Thoughts on a New Book about "Romantic" Science

"Romantic Science." What an interesting idea. Expounded upon in "The Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes, and in this book review. (I have reserved the hardcover from my local library.)

The reviewer, Michael Knox Beran, sums up the spirit of Romantic Science; a rebellion against the crude mechanism of the 18th century:

"The wonder revealed by science is not, finally, severable from the mind of the wonderer. Holmes cites Richard Feynman’s belief that science is “driven by a continual dialogue between skeptical enquiry and the sense of inexplicable mystery,” and that if either is permitted to get the upper hand, “true science” will be “destroyed.”

"Even as he studies the outer world, the Romantic scientist is preoccupied with the secret of his inward existence. Banks observing the customs of the Tahitians, Davy on laughing gas, Mary Shelley wondering “in what sense Frankenstein’s ‘Creature’ would be human”: all remained perplexed by the mysteriousness of man. What laws govern his being? How do changing conditions affect his nature? Is he a creature created on purpose or a mere material accident?

"If Enlightenment thinkers built on the metaphor of the well-ordered machine, the Romantics sought to understand the spark that makes a thing live, whether it be a human being, a work of art, or a nation-state."

I very much identify with the spirit of this science, in which the primary mystery is always "man's inward existence." I discovered a similar spirit in the Confessions of St. Augustine. I have a sense of confusion and wonder about myself, and as I look within I cannot fathom what I am (See the Confessions' "On Memory" for a taste.) Look to the world, and things are even more mysterious. (See the Confessions' "On Time").

While this spurred Augustine to a sense of awe and reverence for the creator of such mystery, I must confess that I am more prone to grumbling. Steeped as I am at this point in my life in the notion of efficiency of process, I express much frustration with, and to God instead. I am pondering writing a cranky book entitled, "Life: The End User Experience."

This is also why Descartes, a later student of Augustine, fascinates me. As a person, he seemed more troubled by mystery, and wished to obliterate it. (Was he stymied by his own embarrassments and failures?) Hence, the rise of what we are talking about here, in reaction to the mechanistic natural philosophy of Descartes, and others like him.

However, the last paragraph quoted above also points to the dangers of Romantic Science: Its vitalism prepared the way for myths of living states, such as Nazi Germany. While Lincoln did not go so far, even as he read the Romantics, Bismarck and the rest of the Germans did.

Thankfully, my own crankiness will not lead me to posit a living spirit in a country, which I would then, perhaps, feel a need to save. I will leave that to more optimistic types. Personally, I believe the mechanical "checks and balances" of our society, referenced by Michael Knox Beran in this review, are falling apart, and that this machine called the United States is piling up fatal political defects. I may be wrong, and I pray that I am wrong, but I don't see the machine lasting long.

But so long as man's sense of his own mystery lives, new experiments in liberty will come forward.