Art as Beauty and Science as Truth

We are familiar with the haunting words from the “Ode on a Grecian Urn”:

Beauty is Truth,

Truth Beauty–that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Similar are the words of Gurudev Tagore:

Let us stand firm and suffer

With strength for the true

With freedom for beauty.

And the words of Ramakrishna’s disciple are haunting:

The search of the mind for beauty and truth

Is the search for God.

That way lay real happiness and true progress.

The question that one may legitimately ask is – Are these thoughts of merging of beauty and truth, these lines which relate art to science and science to art, a mere flight of poetic imagination, and the mere passionate outpouring of a religious mystic? Or, is there really truth in beauty which is science in art, and beauty in truth, which is art in science? When Yama says to Nachiketa that “fools dwelling in darkness but thinking themselves wise and erudite, go round and round in circles by various tortuous paths”, or when Sri Ramakrishna says, “By adding many zeros together you gain nothing, they have no value” and “Can any pearl be found in knee-deep waters? If you want to realise Him, dive down into the very depth of the ocean”, and when King Solomon compares the Shulamite’s neck to “an ivory tower”, a scientific statement or discovery is being made through using a parable like the pearl and ocean, or seeing an analogy like the circle and the round and the fool, or like the ivory tower and the neck, which no one has seen or spoken of before. This language describes a process that is basic to the art of discovery as well as the discovery of art. The language which uses the round and the circle in art has its equivalent in biology or the zero its counterpart in mathematics, or the depth measure (by the knee) its counterpart in physics, or the ivory tower its counterpart in mathematics. The merging of science and art is seen when mathematicians speak of the dance of numbers, or the astronomers of the music of the spheres.

Not only in language but more generally, science and art are two sides of the same coin. They inhabit the same universe, as each projects his or her understanding of reality in the chosen medium. They are judged by the norm of excellence, as tested by the scientist in experiments and the artist in aesthetics. If the former is popularly termed objective and the latter subjective, these terms are merely relative, as is demonstrated by the history of science which is the story of discarded theories, similar to the recasting of values, the restructuring of criteria of relevances, and the turn around of frames of perception which are equally the history of art. They both have the same zigzag course of progress – the artist in a succession of classicism, romanticism, naturalism, impressionism and surrealism, alongside of the religious story, the social novel, the existential romance, even as the physicist passes from the Aristotelian to the Newtonian, to the Einstonian and back to the counter-Einstein conception of the cosmos, with similar gyrations that we can see in the progress of medicine, agronomy and psychology. They each follow the same technique of abstraction by selective emphases, selecting and highlighting those facets of reality which he or she considers important, classing the rest as irrelevant. Thus whether it be a landscape or portrait painting, or the play concerning the Postman, or the Survey of India’s map, the technique is the same, the criterion a subjective sense of relevance and the medium, of course, different. Finally, every valid scientific discovery is for its author an exercise in beauty, as Jagadish Chandra Bose’s discovery of plant life was the outcome of his view of the beauty and unity of all life, as C. V. Raman’s Frequencies and Effect was his means of creating harmony out of dissonance. Similarly, the artist experiences his expression of beauty when his mind tells him that what he has created is true, as endorsed by his form of experience. At first blush, this may seem a somewhat daring comparison of science and art. What, it may be asked, is the commonality between Roy Chowdhury’s pastorol scene which we identify with beauty, and Ramanujam’s mathematical equation which is the high watermark of pure truth. It was Ramanujam’s Cambridge tutor, G. H Hardy, who tells us that Ramanujam’s discoveries expressed in his equations were his half conscious search for “mathematical beauty for the harmony of numbers, for geometric elegance”. He and our outstanding physicist who got the Nobel Prize believed that it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit one’s experiment.” Similarly, Roy Chowdhury states that he has been guided by scientific theories by the geometry of perspectives, and lines, and for shortening. Thus the scientist who says he depends on his intuition to guide his theorizing, and the artist who relies on abstract principles to discipline his intuition, seem to be in an inescapable complementary relationship, with only varying proportions of dependence of each on beauty and truth.

