As someone that finds himself comfortable at any area of knowledge, I had at some point to make a difficult decision between the arts and the sciences. I like the scientific knowledge because its set of truths is reliable enough to construct thought from. I hate half-truths and obscure reasoning for that same reason. This text from Félix Guattari, quoted by Dawkings and seen in Certain Doubts blog sums up pretty well what I generally consider a shameless attempt to build basaments on air:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.
Yet, as you may know, I finally made a choice for the arts and particularly for literature. Is literature a better media than science to convey essential truths? No, it isn’t. You get in the way all those variable connotations and social conventions that use to confound posmodernists so much about truth (pomos seem to worry only about second hand knowledge, maybe they spent too much time reading academic papers). What in my opinion literature is better at, in the rare occasions when it tries to, is at providing together truth and the sense of truth (an holistic experience of truth, if you want it in mind-boggling terms). For example, the fact that stars are other suns is true, though for most people there’s currently no way of directly experiencing the meaning of that truth with their own senses. Astronomers can approach that experience through the data of their sharp-edge technology, and even amateurs when they track changes in variable stars, but the common of mortals would need to dogmatically accept the word of scientists if it wasn’t by the recreated truths that literature and arts provide.
Literature often doesn’t limit itself to communicate the scientifical essentiality of something true. It tries too to hack and wire into the reader’s knowledge of their past, real experiences, to give that essential truth the quality of a self-experimented truth. As an analogy, if knowledge is light, recreated truth is a ceiling lamp while experienced truth is the Sun and essential truth is a distant star. The wealth of essential knowledge that the humanity owns is huge and growing, the wealth of experienced knowledge is always limited to the individual biographies, and the recreated truth is what most often bridges between both, even for scientists when they need to get a real feeling of the meaning of an abstract theory.
The main virtue of experienced truth over essential truth is that individuals can react more easily to things they experience than to things they abstractly know. Sometimes scientifical or sociological truths, like those often portraited in dystopic literature, remain undiscovered for most people until they are developed into a recreation. Shakespeare’s King Lear is full of recreations of the consequences of bad decision making that were probably most powerful than the words the Parlamient and the Counselors adressed to the King. Cervantes’ portrait of the real appareance of self-delusions are more easily felt as true than a Psicology paper on that same subject. In Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, the image of the river flood is closer to the direct experience of it than what the mere knowledge of a river flood could convey in the same length.
That makes literature an extremely exciting activity. You are always digging down to the essentials and building up towards the real, trying to induce reactions by exploiting the potential for experience of truth (from whatever reliable source you got it from, including self reflection) and chaining the movement created by those reactions into the discovery of a wider reality. That discovery process is what gives me reliability on literature, because even though it can be a very subjective art, I can exploit the capabilty of the reader to experience truths to compare, contrast and validate the value of my proposed text, specially when the idea that it conveys is the value of the same discovery process.
