D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• The Vienna Circle of “logical positivists” and what constitutes “proof.” • A work of art is the sum wholeness of a great multitude of relationships; this is even more true of anything in Nature. • “Scientific” now means responsible, dependable, leading to “truth.” Yet early 20th century discoveries revealed limits of “classical” science. Our “post-Enlightenment” age. • Inspiration and sudden insight in science, logic and analysis in art-making. • Non-verbal knowledge. • Consciousness, the brain, and religious and spiritual experience. • The Arts as a defense against materialism. • Art must have a physical presence. It escapes our nets of words and numbers. • The Arts and Nature literally revivify us. • Art-making: a bravura act of personal creation or a receiving of gifts? • Chaos theory and Systems theory. • Art-making and Science: strongly related human activities.

“Why is it that the silhouette of a storm-bent leafless tree against an evening sky in winter is perceived as beautiful, but the corresponding silhouette of any multi-purpose university building is not, in spite of all efforts of the architect? The answer seems to me, even if somewhat speculative, to follow from the new insights into dynamical systems. Our feeling for beauty is inspired by the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder, as it occurs in natural objects—in clouds, trees, mountain ranges, or snow crystals. The shapes of all these dynamical systems jelled into physical forms, and particular combinations of order and disorder are typical for them.”

[German physicist Gert Eilenberger, quoted in James Gleick, Chao: Making a new Science, p 117]

The poet is one who starts from the seat of the unmeasurable and travels towards the measureable….Although he desires not to say anything and still convey his poetry, at the last moment he must succumb to the word after all.…

The scientist has unmeasurable qualities as a man, but he holds his line and does not travel with the unmeasurable because he is interested in knowing.…He receives knowledge in full and works with this, and you call him objective.

But Einstein travels like a poet. He holds to the unmeasurable for a long, long while because he is a fiddle player. He also reaches nature or Light at its very doorstep….He deals with Order and not with knowing.

There is nothing about man that is really measureable…He is the seat of the unmeasurable, and he employs the measureable to make it possible for him to express something.

[Louis Kahn, quoted in John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis Kahn, p 14]

In the earliest days of Western culture, the sciences were all part of the broad category of philosophy—that is, of the love of, and search for, wisdom. Through the centuries, however, scientific endeavors have become ever more separated from philosophy, and from the arts. Eventually, in the 1930s, the Vienna Circle of “logical positivists” solemnly announced that anything which could not be scientifically tested was not worth talking about, was mysticism and “garbage.”[1] (This was not a new idea: eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume had made very much the same claim, as we will see in the next chapter.) To members of the Vienna Circle, philosophy was useful only as a means whereby the concepts of scientists could be clarified and sharpened. Statements unconnected to science were meaningless; metaphysics, religion, aesthetics, ethics and morality all fell outside the verifiable and therefore outside the meaningful.[2]

Nowadays, technologies of various kinds are employed as artistic media, in what is sometimes claimed to be a wedding of science and art, or seen—perhaps wishfully—as a subsuming of art by science. But technologies, that is machines, cannot produce art on their own, except perhaps by accident, and an occurrence of art-making can never be repeated, while the scientific method insists that its empiric proofs be replicable. In popular opinion, art and science are still believed to fall at opposite ends of a spectrum.

A work of art is the sum wholeness of a multitude of crucial and complex relationships—within parts, between parts, and simultaneously between each part, all parts, and the whole—through all the nuanced possibilities of sound, light, color, tonality, position, shape, movement and so on (with their attendant resonances in mind and memory). Together these relationships form a lively and more or less coherent whole reported by our senses and recognized by our complete, hugely complex, mind.

In the everyday physical world in which we all live, the even more vastly numerous and complex relationships among multiple parts which make up the “real” are precisely those which science is finding it difficult and perhaps impossible to describe mathematically, to predict or to control. As the British geneticist B.S. Haldane said, “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, it is queerer than we can suppose.”

We tend to think of subatomic particles as some kind of small billiard balls or small grains of sand. But for physicists, the particle has no independent existence. A particle is essentially a set of relations, that reach outward to connect with other things. The other things are interconnections of other things which also turn out to be interconnections, and so on and on. . . . In atomic physics we never turn up with any things at all. The essential nature of matter lies not in objects but in interconnections [i.e. in relationships]. [italics mine]

[From the film Mindwalk, 1990, based on the book by Fritjof Capra]

The essential nature of a work of art—like that of every object including the subatomic particle—is also the product of the set of relationships constituting it, the entirety of which is its “meaning.”

