Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

82 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
physical causality; man as a part of the physical continuum is also
subject to its laws, and any theory which asserts otherwise is wishful
thinking. (34)
As Becker suggests, it is not possible to avoid this difficulty. Science itself is
never completely objective, no matter how conscientiously it may strive
toward that end. The business of science is not a matter of merely collecting
facts but must be a constant interplay of fact and theory. Scientists and
philosophers of science have increasingly acknowledged the importance of
preconceived notions and unconscious assumptions in determining the direction
of science. Preconceptions are even more unavoidable in the case of
the artist, who must filter reality through imagination. Shaw’s position
avoids that weakness of the traditional realists because he acknowledged
his subjective biases—his “will-to-believe”—while the realists imagined
themselves as objective and utterly impartial observers. The most important
difference between Shaw and Zola, however, is in their metaphysical
assumptions. If one attempts to evaluate Zola and Shaw by their own criteria—as
purveyors of truth, not creators of art—one cannot avoid the question,
Which of the two metaphysical systems is most nearly true? Our
immediate concern, however, is that different views of the truth produce
different styles of artistic work.
Shavian Realism Is Super-Scientific Realism
Where Zola and his followers accepted the mechanistic determinism of
scientism which insisted that every event in the universe—including human
behavior—was produced by mechanical, physical law, Shaw saw will
as an independent causal agent that also has the power to influence physical
events. Mechanical causation is insufficient to explain everything that
happens; where the living will comes into play, it is necessary to use teleological
explanations to describe the universe adequately. Shaw the artist
thus regarded human motivation and its consequences as his primary subject
matter, while Zola chose to examine the environmental conditions he
assumed were the ultimate causes of human behavior. This may be part of
the reason why Shaw succeeded as a dramatist and Zola as a novelist: those
forms may just be better suited to their respective visions of truth.
Shaw still had much in common with the traditional realists, despite
their essential philosophical difference and the divergence in style it produced.
Objecting to critics who saw the characters in Candida as simple
embodiments of ideas, he told Augustin Hamon: