. Using the metaphors of coding. we say
that some of the 64 trip lets make sense and some make nonsense. We further assurne that all
possible sequences of the amino acids may occur (that is, can be coded) and that at every point
in the string of letters one can only read 'sense' in the correct way .... It is obvious that with
these restrictions one will be unable to code 64 different amino acids. The mathematical problem
is to find the maximum number that can be coded. We shall show (I) that the maximum number
cannot be greater than 20 and (2) that a solution for 20 can be given. (Crick, Griffith and
Orgel, 1957, pp. 417-418)
Thus, purely formal considerations "solved" what was, arguably, the first
theoretical problem in molecular biology. The particular solution they presented
is shown in Figure 2. 407 other such schemes are possible.
x v Z
A A A A A
A B C B B D B
B B C C C
D
Fig. 2. The comma-free code. Read cyclically in triplets in each of the three columns of the
three c1asses (X, Y, and Z). A, B, C, and D can each be any of the four nucleotide base type.
Exactly 20 triplets emerge up to cyclic permutation (after Crick, Griffith and Orgel, 1957).
Probably, few ideas entirely bereft of experimental evidence have captured

the imagination of working scientists as much as the comma-free code in the
later 1950s. It spawned an entire industry of mathematicians and biologists
who presented variants, attempted to generalize it, or simply referred to it
without good reason in their publications. Among them were the mathemati-
cian, S. W. Golomb, and such stalwarts of the new molecular biology as Max
Delbrück and Andre Lwoff (Sarkar, 1989). I have argued, elsewhere, that
had the comma-free code or any of its variants, tumed out to be true, it would
have been a remarkable success of a non-reductionist research strategy in
molecular biology (Sarkar, 1989, 1996). But history was not kind to the
formalists.
In fact, when the code was finally deciphered in the early 1960s, it had none
of the "desirable" properties envisioned for it in the 1950s. Some experimen-
talists, long skeptical of the mathematical models of the theorists, could barely
contain their glee. They were also not hesitant to point out that, ultimately,
the considerations that led to it were aesthetic, and to denigrate it on those
grounds. "The early period [of research on the genetic code]", wrote Woese,
from 1954 until the discovery of the in vitra system i.e., 1961) was dominated, of necessity,
by theoretical speculations, for which the few facts then available served as seasoning rather
MOLECULARIZA TION OF BIOLOG Y 163
than substance. Consequently, this early period was rather unfortunate, scientifically speaking,
in that theories were judged alm ost exclusively along Platonic lines - by their internal consis-
tencies, aesthetic qualities, and numerological appeal. (1963, p. 212)
Gamow's stereochemical codes were bad enough, but Crick's comma-free code,
especiaIly as mathematicized by Golomb, particular1y irked Woese: that code
"serves in retrospect as a good example of how, unchecked by fact, attrac-
tive hypotheses can become elevated to the level of dogma, and further
fabricated into impressive, beautiful but illusory dream worlds. Sadly, such
worlds have been the repository of aIl theories of the biological code to date"
(1963, p. 216).
Nevertheless, the metaphor of the code continued to be used as an impor-
tant organizing principle within molecular biology. One corollary was the
exclusive attribution of ultimate or fundamental importance to the DNA
sequence of an organism. Even though, at the level of DNA, information,
was not stored uniformly, due to a variety of factors, including differing
codon usages in different organisms, the degeneracy of the code, the exis-
tence of introns, etc., the universality of the code could be used to argue that
there was at least one level at which aIl living organisms could be viewed
as being the same.
Note that there are many other levels of functional behavior where equaIly
universal phenomena exist, for instance, in the dynamic redefinition of self
and the distinction of non-self from self that forms part of the immune response
of all living organisms. However, these phenomena do not - as yet - have
the same simplicity and elegance that is so endearing about the genetic code.
So far, they have failed to capture the biological imagination in the way that
the code has. It is arguable that the Human Genome Project, the mechanical
pursuit of DNA sequences at the expense of everything else, with little concem
for the actual explanatory or cognitive value of the sequence, is the ultimate
result of the deification of the code.
I have argued in detail, elsewhere, that the DNA sequence of any organism
(except a virus) would be of little explanatory value at present. 20 I am not
c\aiming that, a generation or so down the road, these sequences might weIl
become part of the daily repertoire of molecular biologists. The Human
Genome Project, however, wants to sequence something that is supposed to
be "the" entire human genome by 2005. However, at present, thanks to the
absence of any potential solution for a variety of other problems, especially
the pro tein folding problem, we cannot get from a DNA sequence even to
the structure of a protein, let alone biology at higher levels of organization.
I am more than skeptical that these problems will have been sorted out by
the time when the HGP's technicians begin chuming out larger and larger DNA
sequences. This is formalism, through and through, and almost entirely abstrac-
tion devoid of any concern for subsequent constructive possibilities. A certain
set of entities, in this case the DNA sequences, has been identified as funda-
mental by criteria that are not purely epistemological and has since been
relentlessly pursued for its own sake.
164 SAHOTRA SARKAR
This is not to suggest that the aesthetic criteria are the only ones that have
contributed to the pursuit of DNA. In a society where economic power is para-
mount, and wealth is inherited, the "stuff of inheritance" is obviously going
to be interesting. This sociological factor certainly forms part of the expla-
nation of the origin of eugenics and human sociobiology; it is at least quite
likely to be important in the explanation of the rise of genetics and, in par-
ticular, of the Human Genome Project. Nevertheless, the possible role of
aesthetic factors, which would have worked in harmony with the socio-
economic ones in this case, should not be ignored in attempts to understand
the origins of contemporary molecular biology. Moreover, in the case of
physics, at least, such socio-economic explanations have never been particu-
larly convincing and, ultimately, aesthetic concerns may weIl be more important
to science than the ideological roots of scientific practices.
DIVERSITY AND COMPLEXITY
Formalism is by no means all that there is to any medium of art. Even in

the 20th century, Hans HoIlein's Städitches Museum Abteiberg (Mönchenglad-
bach, 1976-82) provides the counterpoint to Mies' Farnsworth House without
foregoing a modemist emphasis on material. Yousuf Karsh's portraits or Robert
Capa's meticulous record of the desolation and heroism of war are as intriguing
as the formalist nudes of Weston.
In physics the situation is no different. The diversity and complexity of
physics at the human scale are ignored in the pursuit of "fundamentals" at
the level of leptons and quarks. Nevertheless, the formation of minerals and
mountains, or the patterns of clouds and waves are all governed by physical
principles. Moreover, nothing more than an unproved assumption of explana-
tory reductionism justifies the designation of such phenomena as incidental,
rather than central, to the pursuit of physics. When such phenomena have
been pursued, interesting explanations have often been forthcoming, at least
up to a first level of approximation. During the last decade, moreover, studies
of complexity has made almost as many inroads into physics as anywhere
else (Ford, 1989). Ultimately, the choice of fundamental particles, rather
than middle-sized objects, as the frontier of physics, is largely an aesthetic
choice.
If diversity and complexity have finally breached the defences of physics,
biology has traditionally reveled in their pursuit. Moreover, molecular biology
has not been able to avoid complexity within its own ranks. They early uni-
versals of the field: the single genetic code, the operon model of gene
regulation, the linear contiguous relation between DNA, RNA and protein have
all fallen afoul of the unexpected complexity of eukaryotic genetics. If the
comma-free code was an instance of the pursuit of form over representation,
the Human Genome Project is the pursuit of form over function. In retro-
spect, it is hard to criticize the comma-free code. In the absence of any
experimental evidence to be represented, it was not unreasonable - and intel-
MOLECULARIZA nON OF BIOLOG Y 165
lectually exciting - to pursue form for its own sake. The Human Genome
Project, however, is quite another story. Whatever excitement it generates is
technological. How most of a sequence is to be related to biological behavior
or function is simply mysterious at present, and unlikely to be much clari-
fied within the next few years while the genome gets sequenced for its own
sake. Nevertheless, however dimly we foresee, we charge ahead.
But what is most intriguing, for my present purposes, is that the same pattern
of choices apparent in the pursuit of the arts also manifests itself in the sciences.
Formalism in the arts is mimicked by the relentless drive to the smallest par-
ticles in physics, with the hope that the principles found there can be used
to explain physics at all other levels of organization. A formal universalism
is pushed in biology at the level of DNA sequence and code. The similari-
ties go even further. In the arts or in the sciences, the skills generally required
by the formalist do not completely coincide with those that are required by
those pursuing diversity and complexity. The skills of the formalist are often
technical, whether it be an architect's competence in structural technology, a
physicist's grasp of differential equations or a biologist's knowledge of a
polymerase chain reaction. If abstraction is pursued for its own sake, the atten-
tion to technique can become of paramount importance. "God is in the details"
was Mies' famous dictum. A mathematical physicist must perforce study the
divergence of series. A biologist must perfect DNA sequencing techniques.
Finally, just as formalism is but one of the many modes of artistic practice,
with many other modes co-existing with it, physics has the option of pursuing
everyday objects and processes, and biology that of exploring the diversity and
complexity of organic life. In fact, to the extent that Theodosius Dobzhansky's
famous dictum, that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of
evolution, is true, biology has no option other than to move beyond the for-
malism of the genetic code. This is not to suggest that the formalist mode of
inquiry in biology (or, for that matter, physics) is inappropriate or sterile.
Any such judgment would make a mockery of the excitement and fascina-
tion of molecular biology during the last generation. It is merely to note that
this is not all that there is to the subject.
McGill University and Dibner Institute, MIT
NOTES
* This paper is the transcript of a talk given at the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of
Science, November 17, 1992.
1 My use of "formalism" should not be confused with any of the customary - and mutually
inconsistent - uses in the literature of art criticism. I will explain my use in detail in the next
few paragraphs. I am fully aware that the idea about formalism that I am advocating require much
more detailed elaboration and defence than what I provide here. My excuse is a lack of space
and the constraint that I have to address the aesthetics of science, not just art-forms, in the context
of this anthology. There are many similarities between what I am arguing here and wh at the
French art historian, Henri Focillon, argued long aga (Focillon, 1934; a highly interpretive English
166 SAHOTRA SARKAR
translation has recently been issued (Focillon, 1989». In between came two sets of debilitating
developments, one in art history starting especially with Erwin Panofsky's iconographic analysis
of forms (see Panofsky, 1955), which is a collection of his most influential essays), and the
other in philosophy, with Rudolf Carnap and the logical positivists' interpretation of all form
as syntax to be distinguished from semantics as subject (see note 4 below). 80th of these have
discolored subsequent philosophical accounts of artistic form (see Whyte, 1951) with the full
cooperation of the 20th century's unfortunate linguistic turn in philosophy.
2 I am not using "medium" in any precise sense, accepting as a medium anything that commonly
gets referred to as such.
l It follows that what the appropriate categories are for a medium - "appropriate" in the sense
of being useful in critical reflection - only gets discovered as a critical tradition develops.
4 The ultimate responsibility for this lies primarily with Carnap (1937). Philosophy is the
syntax (later, also the semanties) of a language. Physicalism was taken to be obvious (though,
in all fairness, Carnap was sensitive to the possibility of genuine introspective life unlike much
more narrow-minded behavioristic physicalists such as Quine).
5 Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that the standard artists' claims of trying to reach
"truth" in a work should be taken literally. What that truth ostensibly refers to is not neces-
sarily anything about the state of the "physical" world (where "physical" only refers to what
current physics allows) but, presumably, some other realm to be described and understood.
That no such truth can be referred to is a dogma that has resulted from yet another dubious
move in 20th century philosophy, namely, physicalism. Physicalism denies the possible "real"
existence or explanatory value of these other realms but, once mental phenomena are recog-
nized to exist - and only philosophers would deny the unequivocal existence of minds and mental
phenomena - and once we refleet on how little behaviorist (or any non-mental) psychology
teils us, I am somewhat mystified as to why we should believe in physicalism. Even if only as
an aside, I should like to note that a hard-headed positivism - trust only your experiences and
avoid metaphysieal (especially ontological) eommitments - argues against physicalism rather
than for it. Such hard-headed positivism would worry about the regularities of artistic experi-
ence, including the introspections of artists. In fact, it might even be a first step towards a
"naturalistic" understanding of aesthetics but, about that, neither I nor, as far as I know, anybody
else has so far had much to say.
6 See, e.g., the practices encouraged by Kandinsky (1979) while ignoring the dubious pseudo-
psychologie al theories elaborated there which confer an illegitimate veneer of naturalism over
what is otherwise a very interesting exercise of rule-governed art construction.
7 For Klee, see Lazaro (1957); for de Stijl, Overy (1991) is particularly useful.
8 I am only concerned with modernism in the 1920s and early 1930s. A much more compli-
cated story would have to be told about its later disparate parts, including the obsessive
minimalism of Mies and the brutalism of Corbusier, wh ich contributed much to modernism's
unpopularity in the late 1960s and 1970s (see Jencks, 1985).
9 Indeed, it is doubtful that any tangible relation subsists between Corbusier's voluminous
writings and much more modest building accomplishments during this period.
10 Unfortunately, the only book-Iength contribution devoted to the aesthetics of architecture from
a philosophical orientation (Scruton, 1979) shows little familiarity with the transformation of
architectural practice and theory brought about by the technological and political experiments
of the first half of the 20th century. Worse, the book is devoted to developing the rather
sophomoric thesis that architecture should be evaluated in continuity with sculpture.
II It is also likely that the dialectic of abstraction and construction that I outlined there, in the
context of modern art, might be equally applicable to the construction of scientific models. An
exploration of this point, however, is far beyond the scope of this discussion though it might
be more important than any of the points being made here.
12 For "physics on a human sc ale" see Chapter 4 of Leggett (1987).
\3 See Shimony (1989), Close (1989) and Georgi (1989) for a survey of the current state of
quantum mechanics and particle physics.
14 The latter notion of "composition", which is akin to what was used in c1assical physics
MOLECULARIZA TION OF BIOLOG Y 167
does, however, influence modern particle physics. I have previously argued that the quark
model constitutes an attempt to capture, to the extent that is possible, the classical notion of
composition in modern high-energy physics (Sarkar, 1980).
15 Note, moreover, the pursuit of forms in the arts is also not unconstrained. Depending on
the medium, representation and function can weil be regarded as constraints analogous to the
evidential concerns of science.
16 See Shimony (1987), however, for a very important and welcome exception.
17 For a development of this point, see Sarkar (1996).
18 I am grateful to Joshua Lederberg for this reference.
19 For details of this history, see Sarkar (1989).
20 Part of this work was done in collaboration with A. I. Tauber. See Tauber and Sarkar (1992)
as weil as Sarkar (l992b).
REFERENCES
Buchsteiner, T., Weston (Schaffhausen: Edition Stemmie, 1989).

Carnap, R., Logical Syntax of Language (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1937).
Close, F., 'The quark structure of matter', in P. Davies (ed.), The New Physics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 396--424.
Crick, F. H. c., Griffith, J. S. and Orgel, L. E., 'Codes without commas', Proc. Nat!. Acad. of
Sei. (USA) 43: 416--421, 1957.
Ephrussi, B., Leopold, U., Watson, J. D. and Weigle, J. J., 'Terminology in bacterial genetics',
Nature 171: 701, 1953.
Focillon, H., La vie des formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934).
Focillon, H., The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
Ford, J., 'What is chaos, that we should be mindful of it?', in P. Davies (ed.), The New Physics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 348-372.
Gamow, G., 'Possible relation between Deoxyribonucleic Acid and protein structures', Nature
173: 318, 1954.
Georgi, H. M., 'Grand unified theories', in P. Davies (ed.), The New Physics (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 425-445.
Jencks, c., Modern Movements in Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
Kandinsky, W., Point and Line to Plane (New York: Dover, 1979).
Lazaro, G. D. S., Klee (New York: Praeger, 1957).
Leggett, A. J., The Problems of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Overy, P., De Stijl (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991).
Panofsky, E., Meaning in the Visual Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955).
Sarkar, S., 'On the concept of elementarity in particle physics', Columbia Journal of Ideas
5(3): 93-129, 1980.
Sarkar, S., 'Reductionism and molecular biology: A reappraisal', Ph.D. Dissertation, Department
of Philosophy, University of Chicago, 1989.
Sarkar, S, 'Models of reduction and categories of reductionism', Synthese 91: 167-194, 1992a.
Sarkar, S., 'Para qut sirve el proyecto Genoma Humano', La Jornade Semanal180: 29-39, 1992b.
Sarkar, S., 'Biological information', Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 183: 187-231,
1996.
Schrödinger, E., What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Cambridge: Cambridge
Schulze, F., Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1959).
Scruton, R., The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
Shimony, A., 'The methodology of synthesis: Parts and wholes in low-energy physics', in R.
Kargon and P. Achinstein (ed.), Kelvin' s Baltimore Lectures and Modern Theoretical Physics
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 399-423.
168 SAHOTRA SARKAR
Shimony, A. , ' Conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics' , in P. Davies (ed.), The New
Physics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 373-395.
Tauber, A. 1. and Sarkar, 5., 'The human genome project: Has blind reductionism gone too
far?', Perspectives on Biology and Medicine 35(2): 220--235, 1992.
Watson, J. D. and Crick, F. H. c., 'Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for
Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid', Nature 171: 737-738, 1953.
Whitford, F., Bauhaus (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984).
Whyte, L. L. (ed.) Aspects of Form (London: Lund Humphries, 1951).
Woese, C. R., 'The genetic code - 1963', lCSU Review ofWorld Science 5: 210--252, 1963.
Yockey, H. P., Information Theory and Molecular Biology (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1992).
SCIENTISTS' AESTHETIC PREFERENCES AMONG
THEORIES: CONSERVATIVE FACTORS IN
REVOLUTIONARY CRISES
I. EMPIRICAL AND AESTHETIC CONSIDERA TIONS

IN THEOR Y -CHOICE
Scientists choose among alternative available theories in part on empirical

considerations, but in part also on aesthetic considerations. That is, their choices
to adopt one theory in preference to another are determined partly by the
degree to which they regard the theories in question as "beautiful", "elegant",
or "aesthetically attractive". This paper is a contribution to the study of the
aesthetic considerations to which scientists appeal in theory-choice, and of their
role especially in revolutionary times.
In general, scientists decide cases of theory-choice by referring to a notion
of what counts as an acceptable theory. This notion of acceptability will refer
to a number of criteria by which theories may be evaluated. A theory's score
on these criteria will determine whether it will prove acceptable to a partic-
ular scientist. Undoubtedly, the notion of acceptability to which most scientists
have held is constituted partly by empirical criteria. Most scientists, through
history, have possessed a concept of the empirical performance of theories, and
have aimed to choose theories whose empirical performance will be good. They
have identified properties of theories that are conducive to good empirical per-
formances, and their empirical criteria have attached weight to these properties.
Present-day scientists generally cite internal consistency, predictive accuracy,
breadth of scope, degree of simplicity, and explanatory power as empirical
properties of theories that they value particularly. (For a philosophical account,
see e.g. Newton-Smith, 1981, pp. 226-232.) Although scientists in previous
centuries have given differing analyses of theories' empirical properties, most
scientific disciplines since the Renaissance have valued properties of theories
akin to our "predictive accuracy", for instance.
However, in constructing their notion of what makes a theory acceptable,
many scientists refer to concerns other than for the empirical performance
of theories. Some of these concerns are aesthetic. Many scientists have pos-
sessed a concept of the beauty of theories; they have subjected to aesthetic
appraisal the intellectual constructs that make up theories, and the verdicts
of these appraisals have contributed to determining whether they deemed
each theory acceptable.
It is impossible to give a straightforward list of properties of theories that
scientists regard as conferring aesthetic value to a theory, since scientists in
different disciplines and at different times have found wildly different sets
of properties attractive. Any attempt to list properties conferring beauty to
169
170 JAMES W. McALLISTER
theories would thus have to be specific to discipline and time, at least. However,
some general attempt can be made to analyse the experience that a scientist
has when pereeiving a theory as beautiful. Scientists commonly describe per-
ceiving beauty in a theory as receiving an impression of aptness; they regard
a theory as beautiful if they regard its properties as apt. Some scientists have
explieitly charaeterized the beauty of theories in terms of aptness: for instance,
Wemer Heisenberg speaks of a theory as being beautiful if it shows "the proper
conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole" (Heisenberg, 1970,
p. 174). Heisenberg's characterization of beauty in theories has been endorsed
by various seientists (e.g. Lipseomb, 1982, p. 4; Chandrasekhar, 1987, p. 70).
Many others, while not offering any so explicit eharacterization of theoret-
ical beauty, have alluded to feelings of aptness when describing their aesthetic
response to theories.
Explicating the perception that a theory is beautiful as the perception ihat
its properties are apt is consistent with many treatments of beauty in art
criticism. We commonly speak of properties of an artwork as being appro-
priate, fitting, proper, or seemly. When we say of the conclusion of a musical
composition or of a play that it is just what was demanded or could not
have been different, we are signalling that we regard these elements of them
as apt. In the evaluation of a work of art, the apparent aptness of its proper-
ties is a standard justifieation for attributing to it aesthetic value. Aptness
has, in fact, been central to eoncepts of beauty sinee classical times. Greek
art theorists, including Plato, knew it as prepon, and Roman writers, such as
Vitruvius, as decor. It is because of the importance given to these concepts
that, for instance, the consistent use of arehitectural orders in building was seen
as ensuring beauty in an edifice (pollitt, 1974: see pp. 217-218 on prepon,
and pp. 341-347 on decor).
Of course, different properties of theories will strike different observers
as being apt For instance, while one scientist may experience a sense of aptness
in disceming that a theory exhibits particular symmetries, another might
experience it in disceming that a theory offers a visualization of phenomena
in familiar terms. This fact explains why scientists have regarded many dif-
ferent properties as securing aesthetic value to theories.
I shall refer to any property of theories that is capable of produeing a
sense of aptness in one or another scientist as an "aesthetic property" of
those theories. Under this terminologie al eonvention, calling a property
"aesthetic" falls short of claiming that a given scientist will find theories
that exhibit that property beautiful: rather, a scientist regarding a theory expe-
rienees a sense of aptness only upon discerning in it speeified aesthetie
properties, viz., those to which he or she attaches the value of beauty. Again,
this usage conforms with standard talk. In passing an aesthetic appraisal of
a building, for instance, we examine it for its aesthetic properties; however,
what is required if we are to consider it beautiful is not that it should possess
any aesthetic properties whatsoever, but that it should possess some of the
aesthetic properties to which we attaeh value. I take it that which particular
SCIENTISTS' AESTHETIC PREFERENCES 171
aesthetic properties of theories a scientist attaches value to is specified by

that scientist's aesthetic evaluative criteria.
I consider scientists' aesthetic criteria to be just as central to scientists'
notions of the acceptability of theories as are their empirical criteria. This
interpretation of seientists' aesthetic considerations will find little favor with
those philosophers of science who identify the "scientific" with the "empiri-
eist". On their view, scientific activity is the construction of logically consistent
theories to explain empirical data: all other concerns are external influences
acting on science. For instance, Philipp Frank drew a distinction between
two sets of criteria for theory-evaluation, which he termed the "scientific"
and the "extra-scientific". His "scientific" criteria are "agreement with obser-
vations and logical consistency": all other criteria, doubtless including aesthetic
criteria, are extra-scientific (Frank, 1957, p. 359). Such views of science would,
I believe, lead us to misrepresent the construction of scientists' standards for
the acceptability of theories, ignoring the roIe within them of various sets of
considerations that cannot properly be described as empirical. In fact, both
aesthetic and empirical criteria take part in determining scientists' notions of
the acceptability of theories. This does not mean, of course, that we can draw
no useful distinction between scientists' empirical and aesthetic considerations;
but it does mean that the distinctions we draw between them cannot be por-
trayed as a demarcation between the scientific and the extra-seientific.
Once we have established that scientific communities evaluate theories
both on their empirical and on their aesthetic properties, many interesting
questions arise. The one on which this paper will focus is: what contribu-
tions do evaluations of these two sorts make to shaping the historical
development of science? The answer today usually given to this question
is that scientists' aesthetic preferences inspire them to inventiveness and
iconoclasm, while their empirical norms hold them to continuity and conser-
vatism. Perhaps this view descends from the images, widespread in present-
day Western culture, of aesthetics-governed activity as the re alm of imagi-
nation and daring and of data-governed activity as the realm of proof and
punctiliousness. In the course of this paper, I shall outline a contrary view: I
shall claim that, at crucial junctures of the history of science, scientists' empir-
ical concerns lead them to invention and novelty in theorizing, while their
aesthetic preferences among theories curb and resist innovation. We begin
by examining one of the most elaborate formulations of the standard view,
given by Thomas S. Kuhn.
2. KUHN'S VIEW OF AESTHETIC FACTORS
Kuhn sees in seience two modes of development: the normal mode, in which
scientists cultivate their discipline by progressing from theory to theory, and
a revolutionary mode, in which scientists switch not just between theories
but between paradigms. Kuhn considers that in both modes of development
scientists choose among these intellectual constructs partly in the light of
their empirical and aesthetic properties. However, these sets of properties

play different roles in the two modes of development.
According to Kuhn, aesthetic factors play no decisive role in theory-choice
within normal science. He says that, in the puzzle-solving of which normal
science consists, the usual stimulus for scientists' coming to embrace a new
theory is its being demonstrated empirically superior to its competitors. Kuhn
has formulated five criteria, including those of predictive accuracy and degree
of simplicity, on which one theory may be judged empirically superior to
another (Kuhn, 1977, pp. 321-323).
By contrast, a new paradigm's empirical properties will typically not enable
it to poach adherents from a better-established paradigm, Kuhn believes.
After all, he says, a mature paradigm will have developed problem-solving
resources that new paradigms are unable to match. Therefore, scientists in a
revolutionary crisis will typically find their estimates of the competing para-
digms' empirical properties weighing in favor of their current paradigm, and
inhibiting paradigm-switch (Kuhn, 1962, pp. 156-157).
Kuhn identifies the factors that tend to induce paradigm-switch in arguments
of a different sort: "These are the arguments, rarely made entirely explicit, that
appeal to the individual's sense of the appropriate or the aesthetic - the new
theory is said to be 'neater', 'more suitable,' or 'simpler' than the old" (ibid.,
p. 155). Kuhn suggests that, without the contribution of such arguments, it
might be impossible for a world-view to develop into a paradigm dominant
in its community:
The importance of aesthetic considerations can sometimes be decisive. Though they often
attract only a few scientists to a new theory, it is upon those few that its ultimate triumph may
depend .. lf they had not quickly taken it up for highly individual reasons, the new candidate
for paradigm might never have been sufficiently developed to attract the allegiance of the
scientific community as a whole. (Ibid., p. 156)
This means that, at times when scientists are deliberating whether to switch
paradigm, their empirical and aesthetic considerations weigh on opposite sides.
Empirical considerations will militate in favor of preserving the status quo,
since the well-established paradigm will generally have superior problem-
solving capability. But aesthetic considerations can sometimes outweigh this
conservative bias:
Something must make at least a few scientists feel that the new proposal is on the right track,
and sometimes it is only personal and inarticulate aesthetic considerations that can do that.
Men have been converted by them at times when most of the articulable technical arguments
pointed the other way. When first introduced, neither Copemicus' astronomical theory nor Oe
Broglie's theory of matter had many other significant grounds of appeal. (/bid., p. 158)
Kuhn is willing to test these claims against the history of science. An appro-
priate test is performed as follows. We must identify a theory of which the
adoption, we agree, constituted a revolution in some branch of science. We
must then ascertain what role the empirical and aesthetic properties of that
theory and its displaced predecessor played in either inducing or inhibiting
the paradigm-switch. Kuhn's model of revolutions would be shown to accord

with this episode of the history of science just if we found that the paradigm-
switch was inhibited by empirical considerations and induced by aesthetic
factors.
As a suitable test-case, Kuhn picks the transition from Ptolemy's to
Copernicus's theory in mathematical astronomy, which he maintains consti-
tuted a revolution (Kuhn, 1957, p. 134; 1962, pp. 149-150). He reconstructs
the grounds on which mid-sixteenth-century mathematical astrÜ'nomers decided
between these theories. Kuhn claims that the Copernican theory could not have
won adherents from Ptolemy's theory on the grounds of either predictive
accuracy or degree of simplicity: "Judged on purely practical grounds,
Copernicus' new planetary system was a failure; it was neither more accurate
nor significantly simpler than its Ptolemaic predecessors" (Kuhn, 1957, p. 171).
Rather, Kuhn believes that Copernican theory gained adherents on the strength
of its aesthetic properties. According to Kuhn, the arguments advanced in
De revolutionibus show that Copernicus hirnself was aware that he could
attract Ptolemaic astronomers to his theory most effectively by stressing its
aesthetic virtues:
Each argument cites an aspect of the appearances that can be explained by either the Ptolemaic
or the Copemican system, and each then proceeds to point out how much more harmonious,
coherent, and natural the Copemican explanation iso (... ) Copemicus' arguments are not prag-
matic. They appeal, if at all, not to the utilitarian sense of the practicing astronomer but to his
aesthetic sense and to that alone. (... ) The harmonies to which Copemicus' arguments pointed
did not enable the astronomer to perform his job better. New harmonies did not increase accuracy
or simplicity. Therefore they could and did appeal primarily to that limited and perhaps irra-
tional subgroup of mathematical astronomers whose Neoplatonic ear for mathematical harmonies
could not be obstructed by page after page of complex mathematics leading finally to numer-
ical predictions scarcely belter than those they had known before. (Ibid., p. 181, emphasis as
in the original; see also ibid., p. 172)
Kuhn concludes that Copernicus 's theory established itself in virtue primarily
of its aesthetic properties and despite being able to demonstrate no empirical
superiority over Ptolemy's theory. Therefore, he judges that, qua paradigm-
switch, the transition from Ptolemaic to Copernican mathematical astronomy
accords with his view of the role of aesthetic factors in revolution.
I shall try to show that Kuhn has misread the roles played by empirical
and aesthetic factors in scientific revolutions. I trace my disagreement out as
follows. Kuhn has advanced three interrelated claims about scientists' aesthetic
preferences and scientific revolutions:
1. Theory-succession within a paradigm (i.e., in normal science) is typically
prompted by empirical factors; paradigm-switch in a scientific revolution
is typically prompted by aesthetic factors and inhibited by empirical factors.
2. The transition from Ptolemy's to Copernicus's theory constituted a revo-
lution in mathematical astronomy.
3. In the choice open to mid-sixteenth-century mathematical astronomers
between Ptolemy's theory and Copernicus's, the switch to Copernicus's
theory was encouraged by aesthetic factors (viz., the aesthetic properties

of Copernicus's theory) and inhibited by empirical factors (viz., compar-
isons of the empirical capabilities of the two theories).
Claim 2 specifies how, in Kuhn's view, the transition from Ptolemy's theory
to Copernicus's may be adduced as evidence in evaluating claim 1. On the
assumption of claim 2, claim 3 presents that historical episode as evidence
favorable to 1. In what follows, I endorse claim 3, but reject 1 and 2. I shall
argue that Kuhn's own findings about the transition from Ptolemaic to
Copernican theory ought to persuade us that this episode constituted no
revolution. Copernican theory was able to attract adherents through the appeal
of its aesthetic properties precisely because of its conservatism, its fulfil-
ment of aesthetic canons that had long shaped the preferences of mathematical
astronomers. I shall proceed to sketch a revised model of scientific revolu-
tion, that suggests that the factors which Kuhn sees as tending to induce
revolutions tend in fact to inhibit them, and vice versa. I shall support some
elements of this model by further reference to early modern mathematical
astronomy.
3. HOW DID COPERNICAN THEORY ATTRACT ADHERENTS?
If mid-sixteenth-century mathematical astronomers had been attracted to

Copernicus's theory on empirical considerations, we would expect them to
have been able to portray it as superior to Ptolemy's theory in such qualities
as predictive accuracy or degree of simplicity.
There are two classes of predictions in which the accuracy of Copernicus's
theory could be compared to that of Ptolemy's: quantitative predictions of
the positions of the celestial bodies, and qualitative predictions of the appear-
ance of the night sky from the Earth.
Take first the quantitative predictions of Copernicus's theory. There is
little evidence either that Copernicus's work was motivated by dissatisfac-
tion with the current accuracy of astronomical predictions, or that it brought
an improvement in that accuracy. The quantitative track record of the Ptolemaic
theory in the sixteenth century was still generally perceived as good: the
claim advanced by some old historiography that by the mid-sixteenth century
the Ptolemaic theory had led astronomy into an "empirical crisis", which
Copemicus resolved, is not tenable (Gingerich, 1975). At the opening of both
the Commentariolus, a treatise which he composed probably in 1510-14, and
De revolutionibus, Copernicus pronounces hirnself content with the accuracy
of the predictions of planetary positions yielded by Ptolemaic theory
(Swerdlow, 1973, p. 434; Copemicus, 1543, p. 4). The numerical predictions
of the Ptolemaic and the Copemican theories have been compared by several
historians of mathematical astronomy, who have found the latter no more
accurate than the former (Price, 1959, pp. 209-212; Gingerich, 1975, pp.
85-86; Cohen, 1985, pp. 117-119). Furthermore, a comparison of the predictive
accuracy of the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories would have required data
more precise than were available in Copernicus's lifetime, or for decades to

follow. Thus, even if the Copernican theory had yielded quantitative predic-
tions more accurate than its Ptolemaic competitor, this superiority would not
have been apparent to astronomers of the time.
Copernicus's theory failed to establish a clear superiority over its Ptolemaic
competitor also in qualitative predictions about the appearance of the heavens.
For instance, many of his contemporaries reasoned that, if the Earth truly
moved, the apparent positions of stars viewed from the Earth should oscil-
late, by the effect of parallax. The fact that no such oscillations could be
observed supported Ptolemaic theory better than Copernican. As a second
example, take the problem of accounting for the observation that the apparent
luminosity of Venus is approximately constant. The present-day explanation
of this fact is that the apparent luminosity of Venus depends both on its distance
from the Earth and on its phase, or proportion of the planet's orb which reflects
light towards the Earth; and the effects of these two quantities compensate
for one another almost exactly. But the phases of Venus were first detected
only in 1610 by Galileo. Ptolemaic theory suggested that the distance of Venus
from the Earth varies greatly: if that were true, one would expect the apparent
luminosity of Venus to vary correspondingly widely. But Copernicus's theory
predicts a similar variation in the Earth-Venus distance, and offers no separate
explanation for the constancy of the apparent luminosity of Venus. So the
Ptolemaic and Copernican theories fared about equally poorly in accounting
for this observation (Price, 1959, pp. 212-214).
On the basis of such considerations, Robert Palter concludes that
Copernicus's theory was not perceptibly superior to Ptolemy's in predictive
accuracy. "In order to square this fact with the putative reality of a 'Copernican
revolution' ", according to Palter, "one is constrained to fall back on the
criterion of simplicity" (Palter, 1970, pp. 114-115). If Copernicus's theory had
a degree of simplicity greater than Ptolemy's, although it may offer no greater
predictive accuracy, it could still be portrayed as empirically superior to the
lauer.
Many historians and philosophers of science have suggested that the degree
of its simplicity was the chief virtue of the Copernican theory, and the property
on the strength of which it in fact attracted support. For instance, Hans
Reiehenbach writes: "Copernicus (... ) was able, in fact, to eite as a distinct
advantage only the greater simplicity of his system" (Reichenbach, 1927,
p. 18). All too often, however, present-day estimates of the relative degrees
of simplicity of the Ptolemaic and Copernican theories have been naive, con-
sisting merely of a count of the circles in the geometrical constructions to which
the theories appealed: Ptolemy's 80-odd eircles are routinely contras ted with
the 30 or so required by Copernicus 's theory (e.g. Kordig, 1971, p. 109; for
further details and examples of the count see Palter, 1970, pp. 94 and 113-114;
and Cohen, 1985, p. 119). While overall numbers of eircles may contribute
to determine the theories' degrees of simplicity, they cannot be taken as the
definitive measure of this parameter. (For some problems eneountered in
comparing theories in simplicity, see McAllister, 1991.) Indeed, on another

set of criteria, Owen Gingerich judges that "the Copemican system is slightly
more complicated than the original Ptolemaic system" (Gingerich, 1975,
p.87).
Among the many different standpoints from which the degrees of simplicity
of the Ptolemaic and Copemican theories could be compared, let us choose
one that might hold significance for Renaissance mathematical astronomers
themselves. Their typical task was to calculate the apparent position of a
planet viewed from the Earth. No calculation of this sort on Ptolemaic theory
required the use of all its 80-odd circles: it needed no more than the six or
so circles goveming the motions of the planet to which the problem referred.
Copemicus's theory, by contrast, supposed that both the Earth and the planet,
whose apparent position was required, were in motion. Therefore, the position
of a planet as seen from the Earth at some moment could not be calculated
on Copemican theory without referring to the circles goveming the motions
of both bodies. In this sense, as a set of solutions to individual problems,
Ptolemaic theory is simpler and more convenient - if somewhat less system-
atic - than that of Copemicus (Hanson, 1961, pp. 175-177).
In fact, the Copemican theory was not at the time of its enunciation reputed
to be any simpler than the Ptolemaic theory (Cohen, 1960, p. 58; Neugebauer,
1968). There is evidence that, in his maturity, even Copemicus realized he
could claim on behalf of his system a degree of simplicity no greater than
that of the Ptolemaic theory. His early work, the Commentariolus, had sug-
gested that his theory was simpler than the Ptolemaic theory (Swerdlow,
1973, pp. 434-436). If Copemicus had maintained this belief, he would surely
have repeated and elaborated on it in his more systematic treatise, De revo-
lutionibus, just as most of the other arguments in defense of the Copemican
theory that appear in the Commentariolus receive an extended treatment in
the later work. Instead, De revolutionibus omits claims that Copemicus's theory
was simpler than Ptolemy's (Pera, 1981, pp. 157-159).
Neither predictive accuracy nor degree of simplicity thus emerge as decisive
factors in favor of the Copemican theory. On what grounds then did
Copemicus's theory prove preferable to Ptolemy's? As Kuhn and other present-
day historians have documented, these grounds were primarily its aesthetic
properties (Neugebauer, 1968, p. 103; Neyman, 1974, p. 9; Gingerich, 1975,
pp. 89-90; Hallyn, 1987, pp. 73-103; Hutchison, 1987, pp. 109-136; and
Westman, 1990, pp. 171-172). Evidence that sixteenth-century astronomers
were attracted to Copemican theory by its aesthetic properties is contained
in, for instance, the admiration for Copemicus's achievement that Tycho Brahe
expressed in a letter of 1587 to the astronomer Christoph Rothmann:
Copernieus ( . .. ) had the most perfeet understanding of the geometrieal and arithmetieal
requisites for building up this diseipline (of astronomy). Nor was he in this respeet inferior to
Ptolemy; on the eontrary, he surpassed hirn greatly in eertain fields, partieularly as far as the
device of fitness and eompendious harmony in hypotheses is eoneerned. (Quoted in the trans-
lation of Moesgaard, 1972, p. 38)
Copernicus himself expected that his theory would win support on its aesthetic
virtues. He claims as the chief merit of his theory an internal harmony greater
than that of Ptolemy's:
Those who devised the eccentrics seem thereby in large measure to have solved the problem
of the apparent motions with appropriate calculations. But meanwhile they introduced a good
many ideas which apparently contradict the first principles of uniform motion. Nor could they
elicit or deduce from the eccentrics the principal consideration, that is, the structure of the universe
and the true symmetry of its parts. On the contrary, their experience was just like some one taking
from various places hands, feet, a head, and other pieces, very weil depicted, it may be, but
not for the representation of a single person; since these fragments would not belong to one
another at all, a monster rather than a man would be put together from them. (Copemicus,
1543, p. 4; see also p. 22. For further discussion, see Rose, 1975, and Westman, 1990,
pp. 179-182)
We may thus join Kuhn in his conviction that Copernicus's theory owed
its adoption to aesthetic factors. However, the import of this conclusion for
models of scientific revolutions does not emerge until it has been ascertained
whether the adoption of Copernicus's theory in fact constituted a revolution.
4. THE CONSERVATISM OF COPERNICUS
In the fourth century B.C., Aristotle had enunciated three principles in

cosmology: a principle of geocentricity; a principle of distinct physical regions,
which held that the physical nature of the sublunary region (composed of
the Earth and its atmosphere) differs from that of the supralunary region
(containing the celestial bodies); and a principle of the circularity and uni-
formity of celestial motions, which held that the heavenly bodies move with
uniform linear velocities along paths that are circles or compounds of circles.
The latter two principles, in particular, were deeply intertwined in Aris-
totelian natural philosophy. Objects in the sublunary region, composed of
the four elements traditionally cited in ancient cosmologies, were subject to
violent or forced motions, in which they were displaced from their natural
locations. By contrast, celestial bodies were composed of a fifth element or
quintessence, ether, which gave them perfection and ensured that they moved
only with motions natural to them. These motions were circular and uniform
(Randall, 1960, pp. 153-162).
Aristotle's corpus did not contain a theory of mathematical astronomy,
but his three cosmological principles imposed constraints on how the heavens
might be mathematically described. Mathematical astronomy in succeeding
centuries was profoundly influenced by them, but not equally strongly by all
three. The principle most frequently disputed was that of geocentricity.
Pythagorean astronomers, such as Aristarchus of Samos in the third century
B.C., flatly rejected it, embracing heliocentrism in its place (Heninger, 1974,
pp. 127-128). Heliocentrism was supported also by forms of sun-worship,
which retained its popularity into the Renaissance. Another astronomical
system watered down geocentrism by portraying the sun, moon and outer
planets as orbiting the Earth, but Mercury and Venus as orbiting the sun.
This theory, first propounded by Heraclides of Pontus in the fourth century
B.C., was widely endorsed by leamed people throughout the Middle Ages.
Aristotle's most faithful disciples were naturally anxious to supplement
his physical cosmology with a theory of mathematical astronomy which
adhered as closely as possible to all his cosmological principles. Such
astronomers as Apollonius of Perga (third century B.C.) and Hipparchus
(second century B.C.) accepted the constraints of the principles of geocen-
tricity and of the circularity and uniformity of celestial motions: they described
the motions of celestial bodies by appeal to systems of circles centered at
least roughlyon the center of the Earth. Further, since their theories were
primarily mathematical models that advanced few physical claims, they did
not conflict either with Aristotle's principle of distinct physical regions.
The chief difficulty encountered by astronomers in this tradition was in
accounting satisfactorily for observational data. Several times it occurred that
a theory was recognized to be incapable of accommodating the data to accept-
able accuracy with its arrangement of circles, and was succeeded by a still
more intricate geometrical system. Eventually, around A.D. 150, it was con-
cluded by Ptolemy that a satisfactory accord with data required the introduction
of a new adjustable geometrical device.
Consider all cases of bodies moving along a circle with angular (not linear)
velocity that is uniform about a particular geometrical point; and call this,
as did Ptolemy, the "equant point". In some of these cases, the body moves
also with uniform linear velocity along its circle: these are the cases in which
the equant point coincides with the center of the circle. In constructing an astro-
pomical theory, it may be stipulated that the equant point goveming a certain
body's motion should coincide with the center of the circle along which that
body travels; this is what, in effect, Ptolemy's predecessors had stipulated in
stating that celestial bodies travel with uniform linear velocity. By contrast,
Ptolemy allowed himself the extra degree of freedom of locating the equant
point so as to optimize the system's fit with the data: the equant point will then
coincide with the center of the circle only occasionally and accidentally.
Thanks partly to this extra degree of freedom, Ptolemy's theory was much
better than its predecessors' at according with the observational data. However,
reference to equant points amounted to relaxing so me wh at the commitment
to the principle of the circularity and uniformity of celestial motions, since
the theory no longer represented heavenly bodies as moving along their orbits
with uniform linear velocities.
To Copemicus, this relatively late innovation in Hellenistic astronomical
thinking was unacceptable. Copemicus considered that subscribing to the prin-
ciple of the circularity and uniformity of celestial motions was mandatory
for astronomical theory (Brackenridge, 1982, pp. 118-121). Appeals to equant
points violated this fundamental principle, and Copemicus wished to rid
astronomical theory of them. This intention is visible in both his polemics
and his positive theorizing. First, he attacked Ptolemaic astronomy in both
the Commentariolus and De revolutionibus not as a heliocentrist astronomer
criticizing a geocentric theory, but on the grounds that Ptolemy had adhered
insufficiently strictly to the principle of the circularity and uniformity of celes-
tial motions. Secondly, he constructed a theory which, by avoiding use of
equant points, more fully satisfied the principle of the circularity and unifor-
mity of celestial motions, as well as being consistent with the principle of
distinct physical regions. He retraced his reasoning at the opening of the
Commentariolus:
The theories conceming these malters that have been put forth far and wide by Ptolemy and
most others, although they correspond numerically (with the apparent motions), also seemed quite
doubtful, for these theories were inadequate unless they also envisioned certain equant circles,
on account of wh ich it appeared that the planet never moves with uniform velocity either in its
deferent sphere or with respect to its proper center. Therefore a theory of this kind seemed neither
perfect enough nor sufficiently in accordance with reason.
Therefore, when I noticed these (difficulties), I often pondered whether perhaps a more
reasonable model composed of circles could be found from which every apparent irregularity
would follow while everything in itself moved uniformly, just as the principle of perfect motion
requires. (Swerdlow, 1973, pp. 434--435; interpolations by Swerdlow)
In other words, Copernicus sought to formulate an astronomical theory that

was more Aristotelian than Ptolemy's had been.
This achievement, it is true, involved sacrificing the principle of geocen-
tricity and the belief that the Earth is immobile; and these changes too were
opposed by Aristotelian natural philosophers (Grant, 1984). However, the prin-
ciple of geocentricity was, as we have seen, the least deeply entrenched and
most widely disputed of the three principles of Western astronomy. In relaxing
adherence to the principle of geocentricity, Copernicus was therefore following
a tradition relatively familiar to his readers. Indeed, in De revolutionibus
Copernicus cited Pythagorean heliocentrism as a precedent for his own proposal
(Copernicus, 1543, pp. 5 and 12); and many contemporaries interpreted
Copernicus straightforwardly as having revived Pythagoreanism in astronomy
(Heninger, 1974, p. 130).
Copernicus seems to have believed that the fact that his theory adhered more
faithfully than Ptolemy's to the principle of the circularity and uniformity of
celestial motions would prompt astronomers to transfer their allegiances from
Ptolemy's theory to his own, despite the fact that it was able to demonstrate
no dear empirical superiority. He was largely correct in this expectation. There
is good evidence that many late-sixteenth-century mathematical astronomers
found this feature of Copernican theory so attractive as to outweigh any
reservations they may have had against the theory on other grounds. Examples
of this attitude are offered by Erasmus Reinhold and by Tycho. Reinhold,
one of the leading astronomers of his time, who endorsed Copernicus's theory
primarily on the ground of its elimination of the equant point and its restora-
ti on of uniform circular motions; the fact that it placed the sun rather than
the Earth at the center of the uni verse appears not to have greatly influenced
his opinion of the theory (Gingerich, 1973, pp. 55-59). Similarly, in his letter
of 1587 to Rothmann, after having paid tribute to Copernicus's ability to attain
"fitness and compendious harmony in hypotheses", Tycho wrote:
180 JAMES W . McALLISTER
(Copernicus's) apparently absurd opinion that the Earth revolves does not obstruct this estimate,
because a circular motion designed to go on uniformly about another point than the very center
of the circle, as actually found in the Ptolemaic hypotheses of all the planets except that of the
Sun, offends against the very basic principles of our discipline in a far more absurd and
intolerable way than does the attributing to the Earth one motion or another (... ). There does
not arise from this assumption so many unsuitable consequences .as most people think. (Quoted
in the translation of Moesgaard, 1972, p. 38)
In the light of its relation to the Aristotelian cosmological principles,

Copernicus's theory was seen by contemporaries as areturn to long-established
values in the construction of astronomical models: as a restoration more
than a revolution (Neugebauer, 1952, p. 206; Hanson, 1961; Cohen, 1985,
pp. 123-125). As Robert S. Westman claims, far from being perceived as
iconoclastic, the Copernican theory was respectfully welcomed into what Kuhn
would term the "normal science" of mid-sixteenth-century mathematical
astronomy (Westman, 1975, pp. 191-192).
This finding alerts us to inadequacies in Kuhn's ac count of aesthetic factors
in science. Having drawn attention - with much justice - to the part played
by the aesthetic properties of Copernicus's theory in winning it support, Kuhn
is led to portray Copernicus's theory as a revolution. Under that portrayal, after
all, the reception of Copernicanism would support his view that paradigm-
switch is typically induced by aesthetic factors and inhibited by empirical
factors. But the historical evidence suggests overwhelmingly that, for any
reasonable construal of "scientific revolution", Copernicus's theory did not
constitute a revolution in mathematical astronomy. A model of aesthetic con-
siderations which regarded them as a conservative factor would yield a more
adequate view of the history of Copernicanism: it would enable us both to
acknowledge fully the role of aesthetic considerations in the reception of
Copernican theory, and to explain why contemporaries regarded the theory
as non-revolutionary.
5. REVOLUTION AS THE ABANDONMENT OF

AESTHETIC COMMITMENTS
The formation of scientists' aesthetic preferences is patently backward-Iooking.