During the past 300 years or so, Science has gradually come to be regarded as the pattern for all other enquiries, both by its own practitioners and by outsiders. “Scientific” now means responsible, dependable.[3] Recently, the “scientific” analysis of the arts has been intellectually fashionable—at precisely the same time that the complex systems of interrelationship in the physical world are defying scientific efforts to measure and predict them, even with the assistance of exponentially increasing computing power.

It was in the early 20th century that the intrinsic limitations of classical—that is, reductionist—science became inescapably apparent. Yet later in the same century, a reductionist, “deconstructivist” approach to literature and gradually to the other arts infected scholarship and criticism of the arts. It is obvious that the dissection of a living body into parts requires the death of that body —and the disappearance of what we call the soul or personality as experienced in the living person. In the same way, the deconstruction and demythologization of the experience of the work of art must and does result in the escape of the transcendent, the very quality that makes the work valuable, essential, worthy of long and focused attention, and ultimately life-giving. Classical science works by deciding on a simplified diagram of an aspect of the world and discovering what it can of that; such a picture is necessarily to some degree false because severely limited. The question is, why do we not insist that in any discussion of a great work of art (or of an animal or plant species, of an ecosystem or of the universe) the power of the ineffable whole be recognized and respected as being both essential and mysterious?

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The imagined schism between the arts and the sciences makes a man like Leonardo da Vinci seem almost unbelievably gifted, combining genius as a painter, sculptor, and musician with genius as a research scientist, an inventor, and an engineer. Today we believe that scientists and artists are quite different people: scientists and engineers are practical and pragmatic; artists of every kind are intuitive, quixotic, visionary.[4]

Within this conceptual framework, Leonardo is necessarily seen as an anomaly, as two persons in one skin, a kind of marvelous freak. However such a separation of scientists and artists does justice to neither—scientists and mathematicians know that in fact creativity and intuition are essential in their work; artists know that their work depends on logical thought and on pragmatic questions of material and skill, as well as on inspiration, intuition, and insight. To the extent that we experience and enjoy the world through our senses, and make things, and at the same time are curious about how the world functions and is constituted, each one of us is both artist and scientist.

In the working lives of scientists there are many instances of unexplainable inspiration, of new conceptions arising full-formed in dreams and reveries, or in sudden flashes of insight. The very foundation of modern western science—the system which is now generally seen as the most valid and respectable way of thinking about the world— was itself the product of insight and inspiration, of dream.[5] The original pattern for a rational and dependable examination of reality, a procedural method known as the scientific method, came to René Déscartes in a trio of dreams during a single night in 1619, when he was just 26 years old.

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The word art comes from the Latin artem, thought to have been formed on the more ancient base ar-, meaning put together, join, fit.[6] It has to do with skill and dexterity, but also with branches of learning; clearly its meaning is related to that of concinnity.[7] Science means knowledge, especially of a technical kind. It derives from the Latin verb scire, to know. The adjective scientific was originally used primarily in the translation of the works of Aristotle from the Greek, and was applied first to arguments or proofs. It was later extended to matters and persons having to do with science.[8] Since the sixteenth century, a “man adept at science” has been referred to by various names: as, sequentially, a sciencer, a scientiate, and a scientman.[9] Our word “scientist” was first used in 1840.

We believe that Science produces knowledge which can be proven true again and again, although what constitutes “proof” is less clear;[10] we will give attention to this in later chapters. The pronouncements of scientists are commonly accepted as having ultimate authority, because we assume that they are based on such dependable knowledge, on “truths” which can be irrefutably demonstrated in the physical world. Perhaps because of this, great scientists are commonly honored by such titles as “the Father of Relativity,” or “the Father of Evolution,” as if they were the creators of the phenomena which they have investigated and described—as if they were that which used to be called “God.”

The pervasiveness of an unquestioning faith in Science may be due in part to the fact that the great gaps in human scientific knowledge, vast though they are, are so seldom mentioned, either in textbooks or in the popular press. This is not entirely vanity and hubris on the part of scientists; there are political and financial reasons for the oversight, having to do with the funding of scientific research by corporations and the military, and with big business media engineering of the “news.” Such influences can be imagined to some extent; they have been written about at length by others.

