An artist writes a companion piece to my “Truth vs. Beauty” essay, both in Quillette

At the end of last year I wrote an article in Quillette called “Can art convey truth?” (archived here). I contended that while the object of science is to find the truth about the universe (including humans, of course), the goal of much of the humanities—the arts—is not to find truth; humanities have other aims. As I said,

The real value of art, then, is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Because of this, we can’t say that the purpose of universities is to “find and promulgate truth” so long as universities teach the visual, literature, music, cinema, and so on. That doesn’t diminish the value of universities, but slightly changes what we see as their mission.

I was prompted to write this because at a Heterodox Academy meeting in Brooklyn last year, I was roundly criticized by scholars like John McWhorter and Louis Menand, who maintained that there was indeed agreed-upon “truths” to be found in art (McWhorter later recanted a bit). I think they were wrong, perhaps wedded to the idea that admitting that art isn’t “truthy” would be an admission that it’s inferior to science. (It isn’t; they are simply different.) And reader of this site will know of my respect and admiration for art.

Now an artist has weighed in on this argument, (also in Quillette) and she’s on my side. The artist is Megan Gafford, who is quite accomplished, and I like her work (see examples here).  I will first show her view that, in general agrees with mine, and then discuss a few reactions I have to her contentions. I am not saying where she’s wrong, but merely commenting on her commentary.

You can read Ms. Gafford’s article by clicking on the title screenshot below, or, if you can’t see the original, find it archived here. Her piece also contains one of her lovely drawings.

Here’s her opening, which I was pleased to read (I took a lot of flak for saying that art does not uncover “truths”):

In a recent Quillette piece Jerry Coyne argues that “unlike science, the literary, visual, and performing arts are not about truth.” When he made a similar assertion last June at a Heterodox Academy conference, it “resulted in Louis Menand and John McWhorter telling me, in so many words, to stay in my lane,” he writes. Wary that people might perceive him as “just another narrow-minded disciple of the science-as-hegemony school,” Coyne writes about art from a defensive crouch—but because I’m an artist, and well within my lane, I have no such qualms. Coyne is correct when he writes:

The real value of art … is not that it conveys knowledge that can’t be acquired in other ways, but that it produces emotional and cognitive effects on the receiver, usually conferring an experience of beauty. Art can enrich how we think about ourselves and other people, and, crucially, allow us to view the world through eyes other than our own. Through reflection, this expansion of experience can enhance our knowledge of ourselves. But that is subjective rather than propositional knowledge.

Would-be defenders of art make a serious category error when they insinuate that beauty is inferior to truth—as if beauty were an insufficient goal. But it is impossible to champion art effectively unless you believe that beauty is its own justification. Coyne offers examples of poems and paintings that he admires for their beauty. But he does not go far enough. Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

One comment I have on her piece is that she never really defines “beauty”.  It can of course be construed in several ways, including the most common interpretation: something that pleases the aesthetic senses (especially sight). This would include music you find appealing, paintings by Johannes Vermeer, literature that is appealing to the ear (for me that would be Yeats or Joyce’s “The Dead”), and so on.

But one could argue that much great art is not “beautiful” in that sense, for many works of art are upsetting and distressing, or conveys emotions that are not pretty.  I’ve thought of a few, including Dante’s Inferno, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 1984, art depicting war (“Guernica,” Goya’s paintings), or upsetting art like Serrano’s “Piss Christ” or Munch’s “The Scream”. I’m a fan of Jackson Pollock, but it’s unclear whether the artist intended his “drip paintings” to be beautiful, and certainly many people don’t find them so.  By concentrating on “beauty” as the goal of art, Gafford herself doesn’t go far enough—unless “beauty” and “what I consider great” are taken as synonymous. That makes the argument tautological, though.

I will now give a few quotes from Gafford along with my response:

Beautiful art can guide us through places where scientific truth can’t help us.

I’ll use my favourite novel as an example. John Steinbeck recasts the Cain and Abel story in his 1952 saga East of Eden, and his wisest character ponders different English translations of that Bible story with mutually incompatible interpretations. He wants to understand the precise meaning of what God told Cain after he slew Abel, so he consults the original Hebrew to sort out what it really means:

I won’t reproduce Gafford’s argument, here, but her example from Steinbeck doesn’t seem to me to convey “beauty” unless it’s seen as s proper (and therefore more meaningful) translation of the Hebrew for the Cain and Abel story, which itself was a model for East of Eden.

