Scientific Experiment, Drama, and the Origins of the Novel

Michael McKeon

Monday, Nov. 2

Photonics 906

8 St. Mary’s Street

For modern thought, art is antithetical to empirical epistemology and scientific method; but this antithesis is belied by the early history of these categories as they coalesced during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns began as a debate about the significance of the great diachronic divide that seemed in itself unquestionable. However a by-product of this debate, the synchronic division between the sciences and the arts, would become no less important for modernity than the diachronic one. By virtue of this division of knowledge, natural philosophers like Bacon, Sprat, and Hooke worked to formulate the principles of scientific or experimental method. And counterintuitively, these scientific efforts encouraged in others the theorization of what later would be called “aesthetic” experience–not in opposition to, but in emulation of, empiricism and its first principle that epistemological distance is the necessary precondition for all reliable knowledge. In the critical essays of Dryden, Addison, and Johnson on the nature of dramatic response, as well as in the self-conscious novels of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne, we can see the emergence of a theory of the dramatic aesthetic and novelistic realism as an explicit response to the Quarrel. These theories conceive a special sort of knowing that achieves empirical distance as the basis not for the cumulative and progressive ideal of scientific knowledge but for the virtual knowledge that Coleridge at the end of the eighteenth century would identify with “the willing suspension of disbelief.” Soon after this, however, the aesthetic began its long modern devolution into a secular mode of idealism whose work is to transcend the empirical and no longer to mediate between the senses and the understanding.