the moder values

THE MODERN VALUES AND

ORIENTATIONS OF SCIENCE AND ART

 

An analysis of Values.

The Horizons of Culture

Vision of a New Deal that does not endanger former conquest of human consciousness.

Special Study for The American Academy of Sciences and Arts

By Aung Maung Cherenzi Lind. Ph.D.

Chairman of the Chinese Bodha Association

With application for Membership.

Ad: Prof. OM Lind

C/o. Mrs. N.

245 E. 72 St. Longstreet.

  1. N. York. City.

U.S.A.

1934


 

SCIENCE AND POETRY

“There is as much beauty in science as there is precision in poetry” Swami Jñanakanda.

“On the trail of new values in a fastly changing world”. Prof. OM Lind, Ph.D. 

Not very long ago, the scientific columnist of the New York Times summarized modern advancements in the domain of mathematical physics and concluded with a request for a poet of modern science. The idea was a most happy one, and would entail one of the greatest achievements of the current days of the modern age if such poetry did give us a view of the beauty centered about the generalization of modern science, more so if it succeeded in synthesizing the spiritual values involved.

"The enemy of any subject is the professor thereof", said Prof. Schiller of Oxford in his "Tantalus or the Future of Man". He referred to political economy as black magic in the labyrinth of whose terminology even the inventors thereof do not find their way. He said, "If that is so with exact sciences, speculative subjects must fare worse, no doubt, e.g., in matters concerning the spirit of man which is abstract life psychology" (what about mathematics?). Furthermore, "No wonder a medical man is reported to have said, “I have dissected many bodies but found no evidence of soul'. "His own soul had, then, undoubtedly gone astray. Yet it is true that many academic teachers only too often deal on matters of which they are too ignorant, and this proves the truth of the old oriental adage, "Too much science is sickening, and too little science is disgusting". 

Mr. H. N. Sullivan has written a small book called "Gallio or the Tyranny of Science” and complains that even physics has come to a standstill, thanks to the narrow limits imposed upon the subject by so called “scientific outlook”. He complains that while Newton said that if mathematics does not give a satisfactory explanation to physics, some other method should be tried. The modern scientist would rather sit down with arithmetic than move into another sphere for explanation. “Three hundred years of building up exact science really amounts in the last analysis to doing what dictionary compilers did when they defined the violin as being a small violoncello and the latter as a large violin. What is left out of this closed system of cyclical definitions is the scientific himself. For to a man who has never seen or heard of a thing like a violin, these definitions and explanation mean little.

Thus, only the sophisticated can know the subject and its terminology, to the exclusion of their consciousness and criterion. But this Mr. H. N. Sullivan has undoubtedly a quaint and démodé view regarding science, on which he appears to have had but faint ideas. He speaks in terms of that wild, uncouth, bewildering confusing Marxian concept regarding’ science, for science can be no more tyrannical than the exact precision of a marvelous piece of machinery, mathematics, or beauty itself.

Thus a Prof. Paddington seems to have remarked when no physical conception could explain a new set of facts unknown till now to physicists, “the phenomena may indicate that the Universe is irrational” - instead of concluding that his scientific attitude towards this studied subject is insufficient, therefore irrational[1].

Following the selfsame erroneous criterion, Prof. Schiller, mentioned first above, said that since the time of Neanderthal man nothing fundamentally new or epoch-making was discovery, in all sophistry concluding that therefore mankind in foundering. On the other hand, he asserts that what all these 20 and odd thousands of years of evolution has done is simply permutation and combinations of the simplest things left by our most primitive forefathers; we have been drawing upon the meagre capital left by them as it were without enriching the fund. He was convinced that Neanderthal man had more brain capacity and natural genius than our greatest discoverers and conquerors. Of course, we know so little about Neanderthal man that it seems to us preposterous to assume that he was as intelligent and advanced as we homo sapiens of these troubled days are. We may have to our debit equal amount, or perhaps more, of savagery, a higher efficiency in warfare, a more developed sense for destruction, better dispositions for slandering our neighbor, more desire to satisfy our lust and other mean passions, and also an unlimited stupidity in aims of achievement and grandeur; but to our credit we have mathematics, electricity, machinery, which, though most of the time wrongly applied, do signify that we human beings are indeed evolving somehow.

