Humannoyeds
The apparent clear line which separates the objective, scientific form of thought from subjective or "artistic" approach is becoming blurred. It is both fascinating and confusing. It stretches logic and, if one observes what is said and goes on around one, it is hard to escape the conclusion that these two modes of thought have been exchanged between these seemingly mutually exclusive fields and the ppl who operate within them.
More clearly, it seems scientists, who traditionally concern themselves with discovering a truth about the physical world, are increasingly adopting the concept of beauty in representation of said truths-- heretofore the domain of the arts-- in not only their conclusions (insofar as that is possible in any "absolute form" in scientific discourse) but also in their pursuit, their research; while contemporary artists, on the contrary, have become more preoccupied with how accurately their work depicts reality and "authentic experience" more than ideals-- of beauty, of representation, or of the imagination.
The root(s) of this curious development, to me, can be found in scientific development and linguistic shifts, but also, and perhaps mainly, in the way in which society has integrated political frameworks and goals. It is not controversial to say humanity as a whole has made considerable progress when it comes to improving ppl's daily life. Basic needs have largely been met in rich countries (of course with pockets of poverty), and countries in development have made considerable progress in that regard. This has not been achieved without pragmatic measures; priority has been given to utilitarian concerns (physical well-being comes first, everything else is secondary). While this may be an acceptable way to get ppl out of poverty, it does not come without some consequences.
Here, then, I'm interested in the outcomes this has had for thought, and how scientists and artists engaged in this curious free trade.
Roughly speaking, the line which traditionally separated scientific thought from the arts and religion was (and is) the idea that the former starts from a question about a given phenomenon and the latter presents a vision, an interpretation, of something. The former focuses on the meticulous steps involved in getting an answer--whatever that might turn out to be-- and the latter is an interpretation and a representation of a person's subjective sensations, out of the imagination.
Scientists ask how something works and set out to find out; artists tell us what they sense. Human sciences attempt to explain how these non-scientific mechanisms work.
But I see the shift. This is no longer the case most of the time.
What I see now is how thought has developed since the Enlightenment, when early scientists really did ask totally open-ended questions and presented the research and conclusions regardless of what the outcome might be, largely because they were not funded by any corporation or government; there was no line to tow, no section of the population to appease, no political concerns to take into account; curiosity reigned.
Man's Reason took the place of "revealed truth", discovery replaced description.
In the arts, Romanticism emerged from this rigid mode of thought that is the Enlightenment; but there was also a number of artists who adopted this framework in their representations of the world and how they think about art.
Suddenly, ideas became more important than ideals in art. No longer were we facing a picture of Man or the world which presented to us what could be, but only what is. From interpretation and subjectivity to faithful description and a kind of decontextualized objectivity.
Previously, even in the arts, when the main mode of thought had been mimetic (largely vis-à-vis Ancient Greco-Roman art), artists kept the "ideal" in their work, whose main purpose is to elevate what is, transforming reality and highlighting perception, the imagination. After Romanticism, this disappeared.
Thought, not feeling, has come to dominate the arts.
Going to any museum today will give anyone evidence of this. If one looks at works made in the early XXth century and before, there is no brochure, no "statement" from the artist apart from the art itself; in music, there is no obvious political (or otherwise) message outside of the lyrics, or somehow "embedded" in the work via a lengthy text or PR statement telling us how a sequence of notes is representative of concerns with global warming.
Conversely, in scientific discourse, we no longer get the straight-fwd, open-ended possibilities we have come to expect from the scientific method; after all, the main role or purpose of science is to tell us what we do not know, it is to challenge common sense and to discover how something we do not understand works. What is curious about science today is that it seems to "discover" exactly what the political consensus says. It is true that some political changes occurred after important scientific discoveries, but today, science seems to be directed by politics, with a dose of corporate money thrown into the mix.
And art is directed by a strange type of scientific realism, politics, and the application of a distorted version of democracy.
It is as if we have become so disenchanted with the way political and scientific discourse have evolved that we simply displace the modes of thought inherent to these systems to art and artistic endeavour.
The misapplication and misconception of the idea of subjectivity is largely to blame in how ppl have come to think about art.
Thinking everyone is an artist and that everything is art means that no-one and nothing is. To declare something Art does not make it so. To have two million people say it is art, good, bad, or mediocre, does not make it so either. To have two million people say it isn't art also does not make it true!
But, important though these points might be, what really confuses me is this:
Humanism, the main philosophical foundation of the Enlightenment, the spring of science, is being denied, disavowed, diminished, by many many ppl, scientists, politicians (through their misuse of the word), as well as some non-religious secularists!
If the core of a philosophy is that there is no revelation, only discovery, then it follows this can only be accomplished by Man -- with his Reason, as posited by Kant -- and that all other kinds of knowledge are not acceptable because not scientifically sound, i.e. cannot be verified by anyone, given the nature of subjectivity.
So... it follows, too, that if Man's Reason is no longer trusted to be able to do the job (="ppl are stupid" a phrase we hear often, and maddeningly, to me, it comes with either a pro or an epilogue: Einstein said that, yknow! And he did, too! "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe.")
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| Goya, los caprichos, #39 Hasta su abuelo |
If scientists themselves think Man so low, what is the basis for their opinion that the truth can be got at via Man's Reason? If the basket of Reason has a hole in it, why should anyone put all his eggs in it? If we aren't to trust our Reason, if we are in fact no better than an ape or an ant or a dolphin (and some even say these other species are better than Homo sapiens because they have some kinesthetic abilities we lack), why should one fund ANY scientific exploit anymore, what is the motivation in asking questions if the answers-- and the questions themselves-- will be regarded as anthropocentric illusions? Delusions of anthropological superiority?
Bizarrely, the three monotheistic religions have Homo sapiens as the center of the Universe, as the most important creation. An utterly Humanistic position! And one non-religious secularists dislike!
It is very confusing to me. How can I, at the same time, hold that...:
1- Knowledge has to be got through the use of Reason;
2- The scientific method uses Reason as the foundation of all inquiry;
3- Any knowledge not got at through science cannot be trusted to be the truth about the Universe;
4- Dolphins are not scientists;
5- Man is stupid
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| Goya, los caprichos, #42 Tù que no puedes |
...and say I am a humanist?
And with all that, mathematicians and physicists see beauty in mathematics and physics. This is more than I can say for most artists these days, who not only do not see beauty in art anymore, but aren't even attempting to create anything beautiful. When it comes to truth, artists have been presenting truths which are so realistic they become contrived, and thus, paradoxically, are transformed into lies, since art is not produced like a chemical compound.
Recently, I have been interested in Hegel. Hegel's dialectics is a v useful tool when thinking about anything. Comparing things, having a dialogue in the mind helps one arrive at a conclusion which takes into account more elements from the things one is analyzing than mere observation of a solitary object. So applying this idea, I look at science, and at art. What I see is that scientists who used to start their inquiry from an open question, now start from the conclusion and attempt to find experiments which will demonstrate this conclusion is correct; artists, who used to start from the end, from a vision akin to a revealed truth, now start from concepts, ideas, open-ended questions about society and all the rest of it, and produce things which depend on 30 pages of explanatory text in order to put their "points" and "messages" across.
Even as "opinion polls" and "public opinion" are most venerated, opinion, as such, which one may encounter in a conversation, is dismissed. Tell someone what you think about something and, if it does not come with the scientific stamp, it is more likely to be dismissed; if it does not come with 13 pages of Google results which can back it up, it is not going to be taken v seriously. But ppl claim to want novelty, originality.
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