per request
Science Versus Art Revisited
Humans perceive two universes not one, this has caused a bit of confusion in the past. There are those who insist we exist in only one universe and debate has been ongoing as to which universe is the sole universe, few philosophers have realized that we exist in both or at least can observe both from a transcendental perspective. The problem is that the universes are recursive, (re Hofstradter), one embedded within another and therefore analysis by polarization is not valid. Those universes have been known throughout the ages as the Subject and the Object, and any analysis that separates the two is futile, not reflecting the reality of our dual existence as humans. Yet, we, as humans, have still categorized all forms of knowledge into two basic categories. Our epistemology has resulted in the Arts of the Subject and the Science of the Object. Therefore, the conflict of Art versus Science has resulted in the Humanities and Sciences of Academia, not to mention internal turmoil on the parts of countless individuals seeking to answer this question: Is Life an Art or is Life a Science? The answer, of course, is both, and therefore neither.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And From vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that, soaring higher than angels -
What you cannot imagine,
I shall be that.
RUMI ~1250 AD
The conflict between Art and Science is illuminated by Rumi’s verse. He presents the Art of Life. Invert that verse and one obtains the current philosophy of the Science of Death, Reductionism – the whole is the sum of its parts. The problem is that when observed as Objects, humans become 'dehumanized', no longer Subjects. Biologists observe us, dying as men and becoming animals, as just another species of Primates, not much more complex than Chimpanzees. Physiologists view us, dying as animals, as a community of unicellular organisms that organize into tissues and organs. Chemists view us as dying and becoming mere minerals, a chemical reaction to the molecules that compose our genome with the sole purpose of reproducing those genomes in our offspring. Physicists have a bit more enlightened definition of Humanity (re: Quantum Physic et al) and who knows what the Mathematicians definition of Humanity might be...
Rumi’s verse also points to the future philosophy of Science, “What you cannot imagine”, the whole that exceeds the sum of its parts, the holism of Systems theory. Currently Science is based upon the dead, the static, that which can be isolated by deconstruction. Objective analysis is nothing more than tearing a “Thing” to pieces., so that the state of scientific accomplishment is dominated by talk of isolated variables, mere pieces of some Thing - once, whole, more complex and moving.
It seems that there is a real dearth of reverse engineering across the range of the Sciences. Scientists are adept at tearing something to pieces or more delicately perhaps deconstructing into components, but seemingly they lack the ability to repair or put the objects of their studies back together again functioning as new or better. It is easy to tear something apart, that is a destructive process, relatively little thought involved. Scientists have been instruments of destruction, far more often than of creation. Why? Perhaps it is because creation involves “What you cannot imagine”. Creation involves Artistry.
Can one view Art, scientifically, deconstruct it into components without the whole of the experience being lost? Abraham Maslow (Psychology of Science pgs 36-37) seems to think not…
“KNOWLEDGE WHICH BLINDS
We can view this set of problems from still another angle, which I can illustrate with the
Maslow Art Test, something my wife and I made up to test for holistic perception and
intuition by testing the ability to detect the style of an artist. One of our discoveries
was that "knowledge of art”, as in art majors, professional artists, etc., sometimes helped and some times hurt performance in this test. The better way to perceive "style" is not to analyze or dissect it but to be receptive, global, intuitive. For instance, so far there is some evidence to indicate that a quick reaction is apt to be more successful (57) than long, careful, meticulous study. This prerequisite for holistic perception of qualities of wholeness I shall call "experiential naïveté”, and I define it as a willingness and an ability to experience immediately without certain other ways of "knowing”. It means setting aside all our tendencies to rubricize, to know instead of to perceive, to dissect into elements, to split apart. After all, a quality of wholeness is something which pervades the whole and is lost by dissecting. So those individuals who "know" art only in the analytic, atomistic, taxonomic, or historical sense are less able to perceive and enjoy. And the possibility must be admitted that education of a merely analytic sort may actually diminish originally present intuitiveness. (A better example might be conventional mathematics "education”, which is far more successful in teaching children to be blind to the beauties and wonders of mathematics). In every field of knowledge, there exist some "blind knowers" of this sort — botanists who are blind to the beauty of flowers, child psychologists who make children flee in terror, librarians who hate their books to be taken out, literary critics who condescend to poets, the dried-out teacher who ruins his subject for his students, etc. There are the Ph.D.'s who are "licensed fools" and the joyless non-scholars who publish only to avoid perishing… Orthodox, analytic, mechanistic science has no really good way of defending itself against these charges because there is a fair amount of truth and justice in them. A more inclusive conception of science can, however, meet and answer these accusations, i.e., a science that includes the idiographic, the experiential, the Taoistic, the comprehensive, the holistic, the personal, the transcendent, the final, etc.”