Scientists tend to regard as beautiful those theories that have long been estab-
lished, or that at least resemble theories that have long been established, in
their community. Even a theory that is deemed aesthetically unattractive upon
its first formulation can win aesthetic acceptance and admiration, if it remains
established in the community for long enougQ. The history of Newtonian
mechanics, of quantum mechanics, even of quantum field theory exhibits
aspects of this phenomenon.
Of course, what enables a theory to win increasing aesthetic acceptance
is not simply the passage of time: I do not suggest that scientists' taste is simply
for the ancient. Rather, I hypothesize that a scientist's aesthetic preferences are
shaped by the factor that ensures that certain theories remain long estab-
lished in a community: their enduring empirical success. The mechanism by
which scientists' aesthetic preferences are constructed and revised, I suggest,

is inductive. A community constructs its aesthetic canon at a certain date
from among the aesthetic features of all past theories by attributing to each
feature a weighting roughly proportional to the degree of empirical success
scored up to that date by the theories which have embodied that feature. (The
degree of empirical success scored by theories is, of course, judged by the
application of the community's empirical criteria of theory-evaluation.) The
collection of aesthetic features and weightings thus assembled forms the com-
munity's aesthetic canon, which is thereafter used in judging new theories
(McAllister, 1989, pp. 36-41).
This inductive mechanism ensures that aesthetic canons in science are
conservative: they will tend to attribute greater value to, and to recommend
for adoption, theories which duplicate the aesthetic features embodied by the
empirically more successful theories of the recent past. The conservative bias
of aesthetic canons has some interesting implications for models of scien-
tific revolutions.
During certain time spans, its aesthetic evaluative canon will not hinder
a community from adopting the empirically best-performing theories on
offer. This situation holds as long as the aesthetic features of an empirically
successful theory differ to only a small extent from those of its predeces-
sors: in such a case, the aesthetic canon is able to evolve fast enough that,
at any time, it expresses preference for the aesthetic features of the empirically
most successful theory then available. By contrast, if the aesthetic features
of one empirically successful theory differ too greatly from those of its pre-
decessors, the community's aesthetic canon will not be renewed sufficiently
quickly to reflect those changes. The canon will lag behind developments, con-
tinuing to express greater preference for aesthetic features that were exhibited
by the community's former best theories, but that are not shown by the current
best theories.
This lag of aesthetic canons behind technical resources is apparent also in
the applied arts such as architecture and industrial design, which - unlike other
arts - possess a notion of empirical performance. When technical resources
in the applied arts progress at a high rate, aesthetic canons may fail to renew
themselves fast enough to ensure that the most powerful resources available
can always be given a form considered seemly. In the following passage,
Maxwell Fry discusses the implications for architectural design of the high rate
of technical progress seen during the nineteenth century:
The rapidity of this change cut the ground away from under the architect's feet. (... ) If the
structural developments which have led to our present technical skill were to continue at the same
pace into this century, at a pace, that is, exceeding our capacity as artists to assimilate them,
then our hopes of establishing a workable architecture would be slight. (Fry, 1944, p. 122)
This incapacity of architectural canons to keep pace with technical develop-

ments is analogous to the lag of aesthetic canons in a science in a revolutionary
crisis.
In these circumstances, a scientist who rigorously applied the established

aesthetic canons would be unable to adopt the empirically best-performing
theories available. In their reactions to this fact, members of the community
will show two patterns of behavior. Some will deern it advantageous to suspend
their allegiance to the established aesthetic canon, and to conduct theory-choice
on empirical criteria alone. Others will find this too deep a rupture with
tradition, and will allow their theory-choices to continue to be determined
by their aesthetic commitments, even though this decision delivers them
theories that are empirically less successful than other available theories.
Eventually, the gap in empirical performance between the theories chosen
by these two factions will widen to such an extent that retention of the old
aesthetic preferences is no longer a defensible option. When this occurs, the
entire community will align itself with the theory-choices of the more empir-
ically-minded faction, and the period of controversy will come to a elose. In
the years that follow, of course, the community gradually forms a fresh aes-
thetic canon, through the renewed operation of the inductive mechanism, and
the historical cyele recommences.
This, I suggest, is how a scientific revolution should be interpreted: as
the forced repudiation of aesthetic constraints which a community had become
accustomed to imposing on its theory-choices. This model of revolutions
explains several features of such episodes. For instance, it explains the
sensation of many scientists in a pre-revolutionary period that they face
irreconcilable demands: their wish to maximize empirical performance is
frustrated by their allegiance to the established aesthetic canons. Secondly, it
explains why the theories adopted in a revolution "look strange" to many
contemporaries: aesthetic or perceptual criteria played no part in their selec-
tion. Thirdly, it explains why, against Kuhn's expectations, the theories adopted
be fore and after a revolution are not entirely incommensurable: although they
do not have the same aesthetic style, there are common criteria on which
their empirical performance can be compared (McAllister, 1989, pp. 41-47).
In the light of this model of scientific revolutions, I read developments in
early-modern mathematical astronomy as fOllOWS. In adopting Copernicus's
theory, mathematical astronomers rightly saw themselves as holding to long-
established aesthetic commitments of their community. This theory therefore
did not constitute a revolution. The early-modern revolution in mathematical
astronomy occurred only at the hands of Kepler, as we shall next see.
6. THE ICONOCLASM OF KEPLER' S ELLIPSES
Kepler's Astronomia nova of 1609 sets out his first two laws of planetary
motion. These were the fruit of his "war on Mars", the effort which he under-
took between 1600 and 1605 to discover a mathematical law to describe the
motion of the sun's fourth planet. Kepler had at his disposal the observa-
tional data collected by his former employer, Tycho: they had an accuracy
of around 1%, substantially higher than any previous comparable data. Kepler
appears to have reached his first law - that every planet's orbit is an ellipse
having the sun at one focus - by, roughly speaking, an alternation of theo-
retical hypotheses and empirical tests: he proposed a succession of
candidate-paths for the orbit of Mars and gauged the accord of each with
Tycho's data.
Kepler tested first the hypo thesis that Mars moved in a circle. He found that
its angular coordinates would then have departed by as much as 8% from those
recorded by Tycho. This discrepancy was in Kepler's view sufficiently large
for a circular orbit to be ruled out (Whiteside, 1974, pp. 6--7). The distribu-
tion of discrepancies along the orbit suggested to Kepler in 1602 the curve
which he should next consider: "The orbit is not a circle, but (passing from
aphelion) enters in a little on either side (at quadratures) and goes out again
to the breadth of the circle at perihelion, in a path of the sort called an oval"
(Quoted ibid., p. 8; interpolations by Whiteside). However, Kepler could not
reconcile even this hypothesis to his satisfaction with the data. He concluded
in 1604 that the true orbit must be a curve contained between the circle and
the oval, and in the same breath suggested which curve this was:
In the middle longitudes (... ) the perfect circle prolongs (the true orbital path) by about 800
or 900 (parts in 152350, the mean radius of orbit) too much. My ovality curtails by about 400
too much. The truth is in the middle, though nearer to my ovality (.. .) just as though Mars's
path were a perfect ellipse. (Quoted ibid., p. 11)
The first law of planetary motion that Kepler published in the Astronomia nova
expressed this conclusion.
The role played in Kepler's reasoning by empirical factors is evident: the
theory that he published in 1609 was the empirically best-performing of the
candidates that he had examined. Empirical considerations were responsible
equally for the theory's gradual acceptance in the community. Initially, many
astronomers were unable to evaluate the empirical quality of Kepler's theory:
they were much less familiar with the properties of the ellipse than with
those of the circle, and found it difficult to deduce from the theory predic-
tions to test against observation. The theory's empirical performance became
more obvious after 1627, when Kepler published the Tabulae Rudolphinae
(Russell, 1964, pp. 7 and 20). This was a compilation of tables and rules for
predicting the positions of the moon and planets, based on Kepler's laws: in
essence, it was a tabulation of the observational consequences of Kepler's
theory, which by this means opened itself to easy empirical test. Use of the
Tabulae Rudolphinae quickly demonstrated that Kepler's theory was very
successful at predicting the positions of the planets - even those of Mercury,
the planet that had thus far proved most recalcitrant to astronomical theory.
The effect of the empirical performance of Kepler's theory on the com-
munity's opinion of it is illustrated by the conversion of Peter Crüger, Professor
of Mathematics at Danzig. In the early years after the publication of Kepler's
theory, he recoiled from it. He wrote for instance in 1624: "I do not sub-
scribe to the hypotheses of Kepler. 1 trust that God will grant us some other
way of arriving at the true theory of Mars" (Quoted ibid., p. 8 where also more
evidence is given of Crüger's early unfavorable response to Kepler's theory.)
Once the Tabulae Rudolphinae had appeared, however, Crüger revised his
opinion. Writing to the astronomer Philipp Müller in 1629, Crüger expressed
the impact on hirn of the empirical corroboration of Kepler's theory:
You hope that someone will give these tables (the astronomical tables of Longomontanus) a
further polishing and you say that all astronomers would be grateful for this. But I should have
thought that it would be a waste of time now that the Rudolphine Tables have been published.
since all astronomers will undoubtedly use these. ( ... ) I am wholly occupied with trying to under-
stand the foundations upon which the Rudolphine rules and tables are based. and I am using
for this purpose the Epitome of Astronomy previously published by Kepler as an introduction
to the tables. This epitome which previously I had (... ) so many times thrown aside, I now
take up again and study (... ). I am no longer repelled by the elliptical form of the planetary
orbits (... ). (Quoted ibid., p. 8)
This is evidence that Kepler's theory won adherents on the strength of its
empirical properties. The last sentence of this passage, moreover, contains a
clue that Kepler's theory had initially encountered opposition because of
other features of it: its aesthetic and metaphysical properties.
The Aristotelian principle of the circularity and uniformity of celestial
motions, whose power in the mid-sixteenth century we discussed in Section
4, still retained some influence in the early seventeenth century. It continued
to captivate natural philosophers such as Galileo (Koyre, 1939, p. 144;
Panofsky, 1954, p. 25); even Kepler had not been wholly immune to it
(Brackenridge, 1982). Kepler's claim that p1anets moved in elliptical orbits
stood in clear violation of this principle, and was accorded a correspond-
ingly ho stile reception by conservative astronomers. They did not try to justify
their hostility on empirical grounds: they did not claim that postulating non-
circular orbits rendered astronomical theory incapable of accounting with
sufficient accuracy for observational data. Rather, they argued on a non-empir-
ical, or metaphysical, criterion, that only the postulation of circular orbits could
produce the harmony demanded in planetary astronomy. For instance, Tycho
had written to Kepler in 1599:
The orbits of the planets must be constructed exclusively from circular motions; otherwise they
could not recur with a uniform and equal constancy, etemal duration would be impossible;
moreover, the orbits would be less simple, would exhibit greatcr irregularities and would not
be suitable for scientific treatment and practice. (Quoted in the translation of Mittelstrass, 1972,
p. 210)
Hostility to the suggestion that planetary orbits were elliptical was height-
ened by the perceived aesthetic contrast between ellipses and circles: whereas
today we tend to describe the circle as the special case of the ellipse in which
the two axes have equal length, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
saw the ellipse as a distorted and imperfect circle.
Let us return to the passage by Crüger that 1 quoted. 1 interpret its last
sentence as indicating that Crüger renounces one of the criteria upon which
he had previously objected to Kepler's theory: he no longer opposes the theory
on the grounds that it describes the planetary orbits as elliptical. The reason
why Crüger feels he cannot now afford to reject Kepler's theory on these
grounds is, as the rest of the passage makes clear, that the theory had mani-
fested through the Tabulae Rudolphinae a high degree of empirical accuracy.
The effect of the aesthetic properties of Kepler's theory on its reception is
unambiguous: far from contributing to the appeal of the theory initially, they
proved to be a hindrance to the theory's acceptance, and the hostility that
they generated had gradually to be overcome by demonstrations of the theory's
empirical power. This fact leads me, on the model of revolutions that i outlined
in Section 5, to portray Kepler's theory as constituting a revolution.
There is in fact good evidence, independent of any philosophical model
of scientific revolutions, that Kepler's theory represented a deeper innova-
tion in mathematical astronomy than Copernicus's. As Norwood R. Hanson
characterized this period: "The line between Ptolemy and Copemicus is
unbroken. The line between Copemicus and Newton is discontinuous, welded
only by the mighty innovations of Kepler" (Hanson, 1961, p. 169). Certainly
Kepler's theory is far more than a "version of Copemicus' proposal", as
Kuhn characterizes it (Kuhn, 1957, p. 219).
7. THE EFFECT OF AESTHETIC FACTORS UPON

THE COURSE OF SCIENCE
The evidence of early-modern mathematical astronomy can now be used in

a comparative evaluation of the view of aesthetic factors proposed by Kuhn
and the one that I have been defending in this paper. Kuhn takes scientists'
aesthetic considerations as prompting them to innovation, and thereby as
inducing scientific revolutions. I regard scientists' aesthetic preferences as
shaped by the aesthetic features of previous empirically successful theories,
and thereby as imposing a conservative check on styles of theorizing.
I feel that the evidence from early-modern planetary astronomy that we have
examined accords with my view better than with Kuhn's. My view suggests
appraisals of the theories of Copemicus and Kepler that agree with those given
by their contemporaries. On my view, we come to see Copernicus's as a theory
that, although not offering any improvement in predictive performance, was
deemed worthy of adoption in virtue of satisfying more fully than its Ptolemaic
predecessor certain aesthetic desiderata. For from sparking a revolution, this
theory was both intended and received as an orthodox contribution to the estab-
lished paradigm in mathematical astronomy. By contrast, we come to see
Kepler's as a theory that merited adoption in virtue of delivering superior
empirical performance, but could be adopted only if the aesthetic canon
that had dominated the discipline since Ptolemy's time was abandoned. This
rupture with the past was the true revolution in early-modern mathematical
astronomy.
The history of science records many theories of which the reception echoes
that of Copemicus's theory, and many that won adherents in a manner recalling
186 JAMES W. McALLlSTER
Kepler's theory. For instance, Einstein's special theory of relativity stands

to classical physics much as Copemicus's theory stands to sixteenth-century
mathematical astronomy: it was an essentially conservative theory that won
acceptance largely in virtue of its aesthetic properties. By contrast, quantum
theory performed a break with classical physics as deep as that which Kepler's
theory performed with pre-existing mathematical astronomy, and had to rely
on its empirical virtues to attract physicists who were repelled on aesthetic
grounds.
The role of aesthetic factors in helping determine the course of science
cannot be properly appreciated unless their relation with empirical factors is
understood. If I am right, the usual suggestion that aesthetic factors are the
spirit of innovation in science, while empirical factors are the spirit of conti-
nuity, is the contrary of the truth.
Faculty oi Philosophy, University oi Leiden
REFERENCES
Brakenridge, J. B., 'Kepler, elliptical orbits, and celestial circularity: a study in the persistence
of metaphysical commitment', Annals 0/ Science 39: 117-143, 265-295, 1982.
Chandrasekhar, S., Truth and Beauty: Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Chicago, III.:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Cohen, 1. B., The Birth 0/ a New Physics (New York: Anchor, 1960).
Cohen,1. B., Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Copernicus, N., On the Revolutions (Complete Works, Vol. 2), trans. by E. Rosen (London:
Macmillan, 1978), original publication, 1543.
Frank, P., Philosophy 0/ Science: The Link Between Science and Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs,
NJ.: Prentice-HalI, 1957).
Fry, M., Fine Building (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).
Gingerich, 0., 'The role of Erasmus Reinhold and the Prutenic Tables in the dissemination of
Copemican theory', in Studia Copernicana VI (Wroclaw: The Polish Academy of Sciences
Press, 1973), pp. 43-62, 123-125.
Gingerich, 0., '''Crisis'' versus aesthetic in the Copernican Revolution', in A. Beer and K. A.
Strand (eds.), Copernicus Yesterday and Today, Vistas in Astronomy, vol. 17 (Oxford:
Pergamon Press, 1975), pp. 85-93.
Grant, E., 'In defense of the Earth's centrality and immobility: scholastic reaction to
Copemicanism in the seventeenth century', Transactions 0/ the American Philosophical
Society 74, Part 4, 1984.
Hallyn, F., The Poetic Structure 0/ the World: Copernicus and Kepler, trans. by D. M. Leslie
(New York: Zone Books, 1990), original publication, 1987.
Hanson, N. R., 'The Copernican disturbance and the Keplerian revolution', Journal o/the History
o/Ideas 22: 169-184, 1961.
Heisenberg, W., 'The meaning of beauty in the exact sciences', in W. Heisenberg, Across the
Frontiers, trans. by P. Heath (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 166-183; original
publication, 1970.
Heninger, S. K., Touches 0/ Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics
(San Marino, Ca!.: Huntington Library, 1974).
Hutchison, K., 'Towards a political iconology of the Copemican Revolution', in P. Curry (ed.),
Astrology, Science and Society: Hisrorical Essays (Woodbridge, Suffolk: BoydelI, 1987),
pp. 95-141.
Kordig, C. R., The Justification of Scienti}ic Change (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1971).

Koyre, A., Galileo Studies, trans. by J. Mepham (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978),
original pub1ication, 1939.
Kuhn, T. S., The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western
Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).
Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 111.: University of Chicago Press,
1962; second edition, 1970).
Kuhn, T. S., The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scienti}ic Tradition and Change (Chicago,
I1l.: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Lipscomb, W. N., 'Aesthetic aspect of science', in D. W. Curtin (ed.), The AestheticOimension
of Science (New York: Philosophicai Library, 1982), pp. 1-24.
McAllister, J. W., 'Truth and beauty in scientific reason', Synthese 78: 25-51, 1989.
McAlIister, J. W., 'The simplicity of theories: its degree and form', Journal for General
Philosophy of Science 22: 1-14, 1991.
Mittelstrass, J., 'Methodological elements of Keplerian astronomy', Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science 3: 203-232, 1972.
Moesgaard, K. P., 'Copemican influence on Tycho Brahe', in J. Dobrzycki (ed.), The Reception
ofCopernicus' Heliocentric Theory (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), pp. 31-55.
Neugebauer, 0., The Exact Sciences in Antiquity (New York: Dover, 1952; revised reprint of
the second edition, 1969).
Neugebauer, 0., 'On the p1anetary system of Copemicus', in A. Beer (ed.), Philosophy, Dynamies,
Astrometry . .. , Vistas in Astronomy, vol. 10 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1968), pp. 89-103.
Newton-Smith, W. H., The Rationality of Science (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
Neyman, J., 'Nicholas Copemicus (Mikolaj Kopemik): an intellectual revolutionary', in J.
Neyman (ed.), The Heritage of Copernicus: Theories "Pleasing to the Mind" (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1974), pp. 1-22.
Palter, R., 'An approach to the history of early astronomy', Studies in History and Philosophy
of Science 1: 93-133, 1970.
Panofsky, E., Galileo as a Critic of the Arls (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954).
Pera, M., 'Copemico e iI realismo scientifico', Filosofia 22: 151-174, 1981.
Pollitt, 1. J., The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974).
Price, D. 1. de S., 'Contra-Copemicus: a critical re-estimation of the mathematical planetary theory
of Pto1emy, Copemicus, and Kep1er', in M. Clagett (ed.), Critical Problems in the History
0/ Science (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), pp. 197-218.
Randall, J. H., Aristotie (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
Reichenbach, H., From Copernicus 10 Einstein, trans. by R. B. Winn (New York: Dover, 1980;
original publication, 1927).
Rose, P. L., 'Universal harmony in Regiomontanus and Copemicus', in S. Delorme (ed.), Avant,
avec, apres Copernic; La representation de /' Univers et ses consequences epistemologiques
(Paris: Blanchard, 1975), pp. 153-158.
RusselI, J. L., 'Kepler's laws of planetary motion: 1609-1666', British Journalfor the History
of Science 2: 1-24, 1964.
Swerdlow, N. M., 'The derivation and first draft of Copemicus's planetary theory: a transla-
tion of the Commentariolus with commentary', Proceedings of the American Philosophical
Society 117: 423-512, 1973.
Westman, R. S., 'The Me1anchthon circ1e, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg interpretation of the
Copemican theory', Isis 66: 165-193, 1975.
Westman, R. S., 'Proof, poetics, and patronage: Copemicus's preface to De revolutionibus', in
D. C. Lindberg and R. S. Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 167-205.
Whiteside, D. T., 'Keplerian planetary eggs, laid and unlaid, 1600-1605' ,Journalfor the History
of Astronomy 5: 1-21,1974.
JOSEPH MARGOLIS
OBJECTIVITY: FALSE LEADS FROM T. S. KUHN ON

THE ROLE OF THE AESTHETIC IN THE SCIENCES
There is a great muddle quite innocently generated by T. S. Kuhn's candor

in trying to fathom what contributes to what he calls a "paradigm shift" or
the incipient stages of supporting a potentially "new paradigm". Kuhn says
straight out, in The Structure 0/ Scientific Revolutions, that: first, the usual
arguments in favor of a new paradigm (those he had himself explored up to
the point of raising the question) "concern the competitors' ability [that is,
the old and the new paradigms] to solve problems"; second, where new
paradigms beg in to gain ground, this criterion is often, puzzlingly, "neither
individually nor collectively compelling"; hence, third, "other arguments, rarely
made entirely explicit ... appeal to the individual's sense of the appropriate
or the aesthetic - the new theory [being] said to be 'neater', 'more aesthetic',
'more suitable', or 'simpler' than the old". Kuhn speaks of "the importance
of these more subjective and aesthetic considerations", but wams us against
the suggestion "that new paradigms triumph ultimately through some mystical
aesthetic".1 Kuhn was able to offer a variety of cases in which the ability of
the new paradigm "to solve problems" could not have been decisive: the dispute
regarding Copernicus and Ptolemy, for instance, and that regarding Priestley
and Lavoisier being the pest known. (It was Popper's charge that Kuhnian
"paradigm shifts" almost never occur and that "'normal' science is [not]
normal".)2
When he returns to the matter, in Chapter 14 of The Essential Tension, Kuhn
adopts what seems to be a stricter view. In his response to the following
claim:
The more carefully we try to distinguish artist from scientist, the more difficult our task becomes,
Kuhn offers the following:

Undoubtedly ... considerations of symmetry, of simplicity and elegance of symbolic expres-
sion, and of other forms of the mathematical aesthetic play important roles in both disciplines
[mathematics and art]. But in the arts, the aesthetic is itself the goal of the work. In the sciences,
it is, at best, again a tool: a criterion of choice between theories which are in other respects.
comparable, or a guide to the imagination seeking a key to the solution of an intractable tech-
nical puzzle. Only if it unlocks the puzzle, only if the scientist's aesthetic turns out to coincide
with nature's, does it playa role in the development of science. In the sciences the aesthetic is
seldom an end in itself and never the primary one.)
These remarks appear in the final chapter, following another on theory

choice and objectivity in science, in which Kuhn searches for the "shared
canon" of science and introduces a set of five "characteristics of a good
189
190 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
scientific theory" - about which he concludes: "every individual choice

between competing theories depends on a mixture of objective and subjec-
tive factors, or of shared and individual criteria". In context, the remark
seems to invoke the "aesthetic" but does not actually name it. 4
There are some strange phrasings in Kuhn's text - which I can only judge
to be a kind of shorthand or an expression of naivete or both - "nature's
[aesthetic)" being particularly egregious; there is also the disjunction between
the scientific and the aesthetic treated as a disjunction between the 'objec-
tive" and the "subjective", and the easy conflating of the distinction between
science and art with that supposed to hold between scientific criteria (the
"five" characteristics, for instance) and aesthetic criteria. None of this, I
suggest, is helpful in getting our bearings on either: (i) the relationship between
the sciences and the arts, or (ii) the relationship between the supposedly
"canonical" criteria for "a good scientific theory" (Kuhn had mentioned, very
loosely, "accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and fruitfulness")5 and
"aesthetic" criteria. Nevertheless, the puzzle nags, and one becomes im-
patient to have the right answer to it.
There is no way to answer the questions implied in either (i) or (ii) in any
straightforward way. For one thing, there is no assured model of what a science
is or what the "characteristics" of a "good scientific theory" are: Kuhn's criteria
are as difficult to make operational as Leibniz thought Descartes's method was.
For another, there is no gene rally agreed-upon sense about how to charac-
terize the fine arts or artworks; and there may not be any viable sense in
which the "aesthetic" can be usefully defined at all.
For a third, there is no reliable epistemic disjunction between "objective"
and "subjective", either relative to the sciences or the arts; in fact, Hilary
Putnam, who, until recently, insisted on a strong disjunction between the two
- ironically, in opposing Kuhn's and Feyerabend's "idealism", now insists
(convincingly, to my mind) that there is no "Dedekind cut" to make, that the
search for a valid disjunction was due to amistaken and misguided zeal. 6
Fourthly, the "aesthetic" is a mere blunderbuss of a term that has never been
seriously defined predicatively, either by Kant or in recent years; it is, in
fact, a term that cannot be seriously defined and is now being gradually
drummed out of use as a technical term. 7
Fifthly, there is no legible connection between the distinctive features of
artworks, which plainly vary across the entire history of the arts, and the
"aesthetic", which, both in its original use (in eighteenth-century discussions
of beauty and the like) and in contemporary aesthetics, was never restricted
or paradigmatically applied to whatever distinguishes art from nature. The
upshot is that there is no standard conceptual ground, given in terms of the
"aesthetic", for pursuing any principled comparison between the sciences
and the arts.
Sixthly, if indeed the "aesthetic" were "subjective" in anything like the sense
in which Kant originally pressed the claim, it would be impossible to pursue
any interesting or favorable comparison between the sciences and the arts;
OBJECTIVITY 191
for what Kant meant, in the Critique of Judgment, was that "aesthetic judg-
ments" were "subjective" precisely because what was "represented" in them
was, for the purposes of pertinent validation, referred only to feelings of
pleasure and pain in cognizing subjects rather than to the "objects" allegedly
represented thereby, and because the validity of such "merely contempla-
tive" judgments depended on their being "disinterested", that is, not infected
in any essential evidential way by reviewing the properties of any particular
artwork or natural objecL 8
Seventhly, there is no established salient or reliable sense in which, honoring
Kuhn's own idiom, there is a "mathematical aesthetic" or a "physical aesthetic"
- or, for that matter, "nature's [aestheticl". Kuhn clearly means by these phrases
a certain je ne sais quoi - which, of course, Leibniz had originally intended
in speaking of "beauty" and which Frank Sibley, in recent years, has attempted
to specify but not analyze (nonintuitionistically, let it be said) in such a way
that, without his intending any such consequence, it uttterly disabled the
entire idiom of the aesthetic thereafter. 9
Finally (and eighthly), when Kuhn appeals to what seems promising in
E. H. Gombrich's comparison of Constable's mode of painting and the work
of the empirical sciences, he neglects to acknowledge that Gombrich was
very confused about what to count as the perception of wh at is (let us say)
"aesthetically" valued in painting and, also, that Gombrich reached a favor-
able finding about art and science only because he regarded painting (at any
rate Constable's painting or any serious painting that compared favorably
with Constable's) as a kind of empirical science "by other means".IO For all
these reasons, I say, the whole idea of comparing the sciences and the arts
and the scientific and thc aesthetic has proved a complete shambles.
11
Nevertheless, there obviously is something to the two comparisons. What is

it? I had better put my cards on the table. There have been two principal
lines of thought that the history of the topic has doggedly pursued. Both, I
think, are conceptual disasters - for reasons more or less the reverse of those
usually trotted out to ensure the rigor of the sciences. One Kuhn betrays in
minimizing the methodological role of the "aesthetic" in the scientific choice
of theories; the other is best illustrated by the perennial delusion among
theorists of the arts and of "natural beauty" who believe that we will finally
discover that what marks the preeminent appeal of the arts is so me modular
element - the "golden section" most famously - that art shares with nature. II
The first is fatally compromised, not because, as Kuhn suggests, the
"aesthetic" plays only a marginal role in the methodological deliberations of
the sciences, but rather because there is no confidence any longer in our
being able to formulate (in a principled way) the methodological precepts
that define an exemplary science; and because whatever they are , the "char-
acteristics" of "a good scientific theory" (to fall back to Kuhn's phrasing)
192 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
are (as a result) inseparable from whatever contributes to the clarity and
order and intelligibility of the experienced world - but in a way that no
Ion ger bears on the distinction between the arts and the sciences. The second
fails because it ignores the essential conceptual difference between physical
nature and human culture and because it conflates that difference with the
one said to hold between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic.
In a word, there is no way to understand: (1) the conceptual relation (and
difference) between "science" and "art" in terms of the "aesthetic", or (ii)
between the "objective" and the "subjective", or (iii) between the "aesthetic"
and the "nonaesthetic", except relative to our shifting conceptions of the way
the world iso Everyone who speaks to these issues instantly invents the con-
ceptual lens through which his or her particular pronouncement will seem
reasonable. There is no other way to proceed: there may never be another
way. Here, pronouncements tend to be ideologies masquerading as either
science or philosophy.
This reverses the usual line of reasoning - when one is asked: Given the
exemplary, objective functioning of science, in what way does the "aesthetic"
contribute to or affect its work? and what discemible aesthetic properties of
things do the sciences and the arts share in pursuing their respective labors?
There is no settled view of science or physical nature or human culture
or objectivity, subjectivity, methodological rigor, aesthetic qualities, beauty,
art, or the like, in virtue of which the questions just posed can be answered.
To see this, one has only to be reminded of the hopeless search of the Gestaltists
for the precise formulation of the law of Prägnanz and the empirical falsifi-
cation of every attempt at supplying the "ratio of natural beauty".12 I am
reminded of lectures given by William Dinsmoor, the eccentric but well-known
historian of classical architecture, who reported (many years ago) having
measured (by hand) all the principal buildings of ancient Athens and having
found no satisfactory evidence that the golden seetion (based on the ratio
3:5) could be confirmed in the Parthenon or anywhere else. I believe notions
like that of the golden sec ti on must have been in Kuhn's mind when he spoke
of the "mystical aesthetic" - or perhaps he had in mi nd Pythagorean
numerology. To put it baldly: those who are searching tor the "mystical
aesthetic" are looking in the wrong place.
The right place to begin, I suggest, is to reject the two mistakes that have
skewed the questions culled from Kuhn's discussion: there is no secure con-
ception of scientific method or scientific objectivity or scientific rationality
to invoke; and there is no settled distinction between the aesthetic and the non-
aesthetic. (This is not a personal prejudice. The philosophical record speaks
for itself.) I don 't deny that, in the interval following the reinterpretation of
Kant's view of the aesthetic in terms of a kind of empiricism (witness Sibley),
the search for its distinction has been notably vigorous. It had to be: there
was nothing to discover. I also don't deny that, from about the nineteen twenties
to the sixties and a little beyond, many well-informed theorists firmly believed
that, somewhere between Hempel and Popper, the essence of scientific reason
OBJECTIVITY 193
was pretty weB captured. But that has proved to be as deep a delusion as
sorcery ever was.
Nor do I mean that there are no distinctive features of artworks (or "natural
beauty", for that matter); or that science is irrational and bereft of all method-
ological rigor. But I promise you: you won't find any uniform array of
properties (often said to be "secondary" or "tertiary", imitating Locke) that
would support a sustained inquiry; and you won't find any evidence that
scientific work actually conforms to the old canons or converges on any new
canon. All that is gone!
Now, does that mean that there are no conceptual linkages between the
sciences and the fine arts, or between certain of the features of art and nature
usually captured as "aesthetic" and the rational assessment of scientific
theories? Of course not.
In whatever way you construe Kuhn 's account, you will not be able to ignore
the fact that, according to Kuhn, normal science has no serious need of the
"aesthetic" and that, in the interval in which a paradigm-shift is indicated,
judgment needs to be guided, somehow, by "subjective" responses to alter-
native phenomenal arrays, in nature or theory, in which such features as.
"symmetry", "order", "simplicity", "balance" and the like are given pride of
place over the more usual considerations (strong statistical regularities, for
instance).
I see nothing wrong with such conjectures. But I should add at once, first,
that thinking of this sort is hardly confined to revolutionary science or more
distinctive of the arts than the sciences; second, that it has no criterial impor-
tance either for the sciences or the arts; and third, that whatever criteria we
adopt for the sciences and the arts are likely to betray such rapid and diverse
and fickle changes that their relevance, over time, will probably be unreli-
able if generalized in terms of their chief examples. Nevertheless, in saying
that, 1 am not saying that the criterial function of such factors is negligible
or irrelevant in the least. On the contrary, I insist that they playa very Zarge
role in both the sciences and the arts!
You may think 1 have contradicted myself or said something decidedly para-
doxical. But 1 have not. It may seem paradoxical to those committed to that
fatally flawed vision of science (and art) which, as 1 say, Kuhn endorses all
the while he pursues the endless task of reconciling the established canon
and the shifting threat posed by the actual history of the sciences. Kuhn never
succeeded in reconciling the two; but he also never took the decisive step of
abandoning the canonical idiom in which the skewed questions (mentioned
above) first led philosophers of science up the garden path.
Quite frankly, what 1 am saying is that we cannot rightly see how consid-
erations of "order" and "balance" and "simplicity" and the like (wrongly
assimilated to the Kantian or empiricist theories of the beautiful in nature
and the arts) do inform the rational assessment of scientific theories, because
we have taken a wrong turn with respect to both the arts and the sciences. Kuhn
is our Pied Piper in this.
194 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
III
You must step back from those who insist on putting the question in the
time-honored way. Let me explain. Imagine that physical nature lacks an
invariant structure. I don't say flatly that it does, but I do say that there is
no assured argument by which a modal claim can be confirmed, namely, the
claim - famously enunciated by Aristotle in Metaphysics Book Gamma and
reinterpreted in a more streamlined way by Hempel for instance l3 - that the
real world possesses a discernibly changeless structure and that any bona
fide science grasps some part of that structure, in virtue of which (alone)
observed changes can be properly explained.
The supposed linkage between Aristotle and Hempel is not as farfetched
as you may think. In Aristotle, of course, it is the intuitive power of nous
that instantly discerns the essential, invariant structure of reality even within
perceptually discernible change. In Hempel, it is by the incremental work of
induction that observation overtakes the limits of its own evidence and begins
to guess effectively at the nomologically necessary structure of changing nature.
Aristotle's science and Hempel's are worlds apart. But, in comparing them,
I am not speaking of the views of two idiosyncratic theorists: they are, rather
equally (even if unequally gifted) spokesmen for the two principal visions
of science flanking the twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy - and
philosophy of science - and each betrays the same Western penchant for under-
standing change under changelessness. Thus, to the Aristotelian eye, the
inductivism of the unity of science program would be as preposterous as
Aristotle's noetized essentialism is to the orthodox empiricist.
I say only that, at the end of the twentieth century, there is no longer any
recognizably compelling argument for holding that the work of the empir-
ical sciences must, apriori, be committed to invariance in the full realist sense;
and that there is no way, aposteriori, that we can ever confirm the nomological
necessity on which our phenomenological laws may be supposed to depend.
I am not interested here, I may add, in the final fate of these two visions.
My point is rather that both rely, in admiuedly different ways, on some rational
capacity to "discern", by theory, what is sensorily imperceptible in nature.
Whatever Kuhn may have meant by the "aesthetic" cannot but have been
already in play, and must still be in play, in appraising a "good scientific
theory" if (as Kuhn obviously intends) a good theory is one committed to
the recovery of what is nomologically necessary. But if that is so, then (I
say) it is not possible to disjoin, in principle, Kuhn 's "objective" and "sub-
jective" criteria for assessing ("good") theories: symmetry, beautiful order, and
the like have from the very beginning ofWestern philosophies of seien ce been
inseparable from the epistemic presumptions of objectivity. Simplicity, for
instance, is regularly taken to facilitate the nomologically exceptionless! The
late Kantian and late empiricist readings of the "aesthetic" (by way of the
philosophy of art) are simply another piece of theoretical obfuscation that
happen, for the most contingent of reasons, to have infected - innocently,
OBJECTIVITY 195
through Kuhn 's influence - our present reflections on the deep connection
between the sciences and the fine arts.
Now, if the premise of invariance is abandoned, then, I say, the original
Kuhnian confidence, which bifurcates the "objective" and the "subjective" (the
nonaesthetic and the aesthetic), no longer has any point. No doubt science
clings to the regulative notion the ideal of invariance supplies, and that may
still prove useful (within limits). But if the principle were abandoned, or
assigned a distinctly subordinate role in the rationale of science itself, then
the methodology of the sciences (whatever we may take that to be) would have
to be utterly unlike what it has been imagined to be among theorists as diverse
as Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, Peirce, Popper, Kuhn, and Lakatos. The
key is this: on the altered vision, the method of science, the model of scien-
tific rationality - both with respect to discovery and confirmation - would
have to be analogical rather than principled or algorithmic and would have
to proceed by comparison with admitted exemplars rather than by way of strict
subsumption under covering laws. And then it would be ad hoc, historicized,
entrenched in changing practice.
What I suggest is that the kind of theorizing and the manner of assessing'
"good scientific theories" that we should have to favor (to reclaim Kuhn's
phrase) would then prove to be distinctly hospitable to the kind of thinking
that obtains in the production and appreciation of art (and of "natural beauty",
if one insists). In that sense, the skewed intuition that the older tradition of
the philosophy of science has preserved in Kuhn's candid reflections can be
put to illuminating use. I don't say that that would provide us with a whole
passei of criteria for getting on with the work of the sciences. No, there's no
prospect of that. But it would mean that we would come to see the issue in
an entirely different light - and that would be more productive in the short
run, both scientifically and artistically. There you have the strategy of the
argument at least.
It still lacks detail, ladmit.
I don't wish to burden this conjecture with too much in the way of con-
troversial theory. On the contrary, I mean to reduce the damage of the theorizing
irrelevancies I have already exposed. So let me try instead to strengthen the
prospects of my reading of the puzzle by reminding you of several truisms
drawn from the arts and the theory of the arts. No one knowledgeable about
the modem and contemporary history of the fine arts could possibly be
unaware of the enormous flight, in the late nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies, from the "official" norms of beauty endlessly intoned in Western art
from classical Greece to, roughly, the French Revolution. You have only to
think of the consternation produced by Debussy's having rejected all canon-
ical presumptions about 'beautiful" musical forms, said to be "rationally"
restricted (that is, compositionally restricted) to certain normatively admissible
harmonies.
What is "aesthetically pleasing" in music, or (more neutrally) is musically
"interesting", has, by this time, proved to be largely a function of the history
196 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
of musical taste. The general assumption, now, is that informed taste is, at least
within very generous limits, primarily a function of historically entrenched
practices. There is, now, in music and the other arts, no confident prospect
of ever recovering an invariant "aesthetic" structure in virtue of which the
appreciation of the fine arts could possibly be said to rest on an "objective"
foundation rivalling the presumption already acknowledged in the sciences.
On the contrary, taste and compositional rigor in the arts have been his-
toricized even more radically than have our intuitions about scientific "method"
and the perception of "good theories" - and, for a very good reason. In the
sciences, prediction and technological control have helped to fix the meaning
of "objectivity" in a way that cannot be matched in the fine arts. 14 Still,
among the sciences, the fixity of those interests has always seemed too pre-
carious to be trusted - has always been displaced by a hankering for a
(disinterested) objectivity of a grander sort: 15 hence, the troublesome perse-
veration of Kuhn's clinging to the remnants of "rational method" that his
own historical studies have done so much to subvert.
The bafflement induced by the questions Kuhn raised is, to put the matter
in a comic light, no more than a symptom of an unconscious longing waiting
to be exposed. I see it as little more than what the Freudians would say
about middleclass kleptomaniac women who, seemingly ineptly, are caught
infragrante in their fashionable shops, so that they can put an end to the mean-
inglessness of their former routines. Kuhn was signalling ("subconsciously"),
I suppose, the futility of the canonical picture of objectivity he knew no way
of displacing! What is mildly amusing about all this is the subsequent seri-
ousness with which so many learned discussants ponder what could possibly
be meant by the "aesthetic" in the sciences. Wh at it really means - what it
can only mean - is this: that professional taste ("reason", if you wish) in the
sciences (as in the arts) is a function of the history of professional practice;
as a consequence, the theorizing criteria of what is "good" in the way of an
explanatory theory or of a painting are, essentially, what accords with that
practice (subject always, of course, to the caution that methods will change
when cultural experience changes). But to admit this is to admit that "reason"
itself is an artifact of historical life and that the "aesthetic" is as conve-
nient a catch-all for the informality with which even the most formal criteria
can be legitimated. There you have the nerve of the solution.
Gombrich, whom Kuhn obviously admires, had spent a good deal of his
connoisseur's capital in inveighing against "the innocent eye".16 But, in spite
of that, he never managed to explain consistently just how Constable could
be said to capture, in any "objective" sense, the way the world looks - that
was not itself the artifact of the historicizing of visual perception. 17 Gombrich
placed hirnself, therefore, in a dilemma of his own making from which he could
not escape; and Nelson Goodman (as is well known) worried his ac count so
effectively that Gombrich was forced to accede to a cleverer dialectician. 18
Nevertheless, for his own part, Goodman was unable to make any consistent
sense of visual perception, for he fell back to a nominalist account - which
OBJECTIVITY 197
is to say, to an ac count that, in principle, admits it cannot explain predica-

tive generality of any kind. 19
IV
All this threatens to take us very far afield, except for the fact that to under-
stand correctly the problem of predicative generality is to understand in the
deepest way just what it is that binds the sciences and the arts together and
what disables any disjunction between "objective" and "subjective" predica-
tions.
I do believe the resolution of the puzzle lies with the right analysis of
predication. In saying that I have no illusions about Kuhn's questions. Frankly,
I rule them completely out of court: I reject all the efforts of late-blooming
theorists of science who imagine they have stumbled on to what Kuhn over-
looked. They deceive themselves: there's nothing to discover. What's called
for is a kind of philosophical therapy that does not dismiss philosophy
itself. The corrective may be put in the form of a theory of predication. You
may think this a piece of whimsy, but the truth is it is not. It is a lesson
buried in Kuhn's own theory. It is for instance the deeper lesson of that best-
known re mark of Kuhn's, viz. that Priestley and Lavoisier "lived in different
worlds".20
To see how all this fits together, let me remind you of the principal themes
of Kuhn's account that Kuhn was ultimately unwilling to sustain, that he incon-
sistently overrode in order to restore so me semblance of the canonical model
of science. The themes are these: (i) the intelligible world is symbiotized in
a broadly Kantian (or, better, post-Kantian) sense, relative to which the dis-
junction between realism and idealism is no Ion ger tenable; and (ii) our various
accounts of the real world, under (i), are themselves successive artifacts of
the historical life of inquiring societies. The "objective" world, as science
sees it, is, on Kuhn's own reading, no more than a reasonable posit made within
the terms 0/ (i)-(ii). Kuhn signals his unwillingness to accept this limitation
- by his obvious distress at the mention of "different worlds" and by his uneasy
disjunction between "objective" and "aesthetic" criteria for a "good theory"
- when assessing scientific revolutions.
This is not the place to argue in favor of themes (i)-(ii). I accept them
without hesitation. They are, I think, coherent and very probably the execu-
tive themes of a good part of the philosophy of the next century. But if they
were to gain ground, then, trivially, Kuhn's formulation of the links between
science and art and objectivity and subjectivity would founder. For Kuhn's pro-
nouncements regarding the "aesthetic" are no more compatible with (i)-(ii)
than is his insistence on nomological invariance - and his dreams of "progress",
which depend upon invariance. 21
My point rests on a neglected theme: that predicables, whether in the
sciences or the arts, are discemed in the world - under (i)-(ii) - in accord with,
and only with, the consensual practices of one human society or another.
198 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
Here, I press any strang usage (regarding language and inquiry) into service
(without prejudice to the philosophical doctrines it serves - for instance,
Wittgenstein's Lebensformen or Foucault's epistemes)22 so long as it admits:
(a) that individual human agents are empowered, as the apt agents they are
(linguistically and otherwise), by having internalized the practices of their
enabling society; (b) that those practices are collective and cannot be satis-
factorily analyzed (or reduced) in solipsistic terms (or biologically); (c) that
such practices vary among different societies and over historical time; (d)
that they change as a consequence of their actual use; (e) that, though con-
sensual, such (lebensformlich) practices are not criterial as such; and (f) that
viable norms and criteria of cognitive success cannot depart very radically fram
their consensual graunding, since their own success is equally consensual. I
say that every society builds a dense network of interlocking practices; that
these cannot be viewed as supporting any disjunction between the "subjective"
and the "objective", except, artifactually, within their own terms; and that
the viability of any and all would-be objective criteria (for instance, Kuhn's
criteria for a "good scientific theory") depend on their congruity with such a
network.
When Kuhn "selects" his five criteria for "theory choice", he intraduces
them in a way that leaves no doubt that he is not departing fram the canon-
ical view and that they can be counted on, ordinarily, to pravide adequate
criteria for an objective choice in the sciences. 23 Without belaboring the point,
what I insist on is this: Kuhn is not entitled to co-opt these criteria, on his
own theory - the theory I summarize as themes (i)-(ii) - not because such
criteria vary from society to society (though they do) but because their appli-
cation cannot be separated from the lebensformlich conditions I have just
identified. The objectivity is entrenched in the running predicative practices
of their encompassing society and has no meaning apart fram that constraint
- even if judged to be transhistorically valid.
The argument is a powerful one: to deny the charge and admit that discourse
requires "real generals" ("divided reference", in Quine's familiar idiom), entails
that either there are discemible uni versals (in the medieval sense) that may
be applied criterially, or else discourse is a sham despite appearances to the
contrary.24
No one in the analytic tradition (I suggest) has the least idea of how to
resurrect the ancient universals criterially - or wishes to do so; and no one
believes that nominalism is epistemically responsible. The only solution to
the problem of general predicables is the one that invokes "consensual prac-
ti ces" . But, if that is so, then the objectivity of the sciences is inseparable
from the objectivity of the productive and critical practices involving the
arts. That is: the objectivity of "theory choice" (in Kuhn's sense) cannot but
be consensual.
Consider this. In painting, when you have before you such exemplars as
Picasso's and Braque's cubism and you wish to consider either or both whether
Juan Gris's clearly distinctive style of painting is genuinely cu bist or whether,
OBJECTIVITY 199
qua cubist, it supports a certain ("objective") assessment of merit, you cannot

escape the encompassing consensual (not criterial) sense in which such ques-
tions are made meaningful and open to resolution.25 One surely begins with
something like Picasso's Ma lolie and Braque's Le Portugais (which are them-
selves so extraordinarily alike). One then fans out across the oeuvre of both
and moves on to see what can be made of the distinctive "cu bist" work of Gris.
I see no principled difference between this matter and Kuhn's concern.
Two considerations are decisive: first, there is no clear sense in which
there can be one and only one correct description or appraisal of Gris vis-a-
vis Picasso and Braque; and, second, the pertinent predicables of the artworld
are irreducibly intentional. ladmit the story is not quite the same for the
physical sciences - though Kuhn's criteria do not touch on the difference. There
are two further constraints that divide the physical sciences from the fine
arts. For one, the sciences (but not the arts) are (not at all unreasonably taken
to be) committed to maximizing prediction and technological control; they
therefore restrict the application of the previous first constraints more narrowly
than ever obtains in the arts. For another, in the arts, the phenomena, not merely
the criteria of assessment, are thoroughly intentional; in the physical sciences,
the phenomena are restricted in principle to wh at lacks intentional attributes.
It remains true nevertheless that the criteria of "theory choice" are as inten-
tional in the one case as in the other. Add to this one final consideration,
and you will see that there is no principled difference between what counts
as objectivity in the arts and in the sciences, although that does not entail
that there is no difference between the arts and sciences.
The addition is this: if the intelligible world is symbiotized along the lines
I suggest, then, although the attributes of physical objects are not "inten-
tional" themselves, the consensual practice by which they are discerned are
intentional in the same sense as that featured in the arts and in culture at
large. In this sense, every science is a human science: the objectivity of the
physical sciences presupposes the consensual objectivity within which its
pertinent methodology can be counted on at all. If so, then if there is no
objectivity with respect to intentional distinctions (recall Kuhn's epithel: the
"subjective", the "aesthetic"), then there cannot be any with respect to the non-
intentional either.
Consider what Kuhn actually says:
First, a theory should be accurate: within its domain, that is, consequences deducible from a
theory should be in demonstrated agreement with the results of existing experiments and obser-
vations . ... Fifth - a somewhat less standard item, but one of special importance to actual
scientific decisions - a theory should be fruitful of new research findings: it should , that is,
disclose new phenomena or previously unnoted relationships among those already known. 26
The key, I say again, concerns the problem of predication. Let me close
this account with abrief word about that. If one thinks there are laws of nature,
one cannot deny that there are "real generals" (the phrase is Peirce's) - not
that universals exist (in Plato's or the medieval sense). But if one thinks that
200 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
there are "real generals", then, on the argument just sketched, they can be
real only in the sense in which the consensual practices 01 human societies
are real. Now then, even if you have doubts about nomological realism, you
cannot convincingly have doubts about "real generals", simply because: (a)
nominalism is epistemically irrelevant and (b) no naturallanguage can function
without predicative resources. Hence, if predication requires "divided refer-
ence", that is, requires that applying a general predicate ("red", "round",
elegant", "symmetrical", and the like) signifies that, whatever may have been
the original exemplars by which they are introduced and instantiated, they
can have no further linguistic role unless apt speakers can apply them spon-
taneously, smoothly, in a communicatively effective way, without needing to
redefine them at the point of every new extension. The only solutions possible,
then, are these: (a) something like Aristotle's noetic grasp of the invariant struc-
ture of reality; (b) so me alternative cognitive gift for "recalling" something
like the timeless forms Plato hints at, that may be criterially applied to the
changing world; or (c) some consensual practice within the terms of which
the extension of "real generals" beyond their initial paradigms can be spon-
taneously ensured. At the present time, only a solution like (c) has any prospect
of widespread professional support. But if so, then, I claim, what links the
sciences and the arts and the "scientific" and the "aesthetic" is that, together,
they cannot fail to rely on the general regularities of consensual life. It is
the arts - more than any other sector of human activity - that systematically
explores every conceivable possibility of extending such similarities and dis-
similarities ranging over both the nonintentional and the intentional.
Since the criteria of "theory choice" are more or less as Kuhn supposes,
then, since they are criteria of a strongly intentional sort and since they apply
paradigmatically in the arts ("simplicity", "symmetry", "beauty", and the like),
there cannot possibly by any principled disjunction between the objectivity
of the sciences and the objectivity of the arts and the rest of cultural life. It
is not that the sciences borrow in extremis from the "aesthetic". It's rather
that the "aesthetic" (allowing a poor term to playa useful role) is already essen-
tial to what we mean by objectivity in the sciences. And that's to say -
against Kant, let it be noted - that the "aesthetic",like the "objective", answers
to our salient interests and their history.
Temple University
NOTES
I Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. enlarged (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 155-158.
2 See Popper, K., 'Normal science and its dangers' , in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.),
Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp.
52-54.
3 Kuhn, T. S., The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 341-
342.
OBJECTIVITY 201
4 Kuhn, The Essential Tension, pp. 321-325.

5 Kuhn, The Essential Tension, p. 332.
6 See Putnam, H., The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle: Open Court, 1987), Lecture 11.
7 For a sense of this, see Dickie, G., Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis (lthaca:
Comell University Press, 1974); The Art Circle (New York: Haven, 1984), Ch. 6. For the last
desperate formulation - actually quite elegantly managed but clearly self-destructive - see Sibley,
F., 'Aesthetic concepts', Philosophical Review LXVIII, 1959.
8 See Kant, 1., The Critique of Judgment, trans. by J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952),
pp. 41-89. See also, Urmson, J., 'What makes a situation aesthetic?', Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society (Suppl.) XXXI, 1957.
9 See Sibley, F., 'Aesthetic concepts', Philosophical Review LXVII, 1959, with extensive minor
revisions, reprinted in J. Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts, 3rd ed. (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1987).
10 See, for instance, Gombrich, E. H., 'Experiment and experience in the arts', The Image and
the Eye: Further Studies in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Oxford: Phaedon,
1982), particularly p. 215.
II See, for instance Birkhoff, G. D., Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1933); and the general review by D. E. Berlyne of the results of this and similar undertakings,
in D. E. Berlyne (ed.), Studies in the New Experimental Aesthetics; Steps Toward an Objective
Psychology of Aesthetic Appreciation (Washington, D. c.: Hemiphere Publishing Corp., 1974),
Chs. I, 14. For a particularly optimistic, but unconvincing. specimen of the thesis, see Hambidge,
J., Dynamic Symmetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1920).
12 For a sense of the earliest empirieist speculations, see Hutcheson, F., /nquiry Concerning
Beauty, Order, Harmony, Design, ed. P. Kivy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). For a late
summary of the role of Gestalt psychology in aesthetics, see Amheim, R., 'Art history and
psychology' and 'Two faces of gestalt theory', To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays (Berkeley:
University of Califomia Press, 1992).
13 I am referring here to Aristotle's thesis that the denial ofthe invariance ofreality (of change's
being subsumed under changeless structures) necessarily leads somewhere to paradox and explicit
contradiction. This is the theme of Metaphysics Gamma. The modal version of the unity of science
account is standardly found in Hempel, C. G., 'Studies in the logic of explanation', Aspects of
Scientijic Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press,
1965).
14 See Hacking, 1., Representing and Intervening; Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of
Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

15 See, for instance, Salmon, W. c., Scientijic Explanation and the Causal Structure ofthe World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
16 See Gombrich, E. H., 'The analysis of vision of 'Irt', Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. (New York:
Pantheon, 1961).
17 See Wartofsky, M., 'Pieturing and representing', in C. F. Nodine and D. F. Fisher (eds.),
Perception and Pictorial Representation (New York: Praeger, 1979).
18 See Goodman, N., Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), Chapter I, §3; also, Gombrich, E. H., 'The "what" and the "how": per-
spective representations and the phenomenal world', in R. Rudner and I. Scheffler (eds.), Logic
of Art: Essays in Honor of Nelson Goodman (lndianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972).
19 See Goodman, N., 'Seven strictures on similarity', in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.),
Experience & Theory (Amhers!: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).

20 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientijic Revolutions, Chapter 10.
21 See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 'Postscript - 1969.'
22 See Margolis, J., 'Wittgenstein's "forms of life": A cultural template for psychology', in
M. Chapman and R. A. Dixon (eds.), Meaning and the Growth of Understanding: Wittgenstein' s
Signijicance for Developmental Psychology (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987); and Foucault, M.,
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. (New York: Vintage,
1973).
202 10SEPH MARGOLIS
23 Kuhn, The Essential Tension, pp. 321-322.

