Meeting point of ordered complexity

-- ‘Art vs Science’

Debraj Mookerjee, who teaches literature, but is also a keen student of the
sciences, attempts to peel the layers of self-inflicted deception that seek to
separate the sciences from the arts in the minds of people. He does not
merely argue that the twain should meet; he believes the two are not apart
from each other to begin with …

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce
in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.
— Albert Einstein

Recently I bore witness to two separate conversations in my place of work, which

happens to be a college in the University of Delhi’s North Camps. In the first, a colleague
from the Arts spoke disparagingly about her science colleagues before a visiting artist,
only to be assured by the artist that she herself was a keen life sciences student, and had
found her artistic form through her search for answers as a student of the sciences. In
the second, a senior science teacher asserted how the ‘new’ principal (who had just
joined) understood systems well because he was a science person, and not a woolly-
headed arts person. Clearly, neither seems to have paid adequate attention to Da Vinci’s
Vitruvian Man. Drawn in 1490 for private viewing and not really intended for the public
gaze, it is today a unique work of art, valued highly along with the Mona Lisa and The
last Supper. The drawing was based on the principles of proportion enumerated by the
ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise De Architectura. Vitruvius,
an architect, described the human figure as being the principal source of proportion
among the classical orders of architecture. In Da Vinci, these architectural principles
marked the convergence of art with science. Da Vinci himself was a Renaissance
polymath, whose genius encompassed  invention, painting, sculpting, architecture,
science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy,
botany, writing, history, and cartography. He pioneered paleontology, ichnology, and
architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. It is also
believed he invented the parachute, the helicopter and the tank. In fact Renaissance
‘humanism’, which he emblematized, included all forms of knowledge. A botanist would
be referred to as a humanist (if he was famous and celebrated) back then. The concept of
the humanities was to emerge much later. And Cambridge University continues to
award only BA and MA degrees, even to engineering students! Frankly, what would you
call your dentist, a person of science, or an artists, or a bit of both? To return then to the
Vitruvian Man, which remains entrenched in the annals of human civilization as a
singular statement about the inseparability of the arts and the sciences. To understand
this inseparability one has to transcend a few epistemological (knowledge-imposed)
barriers that artificially separate them.
 
The human mind is trained to think in terms of binaries. Binaries help our minds line up
contradictory concepts and objects in diametrically opposite alignment, thus shaping
into recognizable forms the thoughts and things that define our quotidian lives. To
understand light, you need darkness; to appreciate good. you need to recognize evil; and
so on. In mediaeval  Europe, a popular trope in literature was Dialogus inter corpus et
animam (Dialogue between body and soul), which along with variations existed as
moral/ethical compass for judging human conduct where the soul was righteous
whereas the body was the site for worldly temptation. Today’s knowledge systems have
become victims of such binaries. By extension, both in campuses and in our minds, the
Arts versus Science binary is the primary determinant of key thought processes.
 
Novelist and British civil servant CP Snow started this science versus arts debate in his
1959 lecture ‘Two Cultures’, which later became a book, besides stirring a furious debate
in which he was accused of being a PR person for promoting the sciences. Within
academic circles and among the intelligentsia, this debate has continued to rage along
more or less the trajectory established by Snow, and his detractors. It is a trajectory we
are familiar with. Science studies promote scientific thinking. Arts studies are essentially
romantic and divorced from material reality. That this argument is completely false is
not immediately obvious to most.
Let us take the example of political consciousness among the youth and subject it to the
arts versus science test. Of course the intention is not to counter one generalization with
another; on the contrary, the idea is to shake up our existing assumptions. I got a
wonderful insight into this when I visited Pakistan in March 2008 with theatre groups
to participate in a theatre festival in Lahore. The professors at the university there
contended that the largest attendance at the ‘tabliqi jamaat’ (religious instructions, etc,
as in a ‘satsang’) was from the engineering colleges. The arts students on the other hand
were more rational in their analysis of society. This is generally true elsewhere as well.
Science students tend to slant towards the Right; arts students towards the Left; the
former mobilizes through an appeal to emotions, the latter through materialist
dialectics. But this in itself is a narrow view, one that seeks to justify one against the
other. Deeper answers lie elsewhere.

The arts versus science conundrum cannot be resolved by looking in from up close; if at
all the picture pans out better if viewed from a distance. Physics, particularly space and
particle physics, provides some clues. Stephen Hawkins in his iconic A Brief History of
Time suggests how physics and philosophy come very close to each other when you
begin to ask the really difficult and fundamental questions about how the universe came
to be. Abstract speculative ideas spring from complex ideation, somewhat like the
though experiments that helped Einstein discover some of the more intricate theories of
physics. Hawkins suggests that that the laws of physics had to be exactly what they are
for the evolution of the universe to reach exactly that point today when an intelligent
species has evolved enough to ask questions about how these laws came to be. Called the
anthropic principle (strong and weak anthropic principles are its primary variants) this
theory argues for a human centric causality to the universe’s evolution, which ultimately
is a philosophical position.

In the subatomic space where particle physics comes into play (inside particle
accelerators where the search is on for fundamental particles that existed at the moment
of the Big Bang), we enter the quantum world. Here again we counter ideas that
challenge intuition and our received understanding of phenomena. Multiple histories,
where every possibility is said to exist simultaneously, with the one being observed
becoming ‘real’ for us, and the future determining events in the past (John Wheeler’s
classic ‘Delayed choice’ experiment) are not ideas that are easy to wrap one’s head
around. The crossover imagination that is needed to experiment with, and understand,
these mind challenging concepts are an admixture of science and philosophy, of
mathematical exactitude and speculative creativity. One for the other, or the other for
the one, cannot separately establish a higher understanding of who we are and what we
can become.