Alienation of Science and Art

We should now turn to the other side – t unbeautiful side, the untruthful facets – of Science and Art.

I begin again with the positive purity of science and art. As religions and all cultures speak of the original language of man being art and science, the first words covering simultaneously music, poetry and science. The Christian, Moslem and Hindu scriptures say that in the beginning was the Word, was Om. The agnostic Valluvar of my state opens his famous poem Kural two thousand years ago with the words, “In the beginning the Word was created and the Word is the original God.” In that state, the same word stood for science and art, the distinction between song and science, between the so-called sacred and the so-called profane or secular had not emerged. The word invested with a holistic meaning applied to each situation and satisfied all. Everything to which man gave a name was God to him or some aspect of God by delegation, so that by virtue of a benevolent revelation or human inspiration, the Word combined the fullness of knowledge (science and truth) with the fullness of the melody which expressed it (art and beauty). That is one reason why in all cultures the first written words are the scriptures, and the first music, dance and architecture are its expression–combining beauty and truth. We have gradually left behind this stage of our life, when man was not separated from man, when man was not removed from nature as its conqueror, or from God as the source of all values.

Today we have not only separated science from art, we have made science the black magic of society and technology the and which ushers in its wonders. And so our measuring rod is the number of engineers, scientists, and technicians that we have and must continuously produce in order to be ranked as the third largest stockholder of science and technology in our world. We want all our people, the children in schools, the illiterate adults in our villages, to be oriented towards the sciences. The status of the country today is measured not by the power of the Word (truth and beauty), but by the density of engineers and scientists per million of the population. This transcendent illiteracy which represents one of the most pernicious forms of nihilism has produced for us the scientific and technological obscurantism which the atomic scientists and their social product, the suffering people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, represent. Stuffed with equations, hallucinated by figures and diagrams, they march onward from conquest to conquest which leaves no room for beauty or culture. Without this cultural ballast, they swing from mental depression to high treason. Thus it is pointed out that one of our leading atomic scientists, Robert Oppenheimer, with whose name the atomic cataclysms of our times are associated, even while still continuing his equations and calculations for the atom bomb, finally discovered the road to peace of mind in Indian culture and its traditional wisdom, which teaches the vanity of all calculations and the ontological nullity of the technological adventure in which he was engaged.

This degeneration of science that I am referring to is not only in regard to its application or misapplication to man and society. Today’s pure science and its extension into technology do not open into the world of values. Science and technology can be developed from one area to another ad infinitum, without encountering the contradiction that such a divorce sets up. Thus we have countries which have used science and technology to attain the highest levels of living, to abolish poverty and material want, to possess an abundance of bathrooms, refrigerators, television sets, cars, razors, and other consumer goods, good housing for everyone, including their aged and aging. Yet in this rush to their laboratories and factories the problem of human existence, the problem of values, was overlooked, with the result that these societies are afflicted by a new mental disaffection – the people are involved in suicide and divorce as normal facets of living, alongside of alcoholism, juvenile delinquency, and in some cases leading to feverish war preparations. Science and its progeny, technology, have in these instances forgotten the human problem. Man is not a statistical entity to be computed, nor an alphabetic numeral to be put in an equation.

If this is the situation with regard to the senior sciences, their junior partners – the social and human sciences – face a similar danger of becoming abstracted from their central concern, man. One reason is that the social and human sciences are modelling themselves on the senior sciences using their mathematics, their equations and their configurations as a means of giving vigour to their subject content, forgetting that these tools have only symbolic value in relation to the authentic vocation of the social and human sciences. Whether it be psychology which has not yet understood itself or its subject, man, whom it deals with as an experimental subject, or anthropology with its epistemological impotence, or history with its inexhaustible ambiguity seen in its having its centre everywhere and circumference nowhere, or sociology or economics which are developing a positivism with a view to establishing a science of man without man, they are all heading in the same misdirection. The intellectual area of the human sciences, like that of all science, is man, his intentions, his expressions, and his values. The growing interdisciplinary thrusts which include philosophy which has so far been sidelined, and which has till now isolated itself, are, however, a hopeful renewal of the social and human sciences, involving the metaphysical renewal of the sciences of man and society.

