Strange Utterances

I run across quotes every day which are puzzling, for example “There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.” (Leonora Carrington) I understand the sentiment but the concept is incoherent. These kinds of things pop up many times a day, things like “Science cannot explain . . .” and “God is unknowable.”

I will argue otherwise. If you can’t put it in words, you don’t understand what it is you are talking about. It is not the mode of communication which is weak, it is your use of it.

Art is definitely a mode of expression that communicates and if there are things about a piece of art which are unsayable, why is so much written about those pieces of art? The experience of a piece of art isn’t all that hard to put into words. And I understand that trying to create the experience of seeing a piece of art with words instead is a fool’s errand. It is intellectual synesthesia, like trying to explain a taste as a touch or a sound as a pain.

Sure, there are plenty of things that are very hard to translate into words, but gosh we seem to do that on a daily basis.

And I always ask when confronted with such sentiments, “How do you know that?” So, your god is unknowable? How did you learn that? How did the person who taught you that learn that? It is the same with the phrase “Science cannot explain <fill in the blank>.” How can one possible conclude such a thing? First, has science tried to explain that thing? If not, then how do you know it cannot? If science has tried to explain a thing and has not, then all you can say is that science has not explained that thing yet. A common utterance is that “science cannot explain consciousness” when all one can conclude is that “science has not yet explained consciousness.” Of course science has only been trying to do that for a century or so, while philosophy has been trying for several millennia (and failed). And “other ways of knowing” also haven’t crack the nut of consciousness.

Most of these statements seem to be sourced in a desire for there to be mysteries in our lives but the statements are simply wishful thinking. As to art, we now have tools, these whacko AI illustration generators, which take words and translate them into “art.” Could it be that art and words are merely translations of the same thing, and all translations are imperfect, apparently? So, could one of those AI thingamajigs turn a piece of art into words and thus make it sayable?

Is great puzzlement. And, I guess, I have made more than a few claims that were not supported at the time, so I am not free of this sin.