Radical Innovators

The Blessings of Adversity in Science and Art, 1500-2000

Anton Blok

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509505524, 9781509505517
• eBook ISBN: 9781509505555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book leading cultural anthropologist Anton Blok sheds new light on the lives and achievements of pioneers who revolutionized science and art over the past five centuries, demonstrating that adversity rather than talent alone was crucial to their success.

Through a collective biography of some ninety radical innovators, including Erasmus, Spinoza, Newton, Bach, Sade, Darwin, Melville, Mendel, Cézanne, Curie, Brâncusi, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Keynes, and Goodall, Blok shows how a significant proportion in fact benefited from social exclusion. Beethoven's increasing deafness isolated him from his friends, creating more time for composing and experimenting, while Darwin's chronic illness gave him an excuse to avoid social gatherings and get on with his work.

Adversity took various forms, including illegitimate birth, early parental loss, conflict with parents, bankruptcy, chronic illness, physical deficiencies, neurological and genetic disorders, minority status, peripheral origins, poverty, exile, and detention. Blok argues, however, that all these misfortunes had the same effect: alienation from mainstream society. As outsiders, innovators could question conventional beliefs and practices. With little to lose, they could take chances and exploit opportunities.

With governments, universities and industry all emphasizing the importance of investing in innovation, typically understood to mean planned and focussed research teams, this book runs counter to conventional wisdom. For far more often, radical innovation in science and art is entirely unscripted, resulting from trial and error by individuals ready to take risks, fail, and start again.

1
THE MARGINS AS A PLACE OF INNOVATION

Many men who are very clever – much cleverer than the discoverers – never originate anything.

Charles Darwin, in a letter to his son, 1871¹

Recent research into the history of science shows that radical innovation did not come from people who were more talented, intelligent, or knowledgeable than ordinary people. Nor did radical innovators mostly come from privileged backgrounds. What distinguished them from ordinary people was an early and overpowering interest in a specific branch of the arts or science and seizing windows of opportunity. Their dedication was both lasting and passionate; it took them from self-study to an extended period of apprenticeship in relative isolation, often with a mentor providing feedback. Rather than talent or skill, daily practice and chance encounters were decisive.²

This book provides a detailed empirical and theoretical account of this viewpoint, spelled out on the basis of a collective biography of about one hundred radical innovators, virtually all of them active in Europe and North America in the past five hundred years. This so-called prosopographic approach is comparative and analyses the background, location, and setting of innovators. According to sociologist and historian Charles Tilly,

the strength of collective biography is not in supplying alternative explanations, but in specifying what is to be explained. Historians who have specified what is to be explained via collective biography often find themselves turning to explanations stressing the immediate setting and organization of everyday life, or relying on something vaguely called “culture.” That moves them back toward anthropology.³

What did radical innovators have in common that enabled them to distinguish themselves from ordinary mortals? Why Charles Darwin? Why Sigmund Freud? Why Albert Einstein? Why Jane Goodall? To say, as generations of historians of science and cognitive psychologists have done, that they had more talent or were more creative is not wrong but tautological and begs the question. To say that most of them were young or new to the field in which they made new discoveries is only taking one step in a promising direction, leaving open the background of their drive and failing to explain late production.⁴

The history of science is more about science than about scientists. As the history of ideas it remained a disembodied affair. Biography as a genre is still primarily descriptive and is only rarely comparative and analytical. Therefore it fails to suggest or establish compelling links between the life and the work of its subjects. If the author of a recent biography of Galileo is correct when he says that “biography is not seen as a respectable genre by professional historians,”⁵ this may be largely attributed to the predominance of the monographic – and not infrequently monomaniac – treatment of isolated cases at the expense of comparative research. Another critical historian of science concludes that it is “difficult for authors of a case study not to become prisoners of their subject. The stronger the lens used by the observer, the greater the possible discovery, and the greater also the danger of becoming so involved in one’s case that one forgets to distance oneself from it. At that point no generalization is possible.”⁶

The situation is no different in the history of art and literature. Both focus primarily on art and literature themselves, leaving the life and work of their practitioners to biographers, who usually restrict themselves to one particular person and his or her work. Here, too, life and work remain separated, making any attempt at explanation strongly ad hoc in character. One misses a comparative perspective focusing on context: the social position of innovators, their place in networks of relationships from their earliest youth onward – an approach that can identify similarities and differences in the lives of innovators and also pays attention to “negative” cases: people who might have been innovative but who refrained from taking a further decisive step.