24 For a discussion of the matter, see Margolis, 1., 'The passing or Peirce's realism', Transactions
01 the Charles S. Peirce Society XXIX, 1993.
25 See Rubin, W., Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism (New York: The Museum of Modern
Art, 1989).
26 Kuhn, The Essential Tension, p. 322.
LEON CHERi'iYAK AND DAVID KAZHDAN
KANT AND THE AESTHETIC-EXPRESSIVE VISION

OF MATHEMATICS
INTRODUCTION
Sinee Plato, aesthetic experienee was understood as the eneounter with the
self-manifesting (self-expressing) authentieity of being. At the same time,
the Western intelleetual traditions were inclined to view mathematies as perhaps
the purest form of human rationality. Sinee rationality was viewed as revealing
of the authentieity of beings, the unity of mathematieal and aesthetic experi-
enees often appeared to philosophers as self-evident.
This situation ehanged toward the end of the 18th eentury most dramati-
eally with Kant's philosophy. The Kantian idea of the radical finitude of human
Reason implies that the virtue of Reason is not its ability to read the text of
Nature, but rather to sublimate Nature to the status of a text. In this inter-
pretation, Reason takes full responsibility for the primary expressiveness of
itself and of the other. Through this partieular implieation of Kant's teaehing
originated two (apparently antagonistie) traditions whieh are largely influen-
tial to this day.
Aeeording to the first, Kant demonstrated the radically subjective nature
of aesthetic experienee. Depriving aesthetic experienee of ontologieal signif-
ieance and, at the same time, retaining mathematies as the purest form of
human rationality, this tradition substituted the question of the ontologie al
meaning of scientific knowledge with the question of the mathematical con-
structibility of the world.
Aeeording to the second tradition, since the Kantian view deprives Nature
of the ability to express itself, it follows that the authentie domain of aes-
thetic experience is the "natural" languages of human communieation and
the fine arts. Sinee the question of authentieity is inseparable from the question
of the essence of aesthetie experience, only here, in the poetic experienee of
language and of the fine arts, ean one hope to find the real foundation of human
rationality.
We argue that the first tradition overlooks that Kant's understanding of
aesthetic experienee as presented in the third Critique is not a mere exercise
in the applieation of the principles of the first Critique. Rather, Kant's aes-
theties is apart of laying down of the foundation which has not been fully
accomplished in the first Critique. We also argue that the seeond tradition over-
looks that Kant's view of mathematics is not simply a eorollary to the
Enlightenment obsession with certainty of representation, but is constitutive
of his idea of the radical finitude of Reason.
We argue that the Kantian interpretation of mathematies does not assert
that the natural world is not objectively given to us, but rather that the objee-
203

204 LEON CHERNY AK AND DA VID KAZHDAN
tlVlty of the world is not naturally given to uso Kant's interpretation of

mathematics was designed to answer the question: How can the natural world
be objectively given? In the Kantian vision of the finitude of human Reason,
mathematics provides the conceptual expression of the radical otherness of
the other, rather than either forms of mastering of the other or of its affinity
of Reason. To be sure, Kant considers "mathematicals" as constructions of
human Reason. However, in mathematics Reason accounts not for the ways
in which it defines the other, but rather for the ways in which the other is
able to define Reason. Thus, mathematics provides the arena within which
the other is allowed to emerge in its otherness. In this perspective, mathematics
can be seen as a true theoretical counterpart of poetry. Not only because poiesis
has these connotations of production and construction, but above all because,
in poetry, being is expressed as the authoring of its expression.
In this work, we argue that the Kantian (aesthetic-expressive) interpreta-
tion of the nature of mathematics anticipated development unexpected by Kant.
Thus, Kant's view of mathematics heralded certain essential themes and prob-
lematics of the 19th and 20th centuries.
REASON'S ESSENTIAL FINITUDE AND THE

NATURAL EXPRESSIVENESS OF BEING
At least since Plato's dialogue, Hippias Major, aesthetic experience was under-
stood as the encounter with self-manifesting authenticity. We can easily discern
this Platonic paradigm in Plotinus' words that "Beauty is the Authentic-
Existents" [1], as weIl as in Heidegger's claim that "beauty is one way in which
truth occurs as unconcealedness" [2]. At the same time, the Western intellectual
traditions, since classical antiquity through Enlightenment, were inclined to
view mathematics as perhaps the most authentic expression of human ratio-
nality. Since rationality was viewed as revealing of the authenticity of beings,
the ontological unity of mathematical and aesthetic experiences often appeared
to philosophers as self-evident.
While during the 19th and 20th centuries a powerful philosophical tradi-
tion I remained faithful to the Platonic vision of aesthetic experience as
fundamentally constitutive of human rationality, it, however, almost completely
ignored the theme of the unity of mathematics and aesthetics which was a
major source of its inspiration in its pre-Kantian period. Heidegger, for
example, and his most prominent followers (especially Gadamer), apparently
completely abandoned this old Pythagorean-Platonic concern with the pri-
mordial affinity of mathematics and beauty. This is hardly surprising since
Western intellectual culture has become essentially dominated by the split,
in Dilthey's words, between the "sciences about Nature" (Naturwissenschaften)
and the "sciences about spirit" (Geisteswissenschaften). This split is antici-
pated by, if not originated within, the Kantian teaching of the radical finitude
of human Reason. The same Kantian teaching laid the foundation for aesthetics
AESTHETIC-EXPRESSIVE MA THEMA TICS 205
as a distinct philosophical discipline. The Kantian teaching apparently "sub-

jectivized" aesthetic experience by restrieting it to the domain of phenomena
produced by human spirit. Can such an "objeetive" seienee as mathematics
eontribute anything essential to our understanding of the nature of aesthetie
experienee?
Heidegger's works epitomize the philosophie tendeney toward what he ealls
the "metaphysies of finitude" originated with Kant [3]. However, what is almost
eompletely ignored in Heidegger's elaboration is the fundamental role of
mathematies in Kantian philosophy. This underestimation of mathematies could
be partially understood in light of the polemies with Dilthey and Husserl.
Heidegger and his followers critically explicated the metaphysical assumptions
whieh pushed both Dilthey and Husserl (the more so the neo-Kantians) to
foUow the pattern of so-ealled exact sciences in thinking of the coneept of
experienee. 2 In line with this critieism, Heidegger, and later Gadamer, were
unable to discern, in the Kantian preoccupation with mathematics, anything
other than the typieal fascination of Enlightenment's thought with what
they eondeseendingly eaU "ealculating reason". Aecording to Heidegger, this
fascination reflects "the forgottenness of Being", and is based on the Cartesian
vision of truth as eertainty of representation [4].
Contrary to this evaluation, we shall argue that, in accordance with the
Kantian vision, mathematics may be considered the counterpart and the com-
plement of poetry. We believe that this relationship between mathematics
and poetry is fundamental for understanding of the very idea of Reason's
finitude. Following this Kantian idea, we view aesthetic experience as a fun-
damental constitutive component of human rationality. However, it is worth
recalling that fundamental constitutive role which was played by mathematics
in Kanfs efforts to shape this idea of Reason's finitude. In its turn, Kantian
interpretation of the nature of mathematics should be understood as apart of
his critical reexamination of the metaphysical assumptions of classical science
as it was built in the 17th-18th centuries.
Science with contemporary philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries shared
the vision of human thinking as representation. In this vision, Reason repre-
sents that which Nature presents. Thus, the dialogue between Reason and
Nature is viewed as initiated by Nature. The initial appeals of Nature to Reason
are called 'phenomena'. Through its phenomena, Nature speaks to Reason.
Nature's willingness to open itself (to manifest itself) in phenomena is
the precondition of Reason's activity. Thus, the intelligibility of the primary
language of things ethe language of phenomena) is the precondition of any
form of Reason's activity.3 The idea that the basic function of Reason is the
representation of wh at is presented in the primary language of things, resulted
in the metaphor of Reason as the mirror reflecting the light of Nature. The
metaphor of Reason as the reflection of "natural light" was the source of the
very name, "Enlightenment", that the epoch adopted in the 18th century. The
claim of Reason's universality, that is, of the primordial affinity between
Reason and the natural order of things, is another expression of the belief
that the appeal to the primary language of things is the source of the initial
intelligibility. This claim presupposes a partieular ideal of objectivity.
According to this ideal the role of science is the disclosure of so-called
"primary properties" of things, that is, those properties which things suppos-
edly have independently of whether they are experienced or not. In other words,
it was assumed that there were properties which could be characterized as inde-
pendent from the conceptual framework organizing the experiment [6]. The
ideal of objectivity was corollary to the assumption that Reason's basie function
is representation or mirroring of the "natural light". Reason as the ideal mirror
was supposed to reflect objectivity, but not the reflection, not its own inter-
actions with objectivity. Correspondingly, this ideal demands for any really
objective knowledge to set aside so-called "secondary properties": the prop-
erties, like color or feit taste, which can be attributed to things only as far
as they were being experienced.
However, these metaphysical assumptions are hardly compatible with the
very essence of experimental science. Phenomena with which experimental
science deals, are articulated within contexts planned and organized by Reason
It is Reason who initiates the communication with its objects in experimental
inquiry and who forces the objects to speak to Reason [5].
Indeed the Critique of Pure Reason can be interpreted as a demonstration
that the experimental character of Galilean and Newtonian science is incom-
patible with the metaphysical ideal of objectivity embraced by that science.
The critical reconsideration of this classieal ideal of objectivity led Kant to
the idea of the radieal finitude of human Reason. 4
This radical finitude of Reason is the central theme of Kant's philosophy:
The power of human Reason sterns not from its universality (that is, an inbom
affinity with natural objects), but rather from Reason's ability to themati-
cally approach its relationship with an object as radical other. The power of
human Reason sterns from the ability to approach an object as non-Reason,
and in this very process to articulate Reason's own boundaries.
It is clear that this idea of Reason's finitude is equivalent to the demand
to understand Reason in its responsibility for the communication with the other.
Consequently, this interpretation of Reason's relation with the other is not com-
patible with the vision of Nature as the primary text. The very word "text"
refers to a communication presented as an object of Reason. Under the Kantian
assumptions, Nature becomes a text only through the encounter of Reason.
Or rather, "Nature" is the collective term for those realities which have been
forced by Reason to become expressive. If the word "Nature" refers to the
reality taken in its independence from Reason, then Nature does not express
anything and does not manifest anything. Outside of Nature's relation to
Reason, the very opposition of essence and its manifestation, or that of
noumenon and phenomenon, or meaning and its expression, are senseless.
AESTHETIC-EXPRESSIVE MATHEMA TICS 207
KANTIAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE RADICALL Y LINGUISTIC

NATURE OF CONCEPTUALIZATION. POETIC MIND AS
THE ORIGIN OF THEORETICAL REASON
The vision of Nature as the primary text corresponds to the pre-Kantian under-
standing of human language as a secondary language. This secondary language
is an artificial tool constructed to bring meanings originated in the language
of things into the sphere of interhuman relations. Kant's philosophy origi-
nated a radically different interpretation of the relationship between the
understanding and human language. In pre-Kantian philosophy, Reason dis-
covers itself as that personage to whom the primary text of Nature is addressed.
Concepts, as the forms of Reason's activity, emerge in this space opened
between Reason and the primary text. According to the traditional point of
view, it is the primary text wh ich opens the space. In contrast, the Kantian
view suggests that conceptualization, as Reason's activity, opens the space
in which Nature dweIls as a text (in fact, in which dweIls any form of expres-
siveness). Thus, the Kantian perspective advances the notion of the radically
conceptual nature of any form of expressiveness. While it denies the reality
of the primary language of things, it establishes human language as the primary
expressive activity. Thus, Reason does not find in language a tool for con-
veying meanings already obtained in its primary eommunication with Nature.
Rather, in language Reason finds its very authoring power. Thus, the Kantian
view also advances the idea of the radically linguistic nature of any form of
conceptualization. This implieation allowed Herder and Humboldt to view
language as Weltanschauung. In the Humboldt's interpretation, language is not
just a tool and a product (ergon) of the ereativity of human spirit, but language
itself is this very creativity (energia). Humboldt initiated that tradition of the
philosophy of language which, in our eentury, led to Husserlean interpreta-
tion whieh made the problem of language to pertain to "first philosophy"
[7], and to hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer.
The prominent role given to language is closely conneeted with the Kantian
interpretation of the "aesthetie judgment", whieh eompletes the foundation
of the first Critique. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the definition of the
finitude of Reason is negative. Reason discovers its finitude only in that
sense that it discovers its non-universality when it finds itself entangled in
the cosmologieal antinomies. An astute reader of the Critique of Pure Reason
(at least, while reading the book for a second time) realizes that Reason is
doomed from the beginning to become entangled in the antinomies. For, on
the one hand, the objeet of Reason is defined as non-Reason, while on the other
hand, Reason's claim to universality can only mean the intention to reduce
the object to Reason. But Reason, the eentral protagonist of the Critique,
does not foresee this dramatic outcome and is eaught by surprise having
found itself tom by the antinomie interplay.
However, since the essence of human Reason consists in Reason's own
ability to define its finitude, the finitude of Reason must become the central
concern and the central theme for Reason from the very beginning of its critical
self-reflection. By definition, this self-reflection is only possible by virtue of
Reason's ability to approach thematically its own finitude. Not only the reader
of the Critique 0/ Pure Reason, but Reason, as the central personage of the
book, must foresee the outcome as inevitable. From the very beginning, Reason
must see itself as if it were its own reader, or as if the reader of the first Critique
became the central personage of the book. This vision of itself from outside
is the fundamental condition of Reason's functioning. But what does it mean
to see itself from outside?
In the Critique 0/ Practical Reason, Kant gave the first ans wer to this
question: It is a constitutive aspect of Reason to see in another human being
not an extemal object of the social environment, but another Reason. Thus,
Kant explicated what was already implicitly present in Plato and Aristotle:
Ethics is not a byproduct or an application of the principles of Reason, but
rather constitutive of Reason. Therefore, Kant insists that theoretical Reason
is rooted in practical Reason. Thus, Kant's ethics is one possible answer
to the question: What does it mean that finite Reason is able to see itself
from outside and that this ability is the fundamental condition of Reason's
functioning?5
However, Kant was apparently not completely satisfied with this answer.
Wh at is missing in this ethical interpretation of the finitude of Reason is the
fundamental fact that, in the first Critique, Kant defines the finitude of Reason
not in relation to another Reason, but in relation to Nature (which is under-
stood as the other entering into communication with Reason). Thus, Reason
has to be able to see itself not only through the eyes of another Reason, but
also through the eyes of non-Reason (Nature). This ability is the subject matter
of the Critique 0/ Judgement. Kant discerns two aspects of the ability of Reason
to see itself through the eyes of Nature. First, Reason presents its own activity
as if (als ob) it were the activity of Nature. Kant calls this activity of Reason
"the aesthetic faculty of judgment". Second, Reason presents the activity of
Nature as if (als ob) it were the activity of Reason. Kant calls this activity
of Reason "the teleological faculty of judgement". According to Kant, this
faculty makes possible the scientific approach to natural organisms. While
Kantian teaching about organic forms (what he called morphotypes) initiated
a fundamental paradigm shift in 19th century biology [8], Kant's interpreta-
tion of aesthetic experience was the basis of Romantic aesthetics and greatly
affected philosophy of the 19th and the 20th centuries. From Schiller, Schelling,
and Hegel to Heidegger and Gadamer, aesthetic experience has been inter-
preted as the central constitutive factor of human rationality.
Thus, the aesthetic faculty of judgment is Reason's faculty to shape its
activity as if it were an activity of Nature. This ability is fundamental in
Reason's articulation of its own finitude. What does it really mean to shape
Reason's activity as if it were an activity of Nature?
The pre-Kantian vision of Nature as the primary text which initiates com-
munication of Reason and Nature, produces, as its corollary, the belief that
humans can speak in their language only because the language of Nature speaks
to humans. As mentioned above, the tradition initiated by Humboldt and cul-
minating in Heidegger's works, understands language not as a tool, but as
the very creativity of human spirit. Correspondingly, in this tradition, the under-
standing of any text implies the explication of the authoring of the language
of the text; only through such an explication can we realize that we are con-
fronting a text. To understand a text, it does not suffice to realize its language
as the language in which we can speak, but rather we have to be able to address
it as the language which, in this very text, speaks to uso If the expression
"producted by Nature" is equivalent to the expression "primarily expressed",
then it refers to the authoring of language. In the Critique of Judgment, Reason
(in contrast to the first Critique) does not address the question how Nature
can be conceived. Here, Nature is taken as given, it is assumed that the other
is articulated, expressed, presented as a text. Correspondingly, Reason (as
the reflective faculty of judgment) is here concemed not with the possibility
of conceiving Nature, but with the possibility of expressing itself. More pre-
cisely, Reason is here concemed with the question: How does the ability to
conceive the other as Nature provides the possibility to conceive Reason itself.
Reason sublimates the other to the status of a text. Thus, thematically
approaching Nature as the possibility of conceiving itself, Reason endeavors
to discem (to articulate) in the text its own authorship.
Historically, Reason emerged as the philosophical protagonist whose role
was to conceptualize its objects which were assumed to be primarily given
(primarily expressed). Within the Kantian view the situation changes. Nature
is now viewed as incapable of expressing itself. Accordingly, it becomes a
function of human Reason to provide all forms of expressiveness. From this
point of view, it is one and the same to speak about Reason as the only
source of expressiveness or about human language as the primary expressive
activity. The 'aesthetic faculty of judgment' is the encounter within a text
with the expressive activity producing this very text. To the extent that the
linguistic creativity becomes itself expressed in language, language emerges
as poetry. Thus, Reason has trespassed the boundary of its traditional role to
conceptualize the reality ("objects") which was assumed to be primarily given
(primarily expressed) and encounters itself as the poetic mind.
The theme of the authoring power of language which emerges in different
philosophical guises since Humboldt, can be understood as an extension of
the Kantian teaching on aesthetic experience. In Heidegger's interpretation,
since language emerges onIy through the disclosure of its own authoring, it
is, in its very essence, poetry. Poetry, as the essence of language, is the
revelation of the authoring power of language. The Poet speaks on behalf
of this authoring power. 6 Heidegger considers poetry as the saying of
truth ("Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is") [9]. From
this point of view, Poetic experience constitutes the basis of any form of
aesthetic experience which Heidegger views as the primary ontological
experience. 7 In this respect, Heidegger reaffirms the ancient Platonic intui-

tion: to experience authenticity means to experience being aesthetically.
Thus, in the post-Kantian philosophical tradition there is a c10se connec-
tion between the placing of the question of language among the central topics
of the "first philosophy" and the interpretation of aesthetic experience as the
fundamental constitutive force of human rationality. The unity of these trends
defines the major theme of Heidegger's and Gadamer's hermeneutics.
KANTIAN INTERPRETATION OF MA THEMA TICS AND

HEIDEGGERIAN MEDITATIONS ON THE CONCEPT OF PREJUDICE
But this interpretation produces its own difficulties. Does not this interpreta-
tion, in fact, deprive Reason of its authoring power and delegate this power
to language? Does it not reduce Reason to language and, consequently, does
it not substitute philosophy of Reason with philosophy of language? Does it
not replace the Thinker with the Poet? Heidegger's interpretation essentially
seems to identify Reason with language; to the extent that Reason distinguishes
itself from language, it seems to be inessential. However, this conc1usion
appears to return Reason to the pre-Kantian status of its absolute dependance
on the primary text. One of manifestations of this return is the fashionable
philosophical belief in the c1oseness, or absolute autonomy, of each text; the
belief finds its motto in Derrida's famous words - "There is nothing outside
the text". What is absent in this trend of philosophical thought is an aware-
ness of the genealogy of the idea upon which it is based. The Kantian idea
of the finitude of Reason originated under the assumption that Nature did
,not have its own expressive ability.8 Therefore the finitude of Reason cannot
be formulated outside an interpretation of Reason's ability to provide Nature
with expressiveness. However, according to Kant, we cannot understand this
ability of Reason without addressing the fundamental role which mathematics
plays in shaping the finitude of Reason. To understand this ability means to
conceptualize those forms of the otherness which human mind gives to the
other. This conceptualization is, according to Kant, mathematics.
A natural phenomenon cannot reveal by itself what it iso The concept
'meaning' presupposes as its inevitable complement the concept 'expres-
sion'. Recognition of meaning implies an appeal to a text. But Nature is not
a text in itself. Only to the extent that Reason addresses itself to a phenom-
enon, does it synthesize the unity of the phenomenon (that is, place the
phenomenon within a text) and, thus, establish what the phenomenon iso
However, in order to synthesize a unity, Reason must be provided with a
phenomenon. But Nature cannot be responsible for this provision. It is central
for Kant that things of Nature cannot self-express themselves. Nature cannot
point at its phenomena. To consider something a phenomenon means to view
it as a potential counterpart in communication. If a natural object is given to
the understanding, it is not Nature which granted it with this status of a
phenomenon. Actually, in this philosophic perspective, it is erroneous to
speak about natural objects as given by Nature, because to be an object

already means to be articulated as a phenomenon toward which thought is
directed. Thus, on the one hand, precisely because there is no natural (i.e.,
provided in advance) affinity between Reason and Nature, Reason cannot
find in itself any apriori knowledge of Nature. Knowledge is the result of con-
ceptualization of Nature and as such can only be achieved through Reason's
meeting with Nature (through experience). So, for Reason to arrive at knowl-
edge, the object (the other as a phenomenon) must be already given. But, on
the other hand, the very idea of Reason's radical finitude deprives Nature of
its status as a primary text. Thus, Nature's expression cannot be given to
Reason, but emerges as a result of Reason's articulating efforts. Nature cannot
be considered the messenger of the message which Reason receives from
Nature. Nature cannot provide Reason with any knowledge, even the knowl-
edge that there is an object for Reason to deal with. In order to direct
itself to an object, Reason has to provide itself with the message "this is an
object".
How could these two requirements ('the object must be given', 'the object
cannot be given ') be reconciled? These two requirements reflect the funda-
mental finitude of Reason: In order to function , Reason must explicate its
finitude. The first requirement (the object must be given') reflects the neces-
sity to meet the object as the other, that is, as that wh ich is neither deducible
from Reason nor reducible to it. The second requirement ('the object cannot
be given') reflects the fact that the other cannot take the initiative in informing
Reason about its othemess; it is Reason's responsibility to reveal the other-
ness of the other. Thus, the second requirement reflects the necessity to meet
the other as the object. The forms of othemess are, according to Kant, space
and time (the 'a priori forms of experience'). Theoretical Reason, in order
to obtain objective knwoeldge, has to embed its other in space and time
which are the forms of othemess. These forms allow Reason to meet the
other as its object. Because of this, Kant calls space and time the 'a priori forms
of experience'. Thus, the apriori forms of experience are the forms of "under-
standing prior to the understanding".
This notion of understanding prior to the understanding anticipated
Heidegger's concept of the hermeneutic circle: Any understanding of a message
delivered by a text presupposes the ability to see the text as text, that is, as
a messenger of a meaning. Actually, by introducing space and time as the a
priori forms of experience, Kant discovers this phenomenon of hermeneutic
circle, but, unlike Heidegger, not in the situation where Reason communi-
cates with another Reason, but in Reason's communication with the other of
Reason, that is, with non-Reason. This is the same hermeneutical circle, but
brought forth by Reason's efforts to understand Nature.
The concept of the hermeneutical circle is closely related to the Heideggerian
endeavor to rehabilitate prejudice. This notion of prejudice acquired its modem
negative connotation in Enlightenment cuIture where it stood for that under-
standing which had not yet fully mastered itself. The ideal of universal Reason
required the exposure of any form of Reason's dependence on historical

tradition or of Reason's reliance .on. authority as a sign of Reason 's immatu-
rity. Therefore, in Enlightenment culture, any dependence of Reason on
something extern al testified that Reason had not yet achieved self-determi-
nation and self-sufficiency.9 In contrast, the idea of finite Reason requires to
consider Reason as inexorably dependent on the other. Correspondingly,
Reason's task is not to liberate itself from the tradition in which it origi-
nated, but to clarify its place in this tradition. The task is circular: determination
of Reason by a tradition requires Reason's activity placing Reason into the
tradition and, thus, participating in building the tradition. Therefore, standing
in a tradition means standing in the hermeneutical circle; this standing dictates
the necessity to understand prior to the understanding. The understanding prior
to the understanding is what is called prejudice. For finite Reason, it is impos-
sible to understand without the pre-understanding. It is impossible to judge
without an appeal to a pre-judice.
The Kantian interpretation of mathematics is cognate to this Heideggerian
interpretation of pre-judice. For Kant, mathematics is actually the fundamental
pre-judice (prae-judicium - pre-trial) of pure (i.e. theoretical) Reason. The fact
that prejudice is the inevitable fulcrum of Reason reflects dependance of
finite Reason upon its relation to the other. This dependence is not a burden
which is supposed to be finally overcome (or to be exposed to a procedure
similar to the Hegelian Aufhebung - sublation). Reason's ability to explicate
this dependance is the very source of its creativity. Mathematics is the con-
ceptual representation of the dependance of Reason on its ability to explicate
the otherness of the other. The explication of Reason's responsibility for its
communication with the other belongs to the very essence of pure Reason.
Reasoning is considered theoretical to the extent that Reason's authoring
(with respect to its communication with the other) is explicated within the
context of this reasoning. However, as we discussed above, this explication
is possible for theoretical Reason only to the extent that Reason can express
the otherness of its object. Or, to put it differently, theoretical (pure) Reason
must explicate not only its authoring in its communication with the other,
but also its authoring in articulation of the otherness of the other. As men-
tioned, theoretical Reason, in order to obtain objective knowledge, has to
embed its other in space and time which are the forms of otherness. In this
sense these forms are "objective": the other can appear as an object only as
presented in the forms of space and time, and any object is the other which
has been presented in the forms of space and tim~. Thus, the forms are "objec-
tive" in the sense that they present not Reason, but the other, and as such
they present the contribution of the other in formation of the relationship of
the other and Reason. Having being presented in these forms, the other emerges
as if it were authoring in the communication between the other and Reason.
However, the other cannot be authoring in the communication because it is
unable to present, to articulate, to express. This is a function of Reason, but
not of the other. Therefore, in order to explicate the otherness of the other
and, thus, its own finitude, Reason has to explicate itself as the power wh ich
allows the other to enter the communication with Reason. Mathematics is
the exposure of this "as if" which grants the other the status of the author:
Mathematics explicates Reason's responsibility for providing the other with
those forms of expressiveness which allow it to become the partner of
Reason. Mathematics is the activity of Reason which explicates Reason's
authoring in allowing the other to enter the communication with Reason.
Correspondingly, for Kant, reasoning in any branch of natural science cannot
be considered theoretically mature if articulation of its other is not mediated
by mathematics: ". . . In every specific natural science there can be found
only so much science proper as there is mathematics present in it" [10]. Without
mathematics, theoretical reasoning has not yet attained the level where the
very procedures constituting the other as object can be characterized as
theoretical.
The fact that theoretical Reason takes sole responsibility for its communi-
cation with the other, means that Reason has to articulate the communication
in two voices: That wh ich speaks on behalf of Reason and that wh ich speaks
on behalf of the other. The second voice is the voice of pre-judice. Therefore,
mathematics which conceptually explicates this ability of Reason to judge
on the basis of pre-judice, is constitutive for theoretical Reason.
KANTIAN INTERPRETATION OF MATHEMA TICS

DOES NOT FIT INTO THE OPPOSITION OF
PASSIVE RECEPTIVITY AND CREA TIVE ACTIVITY
Historically, all approaches to the problem of the nature of formalism gravi-

tate to two polar tendencies, which we shall call, quite tentatively, the
Aristotelian and the Pythagorean-Platonic. The Aristotelian approach assumes
that any formalism reflects the fact that human thought and language are
derivatives of the primary language of things. Thus, the Aristotelian view does
not consider human Reason as the author of the text of Nature, but as the
addressee. To the extent that the text of Nature is regarded as guiding the
thought and language of the addressee, the goal of the addressee is to follow
the rules set up by the text. Thus, formalism is interpreted as a reflection of
the willingness of the addressee to obey the text, to accept the text as an instruc-
tion issued by the other.
The Pythagorean-Platonic approach assumes that any text is structured as
an appeal to an addressee and that the very concept of text implicates an
addressee. Therefore, in producing a text, the author must somehow antici-
pate its addressee. Whatever is the origin of the creative power responsible
for the naturallanguage of things, the power must somehow anticipate the will-
ingness of human Reason to comply with this primary language. Consequently,
the compliance of the addressee (i.e. human Reason) with the primary text
of Nature must somehow contribute in the creation of the text. Paradoxically,
the text is predestined to have reproduced within itself the compliance of its
addressee with the text. Thus, formal structure turns out to be the most primary
characteristic of any meaningful text, but not a characteristic of an external
reflection upon the text.
Similarly to the Kantian view, the Pythagorean-Platonic tradition saw the
world (if "world" stands for the totality of the articulated other) as resting upon
"mathematicals".10 However, contrary to Kant, this tradition did not regard
human understanding (the activity of finite Reason) as constituting the primary
expressiveness of things. Consequently, it did not assurne that human under-
standing could be the author of "mathematicals". Human thought did not create
reality but rather discovered and represented it.
Although similar to the Pythagorean-Platonic approach, the Kantian view
of mathematics sterns from the idea of Reason's finitude which excludes the
assumption that there exists a natural language of things. Thus, Reason, in
its communication with the other, is forced to speak not only on its own behalf,
but also on behalf of the other. In order to express the otherness of the other,
Reason complements the "natural" language of the inter-human communica-
ti on with the constructed language of mathematics which is the language of
human communication with the other. The fact that this latter language is
constructed underscores the fact that the other is unable to express itself.
This does not imply that the reality expressed in this language has been
abstracted from Nature by man. The view of mathematics as an abstraction
from natural objects is rooted in the tradition which we have called Aristotelian.
For Kant, the reality of "mathematicals" belongs neither to Nature consid-
ered in its independence from man nor to the world of man-mastered Nature.
This reality is that arena organized by human Reason upon which Nature
emerges as the other of human Reason. Mathematics provides the other with
the means to express its otherness and, thus, allows theoretical Reason to
meet Nature as the other of Reason. In order to let the other manifest itself,
Reason has to retreat providing an unoccupied space for the manifestation; and
in order to let the silent other to be heard, Reason has to be able to hear the
silence. Mathematics provides the unoccupied space of manifestation.
Mathematics is the voice of the silence.
There is a strong temptation to understand the Kantian interpretation of
mathematical thinking as the assertion that there is no reality to be conceived
beyond constructions of human Reason and to take this assertion as the solution
of the ontological problem: What is objectivity? Morris Kline, for instance,
advances this particular interpretation of the Kantian approach to mathematics:
The key idea is that mathematics is not something independent of and applied to phenomena
taking place in an extemal world but rather an element in our way of conceiving the phe-
nomena. The natural world is not objectively given to uso It is man's interpretation or construction
based on his sensations, and mathematics is a major instrument for organizing the sensations.
[11]
Kant was also interpreted this way by such great mathematicians as A. N.

Whitehead and H. Weyl. The ideas of L. E. J. Brouwer also see m to endorse
this interpretation of Kant. The authors who are inclined toward such "con-
structivist" interpretation like to quote the following Kantian words:
Philosophical knowledge is that which reason gains from concepts, mathematical that which it
gains from the construction of concepts. [12]
These authors emphasize the Kantian assertion that mathematics constructs

its concepts. But wh at is usually absent in their analysis is the explanation
Kant provides for the constructive nature of mathematical reasoning. Kant
did not mean to substitute objectivity with the idea of construction as it was
meant by, for example, Rudolf Carnap [13] or Nelson Goodman [14].
According to Kant, the constructive nature of mathematical concepts refIects
the fact that Reason is unable to find the content of the concepts neither
within itselfnor in empirical data. Kant always emphasizes the intuitive nature
of mathematical reasoning, where "intuitive" refers neither to Cartesian under-
standing of intuition as "distinct and clear knowledge" nor as the knowledge
"motivated by vague testimonies of our feelings". Mathematics deals, according
to Kant, not with the empirical intuition but with the pure (a priori) one.
Mathematics represents conceptually (which means for Kant, explicating the
authoring of Reason) the pure form of intuition (the otherness of the other,
its own authoring power irreducible to that of Reason). For Kant, mathe-
matical Reason is intuitive only in the sense that it performs its authoring
by opening and expressing in itself the authoring of the other, that is, the
authoring of non-Reason. It is intuitive only in this sense of proceeding as
being always ahead of itself and beyond itself. Philosophical reasoning, where
Reason proceeds by opening its authoring, and mathematical reasoning, where
Reason proceeds by delegating its authoring to the other, are two funda-
mental aspects of finite Reason whose inevitably complemental relationship
Kant clearly states in the Critique of Pure Reason in the chapter "The
Discipline of Pure Reason" (the section I: The Discipline of Pure Reason in
its Dogmatical Use) [15].
In his interpretation of mathematics, Kant did not assert that the natural
world is not objectively given to us, but rather that the objectivity of the
world is not naturally given to uso Kant's interpretation of mathematics was
precisely designed to address the question: How can the natural world be objec-
tively given? This is, in fact, the central question of the Critique of Pure
Reason, and it leads directly to the central idea of this book, that is, the idea
of the finitude of human Reason. The idea of finitude implies that in
approaching Nature, human Reason does not confront itself but the other of
Reason, that is, non-Reason. The initiative in their communication belongs
to Reason, and not to the other which lacks any intrinsic natural expressive-
ness. Precisely because Reason in the natural sciences is interested in the
objective world, it must provide the expressiveness of the world. Kant does
not deny the possibility of acquiring objective knowledge, but he insists that,
in order to acquire such knowledge, Reason has to provide the world with
the expression of its objectivity, that is, with a manifestation of its other-
ness. Different sciences study different aspects of the objective world. However,
only Reason enables any of these particular aspects to emerge as an object
or to manifest itself as a phenomenon. To be sure, Kant does consider "math-
ematicals" as constructions of human Reason. But in mathematics, Reason
accounts not for the ways in which it defines the other, but rather for the
ways in which the other is able to define Reason.
This interpretation of mathematical thinking does not fit into the concep-
tual framework structured by the opposition of passive receptivity and creative
activity. The power of Kantian interpretation does not stern from an allegedly
mitigating position between these two extremes, as Lachterman proposes
[16]. Such a compromise would suggest that Kant allowed Nature some degree
of intrinsic expressiveness. However, Kant opposes mathematical creativity
not to passive receptivity but to the creativity of philosophical thinking:
While in philosophy Reason is authoring on its own behalf, in mathematics
Reason is authoring on behalf of the other. It is the task of philosophy to expli-
cate Reason's full responsibility for any form of expressiveness including
the expression of the otherness. However, mathematics is the aspect of Reason's
activity which creates this expressiveness of the other.
The Kantian analysis revealed an essential incompatibility of the internal
structure of theoretical Reason and the metaphysical assumption of science
of early modernity. However, referring to science, Kant certainly meant the
science of Galileo and Newton, and he certainly meant that with the teaching
of transcendental experience, he proposed only a philosophical interpretation
of Newtonean time and space. He also believed that Newtonean space and time
are the real objects of mathematics. As Hegel already realized, absolute time
and space are the abstract expressions of the subject (time) and the object
(space) of Enlightenment metaphysics. 11 Therefore, the concepts of space and
time are understood in the framework of the Enlightenment metaphysics
which considers subject as the carrier of "natural light" and object as a
"naturally given" entity. Thus, the Kantian interpretation of mathematics retains
residual elements of the intuition of the relation between Reason and the
other as that of representation and self-presenting reality. Thus, for Kant
geometry simply represents space, whose properties are present indepen-
dently of geometry. Therefore, without any awareness of the possibility of
an alternative, it was assumed that there could be only one "natural" geometry
corresponding to its "natural object". With such an assumption operant, the
potentials of the Kantian interpretation of mathematics could not yet be com-
pletely explicated. To the extent that mathematics could be interpreted as the
language of the other, it was possible to view it only as representing the
other, but not as expressing the otherness of the other. Therefore, Kant could
not fully realize the implications of his interpretation of mathematics. But these
implications were explicated by 19th century mathematics.
KANTIAN EXPRESSIVE-AESTHETIC FEATURES OF THE 19TH-20TH

CENTUR Y DEVELOPMENT IN MATHEMA TICS
The development in 19th-century mathematics opened new potentials for

interpreting mathematics as Reason's authoring on behalf of the other. It is
especially telling that this development began with fundamental innovations
in geometry whose object, according to the traditional point of view, was space.
(Recall, that although both space and time are, according to Kant, the apriori
forms of experience, that is, the forms of the otherness, space is the' form of
external while time is the form of internal experience.) Already in the very
beginning of the 19th century, Gauss rejected the understanding ofaxioms
of geometry as reflections of self-evident properties of reality. He realized
that the fifth axiom of Euclid was not a consequence of the other self-evident
axioms and its acceptance could be considered a matter of a choice. At the
same time, Gauss believed that this absence of objective determination could
arise only in geometry wh ich he viewed as an abstract expression of the empir-
ically given natural order of things rather than a branch of pure mathematics.
He believed that different geometries corresponded to different empirical
aspects of the natural order. On the other hand, Gauss viewed numbers as an
apriori reality which is not based on any externaiobservation. The authoring
of Reason in relation to the reality of numbers was explicated later by
Dedekind. He realized that analytic rigor could be achieved only in assuming
responsibility for the construction of reals rather than take them as given a
priori. The coexistence of alternative geometries weakened the confidence that
space was a reality whose universal properties had to be just represented by
geometry. The attempts to clarify the question - What is the object of
geometry? - finally led mathematics to realize its responsibility in addressing
the more radical question - What is the object of mathematics? With the
introduction of non-Euclidean geometries and, through the works of Dedekind
and Hilbert, 19th-century mathematics came closer to the idea that mathe-
matical objects are indeed "constructs" created within mathematics. Thus,
mathematics moved away from understanding-as-representation toward under-
standing-as-authoring.
Hilbert's pondering over the question of the object of geometries trans-
formed the conception of understanding-as-authoring into the topic of
axiomatization. As mentioned, one interpretation of the Kantian assessment
of Reason's authoring in mathematics is that Kant substituted the question
of objectivity with the question of constructibility. Within the perspective of
such a radical "constructivism", axiomatics appears as a pure invention of
our Reason, a kind of game which Reason creates for its own enjoyment.
This vision ofaxiomatics inspired Hilbert's program of purely formal
mathematics which would be completely self-sufficient and would not depend
on any interpretation. However, Gödel's incompleteness theorem and Turing's
halting theorem revealed insurmountable obstacles on the way to realizing such
a program. There is a broadly accepted belief that "Gödel's incompleteness
theorem represents the greatest obstacles to a satisfactory philosophy of

mathematics" [17].
Contrary to this opinion, we believe that results of Gödel and Turing are
an indirect reflection of the fact that human understanding is interpretation. By
interpretation we do not mean an external reflection which establishes a cor-
respondence between a "given" text and a "given" set of objects defined
independently of this text. In order to meet the other as a set of objects or a
set of phenomena, Reason creates texts as the medium of these meetings.
Accordingly, considering a text as a given, self-sufficient entity, we deprive
it of the status of text. Encountering an entity as a text, Reason, by defini-
tion, sees in the entity a manifestation of the other. Thus, by its very essence,
any text transcends itself by referring beyond itself to the other. Interpretation
is the way in which a text refers to the other of Reason and shows the
otherness of the other. Consequently, interpretation is not a procedure applied
to a text after the text is given, but rather the procedure which turns the other
into a text. To accept an entity as a text means to define it within the rela-
tionship of interpretation.
Studies investigating the possibility of complete formalization led to the
discovery of an equivalence between the concept of formalism and that of
"machine-readability". Of course, this was not a completely new idea, as the
notion of "intellectual machines" can be traced back to Leibniz and from
hirn to Raymond Lully. However, both Lully and Leibniz based their vision
of such a machine upon the old Platonic idea of universal mathematics under-
lying the totality of beings, bringing the beings into the totality, and providing
the totality with expressiveness. Lully and Leibniz understood these intellec-
tual machines as incorporating universal mathematics into their very design.
The machines were supposed to mirror the "working" of the uni verse; they
would produce knowledge through re-producing the authoring "logic" of being.
Indeed their belief in the possibility of such a machine implied the existence
of a single uni verse - "the best of all possible worlds". Different universes
would require different intellectual machines, that is, in the absence of explic-
itly stated principles of a universal mathematics, each particular problem would
require a machine of a particular design. As a late echo of this metaphysical
intuition, we can mention the following episode from the 20th century: Before
von Neumann realized the relevance of the Turing's construction of the uni-
versal reading machine, the engineers of the first computers reconnected
wires with each new assignment.
FORMALISM AS A HERMENEUTICAL PROBLEM
The introduction of the axiomatic method which denies existence of the natural
mathematical uni verse and, thus, emphasizes the authoring of human Reason,
is incompatible with the basic Leibnizian assumption of existence of "the
best of all possible worlds". However, there is an essential difference between
Kant's and Hilbert's visions of mathematics. Kant believes that in mathematics

human Reason is authoring on the behalf of the other. In mathematics, the other
is the "real author". But the other as the author is mute, and the reader-
Reason has to split its voice speaking both on its own behalf and on behalf
of the mute author. Thus, mathematics is conceived of as a very special form
of dialogue: in mathematics, as in the old metaphysics, the dialogue of Reason
and the other is conceived of as being initiated by the other; however, this
dialogue proceeds under the assumption that the other is unable to express
its initiatives and it is Reason who is expected to provide the expression.
Mathematics is this effort to provide the expressiveness of the othemess of
the authoring other. It is the effort to open the space within which the other
can come forth and participate in shaping Reason's finitude. Because of this
fundamentally dialogical nature, mathematical thinking proceeds as translation
and interpretation.
Hilbert, on the other hand, endeavored to create mathematics which does
not need any interpretation, that is, any appeal to the other. His motifs are quite
clear. If Reason itself is authoring, why is not it authoring on its own behalf?
Why not to assume that in mathematics the real author and the real reader
are one and the same human Reason? If so, this reader-author would be able
to create systems within which it feels itself as the absolute master, and
where any statement (meaningful in the language of the system) is either
provable or refutable.
However, discoveries of Gödel and Turing demonstrated that the power
of Reason even within systems which it created, is not absolute. Any con-
sistent and sufficiently rich system (in particular, any system of interest for
mathematics) contains statements which are neither provable nor refutable
within the system. For example, consistency of any rich system is provable
within the system only if this system is not consistent (in which case every-
thing is provable). In other words, Reason which entitled itself to be the
absolute author of a system, is even unable to guarantee existence of its
creation. The situation is similar to the one which Kant faces in the Critique
0/ pure Reason. Kant's pure Reason found its boundaries (the cosmological
antinomies) within that very universe which it had created and, as a result,
lost the right to assert existence of the universe. In the same way, Hilbert's
mathematical Reason finds its boundaries within any mathematical uni verse
which it itself creates and, as a result, loses the right to claim existence of these
universes. In other words, Reason fails to establish its absolute authorship.
Hilbert's program brings forth the topic of the hermeneutical meaning of
the formalism. The demand to create mathematics in the purely formal way
which does not require interpretation as an essential aspect of the creation,
is equivalent to the demand to consider the author and the reader as completely
identical. Consequently, any text is formal to the extent that the message it
deli vers is nothing else but an instruction of how this message should be
read. Thus, the formalism is such an expression of the authoring will which
is conceived of as the self-reflection of the reader: the reading of instruc-

tions of the reading. The formalism reflects the fact that it is the reader-Reason
who mediates itself and the "real" author (the other) of any particular system,
who, within the system, speaks on its own behalf and on behalf of the other.
Thus, it is the reader-Reason who is truly universal within the system. The
author of a formal system can be universally presented as a universal reader.
Turing's universal machine is this universal formal reader.
From this point of view, we can see formalism as an expression of a
particular configuration of the author-reader relationship. This configuration
embeds certflin features which are conditioned by identification of the
formalism and the "machine-readability". Firstly, to the extent a text is formal,
it expresses an activity of its reader. Thus, the reader's activity is addressed
thematically and, as such, it is constitutive in regard to the structure of the
text. Secondly, quite paradoxically, this activity of the reader is expressed as
absolute compliance to the will of the author; that is, the reader, as he is present
in the text, has surrende red his contribution in the creation of the text.
Neither of these two features are characteristic for all types of texts. For
instance, any myth as story-telling implies its addressee (its listener) as a
horizon, but does not explicate this appeal thematically. "When Uranus knew
Gaea ... ". But who was the ob server of the event? Where are the protocols
describing the observation? Whose message does Hesiod deliver to us? How
was the tradition built up which has succeeded in carrying this information
to the present listener? Hesiod's Theogony does not ask - not to say, answer
- such questions. It does not consider its own relationship with its addressee
as its topic. On the other hand, the central subject matter of such a text as
the Bible is the relationship between its Author and its reader as the Author's
partner in their covenant. The book recounts the pre-history of their relation-
ship and the development of the relationship in the period preceding the
moment of the book's delivery to the reader; it narrates the very moment of
the delivery and even the development of the relationship after the delivery.
Martin Buber's famous aphorism - "It is this earth where God's destiny is
decided on" - precisely expresses how crucial the reader's will is in shaping
the story and, thus, in shaping the authoring will of its Author.
Because a mathematical text can be recognized as formal only to the extent
that it is readable by a machine, the formal structure of the text expresses
nothing else, but an instruction how this very text is to be read. Thus, to the
extent that a text is considered as formal, its subject matter is its reader's
behavior. In this respect, a formal text is similar to the Biblical, but is dif-
ferent from any mythological text. However, formalism tells only how the
text affects the behavior of its reader, but nothing about the reader's ability
to affect the authoring power which created the text. Unlike the Bible, any
formal text presents the attitude of the reader toward the author only in the
aspect of the reader's absolute obedience, but not in the aspect of its respon-
sibility for the author's fate and will. The demand of obedience is so absolute,
that, to the extent that a text is read as formal, its reader can be substituted
by (and must be viewed as) a reading machine. Thus, a text as formal omits
a thematical presentation of the creative will of its addressee, and in this respect
it is similar to a myth.
Actually, the formalism of a mathematical text implies that it is a
pre-text, in the same way as understanding in mathematics is a form of
pre-understanding (the pre-judice of theoretical Reason). However the real
virtue of any mathematical text is not its formalism as such, but rather its
capacity, by means of formalism, to structure the space in which the other
may appear in its otherness. A text is mathematical to the extent that it
expresses Reason's authoring on behalf of the other. To be sure, in order to
express the otherness of the other in the text, Reason has to express itself under
its own name as weIl. However, since it has delegated its authoring to the other,
Reason expresses itself through its obedience to the other. The expression of
Reason's willingness to comply with the authoring will of the other is that
quality of any mathematical text which makes it formal.
CONCLUSION
We argued that the relationship of aesthetics and mathematics in Kantian

philosophy should be understood as extension of the tradition set up by Plato.
In this tradition the mystery of aesthetic experience was viewed as the mystery
of the encounter with self-expressing authenticity. However, it is not accidental
that aesthetics emerged as a particular philosophical science only in the 18th
century with the first attempts to delimit the claim of Reason's universality
which was so typical of Enlightenment's thought. The attempts to define the
boundaries of Reason's ~niversality inevitably led to the critical reassess-
ment of the very concept of seIf-expression. Kant's works were pivotal in
this reassessment. Following these developments, Reason could no longer be
identified with the re-presentation of the self-presenting reality. In fact, Kant
formulated the primary function of Reason as the expression of the realness
of reality. Unlike Plato, Kant considered human Reason as the author of the
primary presentation (the primary articulation). For Kant, the primary function
of Reason was not to represent, but to articulate, to provide the other with
its own voice, to turn the other into a text. In this function Reason emerges
as the poetic mind. Correspondingly, Kantian philosophy led to an increasing
dissatisfaction with the understanding of the natural language of human
communication as a mere tool for Reason's representation of that which was
aiready presented in the primary language of things. Reason could no longer
find itself either in the natural language of things, nor in the sphere of
abstractions produced by Reason in its meeting with Nature. Reason could
encounter itself only within language, and thus, understanding must already
be interpretation.
In this work, we have attempted to approach the question of the relation-
ship between mathematics and aesthetic experience in this Kantian perspective.
We argued that, from this vantage point, mathematics is aesthetic by its very
nature: It deals with the expression of the authenticity. Mathematics deals

with the authoring of human Reason wh ich provides the other with the expres-
sion of its othemess. Since language is the primary expression of the authoring
power of Reason, mathematics, like poetry, is the explication of the authoring
power of language. In this sense, mathematics is poetry. Not only because
poiesis has these connotations of production and construction, but above all,
because in poetry being is expressed as the authoring of its expression. In
this perspective, Kant's words - "Mathematik ist reine Dichtung" [18] - must
be understood literally. However, unlike poetry as a particular kind of literary
activity, mathematics explicates this power as delegated to the other. If so,
this "reine" in "reine Dichtung" must stand as identical to the "reine" in the
Kantian Kritik der reinen Vernunft, that is, as attributed to Reason's apriori
relationship with the other. Thus, it truly may be said that mathematics is
the poetry 0/ the other.
NOTES
1 The tradition was developed from German Romanticism, Goethe and Schiller, Schelling and
Hegel through Nietzsche to Heidegger and Gadamer.
2 Gadamer writes:
... Dilthey let himself be profoundly influenced by the model of the natural sciences, even
when he was endeavoring to justify the very methodological independence of the human ones.
. . . In his account of this independence of the methods of the human sciences Dilthey falls
back on the old Backonian natura parendo vincitur.... However much Dilthey might have
defended the epistemological independence of the human sciences, what is called 'method' in
modern sciences, remains everywhere the same and is seen only in an especially exemplary
form in the natural sciences. Gadamer, H. G., Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1975),
pp. 8-9.
As Heidegger argues in Time and Being, the mode of understanding, which is character-
istic for scientific knowledge, "is itself only a subspecies [italics added) of understanding - a
subspecies wh ich has strayed into the legitimate task of grasping the present-at-hand in its
essential unintelligibility [Unverstaendlichkeit)". (Heidegger, M., Being and Time, trans. by
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 194) Heidegger
continues further:
Because understanding, in accordance with its existential meaning, is Dasein's own poten-
tiality-for-Being, the ontological presuppositions of historiological knowledge transcend in
principle the idea of rigor held in the most exact sciences. Mathematics is not more rigorous
than historiology, but only narrower, because the existential foundations relevant for it lie
within a narrower range (ibid., p. 195).
Perhaps Gadamer is even more certain in this respect. Sharing with Heidegger the believe that
scientific understanding is a mere "subspecies" of understanding, gadamer criticizes Dilthey:
It is, in fact, the main lack in the theory of experience hitherto - and this includes Dilthey himself
- that it has entirely orientated towards science and hence takes no account of the inner his-
toricality of experience. It is the aim of science to so objectify experience that it no longer contains
any historical element. (Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 310-311)
Not only Dilthey, but Husserl as weIl becomes the object of Gadamer's criticism for following
the pattern of so called exact sciences in thinking of the concept of experience (p. 311). Gadamer
makes this reproach after having noted that "in one study after another, he [Husserl) strived to
demonstrate the one-sidedness of that idealization of experience which is characteristic for
sciences" (p. 311). Earlier, Gadamer argued that Heidegger, although in a more radical manner
and on the basis of his return to the question of being, actually followed Husserl "in that
historical being is not to be distinguished from natural being, as with Dilthey, in order to give
an epistemological justification of the methodological nature of the historical sciences"
(p. 230).
We can see from this that neither Heidegger nor Gadamer disagree with Dilthey or Husserl
on what they see as the proper form of scientific experience. They just do not agree with Dilthey's
and Husserl' s evaluation of the general philosophical significance of scientific experience.
They do not accept this form of experience as the fundamental paradigm for human experi-
ence as such. They even do not agree that experience in humanities should be thought of in
accordance (or in correlation) with experience of natural sciences.
3 The epoch did not invent the vision of Nature as self-expressed in its primary language, but
shared it with classical antiquity and the medieval culture. The most famous expression of this
vision - the notion of the book of Nature, - was still popular in the 17th and 18th centuries.
4 Charles Taylor belongs to those who are attempting to im plant the tradition of Heidegger
and Gadamer into the anglo-saxon philosophical soil. Ironically, albeit very telling, Taylor
overlooked that this tradition originated in Kantian critique of that ideal of objectivity wh ich
was characteristic for 17th-18th century science. According to Taylor, the stand point of modern
science (as weil as the naturalist Weltanschauung and the very possibility of the split between
the sciences about man and the sciences about nature) was provided by the 17th century dis-
tinction between primary and secondary properties. Taylor, c., Human Agency and Language.
Philosophical Papers, I (Cambridge, New York, Port Chester, Melbourne, Sydney: Cambridge
5 In the 19th and 20th centuries, this aspect of the idea of finitude of Reason was realized in
different vers ions of the dialogical interpretation of human rationality. Another echo of Kantian
ethics is Heidegger's and Gadamer's interpretation of the understanding as "the standing in the
tradition (Ueberlieferung - the handing down)".
6 Compare the theme of Poet as Prophet in Russian poetry, and O. Mandel'shtam's words:
"Poetry is one's confidence in .one's own rightness".

7 Since poetry is "the saying of truth", any form of artistic creativity is not aiming to decorate
a certain being by supplying it with additional "esthetic properties", but to disclose its truth;
not to present a being as existing within its own objective world, but rather to allow it to
deliver the world which it encompasses within itself and thereby to grant the world with objec-
tivity. lbid.
8 Kant's Nature is not that of Poet. Compare what Heidegger says about Rilke: "What Rilke
calls Nature is not contrasted with history. Above all, it is not intended as the subject matter
of natural science. Nor is Nature opposed to art. It is the ground for history and art and nature
in the narrower sense. In the word Nature as used here, there echoes still the earlier word
phusis, equated also with zoe, which we translate as "life" (Heidegger, M., ' What are poets
for?', Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 101).
9 Perhaps Descartes' account for the origins of his philosophical and mathematical ideas gives
the most vivid example of this dedication of the "modems" to the ideal of the absolute intel-
lectual autonomy. D. R. Lachterman writes: " ... Descartes rejected not only more remote
"predecessors" who might seem to have anticipated hirn - the case of St. Augustine is the best
known; he also repudiates, sometimes tacitly, sometimes stridently, his contemporaries, along
with others standing close to hirn in time and in intention .... Descartes gave birth to hirnself."
Lachterman, D. R., The Ethics of Geometry. A Genealogy of Modernity (Routledge: New York
and London, 1989), pp. 129-130.
10 See the Plotinus teaching about the divine numbers as the "pre-essential" props of essences.
" Mathematics, according to Kant, proceeds as "the construction of concepts". Lachterman

argues that Kant's notion of "the construction of a concept" reflects an alteration in the way in
which mathematics was practiced and understood in the early modern, pre-Kantian period.
This alteration can be captured in two interconnected expressions, both to be found in the deepest
stratum of the "Cartesian" soul [... ): one, that mathematics is essentially occupied with the
solution of problems, not with the proof of theorems; two, that mathematics is most fertilely
pursued as ... the transposition of mathematical intelligibility and eertainty from the algebraie
to the geometrie domain, or from the interior forum of the mind to the external forum of space
and body. [emphasis added) (Laehterman op. cit., p. viii)
However, we believe, the generie commonality of the Kantian and the Cartesian visions of
mathematies, to whieh Lachterman refers, does not suffice by itself to explain the specifie Kantian
meaning of the phrase "the construction of concepts". After all, Kant does not proceed within
the Cartesian opposition of mind and body, and he does not share the Cartesian belief that the
other of thought is the geometrical realm of extension. That eonceptual shaping of intuition, whieh
Kant calls the construction of coneepts, is performed as a transposition which is carried out
from the forum of pure eoncepts (not the interior of mind in general) to the forum of space
and time (not just space). The transposition (or rather, transformation) is performed as reason
ehanges its roles - from that of the authoring on its own behalf (in its activity as the under-
standing) to the authoring on behalf of the other (in the "passive" activity of intuition
(Anschauung). In Kant's vision of mathematics, reason eonceptually shapes its intuition, or it
transforms its ereativity into its reeeptivity. Therefore, Kant's phrase "construction of coneepts"
stands not for a compromise between the passive receptivity and the creative activity, but rather
for a paradoxical eoncurrenee of two extremes - pure reeeptivity and pure creativity. But it
aetually means that the "eonstruction of coneepts", that is, mathematics, proceeds, according
to Kant, as the alienation of reason' sauthoring on behalf of the other.
12 "Time, Iike space, is a pure form of sensibility or intuition; it is the insensible factor in
sensibility. Like space however, time does not involve the difference between objeetivity and a
distinct subjective consciousness. If these determinations were to be applied to space and time,
the first would be abstract objectivity, and the second abstract subjectivity". Hege/' s Philosophy
of Nature, ed. and trans. by M. J. Petry (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., New York,
Humanities Press, Inc. 1970), p. 230.
REFERENCES
[I) Plotinus, The Enneads. I, 6, 6.

