This seems at first to be an astonishing claim , from one we know as a great 18th century master of poetry and literature , but who himself wished to be remembered principally for his scientific work . But it guides us towards recognising that science is by no means the formulaic set of processes that the worst of its educational approaches suggests , but a deeply human attempt to negotiate the gulf of ignorance that divides us from the world , calling on every imaginative power . Once we understand that the cosmos cannot be ‘ readoff ’ from our observations – and that at every stage it ’ s human re-creation is an emotional journey as much as a cognitive one , then thinking of science as a humanity does not seem quite as absurd .
The literary polymath George Steiner wrote a short , but remarkable and heartfelt , book right at the end of the last century . Real Presences is his humanistic cry against the moves of post-modernism to erase meaning from literature . He is distressed by the late-modern divorce of writing and reading from reference to the real world , a shift that he calls the ‘ Broken Contract ’. Summing up the reconciliatory task that art plays in mending such brokenness , he writes :
Only art can go some way towards making accessible , towards waking into some measure of communicability , the sheer inhuman otherness of matter .
I ’ ll never forget the first time I read these words , as an early-career scientist in search of an answer to the puzzling question of why we do science at all . I knew that the motivation for science has nothing to do with technology – to be sure that other creative activity can be nourished by scientific findings , but this is always a by-product , and most technologies develop independently of science . No , there is a human need and consequent desire that are somehow met by science , glimpsed more clearly from the perspective of its older name ‘ natural philosophy ’. Steiner sums up a long philosophical tradition when he pinpoints the problem : humans live in an inhuman world – and we know it , and feel it keenly . Art may indeed go some way towards ‘ making accessible ’ our alien environment , but Professor Steiner , only art ? What else would science be for than to ‘ wake into some measure of communicability ’ the natural substances and processes , the dance of the atoms and the wheeling of the spiral galaxies , that we find in both the microscopic and in the vast spaces around us ?
If the arts , humanities and sciences meet , albeit through different means , the same needs and motivations at the deepest level of the human condition , then might there be renewed hope in our times for a realization of Goethe ’ s vision , that they might reunite as friends ?
Tom McLeish is an OS ( 1973-1980 ) and author of The Poetry and Music of Science
( revised paperback edn . OUP 2022 )
Book artwork by Alexandra Carr
5