Insofar as we do sometimes talk about art as if it had winners, it is not because of science. We speak of Shakespeare as supreme among the writers not because he had a systematic conception of human behavior (and if he did, it was probably the medieval theory of the humors), but because his work has been felt to constitute, persistently and by the widest number of people, the most profound and powerful representation—not explanation—of our shared experience. It doesn’t matter, in that respect, what science happens to believe today about the material substrate of that experience, which may not be what it will believe tomorrow. Whom would Lehrer have anointed, in the visual arts, if he had written half a century ago? Not Cézanne, just as it is likely not to be Cézanne half a century from now. Lehrer can point, in retrospect, to the art that best accords with the current state of scientific knowledge, but what about the artist who proposes something science hasn’t (yet) discovered? How can we guess what it will?

Lehrer belongs to the “we used to think ... now we know” school of science writing. He understands that scientific discoveries are always provisional, but he keeps pushing the recognition away. He also knows that art and science do not belong to the same order of knowledge, but he cannot sustain the idea. Although his writing is more stylish than Chwe’s, his command of his material is not much more sophisticated. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, Lehrer believes, the arts were merely “pretty or entertaining.” (You know—Goya, Beethoven, Swift.) Then came modernism, inspired by the science of its time (a claim he never supports and, in seeking to align his subjects with the science of our time, frequently contradicts). Lehrer is the kind of person who believes that people woke up on January 1, 1500 and started speaking Modern English. “Cézanne invented modernist art.” Stravinsky “steeped himself in angst.” As for Gertrude Stein, “after a few years, her revolution petered out, and writers went back to old-fashioned storytelling.” “All of these artists,” Lehrer tells us, “shared an abiding interest in human experience.” Really, all of these artists? “In a move of stunning arrogance and ambition, they tried to invent fictions that told the truth.” Too bad Dante never thought of that. Lehrer, innocent of subtlety or history or depth, with no idea of how much he doesn’t know, is like the college student who comes home for winter break, all eager to regurgitate the things he has learned in Freshman Humanities.

Like Chwe’s, his argument advances through hyperbole, self-contradiction, oversimplification, and sheer incoherence. Maybe those are no more than the failures of these two men in particular, but I think they point to something larger. I have read other efforts to analyze artistic phenomena in scientific terms—most notably, in the emerging field of literary Darwinism, itself an outgrowth of the highly dubious discipline of evolutionary psychology—and they tend to falter in the same sorts of ways. At best, they tell us things we already know—and know immensely better—through humanistic means. They are almost always either crushingly banal or desperately wrongheaded. Pride and Prejudice is about mate selection. Hamlet struggles to choose between personal and genetic self-interest: killing Claudius and usurping his throne (but the latter never crosses his mind) or letting Gertrude furnish him with siblings (though since Hamlet is already thirty, that isn’t all too probable). Interpretive questions are not responsive to scientific methods. It isn’t even like using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel; it’s like using a chainsaw instead of a stethoscope. The instrument is not too crude; it is the wrong kind altogether.

The problem of “the two cultures” is not, in fact, a problem at all. There’s a reason that art and science are distinct. They don’t just work in different ways; they work on different things. Science addresses external reality, which lies outside our minds and makes itself available for objective observation. The arts address our experience of the world; they tell us what reality feels like. That is why the chain of consilience ruptures as we make the leap from material phenomena to the phenomena of art. Physics can explain chemistry, which can explain biology, which can explain psychology, and psychology might someday tell us, at least in the most general terms, how we create art and why we respond to it. But it will never account for the texture, the particularities, of individual works, or tell us what they mean. Nor will it explain the history of art: its moments, its movements, the evolution of its modes and styles, the labyrinths of influence that join its individual creators. The problem isn’t just that there is so much data that is unrecoverable. It’s too late now to turn up Sappho’s DNA, but even if we dug up Austen’s bones and sequenced her genome, it will never tell us why she wrote Persuasion, or how she came up with the opening of Pride and Prejudice, or what we are supposed to make of Emma. Art is experiential. It doesn’t just speak of experience; it needs to be experienced itself, inhabited in ways that proofs and formulae do not. And experience cannot be weighed or measured; it can only be evoked.