cragwolf said:
I don't understand. I'm cragwolf and you're Artman. Spend a bit of time with me, and you'll know who I am. Science (e.g. evolution) also tells us how we relate to the world around us. What exactly do you mean by "who we are"?
I think Artman is referring to our internal lives-- our subjective experiences. Art can serve as an effective means of communicating what is inherently a difficult thing to communicate. For instance, there are any number of songs that convey the musician's emotions far better than, say, an expository essay could.
Huxley comes to the same conclusion in
The Doors of Perception. He even goes so far as to say that the art of some of the greater artists-- for instance Van Gogh-- reflects a certain way of seeing the world not unlike Huxley's own documented experience with mescalin. Whether or not this is the case, it is well known that many of the artists considered to be truly great or revolutionary also have had peculiar mental conditions, which in itself implies a peculiar sort of subjective experience.
There is an interview in the new issue of
Journal of Consciousness Studies that touches on this issue, among others. Here's an excerpt in which Shaun Gallagher (a professor of philosophy and cognitive science) is speaking with Jonathan Cole (a clinical neurophysiologist, experimental neuroscientist, and author):
Gallagher: You are an experimental scientist, but you are also a physician who treats patients. Is it important to do both kinds of work?
Cole: I get paid as a clinical doctor, and I grew up with an academic, neurophysiological background. And as you say, I am an empirical scientist. Much of my writing is-- well, you could describe it-- it's about narrative, about biography...
Gallagher: It concernes, in the broad sense, how people live with neurological problems.
Cole: Yes, I am trying to look at both sides. Take Ian [the subject of one of Cole's case studies]. I've studied him as a scientist, but I have also written his biography, informed by science, and also by my crude readings of philosophy. When you approach what it is like to be someone else, you can do that scientifically in a lab, to find out how you can create a motor programme or how you can time action, but you also needto go out of the lab to ask how they live. And I know that Ian always says that he would not have done the amount of scientific work, over more than a dozen years, if I hadn't also been as interested in what it is like to be him, with his condition.
I would say that this phenomenological approach to the subjective experience, the lived experience of illness, is just as important and informative as the lab science. [emphasis mine]
Gallagher: Yes, you know that I agree with that. Your work is a good example of how this combination can lead to very productive outcomes in regard to our understanding of illness. One very practical result is that because of your genuine interest in Ian as a person, he was willing to do more science with you. I'm also reminded of one of my favourite pieces by John Dewey. He once gave a lecture to a college of physicians in which he chastised them for focusing in a very mechanical way only on the physical condition, the body of the patient, and ignoring the environment in which the patient lived. To understand illness one needs to know about the body, but also about the person's way of life. To cure the body and then to send the patient back into a noxious environment is to ignore an important aspect of the illness.
Cole: Yes, and the same goes for empirical science. Science is defined as knowledge-- certainly it is in my OED. And it has come to be know as empirical science, which is a wonderful tool, and which I am not in any way criticising. It produces results and data which allow the verification or refutation of hypotheses, which has been such a powerful technique. Most people are not aware of how powerful it has been. We know infinitely more about the natural world and about how we all work because of empirical science.
But we should also not forget the wider, more personal, more subjective experience. To leave that to novelists-- and I have nothing against novelists-- neglects something inbetween, an informed interest. I quote Merleau-Ponty at the beginning of
Still Lives, 'Science manipulates things and gives up living in them.'
Gallagher: Science stays on the outside, in an attempt to capture the whole picture objectively. But in doing that, it tends to miss half the picture.
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