![]() It is not the means to an end.” (Part 2). The House is valuable because it is the House. The sight of the One-Hundred-and-Ninety-Second Western Hall in the Moonlight made me see how ridiculous that is. I am reviewing the novel here on ScientificGems because it has a lot to say about Science, Knowledge, and how to relate to the World: “ I realised that the search for the Knowledge has encouraged us to think of the House as if it were a sort of riddle to be unravelled, a text to be interpreted, and that if ever we discover the Knowledge, then it will be as if the Value has been wrested from the House and all that remains will be mere scenery. Some fan art of mine, prompted by the novella Rain Through Her Fingers by Rabia Gale, which is set in a flooded city that Piranesi reminds me of Navy, Auguste Rodin, William Blake, and Ivan Ayvazovsky. Can we indeed live with contradiction? Can the problems of complementarity be resolved? Or is it possible to construct some new synthesis of Science, Art, Religion, and other ways of seeking knowledge? The novel Piranesi raises some interesting questions, but gives no answers, of course.Īrtwork from a Florentine artist, Ryan N. So those are four ways of seeking knowledge. Indeed, former adherents of this approach seem now to be moving towards a new single dominant metanarrative. The result of this is a kind of postmodernist chaos that seems to me fundamentally unstable. Your “truth” may be completely contradictory to my “truth,” but that’s OK. are seen as contradictory ( P versus not P) but the contradiction is embraced. He has picked up some of the fragments and stares at them intently in the hope that they will eventually bring him new knowledge.” P & ~P (contradiction / chaos)įinally, I use P & ~P to reflect the situation where Science, Art, Religion, etc. This puzzles him, but at the same time part of him refuses to accept that the sphere is broken and worthless. The man has used his sword to shatter the sphere because he wanted to understand it, but now he finds that he has destroyed both sphere and sword. Roundabout lie other broken pieces, the remains of a sphere. The novel Piranesi touches on the problems of scientism: “ It is a statue of a man kneeling on his plinth a sword lies at his side, its blade broken in five pieces. This was not intended to be a positive depiction around about the same time Blake famously wrote “ May God us keep / From Single Vision and Newton’s sleep.” I have illustrated this option with the depiction of Isaac Newton by William Blake. It also includes scientism, or the belief that Science trumps everything else (a doomed approach, because the foundations of Science are themselves not scientific they are philosophical and mathematical). This includes the case of religious people who do not believe that observation of the universe can produce valid truth. are seen as contradictory ( P versus not P), but one source of “truth” is seen as superior to, and thus over-riding, the others. I use P > ~P to reflect the situation where Science, Art, Religion, etc. Increasingly, people seem to be fighting against this situation. Art is distinguished from Technology in ways that the ancient Greeks would have found bizarre. The problem with this approach is a kind of fragmentation of life. For the case of Science and Religion, Stephen Jay Gould has called this approach non-overlapping magisteria. I can study the stars, but independently of that, I can also see them as beautiful. They all produce their own kind of “truth” ( P versus Q). are seen as complementary but incommensurable. I use P & Q to reflect the situation where Science, Art, Religion, etc. Perhaps the pinnacle of the medieval approach is the poetry of Dante Alighieri (depicted above), where Religion and Science are combined together with poetic Art. This was a characteristic of medieval thought in Europe, where Art frequently told religious stories, and Thomas Aquinas had integrated Religion with the best available Science of his day. I use the formula P & P to reflect the situation where different ways of thinking – such as Science, Art, and Religion – are all telling the same story, and therefore form part of a grand cultural synthesis. I see four fundamental options, which I list below, and illustrate graphically above (click to zoom). ![]() ![]() Following my review of the book Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, I wanted to say something about different ways of seeking knowledge.
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