By Natalia Zdorovtsova
For a long time, I've been fortunate to have friends and colleagues from a variety of disciplines. I've liaised, argued, and had dinner parties with a diverse crowd of academics, pseudo-intellectuals, and highly-knowledgeable practitioners. I've also talked a lot to other artists, who are largely removed from the cultural landscape of academia.
I’ve noticed that there seems to be a lot of confusion and insecurity surrounding the broad uses and values of the arts, humanities, and sciences, which I’d like to address in this article. My aim is to establish a few important contrasts between the arts/humanities and sciences, talk about the merits of both, and introduce the dangers of assuming that these ‘two cultures’ (to invoke C.P. Snow’s terminology) have the same role to play in shaping human civilisation. I’ll try to convince you that we do both pursuits a massive disservice when we declare that science lacks the power to explain phenomena in the world, and that we ‘need the arts and humanities’ (in a pragmatic sense) to make up for the supposed explanatory shortcomings of the sciences. While many articles make the case for more collaboration across academic disciplines, and remark on the similarities between the arts, humanities, and sciences, this one will take a different line of argument. My view is that drawing too many parallels between these disciplines produces a conflict—one that the sciences will always win, because they cater to more immediate, pragmatic societal goals. But art is not science, and it doesn’t need to be.
My issue lies not with scientists (who, I’ve found, are largely supportive of and interested in the arts and humanities), but with people who appear to be afflicted by an inferiority complex about the fact that they’re not doing science. These people are relatively few in number, so I don’t want to create the impression of a sweeping judgement being made against non-scientists—but the ill-conceived views of this minority of people still annoy me. I’ll list some of the views that I’ve encountered below:
1. That science, while being useful ‘sometimes,’ cannot provide us with an understanding of ‘certain things’ (usually ill-defined things, like ‘human nature,’ spiritual experiences, or things that the speaker lacks the scientific literacy to understand);
2. That explanatory models built within the humanities (such as those that strive to explain the causes behind historical events) are fundamentally the same as the types of predictive models we try to build within scientific disciplines;
3. That science, while being useful, is unable to afford the same experience of beauty, awe, or wonder as the arts and humanities;
4. And finally, that scientists are dry, ‘uncultured,’ and incapable of engaging with the arts and humanities in the same way that many artists and non-scientist academics are incapable of engaging deeply with scientific matters.
These views tend to bother me for two separate reasons. The first is that they’re incorrect (points 2, 3, and 4), fallacious (point 4), or semantically nonsensical (point 1). The second is that they reveal some degree of ignorance and insecurity on the part of the speaker. In my experience, these arguments contain a level of embedded tribalism—on being confronted with a scientific perspective, or finding themselves in the safe intellectual company of other non-scientists, a person who makes these claims is actually launching a defense of the arts and humanities. Consider this: they were never under attack to begin with (…at least not for these reasons).
The arts and humanities do not need to justify themselves using the same markers of quality as the sciences. Science empowers us to rigorously inquire about and understand causal structures in the world, whereas the humanities (literature, history, etc.) and arts do not. While many subjects within the humanities touch upon structures of causality, the causal mechanisms that they represent are fundamentally irreplicable and uncontrollable. For instance, the same historical event, for obvious reasons, cannot happen twice. We cannot make the same assumptions about predictive models in the sciences (which, if they are good, should be replicable across labs and exist independently of the passage of time) and historical accounts, which aim to describe cause-and-effect relationships within very specific geographic and temporal contexts. If you’d like to read more about the distinction between types of causal mechanisms, I recommend Heather Andersen’s ‘A Field Guide to Mechanisms: Part I’ (link). I found it very useful, and it shaped my understanding of how the sciences and humanities target fundamentally different types of knowledge.
Meanwhile, art—whether literary, visual, or musical—provides us with a glimpse into the ineffable richness of certain inner experiences and ties us to a set of shared epistemic, linguistic, and aesthetic traditions. Art does not create causal models; it does not purport to explain or predict anything. To me, at least, art is a means by which we engage with the evocation of an emotional reaction, thought process, and/or multisensory experience. I don’t think that art needs any additional justification. I also don’t think that art needs to be framed as a substitute for scientific understanding—in thinking of art as an explanatory gap-filler, we simultaneously underestimate science and brazenly mischaracterise the pursuit of artistic, literary, and musical creation.
One last point. The reason that we do science is, broadly speaking, the same reason that we create art. I think it’s safe to assume that our motivations for pursuing anything are founded in a desire to make things better in some way for someone. Science has enabled us to reach for an understanding of universal laws, cure and treat disease, and create technologies that help us achieve higher goals. The scientific pursuit of knowledge is capable of inspiring the same type and degree of wide-eyed, ecstatic awe as seeing a mesmerising, evocative piece of art. The phenomenology of understanding a facet of the causal structure of reality is a similar experience of beauty as engaging with an artwork. Both of these elements of human existence lend themselves to profound feelings of meaning and harmony, and both deserve their rightful place in the tapestry of life. But if we want to preserve a genuine sense of appreciation for the sciences, humanities, and arts, we ought to have the right expectations about the roles of each of these disciplines within society.
Art is not science, and that’s okay.
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