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I lean towards the theory that we think we're rational because it feels good in our diaphragm, the enteric nervous system. After all, we just believe in logic, Ayn Rand's A is not not-A, because we're told when young that bi-valued logic is the only kind. Cognitive dissonance isn't always just two notes. Sometimes it's a three or four note chord.
We're taught major chords are logical, minor chords wrong. Jazz, bad. Four legs, good.
Then we realize, or don't, that forcing life into dualism is only an efficiency, not a correspondence to the bewildering and unsettling real world of fuzzy grays that appear lighter or darker depending on their context.
Logic is no more real than mathematics. It's all in our heads. We confuse transmissibility for concrete reality. Just because someone strongly resonates to our speech doesn't mean the thing we're talking about exists. We may just be agreeing on Jesus.
(You've beat me on crime. Someone got shot today next to that Starbucks we met at on Ninth and Irving.)
It's like Velcro -- one side is useless on its own and has no practical function
Art has no "practical" function ...that is, you can't drive it, play with it, live in it, dress in it, eat it, or comb with it.....
Am I right?
()
Speak for yourself
I believe that our misguided attempts to squelch our emotions inhibit our ability to be rational.
Perhaps the ideal is to go beyond the merely rational, to make rational the irrational, that is, to make sense of the irrational. Is that not what an artist does?
Take cubism for instance, an obvious example but a good one. The ability to see all sides of an object or body at once is clearly an irrational concept, yet the artists did exactly that. Rational compositions of the irrational illuminated the concept for the viewer.
I was replying to Otvos's claim that I was being over the top with regard to the reductionism of the Scientific Method. I advanced a minor indictment of Science in being slow to discover the connections between the brain and body because the standard methodology employed by scientist was flawed.
Science, by employing the tried and true method of deconstructing complex organisms or systems into their smallest examinable parts, has itself partly to blame for its inability to understand how the brain and body function together.
I'm not advancing an ideology (which would certainly be antithetical to the diary), I'm simply stating that Art has been ahead of Science in helping us understand how we function. What could be more practical than that?