The ultimate academic degree one can earn is a PhD, or a doctorate in philosophy.
Ultimately therefore, whether you are a sociologist, a chemist, or a Sanskrit scholar, if
you have defended a thesis that contributes new knowledge to your chosen field of
scholarship, you are considered a doctor of philosophy. The word philosophy comes
from the Greek word philosophia, which means love of wisdom, or knowledge. At its
absolute apex knowledge is not segregated, it is not, to misquote Tagore somewhat,
“broken up into fragments/By narrow domestic walls”. Knowledge unites; it is
ultimately one, uncontaminated by the separatist tags of science and humanities. In fact
only when you recognize it as one can you claim to have acquired true knowledge.

How about putting this entire argument to the test? And how about moving away from
philosophical generalities and abstract configurations to the arena of lived human
experience? What is the end product of science? Technology. What is the end product of
art? Aesthetics. And what is the end product of the humanities and the social sciences?
Perhaps explaining the relationship between the two!

The Industrial era, inaugurated in the early 19th Century, created a deep chasm in the
imagination of writers and thinkers in Europe. The Romantic poets rebelled against the
inhumanity of the machine. Later, documenting the difficult period of transition to an
industrial society from an agrarian one, writers like Dickens painted in detail the
horrific visual assault industrialization inflicted on the beauty of England (his
description of Coketown, an newly emergent industrial town created for his novel Hard
Times, is graphic and disturbing). The primary objection these creative artists had
against industrialization was aesthetic – big machines were ugly, dirty, dehumanizing
and excessively powerful. This early idea about technology has undergone tremendous
churn in the last 150 years. Whereas the earliest machines were grimy and huge and
smelly, over time machines moved out of factories and entered homes. By the turn of the
century technology was cleaner, smaller and useful in so many different ways within the
domestic sphere of human existence. These machines, now called gadgets, blended with
human labour, at times fully substituting it, like the washing machine and the
dishwasher did. And then began to provide entertainment, enter the radio and the TV.
And further became an adjunct to professional productivity, eg, the calculator and the
computer. Slowly technology began to ingratiate itself further into the human
experience by donning the role of a companion – the notebook, or laptop. Meanwhile
the Internet melted the distance between knowledge (stored in books and offices and
forests) and our mind’s ability to connect with it. An important thing happened at this
point – technology enmeshed itself with our consciousness. The world of quantum
physics and anthropic principles had leaped out of the laboratory and entered our daily
lives. In today’s world, technology, for most, is not ugly and forbidding; it exists inside
our pockets and makes life easy, freeing up time for other things.

The story does not end here. This piece began with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian ManI, arguing
how it encapsulated both the arts and the sciences. It will end with Steve Jobs and the
company he built, Apple Industries. An iPhone today is an iconic lifestyle product. In
fact it is more than a product, it is actually a lifestyle choice. An iPhone, not necessarily
the most advanced product in the mobile telephony space, nevertheless is the most
valued. This is so because aesthetically, it commands a rarefied iconic status that
competing bands are unable to breach. Why is it so? Quite simply because in terms of
aesthetics, and pure artistic qualities, there is a certain economy of design that defines
the iPhone. Its form and function blend into one. It is that one singular focal point
where art merges with science. Steve jobs was a technological genius, but more than that
he was an aesthetic genius. He willed into life an aesthetic consensus where technology
could become iconic in its stylistics and command unprecedented worldwide following.
Jobs rounded the circle that the industrial revolution has started etching on the
consciousness of humanity.
The arts versus science debate ought to have been long declared dead. Most of us are
digital natives. We live in a world where we continually make sense of complex science
and technology. With the explosion of social media and the ever expanding footprint of a
digital world, ideas float readily today from one platform to the other. Politics, identity,
contesting social categories, and so on are the staple of everyday news consumption,
making us all amateur social scientists in our own right. And in encountering fictional
narratives via films and photos and tele series, besides books and audiophiles and you
tube and what have you, we everyday make aesthetic choice about what we like, and
what we do not. In short we are dealing with technological and societal and aesthetic
choices all the time and in our own personalized ways. The world has indeed shrunk.
The ICE (information, communication, entertainment) age is truly upon us and inside
it, those who attempt to draw a distinction between its various components are short
sighted and in urgent need of lens correction.

Aristotle was as much a philosopher of science as was Karl Popper (famous for his
concept of ‘critical rationalism’, which itself provides keywords for what we’re trying to
examine herein) or Thomas Kuhn. Bertrand Russel was a mathematician philosopher.
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was a (not very bright) mathematician who
nevertheless created the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen and Humpty Dumpty. In the Indic
tradition, as well in the Islamic tradition, philosophers were often scientists and
scientists were philosophers. In fact India gave the world both the idea of Shunyata
(Buddhist philosophy) and Shunya (zero). Perhaps the final resting place for this debate
lies inside an yet to be built museum dedicated to ‘zero’, designed to beautiful
architectural proportions, and mathematically poetic in its expressions. Science helps us
understand the world; art urges us appreciate it. Anyone who chooses to cast the one out
for the other is choosing to lead half a life. Binaries divide. Wisdom unites. And the
ultimate wisdom emerges from the deep enmeshing of the arts with the sciences.