Behind Appearance by C. H. Waddington (review)

Leonardo, Vol. 4, pp. 179-190. Pergamon Press 1971. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readers are invited to recommend books to be reviewed. Only books in English and French can be reviewed at this stage. Readers who would like to be added to Leonardo's panel o/reviewers should write to the Founder-Editor, indicating their particular interests and specialization . Behind Appearance. C. H. Waddington. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1969. 256 pp., illus.£9. Reviewed by: Peter Lloyd Jones* The loaded title, Behind Appearance, implies a theory of science and a theory of art. It inevitably harks back to the days when painting and science were both activities 'in front' of appearance. That is to say, when the explanation of natural phenomena could be cast in terms of visible geometry or the level ofbiological structure discernible to the eye in gross dissections of organisms. It was a world where ideas like 'harmony' could reach into art and natural philosophy alike, and had not yet been supplanted by more stripped down notions such as 'equilibrium' and 'symmetry', explicitly defined to exclude a semantic payload outside of science. Inevitably too, the name of Leonardo comes to mind as one who straddled the divide for a brief if magical moment. His diagrams of the flow of water and of air shade over indiscernibly into structural schemata for the plaited folds of a young girl's hair. But this is no mere observation of appearances, for all Leonardo harped on the need for direct experience. Closer analysis of these drawings by Gombrich had demonstrated clearly that they are rather theoretical attempts to project Aristotelian notions of impact and impetus onto the visible surface of the flowing stream. We know from hindsight that Leonardo's enterprise was hopeless. The way ahead for science lay in abstraction and mathematics. Usefully predictive theories were more and more cast in terms of entities that could not be seen and more recently in terms that can hardly be imaged mentally at all. For most of the time since this fission occurred this has not been the case for painting. Whereas, in the nineteenth century, for example, theories oflight, electricity and magnetism in physics or molecular and atomic interaction in chemistry demanded explanations in terms of everdeepening conceptual abstraction, painting re- *22Bradbourne Street, Fulham, London, S.W.6., England. This review will also appear in The British Journal for the Philosophy ofScience. 12 179 mained as wedded to the visible world as it had always been. To be sure, there were changes in subjectmatterand artisticintention. At oneextreme, Romanticism could certainly claim almost magical powers of intuitive insight as a direct counter to a scientific monopoly of a truth that no-one could see. For all that though, the science, say of ClerkMaxwell , was parallel chronologically with an art depicting people and events in the work ofCourbet, Daumier and Manet. The situation changed dramatically in the twentieth century. Artists, first the Cubists, but rapidly the Futurists and Constructivists detached art from the visible world entirely. Abstraction in art had joined abstraction in science. It was again possible to imagine (without too bizarre an interpretation of art) some relation between the two. The central question is then what is this relationship? Is it in some way a return to the situation of Leonardo ? Are art and science similar by virtue of the fact that they are, as they had always been, separate but equal modes of enquiry into reality and this similarity of purpose inevitably drives both into abstraction? The title of the book seems a pretty broad hint that Waddington wants to answer these questions in the affirmative. His book is actually an attempt to trace connections between trends in the recent history of science and of art. This is always a perilous endeavour. Correlations between historical trends are more difficult to avoid than to discover. Most, however, particularly those between smooth curve trends, are ofno significance causally at all. Discontinuities are apparently another matter. If a trend curve for some historical process shows abrupt jumps and some other trend curve shows abrupt jumps, and if these sudden 'hiccups' can be aligned chronologically then it can seem that there is something...