(2) Heidegger, M., 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes', Holzwege, 2nd. ed. (Frankfurt a.M.:
Klostermann, 1952), pp. 7-68. 'The origin of the work of art', in M. Heidegger, Poetry,
Language, Thought, trans. by A. Hofstadter (New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco,
London: Harper, 1975), pp. 15-87.
(3) Heidegger, M., Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by James S. Churehill
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 226---238.
(4) Heidegger, M., 'Die Zeit des Weltbildes' (The age of the world as view), in Holzwege
(Frankfurt a.M.: V. Klostermann, 1953), pp. 69-105, English trans. by Marjorie Grene,
Measure, 11, 1951, pp. 269-284.
(5) Akhutin, A. V., lstoria Principov Fizicheskogo Experimenta: 01 Antichnosty do 17 Veka
(History of the Principles of Experimentation in Physics: from Antiquity to 17th century)
(Moscow: Nauka, 1976).
(6) Bibler, V. S., 'Galilei i logika myshleniay novogo vremeni' (Galileo and the logic of
thinking of modemity), in Mekhanika i Tsivilizatsiya 17-18 vekov (Mechanics and the
Civilization of the 17th-18th centuries) (Moscow: Nauka, 1979), pp. 448-518, Bibler, V.
S., 'Kant i logika eksperimenta' (Kant and the logie of experiment), Voprosy istorii
estestvoznaniya i tekhniki, 1987, I.
(7) Merleau-Ponty, M., Signs, trans. by Richard C. MeCleary (Evanston, 111.: Northwestem
[8) Lenoir, T., The Strategy of Life. Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German
Biology (DordrechtJBostoniLondon: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1982).
[9) Heidegger, M., 'Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes', p. 74.
[10) Kant, 1., Metaphysische Anfangsgruende der Naturwissenschaft, Vorrede, in Kant Werke
(Darm stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), Bd. 8, p. 14.
[li) Kline, M., Mathematics. The Loss ofCertainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
p. 341.
[12) Kant, 1., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by F. M. Mueller (London: Macmillan
& Co. LId., 1934), p. 572.
[13) Camap, R., The Logical Structure of the World; Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, trans.
by Rolf A. George (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1967).
[14) Goodman, N., Ways ofWorldmaking (Indianopolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1978).
[15) Kant, 1., Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by F. M. Mueller (London: Macmillan
& Co. Ltd., 1934), pp. 572-592.
[16) Lachterman, D. R., The Ethics ofGeometry. A Genealogy ofModernity (New York, London:
Routledge, 1989), pp. IO-ll.
[17) Cohen, P. J., Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (New York: W. A. Benjamin, 1966),
p. I.
[18) Kant, 1., Opus Postumum, Eng\. trans. by E. Foerster and M. Rosen, ed. by E. Foerster
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 139.
CATHERINE CHEV ALLEY
PHYSICS AS AN ART: THE GERMAN TRADITION

AND THE SYMBOLIC TURN IN PHILOSOPHY,
HISTORY OF ART AND NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE 1920S
What do we mean, from a philosophical point of view, when we compare

physics and art? This is, in its most general form, the issue which I shall address
here. Clearly, contemporary philosophy gives much credit to the idea that
science and art are not essentially different activities. For instance, for
Goodman and Eigin the affinities between art, science and perception make
their respective philosophies appear as different guises of a "general theory
of knowledge" in which the concept of symbol plays a crucial part;' van
Fraassen repeatedly hints at the similarities between the "joint enterprises of
philosophy of art, of law, of religion and of science";2 and Hacking has recently
suggested that the idea of "styles of reasoning" can be developed in new
ways in the philosophy of science. 3 The idea of an essential affinity between
physics and art is undoubtedly attractive, and closely involved with contem-
porary shifting conceptions of the nature of physics and the nature of art.
Yet its presuppositions and implications are not obvious: What conception
of knowledge do we implicitly have in mind when we make a comparison
between art and science? More particu1 arly, what conception of science and
what of art?
Among the reasons why we may want to have a clearer view of the philo-
sophical import of the idea that physics is like art, is the fact that we find
this idea in connection with some major advances of XXth century physics.
Indeed, the notion of an affinity between art and physics emerges in a rather
striking and unexpected way in many of the writings of Bohr and Heisenberg,
which touch upon the philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics.
For reasons that are somewhat elusive, Bohr placed much emphasis on an
analogy between the use of language in quantum physics and its use in poetry,
while Heisenberg contemplated the consequences of such an affinity for physics
and art. Thus, Heisenberg asserted that since the creation of symbols, by pro-
ducing intellectual contents (geistige Inhalte), is the primary way in which
we order reality (Wirklichkeit), there is a continuous transition between science
and art. 4 He also claimed that "one can compare [physical theories] to different
styles of art (Kunststilen)", both in structure and in terms of historical devel-
opments. Moreover, both Heisenberg and Bohr argued that these assertions
were intimately connected with the problem of the physical interpretation of
quantum theory. In this paper, I discuss the general issue of the philosoph-
ical implications of an affinity between physics and art by examining thc
questions raised by such claims: How are such disconcerting claims, as those
advanced by Heisenberg and Bohr, possible? Should we view them as isolated
227
228 CA THERINE CHEV ALLEY
and idiosyncratic features of the philosophy of a few quantum physicists, or

should we relate them to a more general context?
In order to answer these questions, some preliminary work is necessary.
My aim will be, in the first place, to elucidate some of the major features of
the comparison between science and art in Germany in the years 1920-1930.
In the first section of this paper, I look at the history of philosophy and epis-
temology. In this section I argue that, culminating with Cassirer's work but
starting early after the publication of Kant's Critique of Judgement, a whole
tradition developed in which the assertion that physics is like ar; was founded
on a consistent reference to the concept of symbol, in fu11 knowledge of the
presuppositions associated with the use of this concept in relation to scien-
tific knowledge. In the second section I turn to the history of art, and more
specifica11y to the way Panofsky appropriated the notion of 'symbolical form'
to assert that physics and art produce, within each historical period, a special
kind of "objectivation of the subjective", and that modern thought emerged
through a deli berate reference to novel optical categories of vision. This
analysis a110ws a more precise appreciation of the meaning, presuppositions
and implications of the idea that physics is like art during the 1920s when
quantum theory emerged. In the third and final section, I argue that Bohr
and Heisenberg actua11y analyzed the difficulties they encountered in atomic
physics in terms of the philosophical language wh ich they inherited from
this tradition, and that, eventua11y, Heisenberg fu11y explicated the conse-
quences of this trend of thought.
PHYSICS IS LIKE ART:

THE CONCEPT OF 'SYMBOL' IN POST-KANTIAN THOUGHT
For anyone who wishes to analyze the relationship between the concept
of symbol and the idea that physics is like an art, a natural starting point is
the work of Ernst Cassirer. During the 1920s in Germany, Cassirer was the
one philosopher who was arguing that art, science, myth and religion should
a11 be considered at the same level, as forms of "symbolic" activities. In
1923, 1925 and 1929, Cassirer published his Philosophie der symbolischen
Formen in three volumes: I. Die Sprache; H. Die mythische Denken; III.
Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis. In each of these, he reasserted his basic philo-
sophical aim, which was to broaden the foundation of the entire program of
epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) and to develop a "morphology" of the human
mind; in other words, his aim was a general theory of the "forms of expres-
sion" through which man comes to "understand" the world, that is, to link
particulars to the universa1. 5 With such a morphology, Cassirer wanted to extend
the "critique of knowledge" into a "critique of culture". Art, myth and religion,
like scientific knowledge, were conceived as forms of expression and under-
standing. Cassirer called them "symbolic forms" in order to emphasize the
common feature of a11 different kinds of knowledge: No form of knowledge
was a copy or a reflection of the given empirical world, but each was equa11y
PHYSICS AS AN ART 229
the product of a formative force. The common aim and result of language,
myth, religion, art and scientific knowledge was the creation of "world as
representation".6 Therefore the question for Cassirer became whether or not
these symbolical forms were different manifestations of the same process of
objectivation, that is, the question was whether there existed a unity of knowl-
edge which would represent a unity of cognitive function. 7 To answer this
question, Cassirer argued for a new "phenomenology of knowledge"8 that
would give the word "knowledge" its broadest sense, and that would develop
into a "gramm ar of the symbolical function".9
Cassirer thus established an essential connection between the concept of
symbol and the idea that physics was one among a host of intellectual (geistige)
constructs. But what did he mean by "symbol"? Where did this concept orig-
inate? And how exactly was its use connected with the general question of
art and science? It is by no means clear how to answer these questions, nor
is it easy to find a sharp definition of "symbol" in Cassirer's works. Cassirer
frequently asserts that symbolic knowledge is not descriptive, figurative or
mimetic knowledge; this, however, does not clarify what symbolic knowl-
edge iso In fact, rather than providing a definition, Cassirer referred to other
writers who used the notion of symbol in connection with philosophical aspects
of language or with the general question of what is a physical theory. These
writers - to whom I shall return shortly - are Wilhelm von Humboldt, Hermann
von Helmholtz and Heinrich Hertz, and Cassirer praised them for one par-
ticular reason: Each of them had argued that things were never given to us
in direct and immediate intuition, but rather were constituted through complex
and elaborate sets of symbolical relations. Clearly, the common feature between
the different realms of linguistics, physiology and perception, foundations of
mathematics and physical theory was that they dealt in new ways with the
relationship between intuition and concept and the problem of the formation
of concepts. In the background of these philosophical issues stood Kant.
Thus, Cassirer wanted his philosophy of symbolical forms to synthetize the
tradition created by these writers, as weB as to enlarge Kant's conception of
the relationship hetween "concept" and "intuition", so as to ac count in a
unified way for the development of language, art, physics, logic and mathe-
matics.
The question, however, remains: Wh at is a "symbol"? Certainly Kant did
not view concepts as "copies" of empirical phenomena; indeed, his entire philo-
sophical thought strove to undermine this idea. So what was the difference
between the notion of "symbol" developed by Cassirer, Humboldt, Helmholtz
and Hertz, and Kant's idea of "concept"? In order to grasp the exact nature
of this difference, and why the concept of symbol is so closely associated
with the problem of art and science, it will be useful to reconsider Kant's
precise terminology.
The relationship between intuition and concept which Cassirer and the
thinkers he drew upon referred to lO is embodied in Kant's theory of
Schematism. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the doctrine of Schematism is
located in the first chapter of the Analytics of Principles, where Kant con-
templates how to apply the pure concepts of Understanding to intuitions -
that is, how to apply categories to phenomena. Because Kant was concerned,
above all, with putting an end to the "endless fights" of metaphysicians by
identifying the sources of all knowledge (describing the map of the tran-
scendental), there is always a sharp distinction between the Sensibility and
the Understanding in the Critique. Sensibility provides the "intuitions"
(Anschauungen), and Understanding the "categories" (Reason is not in itself
a source of knowledge; to "think" is not to "know") . This very distinction
shows why "Schematism" is necessary: According to Kant, only by putting
intuitions and concepts together do we arrive at knowledge. However, since
intuitions and concepts are heterogeneous, how is this possible? The solution
is to introduce a third term which makes it possible to subsume the intuition
under the concept. This third term, which must be cognate with both empir-
ical intuitions and pure concepts, is the " transcendental scheme" in Kant's
Critique. While the idea of "scheme" is a product of the imagination, it is
definitely not an "image" in the ordinary sense of the word. An image (Bild)
of the number 5 would be, for instance, the drawing of five points on a piece
of paper. However, a scheme is entirely different: It is what makes it possible
for me to know what a number is in general, that is, what enables the relation
between the particular and the universal character of the concept. The scheme
is thus a product of the pure apriori imagination which makes all images
possible. But Kant says little more beyond the cryptic claim that Schematism
remains a "secret art hidden in the human Understanding".', Nonetheless, it
is a crucially important idea because, as Kant repeatedly claims, Man is a finite
being (intellectus ectypus) who has no intuition of the essences; so the doctrine
of Schematism is the only alternative to the trappings of dogmatism and
scepticism.'2 (Dogmatism will result from the proposition that Man has
intuition into the essences, while Scepticism will result from the conception
that all knowledge is derived strictly from empirical associations).
According to Kant's theory of physical knowledge, in the objectivation
process we begin with empirical intuitions, viz., with what is given in space
and time, and we then apply to these intuitions the pure concepts which provide
for the ordering relations between the physical phenomena. In this context,
Kant makes no connection to the character of art - indeed there is none. My
aim here is to understand why there is none. To do so, I shall turn to a passage
in Kant, which is very closely related to his understanding of Schematism,
and which is also crucial for our present problematic of the relationship
between science and art. This passage appears in the third Critique, the Critique
01 Judgment, and testifies to the impossibility of a comparison between science
and art within the Kantian ProblemstellungY
The Critique 01 Judgment represents the indispensable completion of Kant's
critical period, despite the fact that it does not provide a new division of
philosophy, since it does not enter into the "system" developed eventually
as a philosophy of nature and freedom on the basis of the first and the second
Critiques. The importance of the third Critique is that it aimed to compIete

the description of "Judgment" which was left incompletely explicated in the
notion of Schematism. Through Schematism, Kant proposes, Judgment acts
in a "determining" way, going from the universal (concepts) to the particular.
But how about the case of moving from the particular to the universal, such
as when we say "This is beautiful" or when we assign finality to a living
organism or to Nature in general ("purposiveness without a purpose")? Here,
Judgment acts in a "reflective" way. Reflective judgment paralleIs determining
judgment. It provides neither laws of Nature nor laws of Freedom, it does
not deal with objects but only with the subject, yet it allows for our grasp of
the infinite diversity of our experiences as a systematical whole. Therefore,
in order to understand how aesthetic judgments and teleological judgments
are possible, a critique of reflective judgment in general is necessary.
In paragraph 59 of the third Critique, Kant claims that, in general, human
understanding makes use of two kinds of "presentations" of a concept in the
intuition (hypotheses, Darstellungen, exhibitiones, that is the act which makes
a concept sensible).14 One is the schematic and the other is the symbolic.
The first kind of presentation is al ready familiar from the discussion of
Schematism: The concepts are "made sensible" in space and time either in pure
intuition (mathematics) or in empirical intuition, that is pure intuition plus
sensation (physics), which enables physical phenomena to become objects
of knowledge. However, what is "symbolic presentation"? Symbolic presen-
tation comes into play where no "sensible intuition" is available, for instance,
in the case of concepts which can only be grasped through reason (such as
the concept of "God", or any other abstract concept as, for instance, "despotic
state"). In such cases, we need an indirect presentation. Such indirect pre-
sentation is provided by Judgment through a special process, namely Analogy,
where Judgment performs a double function: It first applies the concept to
sensible intuition and then it applies the mere rule by which it reflects on
that intuition to an entirely different object, of which the former is only the
symbol. l5 For instance, we have no empirical intuition of a despotic state,
but we have one of a handmill and we can thus apply to the "despotic state"
the ruIe by which we had formerly linked our concept of a handmill with
the corresponding intuition - the handmill will be a symbol of the despotic
state. Similarly, Kant remarks in this passage that all our knowledge of God
is "analogical". Thus, analogy acquires the full dignity of a process of knowl-
edge, though not of scientific knowledge. In the Prolegomena, Kant sharply
defines analogy as "[not] an imperfect similarity of two things, but a perfect
similarity of relations between two quite dissimilar things".16 Finally, in the
third Critique Kant suggests that our language "is replete with such indirect
presentations according to an analogy, where the expression does not contain
the actual schema for the concept, but contains merely a symbol for our reflec-
tion".l? To summarize, in paragraph 59 of the third Critique Symbolism is
described as the correlate of Schematism in the cases, multiple and diverse,
where no direct presentation of the concept is possible: In these cases
232 CATHERINE CHEVALLEY
Critique of Pure Reason. Intuition and concept in scientific knowledge
Particular ..." " E - - - - - - - - - - - - - Universal

Intuition Concept
(Sensibility) (Understanding)
I I
(Imagination)
SCHEMATISM
(- Determining Judgment)
Scientific knowledge - Objectivation
Critique ofludgement. Intuition and concept in art and teleology
Particular -------~~ Universal

Intuition - - Concept Concepts of reason - - Symbol
(given object) (Object with no sensible intuition)
I I
SYMBOLISM
(= Reflective Judgment)
Art; Teleology - Analogy
(plus Language and 'all our knowledge ofGod')
Fig. I. Schematism and symbolism in Kant's Critiques.
(aesthetical and teleological judgments, theological statements, language),

human understanding deals with indirect, symbolical, analogical presentations.
At this point, it becomes clearer that a consideration of Kant's terminology
explains why the concepts of "symbol" is so closely linked with the problem
of art and science. As we have just seen, Kant's view is that in art, religion
or language, the relationship between concepts and intuitions is fundamen-
tally different from that in scientific knowledge; this difference finds its
expression in the contrast between "symbolic" and "schematic" presenta-
tions. For Kant, science is not possible where there is no direct presentation
of the concept in the intuition, and conversely, no aesthetic judgment ever arises
in connection to science. Thus, he writes that "if we judge objects merely in
terms of concepts, then we lose all presentation of beauty".18 This is a sharp
characterization of why science is not like art. However, at this juncture let
us imagine that a language "replete with analogies" might playa crucial role
in scientific knowledge; or, that scientific knowledge can be obtained with
respect to objects far which no sensible intuition is available. Indeed, in both
these cases, it would be conceded that scientific knowledge is symbolic and
that there is no fundamental distinction to be made between science and art.
This is precisely Cassirer's argument and, as he claims, it entails a radical shift
away from Kant's theary of knowledge towards a general theory of language,
art, myth, science and religion. Only il we depart /rom Kant's theory 01
intuition and concepts, and allow that language plays a constitutive role in
objectivation, can we arrive at the statement that physics is like art. This seems
to be a fundamental philosophical presupposition for those German philoso-
phers who, during the 1920s, argued that there is an affinity between physics
and art.
Importantly, "rewriting" Kant's first Critique with the third Critique in mind
was explicitly suggested and developed by many authors throughout the nine-
teenth century. The modification of Kant's conception of physical knowledge
with which I just identified Cassirer's stance actually occurred much earlier,
and was reiterated throughout the whole history of the Geisteswissenschaften
and the Naturwissenschaften. This development probably originated with
Goethe. Goethe had accepted Hegel's and Schiller's view of the Critique 0/
Judgment as Kant's "chef-d'oeuvre", and we find a clear reference to Kant's
paragraph 59 in section I. 4 of Goethe's Zur Farbenlehre under the title of
"Über Sprache und Terminologie": "One never considers fully enough that
language is actually only symbolical (nur symbolisch), only pictorial (bildlich),
and never directly but only in reflection expresses an object".19 But Goethe did
not accept Kant's fundamental distinction between Schematism and Symbolism
as a clear-cut distinction. Instead, Goethe extended this remark on language
to scientific knowledge in general, claiming that "objects" of Nature were really
"acts" (Tätigkeiten), moreover acts of language, and that epochs of science
became coherent through the use of the same particular sets of metaphors in
different fields of human understanding. 20 Goethe thought for instance that
poetry and science faced the same "ambiguity paradox" and that language
was the means to multiply the correlations between symbols and reality. In
other words, within the very process of Schematism, Goethe found acts of
language with their symbolic analogies.
In turn Goethe's view paved the road for Humboldt, who was extremely
influential in the German tradition of the philosophy of language. 21 What
Humboldt wanted to do, with his amazing knowledge of about thirty languages,
was to demonstrate that language was "the formative organ of thought", that
"no class of presentations [could] be regarded as a purely receptive contem-
plation of a thing already present", and t:lat without language "the act of
concept-formation, and with it all true thinking, [was] impossible".22 Only with
language can we organize the chaos of our sensations - even in silence -
through analysis and synthesis; thus, language constantly and dynamically
produces thought, rather than simply mirroring the world. Consistent with
Kant's perspective, but also addending Goethe's extension of symbolic
language to scientific knowledge, Humboldt declared that "analogy" was the
most fruitful mode of concept formation, because it enabled the transference
of what might be called structural relations to fields other than the ones in
which they originally emerged. It would be inaccurate to envisage these ideas
as offshoots of idealistic Romanticism. Goethe occasionally portrayed hirnself
as a "rational empiricist". Moreover, we find this emerging tradition con-
tinued in the work of Heimholtz (who was decidedly an empiricist) and Hertz.
These developments of Kant's remarks of the third Critique in the epistemology
of certain German physicists during the XIXth Century have not been studied
in detail, and in this essay, the sole focus is on the particular use of the concept
of symbol. Heimholtz generalized this use to the whole erkenntnistheoretisch
problem, explicitly suggesting that one should enlarge Kant's concept of
Anschauung on the basis of discoveries made in the physiology of percep-
ti on and the development of non-Euclidean geometries. 23 Not surprisingly,
Heimholtz emphasized that language, art, science and perception were to be
envisaged at the same level. In one of his last papers, titled "Goethe's antic-
ipation of subsequent scientific ideas", Heimholtz recalled that Goethe "found
much stimulation in the Critique 0/ Judgment". Amusingly, he quoted the lines
uttered by the Holy Spirit at the end of Faust: "All things transitory/But as
analogies are sent", and suggested the following epistemological counter-
part: "What occurs in space and time and what we perceive through the senses,
we know only in symbols".24 After Heimholtz, we also find that Hertz, Schllck
and even HusserI explicitly substitute the concept of "symbol" for the Kantian
concept of "intuition".25 There were many differences, of course, between these
writers, but they all privileged the concept of symbol (as pivotal in human
knowledge). This seems to have been a natural consequence of the two devel-
opments I mentioned above: That language was now viewed as an essential
element of scientific knowledge; and that developments in mathematics and
physics exhibited objects for which there were no possible presentations of
concepts in intuition.
Cassirer - who should not be viewed as a "neo-Kantian" - inherited this
rich and diverse legacy, and he certainly acknowledged his intellectual debt.
The question here, however, is: Wh at are the philosophical presuppositions
of the comparison between physics and art in German thought during the
1920s? And we saw that:
1. It was widely acknowledged that Kant's theory of scientific knowledge was
in need of revision.
2. The alternative to the notion of Anschauung had to be the concept of
"symbol", since the lauer, in Kant's own understanding, was applicable
in cases where no "direct presentation" of a concept was available, and a
"dynamical" use of language was necessary.
3. Finally, the emerging picture of these difficulties and developments entailed
that art, science and religion were similar intellectual constructs.
Thus, the brief consideration of the genealogy of the comparison between
physics and art reveals a complex, but at the same time, familiar set of
connections.

PANOFSKY'S ANALYSIS OF LINEAR PERSPECTIVE
In order to uncover the presuppositions of the idea that physics is like art, it
was necessary to inquire into some aspects of post-Kantian Erkenntnistheorie.
But my aim here is to understand how this idea was also connected to the
notion of a "style of art" in the 1920s. This connection emerged in a spec-

tacular way in the history of art with Erwin Panofsky's 1925-1927 work.
This work was direct1y influenced by both Cassirer's conception of symbol-
ical forms and his parallel between art and physics, and by the formalist
approach of Heinrich Wölfflin. I therefore turn to the essay which Panofsky
published in 1927 under the title of Die Perspektive als "symbolische Form"
(Perspective as a symbolical form).26
Panofsky's essay on Perspective focused on one problem: The discovery
of linear perspective at the time of the Quattrocento. His work was enormously
influential because it was the first assessment of how crucial this discovery
had been in modem thought. Most people at the time still thought of perspective
as the natural way of representing things and the world. 27 Panofsky showed
instead that linear perspective was not only abstract and unnatural, but also
that it came to embody the whole trend of thought which characterized "moder-
nity". Here I shall only sketch the main lines of Panofsky's reasoning (with
many omissions, and also some additions of my own), focusing on two ques-
tions: (1) How did space co me to be represented the way it was in the peri6d
extending from the XVth and XVIth centuries to the beginning of the XXth?
And (2) how is this change of the representation of space to be interpreted?
In order to understand certain aspects of art just prior to the discovery of
linear perspective, let us think of the two paintings by Giotto: Saint lohn which
is in Florence (Polyptique de la Badia) and the frescoes of loachim's life which
are in Padua (in the Chapel Scrovegni). Saint lohn recalls the basic features
of iconic painting: Space is flat or two-dimensional, with a background of
an opaque gold, and the figure appearing very still. A significant difference
from the earlier form of iconography is already visible: A few shadows appear
in Giotto's painting, whereas in icons of earlier times there are no shadows,
as the divine light is everywhere. Nevertheless the aim of this painting remains
the expression of spiritual meaning; it does not intend to convey any meaning
connected to the reality of the world we live in. (This was the prescription
set notably by Jean Damascene in the IXth century in the wake of the icon-
oc1astic crisis: Icons were to make the sacred visible and present, without
making it look in any way like what we experience in the tangible world).
Tuming to loachim's life, we observe a similar contrast: This is still medieval
painting, especially since the organizing element is the set of blocks and bodies,
with space being flat in the interstices. However, the specific "Giotto cube"
(the "c1osed interior") introduces, for the first time in the history of painting,
a piece of three-dimensional space: The characters are set in a box, a "space
box" (Raumkäst), in a manner which is a transposition of the stone boxes of
Gothic architecture.
Panofsky presents Jan Van Eyck's Birth of Saint lohn (1415-17) as one
of the first examples of the changes which occur in the composition of the
picture when the three-dimensionality of Giotto's cube expands to cover the
entire space. There is depth, a window, light and shadows and also parallel
lines on the floor and the ceiling. But looking one century ahead at Jan
236 CATHERINE CHEV ALLEY
Gossaert's Saint Lucas painting the Virgin we would find linear perspective
perfectly mastered. As in numerous other paintings of the XVlth and XVIIth
centuries, the floor resembles a chessboard and there is an opening to the
outside (a Veduta); the space (if not the characters) looks familiar, as if one
could step inside the painting and participate in the scene.
The question Panofsky addressed was what happened, around the beginning
of the XVth Century, which altered, to such extent, the way that space was
visualized? His answer was the discovery of the "construzzione legittima" as
the fundamental theoretical and practical technique of painted art. While the
discovery itself was almost certainly made by the architect Brunelleschi (who
applied it to the Florence Duorno), it was first developed in painting by
Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, and elaborated in theory by Alberti in
his 1435 treatise De Pictura. Alberti provided the modem definition of the
picture as the intersection of aplane and the visual pyramid, at a given distance,
with a well-defined direction of the central rays and a fixed localization of
the source of light. Once this idea was grasped, it was quite easy to under-
stand the corresponding geornetrical technique, wh ich was the construction
of the "carre de base".
First, the painter chose the level for the horizon of the painting. Then he
chose one point on this line as the vanishing point, and another one as the
so-called distance point (such that VP be equal to the distance between the
observer and the picture). Then after dividing ab into equal segments, he
drew lines Voa through Vob, as weIl as the lines cD through bD. This gave
hirn a number of intersecting points with bVo (see Figure 2). Then he drew
the parallel lines to ab which contained these intersection points. Finally he
drew Voa ... Vob. A kind of chessboard thus appeared, where Voa through
Vob represented the lines which were orthogonal to the picture (vanishing in
infinity, that is, at Vo). The dirninishing proportions between the transverse
distahce
Vo 0
~----~~~~--------~
a c d c: r b
Fig. 2. The "construzzione legittima" for the picture.

lines corresponded to the diminishing values for the characters or objects which
were to be represented in the picture. An example of this technique is
Döhleman's reconstruction ofthe Cena ofthe School ofDirk Bouts (1464-67),
where it is obvious that the geometrical pavement on the floor determines
the entire space and depth of the picture (see Figure 3).
We can now turn to the second question raised above: How is this discovery
of the Quattrocento and its general significance to be interpreted? Obviously,
the conceptions of space in linear perspective and in medieval painting are
quite distinct. In linear perspective, space becomes three-dimensional
throughout the entire picture; the organizing element is the light - indeed, light
creates the space - and the light almost always comes from a well-defined
source; this light is propagated according to geometrical laws (the laws of
modem optics), and it is idealized by lines (the rays); the bodies do not come
first, rather they are inserted into the space and localized by geometrical means;
infinity is "in" the picture, represented by the vanishing point; the point of
view from which to observe the picture is fixed and the vision is perforce
monocular vision. To summarize, the space is a mathematical space, aspace
of relations which is homogeneous (all directions have same value) and infinite.
The picture is "like a window" in that looking at the picture is like looking
through a window. To put it otherwise, a painting by Giotto looks at you,
whereas you look at a painting by Poussin. Thus, with linear perspective you
Fig. 3. Dirk BOUIS, Cena (1464-67).

see "reality". In 1935 Magritte would gently ironicize this with his La
Condition Humaine.
However, as Panofsky noted, linear perspective is basically different not
only from the style that preceded it, but also from what the case is in actual
perception. Referring to Helmholtz and Cassirer, Panofsky recalled, for
instance, that real vision is binocular and operates on the curb surface of the
retina. Indeed, people were aware of that in the XVIIth Century, so that the
privilege conferred to abstract central perspective was deliberate. On the
other hand, the space of linear perspective was also not like the heteroge-
neous and six-dimensional space of the Aristotelian cosmos. In fact, the
discovery of the Quattrocento amounted to the assertion that the real space
of the world was Euclidean space, with the corollary that infinity was in actu
in the world. 28
This analysis led Panofsky to conjecture that one and the same revolution
in thought had occurred in the XVth, XVIth and XVIIth centuries in art,
physics, mathematics and philosophy. In art: All bodies and objects were
now represented in Euclidean space; the space-time coordination was deter-
mining the story told by the picture (angels, sometimes still portrayed as
floating in the sky, became purely ornamental); a fixed point of view was
chosen for the spectator; and it was explicitly asserted that painting made
possible knowledge of the essence of reality, as weIl as the grasp of the
infinite. In science: The revolution in mathematical physics began with a
revolution in optics, when Kepler, who was directly influenced by Dürer's
perspectivist methods, showed how a correct geometrical analysis of light rays
could explain vision. Kepler also provided the first theory of optical instru-
ments, along with the modern distinction between imago and pictura. 29 The
discovery of analytical geometry by Descartes entailed that all "things" were
defined through their relationship to a given coordinate system and reducible
to "primary qualities" (figure and extension). The discovery of the calculus
of the infinite by Leibniz and others entailed that man could formally compute
God's ultimate attribute. In philosophy: The emergence of the "age of repre-
sentation" produced a new concept of the subject. Descartes' work, especially,
advanced the idea that the world of experience can be rationally and COT-
rectly reconstructed only from the viewpoint of the knowing subject - the
knowing subject hirnself being not so much a spectator, as someone who builds
the appropriate tools in order to gain the world as the world of his represen-
tation. With geometry as the "code" through which to decipher true
resemblance by means of dissemblance,3o true knowledge was becoming avail-
able to man. This conception became diffuse during the XVIIth century, and
was sometimes deployed as a universal cultural slogan in the frontispieces
of science books (for instance, Athanasius Kircher's 1646 Ars Magna Lucis
et Umbrae). In such striking affinities between parallel developments in art,
science and philosophy, Panoksky saw the process of an "objectivation of
the subjective" which marked the beginning of a newage. For hirn, moder-
nity here appeared as something specifically new, emerging when all bodies
and objects were conceived as cast in abstract Euclidean space, and ruefully
identified with the "true" nature of things seen from a fixed viewpoint. This
state of affairs, as Panofsky also noted, eventually found its full philosoph-
ical expression in Criticism (i.e. in Kant's philosophy), when God had to retreat
entirely out of the picture.
At this point, we can see what Panofsky meant by a "style of art". The notion
of style was for hirn the transposition in the theory of aesthetics of Cassirer's
notion of "symbolical forms": "But if perspective is not a factor of value,
it is surely a factor of style. Indeed, it may even be characterized as (to
extend Ernst Cassirer's felicitous term to the history of art) one of those
'symbolic forms' ".31 This meant that a style could never be simply a set of
purely formal characteristics, as Wölfflin tended to think. In contrast to
Wölfflin's approach,32 Panofsky contended that one should include in the
notion of style the whole Weltanschauung of a historical period. More pre-
cisely, knowledge of styles is the knowledge of the general principles of
representation which determine the form given to the object. 33 In a work of
art, we always deal with at least three different layers of meaning: The "phe-
nomen al meaning", the "significative meaning" and the "document meaning".
The interpretation of the work of art depends, of course, on the subjective
experience (existential and theoretical) of the interpreter; however, in an essen-
tial way it also involves a history of "forms", a his tory of "types" and a history
of ideas. Only if we understand what aperiod of time defines as being
representable (possible forms), conceivable (possible ideas) and meaningful
(the Weltanschauung) can we achieve a deeper insight into all the richness
of meaning which is embodied in a work of art. Comparing the techniques
of the artist with the instruments of the physicist, Panofsky also remarked
that a technique of representation in art has an effect on what is represented
exactly as it does in science: The instrument of knowledge and the object of
knowledge determine each other and actually "verify" each other. 34 Therefore,
the situation in art is never that of a sharp distinction between: (1) Nature as
object; (2) techniques as neutral tools; and (3) the artist as pure subjectivity.
Rather art is created through a constant interaction between these three aspects,
and governed by the conditions of possible representation characteristic of
the historical period. The task of the history of art is to reveal the general
possibilities for representation wh ich characterize the different periods
of style,35 that is, how new forms of interaction emerge which create new
languages of representation. In this respect, Panofsky thought that the inter-
pretation of a work of art can compete with the interpretation of a philosophical
system or a religious conception. 36

A SPECIAL CONFIGURA nON FOR QUANTUM THEORY
SO far I have attempted to show that in the Germany of the 1920s, the asser-
tion that physics is like art was closely associated with a general "symbolic
turn" (which already articulated certain of the premises of the "linguistic turn").
Numerous unusual connections existed between a variety of authors of this
period, even though we tend to regard and study them separately today.
However, one obvious consistency in their thinking was their departure from
Kant's distinction between art and language on the one hand and science on
the other. In characterizing the general epistemological stance which emerged
in the course of the XIXth century, one might say that language increasingly
came to be considered as the basis of the fundamental process of human
knowledge. At the same time the mathematical and physical sciences were
beginning to confront new regions of inquiry in which no presentation of
the concepts in intuition (ordinary space and time) was considered possible.
Kant hirnself had pointed toward the concepts of symbol and analogy (which
had heavy theological background) as adequate in handling such cases;
however, allusion to a symbolic form of knowledge in science entailed a radical
revision of Kant's doctrine of Anschauung and objectivation. This consequence
was openly admitted by many around 1920. As we saw, with these same
presuppositions, Panofsky originated a symbolic turn in the his tory of art,
and shed new light on the connections (in the period of the XVth through
the XVIIth centuries) which existed between physical and mathematical optics,
painting and philosophy. In his 1927 pathbreaking work, he showed that the
orientation of modern thought in all these fields had been influenced by a
definite style of vision, embodied in new techniques for the representation
of space.
As set forth at the beginning of this paper, my aim is to elucidate the reasons
why Bohr's and Heisenberg's interpretation of quantum theory unexpectedly
involved a comparison between physics and art. There is a lot of evidence
of their making such a comparison, but I shall not attempt a complete exegesis
of all the relevant texts. Instead, I restrict myself to two conjectures (which
would need much more development than consideration of space allows here).
My first conjecture is that in the very genesis of quantum theory, the trend
of thought which emphasized a "symbolic turn" contributed to shaping
Bohr's interpretation of the situation in atomic physics. The second conjec-
ture is that the concept of style and the analysis of modernity, which were
so widely discussed in connection with the new orientations in the his tory
of art, contributed to shaping Heisenberg's conception of the meaning of
quantum theory in the history of philosophy.
It is well-known that quantum theory was developed to address a host of
new phenomena which appeared impossible to account for within the con-
ceptual frame of classical physics. The work of analyzing this latter conceptual
framework, and the attempt to grasp the reasons why it failed, were there-
fore crucial for the development of quantum theory and for the discovery of
the mathematical tools which were to provide a consistent interpretation of
quantum processes. In Bohr's work, this interpretative effort began as soon
as 1913, when it became c1ear that contradictions with c1assical theories would
not be easily avoided. However, the turning point came during the years
1924-28, when a final crisis of the old quantum theory opened the way to
the discovery of matrix and wave mechanics, and to the complementarity inter-
pretation. My conjecture here is that c10se attention to the original papers show
that, between 1924 and 1928, Bohr linked the non-Anschaulichkeit of quantum
theory with the idea of "symbolic analogies" and with a Goethean-Humboldtian
conception of language. In 1924, the state of the old quantum theory was
such that Bohr (under much pressure from Pauli) decided to renounce all
mechanical models for the description of the movement of electrons in atoms.
He supported this move by arguing that there was an "essential failure of all
spatio-temporal images",3? and that one would have to take recourse to "sym-
bolical analogies, at a much higher degree than before".38 Bohr's use of the
notion "symbol" was not casual. An examination of his writings between 1913
and the late 1930's shows that, prior to 1924, he rarely employed this notion
(he preferred to write of "formal analogies"); after 1924, Bohr used the notion
of "symbol" systematically.39 Indeed, after 1924 Bohr always called "symbols"
those elements of the quantum formalism which could not have a correlate
in intuition, in contrast with the idea of "concepts" of c1assical physics, which
admitted an intuitive interpretation. Moreover, by "symbolism" he consistently
referenced the characteristic non-anschaulich feature of contemporary physics.
So we may conclude that Bohr deliberately used the idea of symbol to refer
to circumstances or phenomena where, in his words, no intuitive presenta-
tion was possible. Now the question is, how did the role of language enter
this picture?
The problem of language was connected with the contrast between
Anschauung and Symbol in a way which was quite obvious to Bohr. In the
conclusion of his 1927-28 paper on complementarity, Bohr noted that special
hindrances to the understanding of quantum mechanics came from the fact that
classical concepts, and indeed every word in our language, were bound to
our forms of intuition. 40 Later, this claim served as the premise of what Bohr
always declared as the major epistemological paradox raised by quantum
physics: On the one hand, our interpretation of the experimental material rested
essentially upon the c1assical concepts, which were refined concepts of ordinary
language; on the other hand, objects which were not given in ordinary space
and time could not be described with the help of c1assical concepts and ordinary
language. This paradox, however, persisted only as long as one assigned
ontological weight to concepts and words, and disappeared under the auspices
of a more sophisticated conception of language. As Heisenberg later put it,
Bohr was essentially preoccupied with the "limitation on OUT way of expres-
sion, the problem of talking about things when one knows the words don't
really get hold of the things".41 Bohr's complementarity paper concluded
with the remark that the situation "bears a deep-going analogy to the general
difficulty of the formation of human concepts inherent in the distinction
between subject and object,,42 - aremark which looks like a transparent ref-
erence to Humboldt. In later writings (actually as soon as 1929), in conjunction
with a strategy of the "multiplication of the points of view", Bohr developed
an understanding of language as a network of conceptual systems which

provide different descriptions ofthe object. (One of Bohr's favorite examples
was the pair of concepts frequency/light quanta). Recalling the intellectual
developments in the XIXth century discussed earlier, with the establishment
of elose connections between the philosophical renunciation of the conven-
tional (Kantian) concept of Anschauung, the generalisation of the concept of
Symbol to different fields of knowledge, and the emergence of language as
the foundational element of any theory of knowledge, we cannot help but
see striking similarities with Bohr's line of thought. Thus, a natural conjec-
ture seems to be that the conceptual work which contributed in shaping the
so-called Copenhagen interpretation was deeply consilient with the history
of the concept of Symbol in the German context.
According to my second conjecture there is also a elose connection between
the notion of "style of art" and the analysis of modemity on the one hand,
and Heisenberg's special interest in the history of philosophy on the other hand.
Indeed, as I mentioned at the beginning, Heisenberg is very explicit about
the idea that physics is like art. He emphasized this point especially in his
philosophical essay Ordnung der Wirklichkeit (1942), where he proposed a
unified description of language, art and science under the title "Symbol und
Gestalt". He also argued that physical theories were like "styles of art". His
view can be summarized as follows: in the history of physics, there have
been so far four elosed conceptual systems (Newtonian mechanics, thermo-
dynamics, electromagnetism and special relativity, and quantum theory),43
which differ not because their objects differ, but because they create dif-
ferent groups of relations. Such systematic representations of given groups
pf relations appear as symbolical idealizations and, therefore, as components
of human language which are formed through the interaction with the world;
from this point of view, "they may be compared to the different styles of art
(Kunststilen)",44 since a style of art is also a "set of formal rules", elosely
connected with the understanding of mathematical structures specific to an
historical epoch. Here again, we find an element deeply congenial to the context
I described above, What is especially interesting, though, is that such a com-
parison allowed Heisenberg to attempt a characterization of the meaning of
quantum theory versus the history of modem philosophy. "There emerges a
host of relationships to modem philosophy in its various systems", as
Heisenberg wrote in 1958. 45 I will give only abrief indication of two of these
relations, but it should be stressed that Heisenberg's knowledge of the history
of philosophy, even while less extensive than,Pauli 's or Hermann Weyl's,
was nevertheless extremely acute.
The two positions which I want to highlight here relate to Kant and
Descartes, respectively. As early as 1926 to 1927, Heisenberg was aware of
the fact that quantum theory could not accommodate the concept of reality
(Wirklichkeit, as opposed to Realität) of elassical physics. The renouncement
of Anschaulichkeit and Objektivierbarkeit obviously meant a break with Kant's
theory of knowledge, and this is emphasized, often quite explicitly, by
Heisenberg. 46 The target of Heisenberg's critique was not the idea that space
and time are the necessary conditions for all possible experience - on the
contrary, and in agreement with Bohr, he maintained that this was indeed an
"empirical fact". Rather his critical target was the view of the apriori
character of these forms of intuition and of the categories, along with the
way they were purported to be linked to one another (Schematism). In pro-
viding such asolid and privileged foundation to scientific knowledge (with
classical physics as the model of such knowledge), Kant actually contributed
to the dogmatization of scientific concepts. In turn, this entailed the exten-
sion of the "scientific method" far beyond its legitimate limits of application,
leading to "the much deplored division in the world of ideas between the
field of science on one side and the fields of religion and art on the other".47
But Heisenberg also believed that the break from classical physics and Kant's
epistemology was a break from the deepest roots of modem philosophy, viz.,
from the Cartesianische Teilung between the subjective and the objective,
the res cogitans and the res extensa. 48 Heisenberg argued that Descartes wanted
to center all knowledge in the ego cogito, and in order to do so he intro-
duced an abstract distinction between an objective course of events in space
and time and a subject understood as aseparate substance. Here Heisenberg
is essentially reiterating HusserJ's and Heidegger's critique. 49 But while Husserl
and Heidegger (with divergent aims) both criticized the fact that Descartes
had thus been incapable of giving full extension to the modem concept of
the Subject which he had hirnself introduced, Heisenberg focused on the
other side of this critique by arguing that such Cartesian division made it
impossible to give full extension to the modem concept of Nature (to under-
stand that Nature is always only a concept, which is also constituted through
our interaction with it). Heisenberg often quoted Bohr's anti-Cartesian remark
that we are not spectators in this world, but both actors and spectators, and
he interpreted this statement as meaning that contemporary physics not only
demolished the idea that objectivation was objectivation of something given
in space and time, but also undermined the very relationship between subject
and object which had emerged with modem thought.
Indeed, modernity itself, from Descartes through Kant, had been associ-
ated with visualization in a Euclidean space and with the idea of a fixed
view point of the knowing subject. In many ways Pauli shared this view, which
contributed to his decision to work on the period of the Middle-Ages and
the Renaissance: "The time when space and time were not yet up there [at
the right hand of God] and, indeed, the moment just before this fateful
operation, is particularly interesting for me. This is the reason for my study
of Kepler".50 Both Pauli and Heisenberg suggested on many occasions that
contemporary science was changing the entire conception of reality that had
emerged with classical physics and modem philosophy. Like a style of art,
the physics of the XVIIth Century had promoted the ideal of an "objective
explanation" of Nature through Newtonian mechanics (this "specifically
Christian form of ungodliness"), at the very time when Nature had become
a topic for artistic representation 51 and when philosophical systems proceeded

to "attack all questions of Weltans<;hauung" from one unique starting point
(like the cogito ergo sum of Descartes).52 Like a style of art, contemporary
physics worked with quite different presuppositions about the nature of reality.
However, though quantum theory had achieved a.consistent and rational
description of the quantum world, its presuppositions were yet to be made
explicit in the domains of philosophy and in art. As Pauli wrote in 1948,
"for me, working on the elaboration of a new idea of reality seems to be
precisely the most important and extremely difficult task of our time".53
Along the same lines, Heisenberg suggested that in philosophy one should draw
on the Goethean idea of a multi-Iayered reality: Goethe's "bitter struggle"
against Newton's theory of colors foundered, but its essential meaning was
to point toward a multiplicity of levels of reality: "The division of Nature
into a subjective and objective sector [is] an over-simplification of reality; it
would be more to the point to imagine a division into many overlapping sectors,
divided by the type of question we ask of Nature and by the amount of inter-
ference which we allow du ring observation".54 Every layer of reality, every
symbolic form, and every kind of interaction would somehow produce a
specific language. As the distinction between Nature and the Subject became
blurred, certain fundamental features of modern thought also disappeared.
Heisenberg alluded to similar developments which occurred in contemporary
art. Though cautious and tentative, his remarks on this topic are very inter-
esting: Noting, for instance, the cognate tendency to abstraction in physics,
mathematics, "atonal" music and "non-objective" painting, Heisenberg put
special emphasis on the analogy between the "extraordinary period of con-
fusion" which had preceded the formulation of Relativity theory and quantum
theory and the "tendencies to unshaping", the blurring of forms and the striving
for a "new language and new connections" which one noticed in art. 55 Here
as elsewhere Heisenberg (as weIl as Bohr and Pauli) displayed an acute aware-
ness of the fact that a major crisis was emerging from the disentangling of
the framework within which science and philosophy had developed since the
Renaissance. Thus far these facets of their interpretation of quantum theory
have been largely understudied, but that is essentially because they were
separated from their original philosophical context.
My conclusion will be brief and provisional. The idea that physics is like
art - or language, or perception - often finds its way into contemporary phi-
losophy. I have tried to show that this same comparison was central in German
reflection on philosophy and art during the decade of 1920s. It was rooted
in the whole trend of thought which originated with Kant's Critique 0/
Judgement, and with the many "heretic" attempts to describe scientific knowl-
edge as a process of non-intuitive "analogical symbolization", with language
playing a crucial part. It also served as a way to view history of art and the
concept of "style of art" in entirely new ways, which have become increas-
ingly more influential. Certain of the physicists who contributed to quantum
mechanics were highly exposed to these ideas: During the crucial period that
Bohr's interpretation of quantum theory was taking form, we find hirn quite
naturally linking the non-intuitive character of quantum processes with the idea
of symbolic analogies and with a language paradox. Later on, in Heisenberg's
(and Pauli 's) philosophical papers, we also find the comparison between
physics and styles of art interpreted in terms of a general process of sym-
bolization from which different concepts of reality emerge. Of course, my
conjecture was just like Magritte's picture in the picture: I proceeded to show
that the same idea, namely the idea that similar ideas occur in philosophy,
art and science, occurred in philosophy, in art and in science in the 1920s.
But this must be because we are still in the same predicament.
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Paris
NOTES
1 See Goodman and Elgin, 1988. For their argument that analytical philosophy brings together
art and science instead of separating them, see 1989.
2 van Fraassen, 1989, p. 9; 1991, p. I; and 1980, p. 86 where "explanation" is compared to a
representationalist theory of art.

3 Hacking, 1992.
4 Heisenberg, 1989, p. 129: "Denn alles Geistige, sei es in der Sprache, der Wissenschaft oder
der Kunst, beruht auf der Verwendung und auf der Kraft von Symbolen". One can also talk
about a work of art as a work of knowledge which has not been put in scientific language
(ibid., p. 145).
5 See Cassirer, I, 1953, p. 69.
6 In Goodman's words, we always "make worlds". On Goodman and Cassirer, see Goodman
and Eigin, 1978.
7 Cassirer, 1953, I, p. 77.
8 Cassirer, 1953, III, xiv. Also 1956, p. 208.

9 Cassirer, I, p. 86. On Cassirer's concept of symbolical forms, see H. Dussort, 1963; A.
Philonenko, 1989; and J. Seidengart, 1992.
10 See for example 1953, 1. p. 200.
11 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781-1787, AI41/BI80, in Ak. 11,136; Ak IV, 180.
12 Inasmuch as the possibility of knowledge and the ineluctability of finitude have been major
themes in the his tory of German philosophy up to Heidegger, this unsatisfactory "secret art"
of the Understanding has also been central in the developments of this philosophy. See J.
Vuillemin, 1954.
13 To my knowledge, Cassirer does not comment on this text.
14 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790, Ak V 351.
15 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Sk V, 352.
16 Kant, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, 1786, & 58, Ak IV, 357.
17 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Ak V, 352.

18 Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, Ak V, 215. Accordingly, one feels no "pleasure" in science
(ibid., Ak V, 187).
19 Goethe, 1947, Pt I, 4, 221.
20 Goethe, ibid. See also Fink, 1991.

21 von Humboldt had a direct influence on Saussure, Cassirer, Neo-Humboldtians of the 1920s,
as weil as on Boas, Sapir and Whorf. For further detail, see Humboldt, 1988 [1836]. On the
connection with Bohr's conception of language, see C. Chevalley, 1991, pp. 480-502.
22 von Humboldt [1836] 1988, p. 56.
23 See von Helmholtz [1878], 1977.

24 See von HeImholtz, [1892], 1971, p. 497. On Goethe and HeImholtz, see Barnouw's detailed
analysis, 1987, pp. 45-83. I have tried to show the importance of Helmholtz's general position
with respect to Kant's theory ofknowledge in the developments in quantum theory. See Chevalley,
1991, pp. 422-442.
25 For further detail see Chevalley, 1992; and 1994. On Schlick's and Cassirer's use of the
concepts of Symbol and Zuordnung, see Ryckman, 1991. On Hertz's concept of "symbol", see
Chevalley, 1991, pp. 549-566.
26 See Panofsky, [1931]1975. Panofsky was teaching history of art in Hamburg, where Cassirer
was teaching history of philosophy and where Aby Warburg was putting together his famous
library. Later, from the notion of symbolical form, Panofsky derived his definition of "iconology"
as an interpretation of the intrinsic meaning of images, aimed at a reconstitution of the corre-
sponding universe of "symbolic" values. Wölfflin had given primary importance to the concept
of style (which already appeared in Winckelmann's work at the end of the XVIIIth century),
and initiated the idea of a "history of the development of vision in Western Europe" where the
emphasis was put not on national characteristics but on the evolution of optical "categories";
see Wölfflin, 1915.
27 Moreover, the first critica1 editions of the Renaissance treatises on painting were published
only at the end of XIXth century.
28 In his analysis Panofsky drew from Cassirer's study of Nicolas de Cusa.
29 See Kepler, [1604], 1980; Dürer [1525], 1995.
30 In the Dioptrique and the Meditations, Deseartes placed much emphasis on this paradox (inher-
ited from Neo-Platonism): A circle can be represented by an ellipse in geometrie al perspective,

and similarly ideas are only "Iike" images of things - they do not resemble them; see Marion,
1981. Conversely, the many attempts to distort images by other kinds of perspectives were c10sely
associated with sceptical arguments; see BaltrusaHis, 1955, 1969; and Chevalley, 1979.
31 Panofsky, 1991, pp. 40-41. Other very famous examples of Panofsky's method are his
study of the correspondences between Gothic architecture and the philosophy of the Seholastics,
or of Dürer's Melancholy.
32 See Panofsky, 1915.
33 See Panofsky, [1931], 1975, p. 241.

