Where do the arts and the sciences connect, and where and how do they part company?
One of the most illuminating and nuanced answers to this question was offered by way of a distinction between “thought” and “cognition”, by Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers about the human condition of our time (and who actually wrote the influential The Human Condition).
“Cognition always pursues a definite aim, which can be set by practical considerations as well as by “idle curiosity”; but once this aim is reached, the cognitive process has come to an end. Thought, on the contrary, has neither an end nor an aim outside itself, and it does not even produce results.
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Cognition belongs to all, and not only to intellectual or artistic work processes; like fabrication itself, it is a process with a beginning and end, whose usefulness can be tested, and which, if it produces no results, has failed, like a carpenter’s workmanship has failed when he fabricates a two-legged table. The cognitive processes in the sciences are basically not different from the function of cognition in fabrication; scientific results produced through cognition are added to the human artifice like all other things.”
Thought is quite different:
“Thought and cognition are not the same. Thought, the source of art works, is manifest without transformation or transfiguration in all great philosophy.
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The activity of thinking is as relentless and repetitive as life itself, and the question whether thought has any meaning at all constitutes the same unanswerable riddle as the question for the meaning of life; its processes permeate the whole of human existence so intimately that its beginning and end coincide with the beginning and end of human life itself.”
It reminds us of some recent research by educationalists, who highlights 3 habits of minds that are taught in the arts, namely, observe, envision (imagine and ask “what ifs”), and express and finding a “personal vision”, as well as of the proponent of the concept of “multiple intelligences”, Howard Gardner, who concluded that “there is no specific artistic intelligence … any intelligence can be used in an artistic way.”
Just as men can do thinking as well as cognition, English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley encouraged us to think about the connections between the arts and the sciences and urged us to do “and“ thinking rather than “or” thinking in his musings on the question “is the Moon a stone or a god” (in his essay “Meditations on the Moon”):
“Socrates was accused by his enemies of having affirmed, heretically, that the moon was a stone. He denied the accusation. All men, said he, know that the moon is a god, and he agreed with all men. …. [T]o say, with Socrates, that it is made of god-stuff is strictly accurate. For there is nothing, of course, to prevent the moon from being both a stone and a god.
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The moon is a stone; but it is a highly numinous stone. Or, to be more precise, it is a stone about which and because of which men and women have numinous feelings. Thus, there is a soft moonlight that can give us the peace that passes understanding. There is a moonlight that inspires a kind of awe. There is a cold and austere moonlight that tells the soul of its loneliness and desperate isolation, its insignificance or its uncleanness. There is an amorous moonlight prompting to love — to love not only for an individual but sometimes even for the whole universe.
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There the stone is — stony. You cannot think about it for long without finding yourself invaded by one or other of several essential numinous sentiments.
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The universe throws down a challenge to the human spirit; in spite of his insignificance and abjection, man has taken it up. The stone glares down at us out of the black boundlessness, a memento mori. But the fact that we know it for a memento mori justifies us in feeling a certain human pride. We have a right to our moods of sober exultation.”