Rational Philosophy

In a 1929 interview, Albert Einstein apparently said: “I’m enough of an artist to draw freely on my imagination, which I think is more important than knowledge.”

In order to have an opinion on Einstein’s statement, we first need to decide what he means by “more important.” Einstein was speaking of his own process. He had been asked whether intuition or inspiration accounted for his theories. Certainly, when devising a new theory, imagination plays a very significant role, and without it a new theory can’t emerge.

Einstein’s contribution to science was creative. For him, then, imagination was more important that knowledge.

As my wife and I visited our newborn son in the ICU today we talked about the role of the nursing staff. So much of what they do is routine — they learn how to care for the newborns and follow the instructions they’ve been given. But the difference between a competent nurse and a nurse who contributes something important is the degree to which she is engaged with the baby and his parents.

The competent nurse follows the correct procedures, attends to her tasks with care and dedication. The engaged nurse does this too, but also sees things, listens, and reacts.

Artist Mark Rothko said this about art: “It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academicism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”

Rothko could have been speaking about nursing. One looks at Rothko’s paintings and one could be forgiven for asking what they are about. But does this mean that they aren’t about something?

Rothko’s children are suing to have his remains unearthed and moved to a Jewish cemetery. I don’t know how Rothko would feel about this. Judged as a creative act, one imagines that he would find it rather obvious. Judged as an action in the world, one imagines he would find it somewhat depressing.

Another child of a famous person — Max Mosley, son of Oswald Mosley the notorious British Nazi — has been in trouble for exploring his imaginative world in a sadomasochistic orgy with prostitutes in London. Apparently, shades of Nazism can be detected in the role-play. Mosley is the chief of the Formula One motor racing federation and has been asked to resign.

The thread that I’m trying to mine is the concept of engagement. A nurse engaged with her role as caregiver. A scientist engaged with his role as a pursuer of new ideas. A painter engaged with the direct communication of otherwise uncommunicable ideas. And a man engaged with his legacy and its demons.

But what does any of this have to do with Bacon? Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction and Sir Francis Bacon.

Bacon predicted that rational thought would eventually win out; that we would one day have a consistent , complete understanding of the world we live in, but that we would go through tough times to get there. He predicted that language would get in the way. That the terms we use to talk about and define things would become recursively problematic.

Rothko sought to eliminate words. Bacon recognized their challenges. Einstein sought to subjugate knowledge.

There is a reason, I think, for such struggle. Rothko, Bacon and Einstein all felt painfully the distinction between ideas and reality. We experience reality, and we conceive of ideas.

Ideas can be consistent and whole and concrete. Reality must be felt and experienced and can never be pinned down. Einstein eluded language, Rothko avoided it, Mosley seeks to bend it, and Bacon wanted to wrestle with it, but found it stronger than him. Language, I would argue, can be accurate and complete when it expresses ideas, but not when it seeks to represent the world and our experience of it.

I was once involved in a philosophy discussion with someone who questioned whether we truly make progress through quantitative or rational analysis. Specifically, she questioned whether one could say that science has made progress. The perspective she argued took issue with the idea that progress can be defined and measured rationally. Or, put another way, that if you define progress rationally, you will inevitably end up with the conclusion that rational analysis leads to progress.

My wife gave birth to our second child this morning (my third). He was born at full term, but in some distress, having taken amniotic fluid into his lungs. The doctor also needed to cut the umbilical cord as it was wrapped around the baby’s neck. Later, as my new son recovered under the careful watch of the NICU doctors and nurses, my wife and I reflected on the way that modern medicine had affected our lives. The son who was born today may well not have made it without the supremely skilled and sophisticated medical care that the hospital provided. Similarly, my first son, at the same hospital, was saved from a life-threatening trachial infection two years ago, and my daughter, who has had an underdeveloped thyroid gland since birth, would have been plagued by poor development and ill-health if her condition had gone undiagnosed and untreated when she was a newborn.

As my wife pointed out, we’re not alone. Many children who thrive today would not have thrived a hundred or more years ago.

Is this progress?

Well, in one way I agree with the rebuke that this is progress only if you define progress as a relative success in one area over time. We’ve also slurried up rivers and lakes. We’ve depleted the fish in the oceans. We’ve unleashed terrible warfare and pollution. And we’ve changed the world’s climate so that species are threatened or wiped out and so that many millions of people and animals may be in danger in the future.

At the moment we’re very good at making specific, focused improvements. For the sake of our children and their children, I hope we get better at making general, far reaching and balanced improvements.