Interpretation in Science and in Art
HAROLD OSBORNE
Suggests that science interpret the world
Bring “order and regularity into the kaleidoscopic variety of experience”
Seeking “understanding”
A scientific theory is an “intellectual construct”
Deduces theorems from these axioms which are then tested against experience
“Experienced fact” are the ultimate criterion of all scientific theory.
Karl Popper: must be falsifiable by fact
“No theory can be definitively proved empirically for there may always arise new facts by which it is controverted.”
Additionally, the acceptability of a scientific theory is measured by its lucidity, its comprehensiveness or scope and its predictive power.
“The ultimate aim is to unite all knowable facts within one all-embracing theoretical system which displays the maximum simplicity and elegance.”
Einstein:
“It is the grand object of all theory to make these irreducible elements (i.e. the fundamental axioms and postulates) as simple and as few in number as possible, without having to renounce the adequate representation of any empirical content whatever.”[1]
However, the basic principles are not deduced from experience
They are mental creations reached intuitively against a background of highly specialized experience.
Einstein:
“There is no logical path to these laws: only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.”
And further
“Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it.”
Max Planck's quantum hypothesis, which he himself called 'an act of sheer desperation' arising from his work on black-body radiation, was described by H. R. Pagels in his book The Cosmic Code (1982) as:
“an incredible leap of intuition ... one of the great leaps of rational intuition.”
There is a recurring pattern in science where intuitive insights have led to predictions which were afterwards verified by observation.
“As the scientist creates ordered conceptual systems, working for the extension of understanding and incidentally for the greater powers of control over the environment which understanding can bestow, the artist creates perceptible[2] constructs each with its own perceptible beauty, working for the enhancement of percipience, the enrichment of perceptual experience, and adding to the cultural heritage of mankind.”
The representational artist makes a recognizable depiction or description of a segment of the phenomenal world, real or imagined. This is what is meant by calling his work representational. He also brings into being a perceptible construct which claims appreciation as an aesthetic object in its own right. This is what is meant by calling it a work of art. The conditions for success are that it shall have sufficient individuality to stand apart as something unique in its kind, sufficient complexity to sustain attention at a high level of voltage and sufficient perceptual unity to be contemplated as a single presentation.
Appeals to the notion of “Perceptual Unity”
An “elusive notion”
Not to be confused with “simplicity” or with “coherence”
Asks us to consider a landscape from classical antiquity with one by Poussin or Constable.
Naive art and the art of children often exhibits a similar incoherence.
“What we dignify with the title of landscape art, however, not only depicts an assemblage of natural objects but presents a visually coherent structure of colours, shapes, directional lines, etc., with emergent properties which dominate and give character to the whole.
a still life must be more than a haphazard collection of edibles
Must be a coherent composition made distinctive by the sort of “emergent properties”
This coherence is also necessary to o non-iconic abstract art
Even a portrait is more than an accurately depicted assembly of individual features.
The “emergent properties” help us to interpret character and personality of the person represented
Often indeed we apprehend perceptual unity by becoming aware of the emergent properties of the greater whole.
“For just as a simple melody may have qualities of liveliness, tenderness or melancholy which do not belong to the individual intervals of which the melody is composed but lend unity and character to the whole melody, so a more complex work, if it is to be successful as a work of art, must be unified by characterizing emergent qualities, giving distinctive individuality to the whole thing.”
The perception of the whole as a whole is what enables us to expand our vision and extend our perceptual powers.
“Otherwise, as in life generally, we perceive isolated 'bits,' relating them together theoretically instead of perceptually, and percipience remains meagre and desolate ....
Comparisons and contrasts:
(i) Both the artist and the scientist bring new order into the world, responding to a basic human compulsion.
The aim and the justification of the fine arts reside in their capacity to exercise and extend the powers of percipience. In the disciplines of pure mathematics, logic and metaphysics the claims of the intellect are paramount. In the theoretical sciences the goal is understanding for the satisfaction of our intellectual curiosity about the universe in which we live. A scientific theory is a mental product which may have its own beauty of coherence, lucidity, elegance and scope. Scientists have often shown themselves to be highly sensitive to intellectual beauty in their theories.[3]
But, as has been shown, this value is secondary to that of relevance and all scientists are aware that the dividing line between a scientific theory and a non-scientific speculation is that between a theory which is testable against the actuality of experience and that which is not.