This book attempts to explore these uncharted territories by systematically comparing the lives of about one hundred scientists and artists whose work both has been innovative and has had an enduring impact. The criterion for selection is a canon of reconceptualization or radical innovation.⁷ For scientists this comes down to the presentation of a new and more comprehensive perspective. In the early seventeenth century, for example, William Harvey’s discovery of the blood circulation system was based on an analogy: the heart functioning as a (single) pump at the center. Harvey’s system replaced the multiple systems posited by Galen. This was not the only discovery based on an analogy. Darwin’s discovery of natural selection as the driving force of the evolution of species, relegating the theory of creation to the realm of myth (and proving the contemporary belief in the inheritance of acquired properties wrong), was an achievement of similar proportions and also founded on several analogies.⁸ Nicolaus Copernicus’s heliocentric model of the world replaced the prevailing geocentric model of Ptolemy based on countless loose observations. Using Johannes Kepler’s discovery of the elliptical orbits of planets, Isaac Newton completed the Copernican revolution with his discovery of the universal law of gravitation. Most likely as a tribute to the work of his predecessors Kepler and Newton, whom he admired, Einstein observed that “No fairer destiny could be allotted to any physical theory, than that it should of itself point out the way to the introduction of a more comprehensive theory, in which it lives on as a limiting case.”⁹

To find out what radical innovators had in common and to arrive at a new perspective, I also explored a number of scientists who could have been innovative, but stuck to received wisdom. These “negative” cases enable us to sort out independent variables that help account for radical innovation.¹⁰ Which circumstances enabled the young Einstein to formulate the special theory of relativity while Hendrik Lorentz and Henri Poincaré – much older scholars – only came very close? All three scientists possessed an esprit préparé, to use Louis Pasteur’s famous phrase about the role of chance in scientific discovery.¹¹ What stopped two of them, with hindsight, from taking that single step? How and why could Newton complete the Copernican revolution with his discovery of the law of universal gravitation, while fellow scientists Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens did not? What enabled Baruch Spinoza to emerge as the radical pioneer of the Enlightenment, rather than his contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz? Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, though from different backgrounds – the opposite sides of Victorian England – simultaneously discovered the struggle for existence and natural selection as the driving forces of evolution. What did they have in common and where did they differ from their colleagues? The same questions apply to breakthroughs in modern art: why Ludwig van Beethoven, Henrik Ibsen, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Arthur Rimbaud, Constantin Brâncuşi, and Franz Kafka, and not one of their teachers or fellow artists?

To answer these questions this book focuses on the blessings of adversity in the lives of about a hundred artists and scientists in Europe and North America between approximately 1500 and 2000. Their work not only brought about fundamental innovations, but also had a lasting impact. It still appeals to us today – often also because of the surprising simplicity and elegance of their findings and discoveries.¹² Their vision changed the way we see the world and ourselves. Some of them have become historical figures. Others – like Darwin with The Origin of Species (1859), Freud with The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and Max Weber with his study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (1905) – are still our contemporaries. We have made ourselves familiar with great works of art. They have become part of our mental world, part of how we see, feel, and think about life. We can identify with Antigone, Hamlet, and Rembrandt’s Bathsheba, and with many other unforgettable female characters in literature, including Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Strindberg’s Miss Julie, Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else, and Tennessee Williams’s Blanche DuBois. All these examples show the relative autonomy of artists and their art with respect to the societies from which they came. According to Norbert Elias, the question about the relative autonomy of the artist has yet to be answered, but “its complexity should not relieve us from the obligation to further explore the relationship between creator and society.”¹³

What all these achievements have in common, both in the arts and science, is originality and the effect of an enduring esthetic sensibility. People speak of the “intrinsic beauty” of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, the discovery of which pointed the way to the transmission of genetic materials (“information”) and opened the era of molecular biology. According to one of the discoverers, the structure was “too pretty not to be true.”¹⁴ Kepler’s discovery of the elliptic orbits of planets has been called a prime example of elegance in science and the beauty of simplicity.¹⁵ The same qualities have been ascribed to Einstein’s special relativity theory, and he later illustrated that in a presentation in 1933: “It is true that the theoretical physicist who has no sense of mathematical elegance, beauty, and simplicity is lost in some essential way.”¹⁶ Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the prin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The Margins as a Place of Innovation
• 2 Sibling Rivalry
• 3 Heuristic Exceptions
• 4 Adversity
• 5 Chance and Necessity
• 6 Conclusions
• Appendices: Antecedents of Pioneers in Science and the Arts Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Subjects
• End User License Agreement