However our faith in science and its wonders is at root the product of our avidity for certainty and for a sense of security made possible by such certainty. We want to believe, in order to feel safe. American faith in the nation’s inviolable security against harm from outside—based on its superior science and technology even more than on its geographical position—was one of the casualties of the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in 2001.

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Another knowledge altogether is the seemingly innate, or purely experientially gained, non-verbal knowledge of things animate and inanimate. In an essay about the death of his sister, Bert O. States wrote,

Simply put, grief is the overwhelming experience of loss; but more complexly it is the result of one’s discovery that time flows in one direction only, a truth that is normally masked by the animation with which everything living continues to remain itself. For everything that is valued is valued as a sort of instant history of itself: mother is always dependably mother, summer is always a time when there is no school, the robin dependably hops in furious bursts over the lawn…and so on. All things continue to be themselves, and thanks to this wonderful persistence there is a fair amount of security in life. The cancer of grief finds its natural host in this all too vulnerable zone of comfort, and at the highest possible stake. For once life is out of a living thing it cannot be called back, and in that realization the tranquility of a lifetime of safety is temporarily shattered and permanently put on notice.…[in an] exquisite awareness of how the value of all things rides on the current of an indifferent causal order.

[Bert O. States, “The Death of a Finch,” The Hudson Review, Spring 1996]

“The animation with which everything living continues to remain itself” cannot be measured—or even described except by means of art. Reference to it is reference to an innate knowledge we all hold in common. We can “know” things without “understanding” them. We can experience < >´ in its endless manifestations without being able to explain it. All of this is “aesthetic;” we experience it by means of our senses. “Come to your senses” is one way of saying “Be Here Now.” The mind/sensory system whole is hugely subtle and complex, more so than we can yet begin to understand. The reality around us, of which each of us is actually one small part, is infinitely subtle and complex.

Our conscious life, which includes our conscious imagination, manifests itself through time in the broad space between two conceptual markers. The first is that of intuitive knowledge and empirically gained knowledge gathered over millennia and handed down in the form of myths or rules of conduct.[11] The second, at the other end of the field, is that of scientific knowledge, which aspires to, and commonly claims, a consistent verifiability. This is also empirical knowledge, though of a narrowly defined kind, and it too is handed down with its own beliefs and rules of conduct. The space between them encompasses the arts, politics, religious life, commerce, human culture, our interaction with other people or with the world of nature, and even scientific theory. In contemporary western culture we crowd together for a presumed security at the science-and-technology end of this vast experiential and cognitive field.

Certainly a powerful minority among human beings has been made physically comfortable, long-lived, and relatively or absolutely affluent by the technology growing out of science. But despite these successes, and in part because of them, stress-and-anxiety-related disease is epidemic, and drug abuse and violence increase worldwide. More ominous still is the destruction of the natural, non-technological environment—infinitely beautiful and mysterious, the essential material and spiritual support for our life—by our use of our technology, on which we ever more helplessly depend. At the same time millions upon millions of human beings suffer from desperate poverty, starvation, and political oppression. Those who position themselves with any smugness at the shrine of That-Which-Can-Or-Will-Be-Proven are required to ignore or sublimate these problems —Science will find a way!—and to deny or overlook the spiritual dimensions of our current situation.

Can it be that some of us are unable to experience the immeasurable, the undefinable, in the same way that others are tone-deaf or color-blind? Freud, for instance, loathed music, though believing that it could release mental tensions and return the psyche to the state of blissful equilibrium experienced in the womb. [12] Bertrand Russell is said to have been so visually inept that he had difficulty in recognizing the faces of people whom he had met many times, and had to resort to memorized lists of their outstanding features as a means of identifying them.[13] Such people tend to use “mystical” as a term of censure and derision. At the same time, the spiritual dimension of reality is obviously susceptible to exploitive chicanery of a kind to which modern science, at least in principle, is immune.

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We use the word “consciousness” to name our capacity for awareness in all its forms, whether our experiences can be scientifically validated or not. However the relationship between what we call consciousness and the physical object we call our brain is uncertain. Some now believe that consciousness—that which we experience as “I”—is simply the sum total of all the physical activity in the brain, both chemical and electric, moment by moment. A scientist is likely to tell you that what you consider religious or spiritual experience is imaginary, or merely a product of such brain activity; it is another aspect of the physical world which science has not yet fully explained, but eventually will explain. No doubt such experience will then no longer be labelled “spiritual,” “spooky,” or “garbage.” Clearly, however, such experience will be no more “real” when science has provided a physical explanation for it than it is now and always has been.

On a spring morning in the early 1980s, while waiting for a train in London, neurologist James Austin experienced something that seemed to fit standard descriptions of mystical awareness, of grace, of spiritual epiphany. However, being a neurologist, he believed that all we see, hear, feel and think is mediated or created by the brain, and therefore he was quite sure that his experience was merely a “proof of the existence of the brain.”[14] Dr. Austin reasoned that in order for us to feel that time, fear, and self-consciousness have dissolved, brain circuits which normally carry these things must be interrupted.[15] He presented his theories in 1998, in an 844-page paper called “Zen and the Brain,” which was published by MIT Press. In the years since then, a field called “neurotheology” has emerged, and Columbia University has established a center for the Study of Science and Religion.

More recently, SPECT scans of the brains of Buddhists and Christians deep in meditation and prayer have substantiated Dr. Austin’s theory that in such states of mind, “time, fear, and self-consciousness” dissolve. But of course this does not automatically mean that such phenomena are generated by the brain itself. In a 2001 paper, “Why God Won’t Go Away,” Dr. Andrew Newberg argued that the association of spiritual experience with distinct neural activity is no proof that such experiences are “mere neurological illusions.”[16]

It’s no safer to say that spiritual urges and sensations are caused by brain activity than it is to say that the neurological changes through which we experience the eating of an apple cause the apple to exist…[T]here is no way to determine whether the neurological changes associated with spiritual experience mean that the brain is causing those experiences…or instead is experiencing a spiritual reality.

[Andrew Newberg & Eugene d’Aquili, “Why God Won’t Go Away,” April 2001, quoted in Newsweek magazine, May 7, 2001]

Robert K.C. Forman, a scholar of comparative religion at Hunter College, has said that mystical experience may tell us something about consciousness, which is perhaps the greatest mystery in neuroscience. “In mystical experiences, the contents of the mind fade, sensory awareness drops out, so you are left only with pure consciousness,” he says. “This tells you that consciousness does not need an object, and is not a mere byproduct of sensory action.”[17]

Consciousness is currently the object of much scientific theorizing:

Among the possible positions [quantum consciousness researcher Sir Roger Penrose] describes, is the view that consciousness is not amenable to treatment by science. He rejects this position on the ground that it is the “viewpoint of the mystic.” But…the problem of consciousness might not be solvable in terms of the human science-forming cognitive system…inaccessibility to humanly constructed science is no mark of the mystical; it is simply the result of the limitations of human mentality.…My point would be that to get the new physics we need we would have to acquire a new mind—not something to hold your breath for. In other words, consciousness is a mystery for the human intellect, given our mental architecture, but it does not thereby betoken anything contra-natural. The mind indeed casts a shadow, and inside that shadow it itself falls.

[Times Literary Supplement 1/6/95, p 12]

Thus if human science cannot explore and explain—that is, “treat”—consciousness, or by implication any other mystery, this is no mark of the mystical, the non-physical, but only of the fact that our brains are limited entities.

We are brought full circle. If we can never hope to comprehend a given phenomenon, because of the physical limitations of our brains, then surely it is a mystery… Do we need a new category for things which seem to be unexplainable, but we believe would be explainable to us if we had bigger or better brains? Or is the category “mysterious” adequate? It is a question of the degree of scientific optimism or hubris at work, as against the degree of willingness to accept some things as unprovable, and to give such phenomena a degree of respect—a respect which when directed toward the ultimate sum of mysteries may become worship, in those able to take that ego-effacing mental position. Certainly there is an egotism which appears incapable of experiencing an overwhelming respect for anything except itself and those things which it judges to be like itself. Penrose suggests that our human science could certainly explain consciousness if our brains were complex enough. A friend, who is a neurophysicist, is confident that computers will eventually be able to explain everything. “We are not made by God, we are making God,” he says. The general presumption is that “God,” whatever that means—the ultimate computer, a bearded old man in a blue dressing gown sitting on a cloud, or Empedocles’ circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere— “understands” the mysteries.

