reflections on art and science

Leonardo

Reflections on Art and ScienceAuthor(s): Aharon Katzir-KatchalskySource: Leonardo, Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer, 1972), pp. 249-253Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1572387 .

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Leonardo, Vol. 5, pp. 249-253. Pergamon Press 1972. Printed in Great Britain

REFLECTIONS ON

ART AND SCIENCE*

Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky**

INTRODUCTION

Creative art and science evolve only within a framework of hospitable social attitudes. For, as historical experience has led us to conclude, creativity is an extremely sensitive and vulnerable process, easily constricted by adverse conditions. Thus, in a society governed by oppressive or fanatical rulers, science may well be converted into a collec- tion of dead facts, safely entombed in official text- books, while art can become a repetition of stereo- types. But in any culture, or at least those cultures which need intellectual and artistic creativity for individual progress and social well-being, a constant vigil on spiritual attitudes has to be maintained.

There is a growing feeling today that, after a long period of thriving development, Western art and science are approaching a dead end and that a rather neo-mediaeval attitude is going to throttle creativity. As usual, art and science are being assaulted simultaneously. And, irrespective of the attitude of artists and scientists towards each other, in periods of spiritual decline both groups meet the same fate. So that, in the present crisis, artists and scientists and all those concerned with the survival of art and science have to become aware of the need for a common programme to arrest the spread of the anti-intellectual flood.

THE CONTEMPORARY ATTACK ON ART AND SCIENCE

Before proceeding further, it would perhaps be in place to consider some of these attitudes threatening the growth of science and art.The most vociferous of them is the 'revolutionary' attitude, which de- mands an immediate moratorium on all scientific activity. Proponents of this view concede that during the 'age of enlightenment' science was indeed

* Based on a lecture given at the Art and Science Sym- posium organized for the inauguration of the new Tel Aviv Museum on 20 April 1971. The symposium was sponsored by the Helena Rubenstein Foundation of New York, N.Y., U.S.A.

** Prof. Katzir-Katchalsky, Polymer Department, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel. (Received 8 February 1972.)

devoted to the search for truth and in its struggle against the 'dark forces of nature' provided the means to raise man's standard of living-but now it has become a menace and its progress endangers the survival of mankind. True, they accede to the recently established notion that science is based on a curiosity that has biological roots deeper than human culture and that it cannot be controlled by political decisions. But they accuse modern science of a hypertrophy of curiosity that has assumed pathological dimensions. They claim that the scientists, by their immature evasion of responsi- bility for the consequences of their activity, have yielded the utilization of science to amoral ex- ploitation, so that almost all further development of science has become as hazardous as the handling of atomic bombs by politicians or generals.

These claims are supported by the recent awe- inspiring discoveries of 'genetic engineering' and the possibilities opened up by chemical and physical intervention in the workings of the brain. Un- accompanied by appropriate moral values, the advancement of molecular biology may become as dangerous as the uncontrolled utilization of atomic energy. In a recent book entitled The Making of a Counter Culture, Theodore Ruszak describes some of the anti-human attitudes of the new generation of technocrats. Convinced that the overwhelming majority of all human needs are of a technical nature, the technocrats believe that it is within their power 'to make everybody happy'. Ruszak points out that the prophets of technical progress are so obsessed with the mad rationality of efficient production that they cannot pay any attention to 'minor' items such as love and freedom or the loneliness and alienation in modern society. The critics of the contemporary 'Brave New World' describe the scientocratic society as a joyless, rapacious and egomanic structure-or, in the words of Jacques Barzun (Science the Glorious Entertain- ment), 'Artists detest and despise the scientific culture because when techne assails the senses and science dominates the mind, whatever they touch grows numb, ossifies and falls away like black, mortified flesh... .'

Although much can be said for this criticism, the conclusion that the time is ripe for the abolition of science and that only some sort of anti-intellectual-

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ism can save mankind is self-contradictory. It is not only that science cannot be halted by wishful declaration-there are enough powerful interests of a military and industrial nature to keep science going-but from a humanistic point of view the negation of rational thinking undermines the very foundations of moral judgment. As the Bible put it long ago, only after eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge does man learn to distinguish between good and evil-and today there is no knowledge without science. Anti-intellectualism is potentially as dangerous as the mad rationality of the worshippers of commodity production; it is well known that totalitarian regimes pursue their indoctrination by destroying the intellectual ability to distinguish between right and wrong.

The attack on artistic creation is more subtle and sophisticated. It starts with the prevalent appre- hension about the state of modern art, which is said to have lost the ability to express the depth of human experience. Art, which for millenia guided man in his attempt to know himself, now finds itself at a loss, unable to communicate information about the innermost emotions and struggles of man. Follow- ing such views to their logical conclusions, thinkers such as Gunther Stent in his The Coming of the Golden Age came to the 'information-theoretical' conclusion that art is doomed and that we shall soon witness the death of all artistic progress.

Stent's analysis can be summarized as follows: In order to endow artistic information with meaning, its symbols have to be part of a spiritual structure. If, however, the mental structure is strictly formalized with rules and patterns, genuine artistic creation becomes impossible. For, all information is based on novelty, on the unexpected, on an act that transforms the unknown into the known, and artistic information has, therefore, to provide its audience with a thrill of discovery. Hence, rigid structures, even though they may be rich in meaning, are poor in information and artists are often com- pelled to liberate older styles from a fixed organ- izational pattern and to relax their modes of expression. But, according to Stent, such a process is self- defeating, for the rapid erosion of classical structures may produce a flood of structureless information, which, again, carries no meaning. Ultimately artistic creation is perceived not as art but as a senseless 'white noise'.

Despite its scientific form, this prophecy of doom is based on rather doubtful assumptions. The 'information-theoretical' prediction of the end of art takes for granted that only one possible field of information exists in which a finite number of symbolic structures can be organized and, when these structures are undermined by the liberation process of modern art, nothing remains to endow artistic creation with meaningful content. This would be true had all historical periods operated with the same mental images or, borrowing the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, had there existed a single 'paradigm' on which an informational field could be constructed.

The truth, however, as has been pointed out by Kuhn and his followers, is that the paradigms change and with them the realm of informational choice and the contents of meaning-conveying symbolic structures. The 'end of art' is thus seen to be nothing more than the end of a paradigm, the end of an old 'world view', which is slowly giving place to a new outlook and a new artistic expression.

Art is the oldest expression of human culture and its appearance, some tens of thousands of years ago, signified the transition from biological to human evolution. Before man wore clothes, he could paint and express his emotions in form and colour; before man learned how to count on his fingers, his dances were grotesquely splendid and human bodies were adorned with sophisticated lines that enhanced both posture and motion. To stop art is equivalent to stopping the evolution of the self-recognition of emotion, just as the end of science means the death of ethical thought and the end of any perception of cosmic beauty. Hence, it is important to pay close attention to the emerging paradigm of our era and to appreciate the role of art and science in the new world outlook.

THE CONTEMPORARY PARADIGM

A paradigm is not a philosophy or a 'world view' but a system of 'self-evident' concepts that underlie the philosophy of an era. Thus, the paradigm of antiquity assumed that the world is eternal and immutable, and that its pattern is fixed by divine decree. Cosmic evolution was inconceivable and all phenomena were regarded as constant or repetitive. 'All things are wearisome . .. what has happened will happen again, and what has been done will be done again-and there is nothing new under the sun.' In such a static universe, time had no direc- tion; it circulated in everlasting, meaningless cycles. Naturally, art reflected the paradigm and its serene expression tried to represent the eternal, unchanging properties of Man and Nature. And since only the endless repetition of the universal properties carried weight, the emergence of novel properties in an individual form was disregarded, and artistic attempts strove to integrate individuality into invariant, universal prototypes. As far as science was concerned, the appearance of the classical paradigm coincided with the discovery that the human mind was capable of quantitatively correlating natural phenomena and of assigning numbers to a wealth of objects and processes. The Pythagorean maxim that 'the world is the number' was a proud statement about the power of the human mind and its ability to grasp the 'nature of things'. The biblical doctrine that man is made in God's image provided justification for the belief that the human mind reflects the divine plan of the universe.

From this paradigm developed the scholastic conviction that all natural phenomena can be

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deduced from the principles of thought and that the deliberations of the authorities suffice to provide ultimate criteria for what is right and wrong, correct and incorrect. Of course, direct observation or experiment to verify the validity of scholastic dogmas was not considered necessary and it is remarkable that even Galileo-the father of modern experimental science-still lived in the paradigm of antiquity. In a letter to a friend, Galileo wrote that, whenever he performed an experiment, he knew the results beforehand. 'So you may ask, why do I carry out the experiment at all? Only to convince the idiots . .!'

The antithetic paradigm grew gradually from the Italian Renaissance till the end of the nineteenth century. Whatever the historical reasons under- lying this development, the impact of the new explorations, observations and discoveries made the classical paradigm untenable. It was realized that the principles of scholastic thought are in- capable of explaining new reality and that human authority is a stumbling block to the attempt to develop a consistent world model The gradual shift in authority from conventional doctrines to statements based on an interaction with natural phenomena is summarized in the powerful thesis of Spinoza, 'Deus sive Natura' (God is Nature).

The revolutionary negation of scholastic dogma led to an 'anti-intellectualism' characterized by a shift from the veneration of traditional principles to a rather crude materialistic conception of the universe. Even the processes of thought themselves were regarded as 'excreta of the brain' (Virchow). Instead of the integrative processes of antiquity, the new approach began to admire the colourful diversity within unity and came to appreciate the unique and specific, the atomistic and individual. This process led to such extremes as the empiricist approach, which denied the very existence of 'natural laws', regarding them as labels of packaged experience.

In keeping with this paradigm, art, too, discovered individual expressions and learned to pay attention to man's suffering and frailty, to his hopes, visions and the versatility that enabled him to create new worlds of feeling and expression. Much of the production of artists during this phase was realistic and even materialistic; while in its more advanced forms there emerged a kind of composition that was not only contradictory to classic immobility but forecast the restless, mobile universe of the contemporary paradigm.

The modern phase started at the beginning of this century with the assault of the theory of relativity against the absolute space and time-the sanctified foundations of all preceding world images. The crumbling of the conceptual basis was followed by the breakdown of the 'materiality' of matter. Atomic research led to the conclusion that atoms are not the rigid, well-defined objects of the materialistic paradigm but wavy, vague patterns, understandable only in sophisticated mathematical terms.

Already in the middle of the nineteenth century, evolutionary philosophy began to perfuse biological

and sociological thought. It is, however, the twentieth century which has made the principle of Heraclitus, 'Panta rhei' (Everything flows), the basis of its world image. Not only life and society are in a state of everlasting flux but the atoms themselves undergo transmutations through billions of years and the cosmos as a whole varies and evolves on an awe-inspiring scale. Even the laws of nature-the pillars of the observed phenomena and the expressions of cosmic wisdom-seem to change with time.

However, out of the crumbling of the materialistic world there is emerging a new synthesis, which bears some resemblance to the organized world of the antique thesis. While the material properties of the elements have lost much of their conviction, there is a growing interest in relation, in composition and in structure. The structural aspect of material relations removes many of the barriers that distinguished art and the humanities from the natural sciences and allows a new unification, on a higher level than classic integration. When the geneticist talks about the 'code' of DNA he is applying linguistic concepts to molecular structures; when the biologist tries to understand the 'cybernetics of the cell' he is applying the approach of sociologists and technologists to the interpretation of life.

We are at present witnessing only the beginning of the transition from the paradigm of the epoch of enlightenment to the new conceptual framework. The impact, however, is being felt widely already in circles of artists and intellectuals. Those who do not believe that the passing of the old paradigm signifies the death of creativity are attempting to fathom the depths of the new world and to establish the informational field for the art and science of the future. An illuminating example is a statement by Mondrian on modern art, expressing a point of view remarkably close to the scientific consensus of opinion. He says:' . . . the great struggle facing the artists is the annihilation of static equilibria in their paintings-through a continuum of opposites among their means of expression . . . when dynamic movement is established through contrasts, re- lationship becomes the chief preoccupation of the artist. .. .'