When we turn to art today, we see that it is isolated from other human activities. As we look at our temples and their surrounding gardens and landscape, the sculptures and murals found in them and other historical monuments, we realize that we have left behind the conception of art that they represent–a conception when the masons, geometers, architects, philosophers and sculptors had beauty as their primary objective, doing work that was both true and beautiful, moving, evoking the creation, the human condition, fertility and life. Our universities and schools (and the temples we build today) on the other hand show the state of our art; they exhibit no aesthetic sense and are among the ugliest in the country.

Second, severed from its moorings in beauty, art today has no dominant image and is diverse and dispersed in its coverage, original and esoteric in its meanings, arbitrary and systematic in its expressions, violent and bland in its message, and tending either to contest or to conform to existing values. The result is that art today tends to leave people indifferent and its disarray confuses its votaries. In this situation, art has come to be identified with, and replaced by the artist, unlike all true art of which the creator is either anonymous or known because of his masterpiece.

Further, even the artists in many cases express only expression. In painting, the object is only a colour or a line; in poetry, the word is only a sound; in music the sound is too precise so that noise becomes its substitute. There is no message here of beauty or truth but only of self. Art then becomes meaningless, its only expression being the incomprehensible one that has been made, or badly made or even not made. It is a how without a what, which means that in the case of acting, there is no purpose beyond the action itself. Its message seems to be “I am, therefore I act,” which might mean that “I act, therefore I think” or in the case of the other arts “I am an artist, therefore I make art.”

Art through our history has been able to use science and its techniques as seen in the 1,000-leg hall at Sri Ranganathaswamy temple at Tiruchi, the gopurams (ornamented gateways) of the Meenakshi temple at Madurai, the monoliths and the murals and paintings, which used wood, wall coatings, stone, line, and mirror. And what was created was a reflection of their innate concept of beauty embedded in truth. Today’s science and technology has produced a large number of new products from plastics to hardened steel and new techniques, Industrial and computer based, which enable the artist to try out new instruments, new prints, new sounds and new noises, enabling the architect to plan and build towers of concrete and even aluminum which reach out to the sky, the sculptor to present mobiles, the painter to show as art a bag, a pair of sandals or artificial snow. But in all this art, the notion of beauty is absent as much as is truth. And so while in true art, the person participating was absorbed and was lifted into the world of the true and the beautiful, into a domination of the secular and profane by the sacred and of the real by the surreal, today art causes confusion and puzzlement. Today’s art does not arouse even a sense of admiration, leave alone of beauty or truth. Art has become a commercial commodity in this society of consumerism, and a source of big investment, speculation, smuggling and black-marketing.

Science vs. Art

In this situation, science became divorced from art, and art has come in conflict with science.

The separation starts with science, where the experimental spirit introduced the first doubts concerning the identity and reality of the beautiful and true. From there, the experimental scientific method undermined the sacred spirit and devalued the fables and the myths which traditional art expressed and magnified. And so science came to consider itself as the only source of truth, the only source of power, the only legitimization of power, and the only means of achieving human happiness. The terms in popular use such as the scientific spirit, scientific evaluation and scientific socialism are expressions of this contradiction, of the belief that beautiful things are neither real nor true, that many real things appear to be strange, unexpected, complicated, bizarre, ugly, and even horrible. Beauty is no longer a criterion of truth. Art and artistic emotion are thought of as being unscientific, of being fake and false. In the so-called industrialized societies, the outstanding success of experimental science joined with belief in reason and rationality has brought a confidence in science as being able by itself, alone, to guide mankind, to reach the true life and attain both happiness and plenty. And so art, which was the tutor of science in many societies, has in the above societies become its servant.

Equally, art in these societies is in rebellion against science. The artist flees from a society where experimental science has decreed that the beautiful is no longer true, that beauty is subjective and all aesthetics deceptive. As a poet, as a man sensing beauty and truth, he runs away from science, which is to him not truth, but a mass of incomprehensible mathematical scribbles which repel him. Yet even as he flees from science, he does not know where he is going, except he has to create, as his vocation is a creative art and an original mandate. In this state of art as being sick of science and turning away from it, the will to do something else leads the artist to break, to upset, to dismember, to smash, or to propose enigmas. Behind him is a new art clientele which has considerable buying power, and which, lacking in the traditional culture of beauty and truth, has opened up a vast new art market which patronizes this art divorced from its tradition. For instance, Picasso is the result not only of the outflow of Picasso, the genius, but also of his commercial success in the art markets of the United States and Europe.

