[Note: this is the penultimate World of Wonders. Enjoy!]
I blame the Romantics, mostly.
There is a false belief that art and science are somehow in opposition to each other. That science is this alien, arrogant, thing, and art is all cuddly.
The idea that looking outside of ourselves for knowledge is prideful and arrogant was put forward by the same people who believed that what they personally found beautiful was "truth", and that their own personal feelings mattered more than the careful study of objective reality.
Unsurprisingly, many of them were nationalist war-mongerers, seething with hate, and no friend to women, despite Mary Shelley being one of them. Why should one expect anything different? These were young men insisting on their freedom to express their "true authentic feelings", which in most young men most of the time are more earthly than sublime, however much they might be masked by fine language.
Romantic arrogance has persisted down to the present day, although as an artistic movement it was superseded by realism and various forms of modernism. But because it dominated art between 1800 and 1850 or so, the arrogance of the Romantics is baked in to the foundations of the modern world, and it's long past time we elaborated our way beyond it.
Art and science are not at odds.
Consider the following list of characteristics:
1) To see clearly what is there before us, without preconception. To see what the world is, not what we expect it to be.
2) To express what we see in clear form, to reduce the myriad complexities of what we see into something simpler, more essential, more unified.
3) To be open to the possibility of error in our expression.
4) To be willing to change what we do in the face of errors that we discover.
5) To be modest in our expression: not to try to encompass absolutely everything in a single work, unless it is in the most abstract way, leaving the working out to others.
6) To learn from others and to teach others.
7) To make our work available to the public, not keeping it hidden or secret.
Am I describing an artist? Or a scientist?
I can't tell.
Artists and scientists have quite similar, though not identical, aims, both of them having to do with reducing the world to something comprehensible, something manageable by our limited minds and senses... or to express clearly the boundaries of our incomprehension. Scientists do far more of the latter than laypeople realize.
There's a famous scientific paper that starts off with something along the lines of, "This paper is not intended to resolve the question at issue, but to add to the confusion surrounding it in the hopes of shaking something loose."
Science, too, has its surrealists: the people who are trying to find weird and improbable associations between disparate ideas in the hope of learning to see the world in a new way. They're mostly theorists, often with a deeply mathematical bent, and they're mostly wrong. But they're often interesting.
Anyone can be an artist in the same way anyone can be a scientist: it is in all of us to observe, to reflect, and to express our reflections.
Given the similarities, what are the differences between art and science? Not the ignorant twaddle of the Romantics, but the genuine differences?
Neither artists nor scientists see the world through ordinary eyes, so that can't be it.
When engaged in conceptual analysis of this kind, where we're trying to figure out the difference between two concepts, it's best to start with their similarities. Then we can ask what distinguishes them as members of a common genus.
I'm fond of observing that science is more of an art than a science: science uses many of the methods and techniques of the arts, and there is no substitute in either discipline for taste and good judgement. And that's the clue I need.
Art and science have a common genus: they are both disciplines. A discipline is a field of practice aimed at a specific end. Martial arts are disciplines: practitioners work on various techniques for doing unto others before they are done unto themselves.
Science is the discipline of updating our beliefs via systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference. The aim of the discipline of science is knowledge.
Art is not about giving people knowledge: it's about giving people experiences.
Art is the discipline of creating experiences via known and acknowledged contrivances or artifices.
It's important to art that the use of contrivances or artifice is acknowledged by or known to the person having the experience: otherwise it's fraud.
This is a useful definition, I think. It even works to distinguish between art and craft: craft uses contrivances and artifices, but it falls short of creating an experience, a strong emotional or perceptual state. Craft can be appreciated, but it does not create the kind of experience required for art.
But it's notable that for art to work, artists have to have much the same mindset as scientists. They have to be close observers of reality. They have to be mindful, and not let hidden assumptions fog their perceptions. They have to be willing to discard an approach or a work that isn't working.
Beyond that, both artists and scientists have to master specialized tools to do their work.
The specific tools--and the specific kind of contrivance those tools are aimed at creating--vary with the art-form: painting uses artificial arrangements of colour to create experiences, which may range from the experience of seeing a particular scene as if it had been photographed, to being overwhelmed by emotions of awe and wonder in the face of something like a Rothko.
Acting uses a quite different set of tools, from body language to tone of voice, all wrapped up in some model or understanding of the character being played, the themes being expressed, and so on. I'm currently playing in a comedy, and finding new meaning in the lessons I learned in improv. In drama, both the audience and the characters take the problems the characters are facing seriously. In comedy, the characters take their problems seriously, but the audience doesn't. Self-awareness in a character kills comedy, which is driven by the audience knowing what the characters don't, whereas it's perfectly fine in drama. It can even enhance things by increasing the character's suffering.
Each art has its own tools, just as each science does. Don't send a physicist to do a biologist's job, or a sculptor to do a musician's.
Art and science are not at odds. The are simply two different disciplines with different aims. They really are "non-overlapping magesteria", and can no more be at odds than karate can be with baking.
Furthermore, the artist's mindset is as alien to ordinary experience as the scientist's is: neither are normal human beings. We've attempted to democratize art in the past century, as we've attempted to democratize science. These are perfectly worthy efforts, but the fact that the average person can do a little art or a little science should be looked at as a potential on-ramp or a way of gaining a greater appreciation of their own potential, not a justification for the claim that "everyone's an artist" or "everyone's a scientist".
Artists are different. So are scientists. From each other, and from non-artists and non-scientists. The disciplines they practice are both incredibly demanding, and have enormous similarities but very different ends.
We should celebrate both of them, not put them at odds with each other as the Romantics, in their overweening pride, would have us do.
Let's bury the dead poets and get on with creating knowledge and experience, side by side, together.
❤️ “side by side together” ❤️