Truth and Beauty

Posted on March 24, 2004 in Crosstalk Evolution & Creation Thinking

Yule’s rolling, I’m rolling. Mostly we’re coming to the same places by different routes. She asks:

So, tell me what you think: is truth and beauty somehow “out there,” already in form, or is it something created by you in your mind? Do you recognise it (think carefully — are you sure?) or do you make it up as you go along? Instead of either-or, is it perhaps both? If it is both, how does expression factor into the mix? What is expressed? The thing-in-form, already out there? Or the recognition of it? Or the process — mental, social, interactive — whereby the thing is being engendered? Hmmm?

I answer that they exist out there and they are products of our minds which take in fragments of the world and organize a picture. Sometime in the past, a mutation occurred in our genetic lineage which allowed us to speak about what we detected “out there”. I don’t believe in Pinker-style “unintelligent design”: I believe this was an accident which our ancestors exploited once they realized that they had it. We are still exploring the capacity and that gives us the history of art and literature. Fortunately, the first art appreciator bred: our brains are enough alike that an object sensed by one person can be relayed to another.

We make much of this because, so far, we’re the only creatures that have this particular mutation. Dolphin’s might regard themselves as superior for different genetic boons. It’s hard to tell because they don’t have language to tell us what they think.

Yule’s questions come as I read neurologist Alice W. Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease : The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. She writes (p. 163):

By contrast with oral language, writing probably evolved only about five thousand years ago, in part from primitive art and pictograms, but perhaps, primarily, at least in Sumeria, from tally marks used in commerce. This latter theory…is appealingly clever but saddens me. How could poetry and literature have arisen from something as plebian as the cuneiform equivalent of grocery-store bar codes? I prefer the version in which Prometheus brought writing to man from the gods. But then I remind myself that…we should not be too fastidious about where great ideas come from. Ultimately, they all come from a wrinkled organ that it its healthiest has the color and consistency of toothpaste, and in the end only withers and dies.

Is that all ye need to know? I doubt it. Let’s keep exploring what’s out there and what’s in here (tapping on the skull).