ART & ORGANISM

ART IS A LIE but TRUTH is BEAUTY

Art is a lie I use to tell the truth —Picasso[1]

L’exactitude n’est pas la verité  —Matisse[2]

[GET ORIENTED WITH

KNOWLDGE and TRUTH, TRUTH, REALITY, and REALITY TESTING]

They asked him, “Is there anything truer than truth?”    

“Yes” he replied, “Legend.” (Kazantzakis).[3]  

And Salman Rushdie[4] speaking about el realismo mágico, held that “The real, by the addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional force. It becomes more real, not less.”

Well we know that science (a highly specialized version of everyday experience) consists of facts and theories.  That is,phenomena that we assume exist in the world alongside us, and the relationships between them that we guide our thinking about how they relate to each other and to ourselves. These might determine or reflect the modes of reality-testing that we possess (correspondence and coherence)[5] that confer a measure of confidence in them (are they real? illusory? hallucinations?), but more about these cognitive mechanisms and their evolution and adaptive utility later.     

It is significant that our experiences—perceptions and conceptions of the world—are presumed to be more-or-less accurate internalizations of something outside ourselves.

Actually, we will see that the boundaries between inside and outside our selves is often very fuzzy.   Write these promises down—make sure that they are kept.

At this point you would not be surprised that someone like Frank Lloyd Wright could say, “The truth is more important than the facts.” [6]  But facts are isolated little things: their importance is in the roles they play constructing narratives–the scripts by which our lives are lived.  A false or weak fact can destroy a narrative:  “The great tragedy of science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact” (TH Huxley 1870)   Amongst our mantras: “Tell the best story you can with the best facts you have.”  We cannot expect “perfection,” only the closest approximation of the truth–perfection is for the gods alone, transcendence to a place we cannot know.) 

(Read on: Art & Organism notes page on “ART is a LIE”)