This is inherent in our conception of what science is. And those theories which do not pass the test are abandoned, however beautiful they may be.
Lamarck's theory of evolution was described by
Schrodinger as 'beautiful, elating, encouraging and invigorating,' but
untenable because it wrongly assumes that acquired characteristics are
physically inheritable.[4]
Dennis Sciama said of Hoyle's 'steady state' theory of the universe that
'it is very beautiful but it is now in serious conflict with observation.'
Unlike the pure mathematicians, no scientist is interested in producing theories of however great beauty which will turn out to be not in keeping with the facts of observation or barren of further discovery.
By contrast the artist, with the help of craftsmanship, brings new things into being, adding to the contents of the perceptible world. Unlike those of the scientist, his products are subject to no criterion of relevance.
Although they may carry many and important extra-aesthetic values, as art they are assessed solely by their own perceptible beauty, that is by their qualities of unity, coherence and complexity, which are the measure of their power to extend and enlarge percipience.
If the work is representational, the artist's creations will inevitably interpret that section of the world, real or imaginary, which they represent. But this is not essential to their being as art and even when works of art are representational neither exactness nor completeness of correspondence are criteria of their excellence as art.
Nevertheless vigour and delicacy of interpretation are one of the more important extra-aesthetic values which works of art may possess.
As science can alert and nourish men's intellectual curiosity, art can by this means induce them to cultivate a more sensitive and satisfYing experience of their world.
(ii) A scientific theory once formulated and accepted is in principle common property, not varying from man to man; but in the arts interpretation is always subjective, carrying the stamp of the artist's personality.
It is an expression of his individuality, for others to acclaim or deplore. This is why works of art do not become obsolete when new ones are created as do scientific theories.
(iii) While much routine work is involved in working out the implications of scientific theories and then testing them, and much craftsmanship goes into the production of works of art, both originate in an act of creative insight which cannot be reduced to rule.
Despite the canons of beauty which have existed from the time of the ancient Greeks and theories of symmetry based on the Golden Section which have been propounded since the Renaissance,[5] the principals of order which underlie perceptual beauty cannot be brought within the purview of theoretical understanding.
There are no theoretical, no mathematically expressible rules for the creation of works of art and it is not possible to analyse with scientific rigour in what their beauty consists.
Every work of art is the result of a separate creative act, however much calculation may have followed or preceded that act, just as the fundamental concepts of a scientific theory are reached by an act of creative intuition. This holds good whether the work involves highly personal or mainly traditional modes of interpretation.
If the principles of perceptual order cannot be rationalized, neither do the concepts of the contemporary physical science lend themselves to perceptual imagination. The mathematical ideas of particle physics cannot be concretely imaged and the metaphorical language in use leads to paradox or contradiction if removed from its mathematical and experimental background.
Even the magnitudes in which science now deals evade imaginative grasp. We can understand, but there are few if any people who can realize concretely, the difference between five million and three billion years ago on earth.
The difference between a distance of a hundred million light years and twenty billion light years away from earth can be understood theoretically but cannot be apprehended concretely. A popular exposition of particle physics contains the statement that 'in familiar units, a typical nuclear diameter might be, say, 0.000000000000006 meter ... ' and that the time it would take for light to cross a typical nucleus is '2.0 .. 10-23 sec.'
If a few 'O's' were added or removed, it would make no difference to imaginative apprehension, although these things are not opaque to a trained understanding.
This chasm between the two modes of apprehension, perceptual cognition and analytical understanding, has increased out of all measure in the present century, and is a major reason why the unprecedented advances in knowledge that modern science has so rapidly achieved have made little if any impact on the popular or artistic imagination of the age.
Artistic imagination remains impoverished and deprived, no longer able to give concrete expression to what is most typical of our time, though scientists are not similarly impeded from contact with what art has to offer.
(iv) Although imagination of its own kind plays an indispensable role in the origination and elaboration of scientific theories, science has no place for the imaginary in the sense of what might be but is not. In the interpretations offered by the arts, however, this makes a major contribution.