34 Ibid., p. 250.
35 Ibid., p. 195.
36 Ibid., p. 252. In this lecture, which was given at the Society for Kantian Studies in Kiel,
Panofsky refers several times to Heidegger's 1929 book on Kant.
37 See Bohr, "Über die Wirkung von Atomen bei Stoßen" (1925), in Collected Works V. The
situation in 1924 was especially difficult because of the failure of the helium model and of the
Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory. On this, see O. Darrigol, 1992.
38 Bohr, Collected Works V, p. 85. The whole strategy connected with the "correspondence prin-
ciple" was a strategy based on an "analogy" with c1assical theories (between c1assical
electrodynamics and the "theory" of quanta), where analogy did not mean a vague resemblance,
but an attempt to transfer some structura1 features, to be identified.
39 This use extended to collaborators, and just before Heisenberg's break in 1925, the idea of
symbolical analogies had become the core of Bohr's "principle of correspondence"; Heisenberg
used it (along with Pauli's own radical strategy) in his matrix paper wh ich marked the birth of
quantum mechanics. Born, Heisenberg and Jordan also spoke in 1925 of a symbolic quantum
geometry in contrast with the anschaulich geometry.
40 Bohr, 1928, p. 590.
41 Heisenberg, 1963.
42 Bohr, 1928, p. 590.
43 See Heisenberg, 1958, chapter 6. Heisenberg suggests that a fifth c10sed theory is needed.
His description is especially interesting for its emphasis on the existence of shared concepts in
two or more of these conceptual systems.
44 Ibid., p. 97.
45 Heisenberg, 1958, p. 17.

46 See, for example, Heisenberg, 1965, pp. 290--301. Heisenberg writes that quantum mechanics
is in no way concemed with the objective determination of space-time phenomena since, despite
the fact that the act of measurement provides outcomes which are "given in space and time,"
the indeterminacy principle forbids the derivation, from these outcomes, of a "non-ambiguous
image of the atom".
47 Heisenberg, 1952 [1934]. p. 22. This is one of Heisenberg' s major papers, and it had a
great influence on Heidegger; see ChevaIley, 1990.

48 This theme occurs many times in Heisenberg's writings. For references, see Chevalley,
1992.
49 On Heidegger's interpretation of Husserl's analysis of the Cartesian distinction between res
extensa and res cogitans, see Marion, 1989, chapter 3.
50 Appearing in a letterfrom Pauli to Fierz (1947), quoted in Laurikainen, 1988, p. 193. Pauli's
work on Kepler appeared in Jung and Pauli, 1952. Panofsky checked Pauli's translations from
the Latin texts and occasionally teased hirn with Latin puns such as: "You shall not 'empty
out' Kepler with the fluctibus" (see Laurikainen, 1988, p. 296). Similar reasons inspired Paque's
major study of the Parisian Nominalists; see Paque, 1970.
51 Heisenberg, 1953.
52 Heisenberg, "Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft" in [1934] 1952,
p.25.
53 Letter from Pauli to M. Fierz (1948), quoted in Laurikainen, 1988, p. 193. Pauli added: "I
would like to make an attempt to give a name to that wh ich the new idea of reality brings to
my mind: The idea of the reality of the symbol".
54 Heisenberg, "Goethesche und Newtonsche Farbenlehre im Lichte der modeme Physik", in
[1934] 1952, p. 74.
55 Heisenberg, "Die Tendenz zur Abstraktion in moderner Kunst und Wissenschaft" [1969] 1974,
pp. 143-153.
RE FE REN CES
Baltrusaitis, J., Anamorphoses ou Perspectives Curieuses. Second edition (Paris: O. Perrin, 1955).
Bamouw, J., 'Goethe and Heimholtz: Science and Sensation', in F. Amrine et al. (eds.), Goethe
and the Sciences. A Reappraisal [Boston Studies in the Philosophy 0/ Science, vol. 97]
(Dordrecht: Reidel, 1987), pp. 45-82.
Bohr, N., 'Über die wirkung von atomen bei stoßen' [1925], in L. Rosenfeld et al. (eds.),
Niels Bohr's Collected Works V (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1975),
pp. 175-206.
Bohr, N., 'The quantum postulate and the recen! development of atomic theory', Nature 121 :
580--590, 1928.
Cassirer, E., The Philosophy 0/ Symbolic Forms. I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953).
Cassirer, E., Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs (Oxford, 1956).
ChevaIley, c., 'Physique quantique et philosophie', Le Debat (Novembre) 72 (Paris: Gallimard,
1992).
ChevaIley, c., 'Nieis Bohr's words', in H. Folse and J. Faye (eds.), Niels Bohr and Contemporary
Philosophy [Boston Studies in the Philosophy 0/ Science, vol. 153] (Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publisher, 1994), pp. 33-57.
ChevaIley, c., Introduction and glossary to N. Bohr, Physique atomique et connaissance humaine
(Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 480--502.
Chevalley, c., 'La physique de Heidegger', Etudes philosophiques 3: 289-311, 1990.
Chevalley, c., 'La physique quantique et les Grecs', in B. Cassin (ed.), Nos Grecs et leurs
modernes (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992), pp. 151-187.
Chevalley, c., 'Rationalite de I'anamorphose', XVIIe Siede (July-September) 124: 289-296,
1979.
Darrigol, 0., From C-numbers to Q-numbers. The Classical Analogy in the History of Quantum
Theory (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1992).
Dürer, A., Instructions sur la maniere de mesurer avec la regle et le compas les lignes, plans
et solides [1525], French trans. and introd. by J. Peiffer (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995).
Dussort, H., L' Ecole de Marbourg (Paris: Puf, 1963).
Fink, K. J., Goethe's History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Goethe, J. W. , Die Schriften zur Naturwissenschaft, R. Matthaei et al. (eds.) (Weimar: Böhlau,
1947).
Goodman, N. , Ways ofWorldmaking (lndianapolis: Hackett Publishers, Co., 1978).
Goodman, N. and Eigin, c., 'Interpretation and identity: Can the work survive the world ?', in
Reconceptions in Philosophy and other Arts and Sciences (London: Routledge , 1988).
Goodman, N. and Eigin, c., 'Changing the subject' , in R. Shusterman (ed.), Analytic Aesthetics
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Hacking, 1. , 'Styles for historians and philosophers ' , Studies in the History and Philosophy of
Science, 1(23): 1-20, 1992.
Heisenberg, W., Ordnung der Wirklichkeit, in H. Rechenberg (ed.) (Münich: R. Pi per, 1989).
Heisenberg, W., ' Interview of February 11, 1963', Archive for the History of Quantum Physics .
Heisenberg, W., Physics and Philosophy (Gifford Lectures 1955) (New York: Harper & Row,
1958).
Heisenberg , W., ' Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik ' , in Max-Planck Gesellschaft Jahrbuch,
1953, 32-54, English translation: The Physicist' s Conception of Nature (New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1958).
Heisenberg, W., ' Die Plancksche Entedeckung und die philosophischen Grundfragen der
Atomlehre', in Max-Planck Gesellschaft Jahrbuch, 1958,26-52, English translation: Across
the Frontiers (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Heisenberg, W. , 'Die Entwicklung der Quantenmechanik' (1933), English translation in Nobel
Lectures, Physics 1922-1941 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1965).
Heisenberg, W., 'Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft' , in Die Naturwissen-
schaften 40,1934, English translation in Philosophie Problems ofNuclear Science (New York:
Pantheon, 1952), pp. 11-26.
Jung, C. G. and Pauli, W., Naturerklärung und Psyche (Zurich: Rascher, 1952).
Kant, 1., Kritik der Urteilskraft. 1790.
Kant, 1., Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 1781 - 1787.
Kant, 1., Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik . 1786.
Kepler, J., Paralipomena ad Vitellionem [1604], French trans. and introd. by C. Chevalley (Paris:
Vrin, 1980).
Laurikainen, K. V., Beyond the Atom (Berlin: Springer, 1988).
Marion, J. L., Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: Puf, 1981).
Marion, 1. L., Reduction et donation (Paris: Puf, 1989).
Panofsky, E., 'Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst' , Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und
Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft X: 460-467, 1915.
Panofsky, E., 'Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden
Kunst' (1931), Logos xxi: 103-119,1932, French translation: La Perspective comme Forme
Symbolique (Paris: Minuit, 1975), pp. 183-196.
Panofsky, E., ' Die Perspektive als symbolische Form. Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-25 ' ,
Leipzig-Berlin, 258-330, French translation: La Perspective comme Forme Symbolique (Paris:
Minuit), 1975, pp. 37-182. English translation: Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York:
Zone Books, 1991).
Paque, R., Das Pariser Nominalistenstatut. Zur Entstehung des Realitätsbegriffs der Neuzeitlichen
Naturwissenschaft (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1970).
Pauli, W., 'Letter to M. Fierz (1947)" in K. V. Laurikainen, Beyond the Atom (Berlin: Springer,
1988), p. 193.
Pauli, W., 'Letter to M. Fierz (1948)" in K. V. Laurikainen, Beyond the Atom (Berlin: Springer,
1988), p. 193.
Philonenko, A. , L' Ecole de Marbourg (Paris: Vrin, 1989).

Ryckman, T., ' Conditio sine qua non? Zuordnung in the early epistemologies of Schlick and
Cassirer' , Synthese 88: 57-95, 1991.
Seidengart, J., 'La physique moderne comme forme symbolique privih:giee dans I'entreprise
philosophique d' E. Cassirer', Revue de Meraphysique et de Morale 4: 491-515, 1992.
van Fraassen, 8., The Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
van Fraassen, B., Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
van Fraassen, B., Quantum Mechanics. An Empiricist View (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991~ .
von HelmhoItz, H., 'Die Tatsache in der Wahrnehmung' [1878], English transiaiion ('The
Facts in Perception') in Epistemological Writings, Introduction by R. S. Cohen and Y. Elkana
[Boston Studies in the Philosophy 0/ Science, vol. 37] (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1977), pp. 115-145.
von HeImholtz, H., 'Goethe's anticipation of subsequent scientific ideas' [1892], in R. Kahl (ed.),
Selected Writings 0/ H. von Helmholtz (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971).
von Humboldt, W., Über die Verschiedenheiten des menschlichen Sprachbaues [1836], English
translation in On Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Vuillemin, J., L'Hüitage Kantien et la Revolution Copernicienne (Paris: Puf, 1954).
Wölfflin, H., Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Münich: F. Bruckmann, 1915), English trans-
lation: Principles 0/ Art History (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1932).
ALICIA CRAIG FAX ON
INTERSECTIONS OF ART AND SCIENCE

TO CREATE AESTHETIC PERCEPTION:
THE PROBLEM OF POSTMODERNISM
INTRODUCTION
In visual art, the aesthetic moment is that flitting instant, so

brief as to be alm ost timeless, when the spectator is at one with
the work of art he[lshe I is looking at. ... He [/she leeases
to be his[/herI ordinary self, and the pieture or building, statue,
landscape, or aesthetic actuality is no longer outside
himself[/herself]. The two become one entity; time and space
are abolished and the spectator is possessed by one awareness .
. . . In short, the aesthetic moment is a moment of mystic
vision.
Berenson, 1948, pp. 84-85
This is the best description of aesthetic perception of which I am aware. For

the scientist, it may be a frustrating one because it contains no measurable
properties and no table of values. It is often equally frustrating to the artist,
as there is no formula for reaching this perfect moment. However, standards,
ideals, and judgment of formal properties have been enlisted over the centuries
to try to approximate this vision. It is here that science and art most often inter-
sect in an attempt to achieve this elusive ideal. The abstract expressionist artist
Barnett Newman reportedly said that aesthetics was to artists as ornithology
is to birds. This apocryphal remark implies that aesthetics is as irrelevant to
artists as the study of bird habits is to birds. However, as ornithology studies
what birds do, the domain of aesthetics includes what artists do. Newman
implied that theory was not essential to artists; their making of art was the
important activity. This is an orthodox abstract expressionist tenet, but in
fact, theory and aesthetics were extremely important in the making of
Newman's own art. The exact placement and proportions of his vertical bands
(or "zips") on a saturated color field were crucial to the impact and percep-
tions of his paintings.
It is in the area of measurement and perfect proportions that science and
art frequently intersect. Both artists and scientists study the natural world,
although for somewhat different purported reasons: the artist to represent it
in some way, no matter how abstractly, and the scientist to discover the basis
of its workings. As Leonard Shlain put it, "revolutionary art and visionary
physics are both investigations into the nature of reality" (Shlain, 1991,
p. 15). Both artists and scientists seek to discern patterns in nature, admire
harrnony in the constituents of its structure, and use creative imagination to
recreate its dynamics. But perhaps more fundamentally, the relation of art
251
A.l. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, 251-266.
252 ALICIA CRAIG FAXON
and science as epistemological explorers has long provoked the question of

how one domain might "drive" the other. To what extent so-called extemal-
istic factors influence science is a topic of heated debate today, whereas its
counterpart, the power of the current scientific worldview to guide artistic
perception, has been well-documented. It is well-appreciated that new scien-
tific discoveries often affect artistic representations, and the knowledge of
scientific conceptions of representing the world has long been an important
factor in artists' studies. When artists have desired to create a model, a
simulacrum or an ideal fonn of the visible world, it has often been to science
that they hav~ tumed to seek formulas for aesthetic perfection. Of course, in
a postmoderri world such a referral is problematic,' as the very position of
science as an authoritative guide to art may in fact be both debated and denied.
Nevertheless, this paper will attempt to construct just such a possible post-
modern relationship. To do so, it must first delineate a provisional postmodern
aesthetic itself. Then, as a guide to understanding postmodern relations between
art and science, it will attempt to learn from the "premodern" relationship
between these two ambitious, uniquely human arenas.
POSTMODERNISM AND AESTHETICS
One of the most important questions that postmodernism has raised in the
discussion of aesthetic values is whose aesthetics? During the era of the for-
mulation of the principles of modem art, a universal standard of aesthetic
judgment was assumed, a system of eternal values untouched by time, cultural
differences, ethnic background or even gender. However, as we enter the
condition of postmodernism, an era of muIticuIturalism, global vision, and
an awareness of a muItiplicity of standards, it is important to evaluate the basis
of aesthetic judgment itself.
The introduction of new art and new cultural trends induces us to create
aesthetic judgment appropriate to, and conditioned by, these changes, much
as the creation of such judgments, in turn, stimulates the production of new
art and the continuance of the cycle. We no Ion ger follow an ideal of art as
absolute truth to nature, nor judge art on the basis of its moral content as
postulated by the foremost art critic of the Victorian era, John Ruskin. If
anything, we are closer to the aesthetic judgment of WaIter Pater, who feIt
all art should approach the condition of music - that of purity, sensuality,
and beauty - having no program to advocate or message to deli ver. The
gospel of significant form promulgated by Clive Bell and Roger Fry as the
epitome of aesthetics no longer seems relevant, nor do the ideals of abstrac-
tion and self-referential art advanced by Alfred Barr and the modemists seem
cogent at this time. Even Clement Greenberg's ideal of art as something valid
solelyon its own terms appears irrelevant in today's pluralistic culture which
speaks with many voices and a multitude of agendas and standards. In Owens'
words,
INTERSECTIONS OF ART AND SCIENCE 253
In the modem period the authority of the work of art, its claim to represent some authentie
vision of the world ... was based on the universality modem aestheties has attributed to the
forms utilized for the representations of vision .... Not only does the postmodernist work
claim no sueh authority, it also seeks to undermine all sueh claims. (1990, p. 187)
The revolt against a rigid modemist judgment of aesthetic value came when
new standards of criticism arose, embodied in such movements as Marxism,
feminism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, semiology, and post-colonialism.
What emerged was the realization that the "universal values" of modem art
were actually the values of a small and exclusive body of white, often Anglo-
Saxon, Protestant men, although some male members of different nationalities
and religious beliefs were allowed into the sacred confines. The "purity" and
essence of modem art appeared to be based on "a succession of repressions
and exclusions" (Lomas, 1993), exclusions that denied entry to such out-
siders as women and non-Westemers. It represented an aesthetic standard of
Western taste which totally discounted the views of different cultures and
continents. African art, for example, was judged by Western standards, rather
than African ones. As Edward Said expressed it,
we need to think about breaking out of the diseiplinary ghettos in whieh as intelleetuals we
have been eonfined, to reopen bloeked social process eoding objeetive representation (henee
power) of the world to a small eoterie of experts and their elients, to eonsider that the audienee
for literaey is not a closed eircle of three thousand professional erities but tbe community of
human beings living in society, and to regard social reality in a secular rather than a mystieal
mode, despite all the protestations about realism and objeetivity. (1991, pp. 157-158)
In the same vein, loanne Waugh addressed the issue of gender bias in
modemist aesthetics:
Women's opportunities in the iII1s have been stroetured by men's domination in the produetion
of art, in the languages of art and art eritieism .... It is troe, then, that mueh of what we have
done in analytie aestheties is "maseuline aestheties". (1990, pp. 323 and 325)
Instead of a monolithic concept of aesthetics, the postmodern era offers a

multicultural vision and the opportunity of choice. As Charles lencks writes:
Tbe Post-Modem age is a time of incessant cboosing. It's an era when no ortbodoxy can be
adopted without self-eonsciousness and irony, beeause all traditions seem to have some validity .
. . . Pluralism, the 'ism' of our time, is both the great problem and the great opportunity. (1982,
p.7)
The term "postmodern" was probably used for the first time in 1934 to
describe areaction within Modernism by the Spanish author Frederico De Onis
in Antologia de la Proesia Espanola e Hispanoamericana (1934), and it was
later employed by Arnold Toynbee in A Study of History (1900) to mark the
end of an era of Western dominance and the rising power of non-Western
cultures. Leslie Fiedler also used the term in 1965, and then frequently "post-
modernism" is found in the writings of critics of the modemist enterprise during
the 1970s and 1980s in fields as diverse as architecture and semiotics (e.g.,
Ihab Hassan, lean-Francois Lyotard, lane lacobs, Robert Venturi, lohn Barth
and Umberto Eco (lencks, 1982, p. 7).
254 ALICIA CRAIG FAX ON
The concept of aesthetics itself came under fire, and the term "anti-aes-
thetic" was attached to the creations of the new era. " 'Anti-aesthetic' also
signals that the very notion of the aesthetic, its network of ideas, is in question"
(Foster, 1991, p. xv). Postmodernism marks arevolt against high modernist
style, and it inaugurates an effacement of boundaries, especially between
high culture and mass or popular culture. Many cultural standards, both past
and present, are the marks of this new era. Its aesthetics are not divorced
from the world but are rather part of it. As the Pop artist Claes Oldenberg
said, "I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something
other than sit on its ass in a museum .... I am for an art that takes its form
from the lines of life itself ... " (quoted in Selz, 1992, p. 220).
A number of new areas of artistic vision have been opened up by the posi-
tions and critiques of postmodernism. A formalist style based on aesthetic
theory giving priority to line, color, and shape has been superseded by such
formerly forbidden elements as narrative, personal voice, iconographical
reference and fragmentation, many of which reflect conditions of the world we
live in today. In architecture, for example, the postmodern era was heralded
by the works of Philip Johnson (the former arch-modernist) and John Burgee
in the Chippendale crown of the A. T. T. building in New York (1978-1982),
as weIl as by the concepts of Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown and the eclec-
ticism of James Stirling and Michael Graves. The clean lines of the modernist
aesthetic of steel and glass were succeeded by ornamentation of no func-
tional value and quotations of past styles. Another fecund area is that of art
photography, where the pure, formal beauty of alandscape by Ansel Adams,
or a nude by Edward Weston has given way to an expressive use of the
camera in the works of Andres Serrano, Mike and Doug Starn, Cindy Sherman,
Lorna Simpson and Ann Mendista, among others. Photography is no longer
seen as an objective medium or even a documentary record, but rather as a
way to explore and question the stereotypes of the culture, and to create new
expressions quoting works of art, film, and faith. The semiotic concept of
the signifier is used sometimes ironically, sometimes mystically, but always
evocatively to invest objects with new meanings and significance.
Is it possible, then, to construct a unified aesthetic of postmodemism, or
are its aims so broad and so diverse that the task is impossible? More fun-
damentally, would postmodernism itself perhaps question the need for
such a task? These are important questions meriting deep analysis, but a
provisional outline for a unified postmodern aesthetics may nevertheless be
offered; and certain factors must be taken into account if the project is to
have any possibility of success. The most important caveat is that any for-
mulation of aesthetics must include more than one narrowly based view of
the world. It must be a multicultural, multi-ethnic vision. As Elaine King
expressed it:
One cannot deny that the emergence of multiculturalism needs to be reckoned with as a force
both in the art world and in the larger, ever changing global society .... A white, Westem-
European educational system has shaped and influenced our social, economic and political
consciousness. And there is no denying that for nearly 50 years this Western system has
dominated the production of art and its surrounding critical discourse by manipulating and
controlling the canons defining aesthetic judgment. (1992, p. 105)
The awareness of the issues raised by feminism and multiculturalism requires

a rethinking of basic concepts and standards. This may involve deconstructing
such notions as originality, the work of art as an autonomous, ahistorical object
and the Aristotelian claim of the universality of great art. We may, according
to Mary Devereaux, have to resort to the Socratic method of questioning
all certainties and examining the bases of our judgments (Devereaux, 1990,
p. 346).
For example, feminist theory and values cannot simply be grafted onto an
existing male-oriented canon of judgment. Instead, for example, the possibility
of a female-oriented literature or art could be entertained. Instead of privileging
the hero's saga, the heroine's epic could also be studied, such as the ancient
Demeter-Persephone quest of the mother for her lost child, or the Descent
of Inana to the Underworld, both predating not only the Greek and Roman
myths, but even the tale of Gilgamesh. An aesthetic which takes female and
non-Western experience seriously, and which accords to it the same impor-
tance as Western traditions is certainly representative of postmodernist goals
and sensitivities. An inclusive rather than an exclusive aesthetic theory marks
the present era, with a curiosity about cultures other than one's own, and a
generosity of spirit towards all artistic expressions.
There are, of course, possible dangers in such an inclusive standard of
aesthetic worth. One is that criteria of judgment of the quality of aesthetic
experience may become elusive in the face of the onslaught of so many cultural
expressions and agendas; However, this concern may merely result from the
fear of a loss of power to define a canon, as weIl as from a reluctance to
share and learn from the values of non-Western standards. A related threat
to aesthetic values in a postmodern era is that popular taste and patronage
will reduce all standards to mediocrity. Uneducated mass taste can be, and
is, manipulated by the media and the advertising industry. But has aesthetic
value ever been popularly based? Inclusiveness of aesthetic standards does
not necessarily signify their identification with what is most commonly, or
en masse, appealing. 2 In fact, it is quite likely that not everyone will be inter-
ested in promulgating aesthetic standards or taking the trouble to leam about
or credit traditions other than their own. Real interest in aesthetic endeavors
will probably remain the concern of a minority of the world's population;
but of course it should be a minority without exclusions in terms of race, nation,
culture, or gender.
The postmodern era need not be one without aesthetic concerns or one
with an anti-aesthetic bias. Every new style has been denounced as barbarous,
rude, and untutored, as the death of existing standards in art, and as under-
mining the very basis of aesthetic judgment. Gros criticized Delacroix's
Massacre at Chios as the massacre of painting, and more recently, the Art Brut
of Dubuffet was denounced as anti-art (only to be reinstated later as the essence
256 ALICIA CRAIG FAX ON
of expressive Modernism). New constructs and discourses of aesthetics in

the postmodern era will undoubtedly create new and, it is hoped, more inclu-
sive standards of aesthetic judgment.
As a potentially useful guide to the directions of such new standards, the
remainder of this paper will hint at the potential relations between art and
science in this postmodern era. As they have before, new discoveries and
theories of science will continue to intersect with art, challenging artists to
express themselves in new ways, relevantly, in a new era, and to create new
visions of aesthetic value and expanding perceptions of the structure of the
uni verse. As a groundwork for speculating on future intersections of art and
science to create new aesthetic perceptions, it may be helpful to look at the
role of science in the past, as it helped form aesthetic experience and judge-
ment in several areas. As such, I will now turn to the past relations between
art and science as a reference point not to be analogized and transplanted
onto present relations, but to be understood in its limited context and applied
accordingly.
FORM
One instance where scientific measurement has been considered necessary

in the creation of aesthetic standards has been in the formation of a canon
(or a rule) to achieve the correct proportions of perfect beauty, symmetry
and harmony. In certain eras and cultures the desire for such standards was
especially evident. An aesthetic criterion was sought in classical Greek art,
especially in architecture and sculpture, where mathematically determined pro-
portions were used to create an ideal of harmony, unity, and aesthetic
perfection. In the firth century B.C., the sculptor Polykleitos wrote a book
named Kanon, or rule, which established the measured relationships of dif-
ferent parts of the human body to create an aesthetically pleasing figure. The
Doryphoros (Spearbearer) was used to illustrate this system of proportion. The
formula varied in the fourth century B.C., with sculptors such as Praxiteles
using a smaller sized head in relation to the body length, but the idea of a
scientific formula achieving an aesthetic of perfection continued. Ideal pro-
portions and ratios were also operative in the construction of Greek temples
so that all parts were in harmony with the whole, and the buildings were
structurally symmetrical and balanced.
Belief in scientific rules for the construction of human figures and archi-
tectural structures also became a key concept in the Renaissance. Existing
Greek and Roman sculptures were studied to recapture ancient formulas for
the perfect body. Albrecht Dürer studied and experimented with figure types
to create the same aesthetic satisfaction achieved by Greek art, as embodied
in such works of antiquity as the Apollo Belvedere (Vatican Museums, Rome).
Dürer, failing to learn the secret of perfect proportions of the human figure
from the Venetian artist Jacopo de' Barbieri around 1500, was forced to
create his own theories and measurements of the body in four books on
human proportions which he published in 1528. Earlier, in using scientific prin-
ciples to create an aesthetic of artistic proportion, Filippo Brunelleschi had
rediscovered the secret of perspective in the I 420s, and Leon Battista Alberti
had used classical theories and proportions as models for Renaissance painting,
sculpture and architecture. In all of these cases the artists borrowed from the
findings of science, using mathematical formulas and the study of appro-
priate proportions to construct an aesthetic for their era.
Leonardo da Vinci was, perhaps, the greatest proponent of scientific method-
ology, observation and experimentation in the service of art. His notebooks
endlessly explored the secrets of the natural world in observations of geology,
anatomy, botany, biology, physics, aerodynamics, aerial perspective, oceanog-
raphy, and psychology. He was fascinated by studies of proportion, color theory,
and visual perception. Using scientific methods of dissection, he explored
human anatomy, from the fetus in utero to the ravages of old age and death,
using many of his observations in the creation of ideal types and forms . This
is especially evident in Leonardo's familiar image of a man constructed within
a circle and titled Proportions ofthe Human Figure (Galleria Dell' Academia,
Venice). Moreover, using the science of perspective, he centered his Last
Supper of 1498 at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, focusing the entire
composition around the figure of Christ. His knowledge of the proportion of
the figures and their mathematical foreshortening within a perspectival schema
thus created the balanced format and aesthetic consistency of the work. In other
words, Leonardo, as artist, used his scientific knowledge and mathematical
system to establish the quintessential statement of Renaissance aesthetics.
How might a postmodern interpretation of a scientific measurement of
proportions and mathematical formulae to create balanced and consistent
form differ from that of the past? With respect to the idea of the "perfect"
fi gure , in this pro-diversity age of relative and contingent adaptation, no one
singular set of measurements would be considered adequate; the Pythagorean
Kanon for the figure expresses a Western European ideal, not a universal
one. The slighter build of many Asiatic figure types and the more massive pro-
portion of African and many Latino body types would also need to be expressed
as aesthetically desirable. Obviously, a canon of a single perfect figure cannot
remain applicable on a multicultural scale. Likewise, as notions of nature
emerging out of struggle replace images of nature arising from harmony, ideals
of symmetry and balance are often discarded in postmodernist architecture.
In fact, just as traditional formal systems, from Euclidean geometry to logic,
are seen as limited even in the face of their consistency, measurements and
formulas for perfect proportion and scale have themselves become less relevant.
Thus, as the concepts of ideal form and universal formal systems have them-
selves changed in science, so we may expect analogous change in postmodern
aesthetics.
SPACE, TIME, AND MOTION
From the time of Aristotle through the end of the nineteenth century, a struc-
ture of three-dimensional space and absolute time grounded science within a
self-conscious system. Such a framework, with its traditional conceptions of
space, time, and motion, likewise characterized the uni verse of the artist.
Regarding space, its three-dimensional representation on the two-dimensional
plane of painting or relief sculpture became an important aesthetic issue in
the early Renaissance in Italy. As already noted, in the early 1420s Filippo
Brunelleschi invented (or rediscovered) a system of linear perspective during
his study of classical sources for his architecture. This system enabled painters
and sculptors in relief to create the illusion of three-dimensionality on a
mathematical grid leading to a vanishing point on the horizon. One of the
first examples of this technique was the gilt bronze relief by Donatello, The
Feast of Herod of c. 1425 on the baptismal font of S. Giovanni, Siena. In
this panel, Donatello created the illusion of three-dimensional space through
the application of the principles of one point perspective. Similarly, Lorenzo
Ghiberti used perspective to give the illusion of great depth in the shallow
panels of the "Gates of Paradise" reliefs of c. 1435 at the Baptistry of Florence.
In the panel of The Story of lacob and Esau, Ghiberti created the feeling of
architectural recession in the background with the use of perspectival formulas,
heightening the illusion by having the surface figures in high relief, pro-
jecting into the viewers' space. The whole composition was based on the
foreshortening of figures and architectural placement according to mathematical
formulas calculated from the one point perspective vanishing point.
In painting, one of the first applications of the scientific theory of perspective
to a wall fresco was by Masaccio in 1425 in The Holy Trinity with the Virgin
and St. lohn in the Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Here, using
a perspectival formula, Masaccio created on a flat wall the illusion of figures
existing in a barrel vaulted niche. The coffered ceiling of the pictured vault
recedes in space on a carefully calculated perspectival grid to give the illusion
of depth and three dimensional figures existing in space. The aesthetic effect
is greatly heightened by this scientifically formulated depth which gives
mystery and power to Masaccio's composition.
Throughout the early and high Renaissance in Italy the scientific discovery
of a perspectival system continued to be demonstrated by artists. It became
alm ost a certificate to testify to the artist's competence and proper mathematical
and scientific knowledge. It can be seen in the almost formulaic structure of
Pietro Perugino's Delivery of the Keys to Saint Peter of 1482 on the Sistine
Chapel wall (Vatican, Rome). Here the artist neatly delineates the grid of space
by the receding lines of the pavement and the figures presented in carefully
calculated sizes to show foreground, middle ground and background of the
scene. The most inspired use of mathematical proportions and the illusion of
re ce ding space contained within a perfectly balanced yet dynamic composition
is surely Raphael 's The School of Athens (1510-1511, Stanza della Segnatura,
Vatican, Rome). Here the architectural background seems to recede infinitely

in space, creating a frame for the central figures of Plato and Aristotle. The
rational and scientific world of the philosophers, mathematicians and scien-
tists of antiquity is perfectly echoed in the rational and scientific composition
of the painting itself, in which the scientific discovery of perspectival formulas
allows the artist to express the aesthetic experience of perfect rationality and
balance.
Moving onto time, it is perhaps best also to move through time to discuss
its representative understanding by nineteenth-century artists. One of the
inevitable components of showing a succession of images in space which
originated in the scientific recording of sequential movement by photography
is the capturing not only of motion but also the recording of absolute duration,
or the time involved in the process. Time was an important component in
the work of the Impressionists. The scene to be painted had to be shown at
the same time of day, for as Monet pointed out, after half an hour the light
changed and the visual field was therefore different in terms of color, atmos-
phere and light elements. As the Impressionists set out to record visually a
specific scene at a specific time of day, the factor of time was an integral
part of the process. Claude Monet carried this concept further in his series
paintings. Starting in the 1890s, he recorded the same scene, such as poplar
trees along the river, grainstacks in a field, the Rouen Cathedral, mornings
on the Seine river, etc. at different times of day, and showed the paintings
together as aseries, so that the viewer saw a succession of images of the
same scene recorded throughout time. In this way, absolute time as an element
of painting was dramatized and codified.
Finally, the nineteenth century also provides useful examples concerning
artistic representations of motion. Scientific observations and machines
invented to record motion as it was taking place provided the basis for artist's
accurate representation of animal and human locomotion. Two of the most
influential investigators of the problem of representing motion were Etienne-
Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge. Marey invented a chromophotographic
gun to capture the flight movements of birds which took twelve photographs
per second (1873), and his discoveries were paralleled by the photographs
of running horses taken by Eadweard Muybridge (1878) (Figure I). Marey's
and Muybridge's discoveries in the scientific recording of animals in action
were extremely important to such artists as Meissonier, Gerome, Detaille and
others who wanted to convey the reality of horses charging or turning in battle.
Muybridge was able to demonstrate this action to the artists in photographic
still shots, and, more dramatically in a rotating zoopraxiscope which animated
the frames as in a motion picture. This immediately influenced artists to change
from the static model by which they had represented horses in motion to
more realistic depictions gained from these scientific demonstrations. 3
Assuming that scientific insight will continue to affect artistic expression,
how might postmodern art parallel twentieth-century science's own revolu-
tionary change in perspective concerning space, time, and motion? Specifically,
Fig. I. Eadweard Muybridge, Horse Cantering, Photograph, a 1885 George Eastman House,
Rochester, N.Y.
how have, and will, artists come to tenns with the same issues of non-Euclidean
space, subjective time, and quantized motion faced by scientists in relativistic
and quantum physics? Regarding space, the scientific mIes of perspective to
create the illusion of three-dimensionality are still operative in the creation
of art, but, as many contemporary works of art are abstract, two-dimensional,
or create an irrational dream world or spatially disoriented stmctures, they
are no longer seen as a universal necessity. At the beginning of this century,
absolute spatial dimensions were destroyed by Cubism's collapse of spatial
relations into subjective appositions, and by century's end our perceptions of
space and time have been expanded into intergalactic worlds (e.g., Robert
Rauschenberg's Stoned Moon series of lithographs, which expressed the pos-
sibilities of existence in lunar space).
Regarding time, in the twentieth century the element of time was added
to a work of art by Alexander Calder's concept of the moving sculpture or
the "mobile" (the name, incidentally, was coined by Marcel Duchamp). His
first mobile in 1932, The Lobster TaU and Fish Trap (Museum of Modern
Art, New York) was a delicately balanced hanging stmcture which revolved
with any changes in air current. The whole of the configuration could not be
comprehended without the addition of time to see the changes in the posi-
tions of the elements in space. Calder's addition of the element of time to a
single work of art has been compared to Einstein's formula of E = mc 2 in
which the field of light determines the stmcture of space and time (Shlain,
1991, p. 246). This concept is also dramatically demonstrated in Jasper Johns'
0-9 in which the numbers 0 through 9 are delineated in overlapping fashion
in the same space, as if the stopping of time telescoped the whole sequence
of numbers into one place in space. Another dramatic image of the arresting
of time is the Surrealist artist Sa1vador Dali's The Persistence 0/ Memory (1931,
Museum of Modem Art, New York). Here watches are shown limp, no longer
recording the passage of minutes, as memory is timeless and subjective. Here
the concern of the artist is with the internal not the external world, drawing
closer to the domain of dreams and memory. Dali's painting could be an almost
literal translation of Freud's theories of the importance of remembered events
and the presence of the past in the now of a patient.
Finally, regarding motion, Marcel Duchamp is known to have read the works
of Marey and undoubtedly employed the sequential motion studies of his
photographs, but in a different way than nineteenth-century artists. Nude
Descending aStairease #2 (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which was exhib-
ited in the New York Armory Show of 1913, created a critical furor among
those who could discern neither the nude nor the staircase (Figure 2).
Duchamp's representation has been compared to a visual equivalent of
Einstein's theory of relativity:
Had Einstein commissioned Duchamp to render diagrammatically wh at happens to time at
nearly the speed of light, the painter could not have achieved a more lucid representation.
Duchamp's Nude can be observed as existing in the past, present and the future. The only
place in the universe that this observation would be possible would be aboard a beam of light.
(Shlain, 1991, p. 210)
However, Duchamp had probably not heard of Einstein's theory at this

time.
In parallel fashion, photographic images have become a major mode of
expression in postmodern art, but not as a scientific aid in motion studies.
Rather, they have been used expressively as a medium for socia1 comment
(Lorna Simpson, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, and the Starns, among
others), narratives (Duane Michaels and others), abstract constructions
(Chiarenza, Serrano et al.), and created symbols (Mendieta, Rauschenberg, and
others). Photographic images have been manipulated to make fantastic worlds,
in direct opposition to the use of photographs to represent motion accurately
and scientifically. Film and videotape, moreover, while in certain instances
having replaced the artist in the role of recording motion accurately, have
also been utilized to create individual interpretations of quantized motion.
Thus, as with form, artists have again paralleled their scientific counterparts
in utilizing radical new contructions of space and time to create novel visions
of the universe within and about them.
COLOR
Finally, one last area of exploration in art which has used scientific studies,
namely those of chromatics and the refraction of light, is color theory. This
had been explored as early as Aristotle, but a scientific component of color
theory is particularly evident in Leonardo's Notebooks (1939) and in Newton's
theory of colors which was first published in the 1670s in the Philosophical
Fig. 2. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending AStairease, 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art,
Bridgemanl Art Resource, N. Y.
Transactions of the Royal Society and also in Opticks, published in 1704.

Newton's work drew attention to the role and effect of complementary colors
on the color wheel and also pointed out analogies between visual and aural
harmonies. Geothe's Theory of Colors was an important influence on artists'
knowledge of color and the effects of color usage. Even more influential for
French artists was Michel Eugene Chevreul's The Principles of Harmony in
Contrast of Colors and Their Application to the Arts (published in 1839).
Chevreul was the director of the Royal Tapestry Factory and many of his obser-
vations came from his experiments with color combinations in the weaving
of tapestries. Other treatises on color theory which were extremely influen-
tial for artists in the nineteenth century were lohn Ruskin's The Elements of
Drawing (first published in 1857), Charles Blanc's Grammar of the Arts of
Design (1867), and Ogden Rood's Modern Chromatics (1879). Rood was an
American physicist and a professor at Columbia University who presented sci-
entific formulas for effective optical mixture. His book was used extensively
by both the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, as was his Scientific Theory
of Colors and Their Application to Art and Industry (1881) which explored
the fusion of color in the retinal perception of the spectator.
Although the dependence of the Impressionists on scientific color theory
may be exaggerated (Broude, 1991), there is no question that it was an integral
part of Georges Seurat's artistic working method. His disciple, Paul Signac,
cites the importance of the work of Charles Henry's "Introduction a l'esthe-
tique scientifique" published in Revue contemporaine August 25, 1885 (Signac,
1978, pp. 14-15), as weIl as of the color theories of Ruskin, Feneon, and
Rood in the formulation of Seurat's method of uniform color dots to create
a regulated, "scientific" transcription of landscape and figures. Seurat's desire
to record accurately, using scientific principles, earned hirn the title of "the
little chemist" , epitomizing the use of objective color as fulfilling an allusion
to the scientific ideal.
Moving finally towards a more postmodern, subjective interpretation of
color, Seurat's post-Impressionist colleague Paul Cezanne employed scien-
tific color theory to create a system in which space was indicated by color
gradations. Noticing that warm colors advance, and that cool ones recede,
he employed tonal changes to chronical spatial difference in his late land-
scape paintings of Aix-en-Provence, particularly his Mont Sainte-Victoire
series. The other side of post-Impressionism, the expressive or romantic
rather than scientific school, used color to give emotional resonance to art,
as in paintings by Van Gogh and Gaugin. These artists disregarded local
color, and created an aesthetic based on dynamic emotional response to color.
This same disregard for reproducing color naturalistically was continued in
the explosive canvases of Henri Matisse and the Fauves. Rather than creating
a system based on a scientific aesthetic of color, they used emotional corre-
spondences and psychologie al responses to color as the key to their art.
This correspondence to color, has, of course, also been studied empirically,
most notably in the Lushe system of color preference as a determinant of

psychological type. Again, science and art have intersected, if not blended,
in their emerging conceptions of color and color theory.
CONCLUSION
Prior to the postmodern age, science and art could take solace in one another's
absolutist convictions. Science, with its conceptions of logically harmonious
form, absolute space and time, and objective color, could to a large degree
influence artists' own worldviews, as evidenced by the art of the Greeks, the
Renaissance, and the early nineteenth century. Artists, likewise, expanded such
worldviews in directions uniquely their own, while never, however, overturning
the absolutist foundation of the entire philosophical edifice. In large measure,
the integrated nature of science and art prior to the mid-nineteenth century
guaranteed a certain complementarity of their respective worldviews.
However, in this postmodern era, science and art have each diverged into
more isolated domains of professional expertise, and at the same time each has
had to adjust to a radically altered vision of reality. Both artists and scien-
tists now face a world where the absolute parameters of space and time have
been radically challenged. Each domain must now forge new, relativistic inter-
pretations of nature and of humanity. Science, in the wake of Darwinism,
relativity, Gödel, and quantum mechanics, has constructed, even if in mathe-
matical form, a contingent, quirky uni verse unforeseen in the age of Cartesian
and Newtonian determinism. Art, likewise, has on the canvas, in sculpture, and
in new forms entirely, paralleled such a trend with its own breakdowns of
space, time, and color.
How one system might affect the other in this newage is left largely unde-
cided here, but one might expect that art and science must interact with and
in a sense "drive" one another now, as in the past. But in conclusion, a rea-
sonably circumspect observation to be made, even in the midst of what too
often seems to be a maelstrom, is the attitude in both realms of thought of
questioning one's own limited, historically derived foundations and of coming
to appreciate the importance of novel and even seemingly incommensurable
systems. Art and science, in this postmodern age, have again intersected to
create a novel sense of aesthetic perception; however, this perception may
represent as much an internal search as an external vision.
NOTES
I "Problematic" is used precisely in the sense Ellis denounces such astate of affairs: "To pro-
nounce something 'problematical' is not a conclusion nor is it an intellectual achievement;

when we do so, all we have done is pointed the way to a need for much more thought and analysis
of the issues involved. It is not the end of a train of thought but a beginning . ... The real
intellectual work should begin now" (Ellis, 1985, p. 41).
2 In our own materialistically oriented world culture, aesthetic standards, perhaps even the
idea of aesthetic value itself, may become co-opted and degraded by consumerism in an era of
mass communication and advertising. Karl Marx predicted this future when he said, "all our
invention and progress see m to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and
stultifying human Iife into a material force" (quoted in Thackera, 1988, p. 39). The concern no
longer seems to be one of aesthetic or artistic worth, but rather of economic value. In the economic
orientation of the postmodern era "everything and everybody could be reduced to a factor in a
calculation, and that calculation was profit" (Berger, 1980, p. 64). The modem artist, according
to Walter Benjamin, is pursued by the knowledge and fear that his or her products are destined
to be commodities in a marketplace - a marketplace of galleries, exhibitions and museum pos-
sessions (Lomas, 1993, p. 74). The high selling price of a work of art is today often touted by
the media as though it represented the sole measure of its tme worth or value.
3 The interest that artists took in Muybridge's scientific discoveries can be demonstrated by
the wide subscription list to Animal Locomotion: including in England, Holman Hunt, Millais,
Watts, Whistler and Sargent; in France, Geröme, Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Bouguereau and
Dalou; in the United States, Winslow Homer, Elihu Vedder, Thomas Moran, August SI. Gaudens
and Eastman Johnson (Coke, 1986, p. 159). Although that connoisseur of motion, Edgar Degas,
is not named on the list, Paul Valery testified that he was one of the first to study Muybridge's
photographs (Valery, 1989, p. 40).
REFERENCES
Ahlberg, Lars-Olof, 'The nature and limits of analytic aesthetics', British Journal of Aesthetics
32: 5-16, 1993.
Berenson, Bernard, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts (New York: Pantheon, 1948).
Berger, John, 'Another way of telling', Journal of Social Reconstruction: 64, 1980.
Blanc, Charles, Grammaire des Arts du Dessin, Architecture, Sculpture, Peinture (Paris:
Renouard, 1867).
Broude, Norma, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading (New York: Rizzoli International
Publications, Inc., 1991).
Chevreul, Michel Eugene, De la Loi du Contraste Simultane des Coleurs (Paris: Chez Pitois-
Levraut, 1839).
Coke, Van Deren, The Painter and the Photograph (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico,
1986).
Dagognet, Francois, Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace, trans. by Robert Galeta
(New York: Zone Books, 1992).
Da Vinci, Leonardo, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, ed., and trans. by Edward MacCurdy
(New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1939).
De Onis, Frederico Antologia de la Proesia Espanola e Hispanoamericana (Madrid: Junta Para
Ampliacion de Estudios e Investigaciones Cientificas, 1934).
Devereaux, Mary, 'Oppressive texts, resisting, readers, and the gendered spectator: The new
aesthetics', The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48: 338-347, 1990.
Dürer, Albrecht, The Human Figure - The Complete 'Dresden Sketchbook' , ed. and trans. by
Walter L. Strauss (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1972).
Ellis, John, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Foster, Hai, Ed. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seaule: Bay Press, 1991).
Goldman, Alan H., 'Art historical value', British Journal of Aesthetics 33: 17-28,1993.
Greenberg, Clement, 'Modern and post-modern', Arts 54 (Feb. 1980).
Jameson, Frederic, 'Postmodernism and consumer society', in Hai Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic,
pp. 111-125.
Jencks, Charles, What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1982).
Keller, Alex, 'Continuity and discontinuity in early 20th century physics and early 20th century
painting', in Martin Pollock (ed.), Common Denominators in Art and Science, pp. 97-106.
King, Elaine A, 'Art, politics, and ethnicity', in Kim Levin (ed.), Beyond Walls and Wars
(New York: Midmarch, 1992), pp. 104-106.
Levin, David Michael, 'Postmodemism in dance', in Hugh J. Silverman (ed.), Postmodernism

and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 207-233.
Lomas, David, 'Modemism versus postmodemism: Kirk Vamedoe 's 1992 Slade lectures', Apollo
137: 71-74, 1993.
Marey, E. J., La Machine Animale - Locomotion Terrestre Et Aerienne (Paris: Libraire Germer
BailIiere, 1873).
Muybridge, Eadweard, ' A horse's motion scientifically determined', Scientific American 39: 241,
1878.
Muybridge, Eadweard, Animal Locomotion - An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Con-
secutive Phases of Animal Movements, 1872- 1875 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania,
1887).
Newton, Isaac, 'New theory of light and colours', The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society 6: 3075, 1671.
Newton, Isaac, Opticks - Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections, and Colors
of Light, Fourth edition (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1952).
Owens, Craig, 'The discourse of others: feminists and postmodernism', in Howard Risatti (ed.),
Postmodern Perspectives pp. 186-207.
Pollock, Martin (ed.), Common Denominators in Art and Science (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University
Press, 1983).
Risatti, Howard (ed.), Postmodern Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1990).
Rood, Ogden, Student' s Textbook of Color - Modern Chromatics with Applications 10 Art and
Industry (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1879).
Rood, Ogden, Theorie Scientifique des Coleurs et Leurs Applications a ['Art et a l'Industrie
(Paris: G. Bailliere, 1881).
Ruskin, John, The Elements of Drawing, In Three Letters 10 Beginners (London: Smith, EIder,
and Company, 1857).
Said, Edward W., 'Opponents, audience, constituencies, and community', in Hai Foster (ed.), The
Anti-Aesthe)ic. Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 135-159.
Selz, Peter, ' The Stars and Stripes: Johns to Burkhardt', in Kim Levin (ed.), Beyond Walls
and Wars (New York: Midmarch, 1992), pp. 220-224.
Shlain, Leonard, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (New York: William
Morrow, 1991).
Signac, Paul, D' Eugene Delacroix au neo-impressionisme. Introduction et notes par Francoise
Cachin (Paris: Heinemann, 1978).
Thackera, John (ed.), Design after Modernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988).
Toynbee, Amold J., A Study of History (London, 1935).
Vah:ry, Paul, Degas, Manet, Morisot, trans. by David Paul (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
Vermeule, Comelius, Polykleitos (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1969).
Waugh, Joanne B., 'Analytic aesthetics and feminist aesthetics: Neither/nor', The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48: 317-326, 1990.
HILDE HEIN
THE ART OF DISPLAYING SCIENCE:

MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
Science museums have recently become important instruments of science

education. Unlike schools and universities, which continue to be the chief
centers of formal education and training for professional research, museums
are resources for spontaneous discovery in an informal setting. Addressed
to both the general public and to scholars, museums collectively have a
mission that is complex and diverse. They are required to combine elemen-
tary education and exposure to basic concepts of science with collection and
preservation of rare and sophisticated research materials. They must combine
serious pedagogy with artful entertainment and offer something of interest
to both the expert and the novice.
There are several types of science museums, now frequently combined in
a single institution. They overlap in practice and in theory, but vary with
local and historical conditions and with the circumstances of their founding.
Some retain features of predecessor institutions; others reflect local commerce
and industrial enterprise. Size, location, funding source, and community history
profoundly influence a museum 's character. Nonetheless, some things are
common to all museums and distinctive of them. Attendance at museums is
not compulsory. With the possible exception of obligatory school excursions,
visits to museums are voluntary. Whatever their reasons - social, touristic,
or edifying - people go to museums to be gratified and stay only as long as
they please. Museums do not hand out grades, and so far nobody flunks
museums.' Unlike other educational institutions, museums must continually
attract their audience by giving immediate satisfaction.
Aesthetic presentation certainly contributes to the appeal of other public
facilities from grocery stores to banks and hospitals, and it is increasingly
an element of their competitiveness, but t:lat factor is always supervenient
on their basic utility. A pleasant environment may induce shoppers to tarry
longer and buy more, or make a hospital stay more agreeable, but one does
not go there in the first place without a compelling reason other than plea-
surable diversion. Pleasure, however refined or cerebral, has always been the
fundamental justification for museums.
Whether valued as storehouses of treasure, preservers of history, or reser-
voirs of learning and wisdom, museums derive their ultimate meaning from
the satisfaction to be gained from these things. Aesthetic experience and the
aestheticization of culture thus lie at the very foundation of the museum,
regardless of any other function it has come to serve. 2 The primacy of the
aesthetic dimension is weIl understood in the case of art museums, which
are often held, mistakenly, to be the paradigm of museums in general. But even
art museums are not exclusively dedicated to the evocation of aesthetic
267

268 HILDE HEIN
pleasure. They too, like all museums, are devoted to collection, preserva-
tion, research and education. No one can pursue pleasure without relief.
Museums are among the many sources of pleasure, and scholars and con-
noisseurs disagree over which is preeminent or best. Art museums are neither
the most numerous nor the most representative type of museum. Their status
and that of their unique function reflects the social prominence and afflu-
ence of their patrons, but it is not prescriptive to the museum world as a
whole.
Science museums are both older and more popular than art museums. They
have a long his tory of giving pleasure, and are not less deeply concerned
than art museums with the beauty of their subject matter and the aesthetic
dimension of its exhibition. Science museums, like all museums, aestheti-
cize their content by decontextualizing and recontextualizing it. Shorn of
their past and deprived of the use-value they had as objects in the world, all
objects displayed in a museum acquire a new presentational character. At
this new secondary level they are commodified and rendered objects of (exhi-
bition-utility) exchange. There is a sense in which a thing must die and be
reborn in order to enter into a museum as an object for exhibition. In that sense,
it has been said, both science and art museums are a contradiction. Instead
of portraying the world form which they are taken, they use that world as matter
from which to manufacture new (museum) worlds. 3 Whatever the display,
whether of birds nests or bubble chambers or altar pieces, the objects collected
and exhibited are transformed into artefacts by virtue of their presence in
the museum. Thus every museum exhibit is a work of art of sorts, newly minted
for aesthetic contemplation.
In this sense of aestheticizing display, science museums resemble all other
museums. There are, however, distinct types of science museums, which
present their content differently according to aesthetic modes that conjoin with
distinct cognitive exhibition logics. Such aesthetic modes or strategies are
aimed at the impressionable consciousness of their audience in a manner at
once more direct and more diffuse than theoretical or empirically discursive
strategies. I believe that science museum exhibitors are often unaware of the
spontaneous effect of the aesthetic devices they employ and, indeed, use
them intuitively while concentrating on other, consciously selected, cogni-
tive aims.
I will briefly survey here the types of science museums, suggesting how
their history and purpose might have affected their exhibition strategy. I will
also indicate how that strategy is aesthetically modified, leading to cognitive
inferences that may be unintended and occasionally even inconsistent with
the museums' stated objectives. In Part 11, I will discuss science exhibitions
in more specific detail, illustrating the effect of their aesthetic presentation.
In the final section, I will offer so me reflections on the function of the
aesthetic in science exhibition. Though acknowledged to exist, that function
is not weIl understood, and hence the cognitive discord that science exhibits
often engender.
ART OF DISPLA YING SCIENCE 269
I. TYPES OF SCIENCE MUSEUMS
1. Natural History Museums derive from the collections of medicinal mate-

rials and natural curiosities and artefacts preserved by medieval and
Renaissance collectors. These assemblages of the magical, the unusual, the
powerful and the typical were subsequently found to be useful and valuable.
They were preserved and classified in private Cabinets of Rarities, and as tech-
niques of preservation and exhibition improved in the seventeenth century,
the collections found their way into important centers for scientific research.
The first public natural history museum was the Ashmolean, established at
Oxford in 1683. 4 It included exotic and beautiful trees and plants, as weil as
catalogued birds, insects, fish, land animals, minerals, gems, fmits, carvings,
turnings, paintings, weapons, costumes, household implements, coins, and
assorted oddities. The building that housed all these treasures is now the
Museum of the History of Science, but most of its original contents have
been dispersed to various specialized collections.
Natural history museums today are generally composed of near independent
departments which may occupy separate buildings and parks such as plane-
taria, botanical gardens, zoos, and aquaria. Typically, they have also contained
divisions of anthropology in which are displayed the civilizations and cultural
artifacts of so-called primitive peoples. Since these are often shown along-
side of or in halls adjoining the displays of elephants, apes, and exotic plants
- within the context of natural history - the implication visually transmitted
is that human beings - or selected ones of them - are also apart of the
natural uni verse.
That implication contradicts another conviction, as deeply embedded in
the museum tradition; namely that he who collects, examines, preserves and
displays is a subject superior to the object that submits to his gaze. Western
culture has taken seriously the Biblical imperative that Adam name and hold
dominion over all other creatures. Thus man is set apart as subject and authority
over nature, and that cognitive hierarchy remains visually implicit in the
museum's "hall of man". White men are rarely depicted there, although the
Paris Musee de I 'Homme (in 1939) proclaimed its intention to display
"humanity (a)s an indivisible whole, in space and time". Given the history
of collection as a predominantly European practice, and the tradition of
exhibition as an entertainment in which curious objects are presented for
amusement and study, the aesthetic, if not the deductive conclusion to be drawn
is that non-White people and their cultural behaviors are amusing exotica
like the other creatures displayed in zoos and aquaria. Their partial resem-
blance to those who examine them heightens the poignancy of their strangeness.
Only rarely has it incited compassion among beholders or suggested their
common humanity with the beheld.
These aesthetic implications have not been lost on the people most injured
and affected by them, as is evident from some of the responsive Border Art
produced and performed on sites such as the Smithsonian Institution's National
270 HILDE HEIN
Museum of Natural History. One example, in 1992, by Guilliermo Gomez-