In the transition period toward a new paradigm, the conscious effort to adapt ourselves to the new conceptual framework will prove generally to be insufficient. As already recognized by both artists and scientists, we will unavoidably have to probe deeper into the roots of our concepts and examine the subconscious sources of our conventional notions and self-evident ideas. Only after analysing the foundations of the worn-out old world can we hope to reconstitute a new world more congenial to artistic and scientific creation.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS RESOURCES

To be sure, there is nothing original about the attempt to transcend the confines of conventional concepts and to look into the subconscious depths

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for our spiritual resources. A couple of centuries ago, Immanuel Kant wrote: 'The field of our sense perceptions, of which we are not conscious (that is, the dark ideas in man), is immeasurable. The clear ideas cover infinitely few points, which lie open to the conscious, so that in fact, on the great map of our spirit, only a few points are illu- minated'. Still, the prevalent feeling of the modern world has been that only artistic creation springs from subconscious sources, while science, which is objective and impersonal, derives its validity from rational deliberations. This feeling seems to underlie the statement of Vlaminck that 'The contradiction between art and science cannot be bridged'.

Closer inspection, however, seems to indicate that the work of an artist must reach a final step of objectivization, similar to the rationalization of the scientist, while fundamental scientific creation is very often inspired by unconscious drives and even by visionary images. To be apprehended, a piece of art has to be cast into a communicable form; the ideas and the feeling it transmits should be recognized as real, and even familiar, if not shared by most of the people in a society. As eloquently put by Susanne Langer, 'Art is the surest affidavit that feeling, despite its absolute privacy, must express itself in each individual life'. As an expression of all-human universals, art is, therefore, an objective representation of common, subconscious elements. The creative artist knows, of course, that the depth of personal feeling is not enough; it is the ability to transform the experience into objective, symbolic forms which makes the work of art. This was aptly phrased by Shakespeare in Midsummer Night's Dream: 'And as imagination bodies forth/the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen/turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/a local habitation and a name...' or, in more modern language, T. S. Eliot says, 'The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates-the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmit the passions which are in the material'.

In scientific creation, too, any negation of the subconscious forces operating behind the scenes could contradict many well observed facts in the history of science. Thus, for example, the familiar concept of 'force', which played such an important role in the development of the materialistic paradigm, is not based on a logical analysis of experimental data but stems from mythological, anthro- pomorphic origins. In the tenth century, before the birth of modern physics, Maimonides wrote that God governs the cosmic spheres with an infinite force, which never stops. And some six hundred years later Kepler said that 'The sun is in the middle of moving stars, and he distributes his creative force, even as the Father creates through the Holy Ghost'. The visionary aspect of the concept of force continues even to the nineteenth century and it is rather interesting to note that the great master of the experimental method, Michael Faraday, saw

in a dream vision the 'lines of force'-a concept which is fundamental for any field theory-as invisible but tangible, abstract structures. There is also little doubt that the concepts of matter and energy, of atom and organism, came as a result of a free exercise of the imagination and preceded their scientific justification.

A more profound reason may exist, however, for the need for subconscious processes in scientific creativity. As pointed out by Freud, the formal laws of logic do not hold in the unconscious; the categories of opposition and contradiction do not exist there, nor is there any place for the word 'No'! Thus, in the unconscious, one can combine contradictory concepts into higher entities that provide crucial scientific meaning. One cannot, for instance, logically multiply different categories of things, like four tables by ten chairs; in the unconscious, however, such multiplication is possible. In this way, a 'superconcept' can be formed; the product of mass and acceleration, for example, becomes the New- tonian Force or the product of force and distance is the abstract superconcept of Energy.

A psychological systematization of the creative process was provided by C. G. Jung, who asserted that every act of creation has four steps: the choice of subject matter, made either by the individual or by external circumstances; the thrusting or the suppression of the problem into the unconscious, where the raw material for the solution is sought; the solution as revelation; and finally the objectivisa- tion process making the solutions recognizable in a socially accepted form, whether as a mathematical equation, a physical experiment, or else a poem or a pictorial representation. The new feature intro- duced by Jung is his claim that both art and science derive their material from the 'collective unconscious', from the deep layers where the universal ideas of science and religion, of ethics and aesthetics, are living without contradiction and without competition. And it is these deep strata of the human soul that we must consider in our search for pertinent data on which to construct a new informational field for art and science, consistent with the paradigm of the twentieth century.

