Sigmund Freud, quoted by Wolf and Fox. Psychotherapy in its infancy seemed like an effort to scientifically objectify artistic knowledge about humanity and its fears, longings, dreams; much reads like literature, and some -like Jung- sounds religious. It is emblematic of the 20th century that we attempted this translation of poetics into science.
Art reminds us endlessly that human life is essentially unchanging, that we are not different from our forebears, whose concerns and fears and dreams we share, that history is more cyclical than linear. Science tells us the opposite: that history is linear and progressive, that the world and human society are perfectible, and that we are ever-advancing: it is a kind of post-religious eschatology.
Some time ago, writing about Chaplin and Einstein, I wasn’t precisely sure why we now so strongly prefer science to art, but I partially suspect it is because science offers a much more alluring myth than art does, and consoles us in our mortality by telling us that with every decade our species advances towards an unspecified state of angelic or utopian transcendence.
As with the perpetually preparatory model of life offered to a modern citizen, in which every phase of education, employment, courtship, and leisure is measured by its capacity to position one for the next phase, the implied anthropology of a scientific / technocratic model is one of promise: diseases cured, inconveniences conquered, understanding attained, life extended. The purpose of humankind is to perfect itself and the universe, it is suggested, and this will occur; we are thus part of a narrative journey into an ideal future (and as Frankl and James have noted, deprived of a sense of futurity we tend to collapse).
I mean to take nothing from science in noting that although it is among the finest achievements of humanity, certain facts remain which art is better-suited to convey: that despite the Large Hadron Collider and jet airplanes and vaccines and psychotherapy, we remain deeply strange, hopeful, fearful, loving, jealous, giving, deranged, ingenious creatures as mortal as we’ve ever been, and that whatever humanity’s future evolution every one of us lives and dies alone.
It is well that science incrementally improves us, our world, and our understanding of the universe, but it is not surprising that Freud felt as though he was following poets: art, free from rationalism, epistemological restraint, or the need to solve the problems it finds beyond cathartically bringing them into our awareness, often arrives first, and sometimes goes deepest.
