Picasso Reflection

The classic debate between science and art in Picasso is reminiscent of Stuart Kauffman’s book, “Reinventing the Sacred.” Kauffman details that science has had a longstanding reign of credibility over our spirituality since Galileo, Newton and their followers. He said that our worldview has increasingly become more reductionist. That is that to say we are a society driven by scientific pursuit that continually looks to smaller and smaller particles to answer more questions. In the words of Stephen Weinberg, “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” That is what Kauffman calls the Galilean Spell, which has reigned for over 350 years. It is the belief that the universe and all in it are governed by natural laws (131). Kauffman also says that humanity has been divided into two cultures, one of reason and the other the rest of our human sensibilities (246).  This is a contemporary view extended from Steve Martin’s writing about science and art. Science has largely come to be viewed as the preeminent self-correcting path to knowledge. The humanities have reacted to science for 350 years and have adopted a variety of stances toward science, which dominated and pushed society forward. But Kauffman said the problem with science as a ruler of society is that feverishly turning to particle physics for answers leaves us in a meaningless world of facts devoid of values. Science will never fully be able to explain our universe that is ceaselessly creative, in which agency, meaning, value, consciousness and emotion. There are things that exist that natural law can’t explain.

This dilemma appears to be grown from the same seed that Picasso and Einstein argued from.

Kauffman seeks to heal the wound between the two disciplines by stating that science and humanities can co-exist and should harmoniously co-exist. Einstein and Shakespeare must live in a common framework, that in which the universe is beyond reductionism and harbors emergence and vast and ceaseless creativity as it explores the adjacent possible, Kauffman said. Cultural evolution depends on science, art, ethics, politics and spirituality.

“Living involves knowing, judging, understanding, doing, caring, attending, empathy, and compassion, whether science, business, the law, the humanities, the arts, sports, or other ways of going about our lives. If we cannot marvel at our own created, lived, meaningful, unforeseeable human culture, we are missing part of the sacred that we have created and we can instead celebrate,” (253). Just because we replaced science to be the model of rationality hundreds of years ago, doesn’t mean we need to continue living with that view. The two elements of culture, science and the humanities, need not be divided. “Full legitimacy for this spawning cultural creativity, our own invention, is part of reinventing the sacred,” (254).

Kauffman, Stuart. “Reinventing The Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion.” 2008.