Science is not what it once seemed, however. At the end of the twentieth century, our age began to be described as “post-Enlightenment,” because the seemingly rock-solid conceptual foundations of science in Euclidean mathematics and classical reductionism could be seen to be only partial truths. The whole is much more complex and variable and mysterious than we dreamed.

When authority is given only to those beliefs which can be scientifically proven, and the claims and promises of Science do not satisfy, all the other, immeasurable aspects of our being and of our experience may surge forward, demanding attention. Every individual must find a way either to satisfy or to deflect them. We can turn to “New Age” structures of belief, which continue the 1960's movement away from technology and so-called progress; we can embrace the intuitive, the ancient, the holistic, the mystical on the one hand, and inflated or false claims of “scientific validation” on the other. However that movement has been weakened by simplistic or self-serving interpretations of Eastern and Native American spiritual texts, and by a lack of the discipline necessary for spiritual practice. Some of the writings associated with it begin to read like self-parody. Fundamentalist religions have attracted many converts, but such faiths require a radical suspension of the contemporary mind, and can shelter the bigoted, the violent, or the cynically opportunistic. There are myriad superstitions, some of them more dangerous and bizarre than others, with more being revived or invented every day. Many people glorify celebrity, fame, money, power, possessions, glamor, status; they long for these things, and are awed and fascinated by those who possess them. The late Iris Murdoch, novelist and professor of philosophy at Oxford, proposed that art can offer a refuge from all this:

Metaphysical problems now reach the popular consciousness in the form of a sense of loss, of being returned to a confused pluralistic world from which something “deep” has been removed….We still, in our unregenerate way, ignoring the Zeitgeist, take refuge in art. People still read novels and listen to Mozart….[Art] is a defence against materialism and pseudo scientific attitudes to life. It calms and invigorates, it gives energy by unifying, possibly by purifying, our feelings.…[S]uch a paean might now seem remote…old-fashioned…romantic over-valuation….

…The great artists especially make us feel that we have arrived; we are at home. We feel that we are already wise and good….

[Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, pp 8, 11-13]

Murdoch's “old-fashioned” paean to art describes something that most human beings experience. To refuse to accept it or to ignore its importance is perverse. If this quality in art is absent, we look for “something deep” elsewhere.

The need for the transcendent, for those things which, though experienced, cannot be measured or proven, turns out to be immensely powerful. It is powerful psychologically, since when we are deprived of transcendence we seek it in dark places—in addiction, obsession and various kinds of fanaticism. It is powerful socially and environmentally, because ignoring it, attaching no value to it, results in the destruction of the coherence of our social and political structures and at the same time the desacralization and desecration of our physical and spiritual environment in the world.

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The arts always have a physical presence of some kind, even if in the form of sound waves. It has already been observed that their place in our mental landscape is somewhere in that broad ground between the measureable and the metaphysical.[18] They can be talked about and analyzed, and theories about them can be constructed, but that which makes them both compelling and beloved escapes the net of our symbols, whether verbal or mathematical. Art cannot be achieved in any kind of logical process, or in fact by following any known path.

[S]ometimes I start with a set subject; or to solve a sculptural problem I've given myself, and then consciously attempt to build an ordered relationship of forms, to express my idea…. But if the work is to be more than just a sculptural exercise, unexplainable jumps in the process of thought occur.

[Henry Moore, in Brewster Ghiselin ed., The Creative Process: A Symposium, pp 76, 77]

The arts appear to exist in both the physical and the metaphysical realms, as we do. Iris Murdoch wrote of the “recognizable moral effort demanded by the continued search for coherence:”

Because of the endlessly contingent nature of our existence this quest can never reach a “totalised” conclusion...[I]mportant incoherent contingent stumbling blocks are of course loved by artists, both as sources of inspiration in the process of creation, and as deliberately alien items in finished works. The piece which has “nothing to do with” the story or pattern may perform various functions, such as being a reminder that there is another world outside the work of art. This device should be used judiciously. Art which is nothing but such reminders ceases to be art. Art is a cunning mixture of coherence and incoherence, necessary and contingent, systematic and absurd. . .

[Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p 195]

Perhaps one day we will have amassed enough scientific proof to convince us (slow-witted as we are) that the arts and Nature are fundamental to our life, health, and well-being, both physically and mentally—that they literally, not merely figuratively, renew and revivify us; that in fact they are essential to our sanity and happiness. “Studies show” (a contemporary equivalent of “God said,” although the next study may well debunk this one) that school children who listen to Bach may learn more efficiently, elderly people in nursing homes benefit measurably from contact with living animals, and so on. The lively order in music, in other creatures, in fields and woodlands and in each other, actually and mysteriously feeds us; it is able to restore our own enlivened orderliness. At the same time, as Professor Murdoch says, the contingent (the out-of-order element(s) within the orderly wholeness of the work or creature) must be limited, or art is not possible. She writes of the experience of the receiver of art:

Art…essentially (traditionally) involves the idea of a sustained experienced mental synthesis. If with great expectation I stand before the picture and, perhaps because I cannot banish my troubles, “nothing happens,” then something has gone wrong, something which was the point is absent, our sensibility has not been unified….

[Ibid.]

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Many people believe that rather than being a receiving of gifts—from nature, from other art, from memory or the unconscious, or from some unknown source—the making of art is a bravura act of personal creation. They can then choose to view themselves either as incapable of art-making because they lack super-human “genius,” or as members of an elite group of god-like beings who make out of nothing, as God “made” the world. The English critic and pundit Sir Isaiah Berlin has written of the creative process,

A Russian writer asked…in the nineteenth century, "Where is the dance before I have danced it?" Where is the picture before I have painted it? Where indeed. Sir Joshua Reynolds thought that it dwelt in some super-sensuous empyrean of eternal Platonic forms which the inspired artist must discern and labour to embody as best he can in the medium in which he works—canvas, or marble, or bronze. [[19]] But the answer the Russian implies is that before the work of art is created it is nowhere, that creation is creation out of nothing—an aesthetics of pure creation…. Man is not a mere compounder of pre-existent elements; imagination is not memory; it literally generates, as God generated the world. There are no objective rules, only what we make.

Art is not a mirror held up to nature, the creation of an object according to the rules, say, of harmony or perspective, designed to give pleasure. It is, as Herder taught, a means of communication, of self-expression for the individual spirit.

[Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p 228]

That is, Plato was wrong: the artist does not manage to discern some already-existing heavenly form (although in fact the creative process does sometimes feel like a stumbling search for something which already exists somewhere in a darkness beyond perception). Neither is the making of art an attempt to mirror nature, or to demonstrate linear perspective or to produce a harmony according to rules. Dr. Berlin concludes that it must therefore be a matter of pure and godlike individual self-expression. Is great art then an expression of a god-like individual self? The greatest artists would be embarrassed to be told this, and would deny it.

Those scientists and artists able to experience and tolerate mystery often see themselves as receiving gifts —inspiration, ideas, forms, solutions—from an unknown source, from “the unmeasurable,” and are grateful. The great 20th century American architect Louis Kahn was one of these:

“Where is the scientist and where is the poet? The poet is one who starts from the seat of the unmeasurable…he has travelled a great distance before he uses any of the means, and when he does, it is just a smidgin and it is enough.

There is nothing about man that is really measureable…. He is the seat of the unmeasurable, and he employs the measureable to make it possible for him to express something.”[[20]]

[Louis Kahn, in John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis Kahn, p 14]

For the last hundred years or so, many scientists have allowed themselves the ambiguities of paradox in their accounts of reality. Light is both a wave (something with no physical place) and a particle (which has a physical place). But in fact mathematics and science have always found it necessary to incorporate fundamentally paradoxical conceptions:

Infinity is a never-ending amount. The concept of infinity is hard to grasp…even though infinity is an endless amount that cannot be identified by a number…it can fit in a very small space as well as in a very large space.

[Theoni Pappas, The Joy of Mathematics, p 109]

Two twentieth century scientific theories, Chaos theory and Systems theory, appeal to non-scientists because their propositions appear to be harmonious with the world familiar to us in our everyday experience; they describe a world which is both orderly and chaotic, a world full of life. To attempt to think thus in systems rather than in isolated parts is to attempt a more realistic view of things as they actually are, rather than as reductionist science needs them to be in order to make its precise measurements and confident predictions. It appears that in newer areas of science, intuition and insight are often our best available tools; unlike logic, they are the products of a comprehensive human awareness, the non-verbal working of the whole brain. They are the subtlest, most broad-ranging and flexible, the least reductionist of our mental resources. Yet at the same time the rational, the reasonable, remains our absolutely essential defense against the excesses and distortions of human emotion and egotism, superstition and fear—another paradox.