It might be noted that Maslow could have included in that list of “blind knowers”, psychologists that see their clients as Objects and not Subjects, due to a scientific bias.
The Subject of the Arts or the Arts of the Subject the Humanities celebrate the uniqueness of the experience of being human from the perspective of a Gestalt philosophy, where the whole exceeds the sum of its parts, and the simple can only be understood in the midst of a complex. “What Is” is, irreducibly so and “What Is” is more than that which is. What Is Life without the unique experiences of the Subject that is Humanities: Music, Theatre, Dance, Literature, Poetry, Athletics, Visual arts, History, Theology etc.? It seems as though the current trend to promote Science and Mathematics, and eliminate instruction in the Humanities in educational institutions is really quite counter-productive. It would seem that teaching children how to enjoy and appreciate the Subject, the Human, rather than the inhumane Object, would increase humane behavior, as opposed to inhumane behavior, later in life.
One of the branches of the Humanities is Philosophy and two of the branches of Philosophy are Sociology and Psychology. (According to a former Philosophy of Psychology professor, those are the two branches of Philosophy that require the least intellectual prowess!) Perhaps that is why psychologists and sociologists prefer to be thought of as ‘soft’ scientists rather than ‘hard’ humanitarians. The goal of that ‘Philosophy of Psychology’ class was to identify the boundaries and challenges that needed to be overcome before the current School of Philosophy named psychology could be considered a genuine science named Psychology. A list of certain criteria had to be met before psychology could actually be considered a science, for even more than a century later, a comment of William James “The founder of American Psychology” still rings true.
‘When … we talk of “psychology as a natural science” we must not assume that that means a sort of psychology that stands at last on solid ground … This is no science, it is only the hope of a science ” William James, 1892
However, it has proven impossible to categorize the Life of the Mind into the separate categories of philosophy and psychology. Psychology remains a philosophy, not a Science. A fact denied by many in the field. This denial is handicapping research and preventing cures for mental disorders and distresses from being investigated in formal academia. Such a differentiation, between psychology and philosophy, seems to be an artificial boundary existing only in academia simply because, perhaps, of different methodologies or funding opportunities. Perhaps, there is no psychologist who is not also a philosopher to a certain degree and vice versa. At least, there are very few humans, who are not also philosophers to a degree and possess a personal philosophy. A possible definition of psychology, then, is a school of philosophy, which is undergoing transformation into a hard science, but which has just begun that transformation because appropriate tools such as neuro-imaging devices, are just now in the Twenty-first Century are becoming available. Twentieth Century psychology is already obsolete.
