Janus (24 page)

in toto
, then it is pointless to search for
objective criteria of 'progress' in literature, painting or music; art,
then, does not evolve, it merely formulates and reformulates the same
archetypal experiences in the costumes and styles of the period; and
although the vocabulary is subject to changes -- including the visual
vocabulary of the painter -- the statement contained in a great work of
art remains valid and unmarked by time's arrow, untouched by the vulgar
march of progress.

 

 

But at a closer look this view turns out to be historically untenable.
For one thing, there are periods in which a given art-form shows a
definite, cumulative evolution, comparable to scientific progress.
To quote our leading art historian, Sir Ernst Gombrich:

 

In antiquity the discussion of painting and sculpture inevitably
centred on [the] imitation [of nature] -- mimesis. Indeed it
may be said that the progress of art towards that goal was to
the ancient what the progress of technology is to the modern:
the model of progress as such. Thus Pliny told the history of
sculpture and painting as the history of inventions, assigning
definite achievements in the rendering of nature to individual
artists: the painter Polygnotus was the first to represent people
with open mouth and with teeth, the sculptor Pythagoras was the
first to render nerves and veins, the painter Nikias was concerned
with light and shade. The history of these years [ca. 550 to 350
B.C.] as it is reflected in Pliny or Quintilian was handed down like
an epic of conquest, a story of inventions . . . In the Renaissance
it was Vasari who applied this technique to the history of the arts
of Italy from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Vasari never
fails to pay tribute to those artists of the past who made a distinct
contribution, as he saw it, to the mastery of representation. 'Art
rose from humble beginnings to the summit of perfection' [Vasari says]
because such natural geniuses as Giotto blazed the trail and others
were thus enabled to build on their achievements. [10]

 

'If I could see further than others,' said Newton, 'it is because I stood
on the shoulders of giants.' Leonardo said much the same. 'It is a wretched
pupil', he wrote, 'who does not surpass his master.' Dürer and others
expressed similar opinions. What they evidently meant was that during the
period of explosive development which started with Giotto around the year
1300, each successive generation of painters had discovered new tricks
and techniques -- foreshortening, perspective, the treatment of light,
colour and texture, the capture of movement and facial expression --
inventions which the pupil could take over from the master and use as
his baseline for new departures.

 

 

As for literature, it need hardly be emphasized that the various schools
and fashions of the past were not static, but evolved during their limited
life-span toward greater refinement and technical perfection -- or decadence.
We take it for granted that today's physicists know more about the atom
than Democritus; but then Joyce's
Ulysses
also knows more about human
nature than Homer's
Odysseus
. On a shorter time-scale, even films no
more than twenty years old appear now -- exceptions always granted --
surprisingly dated: obvious, over-acted, over-explicit. There is hardly
a writer, past or present, who did not or does not sincerely believe his
style and technique of writing to be closer to reality, intellectually
and emotionally, than those of the past. Let us face it: our reverence
for Homer or Goethe is sweetened by a dash of condescension not unlike
our attitude to infant prodigies: how clever they were for their age!

 

 

Thus we can safely reject as a gross over-simplification Gleb Nerzhin's
view that science is cumulative like a brick-layer's work, while art
is timeless, a dance of coloured balls on the jets of a fountain. The
history of art, too, shows cumulative progress -- in certain periods,
though not in others. In the history of European painting, for instance,
there are two outstanding periods in which we find rapid, sustained,
cumulative progress in representing Nature, almost as tangible as the
progress in engineering. The first stretches roughly from the middle of
the sixth to the middle of the fourth century B.C., the second from the
beginning of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century. Each
lasted for about six to eight generations, in the course of which each
giant did indeed stand on the shoulders of his predecessors, and could
take in a wider view. It would of course be silly to say that these were
the
only
periods of cumulative progress. But it is nevertheless true
that in between these periods of rapid evolution there are much longer
stretches of stagnation or decline. Besides, there are the lone giants,
who seem to appear from nowhere and cannot be fitted into any neat
pyramid of acrobats balancing on each other's shoulders.

 

 

The conclusion seems to be obvious. Our museums and libraries demonstrate
that there
is
a cumulative progression in every art-form -- in a limited
sense, in a limited direction, during limited periods. But these short,
luminous trails sooner or later peter out in twilight and confusion,
and the search for a new departure in a new direction is on.

 

 

However, contrary to popular belief, the evolution of science does not
show a more coherent picture. Only during the last three hundred years
has its advance been continuous and cumulative; but those unfamiliar with
the history of science -- and they include the majority of scientists --
tend to fall into the mistaken belief that the acquisition of knowledge
has always been a neat and tidy ascent on a straight path towards the
ultimate peak.

 

 

In fact, neither science nor art has evolved in a continuous way.
Whitehead once remarked that Europe in the year 1500 knew less than
Archimedes who died in 212 B.C. In retrospect there was only one step
separating Archimedes from Galileo, Aristarchus of Samos (who fathered
the heliocentric system) from Copernicus. But that step took nearly
two thousand years to be made. During that long period, science was
hibernating. After the three short glorious centuries of Greek science,
roughly coinciding with the cumulative period of Greek art, comes
a period of suspended animation about six times as long; then a new
furious awakening, so far only about ten generations old.

 

 

Progress, then, in science as in art, is neither steady nor absolute,
but -- to say it again -- a progression in a limited sense during limited
periods in limited directions; not along a steady curve, but in a jagged,
jerky, zigzag line.