Another:

Physicists have long tried to figure out whether we’re living in a deterministic universe, a question with obvious implications for free will. But for now, we don’t know—and maybe we cannot know. Reality can be inscrutable. It is the task of scientists to answer questions like “do we live in a deterministic universe?” And it is the task of artists to summon beauty that helps us bear the uncertainty. These roles are equally important. They are not interchangeable.

I won’t argue about free will here (except to say that I don’t think we have it in the libertarian sense, and there’s strong evidence for that contention), but rather would note that art has a wider purpose than “summoning beauty to help us bear the uncertainty” (of life and thought, I presume). Again, great art may not alleviate our distress, but exacerbate it. There is a lot of great art and literature that is simply disturbing. Do you think the painting below is beautiful?  It’s  “Head VI”by Francis Bacon (from Wikipedia), one of the versions of Bacon’s famous “Screaming Pope” series. Those paintings are not beautiful in any conventional sense, but they’re mesmerizing and, I’d say, great art. This resembles Munch’s “The Scream”, and I doubt that Bacon meant it to convey beauty. Rather than soothe our anxiety, it heightens it:

Gafford also notes that writers and artists talk about revealing “truth”, for example:

Artists often treasure the truth, as when Paul Cézanne wrote to a younger painter, “I owe you the truth in painting and I shall tell it to you.” By this he meant an authentic impression of nature grounded in immediate perception, rather than any inherited formulae or conventions. Likewise, Ernest Hemingway claims in his memoir A Moveable Feast that “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Clearly Cézanne and Hemingway are talking about subjective rather then objective truth: they are talking about expressing their own views or feelings clearly.

Finally, Gafford talks about how scientists themselves speak of the beauty of their fields, for example a “beautiful experiment” (the Meselson and Stahl experiment comes to mind) or a “beautiful equation”:

Just as artists treasure the truth, scientists frequently extoll beauty. Ulkar Aghayeva argues that “every practicing scientist has an intuitive sense of what a beautiful experiment is.” She details different reasons why scientists have called experiments beautiful. The aesthetic sensibilities of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scientists were “centered on nature unveiling its innate beauty,” she writes, while contemporary theoretical physicist Frank Wilczek regards a beautiful experiment as one where “you get out more than you put in” because “beautiful experiments exhibit a strong information asymmetry between the input from the experimenter and the output of the system under study.”

I’m not sure how much of a role aesthetics plays here, compared to cleverness and simplicity that yield decisive results (Meselson and Stahl experiment) or E = mc², which is “beautiful” in its simplicity and its economy. But there are lots of important equations that are not nearly as simple or economical.

Finally, while of course appreciating science, Gafford seems to see art as a way to give us a respite from science, which is conceived of as wearing and tedious. Gafford first quotes the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen:

“The tightly structured and highly collective nature of scientific work seems to arise from our desire to actually get things right. We use experts and inferential reasoning in science in order to cope with the vast, sprawling nature of the world. Our separate minds just aren’t large enough to do it on our own. So scientists create a vast store of publicly accessible data, and then use this collective database to make accurate predictions. This methodology requires a radical degree of trust. Scientific conclusions are based on long chains of reasoning, which cross different specialties. Engineers rely on chemists, who in turn rely upon statisticians and molecular physicists, and on and on. And much of this involves trusting others beyond one’s ability to verify. A typical doctor cannot vet, for themselves, all the chemistry, statistics, and biological research on which they rely. The social practice of science is oriented towards epistemic efficiency, which drives us towards epistemic dependence. Scientific conclusions are network conclusions. …

Our artistic and aesthetic practices offer us a respite from that vast, draining endeavor. We have shaped a domain where we can each engage with the world with our own minds—or in nicely human-sized groups. We have shaped a domain where we can return to looking at particular things directly, instead of seeking general principles. This form of aesthetic life functions as a relief from the harsh demands of our collective effort to understand the world. Our aesthetic life is a constructed shelter from science.”

. . . and adds this in her own words:

And so, no matter how well beauty and truth complement each other, we should not conflate the value of art with that of science, lest we weaken both. Can scientists reach their full potential without art as a shelter from the psychic cost of surrendering autonomy? Can artists summon beauty into the world if they do not value it as an end unto itself?

I agree with her conclusion about conflation, but disagree with her claim that doing science incurs a “psychic cost of surrendering autonomy”, meaning that we have to dissolve our egos into the collective enterprise of science to do it properly.  But I’ve never felt that to produce a psychic cost: I find it joyful to do my science  in a community, for that is where you get many of your ideas. Only a few scientists, like Einstein, do their work in isolation, and presumably like it that way.

This is just a commentary on a commentary, and, as I said, not a critique of Gafford, but a scientist’s expansion on her ideas—part of a continuing dialogue on science and art.