“It is a mistake to identify scientific practice with the formalized constructions of statistics and scientific method “. “For the prestige of statistics and scientific methodology is enormous … “ B. F. Skinner (Goodwin, 1999, p347)
Now for some inexplicable reason the early psychologist-philosopher of the Twentieth Century preferred the status of Scientist to the status of Artist (perhaps Scientists got paid better than Artists?). The early investigators into human behavior simply lacked the tools to observe the inner workings of the human brain, so they improvised. In the rush to transform psychology from a mere branch of speculative philosophy to a legitimate, prestigious natural science, the early philosopher-psychologists were desperate for prestigious tools to use and perhaps engaged in a process of swallowing camels in order to choke on gnats in using statistical analysis to objectify results from subjective opinion polls. Quantification and standard methodology are valid tools in objective Science, even though the philosophy of Reductionism had to be embraced. What is quantification, it is nothing more than measurement. However, one of the tenets of Science is that if a phenomenon cannot be measured, it is not accessible to Science. What is measurement? It is the determination of quantity in terms of standard units. Measurement is a method for determining quantity, not quality. Is the quantity of life more important than the quality of life to psychologists? It was not until recently in human history that all units were not completely arbitrary, based initially on comparisons to human anatomy, a foot long really was a long foot and a handbreadth was literally a hand’s breadth. However, with the advances in technology over the past few centuries, it became possible to perceive that are non-arbitrary units that could be used to measure the universe, units that have had no relationship to human body parts. These units are standard cells, standard molecules and standard atoms. It is this discovery of a universe of non-arbitrary units that perhaps spawned the general trend toward the philosophy of reductionism in scientific circles. Today, we measure time on the basis of the movement of electrons around the nucleus of a quartz atom, instead of by the cycles of the sun, moon and stars; or the drip of water from one vessel to another or the flow of sand grains in an hourglass. However, psychologists are still using arbitrary measures comparable to ‘body parts”. There are no uniform less -complex structures that are the components of thoughts or behaviors, analogous to atoms, molecules and cells. It is illogically explain human behavior in the same statistical terms physicists use to discuss atoms in Brownian motion. However, the Science of Statistics works with numbers as clean abstract units. If one can translate the foulest of falsehoods into the language of numbers, then the lie becomes a statistical truth, somehow. Absolutely arbitrary measures have been used to create nice clean numbers by sociologists and psychologists to present statistical relationships that simply do not reflect relationships in reality, Numerical representations of whimsy are therefore presented as science instead of fantasy.
There are just so many philosophical issues being ignored by modern psychologists, including the philosophy of ethics. The ethical question of whether use of the statistics that describe the elemental particles of physics is valid for the complexity of humans was never debated. The issue of the real relationship of the Gaussian distribution of physics and the associated measures of central tendencies of the Standard Normal Distribution used in psychology is just one ethical concern of many. Another involves the mathematical concepts of accuracy and precision, in binary the standard for statistical significance, (p < .05) in psychological studies, for a sample size of 15 is 0.000001111. How is that degree of precision validated by researchers when precision, or confidence level is limited to one binary digit, either a 1. or 0., such as a “yes or no” for any given observation or a response to a self-report survey?.
Perhaps the one philosophical issue, that very few psychologists have addressed is the issue of Free Will versus Determinism. Determinism is a Nineteenth Century philosophy that has long been discarded by most modern philosophers, yet it is still state-of-the-art philosophy for many psychologists. Perhaps because it is so intimately related to the philosophies of mechanism and functionalism espoused by the founders of psychological schools such as Freud’s psychodynamics, based upon the thermodynamics of physics or the Chicago school of psychology. William James believed in free will, but other psychologists ignored his work as being un-scientific. Fortunately his work was not ignored by all, for Bill Wilson the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous relied heavily on William James Work to create the Twelve-Step program, used by a variety of recovery programs for the past eighty years. It was not until the mid-1960s that James found allies, other psychologists would shared his philosophy of Humans possessing a free will. Rollo May, Abraham Maslow, Richard Lazarus, Carl Rogers and other notables formed the Humanistic School of Psychology. It is ironic, perhaps, because the Humanistic school, despite its incredible contributions to the field of psychology, has been labeled “an alternate philosophy of human behavior and not an alternative psychology of human behavior”(Oltmans & Emory, pg. 35) The assumption by the early psychologists was that the assumption of the validity of the now discounted philosophy of Determinism. In these psychologists mind-frames every single human behavior is caused by the environment, exactly as every change in an atom’s position is caused by the environment, with no exceptions. “Because free will, by definition is not predictably determined, it is impossible to conduct research on the (eternal) causes of abnormal behavior”9Oltmans & Emery, pg 35). Well then, because the philosophy of Determinism is seen as invalid in the modern world, perhaps it is now and always has been impossible to conduct valid research upon Humans as if they were no more complex than atoms….
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Again, the hypothesis is that more modern orientations in philosophy and psychology would allow researchers to categorize observations concerning the Art of being human, via different methodology and result is some new effective therapies The assumption made to support this hypothesis is that observers are causes of effects upon the observed. Specifically, researchers’ philosophical attitudes affect their perceptions as observers of that which is observed, yet why are comments like these going ignored?