Culture as the Renewal of Art and Science

What then is the means of return to the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth, to the renewal of art and science, so that they are merged once more in our life.

Let us recall that our culture, our aesthetic life, is the product of emotional catharsis along with intellectual illumination. The former is the experience of beauty, the latter brings to us the moment of truth. The two are complementary aspects of an indivisible process. For the experience of beauty to arise there must be the experience of truth which, expressed in today’s computer jargon, would be expressed as beauty being a function of truth and truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the experience of the creative act they are inseparate. The highest form of human creativity expresses beauty and truth. Both the artist and the scientist are gifted with the faculty of perceiving the events and facts of everyday experience from the angle of the eternal, to express the absolute in human terms and reflect it in a concrete image. Culture and its values are where the infinite, which is beyond the human and is elusive and beyond reach, blends itself with the tangible world of the finite. The scientist’s and the artist’s aim of associating their existentialist perception with the concrete is expressed in cultural values. By living in the world of beauty and the world of truth, the creative artist and scientist are able to catch an occasional glimpse of eternity looking through the window of time. Whether it is a Vivekananda Rock temple or a Birbal Sahni law of palaeontology, its root is in the end in culture, as Sri Ramakrishna saw it in his song:

“Dive Deep, Dive Deep, O my mind! Into

the sea of beauty.

Make a search in the regions lower, lower

down under the sea (for truth),

You will come by the jewel, the wealth

of Prema.”

This renewal and reconciliation of truth-beauty and beauty-truth comes from man’s relation to the real and surreal world, that is, to this world which is perceptible to man’s senses either directly as in beauty, or through the intermediary of instruments and formulae as in truth on the one hand, and to the world beyond the observed world, which is the non-observed factors, objects, or systems which man must suppose to be real in order to explain the observed real on the other. For us men and women, the observed real is incomplete in the sense that by itself it cannot be understood or make sense until it is related to the surreal – which is the ensemble of our values and beliefs, which makes the real, that is, the observed world, meaningful so that it is bearable and is possibly joyfully lived. Sri Ramakrishna expresses this relation between the real and the surreal in his discourse on the Vedanta thus: “The Ashtavakra Samhita deals with the knowledge of the Self. The knowers of the Self declare: “I am He,” that is, “I am that highest Self.” This is the view of Sannyasins .... but not that of a man of the world…..The Vedantists hold that the Self has no attachment to anything. Pleasure, pain, virtue, vice, etc., can never affect the Self in any way, but they do affect men who think their soul is the same as the body, Smoke can blacken only the wall (the real) but not the space (surreal) through which it curls up.”

Science thus does not suffice to explain the real because it must admit and evoke a surreal which art imagines and represents. This merging of science and art makes us aware of ourselves and our world of nature and men and enables us to discover the world beyond our senses – the values, which are eternal and the life of the spirit, which is necessary for our intelligence, for our survival and our happiness and our fulfilment, and. which led Vivekananda, the chosen disciple of Sri Ramakrishna, to declare:

“Truth is of two kinds: (1) that which is cognizable by the five ordinary senses of man and by reasonings based on them;

(2) that which is cognizable by the subtle, supersensuous power of yoga.”

“The greatest name man ever gave to God is Truth. Truth is the fruit of realization; therefore seek it within the soul and let your soul see its Self.”

I end with quoting one of his favourite slokas (stanzas) from the Gita.

“This Self, weapons cannot pierce, nor fire can burn, water cannot wet, nor air can dry up. Changeless, all-pervading, unmoving, immovable, eternal is this Self of man.”

–which to me is the culture where beauty is Truth and Truth beauty.

- Excerpts from the Foundation-Day Oration. (1983) of Sri Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture, Calcutta.

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