Pena and Coco Fusco, displayed a pair of "undiscovered aborigines", purported
to be from a remote island in the Gulf of Mexico. The costumed couple per-
formed outlandish antics in a gilded cage in the museum 's Rotunda, next to
the famous stuffed elephant whose image serves as the museum 's logo. A
trained "keeper" fed the "aborigines" fruit and Perrier water, and passed out
maps and "scientific data" about their "native habitat" to viewers. He invited
the public to take pictures of the creatures, admonishing them not to approach
too close. Not every one who witnessed this event understood its dialectical
intention. Some, indeed, were outraged by it; some thought it a case of cruelty
to animals; and a few took it seriously as the sort of scientific collectible
that the museum regularly displays. 5 The performing artists were, in fact,
producing a deli berate parody of the exhibition style that museum curators
have long employed without explicit consciousness of the statement their
presentations make aesthetically. In this instance, the artists' concern was
fundamentaIly political and ethical. Gomez-Pena and Fusco's satirical decon-
struction of conventional exhibition practice corresponds to a broad critique
of science made less theatricaIly by others, declaring that aIl science is rhetor-
ical and that it is neither neutral nor objective, but expresses prejudices and
values which are covert, unexamined, and representative of a dominant class.
Those values are as deeply embedded in the aesthetics of displayas in the
familiar logic of classificatory and analytic explanation.
2. Another type of museum, the Museum of Industry and Technology, also

has roots in the early coIlections of curiosities. These museums were influ-
enced as weIl by the commercial expositions and trade fairs that flourished
in the Industrial Revolution. The great industrial exhibition of 1851, held in
the London Crystal Palace and sponsored by Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert is a prime example. Some of the exhibits that it included remained
after the exhibition closed to become the kernel of the South Kensington
Museum. The exhibition was promoted by the Society for the Encouragement
of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce, now known as the Royal Society of
Art, and was designed to celebrate British industrial achievement and com-
petitive success. Its overt message was educational, to inform the public of
the advances that science had made and, no doubt, to seIl the fruits thereof.
Here too, a subversive artist contrived an artistic counterwork to reveal a covert
message carried by the exhibition's presentational style. Dostoevsky's bilious
commentator in the 1864 story "Notes from the Underground" seethes with
disdain for bland optimism and faith in "progress" and "enlightenment", as
he sputters in his dark hideaway beneath the brilliant, rational order of the
Crystal Palace. A very similar contempt animates Heidegger's fulmination
against technological thought, which he, like Nietzsche, views as the treason
of humanism, threatening to undermine the human capacity for freely chosen
action. 6 Benignly indifferent to such existential anxieties, the museum of
science and industry is a monument to manufacture and rational decision
procedure. It professes to celebrate the triumph of humanism through pro-

ductivity (Figure 1).
An American glorification of the conjunction of reason and industry is
the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, first envisioned by the Founder
of Sears and Roebuck Company, Julius Rosenwa1d. The Chicago Museum
Fig. 1. Machinery Court: A view of the interior of the Ureat Exhibition (Crystal Palace)
(Illustrated London News 20, September 1851). Science and Technology Museums Stella V. F.
Butler (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).
272 HILDE HEIN
scrupulously determined to avoid vulgar commercialism, but held to a policy

of exhibition sponsorship and maintenance through long term contracts with
major industrial corporations such as General Motors and International
Harvester. While not quite promotional, these exhibits are unavoidably lauda-
tory of giant manufacturing techniques, dramatically exhibited as if only they,
and not the weIl-honed skills of craftsmanship that preceded them, displayed
the principles of science. Speed, massiveness and multiplicity convey a
powerful impression of ordered rationality that seems unrealizable in demon-
strations of small-scale, one-at-a-time piece work, however ingeniously
conceived by individual authors.
3. History Museums are of comparatively recent vintage. They come in several

varieties, ranging from historic houses to situated dramatic performances that
narrate or reenact historic events selectively. They have enjoyed a contem-
porary renaissance because of a new interest in vernacular history and in the
use of material culture to document it. Academic historians, long in the habit
of relying chiefly on written chronicles, are now turning to material objects
as weIl as to oral texts, which, with new technologies, can be preserved and
reproduced. Their variety and aesthetic interest are also invigorating museum
procedures.
The European science museums of the 19th century were mostly histor-
ical, intended to document scientific achievement and to describe the
conceptual pathways that had led to current scientific beliefs. Some American
museums also sought to recreate the scientific experience dramatically by
replicating the laboratory and research environment in which famous scientists
performed their experiments. Not unlike the period rooms that convey social
history along with aesthetic appearance, these reconstructions were meant
to bolster the intellectual story of science with a touch of homey realism.
In recent decades, however, museums have abandoned their emphasis on
historic achievement in favor of engaging visitors experientially in the actual
doing of science. Documentary history and theatrical reproduction are still
featured, but more often in the form of video and film representations shown
as auxiliary to the primary display of research materials and investigative
procedures. These offer a mix of didacticism and historical anecdote.
The most innovative science museums of the 20th century, beginning with
the Deutsches Museum in Munich, completed after World War I, strive to teach
scientific laws and principles to the general public. This widely influential
museum also drew attention to the application of science to technology and
everyday life. 7 It featured models and demonstrations, projecting contempo-
rary scientific and technological procedures (building bridges, constructing
tunnels) into past and future to provide a sense of continuity and context. Most
of the contemporary science centers that have proliferated since the 1960's owe
their inspiration directly or indirectly to the display strategies of the Deutsches
Museum, and they have carried forward the idea of "doing science" in the
museum in the form of a "hands on" exhibition aesthetic that appeals to

visitor participation rather than to passive observation.
4. Science Centers were initially denied status as museums by the American

Association of Museums because they lacked curated collections. In response,
they formed their own Association of Science and Technology centers (ASTC)
in 1973, with a new museum philosophy that de-emphasized the intrinsic value
of the collection and focused instead on its educational use. ~kience Centers
generally strive to "humanize" science by bringing it close to familiar expe-
rience. An important feature of science centers is their development of museum
tactics for the informal teaching of science to the non-specialist. They are
concerned with doing science and promoting scientific understanding, rather
than with displaying exhibits about science and the accomplishments of
past scientific "heroes". These centers have gained legitimacy in the museum
world since the 1970's, affecting the very concept of the museum. Their exhibit
techniques have now been embraced even by conventiona1, non-science
museums.
A notable contribution they have made is the idea of the "participatory"
museum and so-called interactive exhibitry. Challenging audiences to think
and do rather than merely to attend, science centers have begun to bridge
the gulf between the formal educational institutions and museums. 8 Meant to
be intellectually as well as aesthetically inviting, they feature ground level
exhibits that welcome physical exploration. By shifting attention away from
the expert scholar/collector and stressing audience interest and inquiry, science
centers have democratized and radically transformed museum practice.
This shift is partially exemplified by the relation that the exhibits in science
centers have to one another, their "internal aesthetic". Unlike works of art,
which are frequently displayed so that each produces a unique and autonomous
aesthetic experience independent of other experiences, science center exhibits
are related as links of an articulated chain of reasoning. The exhibits are
vehicles of ideas, meant to drive visitors along a conceptual road from the
experience of an exhibit to the comprehension of other experiences and prin-
ciples bound to it by way of a common concept. 9 The exhibits mayaiso be
individually pleasing, adhering to an "extern al aesthetic" attractive to users;
but giving self-contained pleasure is not their sole aim. Their purpose, rather,
is to induce the visitor to pass beyond any given moment or particu1ar incident
and even beyond the exhibits themselves, to an active and engaged dialogue
with the world out of which that moment or incident was extracted. The
museum thus strives to direct attention back to the world rather than being a
refuge from it. Science centers, by using this indirect route, may effect a recon-
nection with the world that collection, the typical strategy used by other
science museums, has not successfully achieved. The chief aesthetic aim of
science centers is to excite gratification upon discovery that the phenomena
observed and rendered intelligible in the restricted museum environment can
274 HILDE HEIN
be similarly encountered elsewhere in the "real world". But unlike other

museums, science centers neither sampie nor reproduce that "real world".
11. THE AESTHETIC PRESENT A TION OF EXHIBITIONS
Turning to the content of the museum, I will use the term "exhibition" to
refer to a show composed of a number of displayed objects, supporting docu-
mentation, films, videos, educational materials and various related public
programs. An "exhibit" is a discrete item, usually a constituent of an exhibi-
tion, and often transferable into other exhibitions where it is recontextualized
differently.'o Generally, exhibits are conceived as apart of one or more
collective wholes."
Typically, only portions of a museum's collection are displayed to the public
at any given time. Exhibition of the whole of a museum's collection is not
feasible, and so museums devote much of their resources to storage, cata-
loguing and preservation, apart of their work that is grossly underappreciated
by the public which sees only the exhibited residue. The ideal museum
collection before the era of specialization was a microcosm, expected to
exemplify the neo-Platonic conditions of plenitude, perfection and pu1chritude.
The collection must include the greatest possible variety of specimens, rep-
resenting every kind of being, and the most perfect instance of each. Many
large museums, including art museums are still devoted to that ideal.
According to the philosophy embodied in the early natural history museums,
everything in the uni verse has its appointed place upon a hierarchical scale.
The doctrine of the Great Chain of Being places inanimate nature at the bottom,
with flora and fauna on the next level, and Man, a hybrid of nature and spirit,
above. God, the emanating source of a11 things, is at the top, surveying the
whole with detachment. Long after the explicit neo-Platonism of this arrange-
ment was forgotten, the structure remained (and still does) as a dictate of
"common sense" and therefore as an aesthetically satisfying design principle.
That principle is frequently reca11ed by museum architecture, which places
aquatic and earthbound creatures at ground level, while winged creatures and
humans are upstairs. The founder of the first American museum, Charles
Wilson Peale, depicted hirnself as presiding deity, drawing back a curtain
that conceals the face of nature, hierarchically arranged and catalogued, in
his museum (Figure 2).
In Peale's museum exhibits of birds are arranged along the walls of the
long room in four tiers. At the top are the predators, in the middle the song-
birds, and near the floor are ducks, pelicans and "earthbound" penguins.
Invisible in this picture, but seen in a preliminary sketch for it are cases of
minerals, insects and fossils, and atop them are busts of scientists. A double
row of portraits of revolutionary war heroes presides over the eternal natural
order. 12
Museums were designed for public viewing only secondarily. Primarily
the museum was a place to house collections assembled by curators andJor
Fig. 2. The Artist in the Museum: Self Portrait of Charles Wilson Peale (1822) (Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Art.)
donors for scholarship or personal delectation. Collection was an expression

of reverence, testifying to the Divine order of nature. No less reverential,
but expressive of another aesthetic principle, were those cabinets of curiosi-
ties, whose display style emphasized profusion and diversity, rather than the
276 HILDE HEIN
order of God's works. Those whö sought the rare and exotic celebrated the
magnificence of God's miraculous interventions. Museums that subscribed
to the orderly theodicy favored typical specimens in quantity, neatly labelIed
and ranged in rows of glass cases, while the curiosity collectors inclined toward
smaller and more intimate displays that could exemplify a more personal
taste even while mirroring the extravagant repleteness of the deity.
In the early part of the 19th century, museums became less philosophi-
cally freighted and inclined more toward entertainment than education. The
public was willing to pay to see strange and unusual freaks of nature - and
so they got them (sometimes contrived). But industrialism, national pride
and scientific positivism led to a new interest in promoting secular learning
and in the museum as an instrument of its propagation. Museums, under the
direction of American progressivists such as John Cotton Dana, founder of
the Newark, New Jersey museum, subscribed to a new pragmatic philosophy
that played an important part in popular science teaching. Abandoning the
monotonous rows of glass cases with static, lifeless specimens in them,
museums shifted to livelier, more informal display techniques, designed to
be both naturalistic and dramatic.
The Milwaukee Public Museum was among the first to experiment with
the new ideas. In 1890, the taxidermist Carl Akeley produced a "total habitat
diorama" there, depicting a family of muskrats mounted in a three-dimensional
realistic foreground against a background mural that illustrated their natural
environment. The lifelike diorama was supposed to convey not only the visual
appearance of the animals, but also to show how they live and interact with
their environment. Dioramas quickly captivated the public and became a
,standard mode of exhibition in natural history museums. They have become
aesthetically far more sophisticated since 1890, now incorporating sound, smell
and touch, as weIl as visual realism, thereby making the exhibits accessible
to more people with different learning preferences and abilities.
In the spirit of such complete sensory immersion, dioramas have in fact
expanded to become walk-through environments that do not privilege vision.
Museumgoers are incorporated into a "total experience" replicating the mists
and hoots and musty smells and even the feel of the ground underfoot in a
rainforest or Indian bazaar or Egyptian crypt or whatever venue the museum
chooses to reconstruct. These exhibits, wh ich sometimes include costumed
impersonators, are more like theater in-the-round than classical drama, which
deliberately employs distancing devices. The science exhibits are meant to
diminish aesthetic distance in order to intensify the visitor's emotional and
phenomenologically "authentic" experience. While not exclusive of informa-
tion, these installations rely heavily on their aesthetic impact and often send
viewers elsewhere, to nearby reading stations and resource centers, to educate
themselves substantively.13 Their first objective is motivation al.
Most commonly found in museums of anthropology or history, phenome-
nological exhibits that envelope the visitor also occur in natural history
museums, where they sometimes verge on the theme park or fun house. The
very popular automated reconstructions of dinosaurs and, more recently, of

monster insects, for example, are exquisitely crafted and precisely researched
for accuracy. They certainly engage audience interest and successfully elicit
curiosity about their subject matter, but while they evoke a genuine thrill
and may stimulate curiosity, it is not through the authenticity of the objects
they exhibit. Plainly, they are synthetically engineered replicas, made of soft
and hardware, and many times as large as the objects they represent. In that
regard, the "realism" of traditional museum dioramas is more to the point.
Museum exhibit designers are, however, studying the "imagineered" automata
of Walt Disney World to understand how these convey a sense of reality that
modem audiences fail to see in static glass case displays even of truly genuine
natural objects. The gap between these alternatives modes of representation
is consequently diminishing. A dinosaur exhibition, no doubt economically
as much as aesthetically inspired by the film "Jurassic Park", has been making
the rounds of the major science museums and displaying the robots used in
the film alongside their own fossilized prehistoric relics. Have museums suc-
cumbed to the aesthetic of the amusement park?
The social critic Donna Haraway writes that museum display styles rhetor-
ically enforce a social ideal of stability. Speaking of the dioramas mounted a
generation earlier in the African Hall of the American Museum of Natural
History in New York, she says: "Each offers avision. Each is a window onto
knowledge". But whose vision and whose knowledge is that? Whose con-
struction of truth is presented? Haraway believes that a dubious cognitive
message is disguised by the deceptively "realistic" display:
The groups are peaceful, composed, illuminated - in "brightest Africa". Each group fonns a com-
munity structured by a natural division of function: the whole animal in the whole group is
nature's truth. The physiological division of labor that has infonned the history of biology is
embodied in these habitat groups which tell of communities and families, peacefully and
hierarchically ordered. Sexual specialization of function - the organic bodily and social sexual
division of labor - is unobtrusively ubiquitous, unquestionable, right."
Once more, a museum representation purports to mirror divine providence.

In fact, the animals that form the groups in the dioramas were carefully
selected, first by the hunter who shot them on commission from the museum,
then by the taxidermist who stuffed them - according to "the art most suited
to the epistemological and aesthetic stance of realism" - and finally by the
museum staff that exhibited them. The African dioramas, also the work of earl
Akeley, were constructed, says Haraway, to fit with a conception of nature
archetypically revealed in the perfect specimens. This view of nature embodies
a moral lesson of racial and gen der hierarchy and (human) progress, a
meliorism that modem museums often convey aesthetically by the arrange-
ment and sequencing of their exhibits. As Haraway reads it, the metaphysical
message is close to that imparted by Disney World.
Museum exhibition in the era between 1890 and 1930 had a buoyant and
jingoistic ring, a tone of robust social Darwinism, openly dedicated to guide
young vi si tors to "become more reverent, more truthful, and more interested
278 HILDE HEIN
in the simple and natural laws of their being .. .".15 Deciphering the book
of nature to reveal its truth was. ably assisted in museums by artful use of
taxidermy and photography, and the lessons unconsciously read there have
continued to give "naturalistic" vindication to racial and gender stereotypes
in social practice (Figure 3).
Dioramas are still popular and museums continue to mount them, but new
technologies are swiftly replacing passive displays and transforming some
museums into aggressive centers of didactic communication. Film and video
displays, holography, time lapse and underwater photography, computer
simulation, wraparound sound and other capabilities have enabled science
museums to achieve a level of precision and detail of reproduction unparal-
leled by earlier techniques of static representation. Visitors are able to access
display devices with the touch of a finger and to select layered information
from them. However, although museum professionals stress the interactivity
of exhibits that respond to vi si tor interrogatives (by selecting topics from menus
on computers or pressing buttons that activate text panels or tapes), the answers
are ordained by the exhibit designers. Visitors are given information on
demand. They can even reconfigure and construct information, but they cannot
freely pose problems, and one can only surmise how much cognitive inter-
action takes place where the inquiry is restricted to the world created by the
exhibition context.
Ironically, it seems that in generating such a world of "virtual reality"
Fig. 3. Lion Diorama, credit photographer Sandra D. Breault, New England Science Center.
science museums abandon their original project of enabling people to under-

stand the real world by sampling a bit of it. Museumgoers respond to questions
about their experience by declaring themselves impressed and gratified by
the material that has been recorded, reproduced, synthesized, enlarged, encap-
sulated and analyzed for them. They react with astonishment toward the artful
reality presented by the museum. Many visitors are as fascinated by the tech-
nology of virtual reality as by the self-forgetfulness of their immersion in its
experience. The pleasure of losing oneself in that experience displaces the
desire to know the reality which it purports to explain, and so the phenomena
of the object world of science remain remotely real and virtually inacces-
sible to the museum visitor. 16
The interactive, multisensory exhibits, sometimes called environments,
are a form of spectacle. They attract and hold attention by means of their
theatricality, which also enables them to incorporate some didactic content.
Museum exhibitors have learned the ancient lesson of dramatic theater that
aesthetic investment pays off in emotive return, but their aim is not simply
to "coat the bitter pill" of learning or to enhance dull fact. l7 Dramatic pre-
sentation is meant to trigger an experience that is authentic, because real
experience is wh at museums now purvey and what audiences have come to
expect. Visitors want an experience that is subjective and emotionally intense,
and modem museums comply by subordinating the genuineness of objects
to that of the experiences they engender. Consistent with contemporary epis-
temology and aesthetic theories, which are sceptical of neutral objectivity
and external standards, the emphasis in museums too is on the personal and
inflected. It is tempting to say that the postmodern museum exhibits post-
modern science.
Some ethical dilemmas can be avoided as a consequence. Museums need
not send out expensive expeditions to capture endangered species, as they
formerly did, nor rob ancient cultures of their national treasures. Instead,
they can produce simulacra of the desired creatures of objects, which are
capable of eliciting a response that is both cognitively and empathetically
convincing. Such exhibits presuppose prior research and so are not devoid
of cognitive content, but their chief impact is on the imagination.
The shift from objective to phenomenological veridicality relieves the
practical problem of increased demand for insufficient objects and the expense
of their custodial care. It also responds to criticism from a dynamically habit-
uated population that finds museums stuffy, static mausoleums where objects,
tom out of context, are exposed in a light that is cold, analytic, and neces-
sarily false. For them, the detached and purportedly scholarly exhibition of
objects actually interferes with appreciation of them and, paradoxically, under-
mines the very possibility of acquiring knowledge of them. Like the parodic
"aborigines" who performed at the Museum of Natural History, these critics
challenge the epistemological tradition that exalts objectifying reason at
the expense of sensory and sensuous interaction. Museums especially, they
point out, must acknowledge the part that feeling and the aesthetic play in
280 HILDE HEIN
the construction of knowledge, since museums above all other institutions,

offer multidimensional acquaintance with things.
The aspiration to heightened realism is evidently ambiguous. Pushed to
an extreme it yields surreality and then virtual reality. Realism's partisans
are divided on how to achieve it and cannot even agree on what is the reality
to be represented. An earlier generation believed that objects tell their own
story, but most contemporary exhibition designers hold that objects alone are
dumb. They cannot "speak for themselves", but require interpretation as
elements of a narrative system. Museum exhibitors therefore provide a mise
en scene that combines exhibits rhetorically, creating a scenario that museum
visitors are obliged to follow. Many museums no longer allow visitors to
wander at will from exhibit to exhibit, but require them to adhere to a pre-
selected story li ne that is controlled by traffic flow devices and the architecture
of the exhibition. The didacticism of such coercion is hidden by its aesthetic
form, and vi si tors are no more conscious of manipulation than they are when
following the sequence of a theater production or reading the chapters of a
book. Visitors are gently moved along, and most comply, accepting the given
direction, just as admirers of the less encompassing dioramas accepted their
naturalized political and cultural messages. 18
Audio-deviees that tell visitors where to go and wh at to look for assist in
enforcing such movement patterns. It is a bold patron that turns her back on
or deviates from a disembodied command, especially one given by the voice
of a noted public or museum figure. Audiences tend to be respectful and
obedient and often crave authoritative guidance. Possession of an authoritative
voice would seem only natural to the originators of the modern museum
concept who expressed their singular point of view with unfailing confidence
in its ultimate correctness. The claim to realism did not seem ironie to those
who made it then - in literature or law or the visual arts - nor to its philo-
sophical defenders who also were quite certain that reality could be profitably
investigated. But other voices are now being heard, claiming to know a dif-
ferent reality, and so the voice of authority has a slight quiver.
Yet, museums are weIl ahead of other cultural institutions in attending to
and addressing multiple-meanings. Point-of-view and the significance of con-
textualization are hardly abstract notions for anyone who has assembled a
traveling exhibition in a new environment. A univocally realist point of view
is hard to maintain when the same things come out of the same crates utterly
transformed. Some museums have taken the extreme step of abjuring authority
and becoming non-narrative. They offer a profusion of objects, sights, sounds,
sensory and cognitive ephemera - that of course are never truly unselected
- and invite visitors to "do it themselves" - create their own exhibition. The
Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History exhibit on
material culture "A Material World" (1988) is an example, but few people
see its as "an exhibition" at all. Superficially similar to the original Cabinets
of Curiosities, postmodern exhibits such as "A Material World" have an alto-
gether different metaphysieal basis. Far from being reverentially drawn
examples of divine providence, they are testimonials to human ingenuity and

acquisitiveness.
An anti-realist exhibition mounted in 1988 at the African Center in New
York, self-referentially makes the phenomenon of interpretation the object
on display. The meaning of things is exhibited as a consequence of museum
contextualization. Entitled "ArtJArtifact", this exhibition questions what we
know or think we know about the world as a result of experiencing objects
in museums. The curator's inspiration came from her observation that iden-
tical African objects could be displayed either in the Metropolitan Museum
of Art or across the park in the Museum of Natural History. No tradition of
African art exists in the conventional European sense that could dictate the
curator's placement of objects, nor is there any basis for judging their quality
as art. 19 Curatorial judgment is therefore constitutive. If an object is judged
an ethnographie specimen, it belongs in a museum that values it as a source
of information about culture; if it is declared a work of art, it belongs in a
museum whose interest in culture is secondary to the illumination of its tran-
scendent aesthetic value. The former designation identifies the object as typieal
of work done by a particular group; the lauer as aesthetically unique. Judged
as specimen, the object is likely to be displayed among others, perhaps crowded
together in a confined space. Judged as art, the object may be isolated on a
pedestal, artfully illuminated with high contrast light. Which is it really? There
is no answer (Figures 4 and 5).
"There is no right way" says Susan Vogel (the curator) "for us to exhibit ... only ways that
are more or less iIIuminating, beautiful, instructive, arbitrary; faithful to this or that school of
thought. We exhibit them for our own purposes in institutions that are deeply embedded in our
own culture. There is nothing strange or wrong about that. It is simply a given". (ArtiArtifact
Catalogue, Intro. p. 16, Museum for African Art, N.Y.)
Elsewhere Vogel points out that almost no objects are created to be dis-
played in museums. 20 Some museums now mount exhibitions that challenge
audiences to choose among alternative interpretations of the objects, inviting
comment by means of labels and computer interactive procedures, but also
by aesthetically ambiguating means - lighting, spacing, proximity to other
exhibits - that call into question wh at objects are and what significance they
have historically, politically, culturally, and aesthetically.
Of all museum venues, the one that seems most dialogieal and provoca-
tive of audience interrogation is the science center. Exhibits in science centers
rarely have value greater than the cost of the materials and labor to produce
them. They are not collected for their historic value or beauty, nor preserved
for their symbolic meaning or cultural function; and they are freely repaired,
improved, and modified by the museum staffs that maintain them. 21 The
exhibits are paradoxically transparent despite the visitors' physical involve-
ment with them and, unlike virtual reality exhibits, their success as science
exhibits lies in causing visitors to "see through them" to the phenomena
they point to or exemplify. Since science center exhibits are not ends in
N
00
N
:r:
r
o
tTl
:r:
tTl
......
Z
Fig. 4. African Hall at the Al'1erican Museum of Natural History 1910. No. #32926 - Courtesy of Department of Library Service AMNH.
ART OF DlSPLA YING SCIENCE 283
Fig. 5. Zande Hunting Net, Zaire Courtesy of the Museum for African Art N.Y.
themselves (as works of art), they are readily shared, and recipe books exist
to help people copy them. 22
Science center exhibits can be made to serve a variety of different cogni-
tive and pedagogic functions - to pose a problem, illustrate a phenomenon,
as models, diagrams, experimental tests, to synthesize known information, and
more. 23 Museums such as the Exploratorium arrange exhibits relating to par-
ticular themes in clusters so that visitors can study a subject by interrogating
complementary, redundant and integrative exhibits following a logic and an
aesthetic pattern that leads from one to the next. Some exhibits are insis-
tently question-posing, requiring visitors to activate them if they are to be
functional at all. 24 Others engage their audience in more subtle dialogue; the
interaction is not invariably physical. The initial attraction remains aesthetic,
and, for exhibits to work intellectually, museum visitors must continue to be
drawn by aesthetic vectors within and between exhibits that transfer thoughtful
attention from immediate experience to a remote point of reference.
284 HILDE HEIN
III. THE FUNCTION OF THE AESTHETIC IN SCIENCE EXHIBITION
It remains to consider why aesthetics is relevant to science exhibition, apart

from the trivial observation that museums in general must be pleasing in
order to attract visitors. l1am Chabay, Director of the New Curiosity Shop in
California, which designs and builds exhibits, speaks of curiosity, surprise,
challenge and control as contributory factors to the success of an exhibit. 25
No doubt these are assets to learning, but they are not unique to a museum
context nor even present in a11 successful ones. Not every one finds delight
in the same exhibits nor agrees on the same reasons for satisfaction. Frank
Oppenheimer, the founder-director of the Exploratorium, liked exhibits to
remain as elose as possible to things in the "state of nature" with its infor-
mation-rich, buzzing, blooming confusion. The function of the museum, he
thought, is simply to make what Oppenheimer likened to "a walk in the woods"
more generally accessible and so to spread its intrinsic pleasure. Other people
find that condition distastefully chaotic and expect museums to produce
manicured exhibits that abstract from nature with less options for playful diver-
sion. Such preferences combine to mold and differentiate personal character
and style. But people do not attend museums in quest of a lifestyle. Wh at
then does bring them there, and what induces them to remain with an exhibit?
The pleasure of problem solving is sometimes offered as a response.
However, to achieve that satisfaction, vi si tors must first come to see that
there is a problem to be solved, and secondly think it worth pondering.
Sometimes, merely making the exhibit "work" or go though its paces is enough,
but ordinarily one wants it to answer a question. The question is rarely as
specific as those posed by science experiments, but it must be interesting,
and must permit the satisfaction of an answer. Neither who11y self-contained
nor entirely transparent, exhibits stimulate visitors' inclination to pose problems
- and not a11 visitors pose the same problems or see problems in the same
places. They do not a11 read alike the circumstances that provoke inquiry,
nor would they a11 be satisfied with the same solutions. A successful exhibit
invites, indeed seduces, visitors to partake with sense and inte11ect in the
quest for problems where before there were none. Unlike our everyday
problems that besiege us painfu11y and uninvited, however, those induced
gratuitously by exhibits are welcome. This is not only because they can be
solved, which is not always the case, but because they activate the exercise
of a11 our responsive faculties. Vi si tors are more often energized than para-
lyzed by problems met in museum exhibits.
The motivational research of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi into the phenom-
enon he ca11s "flow" experience addresses the aesthetic character of certain
encounters found object-centered and self-affirming?6 These activities, which
are autotelic or complete within themselves, such as the creation and appre-
ciation of works of art, provide intrinsic gratification. Csikszentmihalyi is
interested in determining what features - intellectual, emotional, and sensual
- make a situation intrinsically interesting, worth having for its own sake.
ART OF DlSPLA YING SCIENCE 285
In other words, he asks, what is common to those experiences that provide

aesthetic satisfaction? Museum professionals have tried to apply this research
to the understanding of vi si tor experiences in museums and to the produc-
ti on of exhibits that are optimally satisfying.
Csikszentmihalyi writes: "The peak is not the point. It is simply closure,
a way of focusing attention on a do-able possible thing to do. What is really
exciting is the climb". He is referring to rock climbing, but he finds the same
conditions met by a variety of activities - sports, meditation, religious ritual,
scientific investigation - aB involving a "state of consciousness character-
ized by intense concentration bordering on oblivion, yet requiring complex
mental or physical activity". To achieve that state of immersion in the moment,
freed from ego-related concerns, museum exhibits must challenge viewers
and simultaneously elicit their exercise of appropriate skills. Obviously the
locus of that tension must vary from visitor to visitor, and so museum exhibits
must be multi-potentiating.
There is satisfaction in the arousal of wonder and in its active gratifica-
tion. Scientists often express this satisfaction when speaking autobiographi-
cally, but it is an acquired taste and is not commonly discussed in reports of
scientific investigations. That exclusion is unfortunate since it discourages and
delegitimates its expression or even admission by students and amateurs to
having experienced it.
Museums are in a position to reanimate the enthusiasm denied or lost by
formal education. Intent upon methods and results, formal science teaching
often overlooks motivation and the experiential gratification to be found in
putting questions to the world and answering them. Students learn to trade
away their motivating curiosity in exchange for certification, and detached
enlightenment replaces empathic knowledge. But the aesthetic or "flow" expe-
rience reattaches the self to itself and to the other. As Csikszentmihalyi
describes it: Having concentrated fuH attention on a limited field and excluded
all other concerns, the ac tor, upon retuming to normallife, "emerges with a
greater sense of wholeness and integration, astronger sense of self".27 Well
made museum exhibits can promote such wholemaking gratification.
To be successful, museum exhibits must compress intuition into a physical
experience or object, exploiting the fuzzy boundary between science and art.
Their aim is not simply to increase public understanding of science - a
laudable, but essentially utilitarian project. It is to reveal the pleasure and attrac-
tiveness of science that some people discover on their own and that is often
obfuscated. Without that appreciation, the practical mission to advance science
alone seems rather grim, focusing as it does on the political and economic
importance of science and its role in a technological world. It may weH be
the case that science museums came into being as agents of public educa-
tion, but that is not a reason to deny the gratification that science can provide
in its own right. The synthesis between aesthetics and science is really not
so elusive. It has been mystified by driving a disciplinary wedge between
art and science and opposing them to one another. But neither the best
286 HILDE HEIN
scientists nor the best artists endorse that division, and neither should the
museum-going public.
College 0/ the Holy Cross

Worcester, Mass.
NOTES
1 School related programs sometimes do inc1ude required museum attendance or c1asses held
in museums, and. some offer intemships collaboratively with museums. Some museums also offer
enrichment courses on topics related to their holdings. These are usually supported by govem-
ment or private foundations with special educational interests that coincide with the museum's
resources. Since their existence depends on evidence of successful learning, perhaps there is a
danger that, as these programs are furtber integrated into the museum structure, museums will
become increasingly dictatorial in their didactic strategies.
2 Museums serve a variety of functions. They play an important political role, representing
nationalism at its best and worst. They facilitate sodal and economic transformations that depend
on the dissemination of technical skiIls. They inculcate culture and help shape group identity.
But their capacity to perform all of these functions presupposes their ability to hold the
aesthetic attention of their audience.
3 Denis HoIlier, 'The use-value of the impossible', October 60, Spring 1992, MIT Press. Far
from collecting in order to display specimen objects or illustrations, the museum employs raw
materials taken from the object-world and deploys them in the newly constructed museum-world,
whose coherence andlor elegance is the product of curatorial artistry.
4 The three story building housed the collection of the Tradescants, father and son, and was
left to their heir John Ashmole. Edward P. Alexander, Museums in Motion (American Association
for State and Local History, Nashville, Tenn., 1979), p. 42.
, I am grateful for information regarding this event to Aleta Ringlero, former Director of the
National Museum of Natural History's Native American Public Programs.
6 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund
(New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
7 The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History has recently completed
an exhibition on the impact of science on ordinary life in the V.S. since 1870. In addition to
installations and "hands-on" activities, it examines some of the sodal consequences of sdence
with particular attention to ethical as well as cultural issues. The exhibition focuses on sodal
change rather than scientific development, as it might highlight were it designed for a museum
of science.
8 In the early phases of the science center movement, practicing sdentists from the academic
world were deeply involved in the design and evaluation of science centers. The Exploratorium,
founded in 1969 by the physicist, Frank Oppenheimer, became a model for the adaptation of
research and laboratory techniques to museum exhibition procedures.
9 Contemporary aesthetic theory questions the viability of the "autonomous work of art" or
"unique aesthetic experience" as weIl, maintaining that both are contingent upon a cultural
tradition of art and a heritage of aesthetic consciousness. Museum exhibitions of art are now
also beginning to display the historical and cultural connections between works of art, some-
times developing a logicalor technical narrative not unlike those found in science centers.
10 At the Exploratorium, exhibits are routinely assigned multiple conceptual places, if not
literally moved from place to place, in order to form part of cognitive pathways that link natural
phenomena or procedures within distinct systems. See "Pathways" guidesheets or my own
series "Interconnective Essays" published by the Exploratorium.
11 The counterpart in an art museum would be a particular work of art, a painting or sculp-
ture which might be exhibited variously as an element of different exhibition concepts or
strategies, e.g. as an item among the oeuvre of an artist's work, as exemplary of a style or
school, as illustrative of a specific subject, as reflective of a political or cultural position, as
collected by ... , and so forth.
12 Gary Kulik, 'Designing the past: History-museum exhibitions from Peale to the present', in
Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig (eds.), History Museums in the United States: A Critical
Assessment (Urbana, Ill. Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989).
13 Philosophically, these phenomenologically dense museums are at the opposite extreme from
the cognitively rich exhibitions advocated by the early Smiths"tinian Assistant Secretary, George
Brown Goode: "An efficient educational museum may be described as a collection of instruc-
tive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected specimen".
14 'Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936',
Social Text no. 11,4(2), p. 24, 1984.
15 H. F. Osborn, 'The American Museum and citizenship', 53rd Annual Report, 1922, p. 2.
American Museum of Natural History archives. Cited in Haraway, p. 55 (see note 14).
16 By comparison to today's technology, the anatomically perfect glass flowers in the Harvard
University Botanical Museum's Ware Collection seem tarne. They were produced over aperiod
of fifty years by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka (1886--1936) nominally as botanical teaching
tools. Now preserved as museum objects, they are still inspiring as much for their detailed
verisimilitude and the skill of their workmanship as for their beauty. Stephen Jay Gould calls
them the perfect solution to the problem "What is the proper balance of specimen and artifact,
of the natural and the manufactured? (in a museum exhibition)" "They represent the most sublime
union of natural beauty and human ingenuity, of science and art" Discover, November 1993,
p.92.
17 Some exhibitions include demonstrations in the form of skits. The Boston Museum of
Science's "Mysteries of the Bog" (1994), for example, features a one-woman performance that
supplements the largely ecological message with a bit of social and cultural history.
18 The recognition of covert didacticism is made by critics from both left and right. Natural
history museums have recently been attacked by creationist and other opponents of Darwinian
evolutionary theory, who point out, correctly, that the sequential arrangement of fossil remains
and reconstructions of prehistoric organisms, and even the floorplans of most museums betray
an unannounced Darwinian conviction.
19 They could, of course, be assessed on other grounds, including their beauty, artistry and appro-
priateness of design to their purpose.

20 'Always true to the object in our fashion', in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics ofMuseum Display (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington
D.C. 1990). Production for museum display is a new notion associated with the modernist
aesthetic. Most objects designated as art, even in the western art historical tradition, were produced
for other sites - church walls, public buildings, private sanctuaries. They have come to rest in
museums as a kind of apotheosis.
21 Since science center exhibits endure a great deal of abuse by audience it is necessary that they
be reparable. Interactivity takes its toll, and the maintenance crew is the least heralded and
most important element of any museum staff. Exhibits that do not work undermine visitors'
self confidence and are aesthetically disappointing.
22 See, for example, Raymond Bruman, Cookbook J: A Construction Manualfor Exploratorium
Exhibits (San Francisco: The Exploratorium, 1987). Volumes lI-IV were subsequently
published by Ron Hipschman.
23 Hilde Hein, 'The museum as teacher of theory: A case history of the Exploratorium vision
section', Museum Studies Journal 2,4, Spring-Summer 1987. See also The Exploratorium:
The Museum as Laboratory (Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990).
24 Art museums also display interactive exhibits. Kinetic sculpture and especially some artworks
of the sixties demanded audience intervention; but the tradition of the art museum remains
contemplative. Visitors continue to be shy of touching the works and alm ost never do so in an
exploratory manner.
25 'Flow Commotion and Crystal Spider: Translating scientific concepts into hands-on learning
288 HILDE HEIN
devices', in Paul G. HeItne and Linda A. Marquardt (eds.), Science Learning in the Informal
Setting, Symposium Proceedings, Nov. 12-15,1987 (The Chicago Academy of Sciences, Chicago,
Ill.).
26 'Human behavior and the science center', Proceedings 1988. See also Optimal Experience:
Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness, ed. by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and Isabella

Selega Csikszentmihalyi (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988). See also The Creative
Vision, 1976 (with J. W. Getzels).
27 Insights: Museums, Visitors, Attitudes, Expectations: A Focus Group Experiment, Sponsored
by the Getty Center for Education in the Arts and the J. Paul Getty Museum, 1991, Los Angeles,
Ca.
ALFRED I. TAUBER
FROM DESCARTES' DREAM TO HUSSERL'S NIGHTMARE
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in
columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add,
divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he
Iectured with much applause in the leeture room,
How soon unaeeountable I beeame tired and siek,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
look'd up in perfeet silenee at the stars.
Walt Whitman
from By the Roadside, 1865
The eonjunetion of aestheties and seienee eonjures up a mixed reaetion. Their

eonneetion dates at least to the Pythagoreans who sought harmony and order
in nature as underlying prineiples of eosmic law. And a wrenehing disjune-
tion oeeurred sometime in the mid-nineteenth eentury, when in aseries of final
eomplex eultural and intelleetual blows, the natural philosophers beeame
seientists and the moral.philosophers, humanists. A widening sehism over
the next eentury evolved into what C. P. Snow ealled the Two Cultures
(Snow, 1959). To be sure, the respeetive roots of art and seienee separated
at the beginning of the modem period, but did not clearly diverge until quite
reeently. The distinetions between seientist and poet was well underway by the
Victorian period. We note that in 1839, when Charles Darwin invoked the
"philosophie al naturalist" (Beagle Journal) or Robert Knox employed the term,
"Philosophie anatomy", such philosophical workers were interested in dis-
covering the laws of nature, not merely in deseribing nature. In the proeess
they re-defined natural history and established the science of biology (Rehbock,
1983). Hermann HeImholtz initiated and then completed a materialistic and
meehanical pro gram to study organic phenomena, by leading the German
reductionist revolt in the 1840s that aspired to reduee organic phenomena to
the prineiples of chemistry and physics (Galaty, 1974; Kremer, 1990). The
various scientifie disciplines thus completed their rejeetion of idealistie
notions so popular in romantie science, and when William Whewell coined
the term "scientist" in 1840 (The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences), he
all but formally distinguished the inquiry of two different modalities.
This is not to say that scientifie strategy was yet totally divoreed from
"philosophieal" or in Knox's words, "transeendental", methods (i.e. insight
289

290 ALFRED I. TAUBER
by intuitive leaps of the imagination rather than by laborious coaxing from

"impersonal heaps of data" (Rehbock, 1983)), but this romantic tradition,
last championed in various forms by the Romantics (the Naturphilosophen and
their immediate heirs) was soon to expire. 1
Walt Whitman's quiet rejection is the response of a temperament that finds
the scientific encounter bereft of personal, and more saliently, emotional
meaning. It was, and continues to be, a widely shared sentiment. It is com-
monplace to note, since the Romantic period, that the analytic, mechanical,
abstract qualities of science, displace the primary encounter, that is the personal,
emotional, and aesthetic. When the poet communes with nature, he does so
in rejection of the scientific stance. From Frankenstein's monster to Luke
Skywalker's trust in the intuitive Force (in the series Star Wars), our culture
is impregnated with the doctrine of Two Cultures. What Snow popularized
as an intransigence between the worlds of the humanities and of science/
technology, is but an echo of a broad cultural conflict, emanating from a
deep chasm in intellectual values and Weltanschauung, and dating at least from
Rousseau. The literature concerning this topic is immense. The orientation
taken here does not dispute that much of post-seventeenth-century Western
high culture is science (e.g. Olson, 1991), nor attempts to review its devel-
opment (e.g. SorelI, 1991), but rather endeavors to re-state the underlying ethos
of the problem. This then is not a discussion of the psychology of science
and the aesthetic, nor a review of how nature is perceived as beautiful. 2 Rather,
I wish to explore from what foundation the scientific attitude and aesthetic
experience - as separate experiences - originate.
Before proceeding, some clarification of the context of aesthetic is war-
ranted. What is proposed here is that to sunder the scientific from the aesthetic
experience represents an epistemological problem. Such an arguement neces-
sarily revolves around defining aesthetic. Given that aesthetics has been
associated with different attributes at different historical moments and cultural
contexts, we must be wary of being satisfied with vague notions of the beau-
tiful, the subjective, the emotional. At the same time I will not defer to the
editorial comment of the Oxford English Dictionary ("Recent extravagences
in the adoption of asentimental archaism as the ideal of beauty have still further
removed aesthetics from the etymological and purely philosophical meaning"),
and attempt a rigorous contribution to the philosophical intersection of the
aesthetic and the scientific. Suffice it to note for this discussion that Kant
viewed aesthetic judgement as unlike either theoretical (i.e. cognitive) or prac-
tical (Le. moral) judgement, in that it is effected entirely subjectively, Le. solely
in reference to the knowing subject. This judgement nevertheless commands
communal assent through the common ground of our shared subjectivity.
Moreover, aesthetic judgement, according to Kant (1790), provides the essen-
tial focus for connecting the theoretical and practical aspects of our nature. I
have chosen to begin with Goethe as the exemplar of this position. There
will be no attempt to trace the fate of the Goethian position (a topic weIl beyond
the scope of this essay); rather his Kantian ideal is discussed as a reference
FROM DESCARTES' DREAM TO HUSSERL'S NIGHTMARE 291
pole to judge our current predicament. Our next stop will be with Nietzsche,
who leads us into one of the many twentieth century responses - namely the
radical aestheticization of experience. Again we seek to orient the bound-
aries of discussion. This course obviously leaves behind the early nineteenth
century German philosophers who dealt extensively with the subjective con-
ditions of aesthetic consciousness; but this theme, extended by twentieth
century phenomenologists, is rejoined by tuming to Husserl, who looked at the
Kantian synthesis in a renewed attempt to discover a common rationality for
our experience. There is no attempt to place this discussion in the domain of
critical judgement, aesthetic evaluation, the moral or social value of art, theories
of art as form, expression or symbol; nor does this discussion address the
conceptual basis of art in terms of intention, representation, or the like. I
"simply" wish to sketch a contemporary response to the Kantian challenge,
and thereby note how the extreme divergence of aesthetic and scientific "judge-
ment" requires renewed attention.
II
The inner Iife of nature and art ... are subject to the same
faculty of judgement.
Goethe
Let us begin with a re-examination of the remnants of holistic science in the