“Psychological theorizing has, for a long time, centered on the past—for example, evolution, genetic history and what the past has taught us about life. This is a method of understanding by looking backward. In a courageous and insightful book entitled Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, which opposed the dominant outlook of the times, the distinguished psychologist Edward Tolman {1932) emphasized the importance of the future in shaping a person's state of mind” (Richard Lazarus, 1999, pg 665)
“Developmental psychology get caught in a process of devising a measure, relating it to variables, finding discrepancies in results, arguing over what the measure really measures after all, and then losing interest in it and moving on to another measure, repeating the cycle. It would be very difficult to tell a coherent “story” of the development of relatedness from developmental research” (Ruthellen Josselson, 1996)
“Are Research Methods Capable of Doing Justice to Our Speculations
About the Mind and Adaptation?
I want to share a personal concern that may have played a role in my methodological critique… Almost as long as I have been a research scholar, I have sensed a troubling gap between two seemingly contradictory features of psychology, especially in those subfields that focus on psychosocial processes. Many of the ideas that psychologists, philosophers and great writers of literature have formulated about the mind and human adaptation are impressive, but we, as researchers, are able to draw on only the most limited procedures designed to provide empirical support for these ideas. We must somehow transcend this gap between speculation and proof by developing better approaches and putting them into practice. I believe this has always been the most important challenge for psychology.” (Richard Lazarus, 2003)
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This artificial habit of abstraction, or working with reductive elements, has worked so well and has become so ingrained a habit that the abstractors and reducers are apt to be at anyone who denies the empirical or phenomenal validity of these habits. By smooth stages they convince themselves that this is the way in which the world is actually constructed, and they find it easy to forget that even though it is useful it is still artificial, conventionalized, hypothetical — in a word, that it is a man-made system that is imposed upon an interconnected world in flux” (Abraham Maslow 1966).
Perhaps Maslow, himself has provided the answer to why this reality is being ignored by psychologists
“More than any other scientists we psychologists have to contend with the astonishing fact of resistance to the truth. More than any other kind of knowledge we fear knowledge of ourselves, knowledge that might transform our self-esteem and our self-image. A cat finds it easy to be a cat, as nearly as we can tell. It isn't afraid to be a cat. But being a full human being is difficult, frightening, and problematical. While human beings love knowledge and seek it — they are curious — they also fear it. The closer to the personal it is, the more they fear it. So human knowledge is apt to be a kind of dialectic between this love and this fear. Thus knowledge includes the defenses against itself, the repressions, the sugar-coatings, the inattentions, the forgettings. Therefore any methodology for getting at this truth must include some form of what psychoanalysts call "analysis of the resistance”, a way of dissolving fear of the truth about oneself, thus permitting one to perceive himself head on, naked — a scary thing to do.” (Maslow, 1966, p16)
That scary truth is that Twentieth Century psychology is obsolete and needs to be discarded. It never really was much of even a ‘soft science”. Statistically, it has been shown that professional counselors with advanced degrees in psychology or psychiatry provide no more therapeutic benefits to clients than laymen, based out outcome measures. Also all these decades of psychological research, have yielded very few predictors of individual humans’ behaviors. So what should replace it? It is suggested that …
The ‘soft’ Science of psychology of the Twentieth Century be replaced
With the ‘hard” Art of psychology of the Twenty-first Century
When the Art of the Subject trumphs the Science of the Object
An artistry that embraces its philosophical roots, proud of,
Instead of denying, its own heritage and genesis.
An art with the Multi-colored displays of neuro-imaging
Replacing the Black Box of Behaviorism.
Artists that know from experience that human experience
Is more than the sum of its parts, because of the exercise of free will
Artists with wide perspectives gained from Systems Theory,
Learning from watching a functioning dynamic system
Instead of examining nonfunctioning pieces of junk with a magnifying glass
Artists that see clients as blank canvases, who serve as the Center of their Art
Or as fellow philosophers with faulty Belief Systems in need of correction
So that those who ask in the Twenty-first Century
Is Life an Art or is Life a Science?
The answer, of course, will be both, and therefore neither.
Life is Psychology
. These Notes might prove useful in providing 'inspiration" for the completion of an assignment at school. Anyway, I believe most of these are open to the public, if not send me a PM and I'll adjust the setting on that paper of interest.
i will investigate those labyrinth you mention to see if i can't solve this paradox...