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During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in part as an inheritance from the Greeks, human beings believed that a Universal Order, designed by God, set the stars in their places, the heavenly bodies in their orbits. Now we believe in gravitational forces (whatever those might actually be—we only know what they do); Black Holes; Giant Red Dwarfs; Dark Energy. The contemporary stories appear to be more “practical.” They have allowed a few of us to visit the moon, and all of us to surf the Web, and astronomers can look deeper and deeper into the universe by means of various sensing-machines. But to the great majority of human beings, much of the information gathered has little meaning, except as facts, which are either added to a primitively simplistic mental picture or else quickly forgotten. The data is often utterly out of scale with our experience; we cannot comprehend it in any real way.

We have lost the poetry of the moon as a mysterious luminous presence, a lantern in the night sky, a pale goddess, but gained the story of Cold Dark Matter/Energy, which, scientists tell us, not only exists but makes up ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent of the universe—though again we have no idea what it is. Our findings impoverish us in the loss of old mysteries, and enrich us with new ones. Such contemporary stories are told to us not by poets but by experts; they are not part of, or even related to our own experience, or to the direct experience of any human being—they are theories to account for information gathered by our machines.[21] In the sense that the story of the Minotaur, or The Man in the Iron Mask, for instance, are very “good” stories, these are generally not good stories. When Science promises that we'll eventually figure out everything, my heart does not rejoice, because the promise implies the final triumph of the positivist position that only the physical, the measureable, is real. Contemporary stories sneer at any idea of a Universe somehow generated by an all-knowing God, “. . . all-knowing, far-shining, self-depending, all-transcending,” as the Eesha Upanishad describes it.[22] The parts of the human psyche which long for transcendence, for spiritual richness, for religious experience, therefore go begging. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “Metaphysical problems now reach the popular consciousness in the form of a sense of loss, of being returned to a confused pluralistic world from which something “deep” has been removed.”

In 1985, John Berger observed:

[In the 16th C painting] The City of Sodom…Lucas van Leyden's vision of the wrath of God is fundamentally a medieval one. It is conceived according to two principles which are naturally opposed to one another: the order, the rationality of God, as opposed to the disorder, the chaos, of the world of man…. The masts of the ships smashed in the harbour are contrasted with the foreground tree which belongs to nature, created by God and relatively uncorrupted by the interference of man.…The power of (God) lies not only in his ability to rain fire down upon the city, but in the very form of the fire in the sky. It is symmetrical, ordered, lucid—like a perfectly developed part of a chrysanthemum. It is part of the order of justice which man fails to understand but cannot escape. Perhaps the reason why such an image can still work on one powerfully—if one allows it time—is to be found in the fact that in one's dreams and unconscious the notion of a higher order may still remain.

[John Berger, The Sense of Sight, p 77]

Ever since Descartes' dream in 1619, the great appeal of science has been that its claims can be proven, its flights of fancy mathematically supported—sometimes being found to be true in the material world long after they were first imagined. By now, any mathematical structure of sufficient beauty may be expected to have some application in the real world. When the double helical structure of DNA was first proposed, scientists working in the Biology department at Cambridge University with Watson and Crick felt intuitively that a double helix might indeed be the structure scientists all over the world were searching for, because it was so beautiful.[23] But science—since its focus is on that which can be proven to be the case in every situation—cannot fill the gap left in our experience, our “sense of loss,” when truths which cannot be proven are dishonored and discarded.

It is when scientific facts are expressed poetically—when the possibility of the ineffable is introduced—that they ring most convincingly “true.” Stephen Hawking has written of the paradoxical possibility “that space-time [is] finite but has no boundaries.” He asks, “Even if there is only one possible theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”[24] The scientist and journalist Chet Raymo wrote of the metamorphosis of a black and brown woolly bear caterpillar into a yellow-winged tiger moth: “There's no way to think about this without gasping for breath. It's one thing to understand the biology…. But knowing the biology only makes the metamorphosis all the more breathtaking.” This, he continued, is “Not magic at all, but a fierce, inextinguishable force driving the universe, Dylan Thomas’ ‘green fuse,’ permeating every atom of matter, soaking nature the way water soaks a sponge. Call it life, call it God….It can't be ignored when you hold it curled in your hand, a gram of divinity…a many-footed distillation of the Heraclitean fire that animates the world….”[25]

