Arthur C Clarke proposed three “laws” or principles about prediction –
- When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
- The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
- Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
There’s a lot of noise these days about “anti-science” – I find this a strange term actually. It’s about as useful as “anti-art” or “anti-philosophy”. “Science” is not a discreet entity. It’s a way of thinking. Deleuze really clarified this for us. He said science was a way of thinking about function. That’s a good summary in my opinion. I enjoy science because it helps me to understand how things work (sometimes!). Deleuze went on to point out that philosophy was a way of thinking about concepts and art about percepts and affects. These great human endeavours – of science, philosophy and art – give us very different ways to think about our lives and the world we live in. Each way of thinking can potentially be illuminating. But it isn’t a competition. The one way of thinking takes nothing away from either of the others.
So when distinguished but elderly scientists claim that “science” is under attack, I fear they’re misguided. What they probably mean is that their world-view is being challenged. Scientists should challenge each other. They should continuously enter into rational debate with each other. But science (thinking about function) is only one way of understanding experience. What’s the science of love? What’s the science of poetry? What’s the science of Shakespeare? Yes, you can take a scientific approach to any of those subjects but there are better ways to understand love and literature.
Health is an interesting case. It’s actually hard to understand. We know when we’ve got it and when we haven’t, but what is it actually? Science can help us to understand a lot about health by helping us to find out how organisms function. But philosophy and art can also help us to understand health, because health is an idea, a concept and an experience too.
So when “scientists” dismiss experiences which they can’t make sense of, it is worth while considering what they have to say, but it’s important not to make the mistake of thinking they are telling the Truth, the Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth. There’s more to life than understanding function and there’s more to life than we currently regard as possible. We, the human race, progress by not accepting that something is impossible. Progress involves discovering that much more is possible than you previously thought. Daniel Gilbert writes about this very nicely in his Stumbling on Happiness. He says when imagining the future we are always limited by what we know now. Futurologists tend to imagine versions of the present rather than the radically different futures which actually transpire.
I love life at the edge of discovery. It’s like magic.
Heroes Not Zombies 
This is interesting. When I was in grade school, and even in college, all of my classes were divided up into different categories, and no one ever wanted to merge ways of thinking to look at the same issues. As if science is separate from art and all else. As if art is separate from math and all else, etc. We have been taught from the beginning that these things don’t merge. But recently, when I was reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, I started to get the understanding that the underlying current to all ways of thinking is about quality. As if how one goes about picking out good quality (that strain of thought that gets one to a quality point) is the main goal behind all forms of thinking, linking all subjects and different ways to think, different “classes”. And the more that I spend time creating paintings or drawings, the more I feel like art is nothing more than a way of thinking mixed with an action, but it pervades all facets of my life. I can’t just be “an artist” when I’m in the studio. I have to think this way, change my mind to see life in an artistic mindset at every moment. Because when I don’t, it’s like not giving the car enough gas, and I can’t go anywhere when I do sit down to paint.
I have to completely agree with you here!
Hmmm, the more time I spend creating — painting, writing, whatever — the more I feel that it has less to do with thinking, and more to do with feeling, and that the intermingling of the two (thinking/feeling), the inspiration for the creation, is something that is more or “higher” than me.
I think the hall was sad too 🙂
You know Ester I’ve never read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and I’ve no idea why not! Can’t help thinking I SHOULD have read it. I like that idea about quality though. I think its crystal clear from your own site that you are an artist through and through. It’s how you are in the world. I think Deleuze was really onto something with his ways of thinking but I think that life’s not black and white and none of us fit into neat pigeon holes (apart from those of us who are pigeons!). I think each of us tends to develop a blend of these strategies to perceive and understand the world and for some of us that blend is really really strongly flavoured with one of these thinking “flavours”! That’s why I put the scene from The Forsyte Saga in this post – to highlight the stark differences in the ways we see the world. Poor Soames just doesn’t speak the same language as Irene!
Glad you agree narziss and thanks for stopping by and reading
Absolutely agree Dove creativity is certainly not about analysis and rationalising. It seems to involve feeling and I’m sure that’s what Deleuze was referring to when he said Art was about “percepts” and “affects”.
Johnathon Haidt in his Happiness Hypothesis (you can read a review in my blog here) has a whole section about this “other dimension”, this feeling of becoming part of something larger or “higher” than ourselves.
Here’s Willa Cather – “….that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great”