Keith,
I have no trouble with the great
scientists. It is their colleagues who operate as if simplification
was the purpose rather than discovering the underlying systems that you describe
in your "history." Yes Keith, we all had that science course in
college too. If they can't find the system they all too often
act as if they have and ignore the first rule of art. Tell the
truth. They also act as if they discovered the rules of the
scientific method themselves instead of claiming to be the first one to write it
down. The first rule of Shamanism is "Be observant, miss
nothing!." The non-literate minds confronting the limited
memories of those of us who have learned to write, find that our minds are
memory poor compared to theirs. Which brings me to the other point
about simplification.
Art also works to expose the systems underlying the
cultural world. Remember I said Art is a "Psycho-Physical
pursuit of values in Sound, Vision, Movement, Taste,"
etc. I would love to claim the credit for this fine sentence
but it came from the composer Arnold Schoenberg through my old teacher Bela
Rozsa who Schoenberg considered his finest
student. I pointed to it but you jump around and
don't answer much of what I refer to.
The issue is not simplification but a diminution of
complexity. The most recent work on complexity holds that it is a
state of incompetence. Nothing is complex to one who know how
to do what people are calling complex. Complexity is zero
in such a situation for the competent person. The higher the
complexity level the more incompetent the people trying to resolve
it. John Warfield contends that it cannot even be accurately
expressed in prose and that prose is usually the tool of the person who is
trying to exercise the prerogative of the disrupter role in a group
process. (Essays on Complexity) He further contends that you have to
use all of the tools to truly diminish complexity in a scientific
problem. All of the tools means graphics, sound, movement,
literature, what Howard Gardner calls "Frames of Mind." Science IS
becoming more whole and working its way away from the linear literary reality of
the 19th century. You should remember that what was sensory
overload for Darwin was not so for Wagner. (Darwin, Marx & Wagner; Barzun)
Warfield states in his essays that we can no longer
succeed at diminishing complexity in dense systems by being tied to prose
words. Wagner and Schumann would have looked at Warfield
and asked what took him so long to realize it. Even
Heinrich Shenker explained the layering of musical reality long before today's
modern psycho-linguists began to examine the layering of morphemes in
semiotics. Science is the child here and like the
adolescent that it is, it too often believes that it invented what it
finds. Warfield has arrived, in his Science, at Art or shall we say
at expressing his science through all of the perceptions and at realizing that
the purpose of all of that writing in the first place was to make the human
being a more perfect instrument so that we could consciously glory in the joy of
skill and mastery. Peter Senge speaks of it in his
business work, Warfield in Science, I speak of it in the Arts and it is
spreading because it isn't linear and it isn't science against art or the
opposite. What I was pointing out in my articles was the
opposite. The need for "sensing" in order to understand science and
to express our humanity in the science of economics and the
marketplace. As for you stuff about how much
better off we all are. You weren't there and neither was
I. Stories about short, brutish lives have too often withered in the
face of scientific study. I wouldn't make those assumptions if I
were you. That is the root of much scientific embarrassment.
That's all.
Regards,
REH
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: Ray Evans Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 4:28
PM
Subject: Diminution and
Expansion
>
> I've been trying to think how to answer your latest in a simple way. And
> writing that, I suppose, explains the difference in our approach -- whereas
> you enlarge, I'm always looking for what may be the crux of any problem.
>
> One sentence you wrote probably summarises the difference best.
> <<<<
> Science works through diminution while art works through expansion.
> >>>>
>
> Apart from suggesting that your choice of "diminution" is pejorative --
> hopefully, you'll agree with me to call it "simplification" instead -- I
> would agree with what you've written. But this doesn't mean that the
> motivations of scientists are inferior to -- or even essentially different
> from -- the artists of the past. All of them have been engaged in trying to
> portray the wonders of the world in which they found themselves. For most
> of the millenia of history the greatest minds were both artist and
> scientist -- what we'd now call polymaths (and who, these days, are
> becoming rarer and rarer).
>
> But, once the importance of the experimental method as enunciated by
> Francis Bacon in the 16th century became more widely accepted, then the
> arts and the sciences started to diverge seriously. The paradox about
> science is that while it has been researching more and more phenomena over
> the past four centuries it has been increasingly successful in explaining
> these with an ever-decreasing number of equations using hardly more than
> half-a-dozen significant numbers.
>
> These numbers are not man-made but absolutely basic features of the
> universe and they do not have (man-made) dimensions to describe them. One
> of them, for example, is the ratio of the strength of electrical forces to
> gravitational forces. If any of these numbers were even slightly different
> from what they are then the universe as we know it simply would not exist.
> That's the way the cookie's crumbled and you can't blame science for this.
>
> On the other hand (in my view), as science succeeded -- particularly in the
> course of the last century -- artists have become increasingly desperate to
> retain the ascendancy they used to have. The result is that, today, the
> arts are rather more used as status symbols by an affluent middle class
> (the "chattering class") than being genuinely appreciated and cherished.
> They have lost credibility in the eyes of the population at large. I think
> that this fashionable manipulation of the arts is unfortunate and will die
> away in due course and then we might start to see less enmity and more
> dialogue between the natural scientists on one side of the divide and the
> artistic intellectuals on the other.
>
> Keith
>
>
> __________________________________________________________
> "Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in
> order to discover if they have something to say." John D. Barrow
> _________________________________________________
> Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> _________________________________________________
>
