For a long time we have believed that the arts are mere accessories in the project of knowledge. Though art may enrich and glorify our lives, many still feel only science can reveal truth. This equivalence of science with truth has existed for so long because science itself has been so vital in shaping modern life. All the infrastructure that surrounds us, from roads and buildings to satellites and mobile phones is the result of our science.  From the moment our ancestors sat down to wonder, to figure out their world, they were practicing science. The arts were for leisure time; they were pleasant, perhaps even important, but certainly not necessary. But modern history has changed these conditions. Science has brought comfort, but also death and destruction. Even as it has made our lives better it has also made them more complex. Yet our perception of science as the exclusive progenitor of truth has remained. Among respectable intellectual circles, art is still seen as a profession for neer-do-wells and muddle heads, and art itself as a topic for after dinner conversation, as if it were a sport or a species of politics. Science, on the other hand, is viewed as serious work—profitable, useful, and most of all true. But seeing science as the wellspring of truth, as many are still wont to do, excuses its more parlous aspects.

I am not proposing to get rid of science or indeed to deny its importance in our lives. Rather, I want to show that art, and in particular poetry, deserves serious consideration as being important in revealing truth. Such a change in mindset can help us to deal with a world whose physical and social aspects are constantly changing, and pull us out of the rigid intellectual conformity that scientific thinking demands. For by associating truth exclusively with science we form a world-view that blinds us to science’s limitations. All that is good in the world comes to be associated with this world-view, while evil becomes assoicated with every other.

The primary guardians of the scientific world-view are philosophers. To most of us, these people are terribly remote academics scribbling obsure treatises on irrelvant subjects. Certainly, there is some truth to this perception—most of don’t read monographs on Schopenhauer along with our morning paper. Nevertheless, how we form our view of the world determines much of how we behave, and the nature of philosophy, its tendency to take all of knowledge as its object of study, gives it an influence far beyond what one might expect. Indeed, because philosophy takes as its central concern questions of language, specifically with how we understand the world through the medium of language, it is the quintessential subject for determining world-views. It is widely, indeed almost universally, accepted that to understand the world we must understand how we use language.

The Scientific World View

The scientific world-view has a rather inflexible view of language. In its perspective language is a tool which serves to convey human requests, commands, or practical information; language has no expressive function. Determining the meaning of a sentence is equivalent to understanding the logical form of the sentence. A sentence whose logical form can be deciphered e.g. “A chair is for sitting,” is meaningful, whereas one whose logic is contradictory e.g. “The floor is over my head,” is considered meaningless, and therefore not worth talking about. Even in the most flexible interpretations, language still is seen by these analytic philosophers as essentially functional (designed to do something) and governed by precise rules. The task of philosophy, according to their interpretation, is to elucidate the ways in which we are misled by linguistic and grammatical ambiguities into misunderstanding the true logical form of a sentence. Once this is done, so the theory goes, all philosophical problems go away.

Analytic philosophy is the handmaiden of science. It justifies and defends the methodology of science against its detractors. Accordingly analytic philosophy supports a scientific world-view that sees sentences as very similar to equations, and that views the world as a series of problems suceptible to a solution.  After all, science has been hugely successful in improving our lives; its predictive power has been demonstrated in case after case. It is therefore normal that it would have a considerable influence on our world-views and on philosophy. But any system of thought can be pushed too far, can be asked to explain matters that are beyond its scope. This is what has happened with science. Its method of reasoning is extremely useful for a wide variety of problems dealing with the physical world. From a strictly philosophical point of view, analytic philosophy is useful for providing a conceptual underpinning for the discoveries of modern science.

But many scientists and practitioners of this philosophy, understandably delighted at the influence of their disciplines, have gone overboard in their exuberance. They have tried to apply analytic concepts of language to all aspects of human relations. Though some statements, such as those that require the performance of an action or a concrete response can validly be dealt with through logical analysis, there is a whole range of what might be called emotive statements— sentences that express emotion, whose intention makes proper logical analysis impossible. Analytic philosophers, in their presumption, assume either that such statements have no philosophical importance, or that they in fact are or contain analytic satements and thus can be dealt with rationally.

Groundwork for a Poetic Metaphysics

Emotive statements are important, however, because emotions clearly affect how we percieve and interact with the world. Nevertheless, they absolutely cannot be dealt with analytically. Indeed, much trouble is caused by the false claim of rationalists that such irrational statements don’t really say anything. It leads to the false conclusion that expressive language is incapable of expressing anything worthy of a solution. This kind of attitude only makes the problem worse. Emotive statements understandably perplex traditional philosophers for philosophers have always been wedded to rationality. If a philosophical problem has no obviouly rational solutions, philosophers feel that their only option is to deny that there is any problem. They seem totally incapable of accepting the importance of the non-rational in human life.