By inventing fictional, even impossible, situations the arts widen men's experience, engendering new and more sensitive attitudes with which to face the realities. They create possibilities of emotional and perceptual experience which life does not otherwise afford except to the very few. And in its own way this too amounts to interpretation. Through its enrichment of personality aesthetic experience is no longer divorced from life.
(v) As has been said, science is interpretation, and scientific interpretation is open and invariant for every man who has learned to comprehend the formal language in which it is expressed. If such men are now few, this does not invalidate the principle.
Art on the other hand has a twofold function
1. Its primary purpose is to create new objects for the exercise of aesthetic awareness.
2. The interpretation of existing reality is secondary and not essential though some artists, such as Malevich, Gabo, Kandinsky and Mondrian, have thought that their non-iconic abstract works were interpretations of fundamental, non-perceptible features of cosmic reality.
The ability to appreciate the products of the arts is not common to all men even in principle. It is a perceptual skill which arises from a special ability often restricted in its ambit and always needing to be cultivated and trained. Without the cultivation of the appropriate skill the kinds of interpretation embodied in the fine arts remain a closed book.
(vi) The most radical difference between the kind of interpretation provided by the sciences and that with which the fine arts are concerned depends upon the nature of their respective subject-matter and is at once so obvious and so far-reaching that it often escapes specific mention. It is the outcome of what historians of thought describe as a movement from quality to quantity.
From its origins with Galileo and Newton modern science pursues its aims by dealing with abstractions. It limits itself to those aspects of things which can be quantified, banishing all else beyond its orbit. The theories and the formulae apply, but apply only to those aspects of experience which can be reduced to number. In his address to the Physical Society of Berlin on the occasion of Max Planck's sixtieth birthday Einstein said:
'As regards his subject-matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit himself very severely; he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy, and logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme purity, clarity and certainty are attained only by the sacrifice of completeness... .'
This aspect of scientific method is familiar also to those who are interested in the new technologies of microelectronics. In his book The Silicon Idol (1984), for example, Michael Shallis quotes Rene Guenon:
'The chief characteristic of the [scientific] point of view is that it seeks to bring everything down to quantity, anything that cannot be so treated is not taken into account and is regarded as more or less non-existent.'
It is this which explains the dominant position given to statistics from quantum physics to molecular biology, to psychology, to economics and the sociological sciences. It is important indeed to bear in mind that the profound insights and the surprisingly deep understanding achieved by science are restricted in their scope to those aspects of things which can be quantified, that is, to those features which are common to a multiplicity of individuals, and that in the human and sociological sciences the results mimic a pseudo-precision only by the suppression of the individual and immediate.
For what can be quantified is that only which is common to individuals in the mass while concrete individuality is reduced to a cipher.
Contrary to this, interpretation in the arts is supremely individual and concrete. Not only is every work of art the outcome of an original creative event, although works of art are sharable objects, every act of appreciation is private and personal. It cannot be communicated in ordinary language.
This is why books on art history are so dull.
Works of art cannot be described and the interpretations of the world which they carry are too
Their interpretations are less useful for the practical concrete to be put into words, for language is the manipulation of the environment but they are conceptualization of experience.
Yet the arts bring more immediate, more precise, more concrete, like back into life the richness and variety which scien-the contacts of persons with persons.
Choose one work ofart and describe in detail the ways in which it offers an interpretation.
True or false: Science has no place for imaginary objects. Beauty in science is secondary to explanatory power. In other words, discuss what general assumptions Osborne makes about (a) art, and (b) science?
[1]
This and the foJlowing quotations from Einstein are from the essays and
addresses incorporated in A. Einstein, The
World as I See It (Eng. Trans., 1935).
[2] Here and elsewhere in this paper I use the word 'perception' and its cognates to cover all forms of direct apprehension, including apprehension of the intellectual beauty of scientific or philosophical theories as opposed to theoretical 'knowledge about.'
[3] 3See H. Osborne, 'Mathematical Beauty and Physical Science,' The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 24, No. 4 (1984).
[4] 4Erwin Schrodinger, Mind and Matter (1958). 343
[5] 5See H. Osborne, 'Symmetry as an Aesthetic Factor,' Computers and Mathematics with Applications (1985, The University of Connecticut).