Science vs. Literature

Science vs. Literature

I must admit that I am tickled by the long-running discussion Ken Loon and Lewis (June 08) have about the division between Science and Literature. One is of opinion that Literature is a puzzling word game that does not solve actual problems; the other thinks that Man can never find himself in soulless Science. Mr Masukor and I have both been roped into their “feud”, but in the end no-one is the wiser. That is precisely the point of the “feud”: the two gentlemen are academically gifted enough to realise that this so-called division between Science and Literature is only an artificial one. In the real world, the two are so inextricably fused that to acknowledge one and disparage the other would amount to intellectual bias.

The reason for this is that the world is naturally “bipolar” – that is to say, it is both numeric and linguistic. It is only half a world when too much weight is placed on one aspect. To illustrate this point, I will refer to two of my favourite authors, one a revolutionary scientist, the other a humanist wordsmith.

               Would the world still be the world as we know it without Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), author of The Origin of Species and promulgator of the “evolution revolution”? One thing is certain: without Darwin’s ground-breaking idea of evolution – whose origin he did owe to Jean Baptiste Lamarck (inheritance of acquired characters) and Herbert Spencer (survival of the fittest) – we would still be living under the dark clouds of religious orthodoxy. The arrival of the Darwinian vision meant that the ancient (Christian) view of Man having been specifically created by virtue of a soul was called into question. Not only did Man not transcend Nature, he was proved to be a part of Nature, encompassing all its ingenuities and shortcomings. Man was knocked off his pedestal; when placed next to an ape, he was seen to share anatomical and behavioural similarities with the hirsute one. Darwin wrote: “The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind.” A glorious revelation it was! The world (or the universe) was suddenly transformed into an “immense mechanism where one can see organic beings as falling along some great chain of being.” We were no longer unique, not the chosen species we had imagined ourselves to be for millennia.

               The supporters of Creationism (these days disguised as Intelligent Design) have been indignant about what they perceive as the inferioritisation of Man in the grand scheme of things, but it is an indisputable fact that Darwinism is here to stay, and is just as credible, if not more so, than the biblical account of the dawn of Man. For Darwinism does not operate on faith. It is a wholly empirical system that manages to provide us with an answer to the question religion has failed to since its mythical days: Why is the world indifferent to the fate of Man? To Man’s stupefaction, the world is never the orderly, safe haven he has been promised. Danger lurks in every nook; diseases (H1N1 anyone?) are eager to consume us; natural elements determine our way of life; civil/world wars always seem a missile away. The answer, in its superficial form, can be found in Darwinism: the natural selection of adaptive variations. The stronger species will have longer lifespans and triumph over the ones which cannot cope with the demands of Nature. It is a “mechanical response to environmental stimuli”, stripped of myth, moralism and sentimentalism. Nature is not cruel; it is simply doing its job (it is therefore never justifiable to personify Nature as a woman). Here, then, is the mystery of terrestrial life, which, from the Darwinian perspective, is anything but a mystery.

               The introduction of Darwinism brought with it numerous consequences. As a direct result of its unromanticism, Man began to see life in its true, unfiltered light: we are here to fend for ourselves; no invisible hand of God will reach down from the heavens to help us along. It should then be no surprise to anyone that the rise of Existentialist philosophy coincided with the absorption of Darwin’s theory into the public psyche. It is true that Existentialism has its roots in Man’s personal faith in God (Kierkergaard, Dostoevsky), but by the time we marched into the 20^th century, with its two devastating world wars and countless genocides, Existentialist philosophers and thinkers were beginning to leave God at the door. The question “How will God save me?” was rephrased to “How will I save myself?” In this strange world of cosmic indifference, what can I do to keep myself from not coming too close to the brink of insanity? This is a pertinent question to ask the 21^st-century man. But for now, no answer is yet forthcoming.

               The Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) began his professional life as a doctor. As a teenager he had been fascinated by medical science and followed, with great success, the career path his guardian Richard Abbey (both his parents had died when he was a wee child) had chosen for him. In late 1816, having consorted with artistically inclined personalities like Leigh Hunt and Benjamin Robert Haydon, he made a crucial decision which would dramatically alter the course of his short life: he exchanged medicine for poetry. The more pragmatic among us would find this an incredible, and perhaps foolhardy, move. But not to young Keats. He had a vision of curing mankind with his knowledge of medicine through Poesy. With the swiftness of a fairy, he started composing long, dreamlike poems with quaint titles like Endymion and Lamia. He met his idol, the Romantic figure William Wordsworth, in 1817, and inspiration kept him writing until his untimely death (from tuberculosis) at the age of 26. The body of work he left behind is a lush, boundless landscape where the reader can see for himself how Keats’ scientific/medical knowledge was translated into the supposedly arcane language of poetry. The poetic Keats has a keen eye for Nature; he observes and analyses its magical qualities with the precision of a surgeon. To Autumn, for instance, displays an affinity with Nature which could only be found in one who has a thorough understanding of it:

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

               Keats is completely conscious of the paradoxical relationship between “human sensibility” and “naturalistic sensations”. To Autumn is as much about life as it is about death, but even in death – or the prospect of it – there is abundant beauty to be found. This acute awareness of the ironic relationship between life and death is characteristically Keats.

In Ode on Melancholy, he talks of avoiding poisonous plants such as “wolf’s bane” and “nightshade” when one is confronted with melancholy (depression). “Glut thy sorrow”, he advises, on the beauty of a morning rose or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave instead. You would be hard pressed to get this sort of advice from your GP.

Keats’ apprenticeship at Guy’s Hospital (1815-16) and his own suffering from tuberculosis also taught him a great deal about the nature of suffering, pain and disease. In The Fall of Hyperion, the physician is presented as a poet with a renewed faith in Apollo (maker of disease). Keats’ representation of illness is one of a kind: the affliction arising from disease channels health; its destructiveness is the source of life for suffering enables the sufferer to access knowledge. Those of us who have witnessed the thuggery of cancer may not see things Keats’ way, but one must remember that the medical poet, or poet-physician, has a more holistic picture in mind. It is the calling of every Romantic physician, according to Keats, to see disease as a passage to life and knowledge.

Science and Literature are siblings who should not be separated. A man who only sees his reflection in one aspect is a victim of self-inflicted blindness. A society that champions the superiority of one over the other is guilty of knowledge manipulation, of robbing its members the chance to experience life in all its splendour.

Edward Ong

August 09

Sources:

http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu

http://users.dickinson.edu

Goellnicht, Donald C. The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science. Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.

De Almeida, Hermione. Romantic Medicine and John Keats. Oxford University Press, 1991.