 

 

A Chinese proverb says that there is a time for fishing and a time for
drying the nets. If you take a kind of bird's-eye view of the history
of any branch of science, you will find a rhythmic alternation between
long periods of relatively peaceful evolution and shorter bursts of
revolutionary change. Only in the peaceful periods which follow after a
major breakthrough is the progress of science continuous and cumulative
in the strict sense. It is a period of consolidating the newly conquered
frontiers, of verifying, assimilating, elaborating and extending the new
synthesis: a time for drying the nets. It may last a few years or several
generations; but sooner or later the emergence of new empirical data, or
a change in the philosophical climate, leads to stagnation, a hardening
of the matrix into a closed system, the rise of a new orthodoxy. This
produces a crisis, a period of fertile anarchy in which rival theories
proliferate -- until the new synthesis is achieved and the cycle starts
again; but this time aiming in a different direction, along different
parameters, asking a different kind of question.

 

 

It is thus possible to detect a recurrent pattern in the evolution of both
science and art. As a rule the cycle starts with a passionate rebellion
against and rejection of the previously dominant school or style with
a subsequent breakthrough towards new frontiers: call this
phase
one
. The
second phase
in the cycle has a climate of optimism and
euphoria; on the footsteps of the giants who spearheaded the advance,
their more pedestrian followers and imitators move into the newly
opened territories to explore and exploit its rich potentials. This,
as said before, is the phase
par excellence
of cumulative progress
in elaborating and perfecting new insights and techniques in research,
and new styles in art. The
third phase
brings saturation, followed
by frustration and deadlock. The
fourth
and last phase is a time of
crisis and doubt -- epitomized in John Donne's complaint on the fall of
Aristotelian cosmology: 'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.'
But it is also a time of wild experimentation (Fauvism and Dada and its
equivalents in science) and of creative anarchy --
reculer pour mieux
sauter
-- which prepares and incubates the next revolution, initiating
a new departure -- and so the cycle starts again.

 

 

This recurrent pattern is in some respects analogous to the successive
stages in the process of individual discovery, according to the schema
proposed by Helmholtz and Graham Wallas: conscious preparation --
unconscious incubation -- illumination -- verification and consolidation.
But while the individual's process of discovery is concluded at the last
of these stages, on the historical scale the last stage of one cycle shades
into the first stage of the next.

 

 

A more recent theory which has strong affinities with the conception of
historic cycles first developed in
The Act of Creation
and summarized
above is Thomas Kuhn's much-quoted essay
The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions
. Kuhn calls the cumulative phases of the cycle 'normal science'
and refers to the revolutionary breakthroughs as 'paradigm changes'.
In spite of the different terminology, there are some striking similarities
between Kuhn's schema and the one proposed in
The Act of Creation
,
though they were developed independently from each other. Both represent
radical departures from George Sarton's venerable theory which asserts
that the history of science is the only history which displays cumulative
progress, and that, accordingly, the progress of science is the only
yardstick by which we can measure the progress of mankind.

 

 

In fact, however, as we have seen, the progress of science on the charts
of history does not appear as a continuously ascending curve, but as a
zigzag line, not unlike the history of art. This does not mean, of course,
that there is no advance; only that both are advancing on an unpredictable,
often erratic course.

 

 

In the course of the last hundred years, history has accelerated like a
rocket taking off, and has produced new discoveries at a breath-taking
rate -- but also more crises, about-turns and undoing-redoings than
ever before. This is in evidence in all branches of science and art --
in painting and literature, physics and brain-research, genetics and
cosmology. In every field the demolition squads were as feverishly
active as the construction workers, but we see only what the latter
built and tend to forget the once proud citadels of orthodoxy that were
destroyed. No doubt in the next few decades we shall witness even more
spectacular feats of undoing-redoing. Some speculative hunches on this
subject will be found in later chapters.

 

 

 

 

 

PART THREE

 

 

Creative Evolution

 

 

 

IX

 

 

CRUMBLING CITADELS

 

 

 

1

 

 

One of the crumbling citadels of orthodoxy mentioned at the end of the
previous chapter is the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution (which also
goes by the name of 'synthetic theory'). The situation was summed up by
Professor W. H. Thorpe when he wrote of 'an undercurrent of thought in the
minds of perhaps hundreds of biologists over the last twenty-five years'
who reject the neo-Darwinian dogma.* The contradictions and tautologies
of the synthetic theory have actually been known even longer, as a kind
of open secret, and yet the dogma has been and still is strenuously
defended by the academic community, with the penalty of discreet but
effective ostracism for heretics. The reason for this paradox seems to
be twofold: firstly, commitment to a scientific theory can be as charged
with emotion as a religious credo -- a subject much in evidence throughout
the history of science; secondly, the absence of a coherent alternative
to neo-Darwinism makes many biologists feel that a bad theory is better
than no theory at all. Whether this is to be regarded as good scientific
strategy is a matter of opinion.

 

* It was this remark of Thorpe's which sparked off the
'Beyond Reductionism' symposium (cf. Ch. I).

 

The essence of the theory is perhaps easiest to convey by drawing a parallel
between neo-Darwinism in biology and behaviourism in psychology. Both derived
their inspiration from the same Zeitgeist of reductionist philosophy which
prevailed during the first half of our century. Behaviourism was founded by
John Broadus Watson just before the First World War, and made its sensational
impact mainly by proclaiming that 'consciousness' and 'mind' are empty words
with no basis in reality. Half a century later, Professor Skinner of
Harvard University -- probably the most influential academic psychologist
of our time -- continued to proclaim the same views in even more extreme
form. In Skinner's standard textbook
Science and Human Behaviour