We have of such plighty exposé of science, for example, the nebulous genius of Hegel. It so happened that a new planet was discovered when he was preparing his dialectics. He hastened to deny that this was possible and asserted it to be an error, since according to his (The) dialectics, all planets were already discovered. What did not suit and occur according to his theory could not exist, and therefore was nonsensical and unacceptable. So, it is with the neo or inverted Hegelians à la Marx. 

Mr. Sullivan is of the opinion that this is all due to materialism and its limitations. He pretends that the material with which science has been working hitherto is turning out to be unsatisfactory. He further asserts, in substance, that there are no indubitable certainties in science but only provisional hypotheses. The scientific practitioner usually treats his hypotheses as tools, while -unfortunately- to the layman they become dogmas. Many of those who accept materialism on what they supposed to be scientific, are rendered acutely unhappy by their belief, but a truer knowledge of the status of scientific theories would render this agony unnecessary. Undoubtedly, science has not, so far, brought any appreciable motive to justify man turning materialist against his will. This does not tell us, nevertheless, how to avoid the ailment, or curse, or how to correct it. 

Of course, we are not all endowed with an equal capacity for criticism, and this explains the blunder of a Marxian dilettante of science, who once said to a biologist in his over-enthusiasm for materialism, that in future life would be "manufactured” in a factory or laboratory. But the cautious biologist was skeptical, answering that life forces are the material upon which man can work to transmute and transform, but he cannot create it at all. But the Marxian enthusiast thought the biologist to be hopelessly spiritual and anti-materialistic and therefore skeptical and pessimistic. Marxians, as disciples of Hegel, have a weakness in finding science always wrong, defective or at the most useless.[2] 

To quote again Mr. Sullivan, "Many people, including some scientists, take science too seriously (as it is yet). They think science gives a far more comprehensive picture than it does in reality". But he denies that for one reason. He explains himself thusly:

“Science as an oak tree is a disguised form of acorn or man an evolved form of amoeba. But this mystic way of explaining in cyclical description is too glaring to be committed by more than a small percentage of modern 'thinkers'. A much more insidious danger is that this type of `explanation' leads one to underestimate the complexity of the thing explained. There is a tendency to neglect those factors in the final product which cannot be traced in its historical antecedents. This is one widespread error of undue simplification. Every natural entity, whether a flower or nation, contains too many factors for thought to be able to grasp completely". Indubitably, the art of human thinking is to make useful abstractions[3] , but while artists and scientists cannot describe and explain the human being in all its capacities and values, exclusions and assumptions had to be made for certain purposes. Thus, in psychology, we depend upon eventual facts. For war purposes, every man is regarded as a mere physical structure capable of attending weapons, a stomach on two legs, fit for a certain activity to that end. This abstraction was useful for that purpose alone, and this applies equally to the economic value of man. The economist left out certain factors in his conception of the individual (worker and voter) with the result that his plans do not seem fit when applied to actual reality, dealing with real human beings, thus confronting us with the great modern failures of governments and politics in the economical domain - without excluding the U.R.S.S. experiment. This is comprehensive enough, and it suggests that science sometimes suffers from wrong abstractions - due to the inadequacy of its means of investigation and also to inaccurate fundamental principles. But this in no way implies that science is on the run-down, futile or mere bunk, as marxians and some too talkative and pompous professors prove to understand it. Science, as fostered by modern physics, is not based on a sort of conventional abstraction of that kind, and it is a great blunder to confuse speculative sciences, such as psychology, economics and militarism with the abstract realm of pure science based on mathematical precision.

  • Simigliante a quella inferna de non piu para in su le prima, ma con dar volta sus dolore scherma” (Dante, Purg. VI)

But let us delve further into the matter. On refusing to resort to the materialistic viewpoint (of physics and Newtonian abstractions), we may assert that aesthetics and moral values (ethics) are as much a part of the real universe (and man) as anything else. Science, however, is a game wherein determined values are accorded to certain rules; yet in certain cases we just throw these overboard, excluding them from the outset. We say that a dot geometrically occupies no space and has no value, yet thru some tricks we get by with it and make it become a line, a plane, a circle, a whole universe, and still we insist on the dogma that it is a mere idea - nothing real. Life insurance actuaries neglect things about men and yet calculate quite correctly what percentage of men die at 40. But they have not proven that the neglected qualities of men do not exist because they do not upset their calculations. Values are the things that count in science, just as well as in aesthetics and in ethics. A mountain is a different thing to a poet than to an engineer. The scientist may experience awe and respect for mountains, like the artist, but he may neglect these factors for his purpose. Be bluntly abstracts the concrete facts from the total. To him one mountain and another are indistinguishable, just as to a militarist, all men are alike and to an insurance agent all men at 40 are just similar, 

Artists appear to have a method of conception entirely diverging from that of scientists. They rather add values to their rules, and would forget and overlook all the determining or concurring factors, so as to satisfy their interest for "aspect" and "perspective". To the scientist, being more practical in the positive sense, “prospect" is the main object, and quite sufficient to him. 

