Monday, January 13, 2014

Just a thought …

When you read a story or a novel, you do not ordinarily, in arriving at an understanding of it, rely on physics,  chemistry, and the other sciences. You will not approach it as a scientific problem, even if the subject of the fiction deals with science. The science found in fiction is the science we know (or, in case of older texts and earlier periods,  what we thought we knew). But the science of being has only a marginal bearing on the story of being. In making up our minds about most things, we rarely pause to consider our molecular dimension. This should prompt a certain skepticism when science is put forward as the gold standard for knowing and understanding things. Science tells us about things in general. It cannot really grasp particulars, and what makes this particular thing what it is in particular is precisely what distinguishes it from things in general. Things in particular are the only things there are. The story or novel that we read is taken as a reflection of how life is lived, not how it is concocted. We need to know both, of course, but shouldn't confuse them.

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