The Secession of Science from Poetry
In antiquity, it was common for philosophers to transfer knowledge in various forms of poetry. Google & its top source define poetry today as “literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm.” It seems reasonable that the ancients would have conveyed information in the form of poetry, since they likely ascended to the written form from a pre-historic oral tradition. The use of rhyme and meter is no doubt useful in the memorization of lines, and the tradition persisted into the works of early philosophers.
The notions of philosophy and science were essentially indistinguishable until the advent of experimental philosophy in the time of Newton. Even today, students of science are awarded a Doctorate of Philosophy when they attain the highest degree of institutional training— the infamous Ph.D. In this modern sense, philosophy appears to be a set of enlightenment tools for apprehending understanding. It is rather unanimously acknowledged that scientists must possess basic philosophical skills including logic, reason, and rationality. The application of these philosophical toolsets to the explanation of causation in nature is what we have come to understand as science proper.
In this sense, science is simply a special type of philosophy — one concerned with mechanistic explanations of cause. Philosophy, a term coined by Pythagoras around 500BC, pursued deep, general, and fundamental questions: what is existence? Knowledge? Reason? Justice? Aristotle broke off the first conception of science as distinct and still within the realm of philosophy. Aristotle’s science, called natural philosophy, sought causation in astronomy, medicine, and physics. With the rise of enlightenment culture in the 17th century, there seems to have been another transition: the departure of philosophy from poetry. That secession would not be complete until life became a separate subject of study, distinct from non-life, in the 18th century.
A curious example of poetic science is an initial attempt by the philosopher, Empedocles, to explain anatomical respiration. Empedocles, was a philosopher from pre-Socratic Greece, whose works only survive in fragmentation. In particular, we find his hexameter piece, On Nature, recounted by Aristotle and others. While the rhythm of the passages will be lost in translation, we can easily recognize his application poetic devices — most notably, the simile. Empedocles, makes a first reference to a stream of breath in an out of the lungs, very astutely apprehending the material nature of air. The philosopher accomplishes an attempted mechanistic description of the anatomy by way of a comparison to the clepsydra, a familiar time-keeping apparatus in those days. Below is the original passage as recounted by Aristotle:
The beauty of the passage is lost on those of us that cannot read Greek, but O’Brian’s translation is as follows:
“Water cannot enter the clepsydra when it is full of air and the of the clepsydra is closed.
In the same way, blood cannot enter the lungs when they are full of air.
When the girl's hand is taken from the top of the clepsydra, water enters.
In the same way, blood enters the lungs when we breathe out.
When water fills the clepsydra and the top of the clepsydra is closed, air cannot enter.
In the same way, air cannot enter the lungs when they are full of blood.
When the girl's hand is taken from the top of the clepsydra, air enters the clepsydra and water rushes out.
In the same way, blood rushes out of the lungs when we breathe in air.”
Now of course, we recognize that this mechanism is completely incorrect. Blood does not leave the lungs when we exhale. And yet the particular failures of the explanation given by Empedocles are not so important so much as the way in which he sets precedent for the delivery of complex knowledge. Today you will find the same poetic devices at play in even our modern science. How often have we heard the heart described as a pump? Or the cell as a tiny machine? Spacetime as a fabric? Each is an Empedoclean simile. It seems this poetic tradition is still alive and well in modern conception of natural philosophy.
Lucretius was another Greek poet-philosopher that used poetry to present scientific mechanism. In his seminal workOn the Nature of Things, Lucretius all but advances the first law of thermodynamics, that no thing can arise from nothing:
“And so this terror, this darkness of mind,
must be dispelled, not by rays from the sun
or bright shafts of daylight, but by reason
and the face of nature. And we will start
to weave her first principle as follows:
nothing is ever brought forth by the
from nothing. That is, of course, how, through fear,
all mortal men are held in check—they view
many things done on earth and in the sky,
effects whose causes they cannot see at all,
and so they assume that such things happen
because of gods. Hence, once we understand
that nothing can be produced from nothing,
then we shall more accurately follow
what we are looking for, how everything
can be created and all work can be done
without any assistance from the gods.”
There is perhaps room to believe that Lucretius’ thermodynamic ideas come across more clearly to the average reader than the mathematics of Clausius and Lord Kelvin. Later in this same poem, Lucretius brings us close to the modern idea of the atom as a building block of macro-scale substances. He suggests that the diversity of substance results from
“different bondings,
weights, collisions, combinations, motions,
through which all actions happen.”
This is a serious leap because it challenged the previously held notion of a primordial fire as the foundational structure of material. This poem was also written in the same dactylic hexameter rhythm as Empedocles — a meter that has failed to achieve lasting utility in English or other modern languages. The rhythm is familiar to the traditions of epic poetry including Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Virgil’s Aeneid, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
Aristotle suggested that we poetry is simply written to bring pleasure to the reader. He also believed that learning something was the greatest pleasure, and so the combination is irresistibly potent. If this is so, why have we abandoned poetic expression for matters of science? Have we bled the pleasure from science for no good reason? Have we inadvertently cloistered scientific knowledge in some vain attempt to purify the discipline?
One simple motive for the secession of science from poetry is the modern scientific dedication to objectivity. Poetry bears feeling, and for this reason may prove an unparalleled means of communicating the human experience, or even understanding human activity. Yet on the other hand science is deeply rooted in atomics and physicality. Science is at heart focused on how inanimate objects interact to produce phenomena: mechanism. There is a sense in this pursuit, that there is little room for bias, feeling. And at the same time, this obsession with objectivity does not hold universal in our modern scientific cathedrals: Observer-dependent explanations like relativity, certainly stretch this law of objectivity in science. Biological explanations dependent on behavior, like socialization, also stretch the law objectivity.
Another often-claimed purpose for the separation of science and poetry, is the quest of clarity. But this prospect is also dubious, contradicted by the contemporary reliance on metaphor and simile in scientific writing. How often are groups of animals treated by scientific analysis as a series of cogs and gears? Think of economics, neural networking, and ecology. Beyond molecular actors like the ATPase, much of biology is only abstractly understood of by way of comparison to machinery, and while it is quite likely that this is a useable format for conveying knowledge, it is not really so far from poetry as we may wish to believe.
In the end, the best way to illustrate mechanism for science may well be just that: illustration. It is often claimed that mathematics is the language of science, and while there is no doubt that it is a powerful language of engineering, much of our canonical scientific mathematics simply served to animate a dynamic explanation. Animation, on the other hand, is much more transparent than mathematics and remains equivalently objective: it shows how the parts of the molecule interact to produce the chemical reaction or how the parts of the cell interact to produce locomotion for the bacterium. All of the great natural philosophers understood the value of illustration in provision of cause, and today the best journals like Nature and Science lean heavily on visualization, and increasingly, on animation.
When it comes to appending knowledge to an illustration of natural cause, why not invoke meter? Fundamentally, the poetic traditions of simile and metaphor already widespread in scientific writing are much more dangerous than rhythm to objective analysis, since they sacrifice detail for fuzzy insinuation. If poetry is as Aristotle suggests, simply the treatment of writing such that it produces pleasure for the reader, then perhaps modern science could be invigorated by some form of poetry. Afterall, science can only progress when it engages the interest of thinkers far and wide. If meter and harmony, like animation, extend science’s accessibility, then why not?
___________
Addendum: For a recent YouTube episode, Quinn & Mickey sat down a scholar of romantic poetry, Dr. Ruoji Tang, to consider some of the subjects discussed above from another angle. Check it out:
