I recently went to visit a friend in Italy. “Come on down, enjoy the warm weather and the pool!” Our friendship over the years has consisted mainly of conversations on subjects about art and creativity. She asked if I’d read any good books lately. I had: The Lily in the Valley by Honore de Balzac. She no longer reads non-fiction, saying, “What’s the point?” Why anyone should spend time reading a 19th-century author when there are problems in the world and so many exciting things to discover about the future of AI, etc.
Our mutual interest was gone. I did my best, although feeling the same hopelessness as years earlier when, as a teenager at a sales job interview, the manager took a pen out of his breast pocket and said, “Sell me this pen.”
I described the book, its unusual form, that it was a study of morals. At the end everything we’ve been led to believe about the motivation of the characters is turned on its head. We’re left with profound human questions. I compared its form to Phillip K. Dick’s UBIK. She remained unconvinced. Happily, the pool was nice.
Great novels and poems contain more truth than non-fiction. Who, except PhD candidates, reads scientific books from the 19th century or before? Almost all are outdated. I suspect that the same will be true in the future for those written today. Someone might say, What about Hegel, Marx, Feuerbach and Nietzsche? They were writing fiction, too. That’s all philosophy is: a person looks around and creates a theory to explain the ambient mess we’re all caught up in. And the same goes for Charles Darwin: his is just a theory, too.
It’s a mistake to take speculation as truth, and a tragedy to create institutions and policies to enshrine them as real. Look at the damage done by Sigmund Freud. Freud himself said that poets had said all he had to say long ago. But that didn’t stop lobotomies, incarcerations and endless other crimes which grew out of his work. In his books the only interesting parts are his inventions, his “poetic interpretations” of unseen motivations. Consider concepts like the “Oedipus Complex,” “neurosis,” “anal retentiveness” or the “Primal Scene” which comes at the end of his book, Totem and Taboo. In that story he explains the origins of incest taboos and takes an absurdist jibe at Christianity. It’s a clever feat of imagination, but isn’t truth. And all the “scientific” work leading up to that story is just a justification for him to let his fantasy run wild.
In physics there’s the concept of absolute value, - 1 and +1 have the absolute value of 1. In the same sense, artistic expression contains the absolute value of the Human. This is what Freud understood but couldn’t do himself. Regardless of historical period, country, or culture, when an artist touches upon the Human, all other considerations fall away, and the essential unity of our experience as beings in time is revealed. Any human behavior can potentially be a doorway to truth. This may explain why chess masters say, “chess is life”: it’s a statement of absolute value. It’s why certain artistic works survive and communicate in cultural contexts undreamed of by their authors, like reading The Tempest in a jet.
Scientific truth is best expressed as mathematical tautologies, not in theoretical treatises which have the absolute truth value of zero. Read a text on Phrenology, racial brain capacity, or try Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls by Edward Hammond Clarke, a best-seller from 1873.
Clarke, a Harvard Medical School physician, argued that rigorous intellectual work diverted energy away from the female reproductive system, potentially causing infertility, illness, and other health problems. The book was discussed and taken seriously by teachers, doctors, and politicians. Any contemporary reader must’ve felt up-to-date and self-righteously congratulated themselves for their progressive thought. I wonder how today’s sexual transition operations on troubled teenagers will be seen in 150 years.
Writers and poets are honest in comparison to intellectual “scientific” explainers. Similarly, fiction films hold more truth than news reports; paintings more than frozen photographic instants and music, with its lack of specificity, holds the greatest truth of all.