To define science roughly, in comparison with art, we would say that its urge is entirely of the order of precision and utility, while in art the concern is laid much more on impressionism, as well as on the significance of things. In science things are valued according to what they can be add capable to serve for, and in art it is according to want they transfer, symbolize and inspire. Yet this make it no less true that there is as much beauty in science as there is precision in beauty, only that in each case the aspects concerned are of a different order. It is true that beauty, in art, is as valuable as precision in data is to science, and., inversely, it requires as much exertion of the mind, knowledge, inspiration and loftiness or purpose to attain scientific precision as artistic beauty. 

Many people are not fitted or trained, however, to understand the real values and purports of science. Likewise, many are wholly foreign to the values and purposes of art. All these are so many reasons why people are refractory either to science or to art. Lack of understanding, or refinement at heart, of transcending idealism, of loftiness of mind turn people away from science and from art, or from both. 

It is generally assented that art is purely conventional. Science in no less conventional, if regarded on a purely assumptive basis. One needs to be an artist to judge art, and likewise, it would be utterly preposterous to attempt any criticism on science without being a thoroughly bred and mannered scientist.

We have seen from the outset of this exposition how boasting scholars, without having properly qualified in science, pretend to catechize with their rush dictum, revealing in that way the extent of their false concepts if theiy have any. Now, let us see how "beauty" and "precision" companionate and resemble each other, and at times wholly merge.

Science, we have said, is in need of a poet. As a matter of fact, science has always had its great singers and interpreters. The Kalidasa of the East is not foreign to science of his epoch, proof of it being the unsurpassable literary compositions such as the Ramayana. Orpheus is an expounder of divine science in poetic forms. Da Vinci is equally great as a scientist and an artist. Then we have the proofs at hand, where eminent scientists excel as poets, like Bergson, Poincare, Einstein, Kolharster, Jeans, Russell, Carpentier, Eddington - that is to say, the standard-bearers of modern thought. 

It seems to us that science without art, and vice versa, is incomplete, for the one completes the other. Science is founded on data of proportions and correspondence, and in art these stand for harmony. The meaning may be slightly different, but not in any way diverging or contradictory. 

Statistical data, according to the amount of feeling in the makeup of the scientist, reveals that the scientists' favorite authors appear to be the poets - Goethe, Shakespeare, V. Hugo, Whitman, and E. W. Wilcox. It seems such people know much of the fierce vitality that sent saints to rot on pillars and in dungeons, that made martyrs worthy of the stake, or even that weaker form of vitality which day by day increases the records of passional affairs. To conclude, we would assume that the scientist is a very human fellow. The artist, it is argued, on the other hand, is conscious of more things in heaven and earth than it is to be believed the man of science has ever dreamed in his abstractions. There is no little unfounded presumption in such a feeling, obviously, for scientists may advance the very sane claims without incurring in too much phantasy. As a matter of fact, modern development of mathematics and astrophysics, biology, chemistry and radiology unfold before scientists realms wholly unsuspected by artists, who, while scientists go into the details of life and the secrecy of the Universe - they are being impressed rather by the outward appearances of reality. 

Mathematicians are all poets, for mathematics is the art of abstractions par excellence. It has been said that mathematicians are an imaginative type of people. Wrong. They are greatly disciplined mentally for deep and sustained abstraction. The proof of it is that since physics swears wholly by mathematics and evolves upon it, materialism has lost its implications. It is materialism that is on the perilous slope of decadency, not science, as pretended by Mr. H. N. Sullivan. Science can never be unsatisfactory, it is only man's limited scientific penetration that is unsatisfactory. 

