Bridge the unbridgeable

With the kind of interdisciplinary major that I chose to pursue, I get told quite often in some pernicious tone that art and science are indisputably at odds with one another.  
But what, I wonder, does that even mean?  Is it just the habit of rhetoric on all sides — or do people truly intend to suggest the existence of some unbridgeable intellectual chasm?

I’m not a fan of the unbridgeable or the irrationally posited.

The methods of the arts and the sciences are perhaps separate from one another when taken and categorized in one bold, sweeping gesture. But, on closer examination, (which is the mark of both art and science!) the gradient of method among and between such disciplines is far more fluid than any polarized set of categories might indicate.

I am just one person — not a divided being who takes Apollo with her to neuroscience and leaves

Dionysus at home to baby-sit the next photography project.

Sitting in class, I sometimes wonder if there is a single artist in the world who would not be struck by the complex and simple beauty of a Golgi stain.

In earlier columns, I have spoken briefly about the role of rhetoric in maintaining and feeding political schisms.  Rhetoric is once again perhaps to blame.

For every discipline, we pioneer a new vocabulary and filter out the would-be scientists, sculptors and philosophers according to their grasp of the language.
We judge those ‘would-bes’ largely, or sometimes entirely, on their ability to know how to insult outsiders and reconstruct age-old arguments of who’s who and who’s best.  We forget what it means to have an idea — pure and simple.

We begin with a heuristic. We begin with the thought that if we tape off a finite piece of the world to understand and apply a chosen and well-honed method, perhaps we have a better chance of someday comprehending the nature of it all. We begin by necessity of doing something doable.

But what do we end with? We end with a society in which artists and scientists cannot converse with one another without flinging metaphorical excrement.

I do not mean to say that this is universal, but it is certainly prevalent. It is certainly a distinct mark of every interdisciplinary student’s experience with learning. And it doesn’t stop at the broad categories of art and science. It exists even within seemingly intact disciplines themselves at the level of factions and philosophies.

I do not know if I have the solution. But I think that, in a sense, I am the solution — I and every persistent student who is willing to learn the rhetoric and speak the rhetoric well enough to go beyond it and try something different.

Perhaps life really does get along best when it’s broken down into manageable categories and methods and ways of speaking.  But, if so, the awareness of the short-cuts is paramount. Without that awareness, all of our intellectual discourse will be ultimately reduced to an abridged version of its own potential.


E-mail: cmcglasson@indiana.edu