Romantic period, an age that still sought to integrate all experience under
Nature's divine order, arbitrated, whether in science or letters, by the indi-
vidual, who perceived or imagined a holistic uni verse.
[They] refused to admit that there is any inherent and inescapable conflict between science
and poetry .... The most common procedure was to regard these, when properly employed, as
parallel and complementary ways of seeing (Abrams, 1953, pp. 308-309).
One of the major architects of this vision was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
who as poet and scientist typifies a vision still operative in the Victorian period,
which however, was largely eclipsed by century's end (Postlethwaite, 1987).
Goethe's color theory and morphological studies are his best known ventures
into science (Amrine et al., 1987). Each was poetically inspirational to hirn,
and, in many respects, served as the more sophisticated exposition of his
theoretical concems. Notwithstanding that the color theory itself had no direct
impact on the development of later nineteenth century research in the physics
of light (Buchwald, 1989), the most knowledgeable nineteenth century physi-
cist and physiologist of light, Hermann HeImholtz, perceptively observed
that Goethe's theory of colors was "an attempt to save the immediate truth
of sense impressions from the attacks of science" (Bamouw, 1987, p. 58).
Although this phenomenalism has been largely rejected by modem philos-
ophy of science, Helmholtz's tepid assessment has been more enthusiastically
echoed by Goethe's sympathetic modem commentators (e.g. Amrine et al.,
492 ALFRED I. T AUßER
1987; Sepper, 1988), who argue that Goethe in fact was a sophisticated
scientist and, as a thoughtful critic of the methodological and philosophical
problems of experimental science, was led to his polemic against Newton based
on theoretical concerns, particularly the importance of separating facts (i.e.
phenomena) from theory. The historical and scientific contexts of Goethe's
studies in optics have been comprehensively commented upon (e.g. Amrine
et al., 1987; WeHs, 1971; Forbes, 1983; Bamouw, 1987; Sepper, 1988), and
here we might simply, and sympatheticaHy, note that the table may be turned
on the reductionists (also committed to a self-consciously articulated episte-
mology (Galaty, 1974). Goethe's understanding of science need not be relegated
to wild romantic fancy, but rather may be viewed as protecting the integrity
of science, both as method and theory (Tauber, 1993). Goethe's color theory
is exemplary of his quest for archetyp al patterns and essential elements from
which the pattern of nature could be disclosed. In his earlier botanical
studies, Goethe exhibited a "phenomenalistic" definition of his science. With
Farbenlehre (Theory 01 Colors) (Goethe [1810], 1988, pp. 157-298), we
see more clearly the epistemological foundation of his scientific thinking,
which is firmly embedded in an holistic sensibility. Thus Farbenlehre, a
study of chromatics, is not only experimental science, but also a work of history
and philosophy of science, which Goethe viewed as integral aspects of a
comprehensive examination of nature. It is this admixture of science and
learned commentary that is devalued by those who judge his work solely
from a modem scientific perspective. So first, let us consider Goethe as
historian of science - a perspective which largely defined his approach to
research.
Of the many facets of Goethe's genius, that of historian of science does
not immediately claim priority. In fact, Goethe was committed to elucidating
the history of science as an important aspect of his diverse scientific enterprise
which included studies of geology, optics and morphology as a major portion
of his intellectual activities. To appreciate the extraordinary breadth of the
sources of Goethe's science, however, one must link his philosophies of
science, history and language to his experimental corpus. Goethe's historical
studies, scientific theory, and philosophy of language each must be factored
to obtain a composite understanding of Goethe as both scientist and histo-
rian of science. Goethe may be encapsulated as a poet-scientist, who syn-
thesized imagination, observation and thought, through the art of language
(Fink, 1991). Sensitive to the differing way scientists used language and to
the limits and richness of language, Goethe understood the rhetoric of scien-
tific polemics and conceptualized his research science as part of history; this
intellectual pursuit went beyond his experimental efforts. From Goethe's
point of view, Newton's optics was problematic for historiography and
language, as much as for science. Goethe's rhetoric engaged the tactic of
linking his science to scientific tradition in order to storm the Bastille. Thus
the shrill polemic with Newton was seen as a rhetorical confrontation with
the canon. Goethe's history of color theory required the development of tech-
niques to acquire source material, authenticate documents, edit and translate

texts, as weil as establish principles of textual linguistics. There was no canon
of texts, for the scientific tradition was amorphous, but the effort was worth-
while as it fulfilled a larger agenda.
Goethe was indebted to Schiller for channeling his thinking and suggesting
a higher purpose and an enriched context for Goethe's science. Schiller
argued that insight into the operation of the mind offered man mastery of mind
and body, and by extension, sufficient detachment from science to allow for
a study of its process. History would offer the vantage point for a better
understanding of the scientific endeavor. Schiller's insight might weil serve
as the true origin of the historiography of science, as "that point when the
act of science, rather than the results of science, become the basis of study"
(Fink, 1991, p. 139). Goethe achieved the difficult transition from descrip-
tive chromatics to a history of optical theory, which then evolved to become
a true historiography of science. The Goethe-Schiller correspondence of
February, 1798 shows the initial struggle to define the lines separating the
various approaches in the sciences, the categories of thinking required for
different disciplines, and the conceptual gaps between the two cultures of
science and history.> With Schiller's active assistance, Goethe would define
those differences and then attempt to construct a bridge between them
during the next two years. By 1800, the chromatics project was divided into
systematic, polemical, and historical aspects, a multifaceted form finally
realized when Farbenlehre was published in 1810. It went weil beyond a
catalog of scientific discoveries and theories to include a narrative about the
human search for knowledge. Goethe must be credited with first recognizing
that scientific development is dependent on both internal and external forces.
His historiography was unique, for other historians of the period failed to
recognize the broader context in which science develops. They practiced
what Goethe and Schiller called "a priori histories", the collection of previous
data, chronological sorting and issues of authorship/priority, to obtain an
"inductive history" or a textbook. 4 In addition Goethe's historiography was
firmly planted in a sensitivity to how language reflected and restricted science.
He heralded our modem understanding of the function of models and meta-
phors, and of the interrelationships of language and history in forming operative
paradigms. He recognized the approximation that language (and models)
offered as descriptions of nature, and believed that epochs of science were
largely defined, and restricted, by the language they employed. 5 Metaphors
of particular epochs were naturally eclipsed and replaced as science developed,
and crises in domains of knowledge ensued when language was deemed
inadequate.
With this perspective - namely a quasi-constructionist role of language,
the complex historical development of science, and its underlying philosoph-
ical presuppositions - we may better appreciate Goethe's comprehensive view
of science. In his work on optics, he sought to establish a compendium of
chromatic phenomena which would all demand scientific attention, thus pre-
venting "overanxious theorists from disregarding entire groups of phenomena

or dismissing them as unimportant or anomalous" (Sepper, 1987, p. 188).
Chromatic phenomena included both objective measurement and subjective
impressions (which today are relegated to different scientific realms). Although
such compendia mayaiso have potentially lasting scientific value, Goethe's
approach resonates at a deeper philosophical level. He rebelIed against a
restricted compartmentalized science that dealt only with discrete portions
of phenomena, for he doubted the feasibility of placing these segmented parts
back into a completed whole. There is an interesting tension here. This program
argued against an epistemology based on narrow interpretation, which
attempted to place "facts" within pre-established, and domineering, theories.
At the same time, holism was the foundation of his understanding, and he
sought the unity of experience to reflect this unity of nature. Goethe's genius
was to implicitly incorporate multifaceted approaches to understand phe-
nomena. Thus a pluralistic orientation characterized his intellectual endeavors,
which were held together in his mind's eye as an unshattered whole. That
whole was not constructed by scientific theories endeavoring to capture
the phenomena, but by the intuitive insight of Goethe 's holistic vision. A
major factor of that experience was the implicit inclusion of an aesthetic
perception.
Wholes must remain intact. A fine romantic sentiment, although there are
casualties in such an orientation. Specifically, and most important, the char-
acterization of subject-object relations in Goethe's perspective are problematic.
On the one hand, he espouses a rigorously detached view of the observed
phenomena. The scientist is supposed to observe and survey his objects of
inquiry with a "quiet gaze" [impersonal, objective], and "must find the measure
for what he leams, the data for his judgement, not in hirnself but in the sphere
of wh at he observes" (Goethe, [1792], 1988, p. 11). Yet there are numerous
cases where Goethe is guilty of succumbing to an engaged rather than dis-
passionate view of describing phenomena as pleasant or unpleasant, useful
or useless, etc. Goethe, the scientific practitioner, was not always consistent
with his own tenets, because of the impossibility of truly separating the subject
from his inquiry, a "failing" he readily acknowledged (ibid.). The quest for
objectification only goes so far, leaving the phenomena to become integrated
and meaningful by some active (or perhaps better termed, creative) process.
There is then a complex question of identity between Goethe the detached
ob server, supposedly divorced from theoretical presuppositions, and Goethe
the creative scientist, seeking archetypes in natural phenomena. Aresolution
(of sorts) was offered in Kant's Critique 0/ Judgement (1790), which Goethe
"read again and again".
I found my most disparate interests brought together, products of art and nature were dealt
with alike, esthetic and teleological judgement iIIuminated one another, I did not always agree
... but the main ideas in the book were completely analogous to my earlier work and thought.
The inner life of nature and art, their respective effects as they work from within - all this
came to c1ear expression in the book. (Goethe [1817aJ, 1988, p. 28)
Goethe concluded that poetry and science are closely related: "Both are
subject to the same faculty of judgement" (ibid.). This position was reiter-
ated in many forms, from the short note to Schiller - "the extent to which
the idea Beauty is Perfection in Combination with Freedom may be applied
to living organisms" (Goethe [1794], 1988) - to The Metamorphosis ofPlants
(Goethe [1790], 1989) where the archetype, a largely aesthetic construct, is
evoked.
The role of the archetype was most clearly formulated in Goethe's botan-
ical studies, where he concluded that the varied components of plant structure
were but variant forms of a Leaf. Goethe's concept of plant metamorphosis
arose from avision of an underlying unity in nature. He sought an ideal
structure (which he believed was the leaf) from which all other plant com-
ponents arose as homologous variations. His confidence in both seeking such
an archetypal theme and recognizing it expressed the appreciation that "in
organic being, first the form as a who1e strikes us, then its parts and their shape
and combination" (Goethe, [1790], 1989, p. 86). The universal, the essence,
the idea is perceived through the senses in each individual case, and "when
the plant is seen as plant, I see the plant" (ibid., p. 122). Goethe clear1y
understood his epistemology:
... my thinking is not separate from objects; that the elements of the object, the perceptions
of the object, flow into my thinking and are fully permeated by it; that my perception itself is
a thinking, and my thinking a perception. (Goethe, [18231, 1988, p. 39)
This realization of a confluence between subject and object has been formal-
ized and deve10ped in twentieth century phenomenological philosophy, where
the "gaze" is the privileged vehicle of the subject's relation to the world, i.e.
consciousness and meaning depend quite li te rally on how we see things
(Husserl [1935], 1970). The scientist must still endeavor ideally to objectify,
but as Goethe recognized, the integrating creative insight resided with a more
complex faculty.
This experimental reality, which is the only reality we live immediately (as opposed to scien-
tific "reality", which is abstract and grasped intellectually rather than experimentally), is thus
fundamentally subjective in nature. The objects that surround us function less "as they are"
than "as they mean", and objects only mean for someone .... To see implies seeing meaning-
fully. (Morrissey, 1988, p. xx)
Might not archetypes be regarded as the ideal, or in another parlance, the

theoretica1 distillation of nature?
The inextricability of subject and object contradicts the ideal of the scien-
tist as independent from the world - the austere ob server, collector of data
uncontaminated by projected personal prejudice. (In this regard Goethe is
attacking Schelling as much as Newton.) How then do the crucial and variable
elements of creative intuition, deduction, and assembly of disparate informa-
tion create "objective" reality? Much of our understanding rests on a different,
"non-scientific" intelligence where "events are not counted but weighed, and
past events not explained but interpreted" (Heisenberg, 1979, p. 68). Whether
Goethe has been castigated or praised for his scientific philosophy, the
argument ultimately revolves around the legitimacy of this faculty. His critics
indict hirn as a poet, a dilletante doing science without the requisite orienta-
tion towards mathematics and its abstractions. Despite his objectification of
method, and his rejection of Schelling's projection of the mind into Nature,
Goethe 's interpretations are guided by an aesthetic sensibility incapable of
appreciating the attitude of dissecting phenomena to abstract mathematics as
the ideal representation of nature. This position leaves Goethe, the poet, with
an unresolved tension: to what extent, as scientist, is he allowed to vent the
power of his artistic faculty?
As already noted, from his espousal of Kant's third Critique, Goethe might
freely acknowledge the legitimacy of aesthetic judgement in scientific dis-
course. But what aesthetic principle would he find useful? Certainly abstraction
per se is not a category he would reject, and those who dismiss hirn on that
basis do hirn injustice. Goethe's archetype is most assuredly an abstraction,
but it originates from a sentiment that seeks wholes. The scientist, according
to Goethe, must integrate the widest scope of experience. In rejecting the
reductionism of Newtonian science, Goethe still propounds abstraction and
objectification. Goethe is not a "poet-scientist", but rather a "holistic scien-
tist". To label Goethe as a poet-scientist is to impose upon hirn our own divided
sensibility of a Two Cultures world, when he in fact regarded a unified nature
with a unified mind and sensibility (Tauber, 1993). The poet and scientist
necessarily view the same object as differently refracted experiences, but to
Goethe, the experience of the object must ultimately be integrated by an arbi-
trating observer. Implicit in labeling Goethe a poet-scientist is the stigma of
subjectivity, whose purging from science constituted the major re-orientation
of the post-Romantic period. To view the world objectively is to remove the
subjective I from the encounter. That is, the scientist as the knowing subject
must divorce hirns elf from projecting hirnself into his inquiry. Goethe strug-
gled with this issue and in a fundamental sense never resolved it. In recognizing
science as history of science, as well as philosophy as history of philosophy,
he placed his perspective stamp on all inquiry and claimed to reach for objec-
tivity, while acknowledging the subjectivity of "facts" and the burden of their
contextual meaning.
III
lIeft the houseof scientists and slammed the dOOf behind

me.
Nietzsehe
As already noted, by the mid-nineteenth century the holism of the Romantic

endeavor was shattered by an ascendent positivism. Positivism is a view of
reality in terms of "phenomena" where the "nature of things" is divorced
from (and ignored by) the abstraction of process and object. The positivist
would thus hope to establish standardized and stable knowledge. This doctrine
assurnes that objects are given in such observation, i.e. the world is made up
of facts; these objects and facts appear in the experience of the scientific
ob server and if not verifiable, they do not exist (Mead, 1936, pp. 451-461).
The characteristic thesis of positivism is that science is the only valid knowl-
edge, and facts the only possible objects of knowledge. Thus positivism assigns
itself the ethos of knowledge, divorced from the vicissitudes of subjectivity
and the active participation of the subject with his object of inquiry. Goethe's
concern was resolved by imposing a rigid separation of self and object. The
purge of the personal was strictly enforced; objectivity made better science.
The term positivism was coined by Auguste Comte in the 1820's, although
its complex history may be traced from Francis Bacon to David Hume, and
most directly to the seventeenth century scientific revolution. The applica-
ti on of the scientific method not only to the sciences, but also to human affairs,
served as the basis of Comte's philosophy. His pro gram had an enormous
influence on the social sciences in particular, as weIl as pervading the general
notion of what constituted valid knowledge. Nineteenth century positivism,
unlike its more circumspect progeny, exalted science without concern for the
limits of its validity. Philosophy, religion, politics were exhorted to become
scientific disciplines. And science was to be confined to the observable and
the manipulable. Positivism assumed that we do not observe, as Aristotle
argued, to see through a process to determine the true nature of the object,
but rather we observe only "to see". For instance, in physics the role of the
ob server is simply to note what changes take place (i.e. what motions occur
and at wh at velocities) and correlate them. In biology, strict mechanical prin-
ciples were sought, so that the organic became an extension of the physical
world, ultimately understood as governed by those laws. Prior to Darwin,
species were explained in terms of divine creation, as the deity bestowed the
peculiar nature that allowed an animal's development, defined its role in the
chain of being, and determined its preservation. After On the Origin of Species,
strictly mechanistic processes became explanatory. In each case, the posi-
tivist doctrine was to rule; the character of observation is detached and
abstracted from "the nature of the thing itself" (Mead, 1936, p. 451).
Claude Bernard exemplified positivism in biology. He espoused wh at he
believed to be the neutral position of a dispassionate ob server, professing an
understanding of physiology based on controlled conditions that allowed for
results that were repeatably consistent. This was not to argue against human
intervention, for observation was part of the experiment, but he demanded rigor
to minimize the effects of method. The more varied and carefully designed
the experimental manipulations, the more precise would be the characteriza-
tion of the phenomena, and the aIl-important interrelations between the object
of study and the instruments (including any distorting effects of the observing
scientist) would be minimized. He believed physiology and medicine might
also aspire to the same standard of objectification already achieved in physics
and chemistry. "The experimental method is the scientific method which
prodaims the freedom of the mi nd and of thought" (Bernard [1865] 1927;

p. 43). Rather than be caught in the webs of competing ideologies, Bernard
argued for an idealized strict neutrality for science. 6 The positivist confines
hirnself to phenomena and their ascertainable relationships, and it was through
the strict standards of Bernard's experimental methodology that his posi-
tivism was to be attained.
Experiment only shows us the form of phenomena; but the relation of a phenomenon to a
definite cause is necessary and independent of experiment; it is necessarily mathematical and
absolute. Thus we see that the principle of the criterion in experimental sciences is fundamen-
tally identical with that of the mathematical sciences, since in each case the principle is expressed
by a necessary and absolute relation between things. Only in the experimental sciences these rela-
tions are surrounded by numerous, complex and infinitely varied phenomena which hide them
from our sight. With the help of experiment, we analyze, we dissociate these phenomena, in order
to reduce them to more and more simple relations and conditions. (Bemard [1865], 1927,
p.54)
Whether Bernard's positivism was directly indebted to Comte, or even

self-consciously philosophieal, has been debated (Canguilhem, 1989; pp.
65-89; Holmes 1974, pp. 403-406 and 454-455). Whatever the case may be
in this regard, his influence signifies a manifestation of a more rigorous
scientific method generally applied to the biological sciences supported by a
strong doctrine of how to derive scientific truth from a rigorously quantita-
tive experimentation. Our current view of such an idealized stance for the
neutralobserver, fact or theory, is a subject which I defer at present. Wh at
is dear, however, is that the positivist believed in such dispassion; ironically,
the self-righteous zeal of the new scientific objectivity, conferred by studying
and reducing organic processes to chemistry and physics, disallowed other
forms of scientific method or conjecture. 7 One might illustrate the disruption
of Goethe's ideal synthesis by chroniding the prevailing positivist ascen-
dency in the natural sciences through the nineteenth century, but perhaps
more striking is to consider the radical rebellion against that tide. By the end
of the century, Nietzsehe had in a sense resolved Goethe's conflict by estab-
lishing a psychology defying the attempt to objectify the world - the world
becomes meaningful only as personal experience.
Nietzsche's Zarathustra, proclaiming will to power and the eternal return,8
invokes a philosophy based on an organismal consciousness, reaching deeply
into the psyche. For Nietzsche, the sciences can barely skim the surface of a
truly comprehensive intuition of life's essence. ("All human knowledge is either
experience or mathematics" (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 288)). How are we bio-
logical is the scientific question that begs the issue of defining our selfhood.
Are we to divorce ourselves from our most intimate organic being through
reason, scientific dissociation, objectification?9 Nietzche reaches for the more
profound question of how our animal character structures our being, and in
his response, he aestheticizes experience as the bedrock of that being.
Nietzsche's answer expounds both his view of the unconscious and the therapy
of a diseased sou1. 10 The psychic ideal was based on accepting the essen-
tiality of the will, and Nietzsche's philosophy was directed at discovering

how our "passionate reason" might capture the vitality and power of the
uncorrupted will. It was the radical answer to positivism's imperialistic
assault on human passion. Amidst what William J ames referred to as the
shrieks of a dying rat was an impassioned plea to search for value in human
experience.
Nietzsche's skepticism of man's conscious, rational faculties drives his psy-
chology. A knowing subject, a unity, is rejected. The problem for Nietzsche
resides squarely in establishing an epistemology from which his psychology
might emerge. In rejecting causality as an artifice and thinking as an "arbitrary
fiction" (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 264), Nietzsche questions how we might truly
discem the unconscious (or better, pre-conscious) reality to which we respond.
In the phenomenalism of the "inner world" we invert the chronological order of cause and
effect. The fundamental fact of "inner experience" is that the cause is imagined after the effect
has taken place .... Our entire dream life is the interpretation of complex feelings with a view
to possible causes - and in such way that we are conscious of a condition only when the supposed
causal chain associated with it has entered consciousness. (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 265)
Such consciousness requires a language the individual understands, which

for Nietzsehe the philologist, is totally inadequate. He demands direct expe-
rience, which may be unattainable:
to be able to read off a text as a text without interposing an interpretation is the last-developed
form of "inner experience" - perhaps one that is hardly possible - (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 266)
It is as direct encounter with experience that our language, our interpretation

of reality, is so limited.
We have no categories at all that permit us to distinguish a "world in itself' from a "world of
appearance". (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 270)
The habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deception of sensation: these again
are the basis of all our judgements and "knowledge" - there is absolutely no escape, no backway
or bypath into the real world! We sit within our net, we spiders, and whatever we may catch
in it, we can catch nothing at all except that which allows itself to be caught in precisely our
net. (Nietzsche, 1982, p. 117)
We do not "know", but can only "schematize":

- to impose upon chaos as much regularity and form as our practical needs require.
In the formation of reason, logic, the categories, it was need that was authoritative: the
need, not to "know", but to subsume, to schematize, for the purpose of intelligibility and
calculation.
The categories are "truths" only in the sense that they are conditions of life for us: as Euclidean
space is a conditional "truth .... " (Nietzsche, 1967a, pp. 278-279)
In other words, "the world seems logical to us because we have made it logical"
(Nietzsehe, 1967a, p. 283), and to the extent that consciousness, knowledge,
rationality are useful in the quest for power and preservation, such faculties
have been developed.
If Nietzsche's epistemology allows only limited knowledge, if our ratio-
nality serves only to distort reality, if we are to remain ignorant of true causes
(especially pertinent to the unconscious), upon what is Nietzsche's psychology

based? Since knowledge is problematic, self-knowledge can not be sought: "we
must not analyze ourselves, know ourselves" (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 230), and
similarly, to observe experience as a detached object is also rejected:
Never to observe in order to observe! That gives a false perspective, leads to squinting and some-
times forced and exaggerated . Experience as the wish to experience does not succeed. One
must not eye oneself while having an experience. (Nietzsehe, 1959a, p. 517)
In each case, the distance placed between a knowing subject and its object,
precisely because of the nature of interpretation, obfuscates and distorts reality.
Nietzsche, consistent with his earliest writings, found the immediacy of expe-
rience qua experience in Dionysian frenzy, i.e. frenzy as unmitigated expression
of power. Health as the fuII vigor of life expresses this assertion of the will
to power, which is pronounced in the primitive organic sphere of rapture
- freed emotion. To invoke a biological model, the conjured image is the
primitive assimilative organism experiencing visceral delight. No conscious
intervention is imposed between the subject and its object. The logic of an
ideal immediacy originating in Nietzsche's epistemological skepticism propels
a Dionysian psychology and provides the basis of his critique of nihilism,
i.e. aII those forces interfering with direct (uncorrupted) experience. 1l
Nietzsche most cogently makes his argument in the context of aesthetic
experience. There is little doubt about the esteemed role art plays in Nietzsche's
thinking, both criticaIIy ("Our religion, morality, and philosophy are decadent
forms of man. The countermovement: art" (Nietzsche, 1967 a, p. 419)) and
metaphysically ("art as life's metaphysical activity" (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 453)).
Consistent with the primacy of the will ("art reminds us of states of animal
vigor" (Nietzsche, 1967a, p. 422)), art serves as the conduit to the sensuous,
the Dionysian. This theme dates to Nietzsche's earliest writings and remains
a constant refrain throughout his work. In The Birth 0/ Tragedy (1872),
Nietzsche attacks "Socratism", "the illusion that thought [rationality]' guided
by the thread of causation, might plumb the farthest abysses of being and
even correct it" (Nietzsche, 1956, p. 93). Art is then invoked as the antidote
to barren rationality, whose
grand metaphysical illusion has become integral to the scientific endeavor and again and again
leads science to those far limits of its inquiry where it becomes art - which , in this mecha·
nism, is what is really intended. (Ibid.)
The structure of Nietzsche's position is essentially that logic (to use his
metaphor) like a snake must inevitably coil up at its boundaries and bite its
own tail, and the insatiable quest for knowledge then abruptly turns into
tragic resignation, for which art is the remedy (ibid.).12 Nietzsche thrusts art
to the core of man's endeavor, the essential, purposeful, life-sustaining and
life-enhancing task. The basic instinct of artistic expression is not neces-
sarily directed towards "art", rather it is focused on "life". As he wrote later
in The Twilight 0/ the Idols (1888),
Does [the artist 'sl basic instinct aim at art, or rather at the sense of art, at life? at adesirability
of life? Art is the great stimulus of life. (N ietzsche, 1959a, p. 529)
Human experience is intimately, and meaningfully, linked to what Nietzsehe

called the will to power. Art becomes the vehicle of our primary encounter
with Being. Beyond science, rationality and knowledge, we must seek our
true essence through art.
Dionysiac art . .. wishes to convince us of the etemal delight of existence, but it insists that
we look for this delight not in the phenomena but behind them. It makes us realize that every-
thing that is generated must be prepared to face its painful dissolution. It forces us to gaze
into the horror of individual existence, yet without being tumed to stone by the vision: a meta-
physical solace momentarily lifts us above the whirl of shifting phenomena. For a brief moment
we become, ourselves, the primal Being, and we experience its insatiable hunger for existence.
. . . Pity and terror notwithstanding, we realize our great good fortune in having life - not as
individuals, but as part of the life force with whose procreative lust we have become one. (lbid,
pp. 102-103)
In the later notebooks, this theme is reiterated: truth is less valuable than art
(Nietzsehe, 1967 a, p. 453), or more radically, "We possess art lest we perish
of the truth" (Ibid., p. 435). As the expression of the Will, Dionysus overcomes
Apollo, the symbol of "the will to truth, to reality, to mere appearance; -
the last is itself merely a form of the will to illusion" (Nietzsche, 1967a,
p. 453).
It is clear where Nietzsche places his loyalty, on the site of the deeper
truth of the biological over man 's futile attempts to intellectually capture and
redefine reality (Tauber, 1994). The first, and primary, reality is man's body
- instincts, passions, emotion. And, consistently with the value he places on
the organic, Neitzsche assigns the aesthetic a true biological value:
aesthetic instinct .. . contains a judgement. To this end the beautiful stands within the general
category of the biological values of what is useful, beneficent, life-enhancing .. . (Nietzsche,
1967a, p. 423)
But like any value (e.g. the good, the true), beauty is both "relative" and
"shortsighted". (lbid.) Art's true importance is its role in expressing the
Dionysian experience captured as the totality and unity of the corporeal-
psychical. And ultimately, our experience of the beautiful assumes its meta-
physical value as the means to approach our Being. Rapture represents this
living nature of man. "If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic
doing and observing, one physiological precondition is indispensable: rapture"
(Heidegger, 1979, p. 96). Nietzsche's definitions of emotion, passion and affect
are indistinct (Heidegger, 1979, p. 45), but rapture offers the basis for linking
the will to human experience and psychic reality. For it is the experience of
beauty as the spiritually highest form of pleasure (the pleasure of life asserting
itself and surviving) that closes the circle.
IV
The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it.

Edmund Husserl
Just as Nietzsche in a furious tantrum rejected the notion of a dispassionate,

objective science as meaningful - science and logical positivists rejected a
personalized world. But we know that science may be experienced aestheti-
cally, and in this sense can be meaningfully, i.e. personally, experienced, and
correspondingly we mayaiso reject Nietzsche's radical skepticism that does
not allow for a knowing self, a cognitive, knowing being. The issue however
is to recognize the limitations of each exclusion. Various philosophical schools
have attempted to in te grate the self as a conscious, objective knower, who
experiences subjectively. The purging of such a complex perceiver, from either
philosophy or science, removes the subject who must integrate experience.
Only an arbitrating self, with "objective" and "subjective" faculties may
encounter its object and know it. In the process of objectifying the object of
scientific scrutiny, the subject is truncated. In the general acceptance of a
scientific inductive and mechanical ideal, the personal has been rejected.
Descartes' separation of mind and body simply formalized a split between
the "I" and the "world" - even between the "self" and the "body" in which
it lives (Leder, 1990). The objectification of nature, in order to study it,
separated, or better, distanced man from intimate involvement. From an
objective perspective, projection of the Self contaminated the process of knowl-
edge. Goethe clearly identified the problem in the early period of the Romantic
era, and Nietzsche proclaimed an irredeemable chasm between the possi-
bility of objective knowledge and personal meaning. Goethe's was a lonely,
doomed heroic effort, and Nietzsche's argument, although the obverse of the
positivists'position, also rejects a composite, or holistic, ideal that might
attempt to incorporate a sterile science. Thus Nietzsehe, in separating personal
experience from what he viewed as a despotic rationality, adhered to the
rejection of an ascetic science. In this sense, he articulated the Two Cultures
chasm, but placed the disjunction within the individual. This essential split
is no longer a dissonance to our sensibility, but a readily recognized response
to positivism's attempted hegemony. To our modem ear, Nietzsche's disclaimer
has become familiar and sympathetically understood by many. And corre-
spondingly, the aestheticization of the post-modem experience from Nietzsehe
to Foucault (Tauber, 1995) taps into a nostalgic desire for re-union of a self,
integrated with its world, and within.
When one views an object aesthetically, one lives in the object in the sense that one allows
oneself to be entirely swayed by the laws of the object without any opposition upon one's own
part . ... The aesthetic attitude may be likened to rowing downstream with the current and
following all of its windings. One is here active in that one moves with the stream, but
passive in that one opposes no resistance to the force which is carrying one on. The attitude
is lost when one attempts to push upstream or off on the side eddy of one's choice. One is
reminded of an illustration by Fidus of children in a boat paddling with the stream who
think they are pushing while in reality they are drifting with the current. (Langfeld, 1920,
pp. 59-60)
This sense of integration, of the self firmly embedded in its engagements,

where subject-object dichotomies are dissolved, represents the triumph of
Nietzsche's Dionysian psyche. It profoundly reflects a nostalgia for a world
made whole again, but now based on a passionate rationality. Heidegger
eloquently describes the process in Nietzsche's aesthetic:
Rapture as astate of feeling explodes the very subjeclivity of the subject. By having a feeling
for beauty the subject has already come out of himself; he is no longer subjective, no longer a
subject. On the other side, beauty is not something at hand like an object of sheer represen1a-
tion. As an attuning, it thoroughly determines that state of man. Beauty breaks through the
confinement of the object placed at a distance, standing on its own, and brings it into essenti, I
and original correlation to the subject. Beauty is no longer objective, no longer an object. Thl'
aesthetic state is neither subjective nor objective. Both basic words of Nietzsche 's aesthetics,
rapture and beauty, designate with an identical breadth the entire aesthetic state, what is opened
up in it and what pervades it. (Heidegger, 1979, p. 123)
Nevertheless there is no point in arguing for imposition of the subjective

into scientific methodology. At the same time to displace the personal from
scientific experience is to deny a large measure of the human dimension of
the endeavor. The attempt to completely separate the subject from its object
is a crucial development in science and has led to the exclusion of all elements
deemed inappropriate to a methodology governed only by rigorous logic and
impersonal objectivity. But the scope of the enterprise is thus reduced and
thereby impoverished as a personally meaningful activity. How does one
address the problem of establishing a humane science? It is insufficient to
merely call upon such notions as "key insight", "beautiful experiments", and
"elegant theory", as glosses for the "extra-scientific" aspects of the experiences
of a few scientists of titanic creativity. The very fabric of everyday science,
beyond its drudgery and frustration, must embody recognition and realiza-
tion of a personalized ideal which also governs the endeavor. My thesis, quite
simply, is that the scientist, just as the poet, draws upon the same aesthetic
resources as a primary component of his experience. The thesis may be
approached by a variety of stratagems, but is oriented by recognizing that
science, in functioning as a creative endeavor, must acknowledge the personal
component, which is best discerned as aesthetic. Almost two centuries ago,
Goethe keenly understood our modern predicament, embracing the notion
that the poet's eye might serve science in seeking Nature's true design:
Nowhere would anyone grant that science and poetry can be uni ted. They forgot that science
arose from poetry, and did not see that when limes change the two can meet again on a higher
level as friends. (Goethe, 1817b)
The aesthetic in this sense serves as one crucial dimension of unified expe-
rience. In short, of the many facets of science, we seek an elusive synthesis
of the objective, qua scientific, with the subjective, qua aesthetic, or better
"personal" .
The question is in fact more fundamental than simply see king links between
rational and emotional experience. It may be traced to a duality erected with
Cartesian skepticism, where a knowing subject, tom between empirical and
rational modes of understanding the world, became more and more self-
reflective, i.e. disengaged from the plenum of existence. Science was based
on this disinterested ob server, relying solelyon an empiricism molded by a
positivist rationality. By exploring the consequences of an imperialistic rational
science, we discem that other modes of experience are left bereft of the ratio-
nalism invoked by "objectivity" and are left adrift to discover their own
philosophical foundations. At the heart of the elusive synthesis of aesthetics
and science is the quest for their common philosophical foundation. The
problem was posed dramatically by Edmund Husserl in The Crisis 0/ European
Sciences:
Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people .... Scientific, objective truth
is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as weil as the spiritual
world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if
the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion ... ? (Husserl,
[1935], 1970, pp. 6--7)
Wh at beg an as Descartes' Dream, a philosophy that seeks to encompass in

the unity of a theoretical system all meaningful questions in a rigorous sci-
entific manner, has left science as Ha residual concept" (ibid., p. 9). By this,
Husserl notes that "metaphysical" or "philosophieal" problems that should still
be broadly linked to science under the rubric of rational inquiry are sepa-
rated over the criterion of "fact". In a powerful sense, "positivism . . .
decapitates philosophy" (ibid.) by legitimizing one form of knowledge at the
expense of another. Husserl highlighted the distinction between science, a
produci of reason, and reason in its existential and metaphysical role that serves
as the vitaJ source of scientific inquiry. It was a powerful reflection on the
perils of fruitfulness, which obfuscates that science is genuine - rationally
grounded - only as long as it remains conscious of its philosophical basis,
which is its starting point and foundation (Patocka, 1989, p. 226 and Harvey,
1989). The crisis of the schism profoundly challenges the meaning of the
sciences, a question we have posed in seeking the common ground of science
and aesthetics. This is but a manifestation of a more fundamental problem.
[U]ltimately, all modem sciences drifted into a peculiar, increasingly puzzling crisis with regard
to the meaning of their original founding as branches of philosophy, a meaning wh ich they
continued to bear within themselves. This is a crisis which does not encroach upon the theoretical
and practical successes of the special sciences: yet it shakes to the foundations the 'whole meaning
of their truth. (Husserl [1935], 1970, p. 12)
For Husserl, the crisis was not limited to "science" or Hphilosophy", but
reflected a fundamental challenge to European cultural life, its total Existenz,
the very collapse of a universal philosophy. We are left with a profound
skepticism of defining a unifying metaphysics. Scientific reason is assigned
to govern one domain of knowledge, and another kind of reason is left to
matters of value and ethics. As a result of this division, we have witnessed

the collapse of belief in absolute reason (ibid., p. 13). Modem man is now truly
tom between a naive faith in reason and the skepticism which negates or
repudiates it in empiricist fashion.
Unremittingly, skepticism insists on the validity of the factually experienced world, that of actual
experience, and finds in it nothing of reason or its ideas. Reason itself and its [object], "that which
is", become more and more enigmatic .... [WIe find ourselves in the greatest\danger of drowning
in the skeptical deluge and thereby losing our hold on our own truth. (lbid., pp. 13-14)
Husserl recognized the need to synthesize experience - the scientific and the
"personal". The "crisis" was at heart a reflection of the deeply divisive nature
of personal and objective knowledge, and he, like Whitehead (1925), sought
to establish a common philosophical grounding for each sphere of experience. 13
We can only note here that the usual discussion takes place in a somewhat
disguised mode, which in our particular case has been presented as the elusive
synthesis of aesthetics and science. This latter issue is but a subset of the deeper
metaphysical schism.
When the physicist Paul Dirac said, "it is more important that a theory be
beautiful than that it be true",14 he did not proclaim qualitative equivalence
as did lohn Keats ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty"), but offered the sense of
the beautiful as paramount, which ultimately translates into an emotional
reaction. Dirac's proclarnation jolts as it challenges the usual perception of
scientific inquiry; but it is neither a novel assessment, nor a radical position.
Instead, it reverberates as only an apparent contradiction might, for beneath
our initial incredulity, a responsive recognition is sensed. However, Dirac's
pronouncement falls prey to the disjunction of the rational scientific from
the emotive beautiful. In the very separation of beauty from truth we perhaps
might be satisfied with Keats' assignment of equality, or at least comple-
mentarily, in as much as "truth" fulfills certain necessary criteria and "beauty",
others. Dirac delineates them as different and hierarchical. In a most profound
sense, by separating truth and beauty, we admit a potentiallY debilitating
dichotomy. We have become self-conscious of the "beautiful" or the "true"
as we intellectually ponder our experience. This division is enmeshed in the
very roots of Western thinking. Pretechnical cultures allOW for little separa-
tion of subject-object encounters. The mythic reality fuses the subject's
dimensions into a continuous uni verse of affect and effect. But in our intel-
lectualizations, our separation of the self from its world, where we become
detached ob servers in our strategy to claim mastery, we define "truth" in
terms separate from our-selves. To discern truth is to comprehend a reality
beyond ourselves, knowable and, to be sure, understood in our terms, but to
discem "beauty" is to experience some reality emotionally, to participate
directly in a communal sharing between the object and the experiencing
subject. 15 It lies closer to that mythic unity of subject with its object. 16 It is
this acknowledgement of the self, the personal I, which is both defined in
the perceptive experience, and expanded in its encounter with its object that
qualifies and defines aesthetic experience. The immediate objection is that

scientific truth also, albeit in a different dimension, defines the self in the
context of its world. There is no denial of that claim, but I contend that the
personal self must fully reside in the world. The prevailing project of twen-
tieth century existential phenomenologists was to describe how authenticity
demanded a self-conscious search of our true essence. The drive toward objec-
tive contemplation, logical analysis, scientific classification cuts us off from
that being in the world. Always to scrutinize is to divorce ourselves from
personal meaning (Polanyi, 1962). The dissection of the world yields a kind
of knowledge which must still be integrated meaningfully. To analyze a painting
"scientifically" eannot yield its expressive eontent - how you are, alone with
the image as your own experienee. Similarly, the seientifie objeet may reside
seemingly separate - "out there" - the foeus of an inquiry of what it is - in
itself - (ignoring the philosophieal diffieulties of that expeetation), but the issue
is to integrate that objeet to our true experience, rational and emotional.
The seareh for this eommon ground is the elusive synthesis of our very
selves in a world ever more objeet-ified from US o No wonder the "problem"
of aesthetics and scienee remains - a beguiling reminder of the lingering
fault of our very experienee.
Boston University
NOTES
I The conflict is often traced to the unleashing of Descartes' mind·body dualism, which bequeaths
a dilemma to both the subject and its world, to render whole that which is broken asunder.
The Cartesian method imparts a tension, for in dissecting the world into parts it offers no
means for those elements to become reintegrated. The holistic design is lost (Grosholz, 1991).
Holism, as a philosophical construct, grew out of seventeenth century debate over the meta-
physical structure of Nature. In response to the dualistic construction of mind and body proposed
by Descartes, Spinoza endeavored to unify the schism by transcending the alternative primacy
of either mind or body with a new concept, substance: absolute, infinite and unknowable.
Spinozean pantheism was the direct antecedent to the Romantic notion of Nature's unity
(McFarland, 1969), and to the extent that this holistic construct formed the metaphysical response
to Descartes' mechanistic philosophy, it became associated with an anti-mechanical solution to
the problem of life's unique property. Where, what, or how was the organic then to be defined?
Romantic biology invoked a strategem that combined vitalism and teleology. Logically inde-
pendent of each other, they were to be generally viewed as inter-related. The eventual ascendency
of a reductionist science was achieved by mid-nineteenth century in the research program to reject
vitalism, waged by the German reductionist physiologists, and by aseparate tributary, a mate-
rialistically based evolution invoked by Darwinism (Lenoir, 1989). Teleology has suffered a much
slower expiration, and appears in new guises (i.e. Mayr, 1992), but is largely irrelevant to modem
discourses of scientific biology. We are heirs to the conflict waged by the reductionists against
Romantic scientists, who were governed by a holistic ideal.
2 The literature is vast, whether we look for comment in the mathematical, whether pure (e.g.
Dirac, 1982; Penrose, 1974) or applied (e.g. Weyl, 1952 or Kappraff, 1991), physics (e.g.
Shlain, 1991), biological (e.g. Thom, 1983; Thompson, 1917 or Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer,
1990) or chemical realms (e.g. Hoffmann, 19990; Anand, Bindra, Ranganathan, 1988). A modem
compendium wou1d be most useful!
3 According to Fink, Goethe's history of science dates to the correspondence with Schiller in
January, 1798. Goethe reported to Schiller that his historical analysis revealed a mirror of the
scientist's self, and it was his intention to write "an aper~u on all of it". (Fink, 1991, p. 76) In
the ensuing letters, Goethe sketched a history of color where he hoped to make "some nice obser-
vations of the human mind". Correspondingly, a transition of terms occurred: From "history"
to "historiography", where a theory of the origins and development of human science and thought
became the focus of interest. This change self-consciously followed Kant's 1788 essay, "On
the Use of Teleological Principles" and was expanded by Schiller in the next year in his
inaugural address, "Why and to what end do we study history?" Kant distjnguished between
"natural history" (Naturgeschichte) and "natural description" (Naturbeschreibung); whereas
the natural sciences might be reduced to theory, the life sciences required teleological princi-
pies. History in this scheme then applied to a description of the present state of affairs, i.e. of
the natural sciences, whereas historiography would seek the origin and development of life.
Schiller extended Kant's distinctions in his discussions with Goethe ten years later.
Historiography, more broadly applied, still would be guided by concepts of purpose and the
historical past would then be reconstructed with an eye to the future.
4 Goethe regarded such histories as falsely presenting a logical pattern of development, where
the origin and f10w of events were vague and at times deceptive. Apriori histories may be
useful, but Goethe's comprehensive and penetrating historical investigations were distinguished
by his attempt to establish the relationship between the growth of knowledge and the human
factors shaping that development. Thus he was critically concerned with the social and psy-
chological dimension of scientific practice, which is best documented in his analysis of the
Newtonian research paradigm. In this light, we might be more sympathetic to the fusion of
polemics and history with descriptive sciences in Farbenlehre. For Goethe, to reach into the
past was to legitimize his scientific vision, so despised by the scientific community of his time.
S This point may be best illustrated by examining Goethe's own scientific biography. He
witnessed a major shift in biology between two distinct modes of thought, as exemplified in
the Cuvier-Saint-HiIaire debates, which he observed with great interest. Simply stated, the dispute
was a watershed between a static view of nature challenged by one where process was cen-
trally reflected. In Goethe's view, this conceptual conflict reflected a crisis in French zoological
language that employed unsuitable metaphors (Fink, 1991).
6 "The theories which embody our scientific ideas as a whole are, of course, indispensible as
representations of science .... But as these theories and ideas are by no means immutable
truth, one must always be ready to abandon them .... In a word, we must alter theory to adapt
it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory" (Bernard [1865]; 1927, p. 39). Bernard had a
similarly sophisticated appreciation of facts: "A fact is nothing in itself, it has value only
through the idea connected with it or through the proof it supplies. We have said elsewhere
that, when one calls a new fact a discovery, the fact itself is not the discovery, but rather the
new idea from it; in the same way, when a fact proves anything, the fact does not itself give
the proof, but only the rational relation which it establishes between the phenomenon and its
cause. This relation is the scientific truth .... " (Bernard [1865] 1927, p. 53)
7 I would be amiss to suggest that positivism had completely subsumed and overpowered the
descriptive modalities. Note how John Merz, in his influential (and magisterial) review of nine-
teenth century thought, summarized the situation at the end of the century: "Clearly, besides
the abstract sciences, which profess to introduce us to the general relations or laws wh ich
govern everything that is or can be real, there must be those sciences which study the actually
existing forms as distinguished from the possible ones, and "here" and "there", the "where"
and "how", of things and processes, which look upon real things not as examples of the general
and universal, but as alone possessed of that mysterious something which distinguishes the
real and actual from the possible and artificial. These sciences are the truly descriptive sciences,
in opposition to the abstract ones. They are indeed older than the abstract sciences, and they
have, in the course of the period under review in this work, made quite as much progress as
the purely abstract sciences. In a manner, though perhaps hardly as powerful in their influence
on practical pursuits, they are more popular; they occupy a larger number of students; and
inasmuch as they also comprise the study of man hirnself, they have a very profound influence
on our latest opinions, interests, and beliefs - i.e., on our inner life" (Merz, 1896, Vol. 2,
pp. 203-204).
8 Zarathustra's anthem - the ethos of self-overcoming ("I am that which must always overcome
itself' (1959c, p. 227», and the eternal recurrence "Everything breaks, everything is joined anew;
eternally the same house of being is built ... bent is the path of eternity" (ibid., pp. 329-330)
- must be assumed in this brief discussion. I believe the roots of this philosophy are traced to
Nietzsche's biologicism, where an organic self-awareness is espoused. A keen cognizance of
the body's truths, which Nietzsehe delineates as the ethic of true emotion and a pledge to a
full self-consciousness, must begin with the body. This attitude serves as the foundation of his
psychology, morality, and epistemology, matters to wh ich only the barest allusion is made here
(Tauber, 1994 and 1995).
9 "In feeling oneself to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a
way that the body in its bodily state permeates the self. We do not 'have ' a body in the way
we carry a knife in a sheath. Neither is the body a natural body that merely accompanies us
and which we can establish, expressly or not, as being also at hand . We do not 'have' a body;
rather we 'are' bodily. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, belongs to the essence of such Being"
(Heidegger, 1979, pp. 98-99).
10 Nietzsche has long been celebrated as a critical author of the modern psyche, credited with
"uncovering" or "unmasking" the unconscious (Ellenberger, 1970; Golumb, 1989; Jung, 1988).
"I maintain the phenomenality of the inner world , too: everything of wh ich we become con-
scious is arranged, simplified, schematized, interpreted through and through - the actual process
of inner 'perception', the causal connection between thoughts, feelings, desires, between subject
and object, are absolutely hidden from us - and are perhaps purely imaginary. The 'apparent
inner world' is governed by just the same forms and procedures as the 'outer' world. We never
encounter 'facts'" (Nietzsche, 1967a, pp. 263-264). The disguised needs for pleasure and struggle,
the instinctual power of sexuality and destruction, and the subtlety of the instincts' vicissi-
tudes, illusory compensations, sublimations, inhibitions, vicarious discharges, and most
problematic, their erstwhile control by consciousness, are each topics of his reflecting and led
to fertile development in the twentieth century. They may be considered as the common source
of Freud, Adler and Jung, but beyond recognizing the unconscious and its power, Nietzsche
was a major architect of its celebration.
11 Concomitantly, there must then be an ethical structure to "organize" Nietzsche ' s psychology,
to provide it with "purpose" (Tauber, 1993). We might apply a coordinate system, where expe-
rience (based in the horizontal organic axis) is "raised" in a vertical moral dimension. Position
is thus dictated by "positioning" morality and psychology upon linked coordinates, intimately
entwined. The ethical dimension is based on the revaluation of values, assuming responsibility
for our self in full cognizance of the biological basis of man's being. For us to become free spirits,
Nietzsche preached an "integrity which, having become instinct and passion, wages war against
the 'holy lie' even more than against any other lie" (Nietzsche, 1959b, p. 609). In a variety of
contexts, Nietzsche denounces the separation of man ' s instincts by a restrictive morality or
intelligence/rationality. He attributes both nihilism and disease to this basic distortion: "man's
suffering of man, of hirnself - the result of a forcible sundering from his animal past, as it
were a leap and plunge into new surroundings and conditions of existence, a declaration of
war against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy and terribleness had res ted hitherto"
(Nietzsche, 1967b, p. 85).
12 Interesting, in Nietzsche' s last writings, the same metaphor is used in its negation, to defend
art (Art is not "purposeless, aimless, senseless - in short ['art pour ['art, a worm chewing its
own tail" (Nietzsche, 1959a, p. 529».
IJ As my colleague Erazim Kohäk notes, given Husserl's conception of rationality as meaningful
ordering, beauty becomes one of the categories of rationality! This is not a matter explicitly
dealt with by Husserl, but remains an intriguing avenue to explore from his perspective.
14 Quoted by Charles Hartshorne as heard in a lecture (Hartshorne, 1982), Dirac c1early empha-
sized a mathematical-aesthetic method at the expense of inductive empiricism: " A theory of
mathematical beauty is more likely to be correct than an ugly one that fits some experimental
data" and "there are occasions when mathematical beauty should take priority over agreement
with experiment" (Kragh, 1990 quoting Dirac, p. 284). Or again, "It is more important to have
beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment" (Dirac, 1963). This so-called Dirac-
Weyl doctrine in fact can be traced in modem physics to Hermann Minkowski, but perhaps of
more influence for Dirac was Einstein, who was guided by principles of simplicity and exhib-
ited legendary confidence in his equations of gravitation theory. Dirac and many other physicists
of his time, regarded Einstein's gravitation theory as created virtually without empirical reason-
ing, although Einstein hirnself was more circumspect in his trust in aesthetic parameters (Kragh,
1990, pp. 286-287). The entire issue of the subjectivity and changing standards of aesthetic criteria
are of course beyond our concern, but have focused much discussion on this issue. (See Kragh,
1990, pp. 288-293; Rescher. 1990; McAllister, 1990; Chandrasekhar, 1987.)
15 When discussing science and aesthetics, we have difficulty deciding where to draw the line
between psychology and philosophy. It is particularly vexing because the intersection of the
discursive languages are incomplete, and even at cross purposes. I have chosen not to dweil
on the issues of how we recognize natural beauty; geometric form and other visual metaphors
generally fulfill criteria of form that we "perceive" as beautiful. But whether the appreciation
of a phenomenon or form as beautiful is learned (i.e. culturally derived), or in fact fulfills
some resonant cognitive nmction remains a vexing question (Rentschler et al., 1988). Such matters
often serve as the discussion of the aesthetic dimension in science. More to the point, despite
its centrality, to pose the question in these terms is to ignore the more fundamental problem
this issue evokes.
16 The merging of the subject and object in mythical and magical cultures has been exhaus-
tively studied. Whether viewed from a neo-Kantian (Cassirer, 1955), structuralist (Levi-Strauss,
1966), psychoanalytic (Neumann, 1954) or aesthetic perspective (Gauguin, 1921), the crucial
elements of the mythical universe are a psychie-religious belief system and cognitive world
view that collapse the subject-object dichotomy. This is the origin of the self-conscious espousal
of a Nietzschean return to the Dionysian, whieh is obviously contrasted with the analytic posture
characterized by a subject scrutinizing its object, and in the same gesture striving to define
itself. Not trusting its context from which only indistinct boundaries might arise, modem man
is denied the ability to simply identify, and thus merge, with a magical world. A particularly
powerful example is the contrasting role of the artist. The self-consciousness of the artist in
our culture, in contrast to the head-hunting Asmet of New Guinea, is a particularly poignant
case in point. A eogent observation was made by Michael L. RockefeIler on his visit to acquire
museum artefacts: "The Asmet eulture offers the artist a specifie language in form. This is a
language which every artist can interpret and use according to his genius, and a language which
has symbolie meaning for the entire culture. Our culture offers the artist no such language.
The result is that each painter or sculptor must discover his own means of communicating in
form. Only the greatest genuises are able to invent an expression which has meaning for a
nation or people" (letter of November 16, 1961 cited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
Y ork, exhibit of New Guinea art).
REFERENCES
Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp. Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1953).
Amrine, F., Zucker, F. J. and Wheeler, H., ed., Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal
[Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 97) (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co.,
1987).
Anand, N., Bindra, J. S. and Ranganathan, S., Art in Organic Synthesis (New York: John Wiley
and Sons, 1988).
Bamouw, J., 'Goethe and HeImholtz: Science and Sensation', in F. Amrine et al., Goethe and
the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 45-82.
Bernard, c., An Introduction to Experimental Medieine [1865], trans. by H. C. Green (New York:
Dover Publications Inc. (Reissue of 192:7 English edition».
Buchwald, 1. Z., The Rise 0/ the Wave Theory 0/ Light. Optical Theory and Experiment in the
Early Nineteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chieago Press, 1989).
Canguilhem, G., The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
Cassirer, E., The Philosophy 0/ Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2, Mythicäl Thought (New Haven: Yale
Chandrasekhar S., Truth and Beauty. Aesthetics and Motivations in Science (Chieago: The
University of Chieago Pres, 1987).
Dirac, P. A. M., 'The evolution of the physieist's pieture of nature', Sei. Am. 208: 45-53,
1963.
Dirae, P. A. M., 'Pretty mathematics', Int. J. Theor. Phys. 21: 603-605, 1982.
Ellenberger, H. F., The Discovery o/the Unconscious. The History and the Evolution 0/ Dynamic
Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 271-278.
Fink, K. 1., Goethe's History 0/ Seience (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
Forbes, E. G., 'Goethe's vision of science' , in Common Denominators 0/ Art and Seien ce
(Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), pp. 9-15.
Galaty, D. H., 'The philosophical basis of mid-nineteenth century German reductionism', J.
Hist. Med. Allied Sei. 29: 295-316, 1974.
Gauguin, P., Intimate Journals (New York: Liveright, 1921).
Goethe, 1. W., [1790] 'The metamorphosis of plants', in Goethe's Botanical Writings, trans.
and ed. by B. Mueller (Woodbridge: Oxbow Press, 1989).
Goethe, 1. W., [1792] 'The experiment as mediator between objeet and subject', in Seientific
Studies, ed. and trans. by D. Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Pub1ishers, 1988), pp. 11-17.
Goethe, 1. W., [1794] 'The extent to whieh the idea "Beauty is Perfeetion in Combination with
Freedom" may be applied to 1iving organisms', in Seientific Studies, ed. and trans. by D.
Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), pp. 22-23.
Goethe, 1. W., [1810] 'Theory of eolours', in Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. by D. Miller
(New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), pp. 157-298.
Goethe, 1. W., [1817a] 'The influenee of modem philosophy', in Scientific Studies, ed. and
! trans. by D. Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), pp. 28-30.
Goethe, 1. W., [1817b] 'History of the printed broehure', in Goethe's Botanical Writings, trans.
and ed. by B. Mueller (Woodbridge: Oxbow Press, 1989), pp. 170-176.
Goethe,1. W., [1823] 'Signifieant help given by an ingenious turn ofphrase', in Seientific Studies,
ed. and trans. by D. Miller (New York: Suhrkamp Publishers, 1988), pp. 39-41.
Golumb, 1., Nietzsche's entieing Psychology 0/ Power (lowa State University Press, 1989).
Grosholz, E. R., Cartesian Method and the Problem 0/ Reduction (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991).
Hartshorne c., 'Science as the seareh for the hidden beauty of the world', in D. W. Curtin
(ed.), The Aesthetic Dimension 0/ Science, 1980 Nobel Con/erence (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1982), pp. 85-106.
Harvey, C. W., Husser/' s Phenomenology and the Foundations 0/ Natural Seience (Athens: Ohio
Heidegger, M., Nietzsehe Vol. 1, trans. by D. F. Krell (San Franciseo: Harper, 1979).
Heisenberg, W., 'The teaehings of Goethe and Newton on colour in the light of modem physies',
in Philosophical Problems 0/ Quantum Physics (Woodbridge: Oxbow Press, 1979), pp. 60-76.
Hoffmann, R., 'Moleeular beauty', J. Aesth. Art Crit. 48: 191-204, 1990.
Holmes, F. L., Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1974).
Husserl, E., The Crisis 0/ European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [1935]
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
1ung, C. G., Nietzsche's Zarathustra (2 volumes) (Prineeton: Prineeton University Press, 1988).
Kant, 1., Critique 0/ Judgement [1790], trans. by W. S. Pluhar (lndianapolis: Hackett Publishing
Co., 1987).
Kappraff, J., Connections. The Geometrie Bridge Between Art and Seien ce (New York: McGraw-
Hili, 1991).
Kragh H., Dirae, A Seientific Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Kremer, R. L., The Thermodynamies 0/ Li/e and Experimental Physiology 1770-1880 (New York:
Garland Publishing Co., 1990).
Langfeld, H. S., The Aesthetie Attitude (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).
Leder, D., The Absent Body (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Lenoir, T., The Strategy 0/ Life. Teleology and Meehanies in Nineteenth Century German Biology
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel Pub!. Co., 1982 and re-issued by University of Chicago Press, 1989).
Levi-Strauss, c., The Savage Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966).
Mayr, E., 'The idea of teleology' , J. Hist Ideas 53: 117-135, 1992.
McAIIister, J. W., 'Dirac and the aesthetic evaluation of theories', Meth. Sei. 23: 87-102,
1990.
McFarland, T., Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
Mead, G. H., Movements o/Thought in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1936).
Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology 0/ Pereeption, trans. by C. Smith (London: Routledge,
1962).
Merz, J. T., A History 0/ European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. 1-4 [1896) (New
York: Dover Publications Inc., 1965).
Morrissey, R. J., 'Introduction. Jean Starobinski and Othemess', in Jean-Jaeques Rousseau.
Transpareney and Obsrruction, trans. by A. Goldhammer (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
Neumann, E., The Origins and History 0/ Conseiousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1954).
Nietzsche, F., 1956, The Birth 0/ Tragedy, trans. by F. Golffing (Garden City, New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956).
Nietzsche, F., 1959a, Twilight 0/ the Idols in The Portable Nietzsehe, ed. and trans. by W.
Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 463-563 .
Nietzsche, F., 1959b, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by W . Kaufman
(ed.) (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 568-656.
Nietzsche, F., 1959c, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsehe, ed. and trans. by W.
Kaufmann (ed.) (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), pp. 112-439.
Nietzsche, F., 1967a, The Will to Power, trans. by W . Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New
York: Vintage Books, 1967).
Nietzsehe, F., 1967b, On the Genealogy 0/ Morals, trans. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1967).
Nietzsche, F., 1982, Daybreak, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
Olson, R., Seienee Deijied and Seienee Defied. The Historieal Signijicanee 0/ Seienee in Western
Culture, Vol. 2, From the Early Modern Age through the Early Romantic Era (Berkeley:
University of Califomia Press, 1991).
Patoeka, J., Philosophy and Selected Writings, ed. and trans. by E. Kohäk (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 223-238.
Penrose, R., 'The role of aesthetics in pure and applied mathematical research', Bull, Instit. Math.
Applie. 10: 266-271, 1974.
Polanyi, M., Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1962).
Postlethwaite, D., Making it Whole. A Victorian Circle and the Shape o/Their World (Columbus:
Ohio State University Press, 1987).
Prusinkiewicz, P. and Lindenmayer, A., The Algorithmie Beauty 0/ Plants (New York: Springer-
Verlag, 1990).
Rehbock, R. F., The Philosophical Naturalists. Themes in Early Nineteenth Century British
Biology (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
Rentschler, L., Herzberger, 8. , and Epstein, D. (eds.), Beauty and the Brain. Biological Aspects
oJ Aesthetics (Basel: Birkhauser Verlag, 1988).
Rescher, N., Aesthetic Factors in Naturai Science (Lanham: University Press of America 1990).
Sepper, D. L., Goethe Contra Newton. Polemics and the Project Jor a New Sense oJ Color
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Sepper, D. L., 'Goethe against Newton: Towards saving the pheRomenon ' , in F. Amrine et al.
(eds.), Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing Co., 1987),
pp. 175-193.
Shlain, L., Art and Physics. Parallel Visions in Space , Time and Light (New York: William
Morrow and Co., 1991).
Snow, C. P., The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).
SorelI, T., Scientism: Philosophy and the InJatuation with Science (London: Routledge, 1991).
Tauber, A. 1., 1993, 'Goethe's philosophy of science: Modem resonances' , Perspect. Biol. Med.
36: 244-257, 1993.
Tauber, A. 1.,1994, 'A typology of Nietzsche's biology', Biol. Phil. 9: 24-44, 1994.
Tauber, A. 1., 'On the transvaluation of values: Nietzsche contra Foucault', in K. Gavroglu
and M. Wartofsky (eds.), Science. Mind and Art [Boston Studies in the Philosophy oJ Science,
vol. 165], Papers in Honor of Robert Cohen (Dordrecht: K1uwer Academic Publishers, 1995),
pp. 349-367.
Thom, R., Mathematical Models oJ Morphogenesis, trans. by W. M. Brookes (New York: Halsted
Press, 1983).
Thompson, D., On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917).
Wells, G. A., 'Goethe's qualitative optics', J. Hist. [deas 32: 617--626, 1971.
Weyl, H., Symmetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952).
Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan Co., 1925).
NAME INDEX
Aalto, Alvar 157 Besseler, Heinrich 22