THE DYNAMICS OF SYMBOLIZATION

The ultimate step of all genuine creation is the formation of an objective symbol that can be com- municated and tested either experimentally in the laboratory or through its impact on the reader, the observer or the listener. There is, however, a profound difference between the symbolic forms of art and science. The symbols of art are unique, specific and irreproducible, while the symbols of science are unspecific, reproducible and amenable to generalization. The product of an artistic creation is complete in itself and represents an organic integrity with a degree of precision and detail far beyond any scientific analysis, while the symbols of science avoid detail, are poor in content

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and have no intrinsic completeness but derive their significance from their incorporation into a larger intellectual structure. A study of a work of art is similar to the analysis of natural phenomena and it is not surprising that philosophers and psychologists have found in the Bible or in Shakespeare an in- exhaustible treasury of observational data, an everlasting source for the understanding of man.

In one of her most recent books, Susanne Langer divides the world of symbols into two groups: images and models. Images are the symbolic form of art; they are self-contained structures composed of non-symbolic elements joined in an organized entity. Through its completeness, the symbolic image acquires its uniqueness, its individuality and its reluctance to fit into any systematic pattern. On the other hand, models are high-order symbols, based on symbolic elements isolated from symbols of a lower rank. The higher the rank in the hierarchical ladder, the lower the specific content of the symbol and the poorer the individual expression of unique traits. Models are readily organized in structures and can be combined into supermodels-hence, they are the typical material of scientific rationalisation and the principles of science are the 'empty' super- symbols. From Langer's point of view, the relation between the symbolic forms of art and science is hierarchical-art being closest to reality, while science is the operationally valid and emotionally impoverished intellectual superstructure.

In an endeavour to grasp the paradigm of our time, one cannot help note that 'Panta rhei' (Every- thing flows) is one of its basic tenets and all symbolic structures are in a state of flux and tend to evolve into new patterns. Recent work, in which we in Israel have been involved, has demonstrated that physical and chemical fluxes may interact and form structures of flow that seem to be related to the origin of life and to the maintenance of a dynamic organisation in cells and organisms. These flow structures survive only as long as energy is supplied for their maintenance; on the other hand, when the energy supply is increased, the systems reach a point of instability at which they jump to a new pattern. Furthermore, students of symbolic structures have made the significant observation that the evolution of these structures also occurs in jumps from one level to another. Indeed, the development of the overall symbolic patterns, which underlies such major evolutionary steps as the transition from the animal to the human state, is not continuous but is a discontinuous jump, closely resembling the

structural transitions of experimental flow patterns. There is also a revealing ontogenetic counterpart to the philogenetic evolution as demonstrated in the personal development of Helen Keller. When Ann Sullivan tried to reach the deaf and dumb little girl, she found that fora long period Helen responded in an animal manner, assimilating only a very limited number of concepts, unable to unite even these into any meaningful pattern. But at a certain critical point, the fusion of single elements into a symbolic structure occurred, a visible jump could be dis- cerned and Helen Keller began to function as a human being.

These facts fit in with the observations by Piaget on the growth of intelligence in the child. He discovered that personal evolution is not a smooth linear progression but a 'step function' in which the symbolic structure of the child passes in leaps to ever higher levels, richer in content and more potent operationally. At the highest level, the basic concepts of reality are perceived, the idea of law in natural processes is mastered and adaptive behavior is developed. He also found that the maturation of the structure of rational symbols is accompanied by a simultaneous formulation of aesthetic and ethical criteria. Within the framework of the well patterned formal structure, it is not only the model that acquires a meaningful content but the images also fall into place and the maturing young person acquires the feeling not only for what is correct and incorrect but also for what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is right and wrong.

Thus, it can be said that the transition towards a new paradigm is a further step in an evolution of new structural patterns in which art and science will form their own fields of expression intrinsically adapted to the needs of a truly modern society. Such an ideal of human evolution towards a higher symbolic expression was expounded by the long suffering Teilhard de Chardin, who, amongst other things, said: 'Man is not the centre of the Universe as was naively believed in the past, but something much more beautiful-Man is the ascen- ding arrow of the great synthesis of life. Man is the best born, the keenest, the most complex, the most subtle of the successive layers of life'.

Editor's note-It is with great regret that the attention of readers is drawn to the death of Aharon Katzir-Katchalsky who was a fatal victim of the incident on 30 May 1972 at the Tel Aviv Internation- al Airport in Israel.

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