Science - not the speculative essays - was never based upon abstractions so much as in its latest and no doubt highest attainments. Prof. Schiller, already quoted, confuses "exact sciences" with "speculative subjects", which he defines as abstract. That is an error, for speculation and abstraction have different meanings, and while mathematics, for example, is entirely abstract, it is not speculative. The reverse would be the proper assertion for psychology and economy. 

The aesthetic value of mathematics is not to be doubted. It requires insight and inspiration, or introspection and a clear mind to deal with mathematics, and the satisfaction derived from a perfectly set equation is the equivalent of the ecstatic bliss of the artist in great vein. As to the beauty of equations themselves, every real mathematician will discuss it to the end without any hesitancy. And not only is there Aesthetic significance in mathematics, but its very sequential precision in arguments is a foundation of Ethics, and while physics has found it to be the very best means of investigation, thus becoming the matrix of all transcending, valuable concept (concept-value), we are to be impressed by the general acceptance that is being made of mathematics. But we would not be surprised if even artists, in the future, resorted to mathematics as a means of discipline. 

In a wider acceptation, we have the maxim handed to us by Leibniz, the German philosopher, who affirmed that "there is no philosophy without mathematics, and no mathematics without philosophy”. 

In modern times, science requires a great amount of criterion, mental vision and a sense or faculty of generalization, which were not found necessary heretofore. Likewise in art, for art is also the outcome of human nature. But it happens that those factors are, indeed, the foundations of philosophy. This explains, again, why the most eminent scientists, besides being artists, are philosophers, and on the other hand philosophy is impossible without science, while art itself seeks, in all its enfoldments, the aid of science. 

To summarize, science is intensely poetic, and art has sought refuge in science to the extent that it can no longer be termed speculative, a pure emotive trend or fantasy. 

Most artists adopt at all times an attitude towards life, which is in correspondence to the prevailing outlooks and concept of science. Art and science thrive side by side. Art was never more symbolical, for example, as during the epochs of great mystic fervor, and realism became a school at a time when science was exclusively positivistic and pragmatic. When fundamentalism became evident in science, art followed a parallel trend of significance, and as science in all evidence lost its bearings under the einsteinian relativism and quanta theory of Planck, art also made a rush in abysses of non-values and absurdity and ridicule. And lo, now that science is on the upward trend with the Indeterminacy Principle, the mystical einsteinian Function Lambda (of “Cosmic Constant” the Universe) and the elusive Neutron as directing factors, art is also showing a certain awakening towards mystical (spiritual?) values. 

To view philosophy, that is to say science and art combined as regarding the world as a mere witless creation of a cruel and selfish deity in need of recreation, life as a complex delusion for the sake of affording monads or something of the sort an opportunity to take leave from the bosom of Brahma or God or The Absolute for the only purpose of seeking, through misery, suffering and the thousand and one forms of ignorance, a way of returning to its source, from whence in all logic it should never have absented itself - under the assumption that it really did and things at large as mere insignificant things fit only to be the plaything of some absurd destiny or otherwise meaningless and just despondent elements coupled to that stupid Chariot of Jagernaut called Determinism, is no wiser than to believe, in the light of pure science, that absolute laws[4] govern life and determine all processes of evolution in matter, or that accuracy is effective and to be counted upon in all experiments. Undoubtedly, a new light guides our steps into the domain of our ignorance, but when it comes to categorical assertions, we may follow the recommendation of a sage, applying it to circumstances: "When I hear shouts of “Long live Freedom”, I proceed to insure my property and look my doors". This brings to our mind the occurrence of Mr. G. K. Chesterton who, on learning that some so-called scientists explained that the church spires were symbolical remnants of phallic worship, he began to doubt the whole Royal Academy. 

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[1] Consult: The Real Significance of Heisenberg: Principle of Indeterminacy in own mental Behavior, in the Biological Process and in the Cosmos at large.

[2] Science, according to marxian ideology, responds to the needs of laborers in the fullest sense of the socialistic orthodoxy, but never to reasoning of finesse or higher order which is termed “bourgeois", capitalist or imperialistic, because of its elaborate abstractions. 

