Poetic Science

"Poets who have sung of despair in the midst of prosperity, and of hope amid darkest gloom, have been the true metaphysicians of nature."

~ John Dewey, Experience and Nature

"It is not possible to do the work of science without using a language that is filled with metaphors. [Useful scientific] explanations...must necessarily involve the use of metaphorical language. ...Indeed, the entire body of modern science rests on Descartes's metaphor of the world as a machine."

~ Richard Lewontin (The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism and Environment)

"There is no science without fancy, and no art without facts." ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The sciences are in the midst of a comprehensive paradigm shift, jettisoning many of the core tenets of the modern, materialistic, reductionistic, mechanistic science that many people still identify with science as such. At the heart of this shift is ontology, which is the study of what is: What is reality made of? What basic features of existence characterize any given phenomenon? What is the real nature of some observed happening? And so on.

As I detailed in my doctoral dissertation, modern science and philosophy are based on an ontology that had its antecedents in the era of the pre-Socratics -- about 2,500 years ago. Since then, the sciences themselves have revealed that this ontology -- called a substance, entity, or particle ontology -- is fundamentally mistaken and obscures far more about reality than it reveals. While it has been useful for a lot of research, it's now clear that reality is far stranger, more unpredictable, and more complex than this old ontology allows.

In the emerging paradigm, a process ontology replaces this obsolete substance-entity ontology. I won't bore you with the technical details of this new framework, but if you want to know I've included some references at the bottom of the page. Here, I want to 

Centrally, manifest reality is ontologically emergent. This means that what we perceive and experience in the world is the result of spontaneous, multidimensional, non-linear processes. Non-linear causation is the rule; linear causation is the rare exception. This is especially and uniquely true in the world of living phenomena. As I detail on the "Basics" page, it is a fundamental tenet of the new paradigm of deep life-mind continuity that living phenomena cannot, under any circumstances, be explained by reducing them to their component parts. You can explain a machine this way -- say, a car -- because a machine is linear and material, and nothing more. But living phenomena cannot be completely explained through linear cause-effect relationships. Some abstracted aspects of them can, but the common error made by scientists, philosophers, clinicians, and researchers across the board is assuming that because they have explained some isolated, abstract aspect of a system, they can extrapolate to explain the entirety of that system as a whole. 

What we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that reality is vastly more complex than previous generations of scientists and scholars could fathom. And not just quantitatively complex -- qualitatively complex, as well. This requires whole new ways of researching, conceptualizing, thinking, perceiving, and communicating. Enter: poetic science.

Life is Literally Metaphorical

The bare statement of this project of "Poetic Science" is that poetry and science are not two separate forms of inquiry but occupy overlapping positions on a spectrum of ways of knowing, perceiving, and communicating about the natural world. As John Dewey said nearly a century ago, ** "science is an art..." This means that poetic descriptions of reality can be literally scientific in the sense that they accurately report and convey aspects and characteristics of the empirical world. Science and poetry are both arts, and they both rely on metaphorical language. In fact, language itself is inherently metaphorical, so it is impossible for science to not be "poetic" in this linguistic sense.

This will be challenging for thinkers raised within the modern paradigm. If this is you, you are likely experiencing some uncomfortable feelings reading this -- annoyance, frustration, shock, confusion, doubt, even anger -- and probably formulating responses explaining why these claims are bogus and you are safe to remain in the beliefs that are familiar to you. **

The belief in a sharp, impassable difference between science and art, or science and poetry, or the sciences and humanities is, ironically, itself a metaphorical construct. Consider the classic formulation of referring to some disciplines as the "hard" sciences (physics, math, chemistry, engineering, etc.) and others as the "soft" sciences (psychology, sociology, the humanities, etc.). The idea here is that the "hard" sciences are more rigorous and reliable because they deal with the "cold, hard" facts of empirical reality and deal in large part with quantitative data. Conversely, the "soft" sciences yield less reliable predictions because they use less rigorous research methods and rely on "soft," qualitative data.

There are a thousand reasons why this is an embarrassingly unscientific position in and of itself. But even aside from all that, the formulation is self-undermining. Bricks are hard and pillows are soft: methods of inquiry are neither. If it's true that the humanities, literature, poetry, etc. are "soft" and less reliable and rigorous than the "hard" sciences, then that very statement is not to be trusted because it relies on a dubious metaphorical (poetic) framing of the situation!