Beyond Science's Borders, the Mystery Art

It’s been unusually sunny for a few months now, past the spring solstice, but just before the trees are shocked with leaves. You’ve probably felt much happier (you don’t know why), even as the hours at Lamont mount, and projects and papers loom in the just-in-the-distance reading period.

It’s spring. And because our lives have been spent almost exclusively as students, spring spells a strange mix of its primordial rebirth and, because of the academic calendar, of ending.

So, in this confusing state of looking forward and of looking back I, your faithful art-and-science columnist, offer you, dear readers, some general thoughts on art and science as my farewell.

Art and science seem to span two disparate facets of experience. ‘Art’ and its relative, ‘artifice,’ imply a sense of production, of creation. The etymon of ‘poetry’ is ‘poeien,’ the Greek for ‘to create.’ ‘Science,’ on the other hand, comes from the Latin ‘scire,’ for ‘to know.’ Art tends to cling to areas of paradox and mystery, uncertain places from which it can build. Science seeks to render the world intelligible by mathematical formalism. There is a way, then, in which the two naturally tend towards opposite poles.

What I’d like to think about in this column is the value of bringing artistic attention to the areas explored by science. Because art tends toward mystery, and the role of science is to dispel mystery, it is easy for the artist to turn his eye away from science’s domain.

But this is a terrible mistake. True, science is daily dispelling mysteries. Yet for each mystery that science dispels, a new mystery is left in its wake.

The story that modern science tells us about ourselves is a strange one. The advancement of medicine and neuroscience has resulted in longer, healthier lives. But our obsession with life (a well-warranted obsession) has shifted our attention almost exclusively to the body. We find ourselves in a neo-dualism, concentrating our efforts on preserving the vessel encasing the invisible ‘I.’ Books like Jonah Lehrer’s “Proust was a Neuroscientist” or Daniel Levitin’s “This is Your Brain on Music” circumvent that irreducible subjectivity by explaining art merely in terms of the brain. We have become so proficient at investigating and maintaining the body, so thorough, that we find fewer and fewer places to understand the possibility of the transcendental self we cannot but believe we are.

But who is the implied possessor of this ‘your brain?’ This is the central paradox of our collective belief: that the body is indifferent to the life that so desperately clings to it, yet this thoroughly mechanized body is nevertheless our only means of living.

The will to create exists at the edges of the will to know. Art breathes easiest in these places of genuine mystery: where the system of our beliefs creates contradictions and paradoxes that must give us pause. We exist in a strange world, where the admirable successes of medicine and neuroscience have distorted our sense of self. We should not lament that science has altered the way we see ourselves as members of this world. It is hard to do anything but believe in what contemporary science holds. It is the artist’s duty not to resist science, but to imaginatively represent those areas toward which science desperately yearns, but cannot reach.

Every new truth that science leaves us necessarily begets another mystery. If we do not constantly bring our artistic sensibilities to these mysteries, we are doing both science and humanity a terrible disservice. Already we have begun to lose faith in the arts. The president looked into the television camera during the State of the Union and told the children of our country to study math and science. In Stephen Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design,” he carelessly dismisses the questions of philosophy, demeaning them to a dependent clause: “Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have becomes the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”

Science is unimaginably valuable. We should certainly do more than we are currently doing to promote the study of math and science in our public schools. But it is also of the utmost importance that we think critically and artistically about science. Because ultimately science, that Latin ‘scire,’ is that part of the soul that pulses with the will to know. Science and art are two human ways of facing the Mystery: dispelling it in the first case, imaginatively rendering it in the second. The Mystery, fueling our minds and our hearts, must be continually confronted. It’s what makes us human, recognizing it and facing it. Science is only inhuman when we fail to bring our artistic senses to it: there is no reason why our confidence in the power of science should not be commensurate with our confidence in the power of art.

—Columnist Adam L. Palay can be reached at apalay@fas.harvard.edu.