In the marxian paradise, U.R.S.S., science is reduced to its crudest inferences, while theory and investigation are overlooked and even despised if they do not deal only with the needs of and conform to the bolshevik socialistic credo, obviously escaping the evidence that theory and investigation are the basis of all possible application and advancement in science. Thus, science is reduced to its meanest factum: "Izvestia", the Communist Party's official organ in Moscow, says in its issue of Jan. 1, 1933, that the “concept of science purported to be absolute, with its own concerns and ideology, independent of politics, remains completely excluded", and this is said by one of the most influential soviet academicians, Prof. Komaroff. In other words, mathematics, physics, chemistry, mechanics, biology are not true sciences because they do not teach the clash of classes and do not recommend social revolution. As an extreme proof of that, at the last Congress of Mathematics, in Zurich, Switzerland, we were recently left dumbfounded by a sovietic mathematician that was making an exposé of what was supposed to be his concept of the differential calculus based on Hegelian dialectics and marxian logic. 

The Communist criterion is based on “materialist dialectics” or “diamat". This was promulgated by recent decree of the President of the Central Executive Committee, and the Academy of Sciences is obliged to apply it in all its activities (Izvestia 1/1/33). We therefore, infer that special ramification of science like microbiology, astronomy, anthropology, radiology, spectroscopy, medicine, to mention just a few, must conform to the Ukase following the absurd, delusive and sophistic criterion of Hegel and Marx. 

In the issue of the 25th of December, 1932 of "Pravda", an organ of the U.R.S.S. government, is to be read a letter of a group of fourth year students of the Medical Institute of Moscow, in the Faculty of Eugenics and Gynecology, to whom the title of "Dr.” had been discerned. 

The brand-new medicos minutely relate how they had been through their study, which was not such an ordeal after all. They had devoted in total one hundred and two (102) hours to the study of internal sicknesses, of which 60 were reserved to lectures. They were not taught anything about kidneys, the blood or the nervous system, which were apparently deemed unnecessary subjects. A simple "visit" to the Institute of Tuberculosis was sufficient to enlighten this new crop of "sovietic medical authorities". Children's diseases, an important subject in such category of study, were exhaustively taught in eighteen (18) classes of three (3) hours each. We comment from "Revue des Deux Mondes", where the sorry plight of the real intellectuals is barely explained. It is in such a paradise of freedom and social enlightenment that things of the sort happen, and where irony seems to thrive successfully if we are to judge by assertions like that of the “academician" Comrade Keller, bristling with sovietic wisdom: "Decadence and ruin must unavoidably befall the different branches of science in the Western world, unless the learned hurry to fight side by side with the laboring class for the success of Communism, which is the unique means of insuring the full flourishment of sciences”. 

So, we are now wholly enlightened about the concept of the future, according to soviet thinkers, as derived from their conceptuous “scientific” outlook on life and the world. One must be a full-fledged communist with “academic" preparation on the practical basis of the quaint, dogmatic and short-sighted hegelian dialectics and marxian speculative logic, in order to make this world of ours a paradise. 

The strange thing about all this is that while materialism is being harshly criticized by all progressive thinkers the world over, and strenuously discredited and supplanted by modern advancements in mathematical physics, in soviet Russia it is upheld, fostering obscurantism in sciences while one of its principal credal foundations is the freedom of the masses through knowledge. 

Upon such considerations, we may imagine now poetry and art in general thrive, having to conform to the exotic, orthodox canons of materialistic ignorance á la Hegel-Marx. 

[3] A difference is to be made between an abstraction and the abstract

[4] At best, laws are only of statistical value. Why should we expect that gravitation should always operate? For instance, do the bulky oak, the slim palm or the giant Sekoya tree that rise towards the sky respond to Gravitation? Is the second “law” of thermodynamics absolutely sound? No. Therefore, to uphold “laws” as absolute is merely to base criterion on blind faith and make of the eventual something inevitable. We might as well say that because it rained during a night it should rain every night, or that because we get run over by a tramcar it is for the reason that it could not happen otherwise. In psychology (psycho? logy?) taste for art is regarded as a mere disguised form of sexual desire; why not a form of hunger, since artists are as much notorious for being hungry as for being erotic? The “Cosmic Constant" Lambda according to einsteinian relativism, affects and even overcome gravitation. Such an attitude of mind was the weaver of the entire dreadful fabric of materialism, a nightmare from which we hardly succeed in tearing ourselves away - now that talks of war and hypocritical warfares under the cloth of nationalism, customs and international trade seem to become day by day to almost unique preoccupation of entire mankind. By believing that the obvious is the principal element of life, we have learned to harden our hearts and soften our minds, for we became materialists and otherwise easy-going determinists with all sorts of complexes. This made the only difference extent between classical religion and science, and meaningless art also.