Abrams, M.H. 291 Beveridge, William 59
Adler, A. 308 Bindra, I.S . 306
Agassiz, Louis 61, 128 Blanc, Charles 263
Akeley, Carl 276, 277 Blinderman 131
Alberti, Leon Batista 236, 257 Blake, William 31
Alexander, Edward P. 286 Blaschka, Leopold 287
Alfv~n, Hans 67 Blaschka, Rudolph 287
Allen 136 Boas 245
Amrein, F. 291, 292 Boccioni, Umberto 54
Anand, N. 306 Boell, E.l. 131
Anderson, lohn M. 286 Bohr, Niels 61, 62, 73, 227, 240-246
Apollonius of Perga 178 Boltzmann, Ludwig 57
Argang, Emile 70 Bouguereau 265
Aristotle 128, 135, 177, 194, 200, 213, Bouts, Dirk 237
261 Boveru, Theodor 128
Amheim, Rudolf 63, 74 Brackenridge,I.B. 178, 184
Ashmole, lohn 286 Brahe, Tycho 180, 182, 183
Braque 54, 199
Bacon, Francis 128, 297 Breault, Sandra D. 278
Baer, Karl Ernst von 137, 141 Brenner, Sydney 93
Bakker, Robert 74 Bronowski, lacob 58
Balla, Giacomo 54, 107 Brooke, Boothby 34
Baltrusaitis 246 Brouwer, L.EJ. 214
Banting, Frederick 60 Brown, Scott 254
Barbieri, Jacopo de 256 Brücke, Ernst 73
Bamouw, J. 291, 292 Bruman, Raymond 287
Barre, Alfred 252 Brumwell, Marcus 61
Barrett, P.H. 46 Brunelleschi, Fillipo 236, 257, 258
Barth, lohn 253 Buber, Martin 220
Baumgardner, I. 116 Buchsteiner 154
Beckmann 90 Buchwald, J.Z. 291
Beer, G. 45, 47, 48 Burgee, lohn 254
Beethoven, L. van 52, 54, 62, 72 Burkhardt, F. 46, 47
B~k~sy, Georg von 59 Burney, E. F 29, 30
Bell, Clive 252
Benjamin, Walter 123, 265 Cajal, Santiago Ramon y 58, 72
Benzer, Seymour 100 Calder, Alexander 260
Berenson, Bernard 251 Canguilhem, G. 298
Berger, lohn 265 Capa, Robert 164
Bernall, 1.0. 61 Carnap, Rudolf 195, 215
Bernard, Claude 68, 70, 77, 297, 298, Carus, Carl Gustav 19,27,46
307 Cassirer, Ernst 228,229,232, 233,238,239,
Bemini, Gian Lorenzo 105 245, 246, 309
Berrill, N.J. 135, 136, 140, 141 C~zanne, Paul 61, 106, \07,263
Bert, Paul 70 Chabay, Ham 284
313
314 NAME INDEX
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan 64, 67, 69, Dollinger 137

170,309 Donatello 258
Chase 100 Dostoievsky, Fiodor 270
Chavannes, Puvis de 265 Drach, Jules 52
Chevreul, Michel Eug~ne 263 Driesch, Hans 132, 138
Chiarenza 261 Duchamp, Marcel 54, 260, 261, 263
Clarac, Le Compte de 15, 16, 17, 18 Duhem, Pierre 57, 70
Clinic, Mayo 76 Dupr~, Louis 68
Cohen, I.B. 174, 176, 180 Durer, Albrecht 238, 256
Cohen, Marvin 76 Dussort, H. 245
Colp, Ralph 34, 37, 42, 46, 47, 48 Dyke, C. 141
Comte, Auguste 297, 298 Dyson, Freeman 62
Constable 191
Copenticus 173-175, 177-179, 186, 186, 189 Eco, Umberto 253
Copland, Aaron 56, 57, 64 Eddington, Arthur 67
Corbusier, Le 153, 154, 157 Edison, T.A. 73
Craig, Salisbury 35 Einstein, Albert 52, 61, 62, 69, 70, 106, 186,
Cranefield, Paul 73 260,261, 309
Crick, Francis 51, 53, 84, 93, 94, 161, 163 Eisenstein, Sergei 139
Cruger, P. 183, 184, 185 Eigin, C. 245
Csikszentmihalyi, Isabella Selega 288 Ellenberger, H.F. 308
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi 284, 285, 288 Ellis, lohn 264
Cunningham, A. 46 Ellison, l. 48
Cuvier 60, 307 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 68
Ephruss 161
Da Vinci, Leonardo 257, 261 Eshkol73
Daguerre, Louis-lacques 106 Espenak, Fred 108
Dalcq 141 Euclid 217
Dali, Salvador 261 Eyck, Jan Van 235
Dalou 265
Damasc~ne, lean 235 Faraday, M. 53
Dana, lohn Cotton 276 Feigenbaum, Mitchell 75
Darlington, C.D. 61 F~n~on 263
Darwin, Charles 13-24, 27, 29, 31-48, 53, Feuchtwanger, Leon 56
289,297 Feyerabend, Paul 190
Darwin, Anne Elizabeth 48 Feynman, Richard 51, 55, 63, 72
Dawis, Philipp J. 64 Fiedler, Leslie 253
Davy, Humphrey 49, 53 Fierz, M. 247
Debussy 195 Fink, KJ. 292, 293, 306, 307
Debye, Oeter 67 Flannery, Maura 129
DeCadolle 43 Forbes, E.G. 292
Dedekind 190,217 Ford 164
Degas, H.G.E. 265 Fortier, Claude Fran~ois 18
Delacroix 255 Fossey, Dian 67
DelbrOck, Max 84, 85, 86, 93, 94, 95, 162 Foster, Hai Ed 254
Descartes, Ren~ 190,205,224,238,242,244, Foucault, Michel 198, 302
289, 304, 305, 306 Fox, W.D 36
Detaille 259 Fraassen, B. van 245
Devereaux, Mary 255 Francesca, Piero della 236
Dewey, J. 131 Frank, P. 171
Dilthey 204, 205, 223 Freud, S. 308
Dinsmoor, William 192 Freund, Hans E. 286
Dirac, P.A.M. 63, 305, 306, 309 Friedrich, Caspar David 19, 20, 26, 30, 33
Dobzhansky, Theodosius 165 Fry, Roger 131, 181, 252
NAME INDEX 315
Fuller, Buckminster 74 Hamburger, Victor 133

Fulton, Robert 60, 72 Hanson, N.R. 176, 180, 185
Fusco, Coco 270 Haraway, Donna 60, 131, 276
Hardy, G.H. 62, 63
Gadamer, H. 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 223, Harrison, Granville Ross 131, 132, 135, 136
224 Hartshorn, Charles 308
Galaty, D.N. 289,292 Harver, C.W. 304
Galileo, Galilei 53, 61, 104, 105, 175, 184, Harvey, William 49
216 Hassan, Ihab 253
Galois, Evariste 52 Hegel, G.W.F. 208, 212, 216, 223, 224, 233
Gamov, George 161 Heidegger, Martin 204, 205, 207-212, 222-
Garcia, Manuel 72 224, 245, 270, 286, 301, 303, 308 .
Gauchy 57 Hein, Hilde 287
Gaudems, August St. 265 Heisenberg, Werner 63, 170,227,240-247,
Gauguin, Paul 263, 309 295
Gauss, Karl Friedrich 57, 106, 217 Heimholtz, Hermann von 53, 57, 73, 229,
GtrOme 259, 265 233, 234, 238, 289, 291
Gilberti, Lorenzo 258 Helthe, Paul G. 287
Gingerich 174, 176, 179 Hempel, C. 192, 194, 195
Giotto 235, 237 Heninger 177, 179
Gleick, James 75 Henn, T.R. 56, 64
Gödel 217-219, 264 Henry-Corrington, Sarah 46
Goethe, lW. von 131, 135, 141,233,244, Henslow 16, 17, 18, 19
245, 263, 290-297, 302, 303, 306, 307 Hepworth, Barbara 61
Gogh, V. van 263 Heraclides of Pontus 178
Golani, Ban 73 Herbert, S. 46
Goldschmidt, Richard 126, 133, 139 Herder 207
Goldsmith, Maurice 61 Hersh, Reuben 64
Golomb, S.W. 162 Herschel, John 19
Golumb, J. 308 Hershey 100
Gombrich, E.H. 191, 196 Hertwig, Oscar 132, 138, 139, 140
Gomez-Pena, Guilliermo 270 Hertz, Heinrich 229, 234
Goodall, Jane 67 Heschel, A.J. 128
Goode, George Brown 287 Hesiod 220
Goodman, Nelson 196, 215, 245 Hilbert 217-219
Goodrich, Edwin S. 60 Hindie, Brooke 60
Gossaert, G. 236 Hipparchus 178
Gould, SJ. 42,47, 126 Hipschmann, Ron 286
Graves, Michael 254 Hodge, MJ.S. 46
Greenberg, Clement 252 Hoff, J.H. 53, 60
Greene, John C. 47 Hoffmann, Roald 58, 306
Griffith 161 Holdermann, Carl Wilhelm 22
Gris 198, 199 Holbein, Hans 164
Gropius 157 Hollier, Denis 286
Gros 255 Holt, E.G. 46
Grober, H.E. 47 Holtfreter, Johannes 126, 134, 139
Holton, Gerald 70
Hacking, I. 227, 245 Homer, Winslow 265
Hadamard, Jacques 52, 71 Horgan, Paul 62, 77
Haden, Francis Seymour 60 Houseman, Lawrence 76
Haeckel, Ernst 128 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 17, 19,207,229,
Haldane, lB.S. 57 233, 241
Halern, Milton 74 Hume, David 297
Hallyn 176 Hunt, Holman 265
316 NAME INDEX
Husserl, Edmund 205, 223, 224, 247, 289, Lakatos, Imre 195
291,295, 304, 308 Lachtennan, D.R. 216
Hutchison 176 Langfeld, H.S. 302
Huxley, Aldous 57 Langham, 1. 48
Huxley, Julian 57 Latour 84
Laurikainen, K.V. 247
Ikegami 134 Lavine, Steven 287
Lavoisier, A.L. 189, 197
Jameson, Robert 19 Lawrence, Peter 127
Jacobi 57 Le Bel, Joseph 53
Jacobs, Jane 253 Leder, D. 302
James, William 299 Lederberg, Joshua 67
Jardine, N. 46 Leggeu 160
Jencks, Charles 157, 253 Leibig 53
Johns, Jaspers 260 Leibniz, G.W. 52, 190, 191,218,238
Johnson, Eastman 265 Lenoir, Tim 137, 306
Johnson, Philip 157,254 Leon, Warren 287
Jordan 246 Levinthal, Cyrus 85, 91, 92
Jordonova, L. 47 Uvi-Strauss, C. 309
Jung, Karl 73, 308 Lightman, Alan 52
Just, E.E. 126, 127, 129, 131, 132, 139 Lillie, Frank 138
Linderunayer, A. 306
Kandinsky, Vassily 110, 117, 118, 153, 154, Lipscomb 170
156 Lobatchevsky, Nikolas 106
Kant, Immanuel 131, 137, 190-192, 203- Locke, John 193
224, 228-234, 240, 242-245, 290, 291, Loeb 131
294, 296 Lomas, David 253
Kappraff, J. 306 Lorenz, Konrad 56, 67
Karp, Ivan 287 Lully, Raymond 218
Kassler, Jamie 60 Lwoff, Andr~ 162
Keats, John 305 Lyotard, Jean-Fran~ois 253
Keller, Evelyn Fox 68, 71
Kennedy, Alexander 76 Mach, Ernst 67
Kepler, Johannes 103, 182, 183, 185, 186, Macquarrie, J ohn 223
238, 243, 246, 247 Magriue, Ren~ 238, 245
Keynes, R.D. 46 Mains 142
King, Elaine 254 Malthus 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38
Kircher, Athanasius 238 Mandel'shtam, O. 224
Kirchhoff 57 Manet 63
Klee, Paul 110, 117, 153, 154 Mangold, Hilde 133
Kline, Morris 214 Maniatis 142
Knox, Robert 289 Marey, Etienne-Jules 259
Koenig, Karl Rudolph 73 Marion, J.L. 246
Koestler, Arthur 62 Marquardt, Linda A. 287
Kohak, Erazim 308 Martens, Conrad 21
Kohn, David 23, 25, 46, 47 Martin, John 15,26,27,28
Kordich 175 Martius 19
Koyre, A. 184 Marx, Karl 265
Kragh, H. 309 Masaccio 236, 258
Kramers 246 Masefield, John 75
Kremer, R.L. 289 Matisse, Henri 263
Kuhn, Thomas 50, 51, 53, 65, 171-174, Maxwell, James Clerk 52, 57, 62
176-177, 180, 182, 185, 189-200 Mayer 53
Kulik, Gary 287 Mayr, E. 46, 125, 306
NAME INDEX 317
MeAllister, J.W. 99, 176, 181, 182,309 Odin, Steve 66

MeClintoek 68, 71 Oldenberg, Claes 254
MeFarland, T. 306 01droyd, D. 48
MeGhee 142 Olson, R. 290
Mead, G.H. 297 O'Neil, Eugene 76
Meissonier 259 Onos, Frederieo De 253
Mellor, A.K. 48 Oppenheimer, Frank 284
Mendeleev 53 Orgel 161
Mendietta 261 Osbom, H.F. 287
Mendillo, M. 116 Oud, J.J.P. 157
Mendista, Ann 254 Owen, Riehard 142, 252
Merehant, C. 48 Oyama, Susan 140
Merz, John 307
Meselson, Matt 83, 100 Palter 175
Meyer, Hannes 157 Pander 137
Meyer, Lothar 53 Panofsky, Erwin 184, 228, 234-236, 238-
MeGillivray, William 18 240,246
Miehaels, Duane 261 Papert, Seumoir 64, 69
Michelson, Albert 58, 73 Paque, R. 247
Middleton, P. 48 Pater, Walter 252
Millais 265 Patocka, J. 304
Milton, John 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 32, 42, 46 Pauli, Wolfgang 69, 241-247
Minkowsky, Hermann 106 Pauling, Linus 62, 63, 74, 77
Moesgaard 176, 180 Peale, Charles Wilson 274, 275
Mohr 53 Peiree 195
Mondrian, P. 156 Penrose, Roger 74, 306
Monet, Claude 110, 144 Perugino, Pitrci 258
Monod, Jaeques 135 Petry, MJ. 224
Moore, Jim 45, 46, 47, 48 Philonenko, A. 245
Moran, Thomas 265 Picasso 54, 61
Morley 73 Pieree 199
Morgan, Thomas Hunt 126, 129 Planek, Max 69
Morris, Desmond 67, 74 Plato 199,200,203,204,213,214,221,222
Morrissey, R.J. 295 Plotin 224
Morse, Samuel 60 Poinear~, Henri 58, 77
Mozart, W.A. 57 Pointon, M.R. 46
Müller, Johannes 132, 137 Polanyi, Michael 66, 306
Muller, P. 184 Pollitt 170
Muybridge, Eadweard 259,260 Polykleitos 256
Popper, Karl 189, 192, 195
Naehmansohn, David 70 Postlethwaite, D. 291
Needham, Joseph 134 Poussin 237
Newman, Barnett 251 Rozenzweig, Roy 287
Newton, Isaak 61, 62, 65,106,216,244,261, Praxiteles 256
263, 295, 296 Priee 174
Newton-Smith 169 Priestley 189, 197
Neugebauer 176, 180 Provett, Septimus 28
Neumann, E. 309 Prusinkiewicz, P. 306
Neyman 176 Ptolemy 173, 174, 176, 177
Nicholson, Ben 61 Pythagoras 204, 213, 214
Nicolas de Cusa 246
Nietzsehe, Friedrich 223, 270, 291, 296, RandalI, Belinda 18
298-304, 308 RandalI, John Witt 18, 177
Novak, B. 47 Ranganathan, S. 306
318 NAME INDEX
Raphael258 Schoenberg 54
Rathke 137 Schotte, Oscar 125
Ratliff, Floyd 59 Schrodinger, Erwin 161
Rauschenberg, Robert 260 Schubert, F. 57
Read, Herbert 61 Schulze 157
Ready, Robert 46 Schwartz, Lilian 74
Rehbock, R.H. 289, 290 Schwartzschild, Karl 53
Reichenbach, H. 175 Secord, J.A. 46
Reinhold, Brahe 179 Secunda, Arthur 74
Rentscher, L. 309 Seidengart, J. 245
Rescher, N. 309 Sepper, D.L. 292, 293
Reymond, Emil :DuBois 73 Serrano, Andres 254, 261
Richards, E. 48 Settle, Ronald 46
Richards, LA. 66 Seurat, Georges 110, 111, 112, 113, 263
Richmond, George 31, 35 Shakespeare, William 52, 54
Riemann, Bemard 106 Shaler, Nathaniel 61
Rilke, R.M. 224 Sherman, Cindy 254
Ringlero, Aleta 286 Shlain, Leonard 251
Ritterbush 131 Sibley, Frank 191, 192
Robards, Jason 76 Signac, Paul 263
Robinson, Edward 223 Siler, Todd 77
RockefeIler, Michael L. 309 Simpson, Loma 254, 261
Rodin, A. 61, 265 Sinnott, Edmund 140
Rohe, Mies van der 153, 164, 165 Skywalker, Luke 290
RolI-Hansen 136 Slater 246
Rood, Ogden 263 Smith, Cyril Stanley 67, 71, 75
Rose 177 Smith, S. 46
Rosenwald, Julius 270 Snow, C.P. 50, 107,289,290
Rostand, Jean 127 Socrates 222, 255
Rothmann, C. 176 SorelI, T. 290
Rousseau, J.-J. 290 Spiegelman, Sol 127, 136
Roux, Wilhelm 136-140 Spinoza, B. de 306
Rubens, P. P. 30, 32 Spix 19
Rugendas, Maurice 15, 16, 17, 19 Stahl, Frank 83-100
Rupke, N.A. 46 Stam, Dough 254
Ruskun, John 252, 263 Stam, Mike 254
RusselI, J.L. 183 Stent, Gunther 85, 86, 99, 100
Stirling, James 254
Sachs, Julius 60 Stravinsky, I. 54
Sacks, Oliver 69 Swerdlow, N.M. 174, 176, 179
Said, Edward 253 Sylvester, Joseph 76
Saint-Hilaire, G. 142
Sapir, E. 245 Talbot, William Henry Fox 106
Sargent 265 Tauber, Alfred I. 292, 308
Sarkar, Sahotra 162 Taylor, Charles 224
Sautry, P.J. 46 Teitelbaum 73
Saxen 140 Thackera, John 265
Schelling 208, 222, 223 Thom, R. 306
Schild, Rudolf 121 Thompson, D. 306
Schiller, F. 208, 223, 233, 293, 295, 306, 307 Thompson, George 65
Schlegel, Friedrich 141 Tinbergen, Niko1aas 55, 56
Schlick, Moritz 234, 246 Toynbee, Amold 253
Schmidt, Maarten 52 Truesdell, Clifford 61, 72
Schneider, Max 22 Turing, A. 217-219
NAME INDEX 319
Tweedie, Sara 74 Westman 176, 180

Twitty, Victor 132 Weston, Edward 254
TyndalI, John 60 Weyl, Hermann 62,63,214,242,306
Whewell, Williarn 19, 289, 290
Ularn, Stan 67 Whistler 60, 265
Whitehead, A.N. 141, 214, 305
Val~ry, Paul 265 Whiteside, D.T. 183
Vedder, Elihu 265 Whitford 157
Vinograd, Jerome 92 Whitman, C.O. 138
Virchow 137 Whitman, Walt 289
Vogel, Susan 281 Whorf 245
Vuillaume 73 Wilkins, Maurice 95
Vuillemin 245 Willstätter, Richard 70
Wilson, E.B. 135, 139
Wachman 73 Wilson, E.O. 74
Waddington, C.H. 77, 139 Wilson, Mitchel 52, 53
Wallace 53 Winckelmann 246
Warburg, Amy 246 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 71
Watson, James 51, 53, 84, 91, 93, 94, 95, Woese 162
96,97,98 Wolfflin, Heinrich 235, 239, 246
Watts 265 Wood, David 76
Waugh, Joanne 253 Woodward, Robert Bums 52, 53, 58, 72
Weber, Carl Maria von 22 Woolgar 83
Weintraub 142 Wordsworth 14
Weiss, Paul 130, 136, 139, 143 Wright, Joseph of Derby 20, 30, 34
Weismann 138, 140
Weisskopf, Victor 62, 72, 75 Yockey 161
Wells, G.A. 292 Yoshimoto 133
Wengwood, Emma 36
Wemer 19 Zeami 133
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
Editor: Robert S. Cohen, Boston University
1. M.W. Wartofsky (ed.): Proceedings oJthe Boston ColloquiumJor the Philosophy oJ Science,
196111962. [Synthese Library 6] 1963 ISBN 90-277-0021-4
2. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Proceedings oJ the Boston Colloquium Jor the
Philosophy oJScience, 196211964. In Honor ofP. Frank. [Synthese Library 10] 1965
ISBN 90-277-9004-0
Philosophy oJ Science, 1964/1966. In Memory of Norwood Russell Hanson. [Synthese
Library 14] 1967 ISBN 90-277-0013-3
Philosophy oJScience, 196611968. [Synthese Library 18] 1969 ISBN 90-277-0014-1
Philosophy oJ Science, 1966/1968. [Synthese Library 19] 1969 ISBN 90-277-OO15-X
6. R.S. Cohen and RJ. Seeger (eds.): Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher. [Synthese
Library 27] 1970 ISBN 90-277-0016-8
7. M. Capek: Bergson and Modern Physics. AReinterpretation and Re-evaluation. [Synthese
Library 37] 1971 ISBN 90-277-0186-5
8. R.C. Buck and R.S. Cohen (eds.): PSA 1970. Proceedings of the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the
Philosophy and Science Association (Boston, Fall 1970). In Memory of Rudolf Carnap.
[Synthese Library 39] 1971 ISBN 90-277-0187-3; Pb 90-277-0309-4
9. A.A. Zinov'ev: Foundations oJthe Logical Theory oJ Scientific Knowledge (Complex Logic).
Translated from Russian. Revised and enlarged English Edition, with an Appendix by G.A.
Smirnov, E.A. Sidorenko, A.M. Fedina and L.A. Bobrova. [Synthese Library 46] 1973
ISBN 90-277-0193-8; Pb 90-277-0324-8
10. L. Tondl: Scientific Procedures. A Contribution Concerning the Methodological Problems of
Scientific Concepts and Scientific Explanation.Translated from Czech. [Synthese Library
47] 1973 ISBN 90-277-0147-4; Pb 90-277-0323-X
11. R.J. Seeger and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Philosophical Foundations oJ Science. Proceedings of
Section L, 1969, American Association for the Advancement of Science. [Synthese Library
58] 1974 ISBN 90-277-0390-6; Pb 90-277-0376-0
12. A. Grünbaum: Philosophical Problems oJ Space and Times. 2nd enlarged ed. [Synthese
Library 55] 1973 ISBN 90-277-0357-4; Pb 90-277-0358-2
13. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Logical and Epistemological Studies in Contem-
porary Physics. Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science,
1969/72, Part I. [Synthese Library 59] 1974 ISBN 90-277-0391-4; Pb 90-277-0377-9
14. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Methodological and Historical Essays in the
Natural and Social Sciences. Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of
Science, 1969/72, Part H. [Synthese Library 60] 1974
ISBN 90-277-0392-2; Pb 90-277-0378-7
15. R.S. Cohen, J.J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): For Dirk Struik. Scientific, Historical
and Political Essays in Honor of Dirk J. Struik. [Synthese Library 61] 1974
ISBN 90-277-0393-0; Pb 90-277-0379-5
16. N. Geschwind: Selected Papers on Language and the Brains. [Synthese Library 68] 1974
ISBN 90-277-0262-4; Pb 90-277-0263-2
17. B.G. Kuznetsov: Reason and Being. Translated from Russian. Edited by C.R. Fawcett and
R.S. Cohen. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2181-5
18. P. Mittelstaedt: Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics. Translated from the revised 4th
German edition by W. Riemer and edited by R.S. Cohen. [Synthese Library 95] 1976
ISBN 90-277-0285-3; Pb 90-277-0506-2
19. H. Mehlberg: Time, Causality, and the Quantum Theory. Studies in the Philosophy of
Science. Vol. I: Essay on the Causal Theory ofTime. Vol. 11: Time in a Quantized Universe.
Translated from French. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1980
Vol. I: ISBN 90-277-0721-9; Pb 90-277-1074-0
Vol. 11: ISBN 90-277-1075-9; Pb 90-277-1076-7
20. K.F. Schaffner and R.S. Cohen (eds.): PSA 1972. Proceedings of the 3rd Biennial Meeting of
the Philosophy of Science Association (Lansing, Michigan, Fall 1972). [Synthese Library
64] 1974 ISBN 90-277-0408-2; Pb 90-277-0409-0
21. R.S. Cohen and lJ. Stachel (eds.): Selected Papers of Uon Rosenfeld. [Synthese Library
100] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0651-4; Pb 90-277-0652-2
22. M. Capek (ed.): The Concepts of Space and Time. Their Structure and Their Development.
23. M. Grene: The Understanding of Nature. Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. [Synthese
Library 66] 1974 ISBN 90-277-0462-7; Pb 90-277-0463-5
24. D. Ihde: Technics and Praxis. A Philosophy ofTechnology. [Synthese Library 130] 1979
ISBN 90-277-0953-X; Pb 90-277-0954-8
25. J. Hintikka and U. Remes: The Method of Analysis. Its Geometrical Origin and Its General
Significance. [Synthese Library 75] 1974 ISBN 90-277-0532-1; Pb 90-277-0543-7
26. lE. Murdoch and E.D. Sylla (eds.): The Cultural Context ofMedieval Learning. Proceedings
of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science, and Theology in the Middle
Ages, 1973. [Synthese Library 76] 1975 ISBN 90-277-0560-7; Pb 90-277-0587-9
27. M. Grene and E. Mendelsohn (eds.): Topics in the Philosophy of Biology. [Synthese Library
84] 1976 ISBN 90-277-0595-X; Pb 90-277-0596-8
28. J. Agassi: Science in Flux. [Synthese Library 80] 1975
ISBN 90-277-0584-4; Pb 90-277-0612-3
29. lJ. Wiatr (ed.): Polish Essays in the Methodology ofthe Social Sciences. [Synthese Library
131] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0723-5; Pb 90-277-0956-4
30. P. Janich: Protophysics of Time. Constructive Foundation and History of Time Measure-
ment. Translated from German. 1985 ISBN 90-277-0724-3
31. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Language, Logic, and Method. 1983
ISBN 90-277-0725-1
32. R.S. Cohen, C.A. Hooker, A.C. Michalos and lW. van Evra (eds.): PSA 1974. Proceedings
of the 4th Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. [Synthese Library
101] 1976 ISBN 90-277-0647-6; Pb 90-277-0648-4
33. G. Holton and W.A. Blanpied (eds.): Science and fts Public. The Changing Relationship.
34. M.D. Grmek, R.S. Cohen and G. Cimino (eds.): On Scientific Discovery. The 1977 Erice
Lectures. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1122-4; Pb 90-277-1123-2
35. S. Amsterdamski: Between Experience and Metaphysics. Philosophical Problems of the
Evolution of Science. Translated from Polish. [Synthese Library 77] 1975
ISBN 90-277-0568-2; Pb 90-277-0580-1
36. M. Markovic and G. Petrovic (eds.): Praxis. Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and
Methodology of the Social Sciences. [Synthese Library 134] 1979
ISBN 90-277-0727-8; Pb 90-277-0968-8
37. H. von HeImholtz: Epistemological Writings. The Paul Hertz / Moritz Schlick Centenary
Edition of 1921. Translated from German by M.F. Lowe. Edited with an Introduction and
Bibliography by R.S. Cohen and Y. Elkana. [Synthese Library 79] 1977
ISBN 90-277-0290-X; Pb 90-277-0582-8
38. R.M. Martin: Pragmatics, Truth and Language. 1979
ISBN 90-277-0992-0; Pb 90-277-0993-9
39. R.S. Cohen, P.K. Feyerabend and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Essays in Memory o/lmre
Lakatos. [Synthese Library 99] 1976 ISBN 90-277-0654-9; Pb 90-277-0655-7
40. Not published.
41. Not published.
42. H.R. Maturana and F.I. Varela: Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living.
With aPreface to 'Autopoiesis' by S. Beer. 1980
ISBN 90-277-1015-5; Pb 90-277-1016-3
43. A. Kasher (ed.): Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems. Essays in Memory
of Yehoshua Bar-Hille!. [Synthese Library 89] 1976
ISBN 90-277-0644-1; Pb 90-277-0645-X
44. T.D. Thao: Investigations into the Origin o/Language and Consciousness. 1984
ISBN 90-277-0827-4
45. Not published.
46. P.L. Kapitza: Experiment, Theory, Practice. Articles and Addresses. Edited by R.S. Cohen.
1980 ISBN 90-277-1061-9; Pb 90-277-1062-7
47. M.L. Dalla Chiara (ed.): ltalian Studies in the Philosophy 0/ Science. 1981
ISBN 90-277-0735-9; Pb 90-277-1073-2
48. M.W. Wartofsky: Models. Representation and the Scientific Understanding. [Synthese
Library 129] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0736-7; Pb 90-277-0947-5
49. T.D. Thao: Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1986
ISBN 90-277-0737-5
50. Y. Fried and J. Agassi: Paranoia. A Study in Diagnosis. [Synthese Library 102] 1976
ISBN 90-277-0704-9; Pb 90-277-0705-7
51. K.H. Wolff: Surrender and Cath. Experience and Inquiry Today. [Synthese Library 105]
1976 ISBN 90-277-0758-8; Pb 90-277-0765-0
52. K. Kosik: Dialectics o/the Concrete. A Study on Problems of Man and World. 1976
ISBN 90-277-0761-8; Pb 90-277-0764-2
53. N. Goodman: The Structure 0/ Appearance. [Synthese Library 107] 1977
ISBN 90-277-0773-1; Pb 90-277-0774-X
54. H.A. Simon: Models 0/ Discovery and Other Topics in the Methods of Science. [Synthese
Library 114] 1977 ISBN 90-277-0812-6; Pb 90-277-0858-4
55. M. Lazerowitz: The Language 0/ Philosophy. Freud and Wittgenstein. [Synthese Library
117] 1977 ISBN 90-277-0826-6; Pb 90-277-0862-2
56. T. Nickles (ed.): Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality. 1980
ISBN 90-277-1069-4; Pb 90-277-1070-8
57. I. Margolis: Persons and Mind. The Prospects of Nonreductive Materialism. [Synthese
Library 121] 1978 ISBN 90-277-0854-1; Pb 90-277-0863-0
58. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (eds.): Progress and Rationality in Science. [Synthese
Library 125] 1978 ISBN 90-277-0921-1; Pb 90-277-0922-X
59. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (eds.): The Structure and Development 0/ Science. [Synthese
Library 136] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0994-7; Pb 90-277-0995-5
60. T. Nickles (ed.): Scientific Discovery. Case Studies. 1980
ISBN 90-277-1092-9; Pb 90-277-1093-7
61. M.A. Finocchiaro: Galileo anti the Art of Reasoning. Rhetorical Foundation of Logic and
Scientific Method. 1980 ISBN 90-277-1094-5; Pb 90-277-1095-3
62. W.A. Wallace: Prelude to Galileo. Essays on Medieval and 16th-Century Sources of
Galileo's Thought. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1215-8; Pb 90-277-1216-6
63. F. Rapp: Analytical Philosophy ofTechnology. Translated from German. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1221-2; Pb 90-277-1222-0
64. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Hegel anti the Sciences. 1984
ISBN 90-277-0726-X
65. J. Agassi: Science anti Society. Studies in the Sociology of Science. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1244-1; Pb 90-277-1245-X
66. L. TondI: Problems of Semanties. A Contribution to the Analysis of the Language of
Science. Translated from Czech. 1981 ISBN 90-277-0148-2; Pb 90-277-0316-7
67. J. Agassi and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Scientific Philosophy Today. Essays in Honor of Mario
Bunge. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1262-X; Pb 90-277-1263-8
68. W. Krajewski (ed.): Polish Essays in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences. Translated
from Polish and edited by R.S. Cohen and C.R. Fawcett. 1982
ISBN 90-277-1286-7; Pb 90-277-1287-5
69. J.H. Fetzer: Scientific Knowledge. Causation, Explanation and Corroboration. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1335-9; Pb 90-277-1336-7
70. S. Grossberg: Studies of Minti anti Brain. Neural Principles of Learning, Perception,
Development, Cognition, and Motor Control. 1982
ISBN 90-277-1359-6; Pb 9O-277-1360-X
71. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Epistemology, Methodology, anti the Social
Sciences. 1983. ISBN 90-277-1454-1
72. K. Berka: Measurement.lts Concepts, Theories and Problems. Translated from Czech. 1983
ISBN 90-277-1416-9
73. G.L. Pandit: The Structure anti Growth of Scientific Knowledge. A Study in the Methodol-
ogy of Epistemic Appraisal. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1434-7
74. A.A. Zinov'ev: Logical Physics. Translated from Russian. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1983
[see also Volume 9] ISBN 90-277-0734-0
75. G-G. Granger: Formal Thought anti the Sciences of Man. Translated from French. With and
Introduction by A. Rosenberg. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1524-6
76. R.S. Cohen and L. Laudan (eds.): Physics, Philosophy anti Psychoanalysis. Essays in Honor
of AdolfGrünbaum. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1533-5
77. G. Böhme, W. van den Daele, R. Hohlfeld, W. Krohn and W. Schäfer: Finalization in
Science. The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress. Translated from German. Edited by
W. Schäfer. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1549-1
78. D. Shapere: Reason anti the Search for Knowledge. Investigations in the Philosophy of
Science. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1551-3; Pb 90-277-1641-2
79. G. Andersson (ed.): Rationality in Science anti Politics. Translated from German. 1984
ISBN 90-277-1575-0; Pb 90-277-1953-5
80. P.T. Durbin and F. Rapp (eds.): Philosophy anti Technology. [Also Philosophy and
Technology Series, Vol. 1] 1983 ISBN 90-277-1576-9
81. M. Markovic: Dialectical Theory of Meaning. Translated from Serbo-Croat. 1984
ISBN 90-277 -1596-3
82. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Physical Sciences and History of Physics. 1984.
ISBN 90-277-1615-3
83. E. Meyerson: The Relativistic Deduction. Epistemological Implications of the Theory of
Relativity. Translated from French. With a Review by Albert Einstein and an Introduction by
Milic Capek. 1985 ISBN 90-277-1699-4
84. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Methodology, Metaphysics and the History of
Science. In Memory ofBenjamin Nelson. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1711-7
85. G. Tamäs: The Logic ofCategories. Translated from Hungarian. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1742-7
86. S.L. de C. Fernandes: Foundations of Objective Knowledge. The Relations of Popper's
Theory of Knowledge to That of Kant. 1985 ISBN 90-277-1809-1
87. R.S. Cohen and T. Schnelle (eds.): Cognition and Fact. Materials on Ludwik Fleck. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1902-0
88. G. Freudenthai: Atom and Individual in the Age of Newton. On the Genesis of the Mechanis-
tic World View. Translated from German. 1986 ISBN 90-277-1905-5
89. A. Donagan, A.N. Perovich Jr and M.V. Wedin (eds.): Human Nature and Natural
Knowledge. Essays presented to Marjorie Grene on the Occasion of Her 75th Birthday. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1974-8
90. C. Mitcham and A. Hunning (eds.): Philosophy and Technology ll. Information Technology
and Computers in Theory and Practice. [Also Philosophy and Technology Series, Vol. 2]
1986 ISBN 90-277-1975-6
91. M. Grene and D. Nails (eds.): Spinoza and the Sciences. 1986 ISBN 90-277-1976-4
92. S.P. Turner: The Search for a Methodology of Social Science. Durkheim, Weber, and the
19th-Century Problem ofCause, Probability, and Action. 1986. ISBN 90-277-2067-3
93. r.c. Jarvie: Thinking about Society. Theory and Practice. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2068-1
94. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Kaleidoscope of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in
History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 1. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2158-0; Pb 90-277-2159-9
95. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Prism of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History,
Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 2. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2160-2; Pb 90-277-2161-0
96. G. Märkus: Language and Production. A Critique of the Paradigms. Translated from French.
1986 ISBN 90-277-2169-6
97. F. Amrine, F.J. Zucker and H. Wheeler (eds.): Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal.
1987 ISBN 90-277-2265-X; Pb 90-277-2400-8
98. J.C. Pitt and M. Pera (eds.): Rational Changes in Science. Essays on Scientific Reasoning.
Translated from Italian. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2417-2
99. O. Costa de Beauregard: Time, the Physical Magnitude. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2444-X
100. A. Shimony and D. Nails (eds.): Naturalistic Epistemology. A Symposium of Two Decades.
1987 ISBN 90-277-2337-0
101. N. Rotenstreich: Time and Meaning in History. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2467-9
102. D.B. Zilberman: The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2497-0
103. T.F. Glick (ed.): The Comparative Reception of Relativity. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2498-9
104. Z. Harris, M. Gottfried, T. Ryckman, P. Mattick Jr, A. Daladier, T.N. Harris and S. Harris:
The Form of Information in Science. Analysis of an Immunology Sublanguage. With a
Preface by Hilary Putnam. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2516-0
105. F. Burwick (ed.): Approaches to Organic Form. Permutations in Science and Culture. 1987
ISBN 90-277-2541-1
106. M. Almasi: The Philosophy ofAppearances. Translated from Hungarian. 1989
ISBN 90-277-2150-5
107. S. Hook, W.L. O'Neill and R. O'Toole (eds.): Philosophy, History and Social Action. Essays
in Honor of Lewis Feuer. With an Autobiographical Essay by L. Feuer. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2644-2
108. I. Hronszky, M. FeMr and B. Dajka: Scientific Knowledge Socialized. Selected Proceedings
of the 5th Joint International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science organized
by the IUHPS (Veszprem, Hungary, 1984). 1988 ISBN 90-277-2284-6
109. P. Tillers and E.D. Green (eds.): Probability and Inference in the Law ofEvidence. The Uses
and Limits ofBayesianism. 1988 ISBN 90-277-2689-2
110. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): Science in Reflection. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History,
Philosophy, and Sociology ofScience, Vol. 3.1988
ISBN 90-277-2712-0; Pb 90-277-2713-9
111. K. Gavroglu, Y. Goudaroulis and P. Nicolacopoulos (eds.): Imre Lakatos and Theories of
Scientific Change. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2766-X
112. B. Glassner and J.D. Moreno (eds.): The Qualitative-Quantitative Distinction in the Social
Sciences. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2829-1
113. K. Arens: Structures ofKnowing. Psychologies ofthe 19th Century. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0009-2
114. A. Janik: Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0056-4
115. F. Amrine (ed.): Literature and Science as Modes of Expression. With an Introduction by S.
Weininger. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0133-1
116. J.R. Brown and J. Mittelstrass (eds.): An Intimate Relation. Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science. Presented to Robert E. Butts on His 60th Birthday. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0169-2
117. F. D'Agostino and I.C. Jarvie (eds.): Freedom and Rationality. Essays in Honor of John
Watkins. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0264-8
118. D. Zolo: Reflexive Epistemology. The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0320-2
119. M. Keam, B.S. Philips and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology.
1989 ISBN 0-7923-0407-1
120. T.H. Levere and W.R. Shea (eds.): Nature, Experiment and the Science. Essays on Galileo
and the Nature of Science.1n Honour of Stillman Drake. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0420-9
121. P. Nicolacopoulos (ed.): Greek Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0717-8
122. R. Cooke and D. Costantini (eds.): Statistics in Science. The Foundations of Statistical
Methods in Biology, Physics and Economics. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0797-6
123. P. Duhem: The Origins of Statics. Translated from French by G.F. Leneaux, V.N. Vagliente
and G.H. Wagner. With an Introduction by S.L. Jaki. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0898-0
124. H. Kamerlingh Onnes: Through Measurement to Knowledge. The Selected Papers, 1853-
1926. Edited and with an Introduction by K. Gavroglu and Y. Goudaroulis. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-0825-5
125. M. Capek: The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the
Philosophy of Science. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0911-1
126. s. Unguru (ed.): Physics, Cosmology and Astronomy, 1300-1700. Tension and Accommoda-
tion. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1022-5
127. Z. Bechler: Newton' s Physics on the Conceptual Structure o[the Scientific Revolution. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1054-3
128. E. Meyerson: Explanation in the Sciences. Translated from French by M-A. Siple and D.A.
Siple. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1129-9
129. A.I. Tauber (ed.): Organism and the Origins o[ Self. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1185-X
130. F.J. Varela and J-P. Dupuy (eds.): Understanding Origins. Contemporary Views on the
Origin of Life, Mind and Society. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1251-1
131. G.L. Pandit: Methodological Variance. Essays in Epistemological Ontology and the
Methodology of Science. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1263-5
132. G. Munevar (ed.): Beyond Reason. Essays on the Philosophy ofPaul Feyerabend. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1272-4
133. T.E. Uebel (ed.): Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle. Austrian Studies on Otto
Neurath and the Vienna Cirele. Partly translated from German. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1276-7
134. W.R. Woodward and R.S. Cohen (eds.): World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation.
Science Studies in the [former] German Democratic Republic. Partly translated from
German by W.R. Woodward. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1286-4
135. P. Zambelli: The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma. Astrology, Theology and Science
in Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1380-1
136. P. Petitjean, C. Jami and A.M. Moulin (eds.): Science and Empires. Historical Studies about
Scientific Development and European Expansion. ISBN 0-7923-1518-9
137. W.A. Wallace: Galileo' s Logic o[ Discovery and Proof. The Background, Content, and Use
of His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1577-4
138. W.A. Wall ace: Galileo's Logical Treatises. A Translation, with Notes and Commentary, of
His Appropriated Latin Questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1578-2
Set (137 + 138) ISBN 0-7923-1579-0
139. MJ. Nye, J.L. Richards and R.H. Stuewer (eds.): The Invention o[ Physical Science.
Intersections of Mathematics, Theology and Natural Philosophy since the Seventeenth
Century. Essays in Honor ofErwin N. Hiebert. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1753-X
140. G. Corsi, M.L. dalla Chiara and G.C. Ghirardi (eds.): Bridging the Gap: Philosophy,
Mathematics and Physics. Lectures on the Foundations of Science. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1761-0
141. C.-H. Lin and D. Fu (eds.): Philosophy and Conceptual History o[ Science in Taiwan. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1766-1
142. S. Sarkar (ed.): The Founders o[Evolutionary Genetics. A Centenary Reappraisal. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1777-7
143. J. Blackmore (ed.): Ernst Mach -A Deeper Look. Documents and New Perspectives. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1853-6
144. P. Kroes and M. Bakker (eds.): Technological Development and Science in the Industrial
Age. New Perspectives on the Science-Technology Relationship. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1898-6
145. S. Amsterdamski: Between History and Method. Disputes about the Rationality of Science.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1941-9
146. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Scientific Enterprise. The Bar-Hillel Colloquium: Studies in
History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Volume 4. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1992-3
147. L. Embree (ed.): Metaarchaeology. Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-2023-9
148. S. French and H. Kamminga (eds.): Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics. Essays in
Honour of Heinz Post. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2085-9
149. M. Bunzl: The Context ofExplanation. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2153-7
150. I.B. Cohen (ed.): The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences. Some Critical and Historical
Perspectives. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2223-1
151. K. Gavroglu, Y. Christianidis and E. Nicolaidis (eds.): Trends in the Historiography of
Science. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2255-X
152. S. Poggi and M. Bossi (eds.): Romanticism in Science. Science in Europe, 1790--1840. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2336-X
153. J. Faye and H.J. Folse (eds.): Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2378-5
154. C.C. Gould and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Artifacts, Representations, and Social Practice. Essays
for Marx W. Wartofsky. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2481-1
155. R.E. Butts: Historical Pragmatics. Philosophical Essays. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2498-6
156. R. Rashed: The Development of Arabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra.
Translated from French by A.F.W. Armstrong. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2565-6
157. I. Szumilewicz-Lachman (ed.): Zygmunt Zawirski: His Life and Work. With Selected
Writings on Time, Logic and the Methodology of Science. Translations by Feliks Lachman.
Ed. by R.S. Cohen, with the assistance ofB. Bergo. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2566-4
158. S.N. Haq: Names, Natures and Things. The Alchemist Jabir ibn I;Iayyän and His Kitäb al-
A~jär (Book of Stones). 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2587-7
159. P. Plaass: Kant' s Theory of Natural Science. Translation, Analytic Introduction and
Commentary by Alfred E. and Maria G. Miller. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2750-0
160. 1. Misiek (ed.): The Problem of Rationality in Science and its Philosophy. On Popper vs.
Polanyi. The Polish Conferences 1988-89. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2925-2
161. I.c. Jarvie and N. Laor (eds.): Critical Rationalism, Metaphysics and Science. Essays for
Joseph Agassi, Volume I. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2960-0
162. I.C. Jarvie and N. Laor (eds.): Critical Rationalism, the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
Essays for Joseph Agassi, Volume 11.1995 ISBN 0-7923-2961-9
Set (161-162) ISBN 0-7923-2962-7
163. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Physics, Philosophy, and the Scientific
Community. Essays in the Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
In Honor ofRobert S. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2988-0
164. K. Gavroglu, 1. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Science, Politics and Social Practice.
Essays on Marxism and Science, Philosophy of Culture and the Social Sciences. In Honor of
Robert S. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2989-9
165. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Science, Mind and Art. Essays on
Science and the Humanistic Understanding in Art, Epistemology, Religion and Ethics.
Essays in Honor of Robert S. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2990-2
Set (163-165) ISBN 0-7923-2991-0
166. K.H. Wolff: Transformation in the Writing. A Case of Surrender-and-Catch. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3178-8
167. A.J. Kox and D.M. Siegel (eds.): No Truth Except in the Details. Essays in Honor of Martin
J. Klein. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3195-8
168. J. Blackmore: Ludwig Boltzmann, His Later Lile and Philosophy, 1900-1906. Book One: A
Docurnentary History. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3231-8
169. R.S. Cohen, R. Hilpinen and Q. Renzong (eds.): Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy
01 Science. Beijing International Conference, 1992. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3233-4
170. I. Ku~uradi and R.S. Cohen (eds.): The Concept olKnowledge. The Ankara Seminar. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3241-5
171. M.A. Grodin (ed.): Meta Medical Ethics: The Philosophical Foundations of Bioethics. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3344-6
172. S. Ramirez and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Mexican Studies in the History and Philosophy 01
Science. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3462-0
173. C. Dilworth: The Metaphysics 01 Science. An Account of Modern Science in Terms of
Principles, Laws and Theories. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3693-3
174. 1. Blackmore: Ludwig Boltzmann, His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900-1906 Book Two:
The Philosopher. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3464-7
175. P. Damerow: Abstraction and Representation. Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking.
1996 ISBN 0-7923-3816-2
176. G. Tarozzi (ed.): Karl Popper, Philosopher 01 Science. (in prep.)
177. M. Marion and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Quebec Studies in the Philosophy 01 Science. Part I:
Logic, Mathematics, Physics and History of Science. Essays in Honor of Hugues Leblanc.
1995 ISBN 0-7923-3559-7
178. M. Marion and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Quebec Studies in the Philosophy 01 Science. Part 11:
Biology, Psychology, Cognitive Science and Economics. Essays in Honor of Hugues
Leblanc. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3560-0
Set (177-178) ISBN 0-7923-3561-9
179. Fan Dainian and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Chinese Studies in the History and Philosophy 01
Science and Technology. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3463-9
180. P. Forman and J.M. Sanchez-Ron (eds.): National Military Establishments and the Advance-
ment 01 Science and Technology. Studies in 20th Century History. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3541-4
181. EJ. Post: Quantum Reprogramming. Ensembles and Single Systems: A Two-Tier Approach
to Quantum Mechanics. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3565-1
182. A.I. Tauber (ed.): The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3904-5
183. S. Sarkar (ed.): The Philosophy and History 01 Molecular Biology: New Perspectives. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-3947-9
184. 1.T. Cushing, A. Fine and S. Goldstein (eds.): Bohemian Mechanics and Quantum Theory:
AnAppraisal. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4028-0
185. K. Michalski: Logic and Time. An Essay on Husserl's Theory of Meaning. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-4082-5
186. G. Munevar (ed.): Spanish Studies in the Philosophy olScience. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4147-3
Also olinterest:
R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): A Portrait 01 Twenty-Five Years Boston Colloquialor the
Philosophy 01 Science, 1960-1985. 1985 ISBN Pb 90-277-1971-3
Previous volumes are still available.
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS - DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON

The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE ELUSIVE SYNTHESIS: AESTHETICS AND SCIENCE

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University

Editorial Advisory Board

mOMAS F. GUCK, Boston University

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS

ISBN-13: 978-0-7923-4763-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-1786-6

Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers,

Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada

In all other countries, sold and distributed

Printed on acid-free paper

Also published in 1996 in hardbound edition in the series

All Rights Reserved

ALFRED I. TAUBER / Preface VII

ALFRED I. TAUBER /Introduction

NAME INDEX 313

A. I. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, VII-VIII.

her work, I am constantly reminded of dimensions of reality weH beyond

August 25, 1995

A. I. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, 1-12.

object is translated from raw electromagnetic data into multivarious visual

Sahotra Sarkar has offered a provocative argument of how an aesthetic

conceptual basis given in terms of "aesthetics" for pursuing any comparison

styles of art emerge through a set of formal rules so do symbolic idealiza-

thetic as essentially a philosophical problem. I begin by examining Goethe

THE AESTHETIC CONSTRUCTION

The first passage, embodying Darwin's "wedging" metaphor, expresses the

A. I. Tauber (ed.), The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science, 13-48.

From Nature doth emotion come, and moods

And Darwin's aesthetic, embodied in his oldest most expressive metaphors,

PART I 1832. EARLY CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE

Let us proceed by first establishing a general sense of the Darwinian sublime

Sources of the Darwinian Sublime

Darwin's referenee is to Foret vierge pres Manqueritipa by the German artist

To Henslow he wrote even more effusively:

There are certain contextualizing clues to Darwin's aesthetic response that

First, Darwin's Humboldtism is usually tied, as in this letter, to Henslow and

Notice the waterfall in the Holdermann rendering of the Der Freischutz

1. a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides

Fig. 5. easpar David Friedrich (1774-1840). Felsenschlucht im Elbsandsteingebirge (The

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.

Milton's Beautiful Bank

. . . murmuring waters fall

On the soft downy Bank damaskt with flow'rs:

Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen

Her hand he seiz'd, and to a shady bank,

Thus the Miltonic bank is first a scene of contemplation (Satan's) in the

Entangled Bank: Synthesis 0/ the Latent Metaphor

Darwin-like Portrait 0/ Bmoke Boothby (Figure 8c; compare the Richmond

We know Darwin had great talent for intellectual synthesis. Ultimately,

metaphoric field fixed by emotion and experience in nature, and partially

PART 11 1826-1859. COGNITIVE HISTORY OF DARWIN'S WEDGING

of Darwin's theory up until the first edition of the Origin whereafter it is

The evidentiary clue to the development of the wedging metaphor provided

fig. 8d. George Richmond. Charles Darwin. 1840.

ti on at Cambridge and the Beagle voyage, witnessed enormous enhancement

28 September Reads Malthus

Transition from Metaphor to Syllogism

CONCLUSION: 1859. PSYCHOCULTURAL HISTORY OF

ical potential to engage public readers as if they were co-discoverers of natural

This interpretation leads us to so me even more direct psychological ques-

By 1844 the "oeconomy" has dropped out and become a surface:

Now this is a critical modification. Darwin is getting concrete: Nature is a