Art and science are strongly related human endeavors. Science searches for the measureable and statistically predictable among the structures of the universe, from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, for an understanding of time itself, of the beginning and end of our universe, and the possibility of other universes. Its laudable aim is an ever-increasing understanding of all that is manifest, an understanding which, when fully achieved, would be expressed by the imagined equations of the “Final Theory,” beautifully simple and yet all-inclusive. Art labors to bring into manifestation new forms of the lively and mysterious universal orderliness—and to do so within the boundaries of our senses, that is, of the “aesthetic;” its possibilities are endless. Both Science and Art are activities of the human intelligence, a mysterious and thus-far-unmeasurable phenomenon. However art by its nature has a moral dimension; science by its nature does not. Contemporary science is a specialized activity, aspiring to be free of heart and emotion in service to its ideal of a pure objectivity. Art is a product of the whole human being—whole mind, whole heart.

[1] The Vienna Circle was an association of scientists, logicians, and mathematicians, many of whom later emigrated to England and America to escape the Nazis.

[2] David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker, 2001, p 156

[3] Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information, and Wonder: What is Knowledge For?, p 94

[4] A sometimes simplistic division of people into “left brain” and “right brain” types is commonly used to account for this.

[5] Willis Harman and Howard Rheingold, Higher Creativity, p 74-76

[6] The derivation of the Greek word Logos is interestingly similar; its verbal form légein includes the meanings “gather” and choose” (as well as “recount” and “say.”

[7] The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology

[8] David Edmonds and John Edinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid. p 157

[11] The word intuition comes from the Latin intueri —to look at, contemplate. (Contemplate: [Webster] 2a: The act or process of coming to complete knowledge or certainty without reason or inferring: immediate cognizance or conviction without rational thought.… a divining empathy…that gives direct insight into reality as it is in itself and absolutely.) The word reason, on the other hand, derives from words in various languages having to do with proof and computation, with counting.

[12] John D Barrow, The Artful Universe, p 190.

[13] Russell’s difficulties could have been a case of a now-recognized genetically inherited incapacity called prosopagnosia. [Oliver Sacks, The New Yorker, 8/30/10, p 36]

[14] Newsweek Magazine, May 7, 2001.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Page 85 here.

[19] This is of course a reference to Plato’s “Forms,” abstract Ideals which real things imitate or participate in. Form is the essential nature of a thing, as distinguished from the matter in which this nature is embodied. [Webster’s Third International Dictionary] I doubt that the great painter imagined that he was copying, in matter, an already-existent, fully formed transcendent reality, although in creative work there is an awareness of, and a craving to find, a form which answers all the requirements of the moment. Dr. Berlin, like most people (perhaps including Plato) seems to have thought of such Forms as singular and permanently established in their transcendent perfection, rather than as rudimentary (the form ‘table’ = a flat horizontal surface dependably supported at a useful height) but generative of vast and it may be infinite numbers of variations. The form of the work is brought into existence by the process of its making, which includes thought, craftsmanship, and labor, but also an alert receptivity to inspiration and insight, and to the possibilities suggested by any unforeseen but “happy” accidents which may occur.

[20] This is a fundamentally important fact: the unmeasurable is fully expressed only in the measureable, the material: that is, in Incarnation, whether in the Arts or in Nature. Such understanding as it relates to Christianity is explored in the work of Canadian theologian and psychiatrist James Wilkes, as for instance in his Breath of Dawn.

[21] Terms like “Cold Dark Matter,” and “The Big Bang,” do have some degree of poetic power, and therefore are easy to remember. “Quark” is good too, for different reasons; it was borrowed from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and is also the German name of a European fresh cheese; it is thus rooted in both art and nature.

[22] W.B.Yeats and Shree Purohit Swami, The Ten Principal Upanishads, p 16.

[23] James Watson, The Double Helix, 1968, p 134. It is now known that the elegant double helix is in fact far too simple to express the actual and still-mysterious relationships within the DNA molecule. “The secret of life,” for a time declared found, remains a mystery. [Barry Commoner in Harper’s magazine, January 2002]

[24] Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, p 174]; quoted here on page 41.

[25] Chet Raymo, The Boston Globe, 10/31/94. Heraclitus, in his writings, used fire as a metaphor for the “Divine Logos.”