Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [166]
This suggests a curious paradox. If art arises from our fundamental isolation in our own minds—from the way we are denied direct access to the world and all its contents—it also temporarily frees us from that isolation. Art lets us live, for a little while, in other worlds, including in other people’s inner worlds; we can hear their thoughts, feel their emotions, even believe their beliefs. (Odd, how able and happy we are to do this with fiction, when we often have so much difficulty doing so in real life.) Put differently, art is an exercise in empathy. Through it, we give the constraints of subjectivity the slip; we achieve, however temporarily, that universal moral aim of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.
If we could contrive to embrace error as we embrace art, we would see that it bestows on us these same gifts. Our mistakes, when we face up to them, show us both the world and the self from previously unseen angles, and remind us to care about perspectives other than our own. And, whether we like it or not, they also serve as real-life plot devices, advancing our own story in directions we can never foresee. Through error—as through the best works of art—we both lose and find ourselves.
The relationship I just described between wrongness and art should seem familiar. Somewhat surprisingly, it looks a lot like the relationship between wrongness and science. Both domains attempt to bridge the gap between our minds and the world, and both rely on their practitioners repeatedly making mistakes. (Scientists, like poets, could fairly claim that, “what we are engaged in…is error.”) In other words, error is central to both the why and the how of science and art: it gives us a reason as well as a means to pursue them.
Yet if both these fields depend on error, they do so in service of two fundamentally different ideas of truth. Artists take as central what scientists (and the rest of us) usually sideline as much as we can: that reality as we know it is inevitably askew, refracted through an individual and idiosyncratic mind always slightly out of step with the world. Stated in more familiar terms, art is subjective. As Picasso put it, “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.”
It’s safe to say that no towering figure of scientific genius ever declared, “We all know that Science is not truth.” However aware of their limits individual scientists might be, the discipline itself leans heavily on the idea of objectivity. Here some recourse to the dictionary will be helpful, since “objectivity” is more often invoked than defined and can be used to mean different things. According to Merriam-Webster, the first definition of “objective” (after the archaic ones and those pertaining to grammar) is “having reality independent of the mind.” In this sense, the objective is what we would see if we could somehow access the world without the involvement of our brain—if we really could figure out how to hold up a mirror, instead of a mind, to reality. This meaning of “objective” is essentially a synonym for “true.” The second definition, meanwhile, is essentially a synonym for “impartial”: “expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.”
These definitions have two things in common. The first is that they reflect our most entrenched ideas about how our minds work: respectively, the toddler’s faith in (and the adult’s relapse into) naïve realism, and the more mature if still idealized notion of an unimpeachably rational thinker. The second thing they have in common is what they omit. In one definition, objectivity is characterized by the absence of a mind; in the other, by the absence of feelings, prejudices, and interpretations. In both