Thar be monsters: Science, Religion, Art, and the Fear of the Unknown

So, this blog entry represents, I am beginning to figure, the second of what I envision to be three interrelated posts, loosely grouped around quotes from Theodor Adorno. The first dealt with remainders and what we should do about an expressed preference for mystery.

In this post, I'd like to address fear of the unknown. The title of the post comes from the tired cliché drawn from cartography - that, once the limits of the known world were reached, monsters were inserted onto maps (apparently to both represent and explain the limits of that knowledge -- I mean, what kind of stupid person would chart that region if, you know, monsters were there).

We tend to be afraid of what we don't know, but are soon emboldened through contact, information, and a kind of narrative sense - whether in dealings with others , with wilderness , or even with our own bodies.

Now, it seems to me (and, judging from the tenor of posts offered in response to the first post, it seems to others as well) that the very laudable goal of science is to translate the unknown into the known. To bring more of the world into the province of human understanding. One potential conclusion to draw from this is that, given enough time, all of the world will be brought under the auspices of human knowledge. So it was with Diderot and d'Alembert.

This enlightenment ideal gets repeated, I would argue, in contemporary responses to religion. Look, how can anyone have faith in religious teachings or spiritual pursuits when everything is, or at least soon will be, explainable through scientific reasoning and investigation? Of course, it seems inarguable that everything already is explained through scientific reasoning. Else, why continue to do science at all? So, I will assert that premise (but welcome refutation below). What follows, then, seems to rest on an article of faith -- "or at least soon will be". Faith that science can and will offer certainty about the world and our place in it, be it biochemical or whatever.

But is there good reason to believe in that likely future? Does the history of science give us good reason, or does it rather seem to suggest that we will always be in the presence of the unknown? Does this persistence of the unknown go some way toward explaining (though not necessarily justifying) the persistence of religious belief that can operate as a bulwark against change and uncertainty?

There is real fear and dread experienced with the loss of certainty, the notion that what is known now may be lost tomorrow. Consider Roquentin's famous disquisition about the root of a chestnut tree, from Sartre's Nausea:

Knotty, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, brought me back unceasingly to its own existence. In vain to repeat: "This is a root"-it didn't work any more. I saw clearly that you could not pass from its function as a root, as a breathing pump, to that, to this hard and compact skin of a sea lion, to this oily, callous, headstrong look. The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was ... below all explanation. (p. 129)

For Roquentin, the categories of understanding, of classifying things as separate and meaningful, can fall away and leave nothing in its place. Nothing. No things. Undifferentiated and unexplainable existence threatening the very self that requires differentiation.

Sartre embraces such fullness/emptiness for its freedom. But it is in the face of this annihilation of self that Leo Tolstoy, at the height of his literary reputation, turns away from such idols and embraces a life of faith - for what else, in his mind, links up the finite with the infinite? What else provides certainty in the face of ephemerality?

Now, those are surely intense and rather radical reactions to the loss or change of category schemes of paradigms of understanding. But we've also seen some very diehard retrenchments against changes in understandings of the world - from geocentrism to neptunism to catastrophism (and back again). It seems relatively human to hold onto some kind of certainty - be it faith in religious dogma, or a specific scientific schema, or a general scientific methodology which will sure reach its apex. It's not for nothing that Plato defined knowledge very precisely, as being immutable and eternal . All else, for him, is belief. All else.

But as I dealt with last time, there may be reasons to believe that there will always be some element of unknown in the world - perhaps simply obstinately declared. No lesser light than Donald Rumsfeld has reminded us of those "unknown unknowns" . But maybe, to overcome the reactionary glom onto religion in the face of scientific uncertainty, we can seek to reconcile science to an embrace of irreducible unknown-ness. It would, I gather, amount to some restriction regarding the power of science in deciding human dilemmas, and this restriction may lead to real and meaningful unease. But it doesn't involve, necessarily, a turn to the irrational. It may, instead, open up the world, if only slightly.

What would that look like? I don't know. But it may be important to maintain some sense of presence for the remainder, to acknowledge that there are parts of the world that eternally resist conceptualization and they should not be feared. For Adorno (see, I didn't forget), that is the province of art - to "express the inexpressibility of the inexpressible." At the very least, however, we can see that some still seek to crave worlds not reduced to obvious human observation (expanding experience by embracing something not fully articulate).

That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mount Blanc, and grieved
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurped upon a living thought
That never more could be.

Here, Wordsworth bemoans the loss of the world of his imagination faced with the stark, seemingly undeniable reality (for a more complete explication of the passage, see the breakdown in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace).

Not satisfied with such tyranny of the empirical image, the artist Christo seeks to recapture some province for the imagination, here covering an island with a sheet - once done, what happens to our understanding of that heretofore irreproachable image? What is the island, fully?

Science may not be able to answer that question completely. What we have to seek is space for that to be true, yet not result in the turning over of science in favor of something else that would pretend to that completeness. Rather, what we need is space for richer experiences and to not simply fear the unknown (we will always do that, I think, to some degree), but to also see in it possibility and humility.

In the next entry, I try to suggest how all this philosophical navel gazing might have explicit practical importance.

*WG's bio can be found at the end of his first guest post here.