But is there room for a non-rational component in our search for truth? Most philosophical analyses would begin by searching for what we have in common in our perception. If you and I stare at a box, we can probably come to some sort of agreement about size, color, shape, and other purely physical attributes. Most philosophical analyses assume that you and I are perceiving the same thing. There is, however, no particular reason to believe this assumption, for beyond the purely physical attributes, our indiviudal experience of a box may be totally different. Perhaps at some time in your past, you were locked in a box similar to the one we are discussing, and so for you boxes are an unpleasant reminder of that former experience, while for me boxes remain merely containers. When you see a box you begin to shiver, your knees shake, and you turn away in disgust. Since our experience of the object is totally different, the way in which we interact with this object will also be different. Though functionally you and I may use the box for identical purposes—storing things—our actual experience of the box remains colored by our individual experience with this object.

What applies to objects here also applies to persons and situations, i.e. to all lived life. There is absolutely no reason to believe that any two people who are exposed to identical phenomena will experience the same phenomena. The histories of the two people will be different and so the meaning of the experience, whatever it may be, will also be different. The individuals may not be able to express this difference; they may not even be aware of the difference, but because of different histories, it will be there. Granted, there will be some overlap in how the experience is described; common sense argues for common ground and is necessary for scientific analysis, but it is false to automatically assume, as science and analytic philosophy do, that similarity equals equivalence.

Language

Language is the mirror of our experience. We learn the word table by being exposed to the thing; we learn happiness and sadness by being exposed to them. But again, while you and I may be able to agree on a thing called table, and about many of its attributes, our actual experience of tables will be quite different. So though we may have the same dictionary meaning for the word table, there will be elements of meaning we have as individuals, that won’t be part of any dictionary meaning. And though the dictionary meaning may be close enough to communicate and to do scientific work, it is manifestly false to say that such a definition is in any way true.

The way in which we use the word truth is the key to understanding how we use language. If we use truth in a merely analytical and objective sense then all the things that conform to truth, and all the meanings of words will also be analytical and objective. Conversely, if we take truth to be individual or subjective, then conformity to truth will have that character instead. A commonsense evaluation of truth, however, should lead us to an intermediate position—most phenomena have some obejctive level of truth and some subjective level of truth.  It is true that we can agree that the table is black, but it isn’t black at all times or from all angles. As a practical matter the table may appear black, but subjectively it sometimes isn’t. And the character of the word truth here is the character of all other words as well—they contain both an obejctive and a subjective part. Of course, philosophy has long paid attention only to the objective part while assuming the subjective part either doesn’t exist or isn’t important. But we see now that philosophy has been in error for a long time.

If the meaning of words is partly subjectively determined, then all larger syntactical structures will also have some subjective component. Since words are the foundation of sentences, subjective words make for subjective sentences which make for subjective writing. The fact that people interpret texts in different ways is the surest sign of this phenomenon. What we must break is the old habit that sees truth only as what is common between people. Truth is really composed of a considerable level of agreement about our perceptions with some essential element of disagreement.

Poetry in the Service of Truth

The function of art is simple enough—to remind us that truth is always partially subjective. Art does do this, and if it did this alone, it would still have enormous value in a society subjected to the juggernaut of scientfic thinking, but art does more by actually creating or manifesting subjective truth. What we see and know objectively is often obvious, whereas the subjective is equally vital, but often unknown or hidden. It is the function of art, and in particular of poetry, to bring to our consciousness that which is hidden, the element of truth that is forgotten in our passion for analysis. Poetry keeps the mind awake because it forces us to examine our linguistic presuppositions. It is the art of language par excellence because it focuses its effects less on individuals or on action than on how we construe meaning. It takes the philosopher’s analytic project and turns it on its head—philosophical problems are not the result of a failure to perceive the correct logical structure, but are rather a result of the failure to see the limits of analysis. The poem then, forces us to confront the reality that not all statements can be logically analyzed, and in so doing, it brings forth the truth, which had been hidden or mistakenly assumed to be found by the analytic philosophers.

Poetry is uniquely suited to the exposition of truth. If we communicate about and understand our world in a primarily linguistic fashion, then poetry automatically becomes an important means to achieve this end. The poem takes the language and logic of the analysts and twists them around so that sentences retain meaning but cease to be amenable to logical analysis. To take just one example well known to philosophers: Silent green dreams sleep furiously. Logically of course, this sentence has no meaning since dreams do not sleep. Yet it would be equally false to say that the sentence is meaningless; rather it has a meaning whose meaning cannot be explained logically. But it is indubitably false to say that if this sentence can’t be explained logically then it has no meaning; that itself is illogical. When a sentence cannot be explained logically then that is all that can be concluded. The genius of the poem is that it opens up our notions of what “makes sense” to something beyond the merely analytical.  Logic is confining and restricting; it deals well with those parts of the world where we agree, but it is incapable of explaining  our sudden wild flights of fancy, our inspirations, our loves. The poem as a work of art is free to throw out the conventions of logic, or at least to reinterpret them in the service of truth.

Poetry completes our true picture of the world. Science is there to sketch the broad outlines, to show us what the world is like in general for most people most of the time. But poetry gives us the proper picture, brings the world into focus, and lets us see that what we thought was the absolute truth was in fact just the merest outline, the shadow of the real. A true picture of our world includes both science and poetry. One, science, sketches the figure, the other, poetry, gives it mass, shape and presence. Only together do they form truth.