Imagination and Science in Romanticism by Richard Sha (review)

Recent STEM to STEAM debates in the educational system have called into question the role of the arts in our science-oriented culture. At the heart of this debate lies the widely accepted view that the arts have always been diametrically opposed to science. Richard Sha's Imagination and Science in Romanticism challenges this assumption in a detailed study of the Romantic imagination. Like Perverse Romanticism (2007), Sha's new book aims to bridge the gaps between disciplines restoring the connection between literature and science. More specifically, Imagination and Science refutes the traditional and historicist versions of the imagination for wrongly assuming a split between imagination and science before such a split formed. Sha's study shows, instead, how Romantic scientists and writers turned to the imagination to further explore their experiences with scientific materiality. The book's chapters unpack an impressive range of scientific writings from natural philosophy, neurology, physiology, and embryology alongside the works of Percy Shelley, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley. While Sha acknowledges delusions and fantasies as prevalent concerns in Romanticism, his study focuses on how the Romantic imagination led to valuable skepticism about the limits of scientific claims.

Imagination and Science seeks to draw our attention to the epistemological role of the imagination that has been overlooked by Romantic and historicist critics. Sha faults scholars like M. H. Abrams, Harold Bloom, James Engell, and Northrop Frye for too hastily dismissing the Romantic imagination as a transcendental idealism counter to the agenda of philosophical materialism. Whereas the historicist view positions materiality as a corrective to the imagination, Sha approaches the Romantic imagination as an epistemological tool for scientific observation. In this context, Sha reframes the Romantic imagination as inseparable from the history of scientific objectivity. Instead of objectivity stripped of the self, Romantic objectivity was "tied to the ability to feel" and relied upon the observer's subjectivity and sensibility (p. 11). It is important to note that, in Sha's view, the Romantics understood imagination as physiological and embodied. Chapter 2, for instance, turns to Romantic neurology to further warrant the imagination as physiologically "embodied in a network of nerves" (p. 103). The study contextualizes the embodied imagination within two defining interests of Romanticism, shared by sciences and the arts: (1) phenomenality and relationality that emerged from Kantian ideas and (2) the move from Enlightenment atomism to dynamic materialism and vitalism.

One of the book's central arguments is that Romantic scientists and writers strived to yoke imagination and reason through a Kantian modesty. This approach, Sha explains, allowed Romantic thinkers to make "claims of materiality overtly speculative," since the thing itself was outside of human reason (p. 13). That the appearance of materiality relied on the speculative imagination challenges the "opposition between the material and immaterial," posed by Romantic critics (p. 13). Instead, Sha's study proposes that the Romantic imagination, when yoked with reason, posited an empirical plausibility that withheld constitutive claims about materiality. Because empirical evidence was registered through the embodied imagination, Romantic thinkers filled the gap between an object and its appearance by investigating phenomenality, what Sha terms the "feltness of experience" (p. 3). Chapter 1, for instance, shows how thinking about "forces" in dynamic materialism made matter "encounterable" and offered a way to bracket physicality as speculation (p. 43). Here, Sha proposes that scientists like Michael Faraday, Humphry Davy, and Mary Somerville enlisted the imagination to aid experiments and make predictions about electromagnetism. As a result, these claims of appearance allowed Romantic thinkers ways to imagine relations between parts and stipulate universal laws without claiming ontological certainty.

Drawing largely on Kant's concept of purposiveness without a purpose, Sha's study highlights two key developments of the Romantic imagination influenced by relationality and vitalism. First, Kant's purposiveness encouraged the Romantics to "feel" interconnectedness by imagining degrees of difference within unity, what Sha calls the "felt intensification of differences" (p. 5). The latter part of chapter 1 focuses on Percy Shelley's fascination...